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94 13 The Selection of the Fittest (1919)   Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943) was the chief planner of Zionist settlement from 1908 until the mid-1920s. Raised and educated in Germany, Ruppin brought to the Zionist movement expertise in political economy, demography, and sociology, which he had acquired as a student and while working in the Berlin Office for Jewish Statistics. In 1907, Ruppin toured Palestine at the behest of the Zionist Organization, and a year later he moved to Jaffa, where he directed the ZO’s Palestine Office. Ruppin promoted Zionist land purchases, cooperative agricultural settlement in various forms, the founding of Tel Aviv, and the development of Jewish holdings in Haifa. From 1926 until his death, Ruppin lectured on the sociology of the Jews at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote numerous books on this subject. He also wrote extensively on Zionist agricultural settlement. This essay, published just after World War I and at the beginning of the Third Aliyah, or wave of Zionist immigration (1919–23), reveals the influences of early twentiethcentury social and racial thought on Ruppin’s attitudes toward Zionist immigration. On the one hand, Ruppin’s concerns were purely practical: given the enormous challenges facing the Zionist project, it was essential that Jewish immigrants be either young and vigorous people capable of rigorous manual labor, or well-to-do, middle-class tradesmen and professionals who could foster the growth of the Yishuv economy. On the other hand, Ruppin had a quasi-biological view of humanity as a substance that needed to be molded by political elites and mobilized in a struggle for national survival. Moreover, Source: Originally published in Der Jude (1919), translated in Three Decades of Palestine: Speeches and Papers on the Upbuilding of the Jewish National Home ( Jerusalem: Shocken, 1936), 66–72, 78–80. this document was one of earliest articulations of a Zionist immigration policy, when the emphasis was not on drawing the Jewish masses to Palestine but rather on attracting those who can potentially make the greatest contribution to the fledgling new Yishuv (on early Zionist immigration policy, see also document 8 on the absorption of Yemenite Jews in the Yishuv). ❖ 1. The Importance of Selection One of the most important problems connected with our Palestinian colonization work of the future is the choice of the human material,1 for it is on the proper solution of this problem that the entire structure of the Jewish community in Palestine will essentially depend. Hitherto this problem has received practically no attention either in theory or in practice. In the matter of theory we devoted ourselves extensively to the question of the economic, legal, and social structure of the Jewish society, which we were erecting in Palestine, but in this we proceeded very much like a physicist who makes his calculation on motion without taking into account the pressure of the atmosphere. We assumed that all we needed to do was find a good social structure, proclaim it by fiat, and presto! it would be there; we seemed to forget that even the best of social structures become flesh and blood realities only by virtue of the individuals that fit into them, and that if the individuals who make up the society do not, in their education, occupation, and character, belong to that structure, they will either alter its form or else reduce it to an empty shell. It had already become evident in the work which had been done in the past of the colonization of Palestine that the best theoretical counsels and preparations came to nothing if they were alien to the views and habits of the east European immigrants. Many of the proposals put forward by European scientists and experts for the improvement of Palestinian conditions would have been excellent if the immigrants had happened to be German peasants, but as applied to individuals who had brought along with them, besides the habits and customs and ways of thought of the Russian cities, the nervous and mental equipment of the town-dweller, they were simply absurd. We must at last learn that in Palestine too we shall achieve good results for the future only by basing ourselves on the realities of the present, i.e., on the actual ways of life of the immigrants, and by a slow development, which starts out from this reality. The higher the level of the immigrant, the more easily the objective can be reached. And the level will be raised...

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