Israel Aharoni was an Israeli zoologist best known for locating and collecting a litter of Syrian hamsters, thus allowing them to be bred and turned into common laboratory animals, and subsequently pets. The majority of hamsters living today are descended from this one litter.
Born in Widzi on the Russian/Polish border, Aharoni was educated in Prague, before moving to the Holy Land (then under Ottoman rule) where he became the first Hebrew zoologist: rediscovering and assigning Hebrew names to the native animals. His early expeditions took place under the protection of the local Sultan, for whom he obtained butterfly specimens in return. Many of his collected specimens are still viewable at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In 1930, Aharoni set off to look for Syrian hamsters at the request of his colleague Saul Alder , a parasitologist who was looking for a easily breedable alternative to the Chinese hamster for research on the disease Leishmaniasis. Syrian hamsters had been discovered and named by George Robert Waterhouse in 1839 but had not been sighted since. Together with a Syrian guide named Georgius Khalil Tah'an, Aharoni managed to discover a nest containing a female and eleven young in the Aleppo region. However, cannibalism of one of the litter by the mother, and the subsequent death of the mother, meant that Aharoni had to hand-rear the pups during the journey back. The four that made it were bred successfully and used extensively in laboratories, before being introduced to the pet market in the 1940s.
