It's a good afternoon. Good news. Hillary turn, everybody.
And welcome to the first meeting of of this term of the Israel Studies seminar.
I'm always happy, as I think I said before, to to host here friends from the university who work on Israel studies.
This is always a delight to see their entire collegiate work on Israeli studies, and it's a delight in this regard.
Also to present to you our speaker today, Anita Cohen,
who is a difficult candidate at the welcome unit for for Israel, for medicine here at the university.
She's currently doctoral fellow at the Centre of Jewish History in New York City and research affiliated.
And we use Taub Centre for Israel Studies also between 2014 and 2015.
Netta was a fellow at the France Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
where she researched the private papers of Heinrich Mendelssohn,
a renowned zoologist and pioneer of environmental thought in Israel and not unrelated,
the title of her talk today is When Climate Takes Command Jewish Zionist Scientific Approaches to Climate in Palestine 1900 to 1948 later.
Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction.
Thank you all for coming. I just want to say a few words before I start this.
The presentation I'm going to give today is part is actually I'm going to describe my my doctoral project and this is my final year.
So I'm kind of approaching the last stages of editing and writing the last bits.
And I'm really, really grateful for any comments, any questions, anything, because I still have the chance to to change things.
And so I'm very happy that you're here for any feedback.
So without further ado, my doctoral project occupies the intersection between modern Jewish history,
climate, environmental history and the history of knowledge and colonial history.
It focuses on Jewish physicians, architects and botanists as they examined the potential ramification of climate
on the success of the Zionist project in Palestine between the years 1919 48.
In my dissertation, I explore the political, social, cultural and cultural ideas and conventions which constructed an informed,
professional and popular knowledge concerning climate.
My dissertation is divided into five chapters.
The introduction chapter generally presents modern Western scientific notions and cultural beliefs which were associated with warm climates.
Starting from the mid-18th century until the mid-20th century.
It is important to understand that the recording of weather observations, as well as notions on the implications of climate on plants,
animals and humans have existed since the times of the Babylonians and the Greeks.
Yet during the second half of the 18th century, they received a renewed attention.
During this time, the increasing importance assigned to the study of climate during this period was related to the growing
transportation of useful medical plants and profitable spices between the METROPOLES and their colonial holdings.
The transfer of plants and speed in spices led European trade companies to hire
experts to study the environmental and climatic conditions required to improve crops.
These experts were usually medical botanist, that is,
physicians who served as consultant for trading companies and were responsible for both
bodily and botanical affairs as a result of their double mission and double expertise.
Descriptions of new environments written by medical botanists tended to emphasise the role of climate not only in relation to flora,
but also in respect to the physical attributes and moral behaviour of indigenous people.
Historians name disease has argued that it was during this time that the discourse on societies,
civility and civilisation, as found in the travel literature, collapsed into the discourse of nature.
According to her, and I quote Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as Flora during the 19th century.
Information. On climate was made even further widespread and it became prevalent as never before.
The proliferation of climate research during this period was mostly a result of imperial technological communication,
communication and infrastructural developments, such as the invention of the telegraph and the railway.
These developments increased the mobility of data produced on climate to a global scale.
According to historian Deborah Cohen and Martin Mahoney, during this time, climate research in empires was understood as the ultimate global science,
both in its subject matters and its practices,
as it reflected the diversity of empires of all types of climate as a sign for both heterogeneity and unity.
In the first chapter of my dissertation, I focus on the evolution of climate research in Palestine as well as in other the two nations.
Just a minute. Let's make this quiet.
So in the first chapter of my dissertation, I focus on the evolution of climate research in Palestine as well as in other
destinations deliberated for Jewish colonisation at the beginning of the 20th century.
This chapter addresses the overall characteristics of Zionist climate research and examines the arguably colonial features of this research field.
Furthermore,
it scrutinises the ways in which colonial knowledge and climate was transported to Palestine and internalised by the Zionist organisation.
