The eugenist history of the Zionist movement
A 1919 political cartoon depicting Chaim Weizmann and Menachem Ussishkin closing Palestine to Jewish refugees:“Necessity breaks iron! Open the gate or they will break it open! Der Groyser Kunds, September 12, 1919, cited in Gur Alroey, Deborah Stern (translator), Land of Refuge: Immigration to Palestine, 1919-1927 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2024), ch. 3
From the late 19th century through the 1950s, Zionist leaders adopted a selective immigration policy designed to exclude ‘undesirable’ Jews. The goal of the Zionist movement was to build a Jewish state in a Palestinian Arab land, and that required Jewish capitalists, skilled laborers, professionals and fighters, not children, elderly people or refugees. The Zionist leadership rejected persecuted, disabled, destitute, sick, diseased and elderly Jews because they were persecuted, disabled, destitute, sick, diseased and elderly. They instead prioritized what they called “halutzim,” or young, healthy Zionist ideologues willing to sacrifice their youth, capital, labor and life for the cause. This is the eugenist history of Zionism, in brief.
Ottoman Palestine: Thou shall reject the poor
Between the 1880s and 1920s, Jews faced waves of pogroms across the Russian Empire. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Jews were scapegoated and over 200 pogroms erupted, destroying Jewish homes and businesses. A more violent wave followed the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and peaked during the 1905 Russian Revolution, with thousands of Jews murdered and entire towns devastated. By 1914, recurring outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence had displaced hundreds of thousands, fueling mass migration.
Most of these migrants settled in the United States but a small number arrived at ports in Palestine in the 1880s and 1890s. Many were “poor people who had nothing,” as the Zionist leader Moshe Smilansky put it. “Those who had no money remained in the country … [and] became a burden on the [Zionist] executive committee.” Menahem Sheinkin described them as “miserable paupers, depressed and patched up, with bundles like rag-merchants, the poorest of the poor, who could not possibly be a blessing to the country.”
It was in this context that the Zionist movement developed its highly selective immigration policy to stem the tide of the undesirables. By the early 1900s, an office was established in Jaffa to screen Jews hoping to settle in Palestine. Menachem Sheinkin and Arthur Ruppin reviewed application letters sent from prospective migrants and told 61% of them not to come, primarily because they were too impoverished.
Cited in Gur Alroey, An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), p.99.
The Zionist movement preferred wealthy Jews over poor ones. “Until capitalists come to the country, there will be no room for workers,” Sheinkin wrote. “The smaller the capital at the disposal of the applicant, the greater the likelihood that he would be advised not to go to Palestine,” as Gur Alroey put it, the world’s foremost expert on the topic. Sheinkin believed impoverished Jews would not only burden the Zionist project, but they would find life in Palestine too difficult and return to their home countries with horror stories of Palestine.
That’s partly because the Zionist colonies could not sustain themselves. Many of the immigrants were unskilled farmers ill-accustomed to agricultural life and expected higher standards of living than rural Palestine could offer (1, 2, 3).
The selective immigration policy had darker roots, though. Arthur Ruppin, architect of the policy, was a committed eugenicist. He even attempted to join an antisemitic German political party during his youth to gain social acceptance. He believed in Jewish racial distinctiveness and thought the Zionist movement ought to recast Jews with a superior racial composition and with upgraded mental and physical faculties. The idea was to create “a new, corrected and perfected type of Hebrew,” to use Ruppin’s words.
Ruppin warned that the arrival of inferior Jews would imperil the entire project. This included impoverished Europeans, as noted above, but also Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, who he described as culturally, spiritually and intellectually inferior, as well as Indian Jews, Algerian nomadic Jews and Black Jews, who were Jews by faith but not by race, and thus should not be allowed to immigrate to Palestine (1, 2). Immigration wasn’t about rescue or even just state building—it was about social, economic and racial engineering.
