Selections from,
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture a dissertation submitted by Etan Bloom for the PhD at Tel Aviv University, December 2008.
"Throughout most of his career, Ruppin was in close relations with the academic field of German race scientists, who operated during the thirties with Nazi support and provided them with scientific legitimization and ideas. This group was not only among the first scientists to join the Nazi party, they were also involved in shaping the general lines of its policy to exclude the handicapped, Gypsies and Jews. Until the final solution stage of the Nazi policy, which began sometime at the end of the thirties, Ruppin was able to understand them perfectly, and to agree that their attitude towards the Jews was only natural."166
165 On the use of Ruppin and other Jewish resarchers by Nazi scholarship see: (Steinweis 2006, 19-22).
166 Ruppin’s relationship with the Nazi scientist Hans Günter and an assessment of his weltanschauung with regard to the Nazis, will be discussed at the end of this work.
3.9 The End of Theory [pp 146-147]
At the end of the 19th century, there was not a major thinker in any movement (from
liberalism and socialism to Zionism and nationalism) who did not use at least
Darwinian or biological arguments and often eugenic ones. In this regard, Ruppin is
typical and not an anomaly. Indeed, Ruppin was following many other Jewish and
Zionist racial scientists, including Elias Auerbach, Aron Sandler, Felix Theilhaber,
Ignaz Zollschan, S.A. Weissenberg, Redcliffe N. Salman and Joseph Jacobs, who
wrote the foreword to the English version of Ruppin’s The Jews of Today, and whom
Efron calls the first “racial Jewish scientist” (Efron 1994, 58). All of them were
motivated by a perceived need to end Jewish intermarriage and preserve Jewish racial
purity. Most of them believed that only by creating a Jewish homeland and by
reducing the assimilatory influences of the Diaspora, could Jews preserve their unique racial heritage (Gilman 1993, 109; Efron 1994, 136, 155). Race was at the essence of Zionist cultural identity. Since Zionism lacked many of the attributes associated with nationhood – common territory, language conduct and customs – race was an Archimedean point for constituting a nation (Hart 1995, 166; Falk 2006).
The Jewish racial scientists and thinkers became the subject of intensive and vibrant
research in the second part of the 1990s. Efron’s The Defenders of Race, Mitchel
Hart’s Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity and many others
described their theories and cultural identity and included Ruppin among them.
Nevertheless, what makes Ruppin’s case so different from that of the other social scientists is that he was able, like only few other eugenicists (e.g. Galton), to undertake a practical implementation of his ideas, as will be discussed in chapter five.
Indeed, as Penslar notes, there were other attempts at social engineering of the Jews, and at linking Jewish economic and physical health with planned colonization. This frame of work was shared by a variety of Jewish international relief agencies that experimented, from the 1870s until the 1930s, with social engineering in South
America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East (Penslar 2001, 223). Nevertheless, the
Palestinian-Zionist project was the only one of these experiments to succeed in
radically transforming modern Jewish identity and, in particular, the Jewish body. The successes of Zionism cannot be overestimated: from one of the many political and cultural options for identity in the culture space of the turn of the century it became, at the end of the twentieth century, a cultural synonym for Judaism.
Zionist ideology was for Ruppin – like, previously, religion – a vehicle
for eugenic codes and practices. When Ruppin wrote, at the beginning of the 1940s,
about the modern Hebrews who were born in the Land of Israel (the so-called Sabars),
he referred to them as a new sub-race, “the Maccabean type,” which had emerged, in
his opinion, as a result of his culture planning activities:182 “Most of the young
generation in the Land display a new type of Jew, a kind of Maccabean type from the
past” (Ruppin 1940b, 287). [Bloom p. 144]
181 (Sadeh 1945, 155-158). Sadeh’s story and images are prevalent in Israeli education system until today. See for example the Institute for Holidays, an internet site that provides stories and other texts
for teachers in kindergartens and schools [www.chagim.org.il/d.html#1].
182 As we shall see, Ruppin believed that his eugenic culture plan was working, see e.g. what he wrote at the end of the 1920s: “If today the level of the diligence of the agriculture workers is greater then 10 or 15 years ago we must first of all give the credit for that to the work of selection among the groups [kvutzot]. From the thousands that passed through the groups, a large part was discarded, maybe most of them. Those who stayed were those who passed the test of fire” (Ruppin 1928, 42).
Selections from,
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture a dissertation submitted for the PhD at Tel Aviv University, December 2008.
