Palestine and World Jewry

Arthur Ruppin was a pioneer in the sociological study of contemporary Jewry and the lead figure in purchasing land for Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early twentieth century. Born in Rawicz, part of the Prussian Empire (now in Poland), he trained as a lawyer but from an early stage devoted his life to the Zionist movement. From 1902 to 1907, Ruppin directed the Bureau for Jewish Statistics and Demography, based in Berlin. In 1908, he moved to Jaffa in Ottoman Palestine to open and head the Palestine office of the World Zionist Organization. In this role, he was instrumental in the development of new, collective forms of Jewish agricultural settlement (kibbutzim, small collective agricultural settlements, and moshavim, which are similar to kibbutzim, but not collectively owned). Ruppin cofounded Brit Shalom, a peace movement advocating for a binational state in the Land of Israel; he left the movement following the Hebron massacre in 1929. In 1926, he founded the department of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Despite their frequently neoromantic and racial categories of analysis, his sociological and demographic surveys of world Jewry remain invaluable.