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Chaim Weizmann: Chemist and Zionist Stateman
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20587 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
2,922 Words |
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George B. Kauffman and Isaac Mayo
George B. Kauffman, professor of chemistry at California
State University, Fresno, has authored 15 books and more than
1,200 publications on chemistry, chemical education, and the
history of science and technology. Isaac Mayo, a former
student of Kauffman's as well as a frequent collaborator, is
a student at the New York State College of Veterinary
Medicine at Cornell University. "I keep looking for some
problem where someone has made an observation that doesn't
fit into my picture of the universe. If it doesn't fit in,
then I find some way of fitting it in. " |
"The story of my life will show how, in the end, my scientific labours and my Zionist interest ultimately coalesced, and became supplementary aspects of a single purpose."
Thus wrote Chaim Weizmann, chemist, statesman, and first president of the state of Israel, in his 1949 autobiography, Trial and Error, less than 5 percent of whose 482 pages are devoted to his scientific carrier. Weizmann's life revolved around synthesis: chemical synthesis, political synthesis, and the synthesis of the two seemingly disparate forces of chemistry and Zionism. Weizmann's chemical research helped lead to the realization of his Zionist dream.
Since the destruction of Israel's Second Temple in A.D. 70, Jews have largely existed as minorities in other nations--the so-called Diaspora. Century after century the homeless Jews wandered, victimized by hatred, persecution, and pograms, while various nations including the Romans, the Arabs, and, at the time of Weizmann's birth, the Ottoman Turks controlled the Holy Land. During Weizmann's time, the largest number of Jews were living in eastern Europe.
In 1792 Imperial Russia created the Pale of Settlement, a Jewish ghetto, near the Polish border, thus denying Jews the right to settle in large cities. The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, for which the Russian authorities blamed the Jews, set off a new wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. Many Jews left Russia and went to Western Europe and America, but a few thousand emigrated to Palestine. In 1882 they founded a colony, Rishon le Tsion (First in Zion) near Haifa. Shortly thereafter, a movement called Choveve Tsion (Lovers of Zion) that promoted the idea of a settlement in Palestine and the revival of the Hebrew language was established in the Pale.
Like the Jews of the Pale, western European Jews also yearned for a land they had never seen, although some, usually the wealthy and powerful, preferred assimilation into Gentile society. In 1894 the Dreyfus Affair in France led Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew educated in Vienna, to conclude that the only answer to "the Jewish problem" was the creation of a Jewish state. In 1895 he composed a pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) that advocated the British-sponsored Jewish colonization of Argentina or Palestine.
Weizmann's Early Life
Weizmann was born on November 17, 1874, in the small
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