"Throughout most of his career, Ruppin was in close relations with the academic field of German race scientists, who operated during the thirties with Nazi support and provided them with scientific legitimization and ideas. This group was not only among the first scientists to join the Nazi party, they were also involved in shaping the general lines of its policy to exclude the handicapped, Gypsies and Jews. Until the final solution stage of the Nazi policy, which began sometime at the end of the thirties, Ruppin was able to understand them perfectly, and to agree that their attitude towards the Jews was only natural."166
165 On the use of Ruppin and other Jewish resarchers by Nazi scholarship see: (Steinweis 2006, 19-22).
166 Ruppin’s relationship with the Nazi scientist Hans Günter and an assessment of his weltanschauung with regard to the Nazis, will be discussed at the end of this work.
3.9 The End of Theory [pp 146-147]
At the end of the 19th century, there was not a major thinker in any movement (from liberalism and socialism to Zionism and nationalism) who did not use at least Darwinian or biological arguments and often eugenic ones. In this regard, Ruppin is typical and not an anomaly. Indeed, Ruppin was following many other Jewish and Zionist racial scientists, including Elias Auerbach, Aron Sandler, Felix Theilhaber, Ignaz Zollschan, S.A. Weissenberg, Redcliffe N. Salman and Joseph Jacobs, who wrote the foreword to the English version of Ruppin’s The Jews of Today, and whom Efron calls the first “racial Jewish scientist” (Efron 1994, 58). All of them were motivated by a perceived need to end Jewish intermarriage and preserve Jewish racial purity. Most of them believed that only by creating a Jewish homeland and by reducing the assimilatory influences of the Diaspora, could Jews preserve their unique racial heritage (Gilman 1993, 109; Efron 1994, 136, 155). Race was at the essence of Zionist cultural identity. Since Zionism lacked many of the attributes associated with nationhood – common territory, language conduct and customs – race was an Archimedean point for constituting a nation (Hart 1995, 166; Falk 2006).
The Jewish racial scientists and thinkers became the subject of intensive and vibrant research in the second part of the 1990s. Efron’s The Defenders of Race, Mitchel Hart’s Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity and many others described their theories and cultural identity and included Ruppin among them.
Nevertheless, what makes Ruppin’s case so different from that of the other social scientists is that he was able, like only few other eugenicists (e.g. Galton), to undertake a practical implementation of his ideas, as will be discussed in chapter five.
Indeed, as Penslar notes, there were other attempts at social engineering of the Jews, and at linking Jewish economic and physical health with planned colonization. This frame of work was shared by a variety of Jewish international relief agencies that experimented, from the 1870s until the 1930s, with social engineering in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East (Penslar 2001, 223). Nevertheless, the Palestinian-Zionist project was the only one of these experiments to succeed in radically transforming modern Jewish identity and, in particular, the Jewish body. The successes of Zionism cannot be overestimated: from one of the many political and cultural options for identity in the culture space of the turn of the century it became, at the end of the twentieth century, a cultural synonym for Judaism.
Zionist ideology was for Ruppin – like, previously, religion – a vehicle for eugenic codes and practices. When Ruppin wrote, at the beginning of the 1940s, about the modern Hebrews who were born in the Land of Israel (the so-called Sabars), he referred to them as a new sub-race, “the Maccabean type,” which had emerged, in his opinion, as a result of his culture planning activities:182 “Most of the young generation in the Land display a new type of Jew, a kind of Maccabean type from the past” (Ruppin 1940b, 287). [Bloom p. 144]
181 (Sadeh 1945, 155-158). Sadeh’s story and images are prevalent in Israeli education system until today. See for example the Institute for Holidays, an internet site that provides stories and other texts
for teachers in kindergartens and schools [www.chagim.org.il/d.html#1].
182 As we shall see, Ruppin believed that his eugenic culture plan was working, see e.g. what he wrote at the end of the 1920s: “If today the level of the diligence of the agriculture workers is greater then 10 or 15 years ago we must first of all give the credit for that to the work of selection among the groups [kvutzot]. From the thousands that passed through the groups, a large part was discarded, maybe most of them. Those who stayed were those who passed the test of fire” (Ruppin 1928, 42).
5.1.8. The Borders of the Modern Hebrew Social Space
[…] there is not a single nation of the white race that is racially pure […] Only a part of any nation will correspond to the description of a particular racial group given by the anthropologists, and may thus be regarded as of pure race Ruppin, 194031 . . .
