Summary
An Islamic scholar and educator whose Altneuland (journal) article on the Druze, and whose founding of the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, Peretz gives in biographical detail (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.226-228).
Details
- Biram was born in 1878 in Bischofswerda close to Dresden to an Orthodox family, studied Oriental philology at Berlin, took a PhD with a dissertation in Arabic on the philosophy of Abu-Rasid al-Nisburi, a further dissertation in philosophy and economics, certification as a gymnasium teacher, and ordination as a liberal Rabbi from the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he founded a Zionist student association; he was a founding member of the Bar-Kochba sports club in 1898, helped found the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa with Hilfsverein support, enlisted for Germany in the First World War, and in 1937 made expanded physical education compulsory for girls at the school (PDF p.226-227).
- In Altneuland the Druze were discussed by Biram because they were an indigenous group in “our colonial territory”; he regarded the Druze, an ethnic mix of Arabs and Kurds in his account, as “also” a nation, innately complacent to Muslim rule despite resisting Ottoman rule and drafts, and viewed them as a threat to Jewish settlement: “this mountain people with a passionate drive for independence, which is undisciplined but brave, fearless and strongly cohesive, is the eternal troublemaker of middle Syria” (PDF p.226-227).
- Hopeful of cooperation, Biram wrote that the Druze canon preserved stories of Caliph El-Hakim’s change from persecuting Christians and Jews to favouring them over Muslims, and emphasized that in their wars against the Maronites the Druze spared women and children and in peace generally abstained from robberies (PDF p.228).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Druze, Altneuland (journal)