This is a photograph of Dov Ber Borochov from the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth century. Boroshov is wearing modern formal clothes of the time. Below the image is Borochov’s name in English and in Yiddish (which is written in Hebrew letters). The image is surrounded by Yiddish handwriting.
Dov Ber Borochov, was a prominent Zionist leader who believed in Marxist ideology and was one of the founders of the Labour Zionist movement. He explained Jewish nationalism and Zionism in terms of the Marxist class struggle. Borochov was also a researcher of the Yiddish language and is considered the founder of modern Yiddish studies.
Would You Like to Know More?
Dov Ber Borochov – Dov Ber Borochov was born in Ukraine in 1881 at the time of a wave of pogroms against Russian Jews and the beginning of the Hovevei Zion proto-Zionist movement. Borochov came from a family that supported Hovevei Zion, but he attended a Russian school where he acquired only a general Russian education. Like many Jewish youth of his time, Borochov was attracted to the Russian revolutionary socialist movement which believed that poverty, exploitation, injustice, and inequality would all disappear with the rule of the working class (the proletariat). Borochov supported Karl Marx’s conception of proletarian rule but disagreed with his solution to the Jewish problem and the denial of nationalism. In Borochov’s view, the Jewish people suffered due to lacking their own territory, and he therefore supported the creation of a territory for Jews in the Land of Israel. In 1906 Borochov was one of the founders of the Poalei Zion, the Social Democratic Jewish Workers Party. His political activities led to his imprisonment by the Russian police; he was later released on bail and fled to Galicia. After the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, Borochov returned to Russia believing that the revolution would bring new hope to Jews as well and wanting to help the Jewish socialist movement. During this trip he fell ill and died in the city of Kiev in Ukraine. In 1963, his bones were brought to Israel, and he was reburied in the Kinneret cemetery.
Poalei Zion – Poalei Zion was a socialist Zionist movement founded in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s there was an ideological split within the movement, and later, in 1935, one of the factions joined the labour union movement (the Histadrut) to form the Labour Zionist movement.