In his memorandum of 1907, Ruppin repeated, in a general way, the analysis he had presented in The Jews of Today. He described the groups existing at the time in the social field of Palestine and analyzed their position with regard to the new social field he planned to establish. As mentioned in the weltanschauung chapter, Ruppin aspired to create a new biological type for the new Jewish society in Palestine, and, as the new source or “gene pool” for this new Jewish Volkskorper, he chose the East European Jews (Ruppin also made divisions within that group, as will be described later).
The two groups that Ruppin saw as unsuitable and even antagonistic to his plans were, on the one hand, the Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews and, on the other, theSephardic and Oriental Jews whom, as he put it, he “lumped together” and defined disparagingly as “Oriental or Eastern Jews” [Heb. yehudey hamizrach].
31 (Ruppin 1940, 18). The title of the chapter in which this text appears is: Race; the conception of race; racial purity.
204
In his lecture The Land of Israel in the Year 1907, which he delivered to The Jewish Settlement Association in Vienna in 1908, Ruppin divided the Jewish population of Palestine into what he defined as four “distinct strata” (Ruppin 1908, 1):
“The first is made up of those Sephardic Jews who have lived in the country for centuries, have become closely assimilated, in mores and in their general mode of life, to the local Arabs and who, side by side with Ladino, speak Arabic too. A good picture of the life of these Jews is furnished by the town of Saida (the ancient Sidon) where 2,000 Jews – all of them Sephardic – may be found. They receive no Chalukkah, earn a difficult and pitiful living as small merchants and artisans, are poorly educated and of a not particularly high moral standing. The Jews of Morocco, Persia and the Yemen, who have come into Palestine in recent years, may be lumped together with this group” (ibid). This group, according to Ruppin, though “poorly educated” and lacking a “particularly high moral standing,” had one advantage: “They receive no Chalukkah”; an important sign of their productivity. In these early definitions we can detect Ruppin’s constant urge to verify his theoretical writings concerning the Semites through his observations in the Middle Eastern and Palestinian social field. As described at length, the ‘Orientals’ were always marked by him as unintelligent, nonmodern, bestial and immoral. Their only good quality and path for regeneration lay in their ability to be useful as an unskilled workforce.
The second group, as defined by Ruppin, was the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox, (Heb. Charedim) who consisted mostly of an unproductive and aged population that was almost entirely dependent on the Chalukkah. The attitude of Ruppin to orthodox Jewry has already been described, and, as in other cases, his observations in Palestine corroborated his theory for he believed that, at least in Palestine, this group was in gradual decline.33
Ruppin’s hostility to these two groups intensified during the 1920s and he saw them as a constant threat to the new social field he was creating. In a letter to Jakobson in1922 he described these two groups – the Orthodox and the
33 As with many other models, this perception became part of the labor movement leadership’s
205
Sephardic – as the “hidden opponents” of the New Yishuv, which he characterized in this letter as the “organized ethnic group” [Heb. eda meurgenet] (Bein 1968, III, 32).
The third group defined by Ruppin was that of the so-called First Aliyah, which
suffered, according to his analysis, from several weaknesses caused by their economic structure being heavily based on the generosity of Baron de Rothschild. The Baron’s unconditional philanthropy led to an ever-weakening connection between them and the land, since it was not developed through their efforts and work but fell into their hands “as a present” (Ruppin 1908/1998, 209). It is important to emphasize that this specific criticism will shape his attitude to the young immigrants of the Second Aliyah.
According to Ruppin, this indifference to the land was the reason for the First Aliyah’s declining “enthusiasm,” – equated in Ruppin’s vocabulary with the “vital force” that his monistic weltanschauung regarded as the most important “element” or “energy” and the necessary quality for becoming a part of the New Yishuv’s Volkskorper. The failure of the First Aliyah is made evident by the fact that their children, the next generation, emigrated permanently from the country, leaving their places for Arab workers (Ruppin 1908/1998, 210).34
Having dismissed these three groups out of hand, Ruppin did however find a fourth, group that he considered a positive asset. This was composed of young immigrants from Eastern Europe who, according to his analysis, were in the first stage of constructive organization. This was the group that Ruppin felt included the best candidates for the mission at hand, which was to constitute the foundation of the healthy Volkskorper but “naturally,” they could succeed only if treated and molded according to the scientific conceptions of modern social sciences and eugenics.
