Hovevei Zion
The Hovevei Zion movement began in Russia and Romania and slowly spread out to the rest of the Jewish world. Important early members were: Chaim Weizmann, Ahad Ha’am, Menachem Ussishkin, Israel Zangwill, and Leo Motzin. The Hovevei Zion organizations were usually small and independent. In 1882, Leon (Yehuda Leib) Pinsker, influenced by a string of pogroms in his town of Odessa, anonymously published “"Auto-Emanzipation. Ein Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen. Von einem russischen Juden"” ("Self-Emancipation. A Warning Addressed to His Brethren. By a Russian Jew") Pinsker outlined his belief that the root cause of anti-Semitism was that the Jews were a people without a nation of their own. He called on Jews to organize themselves for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.