Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine

Summary

Dekel Peretz argues that Franz Oppenheimer and his German Zionist networks used Zionism to traverse the gap between Jewish national and cultural autonomy and membership in a broader, primarily European, cosmopolitan context: by intervening in Imperial Germany’s racial and colonial discourses — proving Jews capable of colonization and nation-building — German Zionists sought to redefine those discourses so as to facilitate the recognition and inclusion of Jews as an ethnic minority in Germany and Europe, while planning for the most part to remain German citizens themselves (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.14, p.26). The book, read here from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War, is built in two parts: Oppenheimer’s engagement with the racial discourse, and a broader Zionist entanglement with the colonial discourse centred on the journal Altneuland (journal) (PDF p.23, p.34).

What the file is

First book edition, 2022, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, in Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge / European-Jewish Studies Contributions, vol. 54, edited by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam (PDF p.3, p.5). The work originated as a doctoral thesis completed in 2020 at the University of Potsdam under Prof. Julius H. Schoeps and Prof. Derek J. Penslar (PDF p.5). 317 PDF pages, about 130,215 words; English, with all translations from German the author’s own unless an English secondary work is cited (PDF p.14). ISBN 978-3-11-072692-3; e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072643-5; DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726435; licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and published open access (PDF p.5). Cover image: the residents of Merhavia with Professor Oppenheimer, private collection Michael Oppenheimer, Israel (PDF p.5). The text copy is complete and legible, with page markers; printed pagination runs 13 pages behind the PDF pagination in the body (PDF p.14 = printed p.1). PDF p.1, 7, 9 and 13 are blank in the text copy. Portions appeared earlier in 2016 and 2017 publications listed in the Acknowledgements (PDF p.8).

Section by section

Front matter and Contents (PDF p.1-13)

Half-title, series page and title page (PDF p.2-4); imprint (PDF p.5); dedication “To Nina and Ronja” (PDF p.6); Acknowledgements recording the Potsdam dissertation of 2020, archival material on Oppenheimer shared by Klaus Lichtblau and Claudia Willms at Goethe University Frankfurt, and a Friedrich Naumann Foundation scholarship funded by the Auswärtiges Amt (PDF p.8). The Contents (PDF p.10-11) give the structure: Introduction (printed p.1); Chapter 1, The Young Oppenheimer’s Utopian Horizon: Socialism, Darwinism and Rassenhygiene (25); Chapter 2, Biology, Sociology and the Jews (55); Chapter 3, Oppenheimer’s Path to Zionism (96); Chapter 4, Altneuland – A German Colonial Journal (121); Chapter 5, Altneuland’s Entanglement in German Racial and Colonial Discourses (169); Chapter 6, When Fantasies Meet Realities (229); Conclusion (275); Bibliography (284); Register (299). The List of Abbreviations (PDF p.12) covers CEEP, CEP, DGS, DPV, ITO, JCA, JNF, JOCG, KfdO, ZO and ZVfD.

Introduction (PDF p.14-37 / printed p.1-24)

The Introduction opens with Oppenheimer’s lines in Die Welt, June 23, 1905, written after Herzl’s death amid unresolved questions of territory, charter and ideology: his unproclaimed position generally leaned to the second choice in each pair — slow infiltration over political means, cosmopolitans in an English crown colony over staunch nationalists, more socialist ideas, abhorrence of strict ritual law — while the consensual primary goal was proving to Jews and non-Jews alike that Jews are physically and mentally capable of colonization and nation-building (PDF p.14). Jewish success in colonization would strengthen Jewish pride secularly and improve the perception of Jewish civic aptitude among European nations; this conjunction of Zionism and cosmopolitanism required a dynamic reinterpretation of Jewish tradition and intervention in German discourses constructing Jewish belonging or otherness (PDF p.14). During the period, Germany was headquarters of the Zionist Organization — Cologne after Herzl’s death, Berlin after Otto Warburg assumed the presidency in 1911 — and the Balfour Declaration and Germany’s defeat ended the hopes pinned on Germany (PDF p.15).

The subsection Franz Oppenheimer’s Jewishness in German Historiography (PDF p.15-19) begins from the 1913 cover picture at Merhavia in the Jezreel Valley: Oppenheimer in a three-piece white suit with his backer Shlomo Kaplansky and his disciple Salomon Dyk, director of the first Zionist agricultural cooperative (PDF p.15). Oppenheimer’s engagement with Zionism started in 1901 and continued until the mid-1930s; his academic career culminated in the first German professorship for sociology in Frankfurt in 1919 (PDF p.15). German biographies centre his “liberal socialism” or “third path” and his influence on his student Ludwig Erhard, architect of the soziale Marktwirtschaft, who publicly recognised Oppenheimer as a guiding intellectual force and as a visionary of a European Union of the “‘free and equal’”, and announced a Federal Post Office stamp of Oppenheimer in the series “important Germans” (PDF p.16). Erhard’s farewell memory stresses Oppenheimer’s Germanness — “I must leave my fatherland now” (PDF p.17). Peretz records Oppenheimer’s compensation for growing antisemitism by emphasising his Berlin roots, Einstein’s repulsion at the Deutschtümelei of his 1934 pseudonymous utopian novel, and the autobiography’s insistence that Jewish tribal consciousness was compatible with German national and cultural consciousness: he made himself a nonexclusive hybrid of both (PDF p.17). Post-Holocaust German historiography, shaped by collective trauma and guilt and by an “anticolonialism” that borrows the binary structures of colonial discourse, reclaimed Oppenheimer as Wiedergutmachung while treating his Zionist and Jewish engagement as an excursion or deviation (PDF p.17-18). The book is not a comprehensive biography; it contextualises Oppenheimer’s relationship to Jewishness — following Lisa Silverman’s analytical category, the relationship between constructed ideals of the “Jewish” and the “not-Jewish”, not fixed religion, ethnicity or culture — in fin-de-siècle Germany, focusing on his experience of antisemitism and his grappling with race science, and on the Zionist journal Altneuland (journal), which he coedited (PDF p.18-19).

The subsection Zionism for the Diaspora (PDF p.19-22) proposes bridging the German colonial and Zionist historical narratives, and gives five hypothetical reasons for their separation: Germany’s smaller colonial apparatus and the sparsity of research on Jews in its colonial service, which is not indicative of German Jewish enthusiasm for colonial ambitions; the retroactive unfathomability, after the Holocaust, of Jewish involvement with German colonialism; the teleological Zionist narrative and the ideology of Negation of the Diaspora, which blurred conceptions in which Jewish sovereignty did not contradict continued Jewish life in Europe or sovereignty outside Palestine — during the First World War Oppenheimer and contemporaries proposed Jewish cultural autonomy in (Eastern) Europe, in affinity with Bundism; the tension between European-nationalist and ethnic-messianic accounts of Zionism’s origins; and colonialism’s negative associations (PDF p.19-20). Research in Israeli institutions in the 1980s and 1990s, the “historians’ dispute”, and Derek Penslar’s work recast Oppenheimer as a Zionist technocrat transplanting German Inner colonization methods to Palestine (PDF p.21). Peretz objects that this scope missed that Zionists were active participants in Germany’s colonial discourse, shaping it to alter how Jews were perceived and perceived themselves, and that even the “new historians” were unattentive to how Zionism could benefit continued diaspora life: between 1921 and the end of 1932 only 3,306 Jews emigrated from Germany to Palestine, 8.3 percent of total Jewish emigration from Germany, on figures Peretz cites from Lavsky (PDF p.22).

The subsection New Perspectives: Zionist Entanglement in Imperial Germany’s Racial and Colonial Discourses (PDF p.22-26) defines the method. “Entanglement” is inspired by Steven Aschheim’s “Orientalist web”; discourse follows Donald Davidson via Rüdiger Graf, as ensembles of assumptions acquired in learning a language, seemingly fixed but open to transformation at specific points of dissent rather than in their entirety (PDF p.23-24). Since the eighteenth century Jews had intervened in the discourses of civic emancipation by this method (PDF p.24). John Efron is quoted for Jewish race science as “race-affirmation” after the perceived failures of emancipation and assimilation (PDF p.24-25). Oppenheimer did not reject the concept of race or even of a contemporary Jewish racial degeneration, but held that social causes influenced race more than biological ones, embraced Rassenhygiene (eugenics), and regarded agricultural settlement cooperatives as the vehicle for the racial transformation of the Jews within a generation (PDF p.25). German Jews thought and acted within German discourses because they were reared in German schools, homes, literature, culture, media and Bildung (PDF p.26). The journal Altneuland (journal), published monthly in Berlin 1904-1906 and edited by Oppenheimer, Otto Warburg and Selig Soskin, is advanced as a consciously designed discursive interface between German colonialism and German Zionism, publishing Jewish and non-Jewish colonization experts (PDF p.26). The experts’ network was fragmented, but in embracing Germany as motherland they shared the objective of redefining the racial and colonial discourses to facilitate recognition of Jews as an ethnic minority in Germany and Europe; this did not contradict a Jewish fatherland because the bulk of settlers were to come from Eastern Europe, not Germany (PDF p.26).

The subsection Zionism and German Colonial Fantasies (PDF p.26-30) applies the concept of Colonial fantasies from German postcolonial studies (Susanne Zantop): colonial literature laid the psychological groundwork for colonization and let Germans imagine a place for the German colonizer. German Jews were receptive through both Germanness and Jewishness — a shared yearning for recognition as equals and a shared colonial latecomer anxiety — so Zionists could portray Zionist colonization as an extension of German colonialism and Zionism as both German and Jewish patriotism (PDF p.27-28). Outcomes were then unresolved: which European power would facilitate Zionism, whether the Ottomans would allow large-scale settlement, Palestine’s exact extent, and whether settlement should be palestinocentric — the Uganda plan being one example (PDF p.28). Germany’s lack of colonial dominions made it the preferable candidate for Oppenheimer’s circle, who hoped to capitalise on its links to the Ottoman Empire (PDF p.28). Zionism is described as a step-child, a subaltern manifestation, of European and German nationalism; the triangular prism through which Jews carved an imagined place between Europeans and the peoples of the Middle East is read through Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones”, with Stefan Vogt’s warning against equating Zionism simplistically with domination, racial superiority and national chauvinism, and an express disclaimer that the study is neither an accusation of complicity nor a defence (PDF p.29). First-generation German Zionists joined non-Jewish allies in promoting an imaginary liberal form of imperialism; after the empire’s demise Oppenheimer still advanced cooperative settlements within Inner colonization in Frankfurt (PDF p.30).

The subsection The Triangular Prism: Challenging the Zionist Narrative (PDF p.30-33) extends the method to the journals Oppenheimer coedited and to his later networks, and argues that adaptation of German colonial fantasies was a further source — beyond Dmitry Shumsky’s Prague multiethnic thesis and Hagit Lavsky’s account — for the exceptional popularity of Binationalism among German Zionists: frameworks aspiring to a peaceful colonization considerate of indigenous populations converge with the German colonial fantasy of the benevolent conqueror, and apart from Palestine, Germany was the only country with an active Brit Shalom association (PDF p.31). Gezel Kressel’s 1972 Hebrew monograph is treated as the teleological counter-case: Zionism as an arrow from Europe into the Middle East, scoffing at Oppenheimer’s mobilisation of non-immigrating sympathisers and at his conviction that Arabs must be included in the emerging Jewish society, and downplaying that commitment as merely retrospective (PDF p.32). Peretz counters from archival material that the commitment held during and after Merhavia; Merhavia coincided with the emergence of adherence to Jewish labor, and as the cooperative’s theoretical mastermind Oppenheimer could not avoid a position on Arab labor (PDF p.33). Oppenheimer did not consider Germany a full homeland as the United States, England or France might have been, but German Jews enjoyed far-reaching civil liberties compared with the Russian Empire and Romania, and he believed economic and social reform could remedy Germany’s ills; in a 1935 letter to Einstein he could not feel hate against Germany and the Germans (PDF p.32). His citizenship was rescinded; he emigrated with his youngest daughter Renata via Japan and Shanghai to Los Angeles, where he died in 1943, while his sons Ludwig and Heinz and his first wife Martha had immigrated earlier to Palestine (PDF p.33).

Overview of Chapters and Sources (PDF p.34-37) summarises the two parts, the primary sources for each chapter, and the argument sequence treated in the sections above: Chapters 1-2 on the racial discourse, using Oppenheimer’s journalism, autobiographical material, German Sociological Society minutes and his debates with Werner Sombart and Wilhelm Schallmayer (PDF p.35); Chapter 3 on the rift with Herzl over the charter and small-scale settlement, his cooperation with practical Zionists who promoted immediate settlement of Cyprus, and the Sixth Zionist Congress of 1903, where he was appointed to the Kommission zur Erforschung Palästinas board with Warburg and Soskin (PDF p.35-36); Chapters 4-5 on Altneuland (journal) as a German colonial journal and networking platform for liberal Jewish and non-Jewish colonial advocates (PDF p.36); and Chapter 6 on the Austrian Poalei Zion — whose delegation to the Ninth Zionist Congress in 1909 helped him gain endorsement for Merhavia — the intergenerational rift in German Zionism, the wartime Komitee für den Osten and its journal Neue Jüdische Monatshefte and its vision of Jewish autonomy in Poland, and his final stand, at Martin Buber’s request, with the younger Central European circle that would later establish Brit Shalom, in the German colonial fantasy of being an anticolonial colonizer (PDF p.36-37).

