Summary
Davis Trietsch’s conception, in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, of a settlement field comprising Palestine and its adjacent countries — Cyprus, Egyptian border regions and the wider Middle East — in which Jewish centers in constant nexus with Palestine would complement, not replace, settlement in Palestine itself (PDF p.143, p.145-149).
Details
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Sha’are Zion’s map in Palästina depicted Palestine without clear-cut borders, the lack of separation from Syria, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Arabia visualising settlement potential; Lebanon alone was clearly demarcated, as a Christian autonomy insusceptible to Jewish colonization (PDF p.146-147).
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The map quantified settlement potential by population density: Palestine 21 and Cyprus 24.7 against Malta’s 557, with Germany as index value 100 (PDF p.147-148).
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Trietsch argued colonization should be centrally coordinated but decentrally distributed across the Middle East, creating local Jewish majorities extending territorial cohesion with Palestine, with ancient precedent in Bengazi’s Jews (PDF p.149).
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At the Sixth Zionist Congress Trietsch accused Herzl of abandoning the Basel Program for East Africa, a land incapable of being incorporated into a future “Greater Palestine” (PDF p.129).
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Peretz questions, from Trietsch’s conception and its Congress adoption, whether diaspora as a form of life had been principally negated or only its negative manifestation in Christian Europe, and when negation became Zionist dogma; the Altneuland circle promoted a Zionism favourable to continued diaspora existence, with colonization as the central project transforming Jewish consciousness worldwide including of those remaining in diaspora (PDF p.151).
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Warburg’s Anatolian plan extended the field northward along the Baghdad railway, with a half-hearted biblical legitimation that Syria was Abraham’s homeland before Canaan (PDF p.176-177).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Davis Trietsch, Jewish Orient Colonization Society, Territorialism, Altneuland (journal)