THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
by
Etan Bloom
SUBMITTED TO THE SENATE OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
(1st December, 2008)
EtanBloom-PhD-ArthurRuppin.pdf (2.3 MB)
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 the First 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.[9]
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 settlement of Palestine, where they would be protected from the assimilationist tendencies in Europe, as he explained in his book The 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.[10] Ruppin personally met Heinrich Himmler’s mentor,[11] Hans F. K. Günther, one of many racist thinkers who greatly influenced Nazism.[12]
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.[13] His variables, later to prove influential in Israel, were worked out over a classification between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Babylonians, and “special types” who didn’t fit into the former categories, namely such as Yemenites and Bukharans.[14] 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.[9] Despite these variations in their respective historic communities, Ruppin was convinced that Jews were distinguished by a special biological uniqueness.[15]
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 the Jewish Agency for Israel), he argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of “blood connection” and that Yemenite Jews should be limited to menial labor.[16] After the Holocaust, historiography in Israel usually minimized or ignored altogether this aspect of Ruppin’s life.