Established in Russia and Romania in the early 1880s when concepts promoting modern Jewish nationalism began to spread from intellectual circles to the masses, the Ḥibat Tsiyon (Hibbat Zion; Love of Zion) movement was a pre-Zionist Jewish nationalist movement; its followers were called Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion). The founders of the movement were Perets Smolenskin, Mosheh Leib Lilienblum, and Eli‘ezer Perlmann (later Ben-Yehudah), who in the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s applied modern theories of nationalism to Jewish circumstances.
