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Zionism, a utopian conception that also borrowed humanitarian concepts from socialism, is the ideology behind the settlement of Jews in Palestine during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. The methods of establishing settlement companies and purchasing lands, building practices, architectural styles, and town planning were all inspired by Zionist concepts.

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of the Zionist movement, expressed his utopian ideas in The Jewish State (1896). In the third chapter of this book, Herzl suggests the establishment of a “Jewish Company” to execute Zionist ideas. According to this plan, The Jewish Company would focus on purchasing lands and would be subjected to English jurisdiction, so its principal center would be in London.¹ The company would erect its own buildings or employ independent architects.² The utopian nature of this plan is echoed Herzl’s statement: “[The] working power, which will not be sweated by the Company, but, transported into brighter and happier conditions of life.”³

In other parts of the third chapter of The Jewish State, Herzl takes inspiration from socialist ideas, as well as concepts developed in Europe after the industrial revolution, to improve living conditions and to apply urban solutions like garden cities and working-class housing. Herzl recommends the building of “workmen’s dwellings” to be erected at the company’s own risk and expense. He rejects European solutions for workers’ housing, which are “miserable rows of shanties which surround factories,” and instead prefers a model similar to the English garden city: “the detached houses in little gardens will be united into attractive groups in each locality.” And, by endorsing young architects “whose ideas have not yet been cramped by routine,”⁴ Herzl advocates modernity in architecture. Even though Herzl was considered a secular Jew, he admits that a visible temple must be built because “it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together.”⁵ He also suggests the foundation of modern high-tech educational institutions, proposing the use of inexpensive materials and techniques to maintain a disciplined and responsible financial plan.

Herzl concludes that the ideal working day is the seven-hour day. Such an idea represented an advance in the nineteenth century, one probably inspired by socialism. Believing that the seven-hour day is not only humanitarian but also more efficient for production, he perceives this labor issue as a recruiting tool: “The seven-hour day will be the call to summon our people in every part of the world. All must come voluntarily, for ours must indeed be the Promised Land.”⁶ At the end of this section, Herzl summarizes: “My remarks on workmen’s dwellings, and on unskilled laborers and their mode of life, are no more Utopian than the rest of my scheme. Everything I have spoken of is already being put into practice, only on an utterly small scale, neither noticed nor understood.”⁷

In “Other Classes of Dwelling,” Herzl offers housing solutions for the poorer classes of citizens, proposing the building of a hundred different types of houses that would be repeated if necessary. This was again an application of modern concepts of architecture using modular, inexpensive units that would assist in developing mass housing.⁸ Herzl also appeals to wealthy Jews to immigrate and invest in the new venture: “If in the new settlement rich Jews begin to rebuild their mansions which are stared at in Europe with such envious eyes, it will soon become fashionable to live over there in beautiful modern houses.”⁹

Zionism is a territory-based revival of the Jewish people that includes aspects such as revival of the Jewish national identity, socioeconomic renewal, and cultural and linguistic rebirth. Herzl’s philosophy is rooted in the Zionist socialist and utopian traditions. There are similarities between Herzl’s utopian vision and Karl Marx’s vision of communism, as they both divided the process of social renewal into two stages: the welfare state and the utopian. The first stage was covered by Herzl in The Jewish State and the second in his novel Old-New Land. In Old-New Land, Herzl defined his utopian vision as “mutualism,” avoiding the term “socialism,” even though mutualism was a stream in the socialist movement of the nineteenth century. The establishment of the kibbutz in Israel was the major manifestation of classical utopianism within Zionism after Herzl, as the kibbutz is the realization of utopian and socialist ideas.¹⁰

While Theodor Herzl was the thinker, or ideologist, of the Zionist movement, Otto Warburg (1859–1938) was the more practical, or pragmatic, member. Warburg’s activities in Palestine and in Europe are linked to the study in this book in two areas: his involvement with the establishment of the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem (1906) and his written introduction for the Levy housing plan in new Palestine (Berlin, 1920).¹¹

Early in his career Warburg was devoted primarily to his studies and research in botany, but toward the end of the nineteenth century he became involved in the Zionist movement. He was especially engaged with the Zionists’ practical implementations, ranging from education to agriculture, irrigation, and Jewish settlements. Warburg was introduced to Zionism by his father-inlaw, Gustav Gabriel Cohen, who met Herzl during the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, a year after Herzl’s publication of The Jewish State. As early as 1881, Cohen had written a book titled The Jewish Problem and the Future, expressing a similar conclusion to Herzl’s vision that anti-Semitism would never vanish and that the only solution would be the establishment of a Jewish state in Ottoman Palestine.¹²

Warburg met Herzl for the first time in 1898, when Herzl was writing Old- New Land. Herzl asked Warburg to assist the Zionist movement as a botanist in developing the flora and fauna of Palestine, as well as other natural resources, primarily water. In 1899 Warburg traveled to Palestine, Cyprus, and Anatolia. In Palestine he investigated possibilities for new agricultural products, as he had in Africa, in line with his promise to Herzl. He also investigated the flora and fauna of the land so as to help Herzl in completing his writing of Old-New Land. In Cyprus, Warburg was also interested in possibilities for establishing garden city Jewish settlements in Famagusta. He later proposed to the Zionist executive the foundation of such Jewish settlements in Famagusta, Cyprus, or Iraq, to be financed by non-Jews, but this proposal was rejected.¹³

