IN THE SWELTER OF AUGUST 1960, 120 notables representing forty countries, mostly emerging nations in Africa and Asia, gathered at the Weiz-mann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, to attend the International Conference on the Role of Science in the Advancement of New States.1 Abba Eban had conceived the event two years earlier in Washington, D.C., while he was Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Since then, Eban had been appointed president of the Weizmann Institute, then elected to the Knesset, and finally chosen to serve as David Ben Gurion’s minister of culture and education. A man of uncommon stamina, Eban continued to hold all three posts. The Rehovot conference was the rare event that captured at once a wide swathe of Eban’s interests and enthusiasms, engaging him as a politician, statesman, educator, patron of Israeli science, and enthusiastic advocate of Zionism and the still-young Jewish state.
After the conference, Eban submitted a report to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing the meeting’s aims and achievements: “The theme of the conference was the capacity and duty of the modern scientific movement to enrich the life of newly emerging communities. At the center of its deliberations stood the two transformations which dominate the life of our century—the rise of Asian and African peoples to independence and the rapid progress of science and technology.” The success of each of these transformations, Eban said, depended on the other: “The history of our times will be written largely by the two groups of men who came together for the first time at the Rehovoth Conference—the statesmen of developing nations and the leaders of scientific disciplines.”2
Bringing these two groups together in a way that might produce freedom, health, and democracy for developing nations, Eban continued, was a task for which Israel was uniquely fit.
Our country stands at a crossroad—not only in geography, but also in the world of ideas. We are, by the fortune of history, a member of the modern world of science and technology. … We are also one of the new states of the international community, a partner in the modern enterprise of national liberation. We thus stand in simultaneous kinship to the scientists and to the representatives of new states assembled at Rehovoth. The fabric of Israel’s history has a single unifying thread—a constant belief, not always easy to sustain, in the positive direction of human history, and in the responsiveness of men, when challenged by great issues and lofty ideas.
Strong currents of passion still sweep across the awakening continents, threatening to submerge liberties hardly won and deeply cherished. It was a moving experience for us, at such a time, to set the stage of an international assembly consecrated to the pursuit of truth in the service of man’s expanding welfare and enduring peace.3
Israel’s singular position as both a scientific powerhouse and an emerging nation made it a natural bridge, Eban believed, between the developed world and the developing world. It was what gave Israeli scientists the authority to teach the leaders of newly established African and Asian nations from experience. This was obvious during the conference when, Eban boasted,
Dr. Zvi Tabor of Jerusalem showed a “sound pond” and solar-energy boilers which indicated early possibilities of turning Asian and African sunshine to practical account. … Mr. Zarchin of Israel gave varying prognoses of the desalinization of sea-water. … Mr. Aaron Wiener of Israel’s Water Planning Organization discussed the agricultural problems of widely divergent climates. … Professor Saul Adler of Jerusalem proposed broad regional planning for the elimination of the tsetse fly. … [and] population regulation [was] outlined by Professor Shelesnyak of the Weizmann Institute.4
Conference participants were also taken around the country on tour buses to visit examples of highly productive industrialized agriculture on collective settlements, desalination plants, big infrastructure projects, and other examples of small and large successes produced by Israeli scientific planning and development. The “concluding discussions” of the conference were devoted to “assistance offered by Israel.” Yohanan Ratner of the Technion pledged “to provide training at our school on the secondary level for technicians and foremen [from developing countries], and in addition to train a smaller number of engineers for four years, on the average, giving them the opportunity to take part in the scientific work conducted in our laboratories to the extent that they are able.” Gehard Schmidt of the Weizmann Institute declared the school’s “readiness to accept graduate students from the new states. … We have immediately available a number of scholarships for the maintenance of students from the African and Asian continents.” Saul Adler of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem arose to say that “students from Africa and Asia will also find [in Jerusalem] laboratories equipped for almost every branch of micro-biology, a subject which may at first appear to be academic as far as some of the new states are concerned but which really has the widest applications for animal and human welfare and also for industrial development.” Amos Maor of the Histadrut labor union offered to provide six-month courses in the union’s Afro-Asian Institute of Labor Studies “for 60 participants from African and Asian countries.” A representative of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission offered to open the “Israel radioscope training center” to students from new countries. Another participant from ORT, the Organization for Rehabilitation and Training, offered technical training. The Institute for Fibers and Forest Products offered “specialized training of technicians, engineers and chemists in these sciences and technologies.” Eban, who chaired the session, saw things this way: the offers of assistance from Israel, “however small its size and modest its resources,” at least set an example for others. “I hope that these statements will have an exemplary effect upon other governments, and especially other scientific institutions.”5
It was with satisfaction that Eban reported the remark of the Reverend Solomon Caulker, vice-principal of a college in Sierra Leone: “I came in darkness, but I leave in light.”6 “The image of sudden illuminations aptly sums up the lasting impression of this encounter between the science and statescraft of this century,” Eban wrote.7 Caulker’s evocative image of light emanating from the campus of the Weizmann Institute to the dark recesses of Africa captures the complexity of feelings that many Israelis, like Eban, had toward science and its place in Israeli society—how attitudes toward science affected Israelis’ self-image, how Israel was viewed from beyond its borders, and countless day-to-day efforts to build and maintain the country. By 1960, science and technology were an important part of Zionist ideology, psychology, politics, and praxis. Indeed, they had been since the very start of the Zionist project, almost a century before Abba Eban convened the Rehovot conference.
The notion that Israel’s fate is tied up with science is far older than the state itself. In 1892, Russian journalist and activist Elhanan Leib Lewinsky published a popular utopian novel called Masa‘ le-Erets Yisra’el bi-shenat tat (2040) (Voyage to the Land of Israel in the year 5800 [2040]). Lewinsky had dropped out of medical school to devote himself to the cause of Jewish nationalism after the wave of pogroms in 1881,8 even traveling for several months to Palestine. The country he described, in a safely distant future, was far more Western and developed than the country he observed firsthand in 1881:
In all the history of new settlements, it was unseen and unheard of for a country to be based on a foundation of justice. One hundred and fifty years ago, our forefathers were naïve enough to genuinely believe that it is possible to so found colonies and build a country. … Everyone now understands that Darwinian theory, with its iron-clad rule of the war for survival, is especially appropriate for new colonization. Here we see how the strong prevails and succeeds and inherits the land, and the weak falls plundered in the war, and will leave behind no trace, even if he has all the support in the world. … In the Land of Israel [were established] for the general good: academies, schools, museums, libraries, parks, tramways, steam and electrical ships, medical clinics, baths, canals and the like for the public good. … All of the Land of Israel is now perfectly established. Cobblestone and iron tracks connect village to village, there are parks and orchards in every settlement, houses of worship and study and learning are well fashioned, there are extravagant libraries, hospitals, clinics, higher and lower springs, quarries, steam and electric ships, until the land before us became a Garden of Eden.9
The Land of Israel of the future that Lewinsky goes on to describe is a workers’ paradise and a model of distributive justice, but it is equally the most advanced of European technocracies. Jaffa, where his protagonist makes landfall, is blessed with modern lighting and efficient, free tramways, and hosts an academy of nautical studies. (Inland, he visits an academy of geological studies, and Jerusalem has a university of high renown.) Visiting a professor he finds “a great treasure trove of books, most from the recent century, with much literature on agriculture and botany in Hebrew, Arabic, French, English, and German.”10 After describing the copious private property that the citizens of the Land of Israel have at their disposal, Lewinsky remarks: “But what is private property compared to the national government’s property: all the rail tracks, steam ships, telegraph, telephone, phonographs, airships, coal and metal mines: all belonging to the government, and everyone is free to enjoy them?”11 So advanced and successful is the country Lewinsky describes that it eclipses the capitals of Europe. Voyage to the Land of Israel ends with this: “In the past, our forefathers traveled to Jerusalem by way of Paris, and because they found themselves in Paris, forsook continuing to Jerusalem. Now the order is turned. We travel to Paris by way of Jerusalem, and when we come to Jerusalem, we forsake Paris. How times have changed!”12
The most famous and influential of early Zionist ideologues and activists, Theodor Herzl, also foresaw a Jewish homeland that would surpass the technological and scientific wonders of Europe. His was what one scholar called a “scientific messianism.”13 Herzl wrote in his 1896 manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) that “the founding of a Jewish State, as I conceive it, presupposes the application of scientific methods. We cannot journey out of Egypt today in the primitive fashion of ancient times.”14 As he neared the conclusion, Herzl grew elegiac:
