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Among the teachers of the new school was Simha Pinsker, who subsequently became the historian of Karaism. This school, the only educational establishment of its kind during that period, served in Odessa as a center for the "Friends of Enlightenment."
"As our mothers in Egypt gave birth to their children before the mid-wife came," writes Pinsker somewhat later, "even so it is with the intellectual products of our brethren: before one becomes acquainted with the grammar of a language, he masters its classic and scientific literature!" Steadily though slowly, brighter, if not better, days were coming.
This calamity brutally aroused the Jews from their hundred-year-old illusions and brought them again to a sense of reality. A Russian Jew, Dr. Pinsker, at that time wrote a small pamphlet entitled, "Auto-Emancipation," which was already a prelude to the modern political Zionism, and sketched all its motives without however developing them symphonically.
It led the way to the elevation of the individual in Zionist affairs, first as a member of a democratic army "willing" the fulfillment, and then settling in Palestine to become the hands that built the Homeland. Arrayed in the armor of democracy, the Zionist movement made the self-emancipation ideal of Pinsker live in the soul of Herzl.
For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the Jew who sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a traitor. He was thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a decade later. Indeed, in the resurrection of the national hope he was the first to remove the shroud. According to him, "the eternal people" have every characteristic that goes to make a nation.
And even outside of the ghetto a voice was heard, the authoritative voice of Dr. Leon Pinsker, announcing his support of the philo-Palestinian movement, as it was then called. In his brochure "Auto-Emancipation", the learned physician of Odessa, one of the old guard of staunch humanists, declares that the disease of anti-Semitism is a chronic affection, incurable as long as the Jews are in exile.
In 1882, Leo Pinsker, a Jewish physician of Odessa, disturbed by the pogroms of 1881, made a keen analysis of the position of the Jews, declared that anti-Semitism was a psychosis and incurable, that the cause of it was the abnormal condition of Jewish life, and that the only remedy for it was the removal of the cause through self-help and self-liberation.
It was obvious that colonization would be the shortest road to renationalization. But as to the place in which the colonies should be established, no agreement could be reached. Pinsker, like Herzl after him, left the problem unsolved. Some preferred America or even Spain.
The propaganda of these Hobebe Zion the Hebrew equivalent for "Lovers of Zion" who acknowledged as their leaders the first exponents of the territorial restoration of Jewry, Pinsker and Lilienblum, led to the organization of a number of societies in various cities.
The "enemies of Christ" were permitted, even invited, to accomplish their "mission" also in Odessa, and thither they accordingly came, not only from Volhynia, Podolia, and Lithuania, but also from Germany, Austria, and especially Galicia. Erter, Letteris, Krochmal, Perl, Rapoport, Eichenbaum, Pinsker, and Werbel became better known in Russia than in their own land.
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