Summary
In Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, the form of empire Altneuland’s circle promoted: a careful approach to indigenous populations linked to social and political reform of the motherland, under which Jews and Catholics would be integrated into Germany’s colonial apparatus and Zionist colonization would model an ideal majority-minority relationship (PDF p.181-182).
Details
- Altneuland fostered ties to liberal imperialists — Vogt is cited for Franz Carl Endres, Paul Rohrbach and Ernst Jäckh — and those ties outlived the First World War in the Pro-Palästina committee founded in 1918 (PDF p.182).
- Otto Warburg argued Germany’s transformation into a colonial empire presupposed reconciliation with its own heterogeneity: “a pure nation-state can never become a world power” (PDF p.194).
- Warburg presented Spain’s rekindling of bonds with the Sephardi diaspora, reported in the Berliner Tageblatt and reprinted in Altneuland, as a form of liberal imperialism Germany should emulate (PDF p.180).
- The vision was presented as already taking form in Palestine: a Jewish colonial Sonderweg, tolerant and open to integrating non-Jewish immigrants and indigenous populations (PDF p.189).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Altneuland (journal), Otto Warburg, Colonial fantasies, Imperialism