The word “impossible” has ceased to exist in the vocabulary of technical science. Were a man who lived in the last century to return to the earth, he would find the life of today full of incomprehensible magic. Wherever the moderns appear with our inventions, we transform the desert into a garden. To build a city takes in our time as many years as it formerly required centuries; America offers endless examples of this. Distance has ceased to be an obstacle. The spirit of our age has gathered fabulous treasures into its storehouse. Every day this wealth increases. A hundred thousand heads are occupied with speculations and research at every point of the globe, and what any one discovers belongs the next moment to the whole world. We ourselves will use and carry on every new attempt in our Jewish land; and just as we shall introduce the seven-hour day as an experiment for the good of humanity, so we shall proceed in everything else in the same humane spirit, making of the new land a land of experiments and a model State.15
In his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-New Land), Herzl gave substance to these abstractions, describing a society more mechanized and technologically advanced than any the Jews left behind in Europe. European visitors, returning to a Palestine that not long before was hopelessly primitive, are amazed at the improvements engineered by Jewish immigrants to the region:
They had to halt at a railway crossing because a train was due. It appeared presently, rushing southward at great speed. When the visitors remarked that the locomotive had no smokestack, they were told that this line, like most of the Palestinian railways, was operated by electric power. There was one of the great advantages of having begun from the beginning. Just because everything here had been in a primitive, neglected state, it had been possible to install the most up-to-date technical appliances at once. So it had been with the city planning, as they already knew; and so it had been with the construction of railways, the digging of canals, the establishment of agriculture and industry in the land. The Jewish settlers who streamed into the country had brought with them the experience of the whole civilized world. The trained men graduated from universities, technical, agricultural and commercial colleges had brought with them every type of skill required for building up the country. The penniless young intelligentsia, for whom there were no opportunities in the anti-Semitic countries and who there sank to the level of a hopeless, revolutionary-minded proletariat, these desperate, educated young men had become a great blessing for Palestine, for they had brought the latest methods of applied science into the country.16
The image of a state that is a marvel of technological and scientific planning and development was a part of almost every early attempt to imagine Jewish sovereignty. In 1899, an orthodox American Jew named Henry Periera Mendes published his own utopian novel, Looking Ahead, which finds in a future Jewish state in Palestine the salvation of all humankind. Mendes was an intriguing figure who resists easy characterization. He was an orthodox Jew, and at the same time he was a founder of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary. In the society he envisioned, the rule of the rabbis was firm. Yet even in his utopian theocracy, Jewish sovereignty was recognizable by its technological development and scientific sophistication: “Roads were made, villages were rebuilt, enlarged into towns, watercourses were constructed, fields were planted, and the growth of the towns into cities bade fair to rival the miracles of Chicago and San Francisco. … Factories sprang into existence. Immense coal fields were found toward Euphrates, petroleum to the south, metals in the Midian Hills. Railways, as if by magic, branched from Jerusalem, Damascus and Lebanon, and met railway systems of other lands. … Palestine [was] now recognized as the future emporium for the world.”17 Mendes’ book ends with this coda, an encomium to Jewish smarts and the light they might bring unto the nations: “No need to describe how the University of Zion became an influence for good, so that human happiness became measurably nearer, and humanity learned that restoration of Palestine to the Jews meant really the restoration of all men to the love of the common Father of all. No need to speak of the world’s progress since then. No need to speak of what we all taste to-day—universal peace, universal brotherhood, universal happiness.”18
Similar themes continued to appear in the fiction of Jewish futurology, resurfacing again in 1922, well after the lurching Zionist settlement of Palestine had produced a reality that rendered utopian novels more fantastic and less plausible than they had early been. Haim Shalom Ben-Avram, in Kommemuyot (Independence), described a Jewish state easily accessible by air or sea, fashioned into a paradise by Jewish energy and ingenuity. Radio stations were built. Great factories with thumping machines were established. Train tracks stitched together the cities, towns, and villages. When, inevitably, the country faced a shortage of power, “it occurred to a young engineer” to dam the Jordan.19 Wind turbines were added. Jews brought with them knowledge from the many places around the globe they had lived, and they produced for themselves the most advanced of nations.
In all of these attempts to foresee the future Jewish state, practical scientific and engineering advances were inseparable from those in social engineering. In each case, new knowledge and new machines were part of engineering a new society and a new Jew. Much was made of the new forms of settlement, new economic arrangements, and new social norms that would evolve in line with rational principles. As reflected in the earlier visionary novels, the homeland was seen not just as a product of the most advanced technologies, informed by the most advanced science. It was a full-blown technocracy, in which scientific principles, interpreted by men schooled in scientific management, scientific planning, scientific agriculture, and so forth, would have ample influence over how the country was developed and administered.20
This vision of a shining technocracy in the Levant was not the sole province of novelist-dreamers. It was an everyday part of the thought and rhetoric of Zionists grounded in the here and now. From its earliest years, “Zionism” described a group of diverse ideologies, outlooks, and programs under great centrifugal pressure. There were political Zionists, practical Zionists and synthetic ones, secular and religious and spiritual Zionists, cultural Zionists, labor Zionists, socialist Zionists, collectivist Zionists, revisionist Zionists, general Zionists, and more. The succeeding waves of immigration in the first decades of Zionism—a First Aliyah, and a Second, Third, Fourth and so on—each had a unique collage of characters and concerns. The fault-lines between Zionists of different backgrounds, beliefs, and ideologies were multitudinous, and across them there were regular eruptions of anger and anxiety. Across this latticework of divides there were relatively few beliefs about which Zionists shared consensus. The notion that Jewish settlement in Palestine should proceed in a scientific fashion, and that the land would be remade by Jews alive to the power of new scientific methods and new technologies, was one of these rare beliefs. It spanned chasms of ideology, background, language, and lifestyle.21
Pick almost any influential Zionist, and you will find that he or she held one version or another of this belief. Vladimir Jabotinsky—the revisionist ideologue and tireless Zionist activist, politician, and diplomat—insisted that critics were wrong to call Herzl’s novels utopian and romantic; while they were literary works of the highest order, aptly assuming some poetic license, they were at heart realistic assessments of what Zionism could produce. Jabotinsky wrote glowingly of Altneuland in a 1905 essay called “Doctor Herzl”: “The picture Herzl painted is the picture of a social regime unparalleled in its progressiveness.” It was a vision that Jabotinsky (who admitted affection for the futuristic yarns of Jules Verne) himself shared.22
Jabotinsky’s enthusiasm for Herzl’s vision of a liberal technocracy would perhaps be surprising had it not been shared by so many early Zionists of so many varied backgrounds and worldviews. One of these was Max Nordau, the physician-intellectual who persuaded Herzl to initiate the Zionist Congresses that became a hub of the Zionist movement in its first decades and a venue for efforts to translate ideas into policies and policies into practical projects and programs. Nordau included in his Interpretation of History a lyrical tribute to how science and technology had moved humanity to a new standing. Consider, he wrote, the “gap between the little oil-lamp and pinewood torch and the electric light! Between the kindling of fire by the tinder and by a match! Between traveling on foot, horseback, or on a raft, and in the electric train or turbine steamer! Between sending a message on foot or by means of telegraph and telephone! Between the club and axe of stone and the revolver, machine gun, torpedo, and armoured cruiser! Why prolong a recital that every educated man can complete for himself? Here, progress is undeniable.”23
The effects of this progress, Nordau continued, go much further than the comforts they provide: “Progress in knowledge permits all the resources of nature that can be used by man to be more profitably employed, the evils and dangers that threatened him to be more frequently avoided, pleasure to be increased, discomfort lessened, and the average duration of life to be prolonged. The immediate effect of increased knowledge is purely utilitarian and biological. Indirectly it is psychological and moral. It increases selfreliance in man, and gives him a rising sense of his own dignity. It rouses resistance to selfish domination, tutelage, exploitation.”24 Nordau believed that it was precisely this rising sense of dignity and resistance to domination that accounted for the nationalist awakening of Jews (though not Jews alone). This progress, the moral progress that rises alongside scientific and technological progress, is at the heart of Zionism and at the heart of the modern condition itself.
