Summary
A concept from German postcolonial studies (Susanne Zantop) used in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine: the literature preluding colonization laid out its psychological groundwork through fantasies that constructed a sense of exclusivity and moral superiority and let Germans imagine a place for the German colonizer; German Zionists adapted these fantasies to carve an imagined place between Europeans and the peoples of the Middle East (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.27, p.29).
Details
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German Jews were receptive to German colonial fantasy due to both their Germanness and their Jewishness, the yearning for recognition by other European nations as equals being a shared ambition (PDF p.27).
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Peretz argues the adaptation of German colonial fantasies was a further source for the exceptional popularity of Binationalism among German Zionists, converging with the colonial fantasy of self-idealization as a benevolent conqueror (PDF p.31).
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Franz Oppenheimer was startled by the shattering of the colonial fantasies upon impact with the grueling colonial realities at Merhavia (PDF p.33).
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By the 1880s colonial fantasies “had become so firmly entrenched in Germany’s collective imagination that they formed a cultural residue of myths about self and other(s)” stirrable for progressive as well as reactionary purposes; Altneuland (journal) is advanced as a strong proponent of the progressive line (PDF p.136-137).
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Chapter 4’s “second discovery” trope: Palästina’s first issue quoted a German traveller seeing the Orient “with German eyes”, and Aaron Aaronson was cast as a Humboldt-like second discoverer whose emmer find opened Palestine for renewed exploration and colonization through preliminary intellectual conquest (PDF p.152-153).
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Schmitt’s Köthen lecture — Prussia as the humane colonizer manqué, obstructed only by its leaders’ hesitation — is read as the melancholic underdog staple of the fantasy, with which Altneuland (journal)‘s Sandler identified, linking German and Jewish fates in turning historical impotency into future potency; Warburg likewise reproduced Pratt’s “anti-conquest” in presenting Germany’s Turkey position as peaceful economic conquest (PDF p.175-178).
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In Peretz’s Chapter 5 conclusion, Altneuland tapped hybridizing metaphors of German colonial fantasy to counter constructed borders between Jews and non-Jews and to instil a not clearly defined Jewish place within the German colonial project between Occident and Orient; its creation of a Jewish “anticipatory colonial identity” aspired not to reject German nationalism but to enable German Jews to fully participate in German and European colonialism and to transform Germany into a liberal, heterogeneous colonial empire (PDF p.230, p.240).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer, Binationalism, Altneuland (journal)