Chapter 1: Race, Antisemitism and Jewishness (PDF p.38-44 / printed p.25-31)

Chapter 1 opens with Kurt Tucholsky’s 1932 review epigraph on the “cross of his Jewishness”. Franz Oppenheimer was born on March 30, 1864, in Berlin’s Spandauer Vorstadt, the old Jewish Quarter, around the corner from the New Synagogue; his father Julius was a reform rabbi at the Johannis Street Synagogue, Berlin’s first reform temple (PDF p.38). Biographers explain his Jewish identity through tikkun olam and scorn for “Mammonism”, but Oppenheimer downplayed Judaism’s influence — ninety-nine percent Kant and Goethe, one percent Old Testament, mediated by Spinoza and Luther’s Bible — and Franz Rosenzweig called him ignorant in Jewish matters as only a rabbi’s son can be (PDF p.38-39). His political and ethical awakening is traced to Kant, Leonard Nelson, SPD politician and anarchist Bruno Wille, and the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis around his sister Paula and Richard Dehmel; his naturalist gaze on the poor and his natural-science method are read as proximity to naturalism (PDF p.39). Silverman’s Jewishness framework is restated (PDF p.39-40). Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population but 10 to 16 percent of medical students between 1891 and 1911 and 16 percent of physicians in 1900, on figures Peretz cites from Efron; academic careers were all but impossible for nonbaptized Jewish doctors (PDF p.40). Oppenheimer specialised in otolaryngology, struggled to attract patients, and closed his practice in 1896 to become a social economist; his medical background shaped his Organicism, while his Jewish perspective — on race, biology and sociology, and combating academic racism and antisemitism — has been widely ignored (PDF p.40). Antisemitism was formative: the autobiography is read as an apologetic defence against antisemitic slander and a proud manifest of Jewish belonging to Germany, opening with his claim to be a “fully authentic” Berliner though not baptised, and locating real Berliners among the social others of the Jewish quarter and the proletariat (PDF p.41). His Berlin dialect was a conscious expression of rootedness and of the liberal conception that a shared tongue founds belonging; he traced his maternal family in Berlin to the seventeenth century and claimed Sephardic lineage, the name Ben Ari, and descent from the house of David — a claim type Peretz, citing Efron, says Jewish anthropologists used to cast the Sephardi as the equivalent of the Jewish “Aryan” against the ignoble Jew of Central and Eastern Europe (PDF p.42). He internalised the aesthetic-racial ideal of classical beauty, writing that his “Hittite nose” branded him as a member of a race treated with traditional, somewhat benign enmity by the blonde Berliner, and distinguished that traditional resentment from the quasi scientifically founded antisemitism of the upper classes, which did far more to question Jewish belonging (PDF p.43). As a freelance journalist in transition — and as a Jew marginalised through racial theory — he fought back within the racial discourse, repudiating tropes of Jewish susceptibility to mental illness, sexual deviousness and physical degeneracy; Efron is cited that the most vocal and influential Jewish race scientists were German Zionists, many of them physicians (PDF p.43-44).

Chapter 1: From Medicine to Sociology: An Organicist Approach to Utopia (PDF p.44-48 / printed p.31-35)

Anthropology’s project of empirically fixing humans’ place in nature produced phrenology and physiognomy; Oppenheimer dismissed phrenology but supported physiognomy while denying that physique and personality were unalterable — even the racially predetermined skull could be shaped at a young age (PDF p.44-45). Consciousness, prone to suggestibility, links body and character: reviewing Max Hirsch on suggestion and hypnosis, Oppenheimer held that suggestion could heal functional nervous disorders and was a formative force in mass movement and in the formation and separation of social groups, founding also his cooperative principle of mutual aid (PDF p.45). His Organicism descends from physicians-turned-social thinkers Bernard de Mandeville and François Quesnay: egoistic action is society’s bonding agent, a harmonic state is a natural balance of conflicted interests, division of labor forms society’s organs, and diagnosis must consider the whole organism (PDF p.46). Oppenheimer, a “flaming supporter of organicism”, insisted it was only a heuristic metaphor: societies do not die of decay, so organicism need not be culturally pessimistic (PDF p.46-47). The social physician’s task is to remove obstructions — above all contaminating state institutions, under his “tutelary custodianship” as an “enlightened despot” — so society regenerates to its natural healthy condition, the perfect society being imagined as an ideal primal society under natural law or social contract (PDF p.47). Liberal organicism, pioneered in Adam Smith, traces national character to political and economic distinctions, not inborn racial constitutions, and ascribes to society a normative ideal of health restorable through social reform (PDF p.48). This brought him into a racial discourse in which aestheticised medical science measured races as healthy or as sick, infectious and degenerate (PDF p.48-49).

Chapter 1: Countering Cultural Pessimism and Concepts of Degeneration (PDF p.49-52 / printed p.36-39)

Romanticism of nature underpinned the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft dichotomy of early German sociology and the Degeneration theories by which educated classes rejected progress, liberalism and cosmopolitanism for a völkish return to imagined national roots (PDF p.49). Oppenheimer endorsed the return to nature but fought degeneration pessimism: reviewing William Hirsch, he supported the attack on Moreau de Tours and Cesare Lombroso for equating genius with insanity, quoted Hirsch that there is nothing more erroneous and unscientific than to assume a so-called normal person, and held that no individual trait can ground a psychological diagnosis (PDF p.49-50). Hirsch’s criticism of Max Nordau — for whom the modern era was plagued with hysteria and degeneration and metropolises were “sorrowful hospitals” — is endorsed: neurasthenia and superstition have always been part of human history and a motor for change, and there is no statistical evidence the modern age is more afflicted (PDF p.50). Oppenheimer shared Nordau’s Organicism, the healing power of sport and a “muscular Judaism”, but disagreed with his diagnosis of society as degenerate — the balancing act of German Zionists retaining a liberal, emancipatory worldview while attempting reconciliation with völkish conceptions (PDF p.50-51). In a 1900 medical article Oppenheimer questioned that increased mental illness resulted from culture’s corruption, weighing Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s balance — civilization blamed, but a small price for humankind’s evolution, its worst result the metropolises and cutthroat capitalist competition — against his own optimism that metropolises, which existed in antiquity on slavery and recurred with modern industrial slavery, are a temporary crisis, nature’s way of calling the physician’s attention to the source (PDF p.51). He located the crisis in industrial slavery and in Bodensperre [land enclosure]: removing the gentry manor holders’ state-enforced protectionism would reverse rural migration, and Siedlungsgenossenschaften [settlement cooperatives] would erode the manors’ profitability until this “remainder of the old feudalism” fell, the manor class being “social-hygienically extruded” and a utopia reached in which freedom and equality, liberalism and socialism, need not be chosen between (PDF p.52).

Chapter 1: Interpreting Darwinist Evolution between Socialism and Rassenhygiene (PDF p.53-56 / printed p.40-43; section unfinished in this part)

Hygiene shaped Oppenheimer’s transition: he called hygiene a sociological discipline closely related to national economy, a technocratic task for physicians, engineers, architects and administrators (PDF p.53). Rudolph Virchow embodied its political imperatives — cell research foundational for Organicism, a genius fusing fields towards science’s integration into one system, and founder of social medicine on the conviction that social conditions facilitated epidemics such as tuberculosis, so the physician’s task broadens from healing individuals to healing society; hygiene is “the art of the ‘medical statesman’”, or practical sociology (PDF p.53). Social medicine’s popularity produced Sozialhygiene and Rassenhygiene; Oppenheimer was at first positively inclined to Rassenhygiene and praised its coiner Alfred Ploetz — misquoting Ploetz’s 1895 title as Die Züchtung unserer Rassen in place of Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen, as Peretz’s footnote notes (PDF p.54). He admitted medical progress might have encumbered Rassenhygiene by decreasing infant mortality and allowing “inferior” elements to reach reproductive age, and he shared the period’s positive connotation of some diseases for their eugenic benefits (PDF p.54). He criticised the lack of empirical evidence for hereditary transmission of mental illness and distanced himself from the negative eugenics of reducing offspring of the supposedly inferior, preferring Francis Galton’s positive English eugenics of increasing offspring of the supposedly superior (PDF p.55). Industrialisation advanced rather than strained mental capacities, though the shift from physical to mental labour disturbed mind-body balance; gymnastics and noncompetitive sport are the remedy, in the Jewish context balancing Jewish lopsided intellectualism as in Nordau’s “muscular Judaism”, and crucial for the whole urban proletariat to which most Eastern European Jews belonged (PDF p.55). Eugenic human breeding schemes are criticised as bound to fail through their focus on defined desirable traits rather than nature’s balancing power and complex heredity and social influences (PDF p.55-56). At its inception some Rassenhygiene adherents were not openly antisemitic: Ploetz at first ascribed a positive role to Jews and miscegenation before his turn to racial purity and his 1911 cofounding of the secret “Nordic Ring”, and Wilhelm Schallmayer opposed racist interpretations and Aryan supremacy, holding class differences more impactful than racial ones; both linked Rassenhygiene with socialism against capitalism and class privilege (PDF p.56). In 1900 Friedrich Alfred Krupp sponsored a competition to prove socialism and Darwinism incompatible, presided over by Ernst Haeckel and won by Schallmayer’s Vererbung und Auslese, which endowed Rassenhygiene as social Darwinism’s official representative in Germany; Oppenheimer, who admired Darwin and opposed his misappropriation, joined the critics of Schallmayer’s treatise (PDF p.56). The section continues beyond PDF p.56.

Chapter 1: Interpreting Darwinist Evolution between Socialism and Rassenhygiene, continued (PDF p.57-60 / printed p.44-47)

The section concludes with the controversy over Schallmayer’s Krupp prize treatise. Oppenheimer’s two newspaper reviews repudiated the competition’s interdisciplinary encroachment and Schallmayer’s underestimation of socioeconomic conditions — nutrition, housing and treatment — in racial evolution (PDF p.57). Schallmayer replied that his subject was social biology and degeneration, and that Oppenheimer’s contention only reinforced his conviction that Rassenhygiene was necessary; the new discipline had to be distinguished from social anthropology, the term for racial theorists working “to provide a scientific legitimation for ideologies of Aryan supremacy”, and Schallmayer preferred “Eugenik” or the singular “Rassehygiene” to Ploetz’s plural coinage (PDF p.57). Both Schallmayer and Ploetz sought cooperation through separation: delineation of eugenics and public hygiene as independent disciplines under an overarching “national biology” whose goal Rassenhygiene would determine, and for Ploetz the primacy of the biological over the economic perspective, so that social policy would not damage the nation through overproportionate support for the innately “unfit” (PDF p.58). Oppenheimer, who also proposed uniting biology and sociology, accused Schallmayer of arbitrarily choosing biological theories, above all rejecting Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics for Weismann’s selectionism; neo-Lamarckism was crucial to Oppenheimer’s understanding of race as dynamic and malleable within one or two generations, his “plasticity of race” (PDF p.58-59). Climate was for Oppenheimer the educator of humanity and the sole adversary in the struggle for existence; civilization was technical, man in Benjamin Franklin’s words a “toolmaking animal”, and his account was fundamentally Eurocentric — Europe’s moderate climate gave the optimal balance, Eskimos and Africans had been made “‘passive’ rather than ‘active races,’”, and belonging to a historical people meant being colonial (PDF p.59). His 1899 climate essay traced Europe’s tribes, their competition preventing a central exploitative power, and a “deliberate natural selection” merging supposed positive characteristics of different European peoples — “Germanic warrior strength and Hellenic beauty, Gallic spirit and German profundity” — as the “Übermensch” of his dream, with race as a promise for a common European future rather than protection of Teutonic blood (PDF p.60).

Chapter 1: Population Policy and Oppenheimer’s Settlement Cooperative (PDF p.61-67 / printed p.48-54)

Birthrate comparisons between one’s own Volk and competing neighbours belonged to cultural pessimism and the Degeneration discourse; population policy became a contested field for technocratic intervention (PDF p.61). Against Malthus — population growing exponentially, sustenance linearly — Oppenheimer argued humans have arms and not only mouths: the “tool making animal” could increase agricultural production enough for stable population growth, a technological optimism he shared with Julius Wolf and Eduard Bernstein, realising his utopian socialism not by reform or revolution but through avant-garde agricultural cooperatives (PDF p.62). His “prophetic Malthusianism” bridged to racial theories that claim science can determine a person’s value through an ascribed tendency: “The Malthusian proposition … means nothing other than that by force of unyielding natural law a multitude of people must be continually ousted into the abyss of extinction through sustenance deprivation” (PDF p.63). Following Kropotkin, Darwin’s struggle was man’s struggle against nature, not between social groups or races, and mutual aid became a foundational tenet of the cooperative model; the veneration connected him for a time with Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber (PDF p.63-64). The settlement cooperative was built on low-interest loans, not charity; the social engineer develops conditions appealing to the inalterable human ego so that the weak are supported rather than deprived, and unskilled city dwellers learn self-sufficiency from farmers and agronomists (PDF p.64). Oppenheimer rejected Rassenhygiene’s sexual intervention programmes — marriage prohibitions and sterilization even if voluntary — and the neo-Malthusian premises of family planning; economic transformation would render many Rassenhygiene and feminist demands obsolete, and the cooperative, where women would have equal status and rights and marriages would rest on love, would remove the economic compulsions behind prostitution (PDF p.65). Migration control was intrinsic to population policy; Eastern European migrants were considered, in Max Weber’s words, especially “physically and intellectually primitive” (PDF p.66). From Theodor von Goltz’s 1893 law linking large estates to rural migration, Oppenheimer identified land enclosure (Bodensperre) as the main source of urbanisation and root of the social question — his main break with Marxism — and applied his law of least resistance to migration: human groups “flow from the plane of higher economic and social pressure to that of lower pressure along the line of least resistance”, and “all of world history is in its core a history of migration” (PDF p.66). Chapter 1 concludes that the early writings already adapted the positions that prepared Oppenheimer to become a social engineer in the service of Zionism, while he remained an optimistic liberal shunning degeneration, innate racial differences between Jews and other Europeans, and the infeasibility of Jewish integration (PDF p.67).

