Draft:Davis Trietsch

Davis Trietsch
Trietsch in Palestine, 1912
Born	(1870-01-04)4 January 1870 Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony
Died	31 January 1935(1935-01-31) (aged 65) Ramatayim, Mandatory Palestine
Resting place	Ramot HaShavim
Occupations	Writer, publisher, Zionist
Spouse	Emma (Esther) Thomaschewsky
Children	4

Davis Trietsch (4 January 1870 – 31 January 1935) was a German Zionist writer and publisher. A proponent of practical Zionism (rather than political), he argued from the 1890s for immediate Jewish colonization wherever it was possible, including in Cyprus and at El-Arish.

Trietsch co-founded the journal Ost und West and the Jüdischer Verlag publishing house, edited the periodical Palästina, and helped found an information bureau in Jaffa that coordinated Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine. He sat on the Zionist General Council from 1907 to 1911 and again from 1920 to 1921. He wrote extensively on the economics of Jewish settlement, promoting industry, garden cities and poultry farming as its basis.

He settled in Mandatory Palestine in 1932 and helped establish the moshav of Ramot HaShavim the following year. He was largely forgotten after his death, and became the subject of renewed scholarly attention with a 2022 monograph by Lisa Sophie Gebhard.

Early life

Trietsch was born in Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, on 4 January 1870. His father, Ludwig Trietsch (1835–1886), served the Jewish community as a shochet and cantor, and his mother was Rosalie Nickelsburg (1843–1879).

The family was poor. His mother died when he was a child, and he and his siblings were brought up in an orphanage. He attended school in Berlin between 1880 and 1886 and afterwards served an apprenticeship.

He never attended university and held no academic degree. This set him apart from most officials of the Zionist Organization.

New York and the emigration question

In 1893 Trietsch emigrated to New York, where he remained until 1899. There he encountered the poverty of recently arrived Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the question of Jewish emigration became the subject of his work.

In 1895, before Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism, he proposed Jewish colonization of British-ruled Cyprus. He joined the Zionist movement in about 1896 and attended the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 as a delegate from the United States.

Cyprus and "Greater Palestine"

Trietsch returned to Berlin in 1899 and published a pamphlet, The Future of Cyprus, linking the island's future to British interests and to the Zionist movement.

At the Third Zionist Congress in Basel that August he objected to the movement's habit of speaking of "Palestine and Syria", arguing that the neighbouring parts of Syria could not realistically be obtained. He said that the specific phrase showed that Zionists realized that they needed a greater Palestine but had looked for it in the wrong direction. Lands divide and seas connect, he told the delegates, and they already knew that he had Cyprus in mind.

The hall interrupted him repeatedly and called on him to stop. Herzl, who was in the chair, twice defended his right to be heard, then put it to the delegates whether he should be allowed to continue. The majority voted that he should not. He continued nonetheless.

He assembled a support committee in Germany that included Otto Warburg and Willy Bambus and negotiated with the High Commissioner of Cyprus and the British Colonial Office. In early 1900 he recruited a group of Jews from Borysław in Galicia, secured employment commitments for them in Cyprus and presented the governor with a development plan that he said could support a thousand families.

The venture failed. The work proved limited and conditions poor and all twelve families returned home. Herzl took an interest in the Cyprus idea in 1902, although the Uganda Scheme gained more support.

Trietsch advocated the colonization of a "Greater Palestine" that would take in Cyprus and El-Arish alongside Palestine itself, a programme he described as "Zionist maximalism". He argued that the local population on Cyprus would economically benefit from an influx of Jews.

He regarded Herzl's negotiations over El-Arish in 1902 and 1903 as an adoption of his own programme without him, and organized a separate expedition to El-Arish in 1906. From 1903 to 1906 he ran the Jüdische Orient-Kolonisations-Gesellschaft, a colonization company that met with little enthusiasm within the organized Zionist movement.

Zionist Organization

Trietsch belonged to the Zionist Organization for decades but served on none of its specialist bodies. At the Eighth Zionist Congress at The Hague in 1907 he was nominated for one of the Palestine seats on the Greater Actions Committee. A Poale Zion delegate from Jaffa protested against his candidacy. Trietsch replied that protests against such nominations were unprecedented, declined to discuss the incident that had prompted it, and told the congress that he would continue his work whether or not it elected him. He was elected by 90 votes to 69, the only one of four nominees whose election was put to a counted vote rather than a show of hands. He served on the Zionist General Council from 1907 to 1911 and again from 1920 to 1921.

Publishing

Trietsch's publishing work was conducted almost entirely in German and from Berlin. Trietsch lived off his writing. Before his own books sold, he earned his living writing publicity material for large commercial firms.

In 1901 he and Leo Winz founded Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Modernes Judentum ("East and West: Illustrated Monthly for Modern Jewry"). Trietsch was credited as co-editor. The magazine addressed itself to a modern, German-reading Jewish public and it ran in Berlin until 1923.

