In 1929, Blumkin was the chief illegal resident in Turkey, where he allegedly sold Hebrew incunabula that he collected from synagogues all over Ukraine and Southern Russia and even from state museums such as the Lenin Library in Moscow to finance an espionage network in the Middle East. He supposedly travelled personally to Ukraine to look for rare Hebrew books, but he also spent time in Palestine and elsewhere organizing the network by posing as a devout Jewish laundry owner or as a Jewish salesman from Azerbaijan. Eventually, he was deported from Palestine by the British.