Until I re-read Miriam Rothschild’s biography of her uncle, Lord Walter Rothschild, I had no idea that Israel Aharoni was one of Rothschild’s collectors in the field. Aharoni is of course known as the man who, in 1930, organised an expedition to find Golden Hamsters near Aleppo on behalf of Saul Adler for research on kala azar or leishmaniasis, a nasty and often fatal disease caused by a protozoan parasite. Adler was looking for a local species to replace the Chinese Hamster which had to be imported, proved difficult to breed and susceptible to a bacterial infection. Aharoni got his local guide, Georgius Khalil Tah’an, to talk to the local sheik. The latter hired labourers to dig holes in a local wheat field. Eventually, having destroyed the crop in much of the field, they found, eight-feet down, a complete nest comprising a mother and her eleven young. Until very recently, all the Golden Hamsters in laboratories and kept as pets were derived from those individuals.
Aharoni’s name appears in the Rothschild biography in relation to ostriches, and the involvement of Rothschild’s colleagues in the Zionist movement in getting them—well their skins—to the museum in Tring. After the delivery of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Rothschild always on the lookout to further his zoological obsession decided it was time to involve the future president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, then a chemist working in Britain, and Nahum Sokolow, also in London, in finding in Palestine two ostriches that he owned but whose whereabouts he had lost touch with during war. With nobody else able to go to Palestine on Rothschild’s behalf it was down to Weizmann to track down Aharoni when he was in the country in 1918; Sokolow apparently knew Aharoni. Weizmann eventually succeeded in finding Aharoni and the two ostriches in October 1918. Miriam described what happened next:
…by the end of November the schoolmaster/naturalist [Aharoni] was again corresponding with Walter. The ostriches were safe and within a year had arrived at Tring. The chick had grown up and in 1919 described it as a new sub-species, Struthio camelus syriacus Rothschild. It was one of the skins retained at the Museum when the bird collection was eventually sold to America.
Later, Miriam added in a footnote, Aharoni, ‘lost his head and began demanding exorbitant sums of money for further specimens. Matters were smoothed over and good relations re-established and he continued collecting for several years for the Tring Museum’.
It was actually the skins of the two birds that arrived at Tring. This is what Walter wrote in the description of the birds as a new subspecies. The paper was given to a meeting of the British Ornithologists’ Club at Pagani’s Restaurant in Great Portland Street, London, on 14 May 1919:
The fact that Ostriches inhabited the Syrian Desert and Arabia has been known for a long time—in fact, there are several passages in the Bible relating to this bird...Some years ago, Mr. J. Aharoni received a number of Ostrich eggs from his Arab hunters from the Syrian Desert, and sent them to Tring. These eggs agree with those of the North-African Ostrich in being smooth and not pitted, but are much smaller and more highly polished than those of that bird. I at once urged Aharoni to procure for me some adult Syrian Ostriches. He managed to procure a pair of nearly full-grown young ones alive, and as soon as they were fully adult he skinned them and sent them to me.
It was not surprising that Rothschild was concerned about finding his ostriches. Already known to be rare by the early 1900s, sightings and remains of what came to be known as the Arablan Ostrich became more and more infrequent. The subspecies is now considered extinct with the last record—of a dying individual—in 1966.
Aharoni went on to find other specimens of the ostrich: in 1927 a female and two chicks were obtained in Saudi Arabia. They are in the museum (see below) in Tel Aviv.
Aharoni was collecting for Rothschild at least by 1909. The eponymous Aharoni’s Eagle-owl was described as a new subspecies, Bubo bubo aharonii, by Rothschild and his curator at Tring, Ernst Johann Otto Hartert, in 1910. They wrote:
We have received one pair from Mr. Aharoni in Jerusalem. They were obtained on the Wadi Suenit, in the valley of the Jordan in Palestine, on April 5th or 6th, 1909…We have named this most interesting form in honour of Mr. Aharoni, who is an enthusiastic naturalist.
It would appear there has been confusion in the past over the use of the common name, Aharoni’s Eagle-owl with the scientific name of another ‘new’ subspecies that Rothschild and Hartert named in the same paper, Bubo bubo interpositus. At some stage, the two subspecies must have been lumped but why into interpositus and not into aharonii I do not know. I have not been able to find when the two subspecies were lumped together and why the common name of one was linked with the scientific name of the other. It is, however, easy when looking up B. b. interpositus in the original paper to overlook the description of B. b. aharonii that comes later. An example of the result of this confusion was in Whose Bird published in 2003—but sorted out in The Eponym Dictionary of Birds that appeared in 2014.
