the Jewish Arts and Crafts School Bezalel, of which Warburg was one of the founders. Bezalel would turn into the most influential factor in the early twentieth century, not only in the field of visual art, but also in the search for architectural style, especially in Tel Aviv in its first two decades.
Davis Trietsch, like Warburg and Ruppin, is considered one of the Zionist pioneer explorers of the Land of Israel. His career in the Zionist Organization involved a number of controversial episodes, including his proposal to settle Jews in Cyprus and El Arish, Egypt; his advocacy and support for Germany during the war; and his postwar idea of Zionist Maximalism.23 He expressed his extreme approach to Practical Zionism in many publications, including books and magazines. In spite of the fact that Trietsch was intensely engaged in the future of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, including the topic of housing, Levy in his publication mentions him only a few times. In Building and Housing in New Palestine Levy introduces the new fuel agent “suddit” based on Trietsch’s book on immigration and colonization.24 Trietsch’s ideas are also mentioned by Ernst Herrmann (in the appendix of Levy’s publication), regarding his recommendation to populate smaller cities to reduce overcrowding in the large cities, and his suggestion to establish new settlements on sites where ancient cities were once built.
Trietsch and Ruppin had different interpretations of the meaning and the direction of Practical Zionism, and because of this the relationship between them worsened over the years. Ruppin, in his memoir, recalls that during the Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913, after introducing a report encouraging the use of a Jewish workforce in Palestine, Davis Trietsch was one opponent who considered his work “insufficient.”25 The argument between the two accelerated in 1919 over the issue of how many Jewish immigrants should be directed to Palestine after the war. It was also a critical question for Levy’s plan, which focused on mass housing following mass immigration. In March of 1919, Ruppin wrote that in the first decade he believed 20,000 Jews per year would be settled in Palestine, 40,000 per year during the second decade, and 60,000 during the third. “I thought that even these numbers would be very difficult to achieve,” verifies Ruppin, “but now I am being attacked by Trietsch and others who say that this is not nearly enough, that we must immediately begin to settle 100,000 people a year.”26 Ruppin discusses this issue again in November, 1919, with greater frustration:
I find it depressing that I am constantly growing older and no longer have an unlimited number of years of work at my disposal. I am also finding my stay in Berlin unpleasant because I am obliged to carry on a written and verbal feud with Davis Trietsch and his adherents. Trietsch is dissatisfied with the program of settlement I have described in my book The Colonization of Palestine. Not 30,000 Jews as I have suggested, but 300,000, they claim, should immigrate into Palestine every year. I consider this demand utopian, because economic considerations make it impossible to absorb this number of immigrants.27
Warburg and Ruppin were technocrats advocating “central role for technically trained experts in the crafting of social policy.”28 Zionism’s settlement experts before World War I represented the first generation of “Jewish national movement’s technocratic elite” and they acted similar to the “technically oriented elites in European society in the late nineteenth century.”29
Warburg was a “classical technocrat, apolitical and elitist,”30 and Ruppin was one of the most successful Zionist settlement experts who “had penetrated the Zionist historical consciousness.”31 The creation of the Palestinian Office in 1907 by Ruppin was a “synthesis between Herzl’s utopian technophilia and Warburg’s developmental ethos.”32 Davis Trietsch, on the other hand, was “one of German Zionism’s most inveterate utopians … a student of the Anglo-German Garden City movement and a champion of its application to Palestine.”33
Like Warburg and Ruppin, architect Alexander Levy was a technocrat in the field of building and housing under the sponsorship of Practical Zionism.
Notes
1.Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896; repr., Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2006), 98.
2.Ibid., 101.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid., 101-102.
5.Ibid., 102.
6.Ibid., 104.
7.Ibid., 105.
8.Ibid., 108.
9.Ibid., 109.
10.Uri Zilbersheid, “The Utopia of Theodor Herzl,” Israel Studies 9, no. 3 (2004): 80-114.
11.The main sources on Warburg are: Otto Warburg, Sefer Warburg (Jerusalem: Masada, 1948), and the Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
12.Warburg, Sefer Warburg, 17-20.
13.Ibid., 21-25.
14.Ibid., 63-67.
15.Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der gegenwart. Eine sozialwissenschaftliche studie (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1904).
16.Arthur Ruppin and Alex Bein’, Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 75.
17.Ibid., 76.
18.Ibid., 80.
19.Ibid., 86-87.
20.Ibid., 159-61. Syria is a geographical term that