1918–1922: No refugees
This point became painfully obvious between 1918 and 1922, when Ukraine witnessed the deadliest wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in modern history. 50,000 to 100,000 Jews were killed or wounded, 120,000 children were orphaned and entire Jewish communities were destroyed. The survivors—hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees—fled for their lives, some looking to Palestine as a safe haven.
But in December 1919, Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist movement, rejected the Ukrainian refugees outright. While he thought Palestine could absorb “thousands”, the Ukraine refugees were “not suitable” for the “great Zionist plan,” as he put it. “Zionism can’t provide a solution for catastrophes.” Refugees were “weak in body and soul” and “broken vessels,” not builders of the nation. “Even 1 percent that’s bad will spoil a great many good people,” Weizmann said. He was so worried about the influx he actually persuaded the British authorities to significantly reduce the Jewish immigration quota as Ukrainian Jews perished in the tens of thousands. Palestine needed halutzim, not refugees, and so the Ukrainian refugees in need of a safe haven were by definition not welcome.
Survivors of a pogrom in Khodorkov, Ukraine early in the 20th century. source
Similarly, in Urmia, Iran, Jews faced anti-Jewish violence and famine, forcing many thousands to seek refuge in Baghdad during and after World War I. The Zionist office in Baghdad wrote to Jaffa that a thousand refugees had “escaped the oppressor’s sword” and many of those left behind were killed. They appealed throughout late 1921 and 1922, emphasizing the refugees had left everything behind and were evicted from their temporary shelter in Baghdad. “One must have mercy on their health…several children have already died from the heat of the sun.” Baghdad even appealed to their eugenicist sensibilities: “they all want to go to Palestine to work there. Many of them are strong, healthy people who can tolerate hard work and make do with little.”
The Zionist leadership said no. They embraced a “slow and steady” immigration policy, carefully selecting the right “human material,” (Hebrew: homer enoshi; Germany: Menschenmaterial) to use a term popular among Zionists at the time. The goal was statehood, and the Ukrainian and Iranian refugees would inhibit progress towards that end. Those in need of rescue were by definition a liability, rather than an asset, and thus were rejected. Physically and mentally healthy ideologues were ideal. Singles were better than families. Europeans were better than Iranians. The goal was to refashion the Jewish body and soul without the inferior Jews. This meant closing the gates of Palestine to hundreds of thousands in their greatest hour of need.
Zionist immigration policy, 1920s-1930s
The British took over Palestine in 1918 and implemented their promise to turn the country, 90% Palestinian Arab, into “a national home for the Jewish people.” The British regime determined an immigration quota twice a year based on the economic absorptive capacity of the country, issuing a certain number of immigration certificates to the Jewish Agency (JA), the precursor to the State of Israel, which determined the rest. The JA distributed the certificates to the various Zionist political parties, creating a dynamic in which each party tried to secure as many certificates as possible for its own sympathizers. The gates of Palestine were now open for Jewish immigration, and rescue efforts could begin. Emphasis on could.
Since the Zionist immigration policy continued to remain highly selective throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Immigrants were screened for health, skills, capital, and ideological fitness. Sick and diseased Jews were rejected. Orphans, widows, rape victims, famine survivors, bankrupted Jews were “wounded in body or spirit” and therefore undesirable. Those seeking to immigrate to Palestine for reasons other than ideological commitment to the Zionist cause were rejected, while those who could not afford to pay large sums of money for their immigration certificate or have enough capital to sustain themselves in Palestine for a year or more or whose skill sets were not relevant in Palestine’s economy were also rejected.
The Zionist leadership also sought to attract Jews to Palestine who could replace Arab workers as part of its broader goal to purge all Jewish-owned enterprises of Arab workers. Arabs dominated Palestine’s most important port, Haifa, for example, and so the Zionist movement went on a hunt for Jewish portworkers. They found a highly skilled community of Jewish dockworkers and longshoremen from Thessaloniki, Greece, who were recruited in 1933 to work at the Haifa port and soon enough became the preferred laborers, putting hundreds of Arabs out of work.
