The Lovers of Zion, also Hovevei Zion or Hibbat Zion, were a variety of proto-Zionist organizations founded in 1881 in response to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire and were officially constituted as a group at a conference led by Leon Pinsker in 1884.

Pogroms in the Russian Empire were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that began in the 19th century. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia, Lithuania and Crimea. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia, unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia was not restricted.