While focusing on individual colonial experts who laid the foundation for climate research in this country,
experts who were recruited for Zionist research expeditions such as German geologist Max Blankenhorn,
British Boer War veteran Major Alfred Hear Hill, Gibbon, Gibbons and Swiss Orientalist Alfred Kaiser were usually not Jewish.
Moreover, according to historian Deborah Neal,
the transfer of knowledge and expertise between different colonial enterprises
on a global scale was in fact the norm in the period between 1871 and 1914.
The few Jewish experts who did profess natural sciences were usually not an
exception to this international and imperial network of experts and knowledge.
They, too, had often required their acquired their professional experience in other colonial enterprises before serving the Zionist organisation.
And in some cases they retained other colonial affiliations even after becoming Zionists.
Research expeditions and scientific excursion were common colonial means to gather practical information on natural and human condition in desirable,
desirable and unfamiliar locations. Therefore, in this chapter,
I also examined the ways in which different representations of knowledge and
climate mirrored and in some tore and sometimes even constructed political,
cultural and social beliefs in various geographies.
One example for the use of climate research as a political apparatus can be seen in the work
of the Zionist research expedition to was an issue in the British East Africa protectorate,
also known as the Uganda expedition. This location was offered to the Zionist organisation by the British Empire and was investigated
by a research commission in 1905 to determine its suitability for Jewish colonisation.
The three reports produced by three different Commission members emphasised the importance of the
country's natural conditions and rendered a distinct account of its climatic conditions at the same time.
The general content and display of data in each report,
as well as each member's interpretation and the final conclusions regarding the climatic conditions,
were utterly different and in some respect even contradicting.
In this context, I analysed the literary and scientific style of each report and demonstrate the ways in which climate was
utilised to promote political views and cultural perceptions under the disguise of a scientific discourse.
A different aspect of contemporary climate investigation,
including the scientific discourse of climate change in which Palestine played a central role.
The main controversy in this context was related to the question of whether the country had become warmer and drier since biblical times.
And, if so, what were the reasons for this transformation?
Climate change discourse at this period reflected the central city of the Old Testament in Judeo-Christian culture and science.
In other words, the discrepancy between the imagined biblical land of the land of milk and honey and
its disappointing present reality became a central subject for scientific examination.
One of the most frequently used colonial master methods for solving this so-called
problem and for improving local climate during this period was afforestation.
This is also the theme of the second chapter of my dissertation.
Improving climate through afforestation was related to the Edenic image of the country in
Judeo-Christian tradition that was that should have been restored according to those who thought so.
The Jewish National Fund even described the planting of trees as promoting the redemption of the land.
And as some of you know, the term collateral, it's reminding us yet again how the environment in Palestine was charged with religious terms.
The first to suggest afforestation in Palestine was in 1894.
It was Jacob Onyango, director of Mcvay's Agricultural School.
According to him, afforestation would solve two main issues the high price of timber in the country as well as local climate.
The improvement of climate would also have implications on the general productive productiveness of the country and in particular on its agriculture.
In an article describing the work of the Jewish National Fund from April 1921,
the importance of the forest was explained and I quote Forests take an important role in human history since the beginning of the civilisation.
A country that has many forests is blessed and can become an attractive settlement.
This is because forests have a big impact on the three principal conditions needed for settlement, soil, air and water.
End of quote. Yet big scale afforestation projects during the first half of the 20th century were eventually a result of British initiative.
The British were occupied with forest eating from the moment they lay foot on the ground in Palestine,
their resources and knowledge which accumulated and developed throughout the centuries,
and Kew Gardens, as well as in British colonies located in many climatic zones,
boosted Zionist afforestation and enabled easy transportation of seeds from many different parts of the world to Palestine.
The use of many seeds from around the world was also possible because because of the diverse climate,
sorry, because of the diverse climate region, regions and Palestine itself.
Climatological accounts in this country frequently presented it as a crossroad of diverse climate regions,
which were often compared to geographical regions around the world.
Following a scientific account provided to him by botanists Otto Warburg, Zionist leader Theodor Herzl wrote in his utopian novel No Land in 1901.
