Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac

The Zionist movement has produced a few truly astonishing figures, men hugely impressive by any standards. This book is especially noteworthy because it is about one of those men, Aaron Aaronsohn, who initiated and led Nili, the spy group which provided crucial intelligence for the British from behind Turkish lines in World War I, written by another of them, Shmuel Katz, in his youth a member of the high command of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, since then unequalled for his single-minded devotion to Zionism and his powers of political analysis.

There have been other books about Nili (the acronym based on the Biblical phrase Netzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker, the splendor of Israel will not deceive Sam 1 15:29), ranging from serious to silly. The most recent, Patricia Gladstone’s Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Untold Story, falls into the latter category. The story she tells has hitherto been untold because there was nothing to tell. Goldstone elaborates–without any evidence–on a supposed love affair between Aaron’s sister Sarah and T.E. Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame and even more far-fetched, predicts that had Aaronsohn lived, there would have been no Arab-Israel conflict.

Katz has now written the definitive work on Aaronsohn and Nili, following his definitive work–the two volume Lone Wolf--on Vladimir Jabotinsky, along with Herzl the greatest of the Zionist giants. In some respects Aaronsohn was even more amazing than Jabotinsky and Herzl, who were educated and developed their abilities in the framework of vibrant European cultures. Aaronsohn was born in Rumania and in 1882, at the age of six, was brought by his parents to the barren rural area that would become the small Jewish township of Zichron Yaakov in the backwater that was Turkish Palestine. Largely self-taught (he completed his formal education at the age of eleven), Aaronsohn became expert in agronomy, hydrology and geology although it was as a botanist that he established an international reputation, for his discovery of wild wheat.

Along with his erudition, it was his personality and character (as in the case of Jabotinsky and Herzl) that impressed the influential people with whom he would come in contact, including scientists, leaders of the American Jewish community, military officers and diplomats. This comes through from the reactions recorded by some who came in contact with him. For example Katz quotes William Bullitt, then an adviser to President Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference (later U.S. ambassador to Moscow and Paris): “He [Aaronsohn] was, I believe, the greatest man I have known. He seemed a sort of giant of an elder day—like Prometheus. He was the quintessence of life: of life when it runs torrential, prodigal and joyous. Many men, no doubt, are as great as he was intellectually, though I have never known his peer, but if they are great intellectually, they are not also great emotionally, as he was: great in courage, in sympathy, in desire, in tenderness, in swift human understanding; great at once in dealing with statesmen and children, with scientists and artists, great at once in humor and constructive imagination.”

A week after Aaronsohn’s death David Fairchild of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a letter to famous jurist (later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter recorded his sense of Aaronsohn as beyond ordinary mortals. “I was accustomed to think of Aaronsohn as one of the eternal natural forces, and I cannot think of him as one of us…Something tremendous has been snatched from the range of our interests with the death of Aaronsohn and his disappearance into the unseen world, which has not yet been studied scientifically.”

Aaronsohn could have had a well-rewarded scientific career. On a lecture trip to the United States in 1909, the 33 year old Aaronsohn was offered the coveted post of professor at the University of California at Berkeley, then the premier seat of learning in the fields of agronomy and botany, to replace the renowned Professor Hilgard, who was retiring. He turned it down. Aaronsohn was a Zionist and was determined to fulfill his dream of creating an agricultural experiment station meeting international standards in Palestine. With the support of influential Jews in the United States (including people like Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, business leader Julius Rosenwald and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold), not all of them sympathetic to Zionism, he was able to achieve this. Registered as an official American institution, the station was on the coast near Haifa, not far from Zichron Yaakov, and Aaronsohn initially ran it with his sisters Rivka and Sarah.

World War I changed the course of Aaronsohn’s life and that of his entire family. Even before the war Aaronsohn had been convinced that the best chance for fulfilling the Zionist dream would be if Palestine became a British protectorate. But what impelled him to actual revolt was Turkish brutality: once the war began the Jewish community was subject to deportations, arrests, confiscation of property. The Jews of Palestine, he feared, were likely to suffer the terrible fate of the Armenians (whom Sarah Aaronsohn, returning home from Constantinople, had seen being murdered from her train window). And so Aaronsohn determined to turn his unequalled knowledge of Palestine’s geography and his ability to travel through Turkish lines into an intelligence trove for the British.

Most of Katz’s book is devoted to the dramatic story of the Nili spy ring which Aaronsohn developed. There were enormous difficulties contacting the British, convincing them of their good faith, overcoming endless failures of communication. There were hair breadth escapes from the Turks. At its height there would be thirty people working in Nili full time with many more contributing information. Sarah would coordinate the network on the ground since Aaronsohn was considered too valuable a resource by the British and he was forced to remain in Egypt.

On one point Katz is less than compelling: he explains Sarah’s brief loveless marriage to a much older businessman in Constantinople by her need to marry before her engaged younger sister, in accordance with Jewish mores of the time. But on his own evidence, both sisters were probably in love with the same man, the tragic Avshalom Feinberg (killed in the Sinai, trying to reach the British). Sarah may well have seized on any opportunity to escape an intolerable situation.

By some counts Aaronsohn’s efforts met with failure. The wild wheat he discovered turned out not to provide the key, as he hoped, to producing new strains of wheat that could grow in hitherto inhospitable soil. The agricultural station that he started with such high hopes was destroyed by the Turks in 1917. Worst of all, the Turks rolled up Nili, killing its leaders. Sarah killed herself during a break in the torture sessions. The British did not make the best use of Aaronsohn’s intelligence, which showed how feeble Ottoman positions were along the coast and did not land by sea near Haifa as Aaronsohn urged them to do. Doing so would have enabled them to sever the railroad line which alone sustained Turkish forces in Gaza. (The British were obsessed with the disastrous consequences of their landing at Gallipoli.) And Aaronsohn himself died in 1919 in an airplane crash, flying from England to Paris on one of his frequent missions on behalf of the Zionist Organization to the Versailles peace conference. He was 43, a year younger than Herzl at his death.

Yet despite all this, Aaronsohn’s work had a major impact. He convinced General Allenby that an attack on Beersheba would lead to the fall of Gaza (which the British had twice vainly attacked). Allenby himself wrote in 1919 “Aaron Aaronsohn...was mainly responsible for the formation of my field intelligence organization behind the Turkish lines.”

After the war Weizmann chose Aaronsohn to lead the Zionist campaign in Paris at the peace conference. Aaronsohn had unequalled knowledge of Palestine, its geography, geology and economic potential, and credibility with the British. Like Jabotinsky, who had created the Jewish Legion to fight for Britain, Aaronsohn had given important tangible aid to the Allies—and had a right to demand his reward in the coin of fulfilling Jewish national aspirations. His work provided the needed evidence that Palestine could support a large Jewish immigration and his maps influenced the drawing of the boundaries of the Mandate.

Like Jabotinsky Aaronsohn was vilified in his lifetime. Even after his death the remaining members of his family in Zichron Yaakov were treated as pariahs, scorned as “spies,” hated for the danger to which they had exposed the community—even though the community had met no harm. The Jews do not treat their genuine heroes kindly. They are more likely to give their adulation to those who take them into the abyss, a Yitzhak Rabin, an Ariel Sharon. And so it is of some comfort that the saga of Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, a great man and his remarkable sister, has finally been given the writer it deserves.

Note: This book is available for $25.00 through AFSI.