The Zionist movement enforced its own immigration policy through ostracization, economic sanction and expulsion. Jewish refugees who arrived in Palestine without official invitation were denied absorption benefits, temporary accommodation, job opportunities, credit, free medical assistance and insurance against work accidents. They were also shut out of the Zionist labor union, the Histadrut, and thus denied access to the social and cultural fabric of the Zionist life in Palestine.
By 1926, Zionist immigration authorities started deporting the undesirables. Jews with epilepsy, heart disease and syphilis were expelled back to Europe, where many “died in the streets from illness” (1, 2, 3). To push them out, Jews were stripped of benefits and support provided by the Zionist institutions, including medical services. Hundreds were deported in this fashion, with the rejects sent to either Austria or even Germany, a practice that continued until 1936 long after the rise of Hitler.
In some cases, the Zionist leadership tried but failed to deport people, such as a Jewish immigrant by the name “P.G.” diagnosed with a nervous disease. Zionist officials did “everything possible to sway the patient to leave the country,” but he refused. The Zionist psychiatrist Dorian Feigenbaum warned that he would “only be a burden to you. His treatment will require labor and many expenses.” He recommended that the medical examinations in source countries be improved to prevent people like P.G. from ever setting foot in Palestine in the first place.
Zionist immigration policy during the rise of Nazism
By the 1930s, the selective attitude persisted despite Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany. A short list of factions that supported this policy included Mapai, the party of David Ben Gurion, the German Zionists, the non-Socialist members of the Jewish Agency coalition, the kibbutz movements, the Labor Zionist youth movements and the Marxist Zionists. Many of the kibbutzim refused to accept families with children or anyone over 35 and insisted upon strong, young and healthy ideologues. Even the Revisionist Zionists, who supported immigration to Palestine in larger numbers, insisted that immigrants must be young. A selective immigration policy was the consensus view.
In 1933, the Zionist leadership in Palestine learned the Zionist Office in Berlin was giving immigration certificates to invalids. And so, in November 1933, Henrietta Sald, the head of the Health Department of the Jewish Agency, wrote to Berlin insisting on a more severe medical inspection of immigration candidates, even naming people who should not have been allowed to come. Sald also demanded some of the sick immigrants be sent back to Nazi Germany so they would not burden the Zionist settlers.
In one case, between April and September 1934, the British authorities provided the JA executive committee 5,500 certificates. Ben-Gurion suggested that 60% of the certificates be dedicated to ‘pioneers,’ 10% to unite family members and 20% miscellaneous. A compromise was struck around 50% to a subset of ‘pioneers,’ members of the Zionist movement training youth in agriculture known as he-Halutz, as well as 30% for skilled laborers and professionals, 10% to other Jewish farmers and 10% to reunite families. In the 1930s, Zionist immigration policy neither revolved around rescue nor reserved certificates for Jews fleeing persecution.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1930s, the leadership continued to lament the state of the “human material” entering the country, as they had for decades. “Only God knows how the poor little Land of Israel can take in this stream of people and emerge with a healthy social structure,” Chaim Weizmann said.
Between 1933-1939, those six fateful years between Hitler’s rise to power and his invasion of Poland, about two-thirds of German Jewish applicants were rejected. Even those accepted were lamented as low quality “human material,” leading David Wener Senator, a JA executive member, to warn Berlin that without an improvement in the quality of humans, the number of certificates allotted to Germany would be reduced. Indeed, as time passed, the rejection rate of German Jews applying to immigrate to Palestine increased. Only about a quarter of the 204,076 Jewish immigrants to enter Palestine during this period arrived from Germany or Austria.
Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Zionist leaders were focused on statehood, not rescue. Arthur Ruppin said immigration “should not flood the existing settlement in Palestine like lava.” Moshe Shertok argued that Jews outside of Palestine needed to be treated “with a certain degree of cruelty.” In the words of a leading American Zionist in the 1930s, Henry Montor, “there could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism … [than] if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables.”
In 1937, Zionist leaders expressed apprehension about bringing a group of 120 Jewish prisoners freed from the Dachau concentration camp to Palestine. Incidentally, their release was secured not by the Zionist movement but by the American Jewish rescue organization, the JDC. “I am not sure that from a political point of view it is desirable that all those released come to Palestine,” as one JA official put it. That’s because most of Jewish refugees were thought to be non-Zionists, while some were believed to be Communists! They were of the incorrect “human material.”
The Germans may not have been the target for rescue but they did provide fodder for political stunts. In early 1939, Ben-Gurion sought to organize a show of dozens of boats carrying Jews without immigration certificates to arrive in broad daylight at a Palestine harbor. The goal was to manufacture a spectacle in which British troops would be closing the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Later that year, in Nov. 1939, Ben-Gurion had an opportunity to lobby the British to allow the 2,900 German Jews who had been issued immigration certificates to Palestine before war broke out to enter. But he declined to fight that battle, perhaps because that battle was about actual rescue, not public spectacle.
In 1938-9, the Mossad organized the illegal transport for 12,000 immigrants to Palestine. Most of them were young ideologues involved in the Zionist youth movements in Poland, Germany and Austria. “It was a step toward personal fulfillment of their Zionist ideal,” as one scholar wrote, and therefore “they bore up well under the inconvenience, hardship, and danger of this concluding stretch of their journey.”
The Zionist movement believed that immigration ought to be limited to those with youth, capital or skills needed to build a state. Zionist immigration policy wasn’t about rescue, it was about social and racial engineering, domination of the local economy, cultural and ideological homogeneity, statebuilding, and, as we shall see, by the 1940s, immigration was about recruiting fighters.
Zionist immigration policy during & after the Holocaust
During the 1940s, the immigration process remained mostly unchanged. The British authorities issued the JA a certain number of immigration certificates, and Zionist leaders decided who got them. Meanwhile, illegal immigration organized by the Mossad, Betar and the Revisionists continued.
By the 1940s, the Zionist calculus had evolved. Although Yishuv leaders continued to focus on economic considerations based on the “absorptive capacity” of the country, demographic and humanitarian considerations mattered as well. Zionist leaders understood statehood was on the horizon and demographic facts on the ground needed to be established. Zionist leaders advocated for humanitarian interventions to save European Jews, and, for the first time, this view began to impact Zionist immigration policy.
The Zionists dropped their rejection of Jewish refugees, as war broke out in Europe and more and more of the Jews seeking to settle in Palestine were de facto refugees. Of course, the preference for wealthy and healthy Jews continued and those with financial means were “for all practical purposes allowed to come without restriction,” as one historian wrote. They also helped cover the costs associated with accepting younger and healthier ideologies, who could fight and endure hardship even if they lacked without means.
As noted, Zionist groups organized illegal immigration to Palestine, ostensibly as rescue operations. However, in 1940, the British published a report suggesting that the operations were about partisan politics, not rescue. "The illegal immigrants whom the New Zionists [Revisionists] transport to Palestine are carefully picked and trained young men of military age and young women, and not old men and women or children, [as in] a true refugee movement." They concluded that the Zionist illegal immigration was organized primarily to gain political leverage in Palestine.
Zionist leaders continued to lament the state of the “human material” of Jews arriving in Palestine. Many Romanian Jews had arrived, and they were considered among the least desirable of all the European Jews. In another case, in 1946, a Zionist operative described a boat departing from Greece carrying a large number of Jewish pregnant women, children, including many babies as containing “very difficult human material.”
