Israel Aharoni
Israel Aharoni (* July 7, 1882 as Israel Aharonowitsch , in Widse near the Russian-Polish border, today Vidzy in Belarus near the border with Lithuania ; † October 9, 1946 ) was a Jewish zoologist . He (re) discovered thirty unknown animal species, to which he assigned Hebrew names. Today he is best known for his expedition to the Aleppo plateau (Syria). There he succeeded in catching a litter of golden hamsters in the wild , from which almost all specimens living today descend, which are kept worldwide as laboratory animals or pets.
Life
Aharoni came from a family of rabbis and enjoyed a traditional upbringing. At the age of 13 he went to Prague to study at the rabbinical seminary founded by Armand Kaminka . At the grammar school he founded a national Jewish youth newspaper in German with Egon Erwin Kisch . He later got involved in Zionist youth organizations. After graduation, Aharoni studied zoology and Semitic languages at Prague University .
In 1901 Aharoni emigrated to Palestine , which at that time was still under Ottoman rule. Here he became known as "the first Hebrew zoologist". His first expeditions were still under the protection of the sultan , for whom he created butterfly collections. Many of the specimens he collected can still be viewed in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem today.
Services
In 1930 Aharoni set out on an expedition to Syria to look for native hamster species. His colleague, the parasitologist Saul Adler , hoped it would be a viable substitute for the Chinese striped hamster , which he used as a test object in his research into leishmaniasis . Together with a Syrian guide by the name of Georgius Khalil Tah'an, Aharoni succeeded in locating and excavating a nest with a female golden hamster and eleven juveniles on the Aleppo plateau (the nest was said to be two and a half meters deep!). The first description of this species was made by George Robert Waterhouse in 1839, using parts of the fur of a single animal that he found in the British Museum . After that, they were never watched again. When the mother started killing her offspring, Aharoni was forced to kill it herself and raise the young by hand on the way back. Yet more of them died or escaped. Only three males and one female survived the transport to Jerusalem. However, these were paired and further bred very successfully. After just one year they had increased to 150 animals and were then used extensively as laboratory animals. It wasn't until the 1940s that they came onto the pet market, in Germany about a decade later.
Web links
- Professor Paul's Lives of the Great Naturalists: Israel Aharoni (English) ( Memento from October 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- Biography Israel Aharonis (Hebrew)
Individual evidence
- ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 33.
- ↑ J. Derrell Clark: Historical perspectives and taxonomy . In: GL Van Hoosier junior, Charles W. McPherson (eds.): Laboratory Hamsters . Academic Press, Orlando et al. a. 1987, ISBN 0-12-714165-0 , pp. 3-7 (p. 6).
- ↑ Claudia Toll: "My Hamster", pp. 7–8; Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart, 2008; ISBN 978-3-440-11050-8 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Aharoni, Israel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Aharonovich, Israel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Jewish zoologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 7, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vidzy , Belarus |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 9, 1946 |