Chapter 2: Biology, Sociology and the Jews — introduction and Oppenheimer in the Context of Early German Sociology (PDF p.68-75 / printed p.55-62)

Chapter 2 opens against the genealogy that dates antisemitism research from 1944 (Sartre, Horkheimer and Adorno shifting the focus from Jews to antisemites): Oppenheimer’s rebuttal of the Judenzählung of 1916 is well known, but Peretz argues that pigeonholing him with the interwar Jewish sociologists (Norbert Elias, Arnold Zweig, Fritz (Peretz) Bernstein) is misleading, because his sociological ideas on Jewish idiosyncrasy and antisemitism were already ardently debated in 1912 at the second Soziologentag of the German Sociological Society, and reached the founders of academic German sociology, not only a Jewish audience (PDF p.68-69). Oppenheimer was a founding member and part of the DGS’s inner core and in 1919 received the first chair of sociology at Frankfurt; among early German sociologists he was arguably the most outspoken against racial theories, and with Tönnies, Max Weber and Simmel race science was officially barred from academic sociology before the First World War (PDF p.70). The chapter follows his three approaches: direct confrontation with racial theorists and the concept of race; normalising Jewish history, which Weber and Werner Sombart viewed as aberrant yet exemplary for modern capitalism; and shifting the discipline’s focus from supposed Semites towards antisemites (PDF p.70). Early German sociology (1909 to the Gleichschaltung of 1934) is no longer treated as incongruous with Nazism, continuities into the Nazi and postwar eras having been exposed (PDF p.70-71). Weber’s demand for Werturteilfreiheit was barely heeded and the paragraph was erased from the DGS bylaws in 1924; Oppenheimer distinguished forbidden subjective value judgements — “social-psychological determination” — from judgements based on scientific observation of causality, and his first sociological treatise treated “inner colonization” in Prussia’s Eastern provinces (PDF p.71). His four-volume System der Soziologie (1922-1935) aimed, following Comte and Spencer’s Organicism, to synthesise the humanities and natural sciences under anthropology, with sociology as the theoretical science of the “social process” (PDF p.72-74). Against Marx, wealth-seeking was for Oppenheimer a means to social prestige, the main motivation for social action — a key to his efforts for Zionism and Jewish pride; shared values extend solidarity within groups while opposing values instil hostility to outsiders, the double morals Weber described being shared by all ancient societies, not uniquely Jewish; the utopian aim was extension of the cooperative spirit to outsiders towards a European, even global, brotherhood (PDF p.73-74). His ambition to crown the scientific hierarchy with positivist-historical sociology was a minority position among DGS colleagues wary of upsetting established disciplines (PDF p.75).

Chapter 2: A Race of Bastards (PDF p.75-80 / printed p.62-67)

Groups, imagined as islands of peace with conflict primarily with outsiders, were society’s smallest component; influenced by Spencer and Ludwig Gumplowicz, Oppenheimer held the group’s purpose to be the individual’s rational striving for resources, yet he opposed social Darwinists’ legitimation of the ruling class, and attempted a discursive transvaluation deeming the landed gentry — not Jews — the real “strangers” and malign tumors to be removed via social hygiene (PDF p.75). He did not deny race’s effect — “race … continues to have an effect long after the environmental conditions that brought it about disappear” — but scorned the slogan that solves all mysteries of history; his use of “race” was inconsistent, as was typical of the period, and races remained in flux (PDF p.76). Anthropometric research had failed to prove consistent racial features; the “plasticity of race” allowed a race’s physical and psychological composition to be altered within a few generations, although he did not in principle dismiss eugenic breeding programmes, endorsing sterilization and marriage prohibitions while objecting they were almost impossible to implement and mistaken in focus until social conditions were stabilised (PDF p.77). Culture’s influence on race outweighed race’s influence on culture by far, any hierarchy of races being temporal and Eurocentric (PDF p.77). Reviewing Albrecht Wirth, he cautioned against confusing peoples and nations with races: Wirth’s “subrace” [Unterrasse] becomes a people when rooted in the land through settlement, peoplehood resting on shared language, history, beliefs and citizenship, not common ancestry (PDF p.78). Citing Paul von Lilienfeld, the state as complex organism cannot be racially pure; Oppenheimer’s gendered analogy of state formation — a masculinised nomad minority dominating a feminised farmer majority — produces out of sexual contact between the classes a “race of bastards”, hybrid offspring who, against Gobineau, inherit master virtues and become “the born leaders of the subject race” and the main agents of state transformation (PDF p.78-79). Jews were in his imagination born into this hybrid role: “The racial character allegedly formed through desert wanderings is the typical character of a multilingual, urbanized former master class” (PDF p.79). Yet he also argued Africans could not achieve Europeans’ cultural level because they biologically mature earlier — himself entangled in the discourse he challenged (PDF p.79). He sympathised with Germanophile racial theories of a “world race of north Germanics”, would have liked Jews included in Chamberlain’s pan-European homo europaeus and maybe in the Aryan race, and, against prominent Zionist racial dogmas, did not regard Jews as racially purer than others: on Chamberlain’s supposition Jews were a mix of “real Semites, Hittites, and maybe ‘Aryans.’”, and his “Hittite nose” insinuated a racial kinship to Aryans (PDF p.80).

Chapter 2: Race and the Jewish Question in the German Sociological Society before the First World War (PDF p.81-84 / printed p.68-71)

At the first Soziologentag (Frankfurt, 1910), Alfred Ploetz’s talk on the terms “race” and “society” met great reservations — class and milieu, the impossibility of speaking of race without prejudice, the term’s lack of clarity; Tönnies countered with Moses Mendelssohn, the “deformed cripple” who produced a dynasty of geniuses, and Goldscheid asked pointedly: “Would society have been better off if Moses Mendelssohn had been selected out?” (PDF p.81). Michal Bodemann noted that almost none of Germany’s obvious “others” were mentioned; only the rapid reproduction of Poles was named as a threat, while Eastern European Jews, derogatorily labelled Ostjuden, were ignored; Weber rejected the factuality of Ploetz’s claims about Poles and African Americans, and Sombart attempted to redeem “race” for sociology (PDF p.82). Oppenheimer, absent, was cited by Heinz Potthoff against Ploetz — exposing that introducing race diverted from Marxism and class theory — foreshadowing the second Soziologentag (Berlin, 1912), devoted to people and nation in relation to race, state and language, where Sombart insisted the Jewish question be made explicit: “Are we a people, are we a nation – and do we have the right to act” (PDF p.82-83). Oppenheimer was the only speaker to take up race, in Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie; the Jüdische Rundschau reported he “quite spitefully” attacked Chamberlain, whose followers left the hall, and that in discussion “the attacker was turned into the attacked”, Sombart spearheading the counterattack; Weber again opposed sketchy racial theories (PDF p.83). Most respondents focused on Oppenheimer’s talk, indicating, in Bodemann’s surmise, where the hearts really were (PDF p.84).

Chapter 2: Oppenheimer versus Sombart: On Jews and the Spirit of Capitalism (PDF p.84-98 / printed p.71-85)

The Jüdische Rundschau title was no coincidence: Sombart’s immensely popular though scholarly deficient Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911) and his pamphlet Die Zukunft der Juden (1912), touting Jews as a separate species or race with a distinct psychology while supporting Zionism, stood at the centre of debate between Zionists and the German Jewish establishment; over 1,500 pricy tickets were sold to his Berlin lecture (PDF p.84-85). Commissioned by Die Welt, Oppenheimer inverted Sombart’s causality: Jews were not the source of capitalist abundance — against Sombart’s “Israel passes over Europe like the sun” — the political system, democracy, attracted them, and when “Junker-clerical reactionaries” strangled democracy an exodus and economic decline ensued (PDF p.85). He conceded a Jewish “psychological race” of unilaterally developed intellect, and read Sombart’s “strangers” social-psychologically: segregated merchant quarters produced a “colonist psychology” common to all merchant peoples (PDF p.86). Against Sombart’s desert-formed nomad character he countered with Jewish multilingualism — Yiddish or Ladino, Hebrew, and the local vernacular — polyglots developing a more abstract and free approach, a category Max Brod held to strengthen Jewish nationalism by slowing assimilation (PDF p.86-87). Oppenheimer accused Sombart of plagiarising his 1898 land-enclosure origin of capitalism; in his 1902 “Die Anfänge des jüdischen Kapitalismus” Jews were initially shepherds, then farmers and mercenaries, their capitalist turn the same historical-social process as any people’s, with Jewish capitalists exploiting Jewish proletarians in the sweat shops of New York and London and the factories of Poland and Russia — a normalisation countering the antisemitic “figure of the third”, the Jew as incapable of forming states, only a “state within a state” (PDF p.87-88). Not an inherent capitalist spirit but free-spiritedness made Jews merchants; they were a Schacherer nation among Schacherer nations, competition among merchant peoples the main source of animosity in antiquity and of contemporary middle-class antisemitism; Jews hardly founded their own colonies, settled as guests, and so built the largest trade network, its ethnic separation and Hebrew as lingua franca enabling survival into the Middle Ages (PDF p.89). Language difference was not race difference: Oppenheimer claimed it questionable “if the Jews were at all a Semitic people and not, on the contrary, an Aryan herdsman tribe forced to adopt a Semitic language”, the diaspora Jews being the urbanised former master class, cut off from landownership and flocked into commercial and medical professions; yet idiosyncrasy was not irreversible — “the difference will disappear when Jews would be provided, for a long enough time, the same conditions as their host nations” — against Sombart’s essentialism in Die Zukunft der Juden (PDF p.90). A second, longer review in Die neue Rundschau for a non-Jewish audience ended: “Therefore, the Jews have no reason to lapse into delusions of grandeur. They are also not creators but, rather, creations of their time” (PDF p.91). Merchant ghettos, common also to Hanseatic merchants, formed the capitalist mindset; the Jewish soul was not shaped in the desert but evolved in Europe (PDF p.92). On baptism, Oppenheimer took a Zionist anti-assimilationist position — departures strengthening the Jewish “species” — while honouring early nineteenth-century conversions as noble; Sombart in Judentaufen (1912) held “You cannot ‘leave a race’ like you would a church”, doubting endogamy would ever cease (PDF p.93-94). Japanese capitalism developed without Jewish involvement, a counterexample to Jewish omnipresence (PDF p.94-95). Rejecting any “capitalist spirit” — “Such ghosts lurk only where the torch of real critical science doesn’t illuminate” — Oppenheimer derived capitalism from land enclosure and class-state formation repeated worldwide, a general anthropological phenomenon whose goals in his account were the opposite of the antisemitic simplification: class conflict, not racial conflict, in the forefront (PDF p.95). Double morals were universal intergroup behaviour, and their antisemitic use continued Christian anti-Jewish resentment that, following Weber, legitimised upper-class looting of Jewish possessions, exposing the class interests under modern antisemitism; Jewish merchants used solely “economic means”, and modern antisemitism was old elites’ reaction to successful Jewish integration (PDF p.96). His second Soziologentag conclusion declared: “The racial conception of history is not a science but a pseudoscience. It is the typical legitimating group ideology of the upper classes” (PDF p.96-97). Sombart’s approach was diametrically opposed — social factors only where biological explanations fail — and Sombart admitted his aim to steer sociology away from Marxist materialism: racial theory’s “great merit” was that “it has freed us from the domination of the materialist conception of history” (PDF p.97-98).

Chapter 2: Reclaiming Intellectual Authority for the Homo Meditarraneus (PDF p.98-102 / printed p.85-89; section unfinished in this part)

Race was more important than class in the early sociologists’ debate; Oppenheimer, not a Marxist, advocated a materialist conception of history and distinguished race- from class-oriented arguments: “My sociological studies have convinced me that antisemitism is, essentially, social class struggle, not racial hate”, and antisemitism was “a special case of an extremely common, primitive, group psychological fact: group hate” (PDF p.98-99). Small differences spark tensions; Jews, differing in language, religion, social class and space, were more susceptible to being hated, their dark-skinned complexion as homo meditarraneus — the spelling of the body term in the original — standing out among fair-skinned northern inhabitants (PDF p.99). The term served two goals: normalising Jewish history by blurring Jewish uniqueness into the Mediterranean merchant peoples of antiquity (including Phoenicians incorporated through mass conversions, and blonde Khazars assimilated through conversion), and placing that history in a European narrative, the European race divided into northern (homo europaeus septentrionalis) and southern species (PDF p.99-100). Writing at the First World War’s beginning, Oppenheimer held “antisemitism is only a kind of chauvinism directed inwards”, its campaign not racist because baptised Jews were not targeted (PDF p.100). His conclusion echoed positive experiences with antisemitic intellectuals such as his habilitation advisor Adolph Wagner, who, reviewing the habilitation paper, hesitantly complemented the analytical capabilities of his “Jewish head” and laughed: “Look I am an antisemite and I also have a Jewish head” (PDF p.100-101). After the war debacle the ruling classes unleashed a “new antisemitism” as scapegoat; racial antisemitism was for Oppenheimer a mere declaration of faith founded on irrational belief, to be countered by exposing racial theory’s scientific shortcomings and its advocates’ subjectivity — their “social-psychological determination”, in Herbert Spencer’s words their “personal equation” (PDF p.101-102). He sought to turn the tables, making antisemites instead of Jews the object of academic scrutiny and wresting the power of interpretation away; Jews had been the first subject of German colonising “intellectual authority”, in Susannah Heschel’s phrase a domestic rather than overseas colonization through the scholarly investigation of Judaism (PDF p.102). With humour he exposed contradictions between racial theorists — Gobineau’s pure-blooded Germanic nobility against Woltmann’s revolutionaries in the same role, Chamberlain’s dark-haired Germanic families surmising his own hair — and repeatedly implied British-born Chamberlain was not a German (PDF p.102). The section continues beyond PDF p.102.

