Aaron Aaronsohn: forgotten man of history?*

In 1882 Ephraim Fischel Aaronsohn left Romania and took his wife and young son on Aliyah. He helped set up an agricultural settlement at Zichron Ya’akov near Haifa where they had five more children. He became one of the Yi$huv\ leading farmers, but was famed less for his pioneering achievements than as the father of some remarkable offspring. The most important of these is the eldest son, Aaron Aaronsohn (1876-1919), who became the leading agronomist in the country and contributed much to the development of agriculture there. He is remembered mostly, however, for creating an espionage network designed to help the British Army in its conflict with Turkey in the First World War, for his subsequent work as an influential member of British operational staff in Cairo and for later activi ties on behalf of the Zionist movement. The successful British campaign against Turkey was helped materially by his knowledge

Written by

Cecil Bloom

Published in

Volume 40

2005

Other articles within the volume

• Jews in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• ADDENDUM to SUGARMAN and SUGARMAN
• Breaking the codes: Jewish personnel at Bletchley Park
• Aaron Aaronsohn: forgotten man of history?*
• Sir Louis Sterling and his library*
• A note on Jewish trade unionism
• The Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter: an episode in migration studies
• Women in the great Jewish migration*
• The Association for Providing Free Lectures to Jewish Working Men and Their Families, 1869-1879
• Dr Angel Pulido and philo-Sephardism in Spain*
• Vice versa: Samuel Montagu, the first Lord Swaythling*
• The nineteenth-century constitution of the Sunderland congregation*
• Lord Burleigh’s support in the Privy Council for Dr Hector Nunes and his commercial ventures
• Preface