The Great War
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Select the portrait to enlarge it.Photo: Unknown photographer, Public domain

Ottoman Empire (Palestine)

Aaron Aaronsohn

1876–1919 Founder of the Nili spy network, 1915

Born in Bacău, Romania, Aaronsohn was brought to Ottoman Palestine at the age of six. After studying agriculture in France he worked for Baron Edmond de Rothschild as an agronomist. In 1906 he found wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoides), an ancestor of cultivated wheat, and later set up a research station at Atlit with American backing. In 1915, with Avshalom Feinberg and his sister Sarah, he organized Nili, a ring of Jewish residents of Palestine who spied for Britain. Moving to Cairo, he helped British headquarters plan the invasion of Palestine, and British intelligence officers later credited Nili's reports with shaping the 1917 attack at Beersheba. He died on 15 May 1919 when a military plane carrying him from London to Paris crashed in the English Channel.

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Wikidata Q2086130