Historian Derek Penslar put it bluntly: “The Zionist movement revered technical expertise as an essential tool for the construction of a Jewish homeland,” and while there were lonely exceptions to this rule, they were surprisingly few.25 Speaking before an “emergency Palestine economic conference” in Washington, D.C., in November 1929, U.S. Supreme Court justice and Zionist leader Louis Brandeis observed that “the Jewish pioneers demonstrated that it was still possible to make Palestine into a land flowing with milk and honey and with much besides. Touched by intelligent effort supplemented by science, it began to bloom almost as a miracle.”26 Earlier, Brandeis had said that American Jewish doctors and scientists had made possible the notion of a Jewish state when they “undertook to make health possible in Palestine. And it really was not a difficult problem. For the lack of health was largely due to malaria. Happily, science enables us to grapple with this disease which had devastated many countries of the world for thousands of years. We know how to rid a land of it.”27 As a matter of principle and practice, Brandeis maintained, Jews would capture the Land of Israel through science and technology.
This view had become, by Brandeis’ time, a commonplace. In 1928, when Irma Levy Lindheim replaced Henrietta Szold as the president of Hadassah, her panegyric to the organization’s founder was that “Henrietta Szold applied the scientific method in organizing. … She reduced the general Zionist idea to a particular part of its program and then proceeded to develop bit by bit the instrument with which to construct this part.”28 As a result, she wrote soon thereafter, “New life and hope are being brought to the East in the standards Hadassah is setting. It is amazing to see the most modern and hygienic methods of handling milk in practice here, in the midst of unspeakable ignorance and filth. The fairy wand of science is lighting up the dark corners of the earth, and the hand of woman is holding up the torch. Hadassah is certainly the Mother of Palestine today. She is tending to her children and healing their ills. She has reduced the infant mortality and blindness from trachoma to a very considerable degree.”29
Arthur Ruppin, the gifted Zionist functionary who headed the World Zionist Organization’s Palestine Bureau (which acquired land for Jewish settlement) and who in time joined the faculty of the Hebrew University as a sociologist, was no less impressed with the advance of Western medicine that came to the Levant with the Jewish immigrants: “The facts that a large hospital attached to the Hebrew University has been built, that a Cancer Research Institute has been established, and that many famous physicians, especially from Berlin and Vienna, have settled in Palestine in recent years, are likely to make Palestine the medical centre for the Jews of the whole world, and also for non-Jewish patients in the Near East.”30
Advanced medicine was only a small part of the scientific modernization wrought by the influx of Jews.31 There were also advances in “sanitation, afforestation and land registration [which] were organized on a modern basis.” Thanks to “a huge influx of Jewish capitalists and experts,” Ruppin wrote, “considerable cultural and economic advance was achieved in the country. … A modern harbour was constructed at Haifa. Jewish initiative led to the establishment of a hydro-electric plant providing the country with power and light. From 1932, while nearly all other countries of the world were suffering from a severe economic crisis, Palestine experienced an unprecedented boom, as a result of the influx of Jewish immigrants and Jewish capital.”32
For Ruppin, as for so many others, the notion of the return of Jews to the Holy Land was inseparable from an account of the advanced science they brought with them and the progress this science would bring. This notion that contemporary science and newly devised technologies could aid Jews in settling Palestine and in laying persuasive claim to the land was put into practice almost at the start of Zionist immigration. As early as 1899, the German botanist and expert in tropical plants Otto Warburg undertook a research junket to Palestine (with stops in Cyprus and Turkey as well) to investigate the suitability of the climate for growing new agricultural products.33 Warburg had met Herzl a year earlier and in time supplied him with botanical background information about Palestine for Altneuland, which Herzl was then writing. Employing his science in the service of a colonial project was not new to Warburg; while teaching at Berlin University he had helped found the Institut für Kolonialwirtschaft (Institute for Colonial Science) and wrote monographs about plantation production of cocoa, coffee, and rubber, core crops of German colonial agriculture.34 Beginning in 1897, Warburg served as publisher and editor of the journal of the German Colonial Agriculture Committee, Der Tropenpflanzer.
After investigating Palestine on his first visit, Warburg was persuaded that botany and agronomy could help Jews develop Palestine in much the same way that these sciences had helped Germany develop her African colonies. In 1903, Warburg received an opportunity to test this persuasion when he was appointed to establish and direct the World Zionist Organization’s Commission for the Exploration of Palestine. Outstanding among his colleagues on the commission were Selig Soskin, a Russian Jew who in Berlin had earned his doctorate in agronomy; Joseph Triedel, a German hydraulic engineer who had earned his degree in Bonn; and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Romanian agronomist who had spent his childhood from age six in the Jewish agricultural colony of Zichron Yaakov and had studied in Montpellier. By April 1904, the four men had come up with a proposal that Warburg and Soskin presented to the WZO Executive Committee, to establish a training farm, an experimental station, and an experimental cooperative settlement in Palestine.35
Although Warburg’s proposals found a mixed reception—there were those who found them out of step with revolutionary collectivism—the schemes reflected an approach that continued to find traction as Jewish settlement of Palestine continued. By 1911, Aaron Aaronsohn had established, with the support of American Jewish philanthropists, a Jewish agricultural experiment station in Atlit.36 Aaronsohn had achieved international fame four years earlier with, as Science reported it, “his discovery of the long-sought wild prototype of wheat.” He raised cash from American Jewish philanthropists and politicians—many of whom (like Julius Rosenwald, Samuel Fels, and Jacob Schiff) also supported and promoted American science and medicine—explaining that his labs would draw experts from around the world and “go far towards introducing American methods in the study of agricultural problems throughout the whole Mediterranean region.”37 Soon other agricultural research centers were established as well, with the aim of enabling Jewish pioneers to bring Western science to the Levant and, conversely, to bring insights gained from the unique research opportunities offered by the Levant to Western science.38
Others, of a more bookish bent, sought to establish universities with the same aim. The idea of a Jewish university in Palestine was first proposed in 1882 by a German mathematics professor (and ordained rabbi) named Zvi Herman Shapira. Shapira wrote in the Hebrew paper Ha-Melits:
We must take care from the very beginning of the establishment of settlements in the land of our forefathers to establish in the center of these settlements a great house of learning, from which wisdom will emanate, wisdom and morality for all the house of Israel. This house shall be divided in my opinion into departments: (1) theology, (2) theoretical sciences, and (3) practical sciences. … The theoretical department will teach natural sciences, geometry, mechanics, astronomy, etc. (about which it was written, “This is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples” [Deut 4:6]). And the practical department will teach chemistry, botany, geology, architecture, and agriculture.39
The first Zionist Congress, meeting in Basel in 1897, discussed Shapira’s idea approvingly; and at the fifth Congress, meeting in Basel in 1901, first steps were taken to make it a reality. Following the meetings, chemistry professor Chaim Weizmann, philosopher Martin Buber, and editor and publisher Berthold Feiwel collaborated on an influential pamphlet called “A Jewish Institute of Higher Education,” advocating the establishment of
a place for Jewish youth prevented from learning a profession in the lands of their birth, and for whom the gates of science are closing in their faces. … Important Jewish scholars, who are deprived because of their backgrounds … would find in it a place in which they could devote themselves entirely to science, and also entirely to their people. … This undertaking, were it to exist, would serve our nation as a proud proof of its living and creating power, and this proof would provide the strength and confidence in still greater national achievement.40
At about the same time, Herzl proposed to Abdul-Hamid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of a Jewish university in Jerusalem that would serve subjects of the empire of all backgrounds and religions. The sultan dismissed the idea as impractical. Still, a fund-raising apparatus was devised by the World Zionist Organization and set into motion; and over the first two decades of the twentieth century, and especially beginning in 1914, land and buildings on Mt. Scopus were purchased as the site of a future university. In 1918, after the First World War had dismantled the Ottoman Empire and established the British as the administrators of Palestine, Weizmann—who was by this time internationally famous as a scientist and, in different circles, as president of the British Zionist Federation—laid the cornerstone of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, declaring that the university would strive to bring blessings not just to Jews but to all nations.
