Russian Zionists Between Colonial Settlement and the Pale of Settlement: The Making of a ‘Palestinian’ Sub-Culture in Late Imperial Russia

• In Event: The Transnational Making and Remembering of "Russian Jewry"

Abstract

In the last decade of the Tsarist state, several hundred committed Zionists began to construct a ‘Palestinian’ subculture in cities and towns across the empire’s Pale of Settlement. In addition to soliciting funds for a variety of colonization projects in Palestine, Zionists in Russia’s western borderlands promoted travel to Palestine, marketed commodities produced in Palestine’s Jewish colonies, and devised plans for raising a generation of native Hebrew speakers in the Pale. Rooted in a particular Zionist conception of Russia’s Jews as a national minority, this attempt to align Jewish culture in Russia with developments in Palestine (actual and imagined) emerged under the dual influence of political changes in Russia after 1905, and the intensification of Zionist settler-colonial activity in Palestine after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

Author

• Yaakov Lipsker, Davidson College