Zionism and Cosmopolitanism by Dekel Peretz

Author:Dekel Peretz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2022-01-31T08:51:10.167000+00:00

natural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole of the planet; it elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants, and animals. In these respects, it figures a certain kind of global hegemony, notably one based on possession of land and resources rather than control over routes.74

Palestine became a real existing land blessed with fertility and awakened by European colonization from millennia of stagnation. Comparing the settlements of enterprising European agriculturists such as Jews and Templers with their surroundings demonstrated that the resurrection of biblical conditions lay in the hands of Europeans and science.

Yet theology and geography were not completely detached on the descriptive layer. While accounts of South America and especially of Humboldt told a story of an overempowering nature in the religious language of the Romantic,75 accounts of the nature of Palestine naturally included an extraordinary religious aspect. They were a testimony to the truthfulness of the Bible. Since building and monuments of old Israel had crumbled to dust over the millennia, nature was the only living memory to be rediscovered. “The pictures, made so familiar long ago by the poets, prophets, lawmakers and historians of their Holy Scripture, confront them [the Jewish immigrants] here with lively presence,” wrote clergyman Konrad Furrer, Bible science and religious history professor at the Zurich University and a DPV managing board member.76

Not only was the land of milk and honey – a metaphor used often in Altneuland by Jews and non-Jews alike – unwaveringly fertile, its climate and scenery were living proof of the connection between Palestine and the Jews. Despite the lack of cultural edifices, the Bible contained a natural scenery, a Kulturlandschaft, which made the land a home to which Jews could now return. The emphasis on fertility corresponded to a general turn in colonial travel reports at the end of the nineteenth century in which explorations ceased to occur in a void like in the Enlightenment era, but in fertile regions where a colony could be transplanted to.77 Attempts at resolving the contradiction between tales of historical abundance and perceived present desolation were, in themselves, not unique to Altneuland or Jewish scholarship, but a matter of discussion among advocates of German agricultural settlement in Palestine.78

Altneuland could draw upon these advocates for the formation of a collective front for the colonization of Palestine. The Bible and other antique sources formed a shared gateway. Especially the accounts of Josephus Flavius were readily utilized by both Jews and non-Jews alike in Altneuland. Flavius reported that the land, and especially Galilea, was densely populated before Roman occupation. Warburg recounted his imagery that a bird’s eye view of Galilea would have revealed only rooftops. In contrast, the current population was sparse, due in his opinion to terrible neglect which turned it into a breeding ground for disease. Warburg was extremely generous in his calculation of population potential of Palestine and its neighboring countries, fixing it at a hundred million people, significantly larger than the five million immigrants potentially available from Eastern Europe’s Jewish population.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.