Summary
Zionist leader who assumed the presidency of the Zionist Organization in 1911, moving its headquarters to Berlin, and who coedited the journal Altneuland (journal) with Franz Oppenheimer and Selig Soskin in 1904-1906 (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.15, p.26).
Details
-
Warburg and Soskin were among the few Zionists considerably engaged in the German colonial service (PDF p.26).
-
At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 he was appointed with Oppenheimer and Soskin to the board of the Kommission zur Erforschung Palästinas (CEP) (PDF p.36).
-
As CEP board member Warburg obtained Herzl’s permission in November 1903 to name the journal Altneuland, intending to give the novel’s ideas a scientific foundation; he favoured coupling land speculation with colonization for large private investors, preferred nationalised land under rigid administration, suggested increasing Ottoman public debt through global finance to gain influence for German banks, and envisioned a decentralised Syria — Muslim north, Christian centre, Jewish south — headed by a Jewish pasha (PDF p.140-141, p.143, p.148-149).
-
Warburg was a founding member of the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and coeditor of its journal Der Tropenpflanzer, founded in 1897 (PDF p.139-140).
-
In Altneuland Warburg argued for a German-Jewish joint venture: Jewish colonization along the Baghdad railway in Anatolia would supply German industry with cotton, benefit Ottomans, Germans and Jews, and serve as Germany’s pillar in the Orient precisely because Jews would “fit naturally” there while German mass settlement would not; he had already founded two settlements for Romanian Jews in Anatolia (PDF p.176-180).
-
Warburg held the Templars had filled their historical role and would, under Jewish sovereignty, become a prosperous commercial minority; and he argued domestic integration through colonial policy — “a pure nation-state can never become a world power” — endorsing inclusion of Jews, Catholics and polyglot indigenous elites in German imperial expansion (PDF p.186-188, p.193-195).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer, Selig Soskin, Altneuland (journal), World Zionist Organization