Biography

An agronomist from Bacau, Romania who emigrated to Eretz-Israel (later Israel), trained in France and was employed by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild (1845-1934) at Metullah (1895). He would become one of the architects of the State of Israel.

In 1906 he achieved fame by discovering near Galilee an ancestor of breadwheat, Triticum dicoccoides (Körn. ex Asch. et Graebn.) Aarons. or wild emmer. The discovery led to his collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the search for ancestral crop plants and their relatives for strengthening crops and improving disease resistance, also marking the start of a programme of conservation of plant genetic resources in Israel which continues today.

During the First World War (1915), Aaronsohn was a founder of the secret intelligence group NILI (a Hebrew acronym meaning The Eternity of Israel Does Not Lie) which spied for British forces in the eastern Mediterranean. An early and willing recruit was his younger sister, Sarah Aaronsohn (1890-1917), who had witnessed first-hand the Armenian genocide of 1915. But in October 1917 she was arrested by the Turkish authorities and tortured for four days, before she took a gun and shot herself. Aaron helped plan the British invasion of Eretz-Israel just a few months later which ended 400 years of Ottoman rule. He used his knowledge of the hydrology and resources of the area in formulating the border proposals for a Jewish homeland put forward by the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919).

Much of Aaronsohn's biological work was published posthumously as he was killed in a plane crash on 15 May 1919 over the English Channel on his way to the Versailles peace conference. Material at BM consists mainly of grasses from his agricultural and floristic studies. His original collections in the Herbarium Reliquae Aaronsohnianae (AAR) at Zichron-Ya'akov, curated and documented by H.R. Oppenheimer (1899-1971), were later transferred to HUJ. The genus Aaronsohnia Warb. & Eig in the Asteraceae was named in his honour as are a number of species from the Middle East including Anthemis aaronsohnii Eig and Onosma aaronsohnii Feinbrun.