And I quote Where in the world will you find a small country like ours with a heart,
a temperate and a cool zone so close together in the Jordan Valley you have tropical landscape by the coast,
the soft beauty of the Riviera and not far away, the snows of Lebanon and Lebanon, Helmand all lying within a few hours of each other by rail.
Thus, another important consideration for planting trees had to be their suitability and adaptation to local climate.
Yet both British and Zionist were not familiar with the original forest cover of the country in the past.
They did not know why the environment, with its arid and semi-arid climate became the way it was,
and they did not know how to go about returning, so to say, the environment to the way they thought it should.
It was like in the past what they didn't know was based on knowledge that the British had gathered in India and in the Caribbean and Caribbeans,
which linked degeneration with deforestation, a problem that was solved in these places by preserving forests as this method was,
was not applicable in Palestine because there were no.
Not so many forests. British and Zionists plant.
Hid in Palestine trees that never existed in the country before.
Thus radically intervening in local natural processes.
The third chapter of my dissertation focuses on the role of climate in medicine.
As I mentioned before, starting from the second half of the 18th century,
climate was increasingly utilised to explain human, physical and moral attributes.
Moreover, the abstract and amorphous concept of climate enabled anchoring,
prejudiced belief and external elements with the support of contemporary scientific explanations.
Lethargy, for example, was believed to be a result of prolonged exposure to the sun and extent.
Excessive heat was explained as a result for the emergence of despotic regimes.
The German anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumen Bach, who was commonly referred to who is commonly referred to as the father of racial theory,
agreed that environmental factors and especially climate, determined the physical form and complexion of people.
Yet if climate had such a great impact on people,
then they were supposed to be able to alter their characteristics according to different climates in different places.
Thus, one of the major questions during the first half of the 19th century was whether European could adapt to life in the colonies.
And if so, but by what means? In other words, the medical aspects of acclimatisation influenced colonial politics and settlement schemes.
Turning Acclimatisation, as Michael Osborne writes and I quote into the paradigmatic colonial science notions on climate,
also received various interpretations in relation to the Jewish people, Europe's internal other.
However, this paradigm was soon also taken up by Jewish intellectuals themselves.
Influenced by German romanticism, some intellectuals wish to stress the organic link between the Jews and the natural conditions in Palestine.
According to them, the Jewish people was created in Palestine and thus its return to the biblical homeland would match its physical and moral nature.
This rhetoric can be found in the writing of various Zionist thinkers, and it is demonstrated, for example,
in the work of Russian Jewish Zionist leader Vladimir Bohutinsky in his essay Zionism in the Land of Israel, published in 1905.
Should Putin's key aim to explain why Palestine was the only logical destination for Jewish colonisation, he wrote,
and I quote The slow and constant pressure of the natural environment, the landscape, the climate and the flora.
The flora and the winds of the homeland is what determines the structure of the nation's soul.
When conceptualising monetarism, we breathed the wind, the the winds of this land.
When we fought for our independence and biblical time,
we were surrounded by its air which nurtured our bodies, the nation of Israel and the land of Israel.
Our won. A different climate, a different flora and other mountains were necessarily distort the body and the soul,
which were created by the climate, the phone and the mountains of the land of Israel.
Judea. Six words stressed the potential regenerative impact of climate nonetheless following the mass immigration of Jews to Palestine.
This positive approach turned into a negative one, and the unknown effects of climate on Jewish European bodies generated fear of its potential.
Dangerous implications. Zionist medical interests in Palestine can be divided into two main medical branches.
The first is tropical medicine and the other is medical climatology.
These two branches also reflected the juncture between two European medical traditions emerging in this country around the same time,
albeit as a result of separate yet inter interwoven historical developments.
Tropical medicine concerns health issues that were associated with tropical and subtropical regions and was usually based on Manzoni in medicine,
typically defined as the research of vector borne parasitic diseases.
Starting from the 1920s, the British government implemented tropical medicine in Palestine,
mainly in relation to malaria, to the swift acceptance of the Zionist medical institutions and experts.
