AARONSOHN FAMILY

early jewish settlers who founded zikhron yaʿacov and the nili spy ring.

Ephraim Fishel Aaronsohn (1849–1939) and his wife, Malka, immigrated to Palestine from Bacau, Romania, in 1882 together with their son, Aaron (1876–1919), in order to fulfill their dream of returning to the land. Fishel was a founder of a new settlement, Zikhron Yaʿacov, and became a farmer. Aaron was educated in the settlement and in France, and became a prominent agronomist. The parents subsequently bore another son, Alexander (1888–1948), and a daughter, Sarah (1890–1917).

Aaron and Sarah are the best known of the family. Aaron's reputation as an agronomist won him an invitation from the United States Department of Agriculture to meet with U.S. agricultural experts. During his visit to the United States in 1909 he also met with prominent Jewish leaders, with whom he discussed his ideas for agricultural experimentation and cultivating Palestine. The outbreak of World War I convinced Aaron that his ideas would never be realized under the Turks, and in 1915 he recruited a number of close friends and family members to found a Jewish espionage group whose objective was to spy on the Turks and provide secret information to British officials of the Arab Bureau in Cairo. The name of the group was NILI, which is an acronym for the text of 1 Samuel 15:29: "The eternity (or 'victory' or 'strength') of Israel will not lie." When Sarah learned that the network had been uncovered by the Turks, she disbanded the group. She was arrested in her home in Zikhron Yaʿacov on 1 October 1917 and was tortured for four days, but rather than disclose the names of her comrades, she committed suicide.

NILI was shunned by Chaim Weizmann and many in the leadership of the Zionist Organization (later known as the World Zionist Organization). On the other hand, the significance of the information uncovered by NILI has been attested to by various British military officers, including General George Macdonogh, Field Marshall Edmund Henry Allenby, and Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.

Aaron was a passenger in a Royal Air Force mail delivery airplane that went down in the English Channel on 15 May 1919. For years afterward there were rumors that he had been purposely killed by the British, but no evidence to support the allegations was ever found; on the contrary, extensive investigations concluded that his death was accidental.

see also Weizmann Chaim.

Bibliography

Engle, Anita. The NILI Spies. Portland, OR; London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Gribbon, Walter. Agents of Empire: Anglo-Zionist Intelligence Operations 1915–1919: Brigadier Walter Gribbon, Aaron Aaron-sohn, and the NILI Ring, edited by Anthony Verrier. Washington, DC; London: Brassey's, 1995.

Katz, Shmuel. The Aaronsohn Saga. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publishing House, 2000.

Livneh, Eliezer. Aaron Aaronsohn: His Life and Times. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1969.

Winstone, H. V. F. The Illicit Adventure: The Story of Political amd Military Intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.

Chaim I. Waxman