Sami Hochberg

Sami Hochberg (* 1869 in Dumbrăveni , Bessarabia , Russian Empire ; † February 23, 1917 in Constantinople ) was a Russian Zionist activist and publicist and at times worked as an intelligence service for the German government.

Life

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Hochberg worked as a teacher. In 1889 he emigrated to Palestine, where he became one of the founders of the Nes Ziona settlement . In 1902 he left Nes Ziona and began to work at a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tiberias . In 1903 he was sent by the Alliance to Iran , to the town of Senna (today Sanandaj ), to teach at a school of the Alliance. In 1908 he was dismissed after irregularities.

From 1909 to 1915, Hochberg worked in Constantinople and was co-editor of the magazine Le Jeune Turc . The then representative of the World Zionist Organization in Constantinople, Victor Jacobson , bought a French-language anti-Semitic newspaper "Courrier d'Orient" and put it on a pro-Zionist course. Prominent employees of Le Jeune Turc were the Russian-Jewish journalist and revolutionary and at times German Social Democrat Alexander Parvus and the Turkish writer and intellectual Celal Nuri Ileri . The editor-in-chief of the paper and co-editor was Sami Hochberg and next to it Vladimir Jabotinsky , who later became the leader of revisionist Zionism. "Le Jeune Turc", which had at times also received financial support from the Foreign Office , was founded in 1915 by the pro-German military junta around Enver Cemal and Talaat Pascha , who had seized power in 1913, and who were responsible for the genocide of the Armenians in Anatolia in the years 1915 to 1918 was responsible, like other publications of the liberal wing of the Young Turks forbidden.

In 1913 Sami Hochberg represented the World Zionist Organization at the historic Arab National Congress from June 18 to 23 in Paris. The Zionist-Arab rapprochement at that time occurred in the euphoria of the initial phase of the Second Ottoman constitutional period , but came to a temporary end in 1917 at the latest with the Balfour Declaration , which was unanimously rejected by the Arab representatives.

After the Young Turks banned the newspaper Le Jeune Turc , he worked as an intelligence agent for Germany in Romania.

The official representative of the WZO in Constantinople, Richard Lichtheim , was expelled from Turkey in 1916 as an alleged American spy. Hochberg died “accidentally” in February 1917 of food poisoning after visiting a restaurant. The Zionist helpers of the Young Turks had become a nuisance to the Young Turks and their German allies after the publication of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

In 2010 the well-known Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna , whose mother was first married to a son of Sami Hochberg, published a self-researched biography in Hebrew.

literature

• Yigal Sarna: Sokhen Mefukpak, Masmerim Publishers, Israel (biography in Hebrew)
• Richard Lichtheim: Return - Memoirs from the early days of German Zionism. DVA, Stuttgart 1970.
• Richard Lichtheim: Dr Victor Jacobson - An Appreciation , Palestine Post, September 3, 1934 Link
• Jewish Virtual Library: Entry Pre-State Peace efforts with the Arabs
• Review of the Hochberg biography of Yigal Sarna: Shany Littmann: Saved from History's Black Hole: Haaretz, November 12, 2010 link (29.4.2017 - 21:18)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Shany Littmann: Saved from History's Black Hole: Haaretz, November 12, 2010 link (April 29, 2017 - 9:18 pm)
2. ↑ Richard Lichtheim: Return - Memoirs from the early days of German Zionism. DVA, Stuttgart 1970.
3. ↑ Irmgard Farah: The German press policy and propaganda activities in the Ottoman Empire from 1908-1918 with special consideration of the "Ottoman Lloyd". Beirut texts and studies, Volume 50. Edited by the Orient Institute of the German Oriental Society, Beirut 1993, ISBN 3-515-05719-6