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Leon Pinsker or Judah Leib Pinsker (; ; – ) was a physician and Zionist activist.
Earlier in life he had originally supported the cultural assimilation of Jews in the Russian Empire. He was born in the town of Tomaszów Lubelski in the southeastern border region of the Kingdom of Poland, and educated in Odessa, where he studied law but was unable to practice because of restrictions on occupations available to Jews.
Pinsker was a supporter of equal rights under the law for Jews, but his optimism was curtailed after the Odessa pogroms. In response to the pogroms of 1871 and 1881, Pinsker founded the Zionist organization Hovevei Zion in 1881.
Political disagreements between religious and secular factions of the Odessa Committee, and Ottoman Empire restriction on Jewish emigration, prevented Pinsker from resettling, and he died in Odessa in 1891. His remains were brought to Jerusalem in 1934.
The Odessa pogroms of 1871 moved Pinsker to become an active public figure. In 1881, a bigger wave of anti-Jewish hostilities, many state-sponsored, swept southern Russia and continued until 1884. Then Pinsker's views changed radically, and he no longer believed that mere humanism and Enlightenment would defeat antisemitism. The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, Alex Bein In 1884, he organized an international conference of Hovevei Zion in Katowice (Upper Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia).
As a professional physician, Pinsker preferred the medical term "Antisemitism" to the recently introduced "antisemitism". Pinsker knew that a combination of mutually exclusive assertions is a characteristic of a psychological disorder and was convinced that pathological, irrational phobia may explain this millennia-old hatred, wherein:
... to the living, the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.
His visit to Western Europe led to his famous pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, subtitled Mahnruf a seine Stammgenossen, von einem russischen Juden ( Warning to His Fellow People, from a Russian Jew), which he published anonymously in German language on 1 January 1882, and in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.
In his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, Pinsker argued against Palestine as the destination for a Jewish commonwealth:
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 piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property, from which no foreign master can expel us. Thither we shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former father-land, the God-idea and the Bible. It is only these which have made our old father-land 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 unquestioned refuge, capable of being made productive.
Despite being urged several times to amend his essay to say that Palestine was the only acceptable Jewish refuge, Pinkser refused, even writing in his will that he had not retracted his opinion. Before his death, he reportedly said "Since the Holy Land cannot be a 'physical center' except for very few of our Jewish brethren, it would be far better for us to divide the work of national revival into two, with Palestine as our national (spiritual) center and Argentina as our cultural (physical) center." Nevertheless, Pinsker became one of the founders and a chairman of the Hovevei Zion movement. As part of the movement, he focused on supporting settlements that already existed and helping them to achieve self-sufficiency before organizing any further migration and the establishment of new settlements. Younger activists, such as Menachem Mendel Ussishkin, actively opposed this approach, urging an acceleration of the pace of settlement.
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