Summary
Zionist writer and practical-settlement advocate who, in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, co-founded the CEEP, edited Palästina with Davis Trietsch, and argued at the Sixth Zionist Congress for small settlements near historic Palestine growing into a connected territory (PDF p.130, p.138, p.144).
Details
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Nossig held that scientific exploration, not the subjective travelogue, had to prepare Jewish colonization, since travelogues contained no practical information for immigrants or investors (PDF p.144).
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At the Sixth Zionist Congress he expounded English colonization in Africa as a model of small acquisitions later connected, replying: “We are not a great power such us England. Neither do we want to colonize the whole continent, nor are we conquerors.” (PDF p.130; “such us” as printed).
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An unprompted committee for the exploration of Palestine had already been formed in Berlin in 1902 by Nossig, Trietsch, Motzkin, Warburg and other practical Zionists (PDF p.130).
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In the reshuffled CEP, Trietsch, Nossig and others considered oppositional to Herzl were officially sanctioned and removed from the journal’s board (PDF p.143, p.145).
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Nossig praised German colonial success as owing to “circumspect and precise exploration” and to sending their economists and professors as pioneers, urged the same methods for Jewish settlement, and — against the antisemitic trope of Jewish mimicry — held Moses had imbued ritual law with social hygiene, bacteriology, social Darwinism and racial anthropology, so these were originally Jewish discoveries (PDF p.162-163).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Davis Trietsch, Commission for the Exploration of Palestine, Altneuland (journal)