There was touching sincerity in Weizmann’s faith in science as a bridge between cultures. It was his own genius for chemistry that had lifted Weiz-mann, son of a struggling timber merchant who had studied in heder, to world fame and to the ballrooms and boardrooms of Europe. Weizmann had also demonstrated that science can be of immense and immediate practical value. The discovery for which he achieved fame was a process for producing acetone, a substance crucial to the mass-production of the explosives that the United Kingdom employed in unprecedented amounts during the Great War.41 Weizmann understood that science in the modern age was both an indispensable tool and a portal into Western society, and both aspects were of great value to Jews trying to establish a national home in Palestine. It was Hannah Arendt who best described Weizmann’s attitude: “For him science is not the eternal search for truth but the urge ‘to make something practical,’ an instrument for a well-defined task: the building of Palestine most of all, but also the possibility of that financial independence to which he owes so much of his political success, and, last not least, his unsurpassable entrance ticket to the international world.”42
In 1921, Weizmann and Einstein barnstormed the United States, raising money for the new university.43 “They don’t need me for my abilities but because of my name, whose luster they hope will attract quite a bit of success with the rich kinsmen of Dollar-land,” Einstein wrote to his friend, the Nobel laureate chemist (and formerly Jewish) Fritz Haber.44 There was bite to Einstein’s ridicule, but it reflected a truth worth pondering. It was not a coincidence that two great Jewish scientists (joined by the engineer Menachem Mendel Ussishkin and Ben-Zion Mossinsohn, the principal of Gymnasia Herzlia) were canvassing for cash to fund a Jewish university in the new Jewish settlements of Palestine. For obvious reasons, there was sense in scientists advancing the cause of a university. But as one may gather from the thunderous reception they enjoyed as they barnstormed the country (“Vast throngs of New York Jews turned out to greet Professor Chaim Weizmann, discoverer of T.N.T. and president of the World Zionist Organization, and Professor Albert Einstein, famous savant” was the headline of the Jewish Independent on April 8, 1921), something else was afoot as well.45 Weizmann’s and Einstein’s reputations had been earned for their surpassing human achievements, and they were now conferring some of the “luster,” as Einstein put it, of these achievements upon the Zionist project, and perhaps upon Judaism in general. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver had traveled from Cleveland to New York to be on hand for the arrival of the scientists, and the honor of introducing them at a gala event at the Metropolitan Opera House fell to him. “We greet, all of us,” he began, “that man, that intellectual Titan, who has again given evidence through his labors and his achievements of the intellectual leadership of the sons and daughters of Israel throughout the world, Albert Einstein.”46
It was not only Jews who saw that the luster of scientific success added gleam to Zionist aspirations. President Warren Harding was unable to meet the delegation in New York, and sent a letter of regret praising the scientists: “Representing as they do leadership in two different realms, their visit must remind people of the great services that the Jewish race have rendered to humanity.”47 There were also those who received Weizmann and Einstein with ambivalence, finding something unseemly in the blurring of the border between science and Zionism. Chemist and science journalist Edwin Emery Slosson wrote a long essay called “Einstein’s Reception” in the Congregationalist journal The Independent. The piece opened with an appreciative tone: “True science is above all barriers of nation, race or sect. Einstein himself, although he is an ardent nationalist and comes to America as an advocate of Zionism, is nevertheless a sincere internationalist and welcomes all efforts to reestablish the world commonwealth of science.” But Einstein’s own universalist predilections, Slosson continued, hardly justified his yoking his scientific achievements to Zionist aims:
It is unfortunate that Einstein should make his first appearance in America as a Zionist instead of a scientist. He would have done more for Judaism in general and for Zionism in particular if he had come to America, like Bergson, as one of the great thinkers of the modern world whom all America delighted to honor rather than as a leader in a separatist movement of a race. But so long as there are some who hold the Jews as a whole responsible for those of their race who have itching palms or dirty fingernails, we must expect them to show in return a disposition to monopolize their men of genius.48
There was substance to Slosson’s surmise that the appeal of a “Hebrew” University in Palestine was, to some, that it would allow Zionists to claim (if not, in the end, “monopolize”) their men of genius. The motivations for establishing a university were many and complicated; a Hebrew University served as a symbol of many and varied things to many and varied people, and it also promised practical benefits of different sorts to different people.49 These diverse motivations were on display at the official opening of the university, which took place in an amphitheater on Mount Scopus on April 1, 1925. It was a festive affair, attended, as the volume published in commemoration of the affair reports, by “some six or seven thousand persons including many visitors who traveled thousands of miles to be present at the ceremony.”50 There were many speeches, some blandly congratulatory, some expansively poetical. Sir Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner in Palestine, predicted that “in this House of Wisdom, there will be studied and taught the most ancient literature and the most modern science, side by side.”51
Weizmann was the one most people came to hear:
What we are inaugurating to-day is a Hebrew University. Hebrew will be the language of its schools and Colleges. But a University is nothing if it is not universal. It must stand not only for the pursuit of every form of knowledge which the mind of man embraces, but also for a commonwealth of learning freely open to all men and women of every creed and race. Within the precincts of these Schools political strife and division cease and all creeds and races will, I hope, be united in the great common task of searching for truth, in restoring to Palestine the thriving civilization which it once enjoyed, and in giving it a place of its own in the world of thought and learning. Our University would not be true to itself or to Jewish traditions, if it were not a house of study for all peoples and more especially for all the peoples of Palestine. Conceived in this spirit, and animated by these ideals, the University has before it, if our hopes are realized, a future pregnant with possibilities, not only for the Jews of Palestine, but also for the awakening East and for mankind at large.52
Weizmann declared that the new university would
win its spurs and build up its reputation by the distinctive value of its contributions to the common stock of knowledge. We have begun with a group of institutes for advanced research in those branches of science and learning for which Palestine offers particularly congenial soil. … Three such institutes [will be] devoted respectively to chemistry, to microbiology, and to Jewish and Oriental studies, and before these celebrations are concluded, we shall lay the foundation stone of an Institute of Physics and Mathematics to be associated with the name of Einstein.53
In Weizmann’s views alone, one finds a collage of justifications for the university. It will serve humanity. It will serve Palestine. It will promote the flourishing of Jewish culture. It will allow Jews to spark the flourishing of Western culture. It will shine a klieg light on the genius of Jews, and it will allow Jews to forge lines with “the awakening East” and “mankind at large.” This complex of views was widely shared by Jews of varied outlooks. “Whether you are a Zionist, a non-Zionist or even an anti-Zionist,” Louis Gershenfeld wrote in the conclusion to his 1934 The Jew in Science,
you must grant that the rise of the Hebrew University in Zion will eventually more than compensate Jewry for any blunders (if you honestly believe they are blunders) in its attempt in the colonization of Palestine. … It is the Hebrew University in Palestine which must serve as the modern agency, yes the powerhouse and the experimental station and the laboratory for revitalizing the Jewish heritage, for aiding in the solution of many Jewish problems, and to serve as a permanent fixture constantly supplying life and force not only to Jewish activities the world over but to scholarship, culture, science and to humanity at large.54
The Hebrew University was not the only center for scientific and scholarly research, teaching, and learning to arise in those years. In 1912, the cornerstone had been laid in Haifa for the Haifa Technical Institute, or Technicum, which was first conceived as a high-level technical secondary school. By the time the institute opened in 1924, after fundraising difficulties and the war slowed its construction, it was an institute of higher education. In its first year, twenty students enrolled to study civil engineering and architecture. Divisions of mechanical and electrical engineering were soon added, and the student body grew rapidly.55 In 1934, the Daniel Sieff Research Institute was founded in Rehovot, quickly establishing itself as a center for chemistry research. It was here that Chaim Weizmann established his laboratory. Beginning in 1944, to mark Weizmann’s seventieth birthday, the Sieff Institute was gradually expanded and renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science (which was finally formally incorporated in 1949).56 By the mid-1950s, when new universities were hastily being planned for Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beer Sheva, about 6,300 students were studying in institutions of higher learning in Israel; of these, about 4,000 students, or 63%, were studying natural sciences, medicine, agricultural sciences, and engineering.57
