Zionism, and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 by Derek J. Penslar

Abstract

830 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE excite the interest of historians and open doors of inquiry into the neglected subject of public works management. Michael C. Robinson Dr. Robinson serves as the historian for the Mississippi River Commission/Lower Mississippi Valley Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He has published widely in the fields of public works and environmental history. Zionism, and Technocracy: The Engineering ofJewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918. By Derek J. Penslar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 210; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00. To redesign a nation after decades of colonial domination is hard enough. To create a nation that has not existed for two millennia except in the hearts and minds of descendants spread over the globe is a daunting challenge indeed. Dreams and ideals have to grapple with intractable realities. Limited occupational directions and prefer­ ences have to diversify in order to include every skill demanded of a modern nation-state. For those Jewish people determined to reclaim their homeland, the major occupational gap was that of farming. Since they were usually prevented from owning land and had emerged from centuries in ghettos, they had no significant peasant tradition. This impediment to nation building was recognized early by Zionist leaders. I had heard of kibbutzim, the type of communal settlements where earnings are shared and all property is held in common. On my first visit to Israel in 1991,1 was given the address ofdistant relatives living in Nahalal in the Galilee and learned of Nahalal’s seventy years of existence as the first moshav, a cooperative smallholders’ settlement of a kind now very widespread in Israel. In these, some buildings and equipment are owned communally, but earnings are not shared. My relatives told me of their decision in the early 1930s while still in Germany to train as farmers for their future work in Palestine. What held my attention immediately on seeing Derek Penslar’s Zionism and Technocracy was the set of circular diagrams on the dust jacket—blueprints for a cooperative settlement. Nahalal too was laid out on a circular pattern, each family farming one pie slice outward from the circle of homes, with communal buildings in the center. Whereas it is widely believed that the inspiration for Jewish settle­ ments came from Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia, in the central section of the book, Penslar points to the powerful German and central European scientific, technocratic planning input, particularly in the period 1897—1909, into what later became the state of Israel. The dust-jacket blueprints were in German. Unfortunately, I could find no explanation for them in the text. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 831 Beginning even before the German domination of the settlement movement, the author identifies a French period, 1870—1909, during which paternalistic French philanthropy, predominantly Rothschild, financed settlement experiments. One motive in this period arose from the realization that Palestine, viewed traditionally as a sacred subject, was coming to be seen by an ever-increasing flow of tourists as a “degenerate object,” eliciting pity rather than veneration. Part 3 of the book, “The Eastern European Period,” points to the powerful stimuli provided by dedicated utopian idealists eager to realize their dreams in Palestine. Their communal, ultrademocratic aims often conflicted with those of the technocratic planners who were using models from Prussia’s settlements in its eastern marshes and from Italy’s “occupational cooperatives” to make its wastelands productive. Surfacing at the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement sought to avoid the ills of industrial society. Parts of the movement were caught up in the idealism that led to communism in the Soviet Union. The Jewish tradition led many to hope that the new country could be a “light unto the nations.” Yet what made the experiment succeed was the technocrats’ ability to combine idealism and pragma­ tism, to use the latest technical agricultural findings in the service of their high goals. On the way they had to learn that women were to be recognized as the equals of men and that Arab practices in the region had much to teach them. At one point, in despair of finding a...