Chapter 2: Reclaiming Intellectual Authority for the Homo Meditarraneus, concluded (PDF p.103-108 / printed p.90-95)

The section concludes by turning Oppenheimer’s attack on Chamberlain into a claim of intellectual authority over Christianity itself: Chamberlain’s “sense of race in one’s own bosom” is read as an admission that craniometry and physiometry had failed, leaving his Aryan — Celts, Slavs and Germans included, supposed Semites and Southern Europeans excluded — without objective principles, and casting doubt on Chamberlain’s own Germanness was a way of questioning his insider capacity to recognise a “real German” (PDF p.103). The racial theorists disagreed over Jesus — Chamberlain’s Jesus descended from “predominantly blonde” Amorites, Dühring’s a pure Semite, Gobineau’s Catholicism the epitome of a Germanness corrupted by the Reformation — while the negative opinion of Jews remained constant; Oppenheimer held racial theories arose to counteract Christ’s teaching of equal natural rights, so that they, not Judaism, corrupted Christianity (PDF p.103). Sombart retorted at the second Soziologentag that there were ideologies of rulers and ideologies of the oppressed and that Oppenheimer’s class analysis belonged to the latter (PDF p.104). Peretz places Oppenheimer, consciously or not, in the tradition of the Wissenschaft des Judentums: barred Jewish scholars answering professorial antisemitism by refuting its scientific arguments and methodology, aiming at a prejudice-free discourse in which Jews held intellectual authority — Oppenheimer’s own position after he left his fraternity Hevellia when it passed paragraphs excluding Jewish admission and faced openly antisemitic professors (PDF p.104-105). His word “Germanomania” — Gobineau its “first victim” — turned out to be Saul Ascher’s coinage in Die Germanomania (1815) against the post-Napoleonic, university-based agitation of Rühs and Fries that helped prepare the Hep-Hep pogroms of 1819 (PDF p.105). Oppenheimer’s pseudonymous poem “Siegheil!”, translated in Hollywood as “Germanomaniacs”, draws the line from 1819’s “Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke!” to the Nazis, and its second paragraph makes the Jewish homo meditarraneus a man of the colonised south against the northern race that made “The White Man’s Burden” its job (PDF p.105-107). Chapter 2 closes: hybrid in-betweenness defined Oppenheimer’s path; he used science for self-emancipation and shifted sociological scrutiny from Jews to antisemites, yet held Jews — “rejected bastards” and “noble leaders” at once — to an almost messianic pioneering role, with Zionist colonization as the vehicle; his hesitation about Zionism’s racialist precepts, and his renown for agricultural cooperative settlement and technocratic social engineering, which appealed above all to Herzl, set up Chapter 3 (PDF p.107-108).

Chapter 3: Oppenheimer’s Path to Zionism — opening (PDF p.109-111 / printed p.96-98)

Chapter 3 opens with Kurt Blumenfeld’s puzzlement at a Zionist Organization member who “emphasized his Germanness, he wanted to have nothing to do with the Jewish national idea and was nevertheless the opposite of an assimilationist” (PDF p.109). Buber’s 1901 Die Welt editorial “Wege zum Zionismus”, placed directly before the second instalment of Oppenheimer’s first Zionist article, welcomed the “social theoretician who wants to implement his ideas on us” as a powerful stimulus while doubting his grasp of “the whole beauty of our national idea” (PDF p.109). Peretz reads the episode as an early manifestation of the ZVfD’s intergenerational conflict: the younger generation redefined Zionism as dissimilation from Germany and ultimately emigration to Palestine, while Oppenheimer’s 1910 “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein” exemplified the first generation’s declaration of belonging to European culture; Blumenfeld, himself a post-assimilationist, later praised the “German-Jewish symbiosis” generated “through the collision of German culture and Jewish essence” (PDF p.110). The core of the conflict was not Germanness, which both generations kept, but how völkisch and racial discourse should affect the reimagination of Jews’ relationship to Europe; the racial positions Zionists occupied initially deterred Oppenheimer, who joined on the basis of the Basel Program as least common denominator, his active engagement spanning almost two decades (PDF p.111).

Chapter 3: First Encounters with Zionism (PDF p.111-122 / printed p.98-109)

Oppenheimer’s memoirs tell of a chance express-train encounter with Oskar Marmorek and Johann Kremenetzky of the Inner Actions Committee leading to Herzl; Peretz shows the timeline is inaccurate and the initiative deflected: “Jüdische Siedlungen” ran in Die Welt in four instalments from December 13, 1901, Herzl commissioned the settlement cooperative immediately after the final instalment in late January 1902, and Herzl had conveyed his regards — perhaps the invitation to write — earlier still; the leadership wanted Oppenheimer to advise on creating a “province” on his theories, originally El-Arish in British Egypt (PDF p.111-112). Before Zionism he had already applied his land-settlement concept to Jews as a board member of the Bodenkulturverein (founded Berlin, October 24, 1897), whose 1900-1901 report aimed to “start a Jewish farmer colony that will prove how very well-suited German Jews are to pursuing agriculture activities on German land”; he shared the assumption that Jewish concentration in urban commercialism was negative and must be remedied, and the Bodenkulturverein is wholly absent from his memoirs (PDF p.113). Robert Weltsch’s opportunist reading — Zionism as the prospect of applying his theory to “a new and vast scheme of land settlement” after the Freiland cooperative’s June 1901 liquidation — is supported by the timing (PDF p.114). Oppenheimer conceptualised the cooperative within Inner colonization, preferring it to overseas colonization; he held Zionist settlement’s fate depended on integration with, not detachment from, Europe, yet told Herzl the cooperative “can admirably exist in every place on this planet” (PDF p.114-115). In 1901 he had twice attacked Zionism’s racial viewpoint — explicitly, that Zionism endorsed the same racial theories as Gobineau, Dühring, Lagarde, Nietzsche and Chamberlain; indirectly, in May 1901, praising agricultural settlement as “the legitimate core of the Zionist movement” in an article seeking JCA support for the Bodenkulturverein, whose model would supply overseas colonies such as Canada and California with exemplary colonists (PDF p.115-116). His motive was proving the dynamics of race: farming would “disprove the old, foolish belief that Jews are too lazy and too clever to dedicate themselves to physical labor”, and transform the Jew physically into a Mensch; the Ostjuden he described as a “gaunt city proletariat” lacking stamina — “It is not in the race; such a claim would be nonsense” (PDF p.116). The subsection Oppenheimer and Herzl (PDF p.117-122) gives the Ahlem gardening school as his exhibit — Galician pupils who, as agricultural workers, had “partially lost the so-called racial characteristic of the Jews” — and his plea to replace alms-philanthropy with Verein für Socialpolitik modernity and a homo hygenicus (PDF p.117). Herzl’s diary of January 25, 1902 records his instant decision “to carry out Oppenheimer’s experiment” in “Egyptian Palestine”, in secrecy, before the JCA “would beat me to it … in order to crush me”; both men drew on Hertzka’s Freiland — Zangwill: “without Freiland there would have been no Judenstaat” — while Herzl’s Der Judenstaat dissociated itself from Freiland utopias as lacking social pressure, the pressure antisemitism supplied (PDF p.118-119). Their relationship formed at the Fifth Zionist Congress (1901), where the Demokratische Fraktion first organised ideological opposition, cultural Zionism entered the agenda over Herzl’s resistance — thirty-seven delegates, 13 percent, walked out when he let two unregistered rabbis speak instead of sixty registered supporters — and the cultural program’s approval led the following year to the Mizrachi (PDF p.120-121). Palestine remained off limits despite the sultan’s willingness to discuss colonization elsewhere in the empire, and Zangwill warned the sultan’s Palestine holdings were barren and the fertile land in private Arab hands (PDF p.121). After the Kishinev pogrom of April 6-7, 1903, Oppenheimer’s January 1906 speech Alte und Neue Makkabäer contrasted the self-defending victims of the 1905-1906 wave — 657 pogroms, over 3,000 murdered — as “true heirs of the Maccabees” with Kishinev’s, “poisoning our sorrow with contempt”; he pressed Herzl on May 25, 1903: “Kishinev drives my blood into my forehead twenty times a day” (PDF p.121-122). Herzl and Oppenheimer, unlike Borchov, distrusted settlers’ goodwill toward “the locals” and preferred rigid discipline down the chain of command (PDF p.122).

Chapter 3: Oppenheimer’s Dissent from Political Zionism (PDF p.123-128 / printed p.110-115)

Oppenheimer was always a proponent of practical, not political, Zionism: Herzl “saw the goal but not the way to the goal”, and mass immigration after a charter would end in “chaos and disastrous destitution”; Kressel concurred that he convinced Herzl to begin small — Herzl regarding the plan as a “substitute charter” — the two complementing each other as visionary-admonisher and thinker-organiser (PDF p.123). While waiting for Herzl’s “Egyptian Palestine” cooperative, Oppenheimer co-founded with Davis Trietsch the JOCG and chaired its board; its predecessor Sha’are Zion (1898, Trietsch and Leo Motzkin) promoted settlement in countries adjacent to Palestine, and Trietsch’s “Egyptian Palestine” exegesis made El-Arish, east of the Brook of Egypt, settleable Eretz Israel (PDF p.123-124). The JOCG’s California-tried cooperative scheme — shares by instalment, hired local workers for the strenuous first phase, immigration only for cultivation and harvest — designated “the Orient”, “Palestine and its adjacent countries”, giving Palestine only slight priority: “Palestine should be preferred by equal or even only almost equal conditions” (PDF p.124). Trietsch shared Oppenheimer’s reverence for Henry George, whose Moses lecture he translated; Oppenheimer came to George through Hermann Krecke and the Eden cooperative (1893), and passed the garden city idea to Trietsch (PDF p.124-125). Herzl, at odds with Trietsch since the First Congress Cyprus motion, was aggravated, recruited Oppenheimer partly out of spite for the JCA, and, when Sigmund Werner published the JOCG prospect in Die Welt on April 24, 1903, accused Oppenheimer of splintering the movement, disclosed Trietsch’s Breslau petition intrigue, and had the ZVfD publicly dissociate itself from the JOCG (PDF p.125-126). Oppenheimer demanded an impartial explanation of why Cyprus experiments were harmful — British rule would aid the success needed for fundraising and for providing experienced settlers for Palestine — and Herzl lured him with a plot in Palestine and the Sixth Congress lecture, conditional on a public pledge to Herzl and the Basel Program; in July 1903 Oppenheimer stepped down as JOCG chairman, reserving the right to “promote with all my strength also other causes, be they Jewish or general humane ones, as long as they don’t cause conflict with my Zionist credo”, and resigned his membership only in January 1904, after the Cyprus plan’s failure and the revelation of improper allocation of funds (PDF p.126-127). His February-March 1903 General-Anzeiger statement, drafted for Herzl’s preapproval lest it contain “heresies”, defined his Zionism: a “resolute opponent of the racial theory which was crucial for many Zionists”, for whom nationalised land rooted in the Mosaic Jubilee laws made the settlement cooperative the Jewish, core solution to a Jewish question borne under “the triple scourge of absolutism, capitalism and antisemitism” — “I am a Zionist because, and insomuch as, I am a devout Socialist” (PDF p.128).

Chapter 3: Oppenheimer’s Debut at the “Uganda Congress” (PDF p.129-133 / printed p.116-120)

At the Sixth Zionist Congress (Basel, August 1903) Herzl presented the British East Africa (“Uganda”) charter as a foreseeable start to practical settlement after the Ottoman dead end and Kishinev; Trietsch dominated the first afternoon accusing Herzl of abandoning the Basel Program for a land not even adjacent to Palestine and incapable of incorporation into a future “Greater Palestine”, Bodenheimer’s oversized gavel broke restoring order, and Herzl destroyed Trietsch’s settler-welfare credibility by reading, from the podium, the statement of a Galatz woman widowed and ruined by Trietsch’s failed Cyprus expedition (PDF p.129). Alfred Nossig argued the next day for small, detached settlements near historic Palestine growing into a connected territory, on the English-in-Africa model but “with the exclusion of cannons and blood, with peaceful means, with the plow in the hand”; Alfred Klee dismissed small-scale colonization as “backward” without military backing; Daniel Pasmanik proposed the Palestine exploration commission — an unprompted committee had already formed in Berlin in 1902 — prompted by Yehiel Tschlenow’s 530-franc donation (PDF p.130-131). Oppenheimer’s lecture, postponed a day, was placed by Herzl — who chose him over Hillel Joffe and reviewed the text — to “create an atmosphere receptive to the idea of Jewish settlement outside Palestine” and to bring “a proper conception of the sense and course of colonization” into the East Africa debate; its three principles were mutual aid, agricultural focus and national ownership of land, accelerating a Jewish nation’s natural development through agricultural and purchasing cooperatives, profit distribution and eventual self-sufficiency, Palestine named at the outset but the “fatherland” left obscure between the historical one and the second generation’s new homeland, with longing for Zion joined by proletarian class consciousness and “a tribal consciousness of heritage from a superior people” (PDF p.131-132). The late-night discussion drew so few that even Nossig and Oppenheimer were absent; Trietsch attacked the agricultural focus for urban pioneers, Pasmanik warned against laying all eggs in one nest, and Bodenheimer recalled the speech was about universal settlement (PDF p.132). The congress appointed both the East Africa commission and, under German-delegation pressure with a two-year budget, the Commission for the Exploration of Palestine, with further unbudgeted goals of agronomical-technical and disease laboratories and a technical information office; it created a cooperative trust within the Jewish National Fund and resolved to nationalise land ownership as a prerequisite for cooperative settlement; Oppenheimer, Warburg and Soskin were voted onto the Palestine commission board, and Oppenheimer — who never filled the post — also onto the East Africa Commission (PDF p.132-133). Chapter 3 concludes that his arrival was not coincidental but grew from prior work on the occupational shift of Eastern European Jews, and that Herzl’s backing of the cooperative model was a victory for the practical Zionists, the site of colonization still open (PDF p.133).