According to Ruppin, this group could become a new “species” or “type” of Jew that would not suffer from the problems of the other groups, those that had to be held back, limited, marginalized or even rejected from the new social space and certainly from its dominant groups.
To Ruppin, reducing the dominance of the first three groups was a mission of no less importance than that of furthering the fourth group and was connected with his attempts to “inherit the land” as rapidly as possible; the same urgency that he exhibited in occupying the land had its parallel in his haste to occupy the social space by creating a new species of Jew, i.e., the Modern Hebrew, to be selected from the pool of young East European immigrants:
34 Needless to say, Ruppin’s assessments and differentiations as sketched above were a result of his weltanschauung and efforts to promote his culture plan rather than of the Palestinian “reality.” E.g., in his accounts, Ruppin ignored the fact that the upper class of the Sephardic community cooperated from the first stages with the “Ashkenazi modernists” and constituted an important link with the Ottoman rulers (Halpern & Reinharz 2000, 198-200). On many of the Second Aliyah working sites, the Sephardic and Oriental Jews– both natives and immigrants – had an important role in the labor and guard forces, and, as we shall see later, those of them who aspired to a greater involvement in creating the modern Hebrew space were usually rejected. The same goes for Ruppin’s assessment of the First Aliyah’s contribution as well as for his premise that there is an essential contradiction between modernity and religion.
206
“We must see most of the Eastern Europeans as desirable Olim [immigrants].
[…] because by transferring people considered morally inferior from one land to
another we are not enhancing their value, and what is more, these morally
inferior people are in most cases, ruining good social institutions” (Ruppin
1919e, 373).
Nevertheless, the fact that the “desirable” immigrants were East Europeans, i.e.
Ashkenazi, did not on its own qualify them. More than anyone else in the Zionist
movement, Ruppin emphasized in his writings and implemented in his practice, the
importance of selecting what he defined as Menschmaterial:
“We devoted ourselves extensively to the question of the economic, legal and
social structure of the Jewish society which we were erecting in Palestine but in
this we proceeded very much like a physicist who makes his calculation on
motion without taking into account the pressure of the atmosphere. We assumed
that all we needed to do was find a good social structure, proclaim it by fiat, and
presto, it would be there. We seemed to forget that even the best of social
structures become flesh and blood realities only by virtue of the individuals who
fit into them and that if the individuals who make up the society do not, in their
education, occupation and character, belong to that structure, they will either
alter its form or else reduce it to an empty shell” (Ruppin 1919d, 373).
This text reflects how Ruppin took the Zionist enterprise from its ideological phase into a phase of culture planning based on eugenic perceptions and, in particular, on the practice of selection. The Jews now became “human material,” a perception which legitimized and enabled the PO to increase its intervention in molding that “material.”
5.2 The Selection of Human Material for Palestine 5.2.1 “Enthusiasm” as “vital force”
The years to come will pass judgment on my work in Palestine. I can only say that I have always considered it my principal object to keep alive in those with whom I have worked the enthusiasm which they brought with them to Palestine. I have tried to guard the flame of this enthusiasm and work by its light .Ruppin36
In the Jews of the East [Europe], he [Ruppin] saw the starting point for the contin-uation of the line; in the most enthusiastic among them, the ancient genealogy. A.Tz’ioni37
As in Ruppin’s vocabulary in general, the meaning of the concept “enthusiasm” or “enthusiast,” (derived, in Hebrew, from the word for flame=lehava) in the above quotations is pregnant with eugenic meaning.38 As already mentioned, the concept of the “vital force” was linked to the concept of “energy” and to Ruppin’s monistic weltanschauung. According his bio-Volkisch perception, the appropriate match between the racial type and the particular type of soil that suited it was a necessary condition for the vitality and creativity of a given type. According to this logic, Ruppin figured that the immigrants who were more “enthusiastic” for the land, who were more connected to it and interacted well with its soil, were more likely to belong to the “ancient genealogy,” as Tz’ioni put it, or to the “Continuität des Keimplasmas” (the continuation of the germ plasma) as Ruppin described it (Ruppin 1903c, 197); i.e. they were more likely to be related biologically to the ancient, “Ur” (original) or “pure race Jews.” In other words, since Ruppin’s bio-historical proposition was that his Darwinismus und Sozialwissenschaft as “the vital force”
This concept – elaborated by Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940), is connected with the concept of Vitalrasse which means a stock with a good intersection of genetic lines of transmission
35 The most positive characteristic of the “desirable element” was what Ruppin had defined already in . (Erblinien). Vitalism saw life as driven by a harmonious final stage. It meant that cells and organisms had an innate drive towards a whole or harmonious form (Hutton 2005, 17, 27). On the particular vitalism of Ruppin, see also: (Penslar 1987; Bein 1968, I, 22).
