Scholar, teacher, and founder of the religious Zionist movement Mizrachi. Born in Russia, Reines introduced a new method for the study of the Talmud, one in which reason and logic replaced drastically literal interpretation. To modernize traditional Jewish education, he founded the Yeshiva of Lida. He worked actively for the Zionist cause and, in 1884, participated in the Hoveve Zion conference at Kattowitz, where strategies for settling Jews in Palestine were considered. When Theodor Herzl issued a call for the establishment of a Jewish state, Reines became an ardent supporter. He was a fiery partisan of the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland and fought bitterly against the anti-Zionism of his contemporaries. In 1902, he founded the Mizrachi movement.