Russian physician, writer, and Zionist leader. He studied medicine and settled in Odessa. In 1861, he began to publish articles favoring assimilation and internationalism as the only solution to the Jewish problem. The Odessa pogroms of 1871 shook his faith in assimilation though it was not until the great pogroms of 1881 that he completely abandoned his earlier convictions. The following year he published Auto-Emancipation, an extraordinary pamphlet in which he diagnosed antisemitism as a “disease” caused by fear of the alien, statelessJew. He prescribed “the creation of a Jewish nationality