But there was an even darker secret about ‘rescue’. The Zionist movement deliberately sabotaged many attempts by US, British and French Jews to rescue holocaust survivors and settle them in the United States, Britain or France (1, 2). That’s because the Zionist movement was terrified that if Jews could find safe haven outside of Palestine, politicians and philanthropists the world over would focus on rescuing Jews rather than supporting Zionism. Rescue operations were thus considered a threat. Zionist leaders worked diligently to link rescue to Palestine, even though that meant much less rescue.
Meanwhile, some Zionist officials remained focused on recruiting good human material well into the 1940s. As the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee in Palestine during World War II Yitzhak Gruenbaum said in 1943, “we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row… we do not give priority to rescue actions… Zionism is above all - it is necessary to sound this whenever a holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism.” He was heavily criticized for this remark, no doubt, but “his critics consoled their consciences, whilst knowing that the logic of Zionism would not allow for rescue to be prioritised,” as one observer put it.
The aftermath of the holocaust and the 1948 War
After the war, Ben Gurion traveled to Europe, obsessed with who had survived. He visited Bulgaria in 1944 and grew interested in the Zionist youth movements and their spin-offs as they could provide the manpower needed to fight for the Jewish State. He met with US army commanders in Frankfurt and a Jewish American Rabbi Judah Nadich in the fall of 1945, hoping to understand what scars were left on the Jews. “Were they broken? Would they have to be hospitalized, and if so for how long?” Ben-Gurion’s key concern was whether they were “good material” for the Yishuv.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Jews found themselves in Displaced Persons (DP) camps after the war. Zionist operatives, including many former Haganah (paramilitary) officers, were sent to the camps to transform holocaust survivors into fighters. Recruitment started off as voluntary, but only 700 people signed up. By early 1948, Haganah officers effectively took over the camps and developed a four-staged plan: propaganda, registration, voluntary draft and then forced conscription. The first refugee conscripts were sent off to fight in April 1948.
The JA executive believed that manpower available in Palestine would not suffice for the war that was awaiting them, especially if the Arab armies were to join the fight. “The Arabs have huge reserves, and now we need people from abroad for the war,” Ben Gurion told his officers in Europe in early 1948. “Send only people aged 18-35, or up to 40 in exceptional cases, capable of using firearms. Everything must be done in order to train the people in the use of firearms prior to sending them here,” Ben Gurion said.
On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate for Palestine ended and the Zionist leadership declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Israel could now orchestrate its own immigration policy, and the first people welcomed were fighters. Israeli officials issued strict orders to operatives in Europe that only Jews with military capabilities were to be brought over.
Israeli immigration policy, 1949-mid-1950s
Thereafter, the state began to open its door to Jewish immigrations, albeit with many restrictions. The Ministry of Aliya continued to screen out the disabled, sick, those with chronic illnesses, and old persons, providing physicians a list of "Medical Rules to Approve Aliyah." The policy required “that every Oleh would be mentally and physically healthy and capable of work. One should particularly observe … that the candidate shall have no impairment that totally or partially limits his work capacity." The list called out impairments such as the blind, amputees, people who were in psychiatric hospitals or formerly hospitalized, people suspected to be mentally ill but were never treated by psychiatric hospitals, people with "mental deficiencies," people with "chronic and severe cases of neurosis with signs of lack of any talents," and people with "severe personality disorders." As Dr. Nahum Goldmann of the Jewish Agency declared in 1948: “A state and a nation are entitled to exercise a certain ruthlessness… a more efficient selection is good for the immigration.”
The policy seems to have been implemented according to plan. Itzhak Rafael, head of the JA’s Aliyah Department, bragged about holding up thousands of visas issued to “invalids” in Tunisia, France, and Germany. "I held up 2,000 visas in Tunis, which had been issued to old people and invalids, and gave an order not to bring them over. I held up 800 visas in France, which were issued to sick and aged people ... also invalids in Germany, 5,000 people."
