Ze'ev Jabotinsky — journalist, writer and zionist leader with roots in the Russian Empire
Ze'ev Jabotinsky was born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky in Odessa, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, on 17 October 1880 (some sources give 18 October), into a middle-class Jewish family. He grew up in the cosmopolitan port city, and his talent as a journalist showed itself before he had finished school. As a young man he studied law and wrote for Russian newspapers as their correspondent; in 1901 he returned to Odessa to join the editorial staff of Odesskiye Novosti, and later qualified as a lawyer in Russia.
The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 turned him to Zionism. He helped organise Jewish self-defence in Odessa, adopted the Hebrew name Ze'ev, and was elected the Odessa delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, the last attended by Theodor Herzl. For the next decade he worked as a Zionist journalist, speaker and organiser across the Russian Empire.
During the First World War, with Joseph Trumpeldor, he helped establish the Zion Mule Corps, made up of Jews from the Land of Israel who served with the British army at Gallipoli, and he then campaigned in London for Jewish fighting units, receiving final approval in August 1917 for what became the Jewish Legion, in which he served as an officer. After the war he remained in Palestine, and at the outbreak of the riots of 1920 organised a Jewish self-defence corps.
In 1923, after leaving the Zionist Executive over differences with its chairman, Chaim Weizmann, he founded the Betar youth movement in Riga, and in 1925 the Union of Revisionist Zionists. In 1935 he left the Zionist Organization and founded the New Zionist Organization; he also headed the Irgun, the underground organisation in Mandatory Palestine. In his later years he lived in exile, mainly in Paris, holding a French identity card as a refugee from Russia. Throughout his life he wrote fiction, poetry and journalism, including the novels Samson and The Five, and translated Bialik into Russian and Dante into Hebrew.
In 1939–40 he campaigned in Britain and the United States for a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies. He died of a heart attack on 3 or 4 August 1940 while visiting a Betar camp at Hunter, New York, and was buried on Long Island. In 1964 the government of Levi Eshkol had his remains and those of his wife, Jeanne, reburied on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, as his will had asked.
"Lived abroad from the 1910s — London, Palestine, Paris — and died in New York in 1940; reburied on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, in 1964."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine)
Born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky in Odessa in 1880 into a middle-class Jewish family, he made his name as a Russian-language journalist for the Odessa press before turning to Zionist activity in 1903.
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Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.