Arthur Ruppin | |
|---|---|
ארתור רופין | |
 | |
| Born | (1876-03-01)1 March 1876 |
| Died | 1 January 1943(1943-01-01) (aged 66) |
| Resting place | KibbutzDegania Alef |
Arthur Ruppin (Hebrew:ארתור רופין; 1 March 1876 – 1 January 1943)[1] was a GermanZionist and one of the founders of the city ofTel Aviv.[2]Appointed director of Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics (Büro für Statistik der Juden) in 1904,[3] he moved to Palestine in 1907, and from 1908 was the director of thePalestine Office [he] of theZionist Organization inJaffa, organizing Zionist immigration to Palestine. In 1926, Ruppin joined the faculty of theHebrew University of Jerusalem and founded the Department for the Sociology of the Jews.[3] Described posthumously as the "founder of German-Jewish demography" and "father of Israeli sociology",[4] his best-known sociological work wasThe Jews in the Modern World (1934). He was also a proponent ofpseudoscientific race theory.
Arthur Ruppin was born inRawicz in theGerman Empire (today in Poland). The family moved toMagdeburg when he was 11, and there followed a period of slow decline in the family's prosperity. At fifteen, his family's poverty forced him to leave school, where he was regarded as an extremely gifted pupil, in order to work to support them. Though he disliked commerce, he proved to be an extremely able merchant in thegrain trade.[5] Nonetheless, he was able to complete his studies in law and economics, and came second place in a prize competition established by theKrupp Steelworks concerning the uses ofSocial Darwinism in industry.[a] While at the university, Ruppin accepted the crude racial views of his age, including the idea that Jews were an inferior race, whose liabilities as a group could only be overcome byassimilation, outbreeding with Germans and Slavs. By the early 1900s, however, he began to think of himself as a Jew and take a more positive view: Jews could be regenerated not by outbreeding with Slavs and Germans, but rather by reconstituting themselves as a separate nation, as Zionism proposed. As he confided to his diary at this time,Zionism or complete assimilation:tertium non datur.[6]
Ruppin joined theZionist Organization (ZO, the future World Zionist Organization – WZO) in 1905. In 1907 he was sent byDavid Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of theYishuv (the Jewish community inPalestine), then in theOttoman Empire, to investigate the possibilities for development of agriculture and industry. He reported on what he saw, which was distressing, and gave recommendations for improving the situation. In 1908 Ruppin came to live in Palestine by decision of the eighthZionist Congress. He opened the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization inJaffa, with the aim of directing the settlement activities of the Zionist movement. His work madePractical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of theSecond Aliya, the last wave ofJewish immigration to Palestine beforeWorld War I.
Ruppin became the chief Zionist land agent. He helped to get a loan forAhuzat Bayit, laterTel Aviv, and acquired land on theCarmel, inAfula, in theJezreel Valley, and inJerusalem. Ruppin was instrumental in shaping the nature of Jewish settlement in Palestine and in changing the paradigm of settlement from those of plantation owners and poor laborers to the collective and cooperativekibbutzim andmoshavim that became the backbone of the state-in-the-making. He catalyzed the commune atSejera, and helped building the first kibbutz –Degania, as well as helping to support and organizeKinneret,Merhavia and other settlements. Later, he supportedYehoshua Hankin in his purchases of large tracts of land in theGalilee.[citation needed]
Ruppin was among the founders of theBrit Shalompeace movement, which supported abinational state, but left Brit Shalom after the1929 Hebron massacre. Thereafter he was convinced that only an independentJewish state would be possible, and he believed that the way to bring about that state was through continued settlement. He headed theJewish Agency between 1933 and 1935, and helped to settle the large numbers of Jewish immigrants fromGermany who came in that period. Ruppin exercised considerable influence in the cultural formation of East European Jews who performedaliyah and were to rise to positions of importance in later decades, such asDavid Ben-Gurion,Itzhak Ben-Zvi,Joseph Shprinzak,Berl Katznelson,Yitzhak Tabenkin,Zalman Shazar, andLevi Eshkol.[7] Ruppin died in 1943. He was buried inDegania Alef.
In terms of historic origins, Ruppin believed that early Jews were a non-Semitic agricultural people, living in the Land of Israel up to the destruction of theFirst Temple. Thereafter they began to intermarry with the surrounding Semitic peoples and thereby compromised and weakened their racial purity. It was the infusion of "Semitic blood", he held, that "seduced" Jews from working land and, instead, led them to concentrate on commerce, a transformation which, he thought, accounted for the later ‘greed’ prejudice attributed to Jews.[8]
Ruppin consideredassimilation as the worst threat to the existence of Jews as people, and argued for a concentration of Jews in a common area, to be realized by the settlement of Palestine, where they would be protected from the assimilationist tendencies in Europe, as he explained in his bookThe Jews of the Present" (Die Juden der Gegenwart in German), especially in its second, largely-amended, edition. Ruppin accepted the idea of a division of humankind into three important races of humans, the "white", "yellow" and "black" and considered Jews to be part of the "white" race (page 213–214), and within this "race", which Ruppin divides in "Xantrochroe" (light colored) and "Melanochroe" (dark colored), to be part of the latter, actually mixture from the Arab and North African peoples and other West and South Asian peoples. Ruppin believed that realization of Zionism required "racial purity" of Jews and was influenced by works of anti-semitic thinkers, including some Nazis.[9] Ruppin personally metHeinrich Himmler's mentor,[10]Hans F. K. Günther, one of many racist thinkers who greatly influenced Nazism.[11]
Specifically regarding Jews, Ruppin distinguished between "Racial Jews" and "Jewish types", and drew up a concept that divided Jews into "white, black and yellow" metaracial categories.[12] His variables, later to prove influential in Israel, were worked out over a classification betweenAshkenazim,Sephardim, Babylonians, and "special types" who didn't fit into the former categories, namely such asYemenites andBukharans.[13] He performed skull measurements and believed Ashkenazi Jews, whom he regarded as superior to, for example, Yemeni Jews, themselves comprised various racial subclasses, according to nasal structure.[8] Despite these variations in their respective historic communities, Ruppin was convinced that Jews were distinguished by a special biological uniqueness.[14]
Ruppin wrote that Jewish race should be "purified", and he stated that "only the racially pure come to the land." After becoming head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later theJewish Agency for Israel), he argued against immigration ofEthiopian Jews because of their lack of "blood connection" and thatYemenite Jews should be limited to menial labor.[15] After the Holocaust, historiography in Israel usually minimized or ignored altogether this aspect of Ruppin's life.[8]
According toRaphael Falk, Ruppin was convinced that Jews and Arabs comprised an alliance forged by common cultural and blood ties.[16]
Ruppin Academic Center is named after Arthur Ruppin.
Media related toArthur Ruppin at Wikimedia Commons