Chapter 4: Altneuland – A German Colonial Journal — introduction (PDF p.134-138 / printed p.121-125)

Chapter 4 opens with the first Altneuland editorial, formulated by Oppenheimer on Soskin’s account: “For will power to turn into redemptive, salvational action we must primarily use that which is our era’s most powerful force: science” (PDF p.134). The monthly, published by the Berlin CEP from January 1904 to the end of 1906, was to build comprehensive knowledge of climate, land, local culture, law, agriculture and trade in Palestine and adjacent countries, and of the physical, moral and psychological capacities of the Jewish settlers, selecting settlement methods — nationalised land, cooperative settlement — by critical review of other colonial undertakings (PDF p.134). Peretz’s thesis: beyond those aims the journal, edited by Jews but a platform for Jews and non-Jews promoting colonial enterprise in the Middle East, must be read as a German colonial text; its circle sought, for their continued life in Germany, to intervene in a colonial discourse “plagued by racism and antisemitism” to sketch “an alternative, liberal and even utopian form of empire inclusive to Jews”, imagining themselves part of a broader European family, “different and not yet equal, but nevertheless a family” (PDF p.134-135). The analysis accordingly widens from Oppenheimer to his network and its broader German colonial activist milieu, under Penslar’s observation that the CEP “implanted into the WZO German colonialism’s celebrated commitment to scientific research and experimentation” (PDF p.135). German colonial literature’s history — the observant-outsider stance, identification with the colonized as metaphor for struggles at home, and Colonial fantasies compensating for absent might, suggesting “potency” in view of “impotence,” significance in view of insignificance — had by the 1880s become “a cultural residue of myths about self and other(s)” stirrable for progressive as well as reactionary purposes; Altneuland is advanced as a strong proponent of the progressive line, its writers agents of transculturation in Pratt’s sense, forming a peripheral Jewish alliance with opinion-forming elites (PDF p.136-137). The journal advocated [see Open questions] small-scale settlements preparatory to mass immigration and Jewish bourgeois integration in a German and European colonial elite; to promote practical settlement it had to reshape Jewish public opinion on Jews’ capability to colonize and on Palestine’s fertility, and, through reports, statistics, reprints and travel narratives, to establish intellectual authority imagining a new relation between stateless Jewry and Europe and between Jews and the local inhabitants of the intended colonization areas, reconstructing splintered European Jewry as a national whole (PDF p.137-138).

Chapter 4: From Palästina to Altneuland (PDF p.138-145 / printed p.125-132)

The CEP and Altneuland evolved from the CEEP (founded 1902), whose journal Palästina — edited by Nossig and Trietsch, with Warburg and Soskin among the founders — preceded and followed Altneuland; after the Sixth Congress endorsement and budget the CEEP became the CEP under a three-headed board of Oppenheimer, Warburg and Soskin (PDF p.138-139). Altneuland appeared as a reduced-price Die Welt supplement, its 1906 edition also in Russian, with large subscription blocs from the Kolonisationsverein Esra and the Vienna Jüdischer Kolonisationsverein; Warburg counted it a success for its “scientific seriousness and objectivity” and its integration of non-Jewish scientists (PDF p.139). Warburg — botanical expert, founding member of the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, coeditor of Der Tropenpflanzer — accused German scientists of excessive objectivity beside English and French support for their countries’ interests (PDF p.139-140). Warburg and Oppenheimer, both Agrarpolitiker, diverged: Warburg’s projects produced raw materials abroad for German industry and he favoured coupling land speculation with colonization as an incentive to large, patient private investors, did not endorse leaseholders becoming permanent independent farmers, and preferred nationalised land under rigid administration; he also suggested using global finance to increase Ottoman public debt to gradually gain influence over the whole empire, for German banks above all (PDF p.140-141). Oppenheimer’s nationalised land was instead the lever to break the global capitalist order founded on land enclosure: the cooperative’s progression from workers to lease holders to “colonists” would transform degenerate urban dwellers into “muscular Jews” and citizens of a democracy superseding the interim technocracy, counteracting the land speculation successful settlement would otherwise fuel (PDF p.141). The disagreement showed in Oppenheimer’s non-involvement in the CEP’s Germany–Middle East trade ventures (PDF p.141-142). His own Altneuland articles were few and theoretical — profit sharing would “make free self-conscious men out of semisubjugated slaves” — his editorial contribution unclear and by some historians marginal, though Soskin credited his unmatched mastery of language: “As long as Franz Oppenheimer was part of the commission, he shined in it, even if he was not totally absorbed by it” (PDF p.142). The reshuffled CEP still comprised practical Zionists favourable to Trietsch’s “Greater Palestine”, who kept propagating Cyprus in the journal (PDF p.143). The renaming from Palästina was announced in Trietsch’s closing editorial, which blamed political Zionism’s unwillingness “to allow the premature shattering of the power of fantasy to control the masses with the hard arguments of facts” and promised to replace biblical-messianic fantasy with a technical roadmap; Warburg obtained Herzl’s permission (November 25-27, 1903) to use the novel’s name intending to give its ideas a scientific foundation, and the editors’ posthumous eulogy (July 1904) criticised the novel’s form as a “poetic idealization” of shared goals (PDF p.143-144). Against Nossig’s and Trietsch’s programme of scientific exploration over the subjective travelogue — continued in Altneuland’s anonymous review finding Friedeman and Struck’s travelogue useful for propaganda but lacking scientific and economic utility — Warburg’s 1899-1900 Palestine trip had collected the plant, water and climate detail for Herzl’s novel as well as for settlement, meeting Soskin, Aaron Aaronson and the engineer Joseph Treidel, whose European-trained measurement services served the CEP’s advisory function for JNF land purchases and the foundation of Palästinkunde (PDF p.144-145). The paradoxical naming is read as a declaration of loyalty and distancing from Palästina’s oppositional position, and as capturing the brief post-”Uganda Congress” moment when settlement outside Palestine was not taboo — the CEP a parallel institution to the East Africa Commission, reinforced by the JNF commission resolution enabling land acquisition in countries bordering Palestine; the Seventh Congress refocused on Palestine, the territorialists founded the ITO in 1905, the journal’s name reverted to Palästina at the end of 1906, and Oppenheimer — who counted himself in the territorialist camp while regarding Palestine as the best place to begin — lamented the secession as a victory for Eastern European national romantics (PDF p.145).

Chapter 4: “Greater Palestine” and the Creation of a New Diaspora (PDF p.145-149 / printed p.132-136; section unfinished in this part)

Palestine’s exact borders, and with them the boundaries of colonization, were debated: Sha’are Zion’s name — the Gates of Zion — already announced settlement not in Palestine proper but in its vicinity, Trietsch’s “Greater Palestine” (PDF p.145-146). Sha’are Zion’s map in Palästina (Fig. 1, PDF p.146) depicts Palestine without clear-cut borders — the Arabian Desert a natural border in the east, borders marked in the south at Wadi El-Arish and in the north by Lebanon, the only land surrounded by a clear political border; Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Arabia are not clearly separated, the lack of separation visualising settlement potential; Lebanon, a Christian autonomy upheld by European agreement, was insusceptible to Jewish colonization, and Syria and Asia Minor were included, Trietsch said, for “scientific systematicity” (PDF p.146-147). The map’s black legend quantified settlement potential by region size, population and density, with Germany as index value 100, and Samos and Malta — Mediterranean islands like the JOCG’s candidate Cyprus — for comparison: Malta’s density 557 as an extreme example of settlement potential, against Palestine’s 21 and Cyprus’s 24.7; Peretz’s footnote shows the map’s German figures were polemical — 54 million population against the 1900 census’s over 56 million, density listed as 100 against the census’s 104.2 (1900) and 112.1 (1905) (PDF p.147-148). Samos suggested a deal with the Sublime Porte: its autonomy had, on Soskin’s figures, raised its density to 117 inhabitants per square kilometre, and Bruno Blau’s Altneuland article argued the Ottomans might allow a Jewish “administrative autonomy” on the Samos precedent of 1834 — a Jewish ruler as a Christian one was appointed there — since “almost all countries are interested in being relieved of their Jews” (PDF p.148). Warburg envisioned a decentralised Syria — Muslim north, Christian centre, Jewish south, possible Druse and other enclaves — headed by a Jewish pasha from the Ottoman bureaucracy, adjustable since Syria would not gain long-standing independence, and even a short-term European occupation and partition anticipating the interwar mandate (PDF p.148-149). Trietsch held settlement of Cyprus, Egyptian border regions and other adjacent countries complementary, not a replacement: there settlers could build centers of Jewish life and culture [emphasis in the original quotation] in constant nexus with the old and future homeland; centrally coordinated but decentrally distributed colonization across the Middle East, creating local Jewish majorities extending territorial cohesion with Palestine, had ancient precedent in Bengazi’s Jews and their part in the uprising against the Romans, and modern transport made such a Jewish colonial empire even more feasible (PDF p.149). The section continues beyond PDF p.149.

Chapter 4: “Greater Palestine” and the Creation of a New Diaspora, concluded (PDF p.150-152 / printed p.137-139)

The section concludes from the map’s distance legend: Palestine made “within measurable grasp”, Cyprus and Egypt akin to settling Palestine, distant diasporas in London, New York, Canada, Argentina and South Africa dispersing settlers irrevocably through family chain appeals stronger than Zionist appeals (PDF p.150). Trietsch contrasted Arab emigrants from Syria and Beirut, returning capital and know-how from Manhattan and aided by American schools in Lebanon, with the numerically superior Jewish New York diaspora’s lack of attachment (PDF p.150-151). Peretz poses the section’s question — had diaspora as a form of life been principally negated, or only its negative manifestation in Christian Europe since the Middle Ages, and when did negation become dogma? — and answers that the Altneuland circle promoted a Zionism favourable to continued diaspora existence, colonization supplying the central project transforming Jewish consciousness worldwide (PDF p.151). Mapping was a first step in the conquest of space and of time: a scientific Palästinakunde, Jews claiming intellectual authority to define their homelands and becoming harbingers of progress to the Orient, within Berman’s “progressive representation of colonialism” (PDF p.151-152).

Chapter 4: Jewish-German Colonial Fantasies (PDF p.152-157 / printed p.139-144)

The “second discovery” trope opened Palästina’s first issue — a German traveller seeing the Orient “with German eyes” finding the place “where the earth hides a nourishing a blessing”, the editor adding the Jews’ incomparably greater reasons and lack (PDF p.152). Its epitome was Aaron Aaronson’s wild emmer discovery at Mt. Hermon: Schweinfurth’s praise, Aaronson’s portrayal of local farmers aware of the grain but oblivious to its significance, the Atlit research station founded under Aaronson, and Warburg’s Eighth Congress presentation of the find as a legacy of Zionism casting Aaronson as a Humboldt-like second discoverer opening Palestine through preliminary intellectual conquest (PDF p.152-153). Neither Germanness nor Jewishness was a precondition for Altneuland: expertise was, German functioned as a cultural-cosmopolitan language distinct from national belonging (Diner), and Aaronson (Romania-born, Zichron Ya’akov) and Soskin (Crimea-born, Berlin and Rostock trained, 1906 advisor in German West Africa) exemplified it (PDF p.153-154). The comparison of German and Zionist colonial fantasies — both born of lack of unity, territory and identity — is focused on their precolonial phases a few decades apart: steering emigration, population politics, preserving culture among emigrants (PDF p.154-155). Germany’s “liminal situation” (Berman) and its culture-based nationhood frame the Zionist literature written in German in Vienna, Cologne and Berlin (PDF p.155-156). Against Menczel’s “we want to make colonial politics before we have the land”, Trietsch proposed “spheres of interest” for future annexation and Oppenheimer read Bismarck’s supposed “Become a power and then come back” to Lassalle as colonize first, negotiate second, while Soskin’s “Kolonialpolitik” was technocratic policy (PDF p.156). The Altneuland readers were being trained as colonial policymakers, not colonists; fantasy cultivation was itself a prerequisite, and Zantop’s colony as “blank space for a new beginning” is applied to Jews (PDF p.157).

Chapter 4: Competing for Intellectual Authority (PDF p.157-164 / printed p.144-151)

Altneuland’s writers integrated and produced knowledge for agents of European colonialism. Said neglected German orientalism, which was theological-philological rather than anthropological and was focused inwards — defining Germany’s role in Europe and establishing intellectual authority over Jews (Heschel) (PDF p.158). The DPV (founded 1877), its journal, and the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology (1902, Dalman) formed the incumbent authority; the supplantation of Christian by Zionist intellectual authority began with Palästina, Altneuland and Ruppin’s Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, integrating DPV research while criticising its biblical approach and antisemitism, until the Palästinaamt (1908, Arthur Ruppin and Jakob Thon) took over (PDF p.158-159). Trade and railway reports reprinted from German and diplomatic sources built a data authority and a feeling of progress — Hijaz and Anatolian lines, the Baghdad railway echoing Der Tropenpflanzer’s cotton-along-the-tracks programme (PDF p.160-161). Nahum Wilbuschewitch’s praise of German milling and criticism of Jewish risk-aversion drew Aaronson’s charge of Germanophilia and ignorance of Jewish technicians, on which they agreed only about the Yishuv’s lack of systematic experimentation; Aaronson and Soskin’s wine argument — adaptation to local climate, varieties and regional markets over centralist remote control — grounded the claim for a locally embedded scientific Jewish colonial elite (PDF p.161-162). Mimicry of German method was explicit (Nossig, Soskin at the Sixth Congress: “how the Aryan peoples colonize”), accompanied by narrative revision: Moses as originator of social hygiene, bacteriology, social Darwinism and racial anthropology, so these were originally Jewish discoveries — the Wissenschaft des Judentums transvaluation method (PDF p.162-164).

Chapter 4: Widening the Circle: Entrepreneurs and Administrators (PDF p.164-174 / printed p.151-161)

The journal printed only one practical immigration article: its audience was liberal, educated, middle-class German Jews — businessmen and future technocrats — since success depended more on bourgeois investors than on the settlers (Pratt’s dual-tier ideological reinvention; Schachtel’s New South Wales convicts flourishing through persistent investors) (PDF p.164, p.171). After Kishinev and the Sixth Congress’s extension of the settlement area, the CEP courted non-Zionists: Herzl demurred, David Wolffsohn endorsed; first partner was the JCA, whose reports the CEP criticised to build authority within the Jewish world while seeking its continued support (PDF p.165-166). Cross-publication with Der Tropenpflanzer and commissioned German experts such as Ludwig Sander integrated Jewish colonial writing into German colonial knowledge and summoned German protection and capital (PDF p.166-167). The Hamburg trade company (Soskin and Warburg, not Oppenheimer; Jewish Colonial Trust joint venture; produce traded exclusively via Hamburg to free farmers from Arab middlemen), the industrial syndicate plan, the Olive Tree Fund — symbolic longevity, juridical circumvention of mirie reversion, and avoidance of Arab labour acquiring land rights — and the planting association Palästina, which Oppenheimer framed as a nondenominational “brotherhood” and Thon as democratization and “return to Judaism” without emigration, mobilised diaspora participation (PDF p.167-170). Soskin’s Brazil argument made a settlement core superior to sovereignty, and directing Eastern European immigration served German Jews’ intermediary position and Germany’s imperial aspirations alike (PDF p.170). Becker’s Altneuland articles transvalued Jewish colonization as a peaceful colonial novum originating in the Exodus, and the Köthen courses (Easter 1905 and 1906, Friedrich Polytechnic and Tchioh; about 200 students, a quarter Jewish) trained the administrator corps and built a Palästinakunde of economics and natural sciences (PDF p.171-173).