36 (Ruppin 1936a, 152).
37 (Tzioni 1943, 4).
38 The particular quality that Ruppin sought in the young immigrants was what hardly any writer, from Renan to Ruppin, fails to mention, that is “indomitable ambition as an outstanding feature of the Jews, and added to their other qualities enumerated above it naturally makes them formidable exponents of the will to power, and ruthless competitors in any contest for influence and ascen-dancy.” The Jews, and the Jews in England, (Cobbet 1938) chapter IV, Character of the Jews.
. . .
341
5.2.8 The Kulturkampf of the Workers and Ruppin’s Educational Principles
The term “culture war” (Heb. milchemet tarbut or milchemet koltura) and even the original German expression Kulturkampf was used explicitly and frequently in the workers’ leading magazine Hapoel Hatzair with regard to various forms of Diaspora Judaism. The Kulturkampf was not directed only against the mentalities of the religious or assimilated Jews of the Diaspora or that of the ultra-orthodox communities in the holy cities of Palestine, but mainly against what might be termed the internal galut, the one that the Second Aliya people carried in their memories and bodies. . . .
The educational perceptions of the Degania members, their attitude to their galut parents and to their “ghetto bodies” reflected Ruppin’s weltanschauung and suggest that the rejection of the intellectual and of intellectualism was one of the dominant factors in the natural selection of the groups. As already noted, and contrary to some of the impressions prevailing in Germany and America, the Second Aliya workers opposed any sign of intellectualism, and many of them were even against reading. In 1910, one of the workers wrote that in the Galilee:
“neither the farmers’ sons nor the workers read much […] the place is ruled by the axiom that anyone who reads too many books is not qualified for work and doesn’t have the talent for it. This [not reading] is the sign of a ‘natural farmer’ and ‘natural worker’ […]” (Yardeni,Shochat 1930, 36).
Thus, as this quote reaffirms, many of the Second Aliyah workers not only lacked education, they actually celebrated ignorance as a sign of a healthy mind and body (Elboim-Dror 1996, 118, 127).
These poetic and ideological views were always connected in Ruppin’s weltanschauung to race and biology. The intellectual Jew who was exposed to the temptations of the modern Christian world would always tend to assimilate. The paradox was that the “excessive intellectualism” of the Jewish race was actually one of the reasons for its degeneration. Using the same logic that made the social Darwinists perceive the “excessive treatment” of modern medicine as an impingement
on natural selection, Ruppin saw in the Intellectualismus of the Jews one of their dysgenic fac-tors. As Gilman points out, Ruppin’s view that those who were labeled ‘intellectuals’ (intelligensia) tended to leave the faith and undergo baptism was a common turn of the century perception.
“In Vienna, fully one quarter of the Jews baptized belonged to the Intelligensia.
In the discourse of the time, on the superior Jewish intelligence, belonging to the
intelligentsia might signal a rejection of one’s Jewish identity and a flight into
mixed-race relationships with all their attendant dangers” (Gilman 1996, 78).
As noted already, Ruppin’s eugenic plan, and his constant anti-intellectualist position,
was devised to curb this trend of European Jews.227
223 As already discussed, according to Ruppin’s racial theories, the preservation and improvement of the Jew could occur only if there was a wide base of agricultural Jews. For him the “pathological” condition of the galut Jews could be solved only by a reversal of the pyramid of Jewish occupations, which was build on a wide base of merchants.
224 E.g. Oppenheimer: “For certainly in the situation in which most Jews in the Diaspora find
themselves today, this intellectualism is very nearly their only weapon in the struggle for existence, but it is unhealthy, it represents a one-sided, almost monstrous development, and the goal of all education and all true humanism (Menschentum) is the harmony of body and soul, a healthy soul in a healthy body” (Oppenheimer 1931, 220).
225 Ruppin’s ideas are similar to those of Borochov (Levita 1966, III, 776-777), but also to those of the Monist League which believed that, since man is limited by his animal nature, he can only weaken himself by attempting to impose upon life an erroneous intellectualism and rationalism (Gasman 1971, 35).
