Franz Oppenheimer

Born near Berlin to a rabbinical family, Franz Oppenheimer trained as a physician before beginning his career as a professor of sociology and political economy. After earning his medical degree in 1885, Oppenheimer practiced medicine for ten years, then returned to school, earning his doctorate from the University of Kiel in 1908 with a dissertation on the eighteenth-century political economist David Ricardo. The Cooperative in Merchavia, a cooperative farm designed by Oppenheimer, was established in Ottoman Palestine by Jewish immigrants. Along with Max Bodenheimer, Adolf Friedman, and Leo Motzkin, Oppenheimer founded the German Committee for the Freeing of Russian Jews in 1914. His scholarship on the sociology of the state influenced several schools of political thought, in particular those underlying many kibbutzim. In 1938, Oppenheimer fled Nazi Germany and settled in the United States, where, in 1941, he helped establish the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. He died in Los Angeles.