Universities, research centers, and experimental stations were the sites of formal science in the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and their importance only grew with time. But most residents of the Yishuv, as Jewish Palestine was known before the establishment of the state of Israel, came to experience science from well outside the laboratory and the university classroom. Farmers on socialist kibbutzim and cooperative moshavim were visited regularly by agricultural advisors who brought with them new agricultural techniques and, often, newly developed seeds for crops and feeds for livestock. Increases in farm production were publicized and celebrated in Palestine with enthusiasm, symbols of the power of Jewish sweat and science. “Where twenty years ago the soil was either marshland or just scratched with primitive plow,” the narrator of the 1935 movie The Land of Promise—the first “talkie” produced in Palestine—intoned with baritone authority, “the modernized machinery and modern methods of the Jews obtain a maximum yield.”58
In farms, towns, and cities, scientific medicine and public health assumed a more intimate place in people’s lives. After the First World War, all new immigrants to Palestine were required to undergo medical examinations in their ports of exit, and then again when they arrived. Medical authorities in the yishuv grew more aggressive in monitoring public health, administering vaccinations, mandating prenatal care, and offering nutritional and other health advice, especially to new immigrants from underdeveloped areas. Schools taught scientific diet and hygiene in an effort to bring to Western standards children raised by “primitive” parents. “We are spreading culture,” was how one nurse explained their mission to a group of young “health scouts” in 1931.59
Science and technology entered everyday life through architecture as well. One of the most celebrated settlements in Palestine was Nahalal, designed in 1921 by architect Richard Kauffmann as a pattern of perfect concentric circles radiating outward: in the center were “public” buildings like the school, auditorium, and warehouses, which were surrounded in turn by homesteads, then greenhouses and cowsheds, and then fields.60 This form of scientific modernism had echoes that resounded at almost every level of planning.61 In 1919, the Scottish biologist-cum-urban planner Patrick Geddes was hired with his son-in-law, architect Sir Frank Mear, to plan the Hebrew University, having impressed a group of prominent British Zionists that included Weizmann.62 Geddes’ appeal owed, in part, to his confidence that his planning reflected the insights gained as a Spencerian biologist, and especially to his theory of “reciprocal accommodation,” for which he had gained fame and a letter of enthusiastic admiration from Charles Darwin himself.63
When Geddes returned to Israel in 1925 for the opening of Hebrew University, he was pressed into service producing a gridwork master plan for Tel Aviv. As Geddes worked to ensure that the city developed in the rational and orderly fashion he advocated, European-trained architects in Tel Aviv began to shape the city, building by building, in Bauhaus, form-follows-function “International Style.” Staatliches Bauhaus was a German school of fine arts, craft, design, and architecture that flourished for 14 years between when it opened in 1919 and when the Nazis squeezed it closed in 1933. During this brief period it moved from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, under the successive leadership of three remarkable architects, Walter Gropius (from 1919 to 1928), Hannes Meyer (1928–30), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–33).
Each of the men, and their colleagues and students, saw themselves as doing nothing less than placing art and architecture on a new foundation appropriate to the age of science and technology.64 “The Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories in which prototypes suitable for mass production and typical of their time are developed with care and constantly improved,” Gropius wrote in 1926. “Only by constant contact with advanced technology, with the diversity of new materials and with new methods of construction, is the creative individual able … to develop from that a new attitude to design, namely: Determined acceptance of the living environment of machines and vehicles.”65 Meyer wrote that “building is not an aesthetic process.” Rather, any new construction is “a product of industry and as such is the work of specialists: economists, statisticians, hygienicists, climatologists” as well as experts in “norms” and heating techniques. The architect is an artist, but he “is becoming a specialist in organization. … Building is only organization: social, technical, economic, mental organization.”66
It was to this school, and this outlook, that the architects who planned Tel Aviv were drawn in growing numbers.67 Four architects who came to have towering influence and towering reputations—Shlomo Bernstein, Shmuel Miestechkin, Arieh Sharon, and Munio Weinraub—traveled to Germany to receive training at Bauhaus and then settled in Tel Aviv.68 They, and a larger number of colleagues who became acquainted with the International Style in their studies in Paris, Brussels, Zurich, or elsewhere, adopted the scientific, modernist approach with an enthusiasm unmatched anywhere else. By the start of the Second World War, Tel Aviv had become the world’s leading exemplar of the pinnacle of modernist, scientifically inflected architecture.69
Science informed not only the efforts to inhabit the city but also the efforts to conquer the wilderness. Geographers and cartographers set out to map and document Palestine, replacing Arabic names with Hebrew names as they did, and, what’s most extraordinary, some of these men became national heroes.70 The introduction to a children’s book, The Pioneers: The Nature Researchers of the Land of Israel, captures this well in its epigraph: “A hundred years ago, our land was unknown. The flowers and the trees that bloomed in its fields and hills, the birds that swooped from branch to branch, the wild animals that wandered on its paths were a sort of mystery. In 1863, a British research expedition arrived in the land of Israel. … [Then] came Jewish researchers—Aaron Aaronsohn who discovered the prototype of wheat, Ephraim ha-Reuveni the researcher of the country’s plants, and Israel Aharoni the zoologist and many others as well.”71
These “Jewish researchers” became celebrities in their own right. Israel Aharoni, for example, was engaged in 1908 by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II to perform zoological surveys of Palestine. Aharoni devoted the next thirty-eight years to cataloging the fauna of the Holy Land, collecting species, anointing them like Adam with Hebrew names, publishing scientific notices, writing Hebrew field guides to Palestine, and tramping into the wild with generations of schoolchildren. When he published his Memoirs of a Hebrew Zoologist near the end of his celebrated career, it quickly went through printing after printing.72
The appeal of figures like Aharoni was complicated and contradictory. The Jewish botanists, zoologists, geographers, and geologists who fanned out over Palestine in the first decades of Jewish settlement were at least two things at once. They were outdoorsmen—men of action, sunswept and ruddy of complexion, with dirty hands and torn work clothes. In this, they embodied the pioneering ideal, with its echoes of German Romantic rejection of sallow intellectualism. But at the same time, they were men of science, bringing to Palestine for the first time the system, the promise, and the progress so easily associated at this time with Western science. And through science, they seemed to offer a justified, if not necessarily just, means to possess the land. “A hundred years ago, our land was unknown,” the children’s book begins. But through the efforts of Jewish scientists, a generation of Jews in Palestine came to believe, it was now discovered.73
At the same time, there were others who resisted the efforts to build a scientific technocracy in Palestine, or at least registered ambivalence. Aharon David Gordon, a charismatic Russian who moved to Palestine at forty-seven in 1904 and began to work fields near the Sea of Galilee, criticized the unquestioning appreciation of science and technology that he saw in so many of his compatriots. It is easy, Gordon believed, to overestimate the value of a scientific outlook. He wrote that “it is in fact the savage, the natural man who possesses sharp, healthy, lively and intact senses. He may achieve with his simple senses what a man of science will never achieve with all of his tools and instruments.”74 Indeed, Gordon wrote elsewhere, “one of the primary causes of the defeats [referring to the first failures in agricultural experiments in Sejera and Kinneret] was that they were bound too tightly to rational methods and measures of the time and the sciences of the time.”75 It is not hard to identify strains of romanticism in Gordon’s views; technology can provide, he wrote, “the flight of an airplane or a zeppelin with all their noise and nuisance, but not the flight of the eagle, nor of a pigeon, nor even of a small bird. A hymn sung out of a phonograph, but not a song sung out of a living human.”76 Still, Gordon is best seen, not as an opponent of using Western science and technology to advance Jewish settlement in Palestine (he himself supported the establishment of the Hebrew University),77 but simply as someone more alert than most to the reverence in which science was held by his compatriots, and more ambivalent about this affection. He distinguished between “a nation that essentially lives with nature” and one “that is entirely unmoored from nature and established fully upon urban relations and the desire to conquer the land mechanically, with technology.”78
Gordon’s ambivalence was shared by some of his contemporaries, especially those who viewed themselves as acolytes of the great “old” man. In a few cases, idealists in early kevutzot and kibbutzim argued deep into the night about whether it was moral to purchase a power thresher or binder. The tensions between romantic and the more technocratic approaches toward developing a Jewish presence in Palestine would remain until after the state was established. But it was not long before even the most romantic of Zionist settlers came to embrace technology and the science that stood behind it, at first with ambivalence and then with enthusiasm. At the end of the late-night meetings, the answer was almost inevitably the same: Yes to the thresher. Yes to synthesized fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide. Yes to scientifically bred grain and fruit and vegetables. It was not long, even on the most militantly ideological kibbutzim, before the romance of back-to-the-earth pioneering was grafted to the romance of laboratory-bred yiddisher-kupfitude, the putative Jewish genius that allowed settlers to wrench from arid Palestine better yields than had been witnessed since Joshua and the spies observed that this was a land of milk and honey.