Chapter 4: A German-Jewish Joint Venture in the Scramble for Palestine (PDF p.174-181 / printed p.161-168)

Vogt’s four convergence arguments — Ottoman stability, a pro-German Yiddish-speaking group, Jews as bridgehead for German economic interests, improved German standing with world (especially US) Jewry — frame the lobbying, with European “protection” of Jews read via Stein as often Jewish-initiated strategic manipulation (PDF p.174). Germany’s reluctance (no Mediterranean access or naval bases) made it a natural ally with almost no settler competition; Soskin’s “Let us be the cultural bearers of our land! Otherwise, it will be others!” and Schmitt’s Köthen counterhistory of Prussia as the humane colonizer obstructed only by hesitation supplied the underdog fantasy Sandler identified with (PDF p.175-176). Warburg’s 1904 Anatolia plan — Jewish cotton settlements along the Deutsche Bank Baghdad line benefiting Ottomans, Germans and Jews, legitimised northward by Syria as Abraham’s homeland — and his export comparison (Palestine already exporting more than all German African colonies combined, fifty times its size) extended the venture empire-wide, within a triumvirate of colonial underdogs (Germans, Jews, Ottomans) and Pratt’s “anti-conquest” (PDF p.176-178). Warburg opposed German mass settlement in the Ottoman Empire — unfit land, Porte refusal, Deutsche Bank opposition, spy rumours of 40,000 armed settlers — urging trade through the Hamburg company instead, with select Jewish colonization as Germany’s crucial pillar because Jews would fit the Orient naturally; he had founded two settlements for Romanian Jews in Anatolia (PDF p.178-180). Spain’s Sephardi campaign (Pulido Fernández, 1905) and Portugal’s 1913 Angola decision show rival liberal-imperial bids for Jews (PDF p.180). The chapter closes: Chapter 5 will show the circle hoped Zionist treatment of Templers, other Europeans and indigenous populations would model the majority-minority relationship and reform Germany itself (PDF p.181).

Chapter 5: Altneuland’s Entanglement in German Racial and Colonial Discourses — introduction (PDF p.182-183 / printed p.169-170)

Chapter 5 turns to interventions meant to purge antisemitism, though not necessarily racism, from the racial and colonial discourses, strengthening Liberal imperialism and German Jewry’s prestige; the ties to liberal imperialists (Endres, Rohrbach, Jäckh) outlived the war in Pro-Palästina (1918) (PDF p.182). Peretz stresses the dissonance: while Altneuland was published, German forces waged genocide against the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, ending with Parliament’s December 1906 budget rejection and Wilhelm II’s termination — and Altneuland’s silence is jarring, given its African technical articles, Soskin’s and Warburg’s African expertise, and its claim of those colonies as “our” colonies (PDF p.182-183).

Chapter 5: Reimagining Relationships between Jewish and Christian Settlers (PDF p.183-189 / printed p.170-176)

The Templars — seven Ottoman-era communities from Haifa (1868), four agricultural — are the projection surface for reimagining Christian-Jewish minority-majority relations in Germany and under future Jewish sovereignty (PDF p.183-184). Oetken’s reprinted travel report praised Templer villages as a lighthouse against “sad and dirty” local villages, held Jewish workers needed toil to be educated to steadfastness, and adopted Altneuland’s anti-JCA criticisms, reinforcing Zionist intellectual authority (PDF p.184-185). Comparisons disciplined Jewish methods (Petach-Tikva beside Sarona and Wilhelmina; infrastructure neglect) and Soskin warned that without transport infrastructure Jews would remain dependent “guests” (PDF p.185). Warburg inverted the hierarchy: Templers had filled their historical role, Jews were viable candidates to inherit Palestine and to supersede even the Templers, whose “schnorrer farmers” were becoming extinct and whose colony-born Jewish counterparts had lost “the traces of the Ghetto-Judaism” (PDF p.186). Templers had Judaified by transculturation — close to the Jewish religion except ceremonial acts, pioneers who adjusted to oriental conditions without losing Germanness — yet could not match Jewish oriental authenticity; racially, Germans fitted to a moderate climate degenerated in Palestine, and intermarriage prohibited, their colonization would not endure; their best future was as a distinct prosperous commercial minority under Jewish sovereignty, in the diasporic mercantile position Jews occupied in Germany (PDF p.187-188). Russian converts to Judaism — a third of two settlements, Hebrew-speaking, on a Russian missionary journal’s account — extended the integrative fantasy: future Jewish sovereignty imagined as tolerant, a Jewish colonial Sonderweg already taking shape (PDF p.189).

Chapter 5: Confronting Racial and Religious Misrepresentations (PDF p.189-193 / printed p.176-180; section unfinished in this part)

Altneuland as autoethnographic expression (Pratt): increasing Jewish visibility against a discourse in which the Jewish native or settler was invisible to the European traveller — Fitzner omitting Galician and Bukovinian Jews, Schwöbel ignoring Galilee’s Jewish settlement, Rüegg’s Rosh Pina Judenschule “mumbling” (PDF p.189-190). Soskin held that ignoring Jewish agricultural prowess rejected the Jewish claim to the land, disacknowledging cultivation being (Zantop) a typical legitimation of disenfranchisement (PDF p.190). Heinrich Loewe’s review of von Soden answered the Bethlehem typology with the Jewish type matching Nazareth and Bethlehem and the Polish Jew, and framed opposition to Zionist colonies as undermining German colonization itself (PDF p.191-192). Guastalla’s L’Italia Coloniale account was quoted in full, “peculiarities” included — British motives as curbing “the infiltration of wretched Hebrews”, Zionism as religious fanaticism — the editors dissenting on El-Arish optimism while preserving scientific exchange (PDF p.192-193). The section continues beyond PDF p.193 in argument, its remaining pages in this part passing into the next subsection.

Chapter 5: Domestic Social Integration through Colonial Policy (PDF p.193-196 / printed p.180-183; section unfinished in this part)

For Warburg, Zionism integrated minorities at home: Catholic newspapers’ turn to Germany’s patronage of all Christians in the Orient showed reconciliatory colonial politics reverberating into ecumenic reconciliation in Germany (PDF p.193). The reprinted Kölnische Volkszeitung article attacked France’s Orient entitlement amid home secularization, urged a first Catholic consul in Jerusalem and an end to discrimination against Catholic clergy — “Any confessional bias means … the elimination of the German Empire … from the competition among Christian nations” — and Warburg generalised: “a pure nation-state can never become a world power”, with inclusion of Jews and polyglot indigenous elites (French-speaking railway staff) essential to empire (PDF p.193-195). The nonreligious German school project in Jerusalem, Warburg’s Köthen objection to the “Protestant” designation against Templer school segregation, and his doubt that German could supplant French in the highly cultured Ottoman Empire close the pages read (PDF p.195-196). The next subsection, Pilgrims and Missionaries for Germany’s Glory, opens at PDF p.196 with the “peaceful crusade” / Reconquista theme and Oppenheimer’s pénétration pacifique, and continues beyond PDF p.196.

Chapter 5: Pilgrims and Missionaries for Germany’s Glory, concluded (PDF p.197-200 / printed p.184-187)

The bishopric ordained converted German Jews, including its first bishop Michael Solomon Alexander, and the German mission found a new purpose in German imperialism: conversion of the Jews as “an initial phase of cultural imperialism”, precursor of the civilizing mission, with a suggested “metonymic identity” between Jews and Muslims (PDF p.197). Altneuland laid blame for proselytization at England’s feet, praised Jewish wine production — “these Palestinian Jews refute all those who declare Jews to be useless for peasantry” — and conveyed that economic improvement provided immunity from proselytization, so cooperation with Germany, supposedly inculpable in proselytization, could be beneficial (PDF p.197-198). Prussian or Hohenzollern pilgrimage to the Holy Land was dated to Albrecht the Handsome, burgrave of Nuremberg, in 1340, pilgrimages read as displays of European dominance against France’s Catholic protectorate and its school network — “In short: German influence is minimal” — with schools and pilgrimages as joint instruments of influence, at the link where Jewish emancipation was being renegotiated (PDF p.198-200).

Chapter 5: Relandscaping Palestine: From Theology to Geography (PDF p.200-206 / printed p.187-193)

A main strategy was scientific research to disprove Palestine’s unfitness for dense settlement: barrenness as neglect against natural abundance, on Pratt’s South America parallel — “Neglect became the touchstone of a negative aesthetic that legitimized European interventionism” (PDF p.200). Palestine was rediscovered as natural history, its Kulturlandschaft a living proof of the Jewish connection; Josephus Flavius’s Galilea, Warburg’s hundred-million population potential against five million potential Eastern European immigrants, Schoenfeld’s Sinai manna claim and unchanged-climate rainfall comparisons all served fertility (PDF p.201-203). The CEP-DPV meteorological network began measurement in three Jewish settlements at the beginning of 1905, Aaronson’s house in Zichron Ya’akov as primary station (PDF p.203). Wild emmer made Palestine the cradle of agriculture, and its Mediterranean geography made Jews, as Homo meditarraneus, a bridge whose bearers — Warburg and Axel Preyer argue — would make better tropical and subtropical settlers than Northern Europeans and Germans as a people (PDF p.204-206).

Chapter 5: Healing a Degenerate Land and Nation (PDF p.206-213 / printed p.193-200)

Land and nation shared images of sickness and neglect: replanting Jews would heal both, in Sufian’s translation “healing the land and the nation” (PDF p.206). Aron Sandler, the Pasteur Institute for Hygiene (1913) and the four-disease nosology — malaria, dysentery, trachoma, leprosy — structure the account; Sandler’s half-percent trachoma figure for a Jewish settlement near Jaffa against 60 percent for the Arab population, and his caution on racial immunity, are held beside the editors’ malaria optimism and their intercession that locals had overcome prejudice against European doctors (PDF p.207-210). Transformation was also begun outside Palestine wherever Jews became farmers: seven Russian governors’ reports, 150,000 Jews in 289 Russian settlements, Argentina’s nine-million-pounds added value, Pasmanik’s case for Oppenheimer’s cooperative over unsustainable private settlement, and the JCA’s first Brazil settlement of 1904 — colonization challenges held to be not specifically Jewish, and Jewish settlement discussed in the same breath as other European projects (PDF p.210-213).

Chapter 5: German Education for the Jewish Nation (PDF p.213-219 / printed p.200-206)

Education schemes aimed to curb an intellectual urban elite among Jewish natives and settlers: the Palestinian Jew as farmer or craftsman, administrators from Europe, experts brought to Palestine rather than settlers sent abroad (PDF p.213). Bezalel — CEP, Boris Schatz, Hilfsverein and others — taught Arts and Crafts handicrafts, sought a Palestinian style from Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, and was accepted by Jerusalem’s religious community, four hundred women competing for forty-five spinnery openings, Orthodox Jews adopting German discipline without changing religious convictions (PDF p.213-216). Heinrich Loewe’s village schools used Hebrew, Arabic as the only foreign language; his urban schools aimed at Hebrew-speaking citizens “on the same level as simple citizens of European states with the best public-school education as in Denmark, Saxony and Holland” (PDF p.216-217). Grünhut’s Jerusalem report praised the German philanthropic organizations’ professional training; Otto Eberhard’s “external” report — Eberhard held philanthropic undertakings in disdain — praised Hebrew instruction ending the “language confusion of the Orient”, and German lessons for Ashkenazi schools; in conclusion the schemes aimed to create future citizens of a European nation of Hebrews (PDF p.217-219).

Chapter 5: A Place among the Semites (PDF p.219-231 / printed p.206-218)

“We are a factor with which the other inhabitants of the land have to reckon” (Soskin) opens a section imagining a Jewish place among Druse, Bedouins, Circassians, Maronites, Kurds and others, through study of populations “in terms of their racial belonging, their religions, their history and their usability for colonial aims” (PDF p.219-220). The Altneuland reviewer of Wilson’s book, calling locals “former slaves of the Jews and other conquering races”, insinuated total possession, but the general tendency was descriptive: locals present from an early stage, Jews as returning locals yet agents of local culture’s transformation and eventual annihilation, and Soskin’s Jews filling the cultivation gap as a new vigorous cultural element (PDF p.220-222). Lilien’s Fig. 2 cover — two biblical scouts carrying a massive grape cluster, Altneuland No. 1, edited by Oppenheimer, Soskin and Warburg — frames the Es-Salt travelogue’s kinship through “our uncle Esau”, its Arab as deceitful liar and its fifty-kilometre familiarity claim (PDF p.222-225). Warburg’s scepticism on Circassian settlement, the Kastinia settlers held less productive than Arabs — “and that says a lot” — Arthur Biram’s Druze as “also” a nation and “the eternal troublemaker of middle Syria”, the Metula conflict, and Schoenfeld’s Sinai Bedouins — gatekeepers serving thirty-two Greek monks, one person per five to six square kilometres, Sinai’s ten thousand against Belgium’s almost seven million, Bedouin farms as “German manors” — complete the range (PDF p.225-231).

Chapter 5: Fantasies of Peaceful Colonization (PDF p.231-241 / printed p.218-228)

The plow was ambivalent: Oetken warned against replacing the Arabian plow, while Oppenheimer championed “conquest by the plow” yet also wrote “The plow is always the mark of a higher economic condition which occurs only in a state; that is to say, in a system of plantation work carried on by subjugated servants” — with Hebrew labour it became an exclusive battle cry (PDF p.231-232). Frantzman and Kark’s mirrored Muslim-Jewish settlement, olive groves’ expected fivefold output over cereals, and the belief that defiers would “soon yield to the power of economic interest” support the fantasy; Yehoshua Radler-Feldman’s intensification making Arab land superfluous, his Pansemitism and education as “peaceful conquest”, and Nahum Wilbuschewitch’s inclusive Shemen give it programme (PDF p.232-239). The final issue’s utopia — robberies “a thing of the past”, “Terra nova” as “Terra aurea” — caps a chapter whose conclusion is that Zionism, for the Altneuland circle, was not a rejection of German nationalism but a means to full participation in German and European colonialism and to transforming Germany into a liberal, heterogeneous colonial empire; the chapter closes by posing the Merhavia clash and the generational ouster to come (PDF p.239-241). Chapter 5 ends here.

