1 March

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ANTI-SEMITIC DRIVE OF KEY ZIONIST LEADER
On this day in 1876, Arthur Ruppin was born. “The father of Zionist settlement” and “the father of Jewish sociology”, he was heavily influenced by German “blood and soil” nationalism. Ruppin’s ancient Jews were supposedly Aryan farmers but this pure Volk, claimed Ruppin, had been corrupted by an infusion of Semitic genes, race-mixing, that took them away from the land towards commerce and money, a debased condition that Zionism would cure. His racial theories influenced Israeli state policies towards “inferior” Middle Eastern Jews in Israel.

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في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1876 ولد آرثر روبين. "أبو الاستيطان الصهيوني" و "أبو علم الاجتماع اليهودي" ، تأثر بشدة بقومية "الدم والتربة" الألمانية. كان يهود روبين القدامى مزارعين آريين ، لكن هذا القوم النقي قد تم أفساده من خلال مزج الجينات السامية ، والاختلاط العرقي ، الذي أخذهم بعيدًا عن الأرض نحو التجارة والمال ، وهي حالة مهينة ستعالجها الصهيونية. أثرت نظرياته العنصرية على سياسات الدولة تجاه يهود الشرق الأوسط "الأقل شأناً" في إسرائيل.

The major architect of the pre-1948 Zionist colony in Palestine, Ruppin was

...the central "colonizer" of the new Zionist community. Between 1908 and 1942 there was hardly any large scale national undertaking in Palestine – economic, juridical, diplomatic or educational – in which Ruppin was not involved at the highest level of planning and direction.
Ruppin's immense contribution to the Zionist movement gave him the title, in Zionist historiography – from high-school text books through Encyclopedia Judaica to the so-called post-Zionists historians – of "The Father of Jewish/Zionist settlement in Palestine." Many historians agree that Ruppin was responsible for the "foundation and structure of the settlement in the land from the 1920s until the establishment of the State,"
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (2011) Etan Bloom

Bloom demonstrates how Ruppin internalised anti-semitic ideas. As a young man

after a visit to the theatre, Ruppin wrote that what spoilt his enjoyment was the "Jewish physiognomy of one of the actresses" and he admitted that he frequently sensed a "strong antipathy" toward Jewish women and girls...He wrote in his diary "anti- Semites are fully in the right when they accuse the Jews of an abnormal lust for profit."

Ruppin's diaries are full of his aversion to the Jewish physique and appearance, and revulsion for the “Jewish face”, paralleled with admiration and deiﬁcation of blonde-haired people and Aryans (in a very similar way to Herzl and many others).

This extreme racist wrestled with a vestigial conscience as late as 1928 in a way few Zionists any longer feel a need to. “It became clear to me how hard it is to realize Zionism in a way compatible with the demands of universal ethics. I was quite depressed.” Ruppin overcame his queasiness about Zionism being incompatible with democracy, socialism, or the world's major religions. These words of Zionism's "father of settlement in the land of Israel" demonstrate how aware of their criminality were - and are - the leaders of Zionism.

Israel's dark history of extreme racism is 'uncomfortable' , according to the Jewish Forward,

"The father of Israeli sociology and a leading Zionist of the British Mandate named Arthur Ruppin, was a believer in eugenics. In 1919 he argued that the Jewish race should be “purified” and that it was “desirable that only the racially pure come to the land [Palestine].” As head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he put his purity schemes into practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because “they have no blood connection,” and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor...

Ruppin and his fellow travelers were able to influence the Zionist movement, tragically in retrospect, to view non-Europeans as a different caste...Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in 1950 that North African Jews’ “primitivism is unsurpassed…. They have little talent for comprehending anything intellectual.”
Author, Seth Franzman, opinion editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Our White Supremacy Problem, Devin Naarr, Jewish Currents Spring 2019

A well-known Zionist and the founder of the sociology department at Hebrew University, Arthur Ruppin...internalized the racist thinking of the era to recast the Eastern European Jew as the Urjude, the original Jew for whom and by whom the new Jewish state in Palestine ought to be built. According to Ruppin, if the Semitic and Oriental racial categories, as described by Chamberlain and other antisemites, related to language, then Eastern European Jews could not be classified as such because they spoke Yiddish — a Germanic language. Ashkenazim, not Sephardim, thus preserved the “Indo-Germanic” and “Aryan” racial composition of the original Israelites. The problem, as Ruppin imagined it, was that as a result of contact with Semites - especially Orientalized Jews and Bedouins - the racial stock of Ashkenazi Jews had deteriorated. Only on their own land could their race be regenerated and preserved in the face of harmful “dysgenic” influences from the Oriental, Semitic Arab—influences that had already drained the “life force” out of those descendants of Spanish Jews in Palestine who had “assimilated” to the Arab way of life and had become “poorly educated” and of low “moral standing.” Ruppin lumped the descendants of Spanish Jews together with the “Jews of Morocco, Persia and the Yemen, who have come into Palestine of recent years,” thereby solidifying the broad category of “Sephardim,” all of whom he viewed as equally “degenerate.”

Ruppin's sociological framework was eugenics and the Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) then popular in his native Germany. Informed by German Romanticism, he sought to define a Jewish Volk similar to the work of his fellow German eugenicists who were inventing a German Volk (one that generally did not include Jews, Roma, Slavs, Africans, people with disabilities and other Others, all of whom were deemed eugenically separate from Germans)

To colonise Palestine, "Ruppin sought Jews whom he considered to have a less “Semitic” physical-mental character. In other words, Ruppin’s founding sociological principal was anti-Semitism. Here he agreed with Theodore Herzl, A.D. Gordon, Ahad Ha’am and other leading Zionists; the Jews of Europe were not fully human. In their minds Jews were physically and morally weak, parasitical and without roots in the world. This is to say that the leading Zionists of the early years, they who formed the tenets of Zionism, broadly and often very specifically agreed with other, non-Jewish, anti-Semites."
Israeli Anti-Blackness Part I, Jimmy Johnson (2017)

See also the entry for January 1st, anniversary of the death of Ruppin, "the central figure in the Zionist colonisation process in Palestine"

75-minute video: the Zionist Story
(https://youtu.be/ufLAitMq3zI)

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This commment is unpublished.
Manaia · 6 months ago
1885 Edward Tregear published The Aryan Maori, Māori were descendants of an Aryan people who had emerged in India.
Māori had the same Indo-Iranian origins as Europeans. Tregear frequently contributed articles on Māori anthropology to scholarly British journals, received fellowships of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/document/29883/the-aryan-maori#:~:text=In%201885%20former%20surveyor%20Edward,who%20had%20emerged%20in%20India.&text=Tregear%20used%20linguistic%20evidence%20to,echoes%20in%20the%20M%C4%81ori%20language.
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