The following year he co-founded a second journal, Palästina. Zeitschrift für den Aufbau Palästinas ("Palestine: Journal for the Building Up of Palestine"), which he also co-edited. It was the first German-Jewish periodical focused on Palestine and Zionist activity there. It continued to appear until 1938.

After the First World War he founded and edited a third, Volk und Land. Jüdische Wochenschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft und Palästina-Arbeit ("People and Land: Jewish Weekly for Politics, Economics and Palestine Work"), which appeared in Berlin from 1919. He used it to promote his own settlement proposals.

Trietsch was also among the founders of three publishing houses. In 1902 he helped found the Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin with Chaim Weizmann and others, and he was its first managing director. The house published writers including Else Lasker-Schüler and Martin Buber, and it continued until 1938. He ran the Orient-Verlag from 1910 to 1932 and he co-founded the Welt-Verlag, which operated from 1918 to 1933.

His own books were descriptive handbooks and they were the most widely read of his writings. The Palästina-Handbuch (1907) went through five editions and the Levante-Handbuch (1909) through three. Written in German, these regional studies found an audience in the German-speaking world well beyond Jewish readers.

Information bureaus

In 1906 Trietsch was a leading figure in the founding of the Allgemeines Informationsbureau für Palästina in Jaffa, which for the first time coordinated Jewish immigration to the country systematically. It was a separate body from the Palestine Office established by Arthur Ruppin in 1908.

Twenty years later he opened a second bureau, this time in the United States. He lived in New York from 1926 to 1927 while he set it up. He wanted American methods and machinery used in Palestine, and the New York office was part of that.

First World War

During the First World War Trietsch worked in the statistical department of the German army and from 1915 published officially sponsored pamphlets arguing for collaboration between Zionism and Germany after the war.

In one of them, Die Juden der Türkei (1915), he argued that about 12.9 million of the world's 14.3 million Jews spoke German or Yiddish as a mother tongue, that in language and commercial orientation Eastern European Jewry was "an asset to German influence", and that Jews were "a Near Eastern element in Germany and a German element in Turkey", so that there were grounds for discussing a German protectorate over Jewry as a whole.

At the request of the British government, Arnold J. Toynbee set out to answer him in Turkey: A Past and a Future (1917), quoting the pamphlet at length and arguing that Zionism had "already challenged and defeated the policy which Dr. Trietsch represents".

Settlement thought

Trietsch believed that industry and trade would pay for Jewish settlement in Palestine and that farming alone would not suffice.

In 1903 he brought the garden city idea into Zionist debate. His version of it was a small house with a fruit and vegetable garden large enough to feed the family that lived there.

Trietsch had seen American methods when living there and wanted them used in settlement in Palestine. He argued for machinery and for modern farming techniques. Poultry and egg production were his model enterprise. He also put money into a machine for planting crops called the Fortuna.

Gebhard writes that he saw Palestine not just as a place to settle but as a "laboratory of future possibilities". It would be a place that could take the good parts of modern life and leave out the bad ones.

He also argued that Palestine could support a far larger population than was generally believed.

Palestine, death and reception

Trietsch settled in Tel Aviv in 1932.

In 1933 he took part in founding Ramot HaShavim, a moshav north of Tel Aviv established by middle-class German immigrants. Poultry farming on his model was the main enterprise and modern American equipment was introduced early.

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 he again pressed for Jewish immigration to Cyprus, and continued to do so until his death.

He died on 31 January 1935 at Ramatayim, having declined to be treated at his Tel Aviv flat because he wished to be attended by his friend the physician Dr Steinitz. He was buried at Ramot HaShavim. He had married Emma (Esther) Thomaschewsky in 1906. They had four children, among them Emanuel Trietsch (1913–2001), who became a water engineer.

Trietsch was largely forgotten after his death. He is absent from Gerhard Holdheim's Zionistisches Handbuch of 1923, is passed over by Arthur Ruppin and is mentioned only in passing in Richard Lichtheim's history of German Zionism of 1954.

In her 2022 study, the first devoted to him, Gebhard describes him as an important forerunner whose practical results nonetheless remained limited. She finds that he lacked entrepreneurial talent and a feel for strategic alliances and that several of his partners considered him unreliable.

He struggled with considerable financial difficulties at Ramot HaShavim in his final years. The Jewish satirical paper Schlemiel had made a similar remark just after the First World War. His ideas sometimes had a success, it wrote. He himself never did.

Selected works

• Palästina-Handbuch. Berlin: Orient-Verlag, 1907 (many later editions).
• Bilder aus Palästina. Berlin, 1911.
• Die Juden der Türkei. Leipzig: Veit, 1915.
• Jüdische Emigration und Kolonisation. Berlin: Süsserott, 1917.
• Atlas der jüdischen Welt. Berlin, 1926.
• Die Fassungskraft Palästinas. Berlin: Orient-Verlag, 1926.

External links

• Media related to Davis Trietsch at Wikimedia Commons

Category:1870 births Category:1935 deaths Category:Writers from Dresden Category:German Zionists Category:German publishers (people) Category:Jewish German writers Category:German emigrants to Mandatory Palestine Category:19th-century German Jews Category:20th-century German Jews