He was a native of Yelgava and graduated in law
at St.Petersburg University, Russia. After the 1881 pogroms in the Russian
Empire, he joined Hibbat Zion movement and edited books in Russian expounding
its ideology. He attended the 1887 Druskiniki conference of Hibbat Zion and was
secretary of the official founding assembly of the society in Russia, held in
Odessa in 1890. Maintaining that mass emigration was essential for Russian
Jewry, he became secretary of the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) founded
by Baron de Hirsch which took Russian Jews to various overseas destinations
incluing Latin America. Bermann saw this as supplementing - not as an
alternative to - emigration to Eretz Israel. He was a founder of the
Historical-Ethnographical Committee of the Society for Spreading Enlightenment
among the Jews of Russia. He fell ill with tuberculosis and went to live in
Cairo, Egypt, where he died.