Incidentally, Aharoni’s initial is sometimes shown as J (by Germans like Hartert) or Y, rather than the english English, I. for Israel. The name is given as J Israel ben A. Aharoni in the Eponym Dictionary of Birds.
Israel Aharoni (1882-1946) had arrived in Palestine in 1901 (or 1902 in other accounts). He was born in Vidzy, now in Belarus. His father, a rabbi, died before Israel was born, and his mother when he was two. Brought up by his grandmother, he apparently fled but then studied at Prague university. Accounts online of his life vary slightly but it would seem that he was a schoolteacher in Rehovot before in 1904 he moved to Jerusalem. There he taught languages at a school and an art school. With specimens from his many research and collecting trips in the Middle East, as well as his writing on ‘biblical zoology’, he established a zoological museum in 1925 under the auspices of the World Zionist Organisation. The collection is now housed in the Steinhardt Museum of the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv. He also lectured at the Hebrew University.
During the First World War, Aharoni served the Ottoman army as zoologist, apparently in anti-locust control. For six months in 1915 a swarm of locusts devastated Palestine, Mount Lebanon and Syria. It is perhaps not surprising that Aharoni, then working for the enemy, was not in contact with Rothschild. On the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Aharoni continued with the same work but with the British army until 1921. That would explain why Weizmann was unable to contact Aharoni until October 1918.
Aharoni's good relations with the Ottoman rulers and later with the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and surrounding countries enabled him to travel more easily and to recruit the help of local bigwigs on his expeditions, as he showed with his search in Syria for Golden Hamsters. Earlier he had explored the area of the Dead Sea and Transjordan. The butterflies he collected were to presented to a Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He travelled and collected in what are now the countries of Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
In Haasiana, a biennial newsletter of the national natural history collections of the Hebrew University published in 2014, the bird collection which was begun by Israel Aharoni with birds he collected in 1906 is described:
Aharoni was an avid naturalist and a multi-lingual expert in near east and other (e.g., East European) languages. In his autobiographic book, “The Memories of a Hebrew Zoologist” (1943), he stated that “Even before my arrival to the land of Israel, my double life-long goal was clear to me: a) The study of wild animals in their natural habitat, in the birth place of each one of them, and b) The study of the original name of each creature, whom the desert dwellers (who live on their hunting and did not change their culture and way of life since the days of “Abraham” our father) are calling each living animal known to them”…
…Aharoni was responsible for important zoological discoveries, specifically (but not limited to) the region’s avifauna. Aharoni collected many Northern Bald Ibises (Geronticus eremita) discovered in the Syrian Desert. This species is nowadays at the brink of extinction, surviving in the wild only in two locations: in southeastern Turkey under a semi-natural setting (the birds are captured during winter to reduce their mortality), and in southern Morocco in several colonies consisting of about 500 birds. In 2002, a tiny population of less than ten individuals was located in the Syrian desert in the exact same locations where Aharoni had traced the birds a hundred years ago… Yet, since this re-discovery, the population has further declined and is now believed to have become extinct…
When the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded, Aharoni was already a renowned teacher and scientist and, consequently, he became one of the first professors of the newly established university. He founded a collection that was meant to become a zoological museum of local wildlife at the university’s campus in Mt. Scopus. Aharoni wrote several books for students of zoology, providing important contribution to the development of the study of local zoology. His autobiographic book provides ample information about his teaching and, especially, his expeditions in the Middle East, as well as a rich description of different aspects of his personal life during several decades since his immigration to Israel. His animal collection was maintained by himself with the help of his daughter, Bat-Sheva Aharoni, a scientist in her own right.
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| Israel Aharoni (holding the skull of a roe deer) with his daughter Bat-Sheva. ca 1940 |
Anon. The Bird Collection, including the collection of Israel Aharoni. 2014. Haasiana No 7. July 2014. p 3-9.
Beolens, B. & Watkins, M. 2003. Whose Bird? London: Christopher Helm.
Beolens, B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2014. The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. London: Bloomsbury.
Rothschild M. 1983. Walter Rothschild. The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie. Balaban (Paperback published in 2008 by the Natural History Museum, London).
Rothschild W, Hartert E. 1910. Notes on eagle-owls. Novitates Zoologicae 17, 110-112.
Rothschild W. 1919. Description of a new subspecies of Ostrich from Syria. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club. 39, 81–83.
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