While Theodor Herzl was the thinker, or ideologist, of the Zionist movement, Otto Warburg (1859–1938) was the more practical, or pragmatic, member. Warburg’s activities in Palestine and in Europe are linked to the study in this book in two areas: his involvement with the establishment of the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem (1906) and his written introduction for the Levy housing plan in new Palestine (Berlin, 1920).11
Early in his career Warburg was devoted primarily to his studies and research in botany, but toward the end of the nineteenth century he became involved in the Zionist movement. He was especially engaged with the Zionists’ practical implementations, ranging from education to agriculture, irrigation, and Jewish settlements. Warburg was introduced to Zionism by his father-inlaw, Gustav Gabriel Cohen, who met Herzl during the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, a year after Herzl’s publication of The Jewish State. As early as 1881, Cohen had written a book titled The Jewish Problem and the Future, expressing a similar conclusion to Herzl’s vision that anti-Semitism would never vanish and that the only solution would be the establishment of a Jewish state in Ottoman Palestine.12
Warburg met Herzl for the first time in 1898, when Herzl was writing Old- New Land. Herzl asked Warburg to assist the Zionist movement as a botanist in developing the flora and fauna of Palestine, as well as other natural resources, primarily water. In 1899 Warburg traveled to Palestine, Cyprus, and Anatolia. In Palestine he investigated possibilities for new agricultural products, as he had in Africa, in line with his promise to Herzl. He also investigated the flora and fauna of the land so as to help Herzl in completing his writing of Old-New Land. In Cyprus, Warburg was also interested in possibilities for establishing garden city Jewish settlements in Famagusta. He later proposed to the Zionist executive the foundation of such Jewish settlements in Famagusta, Cyprus, or Iraq, to be financed by non-Jews, but this proposal was rejected.13
In 1905 Warburg founded the Bezalel School of Art, which opened a year later in Jerusalem, and he appointed artist Boris Schatz its director. Warburg assisted with raising funds for the school, recruiting teachers, and purchasing the building for the school and its museum. In 1908 he participated in the foundation of Chevrat Hachsharat Hayishuv, whose mission was to gather funds for the promotion of economic development projects initiated by the Zionist movement. One of its first aims was to found an agrarian bank that would enable settlers to undertake their first steps in this new venture. Two years later Warburg founded the Migdal Company to locate Jewish settlers in Palestine and to assist them in starting new ventures. After World War I he established a new company, Migdal Bayit Vegan, which created an attractive garden city. This was the realization of Herzl’s concept of the creation of the Company to assist new settlements and projects.14
Another two activists, Arthur Ruppin and Davis Trietsch, were part of the branch of Practical Zionism in Berlin, and both intersected with architect Alexander Levy’s activities in Berlin before and after the war. Even though Levy in Building and Housing in New Palestine comments that the studies of Ruppin and Trietsch contributed very little to the field of building and housing, he still admired their contribution to the topics of Zionist emigration and settlement.
Ruppin in his memoir reveals that when he wrote his book The Jews of Today: A Social Science Study,15 his attitude toward Zionism was still ambivalent: “I considered the diplomatic Zionism of Herzl hopeless and unrealistic. I began to draw closer to Zionism only after I went to Berlin in 1904 and came into contact with the circle of ‘practical’ Zionists [Otto Warburg, Davis Trietsch, Martin Buber and others] who were dreaming of Jewish settlements in Palestine.”16 With the encouragement of Jacob Thon (Otto Warburg’s associate), Ruppin officially joined the Zionist Organization in 1905. In the same year, Ruppin and other members of the organization, including Jacob Thon and Davis Trietsch, drafted and printed a resolution to reject the policy of “charter” (a political permission) and demand “an immediate start of the settlement of Palestine.”17
Ruppin was sent to Palestine in 1907 by the Zionist Organization’s president David Wolfsohn to survey the state of the Jewish settlements there and to look into potential future development in the fields of agriculture and industry.18 A year later Wolfsohn and Warburg offered him leadership of the Palestine Bureau, the office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, and Ruppin arrived at the port of Jaffa in April of 1908.19
Ruppin’s study on the economic life of Syria was published in 1918 by the Provisional Zionist Committee in New York. Ruppin recalled that the idea to write this book came in 1915 after the Ottomans blamed him for trying to constitute “a state within a state” and he was forced to withdraw from his position at the Zionist office in Jaffa. Ruppin moved to Jerusalem and lived in a flat in the library building of the American Archaeological Institute and worked intensely on his book; he traveled to the main cities in the region and completed his manuscript within about nine months. After its completion, Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman administrator, ordered Ruppin to leave Palestine immediately, and he returned only after the war four years later. “I had considered my book on Syria and Palestine,” wrote Ruppin, “as an occasional work which I had come to write only through force of circumstances. It was unexpectedly well received.” The book was published in 1917 by the Committee of Colonial Economy in Berlin as a special issue of the journal The Tropical Planter, and in 1918 it was also published in English in New York under the title Syria: An Economic Survey. The book received excellent responses in leading journals, including the review of Reinhard Junge, author of the Europäisierung der Orientalischen Wirtschaft, in the Frankfurter Zeitung on April 28, 1917: “It is the first large, systematic compilation on the economy of Syria (including Palestine).”20
In the subsection “Life in the Cities,” Ruppin observes that the streets in this region were narrow and crooked, except for some modern quarters with wide streets in such towns as Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Jaffa, and, in the “European” sections, the streets were equipped with narrow sidewalks. Ruppin also mentions that in recent years the government forced new guidelines to create wider new streets and to widen existing streets by demolishing houses. He describes the planning and design of the houses in the region:
The houses built by natives have a large drawing room in the center with numbers of doors leading into smaller rooms. (In Damascus there are beautiful courts with fountains and trees.) The rooms are furnished with rugs, mats, divans, and cushions; there are no tables, chairs or closets. Bathrooms are practically unknown. The first bathrooms and water closets were introduced by the Jews of Tel-Aviv.21
The statistical data that Ruppin collected is also relevant to Levy’s claims regarding the high cost of construction. According to this data, the prices for lands in Beirut, for example, were about four times more than those in cities in Palestine, but the cost of building construction in cities like Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Haifa was considerably more expensive than other cities in the region. The cost of constructing a house built of a framework filled in with sun-dried bricks in Damascus, for example, was 8,000 francs, while the cost of constructing a house made of stone in Jerusalem was 20,000 francs.22
In his report Ruppin