It was no coincidence that the pioneer-scientist was a hero to kids caught up in the drama of building a Jewish homeland; the fact was that science and technology fit snuggly with the way many Zionists saw themselves and wished to be seen by others in Palestine and throughout the world.
Science and technology helped establish Jewish title to the land, sometimes explicitly (as by archeologists who documented generation after generation of Jewish hold on the land, reaching in an unbroken chain back to Joshua in Jericho), and sometimes through a more complicated chain of reasoning. Science and technology made plain the notion that Jewish settlement of Palestine was, in the end, a Western project flush with Western ideals and committed to advancing those ideals in the East.
In The Land of Promise, Jewish-Polish director Juda Leman brought this notion to life on the screen. Doleful images of local Arabs threshing with stone tools and roughly harnessed beasts, then eating and praying, open the film. After the ancient Jews were exiled from Palestine, the narrator explains, “primitive life returned.” In Jerusalem, “the streets and bazaars of the old city are the same today as they were in the Middle Ages.” A song plays over the opening credits, with lyrics by Natan Alterman, perhaps the greatest poet of Jewish mandatory Palestine: “A humiliated land, a god-forsaken land,/Sand and camels, sea and malaria,/Who knows why / It is so sad and pitiful?” Presently, the film shifts to Jewish settlers, working, employing boring machines to drill for water, laying telegraph and telephone cable, using tractors to clear fields and prepare roads. “With the most modern machinery,” the narrator says, “the Jews are bringing Palestine back to its long-neglected fruitfulness.”79 The film also introduced another poem by Alterman, commissioned by the director. Called “Morning Song,” it contained a paean to the sort of “progress” the film worshipped above all: “We love you, our Homeland … / We will dress you in a gown of concrete and cement.”80
As the film toured Europe and America to great acclaim (winning, for instance, the Jury Prize in the Venice Film Festival), this message did not escape notice. “First, the film presents specimens of stubbornly non-progressive Arabs, living in medieval filth and ignorance, unaware of the potential riches in the arid soil beneath their feet,” wrote a reviewer in the Baltimore Sun: “Then, in vivid contrast, one sees how the returning Jews, with up-to-date engineering methods and means of production, have transformed barren lands into fertile vineyards, olive and orange groves and fields of abundant grain. Next the infant industries are shown. … There are glimpses of such interesting institutions as the national bank operated for public and not private profit, the Hebrew University and its symphony orchestra, … and the lively modern city.”81
Much the same message was the point of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The plan, one of the organizers wrote, was to emphasize “the transformation of the country by modern intelligence, the use of the best modern technical resources, courage, self-reliance, faith and hard work.” The pavilion’s six galleries—the Hall of Agriculture and Resettlement, the Hall of Town Planning and Communications, the Hall of Industry, the Hall of Culture and Education, the Hall of Health, and the Hall of Labor and New Social Forms—highlighted the technological savvy of the settlers. A vast mosquito greeted visitors to the Hall of Health, symbolizing the success of Jewish doctors in eradicating malaria. The handbook to the pavilion encouraged guests to view a large statue standing at the foreground of the Hall of Industry: “This statue … is of Lot’s wife. You remember that she and her husband ran away from Sodom and Gomorrah, which God destroyed and covered with the waters of the Dead Sea. She was told not to look back—but she did, and was changed to a pillar of salt. Today, she symbolizes our determination not to look backwards.”82
It was not just on foreign shores that Jewish Palestine sought to present itself in such forward-gazing terms. Beginning in 1923 Tel Aviv put on fairs and exhibitions at irregular intervals but often.83 The first exhibition was a modest affair, occupying three and a half rooms, showing to their best effect products of local industry and agriculture. Thousands showed up to see. In the following year, 1924, a larger exhibition with more and shinier products was held, and in 1925 came one larger still. International exhibitors joined in, bringing the newest technologies from the West to the Levant. In 1926, there were two fairs, perhaps one too many for a city of only 40,000 residents. The pace slowed, but the ambitions of the fairs grew in 1929, 1932, 1934, and 1936 (these last two held in a huge fairground built on the southern bank of the Yarkon River, then the distant north of the city); after this, local and international political upheavals initiated a hiatus that would last until 1962.84 These last fairs attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, from dozens of countries, swelling for their brief efflorescence the population of Tel Aviv to record after new record.
The Palestine Near East Exhibition and Fair, as it came to be called, was at heart a trade fair, sporting pavilions by local businesses made good and by foreign vendors seeking to sell their products (automobiles, factory automation, farm machines, movie projectors, as well as mundane consumer goods) to local worthies, banks, labor unions, bus cooperatives, and the Tel Aviv municipality. By the forward-looking standards of the New York World’s Fair, the Near East Fair of Tel Aviv was planted firmly in the here-and-now. Yet, in its own way, it was very much about the rapid march forward of the Jewish settlers in Palestine, owing in part to what Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff characterized as the “heart, energy and enormous drive” of Jewish businessmen and laborers, but also resulting from their quick embrace of the newest, smartest, and best scientific techniques and technologies.85
A photo of British high commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel’s visit to the 1924 Levinstein and Shulman Pavilion shows a stately entourage posed before a poster and banner bearing the name of the company’s house brand—Progress chocolates, candies, and halvah. (Businesses took up the cachet of the term “progress” to brand numerous products. Shoppers in Tel Aviv in those early fair years could buy Progress furniture, Progress laundry soap, and Progress carbonated beverages; they could avail themselves of Progress laundry and dying services, Progress custom machining, or Progress driving school; and they could learn English by correspondence through the Progress Institute.)86 In 1925, Levi Rabinovitz, a Tel Aviv electrician, advertised to exhibitors his skill in producing “especially large sign[s] of thousands of electric bulbs for the purpose of moving and changing advertisement.”87
In 1926, fair organizers added under-the-stars cinema, showing local films of heroic settlement activities under way far from the city.88 The Jewish National Fund imported a gramophone, still a scarce technology in Palestine of the day, and played Hebrew, Russian, and Italian speeches of celebrated Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Nahum Sokolov, and Arthur Ruppin, to the wonderment of the large crowds that gathered.89 Jabotinsky repaid the favor when, in opening the 1929 fair, he said: “We applaud the organizers of this fair. … These people were among the first in the Land who believed in the future of the factory, at a time when almost everyone who thought himself ‘serious’ mocked the hope that industry could develop in our land of ‘pure agriculture.’ They wrote ‘Industry’ on their standard.”90
In fact, the fair’s organizers went to some lengths to emphasize both industry and agriculture and, for good measure, Zionist government, with its initiatives in public health, economic development, cooperative settlement, and infrastructure creation. Common to all was an emphasis on scientific organization and the swift adoption of technological innovation. Pride that Jews were bringing new energy and modern ideas and artifacts to Palestine settled over almost everything at the fairs, like the fine sand that quickly accumulated on pavilions baking in the Mediterranean sun. It was evident in the triumphant description in Ha’aretz of the visit of British high commissioner John Chancellor to the 1929 fair: “The Commissioner and his entourage passed through several of the pavilions that they had not visited before the opening ceremonies. From the Main Pavilion, in which the Products of Palestine are concentrated, the Commissioner went to the Municipality [of Tel Aviv] Pavilion, and from there to the great pavilion of the automobiles. This pavilion is organized in a very lovely way, and the automobiles it contains are of the most exalted sort. When the Commissioner visited, the lights [of the cars] were ablaze in front and back.”91 Automobiles joined demonstrations of the newest telephones, household appliances, sewing machines, and other symbols of Jewish Palestine’s adoption of the best of the West.
