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Nachum Sokolov around 1922
Nachum ben Josef Samuel Sokolov (also Nahum and Sokolof, Hebrew נחום סוקולוב; born 10 January 1859 in Wyszogród near Plozk, Russian Empire; died May 17, 1936 in London) was president of the World Zionist Organization, pioneer of modern Hebrew journalism and Hebrew writer.
Life
Sokolov was born into a rabbi family in Wyszogród in Poland (then Russian Empire). He was an accomplished language expert and spoke German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish and Russian. As a 17-year-old he began writing for the Hebrew newspaper HaTzefirah ("The Alarm") in Warsaw. He managed the unique feat to inspire followers from different camps of secular intellectuals to anti-Haskalah - Orthodox. He received his own column and later became editor-in-chief and co-owner of the newspaper.
Although Sokolov wrote almost all articles for Ha-Tzefirah himself, he still had time and energy to devote himself to other projects. He contributed to various journals, published for a while a Polish newspaper (Izraelita) for the Jewish community in Warsaw and a Yiddish periodical. He wrote poems, stories and essays. Between 1885 and 1894 appeared six volumes of his Hebrew annual HeAsif, which had great influence on the revival of Hebrew. 1900 to 1906 he published another yearbook, Sefer HaSchana (Warsaw).
Although initially an opponent of "political" Zionism, since 1897 for Zionism, Sokolov was involved in the first Zionist Congress of the Hebrew Literary Commission (together with Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Marcus Ehrenpreis, Achad Ha'am, Armand Kaminka), became Herzls Death 1905 General Secretary of the Zionist Organization in Cologne, edited temporarily the world, beyond that he founded together with David Wolffsohn Hebrew central organ of the movement Haolam("The World") and became Secretary General of the WZC in 1906. In the following years he toured Europe and North America (eg, 1908 Constantinople with Wolffsohn) to argue for the Zionist cause. In 1911 he was elected at the 10th Zionist Congress in Basel in the "Narrow Actions Comité" (together with Otto Warburg, Schemarjahu Levin and Arthur Hantke). He then moved to Berlin and stayed there until the beginning of the World War. As one of the main fighters for the rebirth of the Hebrew language, Sokolov was the first to speak Hebrew at a Zionist conference. On the basis of his application, the Hebrew language was also recognized as the official language of the organization.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he had left Germany and finally came to London via Copenhagen, The Hague, Paris. After talks with Chaim Weizmann and Sokolov, British Foreign Minister Balfour declared in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that Britain was in favor of establishing a "national homeland" for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Sokolov negotiated with many leading political figures and succeeded in gaining approval from the governments of France and Italy for the Balfour Declaration. Sokolov has also repeatedly negotiated with the Vatican and was in 1917 by Pope Benedict XV. to whom he could explain in detail the aims of the Zionist movement. During the peace negotiations, Sokolov became president of the Comité des Délégations Juives and participated in the recognition of minority Jewish rights in the various peace treaties. Statements of approval from many governments (Poland, Romania, South Africa, even the US Parliament) on the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine are directly attributable to Sokolov's work.
1920-1931 Sokolov was president of the Zionist executive (forerunner of the Jewish Agency, ha-sochnut ha-jehudit, founded August 11, 1929), since 1921 president of all Zionist congresses, from 1931 (Weizmann's resignation at the 17th Zionist Congress in Basel because of the Passfield-Weissbuchs) until 1935 President of the World Zionist Organization (WCO); his predecessor and successor in this post was Chaim Weizmann. When Weizmann returned to office in 1935, Sokolov was appointed Honorary President of the WCO. He became chairman of the newly formed Cultural Department, but did not receive enough financial resources to run his programs. So he returned to writing and raised money for the Keren Hajessod.
Sokolov was a prolific author and translator. His literary work is so extensive and covers so many different topics that his fellow writer Chaim Nachman Bialik once found that three hundred camels were needed to transport everything that Sokolov had ever written to a place. His works include a three-volume history Baruch Spinoza and his time (Baruch Spinoza usemanno, London 1929) and numerous other biographies. He translated Theodor Herzl's Zionist novel "Altneuland" under the title "Tel Aviv"(Spring Hill) into Hebrew, and was thus to some extent the eponym of the Israeli city, the first Jewish city in modern Eretz Israel. In 1918, Nachum Sokolov published his "History of Zionism", a two-volume English study on the Western roots of the Zionist idea (with words of welcome from the then French Foreign Minister Pichon and Lord Balfours, complete translation of the first volume by Stefan Hofer, the second volume by Lothar Hofmann).
In 1956, Sokolov's bones were transferred to Jerusalem. The Israeli Sokolov Prize for Literature and the Kibbutz Sde Nahum are named after him.
Other works by Sokolov (selection)
• mekuze erez ("Fundamentals of the Earth", Textbook of Physical Geography), Warsaw 1878
• sin'at olam le'am olam (History of Anti-Semitism), Warsaw 1882
• zaddik wenissgaw (historical novel about Jomtow Lipmann Heller ), Warsaw 1882
• thorath sefath anglith , Warsaw 1882
• erez chemda (on the geography of Palestine), Warsaw 1885
• sefer sikkaron (bio-bibliographic dictionary of contemporary Jewish writers), Warsaw 1889
• Textbook of the English language (in Yiddish, 16th edition 1904)
• Selected Writings , Warsaw 1912
• ha'ani hakibuzzi ("The collective ego"), New York 1930
Web links
Commons: Nachum Sokolow - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
• Literature by and about Nachum Sokolow in the catalog of the German National Library
Sources / Literature
• Jewish Encyclopedia , 1901-1906, XI, 429
• Sefer hajowel. Festschrift for the 25th anniversary of the writer Sokolov , Warsaw 1904
• Travel , Encyclopedia ... , 1st edition 1914, II., 608 ff.
• Ozar Yisrael , Bd. VII., Vienna 1924
• Jewish lexicon , Berlin 1927, Bd. IV./2, columns 485-487
• Archive for journalistic work , July 8, 1928
• Jewish Rundschau , January 23, 1931
• Salomon Wininger , Great Jewish National Biography, Chernivtsi 1925-1936, Volume V., p. 559 ff.
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.): Encyclopedia of Judaism . Bertelsmann-Lexikon-Verlag, Gütersloh, Berlin, Munich, Vienna. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 756.
• Julius H. Schoeps , ed., New Lexicon of Judaism , Gütersloh / Munich 1992, p. 426