Naphtali Herz Imber

Naphtali Herz Imber (1856-1909), born in Galicia, is the poet behind HaTikvah, the Zionist and later the Israeli national anthem. Imber received a traditional Jewish education that excluded secular subjects. He began to write and to travel at a very young age. Imber arrived in Palestine as secretary of Laurence Oliphant, a Christian Zionist whom he met in Constantinople in 1882. In Palestine he published poems, articles and satires. In 1888, he returned to Europe but his restless nature soon took him back to the East where he wandered as far as Bombay. In 1892 he went to the United States. After a brief visit to London, he returned to America, where he spent the rest of his life in squalor, misery and alcoholism. HaTikva, first published as Tikvatenu (Our Hope) in Imber’s first volume of poems is dated “Jerusalem, 1884.”