There was a double claim implicit in this celebration of the embrace of advanced tools and methods. Science (and scientific management and organization) and technology (and scientific industry) made plain the progressive nature of the Zionist undertaking, which endorsed, as Weizmann put it, “the pursuit of every form of knowledge which the mind of man embraces” and sought “a commonwealth of learning freely open to all men and women of every creed and race.” (The great Gottingen mathematician, Edmund Landau, taking part in laying the cornerstone of the Einstein Institute, emphasized that “pure science knows no borders between nations, and who will give that this view will penetrate the hearts of those yet far from it?”)92
At the same time, science and technology were at the heart of arguments that Jewish settlement of the Holy Land would benefit even those ostensibly “primitive” locals who might be displaced by the Zionists, by bringing them culture of universal value and by providing a bridge between these backward societies and the advanced West.93 This was not lost on the locals themselves. A reporter from Al-Jazeera, a Jaffa newspaper, reported that he had visited the 1926 “Jews’ fair in Tel Aviv” and left deflated, having seen how the land’s minority was proudly presenting its progress while the Arab majority failed to press itself forward. Supporting the Jewish fair, he felt, would only make matters worse. “We must not enter under their flag and present our works in their fair,” he advised.94
The notion that Jews could bring modern civilization to the Levant was an old one that found expression in the earliest Zionist writings, as when Moses Hess quoted Ernest Laharanne at length in his own proto-Zionist masterpiece, Rome and Jerusalem: “A great calling is reserved for the Jews: to be a living channel of communication between three continents. You shall be the bearers of civilization to peoples who are still inexperienced and their teachers in the European sciences, to which your race has contributed so much.”95
Bringing European sciences to local inhabitants was assumed to be a benefit that more than justified the hardships that accompanied the arrival of the Zionists. The impact of the wise use of science and technology provided further justification. Zionists pointed to increased agricultural production—what they often called “making the desert bloom”—as a sign of the righteousness of their endeavor. This attitude, which blended a belief that success and increased efficiency are self-justifying with a belief that improvements of the land through labor goes part of the way toward conferring ownership, was rarely analyzed critically, but it had persuasive force (some of which it retains, in Israel, to this day). It was an attitude that was vigorously colonialist, stitching seamlessly a sense of sure intellectual superiority, inerrant entitlement, and selfless virtue. Through superior Western science and technology, Jews would win Palestine, and from this conquest no one would benefit more than the indigenous Palestinians. It is no wonder that this formula had such urgent appeal.
Science also served to link the promise of Zionism with the achievements of generations of Jewish scientists abroad and their famed genius.96 It was no coincidence, nor was it idle generosity, that led the Hebrew University to name its Institute for Physics and Mathematics after Einstein (just as it had been no coincidence, as Einstein himself observed, that he was pressed into service schnorring for Zionism in “Dollar-land”).
One of the great appeals of having an Institute for Physics and Mathematics in the first place, for some Zionists in any case, was the link it suggested between what was being done in the dusty alleys of Jerusalem and what Einstein had achieved in Bern twenty-odd years earlier. Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann, when they stumped for support, were careful to remind their audiences of the German, American, and Russian Jews accumulating Nobel prizes, promising that these numbers—miraculous though they were—would be dwarfed by the achievements of Jewish scientists working under the flag of a Jewish state.
And just as science served to associate Zionists with the achievements of refined and educated Jews in Europe, it served as well to dissociate Zionists from other, more religious Jews they had left behind. This was of great importance to some Zionist theorists. Samuel Joseph Ish-Horowitz wrote that “the Jew must negate his Judaism before he can be redeemed.”97 Judaism, defined as traditional observance, was seen as standing in the way of human redemption. Marcus Ehrenpreis was less charitable still to traditional Judaism:
We have liberated ourselves from the shackles of a sickly, rotten, and dying tradition! A tradition that cannot live and does not want to die; a tradition that manacled our hands, blinded our eyes, and confounded our hearts, that darkened our heavens and banished light and beauty and tenderness and pleasantness from our lives, that turned our youth into old men and our elders into shadows. We have liberated ourselves from the excessive spirituality of the Exile. … We have liberated ourselves from the rabbinic culture, which confined us in a cage of laws and restrictions.98
Such displays of rationalist scorn were commonplace in Zionist circles. A leitmotif of much Zionist prose is a yearning for normalcy, for a culture in which Jews were not merely, or even particularly, Jews, but rather human beings. As the speeches at the founding of the Hebrew University made clear, nothing was viewed as more human, more universal, than the pursuit of science.
There was another side to this as well. For some early Zionists, eugenics (what its founding father, Frances Galton, called “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage”) promised scientifically to improve the stock of Jews.99 Eugenics thrived in Europe at the moment that a good number of Zionist ideologues and activists came of age, and it seemed to some an indispensable tool for those wishing not only to build a homeland for Jews, but to reform Jews as befits a new homeland. Mordechai Bruchov, then the physician of the Herzlia gymnasium, or high school (he later directed the Department of Hygiene of Hadassah Hospital), wrote in 1922 that “the prevailing spirit is the idea that the greatest sin that people can commit to the god of life is to procreate sick children. … In the struggle of nations, in the clandestine ‘cultural’ struggle of one nation with another, the one wins who provides for the improvement of the race, to the benefit of the biological value of the progeny.”100
Scholars disagree about the extent of the purchase eugenic thought had among Jewish intellectuals in Palestine. In some circles, its appeal was strong, and it was dual. Embracing a “scientific” attitude toward population growth and demographics, the Zionists were once again demonstrating their willing ability to use up-to-date science to advance their social and political goals. In a more practical vein, for those so persuaded, eugenics was a science that could not just improve the material conditions of Palestine’s Jews, but also actually improve the Jews themselves.
By embracing science, then, some Zionists deliberately associated the Zionist project with the progressive West and with the great achievements of generations of Jewish scientists abroad, while dissociating it from the primitive, overly Jewish Jews of the shtetl. Along the way, it provided ample justification for the colonization of what most Zionists saw as hopelessly primitive Palestine. Jews would bring the best of the West to the Levant—wealth, culture, comfort—and they would do it using those tools that Jewish hands had wielded so capably in the West: the tools of modern, universal science. In these ways, science served perfectly the ideological agenda of political Zionism in the decades before Israel was established.
