Davis Trietsch

Born in Dresden, Davis Trietsch received his education in Berlin. In 1893, he moved to New York City where for some years he studied Jewish mass immigration to North America. Returning to Germany, he attended the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and became a committed Zionist. Within the movement, he advocated for a “practical Zionism” that would focus its efforts on facilitating concrete Jewish settlement in and around Palestine. Beyond the movement itself, one of Trietsch’s most important interventions in German Jewish cultural life was his cofounding alongside Leo Winz of the Jewish-interest journal Ost und West in 1901. Working against the grain of the assimilationist ideology and purely religious self-definition that dominated German Jewish life, Ost und West propounded an expansive national conception of Jewish culture and identity. It served as a key organ for German Jewish writers sympathetic to Zionism like Martin Buber, Max Nordau, and Alfred Nossig, familiarized German Jewish readers with Jewish tradition and with East European Jewish life, and published much Hebrew and Yiddish literature by East European Jewish authors in German translation. Trietsch worked as a statistician for the German imperial military during World War I, publishing appeals for collaboration between the Zionist Organization and the German Empire. Following the war, he founded the journal Volk und Land to promote his extraterritorial Zionist ideas, which were not confined to the political or historical boundaries of the Land of Israel and focused on settling European Jews in the Middle East more broadly.