In 1882, the Ukrainian physician Leon Pinsker published a pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation in which he analyzed the situation of the Jews in Europe. This pamphlet convinced some in Europe—most notably Theodor Herzl—that Jews could never be assimilated into European culture no matter how many dropped their religion in favor of Christian ways. This pamphlet ultimately led some Jews to migrate to Palestine, despite Pinsker’s own conviction that the Middle East was not necessarily the right place for creating a Jewish nation.

This is the kernel of the problem, as we see it: the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation. . . .

A fear of the Jewish ghost has passed down the generations and the centuries. First a breeder of prejudice, later . . . it culminated in Judeophobia. Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable. . . .

The Jews are aliens who can have no representatives, because they have no country. Because they have none, because their home has no boundaries within which they can be entrenched, their misery too is boundless. . . .

. . . If we would have a secure home, give up our endless life of wandering and rise to the dignity of a nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavors must be not the “Holy Land,” but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large tract of land for our poor brothers, which shall remain our property and from which no foreign power can expel us. There we shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former country, the God-idea and the Bible. It is these alone which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan. Perhaps the Holy Land will again become ours. If so, all the better, but first of all, we must determine—and this is the crucial point—what country is accessible to us, and at the same time adapted to offer the Jews of all lands who must leave their homes a secure and indisputed refuge, capable of productivization.

Source: Robert Chazan and Marc Lee Raphael, eds., Modern Jewish History: A Source Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 161, 163, 165–66, 169–71, 171–74.

Question to Consider

According to Pinsker, why must Jews find “a land of our own”? What is most important in determining the appropriate location for that homeland?