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, a programme he called "Zionist maximalism". He opposed Herzl's insistence that a charter from the Ottoman government must precede any colonizing or even preparatory work, and he held that industry rather than agriculture should carry the settlement. Both positions met strong resistance in the movement.
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.
During the First World War he published pamphlets arguing that Jews and Germans formed a community of language and interest and that Germany should take up the Zionist cause. The British government commissioned Arnold J. Toynbee to answer him.
He settled in Mandatory Palestine in 1932 and helped establish 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 of modest means. His mother died when he was a child and he and his brothers were then sent to a Jewish charitable children's home. 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 Trietsch emigrated to New York in 1893, where he remained until 1899.
There he was exposed to the poverty of recently arrived Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had fled economic hardship and antisemitic pogroms, most of them from the Russian Empire. The Jewish emigration question became the subject of his work. He later described it as the greatest of all the Jewish problems of the day.
In 1895, still before Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism, he proposed Jewish colonization of British-ruled Cyprus.
He joined the Zionist movement in about 1896 and took part in the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, having come from the United States, and he helped build the Federation of American Zionists.
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.
In Germany he assembled a support committee that included Otto Warburg and Willy Bambus and opened negotiations with the High Commissioner of Cyprus and the British Colonial Office. He also took the scheme to the movement's constituencies. In November 1899 he canvassed in Romania, putting it at Galați to the main Zionist committee, which backed him on condition that the British government agreed. At Bucharest he was interviewed at length by Moses Schwarzfeld of Egalitatea, who took up the cause in his own paper. Cyprus, Trietsch told him, would be the first gate to Palestine and a place where Jews then leaving for America might instead be gathered near the Land of Israel, and he offered settlers terms of 5,000 francs a family repayable over five years, after which the land, a house and livestock would be theirs. Ha-Tsefira printed a dismissive note beneath the interview. It said the conversation had yielded no new idea, that the question needed a proper survey by experts and not "a stroll by Mr Trietsch" and that it was unclear whether he was qualified in farming, railways or trade, though he spoke confidently about all three.
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. At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 Trietsch was the first delegate to reject the Uganda proposal publicly, and the movement abandoned it the following year. He objected that it would scatter the movement's effort, where his own scheme concentrated Jewish migration in one region. At the same congress he and the writer Alfred Nossig accused the Zionist leadership of not having pursued the El-Arish project with enough vigour. Trietsch added that refusing the colonization the Sultan had offered across the Ottoman empire had been a serious mistake. He was not arguing for piecemeal settlement but for systematic colonizing work to prepare a mass immigration.
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".
A Zionist tribute of 1930 credited him with being the first to argue for an Anglo-Jewish policy of colonization in the Near East. 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 In 1901 Trietsch was among the founders of the Democratic Zionist Fraction, together with Chaim Weizmann, Martin Buber, Berthold Feiwel, Leo Motzkin and Yitzhak Gruenbaum. The Fraction came before the public shortly before the Fifth Zionist Congress of December 1901 and called for a synthesis of political and cultural work, by which it meant present-day work in the diaspora alongside practical work in Palestine. Trietsch belonged to the Zionist Organization for decades but served on none of its specialist bodies. His standing quarrel with Herzl was over the charter. Herzl held that a charter from the Ottoman government had to come before any colonizing work, or even before preparatory work, and Trietsch opposed that as a reason for doing nothing.
At the Eighth Zionist Congress at The Hague in 1907, during a debate on the supply of Jewish labour to the Palestine market, he was criticised from the floor by Shlomo Kaplansky of Poale Zion. Kaplansky told the congress that Trietsch spoke warmly about occupying every economic position in Palestine, yet had told Jewish workers privately that he would not hold back from replacing them with Arab or fellahin labourers. Kaplansky acknowledged that this was a private matter that did not concern the congress, but said it was relevant since it was characteristic of conditions in Palestine.
Later in the same congress Trietsch was nominated for one of the Palestine seats on the Greater Actions Committee. The delegate Abneroff protested against his candidacy in the name of a group of the Palestine population and of part of the Poale Zion delegation, saying that opinion in Palestine had turned against Trietsch's dealings with his workers.
Trietsch replied that protests against such nominations were unprecedented. He described the objectors as a small group of Poale Zion in Jaffa and declined to discuss the incident behind the protest, saying that airing it would not serve the programme of practical work in Palestine. He told the congress that he would carry on working 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.
The quarrel followed him out of the congress hall. Three months later he came to Lemberg to lecture on Palestine and Poale Zion resolved to boycott the meeting. They took every seat in the hall and walked out together the moment he appeared, leaving him to an empty room. Their resolution said they had protested against him in particular because, as director of what they called the Jewish Commercial Company in Palestine, he had behaved badly toward Jewish workers during a strike.
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 founded a second journal with the writer Alfred Nossig, 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. From 1 January 1904 the official Zionist Palestine Commission took it over and published it as Altneuland.
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. The Palästina-Handbuch appeared first in a Hebrew translation by Jehuda Grasowsky, and an English edition followed in 1907. Otto Warburg commended it at the Eighth Zionist Congress as a cheap book that would spread knowledge of Palestine among the movement's poorer members. It was still in use years later, carried by students on a journey to Palestine in 1913, the young Nahum Goldmann among them, and drawn on by Curt Nawratzki for his study of Jewish colonisation in 1914.
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