Chapter 6: When Fantasies Meet Realities — introduction and Oppenheimer and the Austrian Poalei Zion, opening (PDF p.242-243 / printed p.229-230; chapter unfinished in this part)

The chapter epigraph, cited to CZA A161-15 with no author named on the page: “There should be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you!”, with inhabitants of the Holy Land to be taken “in full brotherhood” as full citizens without exception, and minority protection as science’s last word (PDF p.242). The final chapter revisits the German-Jewish nationalism tension, Oppenheimer’s ethnic conception of Judaism and its implications for minority rights of Jews vis-à-vis Arabs, Poles and Germans, and his need after Herzl’s death for new allies, most prominently the Austrian Po’alei Tziyon, against a younger German Zionist generation demanding disassociation from German politics (PDF p.242-243). Convergence came through Austro-Marxist national frameworks, Karl Renner and Rudolf Laun, rural reform and a Jewish farming class; in 1906 Shlomo Kaplansky invited Oppenheimer to contribute to Der jüdische Arbeiter (PDF p.243). The section continues beyond this part.

Key passages

• “our next goal, our intermediate goal, always remains the same” — Oppenheimer, “Das zionistische Ansiedlungswerk und der Bezalel”, Die Welt, June 23, 1905, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.14).

• “I truly felt German, but I could never understand why my Jewish tribal consciousness could not be compatible with my German national and cultural consciousness. Therefore, I was never an assimilationist.” — Oppenheimer’s autobiography, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.17).

• “They planned on remaining German citizens and Zionism was geared at strengthening their position as such.” — on the German Zionist colonization experts (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.26).

• “Suggestion is one of the most powerful formative forces in the works of human life.” — Oppenheimer, “Suggestion und Hypnose”, Vossische Zeitung, January 7, 1894, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.45).

• “there is nothing more erroneous and unscientific than to assume a so-called normal person and to classify everything deviating from it as ill” — William Hirsch, as quoted in Oppenheimer’s review “Genie und Entartung”, Vossische Zeitung, December 9, 1894 (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.50).

• “flow from the plane of higher economic and social pressure to that of lower pressure along the line of least resistance” — Oppenheimer, The State (2nd ed., 1926), as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.66).

• “The racial character allegedly formed through desert wanderings is the typical character of a multilingual, urbanized former master class.” — Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie”, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.79).

• “Would society have been better off if Moses Mendelssohn had been selected out?” — Robert Goldscheid to Ploetz, first Soziologentag, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.81).

• “The racial conception of history is not a science but a pseudoscience. It is the typical legitimating group ideology of the upper classes” — Oppenheimer, conclusion of his second Soziologentag talk, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.96).

• “My sociological studies have convinced me that antisemitism is, essentially, social class struggle, not racial hate” — Oppenheimer, in Judentaufen, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.98).

• “hygiene is a sociological discipline and, as such, closely related to national economy” — Oppenheimer, review of Dr. A. Gottstein, Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft 4 (1901), as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.53).

• “emphasized his Germanness, he wanted to have nothing to do with the Jewish national idea and was nevertheless the opposite of an assimilationist” — Kurt Blumenfeld on Oppenheimer, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.109).

• “start a Jewish farmer colony that will prove how very well-suited German Jews are to pursuing agriculture activities on German land” — Bodenkulturverein report for 1900-1901, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.113).

• “I am a Zionist because, and insomuch as, I am a devout Socialist” — Oppenheimer, General-Anzeiger statement, March 5, 1903, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.128).

• “For will power to turn into redemptive, salvational action we must primarily use that which is our era’s most powerful force: science” — first Altneuland editorial, 1904, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.134).

• “to allow the premature shattering of the power of fantasy to control the masses with the hard arguments of facts” — Davis Trietsch, closing editorial of Palästina, 1903, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.143).

• “Let us be the cultural bearers of our land! Otherwise, it will be others!” — Selig Soskin, “‘Gross’ und ‘Klein’-Kolonisation”, Altneuland 1 (1904), as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.175).

• “Because a pure nation-state can never become a world power.” — Otto Warburg, “Deutsche Kolonisations-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturbestrebungen”, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.194).

• “the remarkable Jewish type [matches] precisely the inhabitants of Nazareth, Bethlehem and their vicinity” — Heinrich Loewe on von Soden, Altneuland 1 (1904), as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.191).

• “these Palestinian Jews refute all those who declare Jews to be useless for peasantry” — Stuttgart newspaper excerpt, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.198).

• “We are a factor with which the other inhabitants of the land have to reckon” — Selig Soskin, “Zum neuen Jahr”, Altneuland 2, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.219).

• “The plow is always the mark of a higher economic condition which occurs only in a state; that is to say, in a system of plantation work carried on by subjugated servants” — Oppenheimer, The State, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.232).

• “There should be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you!” — Chapter 6 epigraph, cited to CZA A161-15 with no author named on the page, as quoted (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.242).

• “socialism is international and not cosmopolitan” — American Poalei Zion, as quoted in Shimoni (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.243).

Evidence the work relies on

For the pages read in this part: Oppenheimer’s own writings as cited — “Das zionistische Ansiedlungswerk und der Bezalel” and “Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus” in Die Welt (1905 and 1903, PDF p.14); his autobiography Erlebtes, Erstrebtes, Erreichtes (ed. L. Y. Oppenheimer, 1964), quoted throughout the Introduction and Chapter 1 (PDF p.17, p.38-43); his journalism and reviews in the Vossische Zeitung (1894), Neue Deutsche Rundschau (1895, 1901), Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft (1900, 1901) and Die medicinische Woche (1900), and his “Physiologie und Pathologie des sozialen Körpers” (1924) and “Rudolph Virchow” (1927) (PDF p.45-56); the minutes and proceedings of the German Sociological Society and the Herzl–Oppenheimer correspondence and Sixth Zionist Congress minutes are announced as sources for Chapters 2-3 (PDF p.35-36). Secondary and historiographical works cited include the German Oppenheimer biographies (Haselbach 1985; Kruse 1990; Kruck 1997; Vogt 1997; Caspari and Lichtblau 2014; Willms, noted as not referenced), Gezel Kressel’s Hebrew monograph (1972), Derek Penslar’s Zionism and Technocracy (1991), Hagit Lavsky’s Before Catastrophe (2nd ed., 1998), John M. Efron’s Defenders of the Race (1994), Lisa Silverman on Jewishness (2009), Steven E. Aschheim’s Brothers and Strangers (1999), Susanne Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, Stefan Vogt’s Subalterne Positionierungen (2016), Sheila Faith Weiss’s Race Hygiene and National Efficiency (1987) and Weingart, Kroll and Bayertz’s Rasse, Blut und Gene (1988) (PDF p.16, p.21-29, p.34, p.53-56). Membership and emigration figures for 1921-1932 are credited to Lavsky (PDF p.22); Jewish medical-student and physician figures for 1891-1911 and 1900 to Efron (PDF p.40). For the pages read in this part: Oppenheimer’s “Der Einfluss des Klimas auf den Menschen” (Reclams Universum, 1899), “Die Bevölkerungsgesetz des T. R. Malthus” (Die medicinische Woche, 1900), “Die Rassentheorie der Weltgeschichte” (Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 1901), “Die Anfänge des jüdischen Kapitalismus” (Ost und West, 1902), his two 1903 reviews of Schallmayer in Die Zeit (Wien) and Der Tag, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie” and the proceedings of the first and second Soziologentage (1910, 1912), his 1911 reviews of Sombart in Die Welt and Die neue Rundschau, his contribution to Sombart (ed.), Judentaufen (1912), The State in the 1926 English edition, and his antisemitism essays of 1916-1927 (PDF p.57-102). Secondary works cited include Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency (1987), Weingart, Kroll and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene (1988), Stefan Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen (2016), Y. Michal Bodemann, “Coldly Admiring the Jew” (2014), Friedrich Lenger’s Sombart biography (2nd ed., 1995), Christian Dietrich, Verweigerte Anerkennung (2014) and Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land (1975) (PDF p.57-102). The population figure for the German Empire, 1871 to the First World War, is given without a named source in the passage (PDF p.61); the 1,500 tickets figure for Sombart’s Berlin lecture is credited to Dietrich (PDF p.85).

For the pages read in this part: Oppenheimer’s Erlebtes, Erstrebtes, Erreichtes and his “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie” and CZA A161-108 poem versions (PDF p.103-107); the Herzl–Oppenheimer correspondence and Herzl’s Zionistisches Tagebuch in Bein (ed.), “Briefwechsel zwischen Theodor Herzl und Franz Oppenheimer”, Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 7 (1964), and Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, vols. 3 and 7 (PDF p.112, p.118, p.126-128); the Bodenkulturverein’s 3. Jahresbericht 1900/1901 (CAHJP) (PDF p.113); Oppenheimer’s “Genossenschaftliche Kolonisation” and “Die Rassentheorie der Weltgeschichte” (PDF p.115-117); the Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des VI. Zionisten-Congresses (1903) throughout the Uganda Congress account (PDF p.126, p.129-133); Kurt Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage (1962) and Im Kampf um den Zionismus (1976) (PDF p.109-110); Soskin’s memoir Franz Oppenheimer und die Palästina Kommission, CZA A161-78 (PDF p.112, p.134, p.142-143); Altneuland 1-3 (1904-1906) and Palästina 1-2 (1902-1903), including Warburg’s and Blau’s articles and Trietsch’s JOCG articles and map (PDF p.134-149); and the Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt’s Statistisches Jahrbuch 23 (1902) and 28 (1907) for the census check on the map’s German figures (PDF p.147). Secondary works cited include Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized” (1999), Werner Treß on the early Wissenschaft des Judentums (2015), Alon Confino, A World without Jews (2014), Clemens Peck, Im Labor der Utopie (2012), Adam L. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion (2014), Olivier Baisez on “Greater Palestine” (2016), Ines Sonder on garden cities (2005), Yosef Kats, The “Business” of Settlement (1994), Woodruff Donald Smith, The German Colonial Empire (1978), and Gilya Gerda Schmidt on the Fifth Zionist Congress (2003) (PDF p.103-149).

For the pages read in this part: Altneuland 1-3 (1904-1906) and Palästina 1-2, including Trietsch’s “Beirut” and “Die Nachbarlaender”, Soskin’s “‘Gross’ und ‘Klein’-Kolonisation”, Warburg’s “Bericht der Palaestinakommission”, “Die juedische Kolonisation in Nordsyrien”, “Palästina als Kolonisationsgebiet”, “Die juedische Kolonisation Palaestinas”, “Die nichtjüdische Kolonisation Palästinas” and “Deutsche Kolonisations-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturbestrebungen im tuerkischen Orient”, Aaronson’s emmer and wine articles, Nossig’s Palästina articles (1902), Becker’s “Kolonisation und Kolonisationspolitik” (1906), Sandler’s Köthen report, Oetken’s “Palaestinafahrt eines Landwirts” (1906), Loewe’s and Soskin’s reviews, and reprints from the Berliner Tageblatt, Kölnische Volkszeitung, Kölnische Zeitung, Kreuzzeitung, Die Post and Kieler Zeitung (PDF p.150-196); the Herzl-Warburg letter of January 11, 1904 (PDF p.165); and secondary works by Berman, Zantop, Pratt, Heschel, Hübner, Philipp, Goren, Vogt, Penslar, Smith, Shafir, Alroey, Stein, Hart, Gelber, Aschheim, Schaller, Frantzman and Kark, and Gilman (PDF p.150-196).

For the pages read in this part: Altneuland 1-3 (1904-1906), including Warburg’s “Bericht der Palaestinakommission”, “Palästina als Kolonisationsgebiet”, “Syrien als Wirtschafts- und Kolonisationsgebiet” and “Die juedische Kolonisation in Nordsyrien”, Sandler’s “Die Malaria in Jerusalem”, “Das Trachom in Palaestina” and “Die Lepra in Palaestina”, Aaronson and Soskin’s “Die Rosinenstadt Es-Salt”, Biram’s “Die Drusen”, Loewe’s “Die Dorfschule in Palestina” and “Die Stadtschule in Palaestina”, Schatz et al. on Bezalel and its “Bericht”, Grünhut’s Jerusalem welfare and Bezalel accounts, Eberhard’s “Jugendpflege”, Preyer’s, Pasmanik’s, Radler’s “Vom amerikanischen Orient” and Wilbuschewitch’s milling articles, Blanckenhorn’s meteorological and geology articles, Schoenfeld’s “Die Halbinsel Sinai”, and reprints from the Order of Saint John journal, a Stuttgart paper, the Kölnische Volkszeitung and the Generalanzeiger für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums (PDF p.197-241); Oppenheimer’s The State and “Zur Soziologie des Fremdenverkehrs” and the Chapter 6 epigraph (CZA A161-15) (PDF p.222, p.232, p.242); and secondary works by Berman, Pratt, Zantop, Sufian, Hirsch, Davidovitsch and Zalashik, Frantzman and Kark, Bertz, Shepherd, Tzoreff and Shimoni (PDF p.197-243).

Analysis

Provisional, for the pages read: Peretz’s method is a discourse analysis in Davidson’s sense — Jewish participation in a dominant discourse as acculturation and as attempted transformation at points of dissent, without questioning the discourse’s entirety — applied first to race science and then, in prospect, to the colonial discourse through the postcolonial concept of colonial fantasies (PDF p.23-24, p.27). Its stated limit is self-imposed: the study investigates discursive entanglements, not colonial realities, and expressly disclaims both an accusation of complicity and a defence (PDF p.29). The Introduction’s account of why the German and Zionist narratives were kept separate is presented as hypothetical suggestion, not as examined findings (PDF p.19). The work’s own terms are kept throughout: “colonization” is noted as the contemporary Zionist term, preferred over “colonialism” in the postcolonial turn (PDF p.21).