In 1905 Warburg founded the Bezalel School of Art, which opened a year later in Jerusalem, and he appointed artist Boris Schatz its director. Warburg assisted with raising funds for the school, recruiting teachers, and purchasing the building for the school and its museum. In 1908 he participated in the foundation of Chevrat Hachsharat Hayishuv, whose mission was to gather funds for the promotion of economic development projects initiated by the Zionist movement. One of its first aims was to found an agrarian bank that would enable settlers to undertake their first steps in this new venture. Two years later Warburg founded the Migdal Company to locate Jewish settlers in Palestine and to assist them in starting new ventures. After World War I he established a new company, Migdal Bayit Vegan, which created an attractive garden city. This was the realization of Herzl’s concept of the creation of the Company to assist new settlements and projects.¹⁴

Another two activists, Arthur Ruppin and Davis Trietsch, were part of the branch of Practical Zionism in Berlin, and both intersected with architect Alexander Levy’s activities in Berlin before and after the war. Even though Levy in Building and Housing in New Palestine comments that the studies of Ruppin and Trietsch contributed very little to the field of building and housing, he still admired their contribution to the topics of Zionist emigration and settlement.

Ruppin in his memoir reveals that when he wrote his book The Jews of Today: A Social Science Study,¹⁵ his attitude toward Zionism was still ambivalent: “I considered the diplomatic Zionism of Herzl hopeless and unrealistic. I began to draw closer to Zionism only after I went to Berlin in 1904 and came into contact with the circle of ‘practical’ Zionists [Otto Warburg, Davis Trietsch, Martin Buber and others] who were dreaming of Jewish settlements in Palestine.”¹⁶ With the encouragement of Jacob Thon (Otto Warburg’s associate), Ruppin officially joined the Zionist Organization in 1905. In the same year, Ruppin and other members of the organization, including Jacob Thon and Davis Trietsch, drafted and printed a resolution to reject the policy of “charter” (a political permission) and demand “an immediate start of the settlement of Palestine.”¹⁷

Ruppin was sent to Palestine in 1907 by the Zionist Organization’s president David Wolfsohn to survey the state of the Jewish settlements there and to look into potential future development in the fields of agriculture and industry.¹⁸ A year later Wolfsohn and Warburg offered him leadership of the Palestine Bureau, the office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, and Ruppin arrived at the port of Jaffa in April of 1908.¹⁹

Ruppin’s study on the economic life of Syria was published in 1918 by the Provisional Zionist Committee in New York. Ruppin recalled that the idea to write this book came in 1915 after the Ottomans blamed him for trying to constitute “a state within a state” and he was forced to withdraw from his position at the Zionist office in Jaffa. Ruppin moved to Jerusalem and lived in a flat in the library building of the American Archaeological Institute and worked intensely on his book; he traveled to the main cities in the region and completed his manuscript within about nine months. After its completion, Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman administrator, ordered Ruppin to leave Palestine immediately, and he returned only after the war four years later. “I had considered my book on Syria and Palestine,” wrote Ruppin, “as an occasional work which I had come to write only through force of circumstances. It was unexpectedly well received.” The book was published in 1917 by the Committee of Colonial Economy in Berlin as a special issue of the journal The Tropical Planter, and in 1918 it was also published in English in New York under the title Syria: An Economic Survey. The book received excellent responses in leading journals, including the review of Reinhard Junge, author of the Europäisierung der Orientalischen Wirtschaft, in the Frankfurter Zeitung on April 28, 1917: “It is the first large, systematic compilation on the economy of Syria (including Palestine).”²⁰

In the subsection “Life in the Cities,” Ruppin observes that the streets in this region were narrow and crooked, except for some modern quarters with wide streets in such towns as Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Jaffa, and, in the “European” sections, the streets were equipped with narrow sidewalks. Ruppin also mentions that in recent years the government forced new guidelines to create wider new streets and to widen existing streets by demolishing houses. He describes the planning and design of the houses in the region:

The houses built by natives have a large drawing room in the center with numbers of doors leading into smaller rooms. (In Damascus there are beautiful courts with fountains and trees.) The rooms are furnished with rugs, mats, divans, and cushions; there are no tables, chairs or closets. Bathrooms are practically unknown. The first bathrooms and water closets were introduced by the Jews of Tel-Aviv.²¹

The statistical data that Ruppin collected is also relevant to Levy’s claims regarding the high cost of construction. According to this data, the prices for lands in Beirut, for example, were about four times more than those in cities in Palestine, but the cost of building construction in cities like Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Haifa was considerably more expensive than other cities in the region. The cost of constructing a house built of a framework filled in with sun-dried bricks in Damascus, for example, was 8,000 francs, while the cost of constructing a house made of stone in Jerusalem was 20,000 francs.²²

In his report Ruppin lists the most prominent educational institutions in the region, including 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.