Following the work of historian Joseph Hodge. I argue in this chapter that the analysis of medical discourses, their creation, dissemination.
Institutional institutionalisation is important to the understand,
to understanding of how British as well as Zionists viewed themselves and how
they perceive the people and the land that they encountered in Palestine.
Specifically, tropical medicine was instrumental in the creation of a white and western identity,
as well as in defining what was not white and not western.
Another medical branch which addressed the issue of climate was medical climatology, as I said before this,
which concerned the physical and mental effects of climatic and weather factors on human beings and was mainly important to Palestine,
along with German Jewish settlers, among many of whom were physicians during the 1920s and 1930s.
In Palestine, this medical approach was more prevalent among practitioners than among official institutions,
and it often focussed on raising public awareness of the intellectual means for the preservation of health in Palestine.
Moreover, these physicians were preoccupied with the question of Jewish acclimatisation in warm
climates and with the feasibility of Jewish settlement in Palestine in particular.
German Jewish physician Theodora's.
Let's see, for example, explained, and I quote We know that the body can adjust to extreme climatic situations for short periods of times.
But the question of whether the body can also adjust to and transform itself accordingly during long period is unknown.
The central concern of physicians regarding the central concern of physicians
regarded how they could assist Jewish settlers in adjusting to the summer heat.
After all, Acclimatisation was not merely a theoretical issue.
Thus, the risk that the research of this physicians examined I'm sorry physicians during in their research,
physicians conducted experiments that were designed to examine whether and how climate would affect the physical and chemical nature of the body.
Eventually, most physicians failed to show a significant physiological change in Jewish settlers bodies after arriving in Palestine.
One physical element that was routinely examined in this context was blood pressure and its potential drop in warm climates.
As physicians themselves admitted, low blood pressure was traditionally linked with the laziness and indulgence of inhabitants of hot countries.
However, a decrease in blood pressure among Jewish settlers in Palestine could not be shown in the experimental results.
Another major concern for physicians in Palestine was they had seen this climatic phenomenon brought dry,
hot and sandy desert winds, which were believed to cause various physical and mental pathologies lasting.
Who I mentioned before, wrote more than 20 pages describing this phenomenon and its implications in his book,
Climatology and Pathology in Palestine, published in 1935, where he described the mental effects of scenes as including,
and I quote, nervous and mental exhaustion, fatigue, irritation and nervousness, uncertainty, insecurity of memory,
loss of eagerness, loss of energy, loss of capability to concentrate, loss of courage, loss of enthusiasm for work and life.
This brings me to the fourth chapter of my dissertation that addresses the various practical solutions which
were suggested by expert experts to reduce the influence of climate on Jewish European bodies in everyday life.
These solutions were routinely discussed through two central spheres, the domestic sphere and the sphere of labour.
Since Zionism tried to break away from conceptions of traditional Jewish life, understood as depending on charity for its survival,
productive work in general became an extremely important value in the society.
Jewish physician Jacob Zaida, for example,
reported that the most productive temperature for physical work was 16 degrees Celsius and for mental work four degrees Celsius.
Yet accepting these conclusions would imply that the climate in Palestine was not suitable for physical work for more than six months of the year.
And. Moreover, deeming it categorically unsuitable for mental work.
Zaina thus had to settle on the results of another experiment, arguing that the best temperature for such activities was not about 24 degrees Celsius.
Similarly, another physician argued that, according to a different research.
July and August were the hardest months for labourers in the Jordan Valley.
He added that this was three times truer for women, even though, as he claimed, and I quote, their work was much less demanding.
In further treatment of the chop of the topic, Prof.
Strauss, director of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, recommended a unique Russian shirt that unfortunately I can't show you.
That picture is actually kind of interesting. He recommended a unique Russian shirt that was supposed to be worn on the outside of the trousers.
Strauss emphasised that it should also be worn without a belt to permit as much ventilation as possible.
In addition to what he called horizontal ventilation as enabled by the neck, armpit and stomach area, there should be also vertical ventilation.
Since this shirt was designed to have small holes in the back.