But this was not all there was to it. Science (and technology) increasingly met the growing practical needs of Jews in building a national infrastructure in Palestine. When Lord Peel, the chairman of the Palestine Royal Commission, was dispatched from England in 1936 to consider limiting further Jewish immigration to Palestine and found Weizmann tending test tubes in his Rehovot laboratory, he inquired what the scientist was doing. Weizmann replied, “I am creating absorptive capacity.”101 Behind this jest was Weizmann’s dead serious belief that only through science would it be possible to feed, clothe, heal, and protect Jews in Palestine as their numbers grew. This was a matter of surpassing importance to Zionists. Already in 1891, Ahad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsburg, the founder and champion of “cultural zionism”) had warned in an essay called “The Plain Facts about the Land of Israel”: “Those who extol the land have conceded to their opponents that their homeland can not presently receive the multitudes of our people who are wandering from their native land. This applies particularly to merchants and artisans who are seeking an immediate source of livelihood and are incapable of preparing all that is required for agriculture and waiting for the land to give forth its fruit.”102
The desire to overcome this problem was a source of enduring anxiety for Zionist leaders and a continuous spur to deploy those varied sciences—from agronomy, chemistry, mineralogy, geology and biology to Taylorist efficiency science—to increase efficiency and production, and thereby increase Palestine’s carrying capacity for Jews.103 This too was part of the reason that, for Weizmann and many others like him, the ideological and the practical appeal of science were inseparable. The degree to which this was so became obvious in the decade immediately before and the decade immediately after the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The first years of the country’s existence established Israel as a technocracy willing to devote great resources to developing science and technology, its leaders certain that economic, political, and social success depended on science and technology. It was during this time that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) formulated its basic strategy of maintaining technological and scientific superiority at all costs and founded the laboratories, R&D facilities, and factories necessary to the implementation of this strategy. David Ben Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency and in time the powerful first prime minister of Israel, had outlined this strategy in a 1947 memo he sent to the head of the Zionist military organization, the Haganah, setting forth a plan for winning by force and maintaining a state: “Our human materiel in general is … immeasurably better in its moral and intellectual ability than our neighbors. This is our main advantage and at the moment almost our only advantage … We must … [take] advantage of all the achievements of state-of-the-art science and technology for our defensive needs.”104 Ten years later, much in the spirit of Ben Gurion’s memo, and with his enthusiastic support, Israeli physicists were hard at work building an atom bomb.105
It was during these decades that the first huge technological development projects were dreamed up and carried out, and it was during these years that the allure of such huge projects grew so great that no one thought to question them. The Hula Swamp was drained with a passion and brio so heartfelt that, from today’s remove, at which this massive feat of engineering is generally seen as an ecological tragedy, one’s heart breaks to conjure the spiritual devotion with which the project was carried out.106 Plans for desalinization plants, for satellites, for alternative energy, were hatched with like enthusiasm.107 These big engineering projects inspired national pride, and many took them as the fulfillment of an ideal that had accompanied Jewish settlement in Palestine almost since its first days.
Draining swamps, farming deserts, desalinating water, launching satellites—all these helped make Israel in its first years a model for science- and technology-based development for emerging nations. It was during this time that science and technology transfer first became an Israeli diplomatic stock-in-trade, especially in the Third World. In 1953, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett agreed to send agricultural and aeronautics experts to Burma, a relationship that blossomed into diplomatic relations and led, in 1955, to a state visit by Burmese Prime Minister U Nu, the first such visit to Israel by an Asian leader. After Golda Meir assumed the post of foreign minister, which she held from 1956 to 1966, she established scores of technical, scientific, medical, and agricultural assistance programs in Africa, a good number of which paved the way to full-scale diplomatic relations.108 What characterized these diplomatic efforts, one scholar later concluded, was their “almost total focus on technical assistance.”109 Science and technology broke barriers where politics and traditional diplomacy could not.110 It was this that made the 1960 Rehovot conference on science and the new states both possible and, for Israeli leaders, necessary. If the Jewish state was to be, as three generations of Zionist leaders had hoped, a bridge between the West and the East, then its paving stones were hewn from the science and technology at which Jews in Palestine and beyond excelled.
For all these reasons, it was also during this time that, as a U.S. embassy analyst put it in his brief to Washington, Israelis became “indissolubly tied to science and technology as a principal motivating factor in social and economic progress.”111
Almost from the moment the first Zionist settlers found their way to Palestine late in the nineteenth century, science and technology had been revered for many reasons, as we have seen. Jews in Europe and America had enjoyed prodigious success in science, and with this success came the status that all Jews, including Zionists, wished to appropriate. Scientific achievement was also synonymous with progress, enlightenment, and rationality, traits that many Zionists, who were weary of being viewed in Europe as primitives, greatly admired. And just as the great colonial powers—England and France first among them—used science and technology as a way to justify their occupation of far-flung lands, arguing that they were bringing progress and modernity to their backward wards, so too did Zionists, in the cheery confidence that they were saving the Levant, bringing it into the twentieth century rather than appropriating it.112 It was also true, as Abba Eban and the other organizers of the 1960 Rehovot conference realized, that the young state’s accumulating scientific and technological achievements played a role in Israel’s acceptance in the world community as a “Western” country, in defiance of its geography, and allowed it to serve as a conduit for transmitting Western techniques and values to the developing world. No less, the confidence of earlier Zionists like Chaim Weizmann that science and technology would be the key to solving the raft of problems faced by the Jewish state—from feeding and clothing waves of immigrants, to protecting the country from outnumbering neighbors who might turn belligerent, to multiplying the subsistence standard of living they found when they arrived in Palestine to levels that would keep Jews from streaming to the United States and other wealthier destinations—has been handsomely confirmed by a century of remarkable achievements in development and defense, owing to a century of remarkable achievements in science and technology. In all these ways, science and technology played a role from the very start in the way many Zionists understood who they were and what they were doing. Equally, science and technology played a role from the start in who the Zionists became and what they did.
Precisely what forms the “indissoluble” ties linking Israelis over the past fifty years to science and technology have taken is a question of exquisite complexity that scholars have only recently begun to tackle, and as of yet, only partially. Still, for even the casual observer, links of one sort or another are everywhere to be seen. After many years of fretful absence from the list of Nobelists, the past decade has brought Israeli scientists six Nobel Prizes, to great fanfare. They’ve found a place as national heroes alongside entrepreneur-millionaires made rich by high-tech innovation, and their advice has been sought on television and radio about everything from politics to fashion. A popular book describes Israel as a “start-up nation,” a designation one of its authors explains like this:
Israel has the highest density of tech start-ups in the world. More importantly, these start-ups attract more venture capital dollars per person than any country—2.5 times the U.S., 30 times Europe, 80 times India, and 300 times China. Israel has more companies on the tech-oriented NASDAQ than any country outside the U.S., more than all of Europe, Japan, Korea, India, and China combined. But it’s not just about start-ups. Scratch almost any major tech company—Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Motorola, and so on—and you will find that Israeli talent and technology play a major role in keeping these multinational companies on the cutting edge.113
Science-driven high tech is also now at the heart of Israel’s army and accounts for much of whatever day-to-day security many Israelis feel. On September 3, 2012, first place in the Israel Security Prize, the Army’s Oscars, was awarded to the developers of the “Iron Dome,” an automated, ground-to-ground antimissile system developed in just three years, a span so short it is without precedent in peacetime. President Shimon Peres, who presided over the award, thanked the engineers for their genius and creativity, adding: “Thousands of citizens today feel safer because of the Dome. They owe their security to batteries [of missiles] that destroy missiles while they are in the air and prevent many injuries, especially in settlements near Gaza from which many missiles are fired.”114
Science and technology are today a powerful part of the self-image of a great many Israelis, and a source of considerable comfort. Science and technology allow Israelis to sleep at night. Science and technology allow Israelis to feel superior to their hostile neighbors. Science and technology promise a wealthier and healthier future. Science and technology also seem to link Israel with the world—as a universal endeavor—but also with its particular Jewish heritage, as a token of Israel’s perpetuation of putative Jewish scientific genius.
In Israel’s national amphitheater in Rehovot, the following quotation is carved on stone tablets: “I feel sure that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth, creating here, the springs of a new material and spiritual life. And here I speak of science for its own sake, and applied science.”115 The words are Chaim Weizmann’s; the amphitheater was built beside his hilltop garden gravesite. On cool spring days, schoolchildren are herded to see the great man’s final resting place, and the words may be no less true for them than they were for Weizmann himself. As they snap photos of the grave on their iPhones, one can sense just how deeply science and technology have penetrated the material and spiritual lives of these young Israelis, just as it penetrated the lives of their parents and their parents’ parents.