Literally, Lovers of Zion. A 19th-century East European organization for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. A direct reaction to the widespread pogroms in Tsarist Russia, it grew out of the thinking and writing of a few men and from scattered colonization societies that began to spring up in the 1860’s. The Hoveve Zion federation was organized formally at a conference in Kattowitz, Silesia, in November 1884. (See also Zionism.)