Concerns mirroring those of Zionist labourers were addressed to Jewish housewives, for instance,
a cookbook from 1937 and titled How to Cook and Palestine, published by the Women's International Zionist Organisation.
The veto suggested replacing the so-called European fat rich foods with local fruits and vegetables.
As the author Erna mayor explained and I quote, Cooking suitable to the climate must place vegetables, salads and fruits in the foreground.
Physician Jacob Zada, who I mentioned before,
likewise suggested substituting the nutritional values of fats with tropical and subtropical vegetables and fruits such as the avocado and Grijalva,
which he described as good sources for carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.
Furthermore, the the amount of water one needs to drink and the amount of sweat they produce was measured,
measured and discussed in hygiene guidebooks for the public.
Zida wrote that there was no reason to limit the amount of water for a healthy child or adult during the summer saying these.
This is because the body is able to dispose of extra water but cannot adjust to the lack of water for very long.
However, pre-empting any misunderstanding,
he specified the amount of water exactly one and a half litres as a minimum a person should drink during the summer stays in Palestine.
Meteorologists Fruit of Rudolf Figure, moreover,
suggests that the addition of cooking salt into water on hot days since excessive sweat could leach vital bodily minerals such as sodium,
calcium and potassium. In the fifth chapter of my dissertation, I address climate adjusted architectural and urban planning.
Most planners and architects who arrived in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century acquired
their professional training in Europe and brought with them spatial aesthetic and technological concept,
which did not always suit the natural conditions of the country.
Thus, alongside the ideological, aesthetic and engineering related concerns,
architects also had to acknowledge and comply with the physical attributes of the unfamiliar landscape of the country,
and they were especially concerned with the issue of climate.
Starting from the 1930s, they devoted considerable thought to questions of hygiene and health in planning residential buildings,
healthy houses, healthy streets and healthy cities were commonly used terms in architectural professional publications.
In 1946, an editorial column published in the Journal for of the Association of Engineers and Architects called upon town planners,
architects and industrial engineers to improve the climatic conditions of cities and buildings.
Since, and I quote, it is these conditions that will determine our future in this country.
The main architectural focus on climate was by positioning living spaces within the flat in accordance with the prevailing winds and sun directions.
The discussion of wind direction was most central to the architectural discourse and at.
Even led to different flat orientations in places with different topographical and climatic characteristics.
Nevertheless, in this chapter, I argue that the theory and practice of Jewish architects and planners in Palestine was much more often based on
European metropolitan and colonial knowledge than it was based on the study of local material and building techniques.
To conclude, the Zionist approach towards the climatic and environmental conditions in Palestine was not always consistent.
On the one hand, the aim to establish a settler nation was based on the belief in an utter quietness belonging to the land.
This approach was more common during the turn of the century.
It was influenced by romantic ideas and reflected Jewish national ideology, which contained a long tradition of reverence towards the land of Israel.
On the other hand, following the actual encounter of Jewish settlers with the natural realities in Palestine,
and especially especially after the establishment of the British mandate and the emergence of the Arab Jewish conflict in this country,
discussions on climate gradually lost their romantic attributes and became
increasingly associated with colonial scientific ideas on the perceived degeneration.
The dangerous implications of non temperate climates on European bodies and minds.
In my dissertation I argued that Zionist scientific preoccupation occupation
with climate was not simply because Palestine was particularly cold or hot.
Rather, it was deeply grounded in a wide colonial discourse of anxiety about radically different climates in the colonies.
And it relied upon Western knowledge and expertise to confront and ameliorate the so-called enervating influence of climate on European bodies.
By adopting the colonial scientific paradigm concerning warm climates,
Jews in Palestine became concerned with the alleged degenerating effects of the new environment
and even began perceiving themselves as occidental people arriving in an oriental geography.
Thus, through the prism of climate investigation,
I explore not only the ways in which experts transported scientific knowledge from Europe and its colonies to Palestine,
but also how climate both as an abstract concept and a concrete condition shaped Jewish, national, racial, cultural and spatial identity in Palestine.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much.