People, organizations, places and events

Franz Oppenheimer, Dekel Peretz, Theodor Herzl, Otto Warburg, Selig Soskin, Shlomo Kaplansky, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Tucholsky, Rudolph Virchow, Alfred Ploetz, Wilhelm Schallmayer, Max Nordau, Martin Buber, Merhavia, Altneuland (journal), World Zionist Organization, German Sociological Society, Brit Shalom, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Peter Kropotkin, Thomas Robert Malthus, Gustav Landauer, Judenzählung, Kurt Blumenfeld, Davis Trietsch, Alfred Nossig, Henry George, Saul Ascher, Robert Weltsch, Israel Zangwill, Jewish Orient Colonization Society, Commission for the Exploration of Palestine, Bodenkulturverein, Mizrachi, Kishinev pogrom, Jewish Colonization Association, Jewish National Fund, Wissenschaft des Judentums, Hep-Hep pogroms, Aaron Aaronson, Templars, Heinrich Loewe, David Wolffsohn, Nahum Wilbuschewitch, Jakob Thon, Arthur Ruppin, Aron Sandler, Boris Schatz, Bezalel, Arthur Biram, Yehoshua Radler-Feldman, Druze, Po’alei Tziyon

Concepts

Jewishness, Colonial fantasies, Rassenhygiene, Degeneration, Inner colonization, Organicism, Liberal socialism, Negation of the Diaspora, Binationalism, Zionism, Plasticity of race, Homo meditarraneus, Antisemitism, Greater Palestine, Territorialism, Garden city, Liberal imperialism, Pansemitism

How it relates to other sources

Peretz’s Oppenheimer complicates the wiki’s existing German Zionism accounts: against the teleological narrative he shares with Kressel’s critics, his German Zionists plan to remain in Germany and use Zionist colonization to strengthen their position there (PDF p.26), where Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal presents the ZVfD’s Weimar doctrine as diaspora hopelessness and preparation for Palestine. His reading of Altneuland’s journal namesake — a German colonial journal designed as an interface with German colonialism (PDF p.26) — sits beside the existing treatments of Herzl’s novel as a colonial text in Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 and Stateless Citizenship (2013). His claim that German colonial fantasies fed Brit Shalom binationalism (PDF p.31) adds a German-discursive source to the Prague multiethnic account he cites from Shumsky.

Open questions

• The Acknowledgements read “intellectual simulations” as printed (PDF p.8; checked in the original), in context apparently for “stimulations”, and the earlier-portions list closes the 2016 entry with ”).;” as printed (PDF p.8).

• The Contents give the Chapter 2 subsection as “Reclaiming Intellectual Authority for the Homo Meditarraneus” (PDF p.10), with “Meditarraneus” as printed.

• The List of Abbreviations gives CEEP as “Komitee zur wirtschaflichen Erforschung Palästinas” (PDF p.12), “wirtschaflichen” as printed, against the full form “wirtschaftlichen” used elsewhere in the work.

• The Introduction says the approach gives insights into German-Jewish identity “at the beginning of the nineteenth century” (PDF p.19; checked in the original), where the period treated is the beginning of the twentieth century.

• The Efron quotation at PDF p.24 reads “the distinctions between s and Jews” as printed — checked in the original, where the word before “and Jews” is likewise reduced to its final letter; the quoted passage is Efron’s, the missing word is not supplied here.

• Ran Aharonson’s name is given as “Aharonson” in the text at PDF p.21 and as “Aaronson” in the footnote on the same page, both as printed.

• The range reads “racial restauration of the Jews to biblical glory” (PDF p.25), “this influential contemporary discourses” (PDF p.28), “This are evident” (PDF p.31) and “the principal of Jewish labor” (PDF p.33), each as printed.

• Dmitry Shumsky is named “Dmitry” in the text at PDF p.31 and “Dimitry” in footnote 37 on the same page, both as printed.

• The wartime committee is named “Komittee für den Osten” at PDF p.37, against “Komitee für den Osten” in the List of Abbreviations (PDF p.12) and the KfdO expansion; the same overview page reads “ethnocentric approached to nationalism” as printed (PDF p.37).

• Chapter 1 reads “Detlev von Liliencorn” in footnote 7 (PDF p.39), “transforms youths into to useful citizens” in the suggestion quotation (PDF p.45), “tealing society” for healing society (PDF p.52), and a Krupp competition “that to prove socialism and Darwinism were incompatible” (PDF p.56), each as printed.

• Oppenheimer’s misquotation of Ploetz’s 1895 title is recorded by Peretz himself: Die Züchtung unserer Rassen in place of Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (PDF p.54, footnote 57).

• The text copy renders the possessive in “Virchow’s” at PDF p.53 with replacement characters; the original reads “Virchow’s”, checked in the original, so no slip is recorded for the printed book there.

• Footnote 78 at PDF p.59 gives “Weissman’s influence” as printed, with one s, against “Weismann” in the text on the same spread (August Weismann, PDF p.58-59).

• The text at PDF p.69 reads “Kahnmann” for Bodo Kahmann, against “Kahmann” at PDF p.68 and in the footnotes on both pages, each as printed.

• PDF p.65 reads Oppenheimer “opposed the neo-Malthusian focus on moral educational, because he was skeptical” as printed, where the following sentence gives “moral education”.

• At PDF p.87 the text says Oppenheimer’s article “Die Anfänge des jüdischen Kapitalismus” was published “in the same year in which Sombart published his first major work Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben”, and that he expounded the connection “almost a decade earlier” than his Sombart review; elsewhere in this part the same book is dated 1911 (PDF p.84) and the article is cited to Ost und West 2 (1902) (PDF p.88). The three datings are held as printed, not reconciled.

• The same article is cited at PDF p.88, footnote 94, to pages 327-328, against the page range 393-439 given for it in the other citations in this part (PDF p.88-90). Both locators are held as printed.

• The Oppenheimer quotation at PDF p.97 reads “in order to grasp thing scientifically, that is quantitively” as printed, byte-verified in the text copy.

• The work spells the term “Meditarraneus” as printed throughout: in the section heading (PDF p.98), the Contents (PDF p.10) and the body term “homo meditarraneus” (PDF p.99).

• PDF p.100 reads “his habilitation advisor Adolph 15.” as printed, checked in the original: the surname Wagner is not given in that sentence and appears only in the sentences that follow; the same page reads Wagner “hesitantly complemented” Oppenheimer’s “Jewish head”, as printed for complimented.

• PDF p.101 reads “This capitalism of the Other was dangerous, the believed, because” as printed, and its footnote 158 reads Jews were dependent on their intellectual capacities “instead of than their muscles” and calls Paul Ehrlich a “Noble laureate”, each as printed, byte-verified in the text copy.

• PDF p.103 reads “Chambelain” once and “regraded Christianity” for regarded, each as printed and byte-verified in the text copy and checked in the original.

• The homo meditarraneus term is spelled across line breaks in this part as “homo meditarra-neus” (PDF p.103) and “homo meditarre-neus” (PDF p.106), both as printed in the text copy; the established spelling elsewhere in the work is “meditarraneus” (PDF p.99).

• PDF p.110 reads Blumenfeld called for “a clear Jewish disintegration”, as printed, where the surrounding argument concerns dissimilation.

• PDF p.115 reads Oppenheimer’s “skepsis” of settlements prospering outside European trade networks, as printed and checked in the original.

• PDF p.117 reads Oppenheimer’s “plaidoyer” to Jewish philanthropists and the creation of a “homo hygenicus”, each as printed and byte-verified in the text copy.

• The Herzl diary quotation at PDF p.118 reads “ut uliquid fecisse videamur”, as printed and byte-verified in the text copy.

• Footnote 68 at PDF p.125 reads Oppenheimer “singed out land enclosure as the culprit”, and the main text on the same page reads “fruticulture” for fruit culture, each as printed and checked in the original; the same footnote gives Oppenheimer’s Erlebtes at pages 153-254, as printed.

• Footnote 67 is split across PDF p.124-125 and cites Oppenheimer’s 1901 George review to Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften 4 (1901), against the form “Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft” used in the citations in parts 1-2; both forms are held as printed.

• Nossig’s congress speech as quoted at PDF p.130 reads “We are not a great power such us England”, as printed and byte-verified in the text copy.

• PDF p.127 reads the JOCG was “not implicitly mentioned” in Oppenheimer’s resignation statement, as printed, where the sense requires explicitly; held as printed.

• The CEP board passage split across PDF p.138-139 reads the CEEP was replaced by the CEP with a liable three-headed board, the word split “li-/able” across the page break, as printed and checked in the original.

• Soskin’s memoir is cited throughout this part as Franz Oppenheimer und die Palästina Kommision, with one m in “Kommision”, as printed (PDF p.134, p.143), against the “Palästina Kommission” form in the memoir’s other citations in the work.

• PDF p.137 reads Altneuland promoted Jewish “bourgeoise integration”, as printed and byte-verified in the text copy, against “bourgeoisie” elsewhere in the work.

• PDF p.139 cites Warburg’s article title with “im tuerkischen Orient”, as printed in the citation.

• PDF p.149 reads “as occurred with the Christian pasha in Lebanon.Warburg considered it unlikely”, with no space after the full stop, as printed and byte-verified in the text copy; the same page gives the antiquity colony as “Bengazi”, as printed.

• The Sha’are Zion map’s German figures conflict with the census figures Peretz gives in footnote 49 (PDF p.147): the map’s 54 million population and density 100 against the 1900 census’s over 56 million and 104.2, and 112.1 in 1905 — held side by side, not reconciled.

• Oppenheimer’s retrospective claim of a chance 1902 train encounter and no concept of Zionism before it conflicts with the documentary record Peretz gives: “Jüdische Siedlungen” in Die Welt from December 13, 1901 and Herzl’s commission in late January 1902 (PDF p.111-112) — held as printed, with Peretz’s correction.

• PDF p.152 reads “second discovery legitimatizing” as printed.

• PDF p.155 reads “effecting canges” as printed; PDF p.156 reads the Zionist headquarters stood in Vienna, Cologne and Berlin “before the First World.” as printed and checked in the original, “War” omitted.

• PDF p.157 reads “German and Zionists conceptions of nationalism” as printed.

• Footnote 100 at PDF p.160 cites “Altenuland” as printed, for Altneuland; PDF p.162 reads “Aaronson, who grow up in Palestine” as printed.

• PDF p.168 reads the “longeval olive tree” as printed; PDF p.171 reads “educated stratums” as printed; PDF p.176 reads the dire situation of Eastern European Jewry “did allow any delay” as printed and checked in the original, where the sense requires “did not allow”.

• PDF p.179 reads reasons “emanating for the nature and mentality of the Oriental” and Ottoman fears of settlers “supported by canons” as printed; PDF p.180 reads “homogenic Western Europe” as printed; PDF p.184 reads Altneuland “sometimes also endorsing and even spawned it” as printed.

• PDF p.187 reads Warburg argued “from both from a racial and economic perspective” as printed; footnote 27 at PDF p.188 cites “Deutsche Kolonisations-,Wirtschafts-” with no space after the comma, as printed.

• PDF p.193 reads “ecumenic reconciliation” as printed; PDF p.194 reads England and the United States “are undoubtably willing” as printed; PDF p.195 gives the Ottoman system as “Milet” as printed, for Millet; PDF p.196 reads missionary work “poised a threat” as printed and calls the 1841 bishopric’s Jewish evangelizing field “an uncontended” one, the sentence continuing beyond this part.

• The text copy at PDF p.195 renders “Germany’s” with replacement characters; the original reads “Germany’s”, checked in the original, so no slip is recorded for the printed book there.

• Shumsky’s first name is given “Dimitry” in footnote 62 at PDF p.151, as in part 3’s note on PDF p.31, against “Dmitry” in the text there; held as printed.

• PDF p.207 reads colonization “that did necessitate sovereignty or coordinated state intervention” as printed and checked in the original, where the sense requires “did not necessitate”; footnote 101 on the same page cites the “Intenational Journal of Middle East Studies” as printed, and the text gives Böhm’s hometown as “Kharokov” as printed.

• PDF p.208 reads “institutions,Warburg” with no space after the comma, as printed in the text copy; the term is again spelled “homo meditarraneus” there and at PDF p.204, as printed.

• PDF p.212 reads Jewish “settlement were discussed” and “the challenge facing Zionist colonization were not specifically Jewish”, each as printed; PDF p.213 reads “This critic was however articulated” as printed.

• PDF p.214 reads Bezalel should draw on “the wonderful motif that were discovered” as printed; PDF p.215 gives the German educational mission’s formulator as “Friedrich Farbi” as printed, for the Koloniale Aufgaben (1885) author.

• PDF p.216 reads Loewe “advocat” for the Hebrew instruction language as printed; PDF p.217 reads pupils were “to be giving a more advanced language education” and haluka as alms from Jews “oversees”, each as printed.

• PDF p.219 reads imperialism “as a means win over support” and “as wells as”, each as printed; PDF p.220 reads “Altneuland.Wilson’s” with no space after the full stop in the text copy, the name split across a line break.

• PDF p.221 reads Oetken clustered the settlements “saying anything else about the Circassian and Druse settlements” as printed and checked in the original, where the sense appears to require a negation; PDF p.225 reads Circassian “settlements,Warburg” with no space and Bedouin women “awaking” the readers’ fantasies, each as printed in the text copy.

• PDF p.227 reads a Druze religious war “would be take place” as printed; PDF p.231 reads territory “waiting to be colonizing” as printed; PDF p.232 reads “the principal of Hebrew labor” as printed, for principle.

• PDF p.234 reads “Farther, the Swiss theologian Furrer” and the “benevolent conquerer”, each as printed, and Warburg’s Syrian Mischrasse components as “Hethitien” as printed.

• PDF p.242 reads the epigraph’s “in full brotherhood.We should” with no space after the full stop, as printed in the text copy.

Coverage

PDF p.1-243 of 317 read (parts 1-5 of 7). Remaining: part 6, PDF p.244-290; part 7, PDF p.291-317.