Arthur Ruppin was a Zionist thinker and leader. He was one of the founders of the city ofTel Aviv. He directed Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics and Demography from 1902 to 1907. From 1908 on, he was the director of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, organizing Zionist colonisation in Palestine. In 1926 Ruppin joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founded the sociology department. A building there is now named in his honor. His most celebrated sociological work is The Jews in the Modern World.
Biography
Arthur Ruppin was born in Rawicz in the German Empire. When he was fifteen, his family's poverty forced him to work to support them. Nonetheless, he was able to complete his studies in law and economics, winning the Krupp prize in 1899 for his dissertation on the use of social Darwinism in industry. He was to distinguish himself both in furthering practical Zionist settlement and in the academic world.
Zionist activism
Ruppin joined the Zionist Organization in 1905. In 1907 he was sent by David Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of the Yishuv, then in the Ottoman 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 eighth Zionist Congress. He opened the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, with the aim of directing the settlement activities of the Zionist movement. His work made Practical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of the Second Aliya, the last wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War I. Ruppin became the chief Zionist land agent. He helped to get a loan for Ahuzat Bayit, later Tel Aviv, and acquired land on the Carmel, inAfula, in the Jezreel Valley, and in Jerusalem. 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 cooperative kibbutzim and moshavim that became the backbone of the state-in-the-making. He catalyzed the commune at Sejera, and helped building the first kibbutz – Degania, as well as helping to support and organize Kinneret, Merhavia and other settlements. Later, he supported Yehoshua Hankin in his purchases of large tracts of land in the Galilee. Ruppin was among the founders of the Brit Shalompeace movement, which supported a binational state, but he left Brit Shalom after the 1929 Hebron massacre. Thereafter he was convinced that only an independent Jewish state would be possible, and he believed that the way to bring about that state was through continued settlement. He headed the Jewish Agency between 1933 and 1935, and helped to settle the large numbers of Jewish immigrants from Germany who came in that period. Ruppin died in 1943. He was buried in Degania Alef.
Race theory
Ruppin considered assimilation 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 colonisation of Palestine, where they would be protected from the assimilationist tendencies in Europe, as he explained in his book "The Jews of the Present", especially in its 2nd largely changed 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, and within this "race", which Ruppin divides in "Xantrochroe" and "Melanochroe", 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 inspired by works of anti-semitic thinkers,including some Nazis. Ruppin personally met Hans F. K. Günther, one of many racist thinkers who greatly influenced Nazism. Ruppin believed in numerous "Jewish types," performed skull measurements, and believed Ashkenazi Jews were made of various racial subclasses, according to nasal structure. He distinguished between "Racial Jews" and "Jewish types", and believed Ashkenazi Jews to be superior to Yemeni Jews. His concepts included dividing Jews into "white, black and yellow" metaracial categories. Ruppin wrote that Jewish race should be "purified", he also stated that "only the racially pure come to the land.” Afer becoming head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive, he aruged against immigration of Ethiopian Jews due to their lack of "blood connection" and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be limited for menial labor. Due to the Holocaust, historiography in Israel usually played down or ignored altogether this aspect of Ruppin's life.
Awards and recognition
Many cities in Israel named streets after him, and the city of Haifa has a prize in his name awarded for extraordinary works in thinking, philosophy and politics. One of the prize-winners was the philosopher, Zionist and friend of Kafka's, Felix Weltsch in 1952. The German city Magdeburg, in which Ruppin lived during his youth, has named a street after him. Ruppin Academic Center is named after Arthur Ruppin.