Israel made exceptions to its guidelines for Jews facing annihilation, although Morocco constituted an exception to the exception, where even sick and old Jews facing annihilation were rejected. That seems to be why some two-thirds of Jews who sought to immigrate to Israel from across North Africa were rejected before 1954. After pogroms broke out in 1954 in Morocco, the JA loosened its criteria, now rejecting only about a third of Moroccan Jews hoping to migrate to Israel.
At the same time that undesirable Jews were rejected, masses of Jews were accepted. Israel needed as many Jewish bodies as it could find to guarantee a Jewish supermajority, expand the manpower reservoir to build an army, and, perhaps most importantly, to populate the border regions of the state with 108 civilian settlements, where undesirable Jews were needed on the front lines to act as human shields against the surrounding Arab armies.
Still, despite the large number of Jews accepted during the first few years of statehood, the eugenicist immigration policies continued into the 1950s. In 1951, Ben-Gurion told his colleagues in private that “it was still necessary to make sure that the ‘blind and lame’ were excluded, because it was impossible to fill the country with ‘welfare cases.’ In 1952, Ben-Gurion responded to an agreement between the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Ministry of Health concerning Jewish immigration from Morocco:
Is this what we call Aliyah, bringing the paralyzed because we want to make the numbers seem bigger … is this what this country needs? … How can you sign an agreement with no restrictions concerning health and physical conditions … This is against the Law of Return … there are 250,000 Jews in Morocco … so why should we start with the paralyzed and the blind?
Consider the Vazana family, who wished to emigrate from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s, but remained in Casablanca because Israeli immigration authorities did not let them travel with two of their children classified as disabled by Israel. The family was told they should leave them behind. Their story was a typical case in Morocco.
In late 1951, the Israeli government tightened its already selective immigration policy after a large percentage of the Romanian, Libyan and Iranian Jewish arrivals turned out to be old, disabled, sick or unskilled (1, 2).
Meanwhile, the Israeli public expressed their horror that so many inferior Jews were allowed to immigrate. “We should not agree in any way that out of all people, the part that is morally or physically backward… would be immigrating to Israel,” Eliezer Livne, a Knesset Member, wrote in 1951. He said the problem was not financial but rather social and spiritual. “Israel is not a refuge for the backward and unproductive circles of the Diaspora communities, but a center for their pioneers and the best among their sons.” As Yehuda Braginsky, a leader in the JA Absorption Department put it, the problem with Moroccan Jews is that they were Moroccan. “I do not believe in curing all the Jews from Morocco,” he said. They were inherently contaminated.
Age, health, wealth and employability were once again key considerations, a policy applying to all immigrants, but especially Iranian and North African Jews. As for the Iranian Jews, in 1953, Ben-Gurion once said in a fit of anger, "six people from Persia arrived by airplane, and all of them have inherited syphilis, this is against our law." As for the North African Jews, many of whom applied to immigrate through the Marseilles JA office, for example, Israel rejected 20 out of 70 cases. One family wished to move to Israel from Algeria in August 1954 but was rejected because “the father, 57-years-old, is sick and incapable of working. His wife is also sick. The two young sons are retarded and the two older ones left the house and do not support their parents.”
In another case, in 1952, when Itzhak Rafael tried to induce 6,000 Jews from southern Tunisia and Morocco to immigrate to Israel, Ben-Gurion objected because some 10% of them were elderly or disabled. Officials discussed a compromise in which Israel would allow the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle the elderly and disabled in larger Jewish communities in Morocco, while Israel would absorb the rest, the desirable human material. But even this was a problem for Ben Gurion, who “exerted all his influence to block the plan,” as one historian put it. For Israel’s Prime Minister, “allowing the immigration of an entire community when many of its members were in poor health would not help build the country.”
In 1954, Prime Minister Moshe Sharet said that the selection should continue "with all cruelty." The rigid selection criteria was "a form of mercy" towards the "person who suffers, who is ill-fated, who is sick or old, who is frail and has no income." They justified the rejections by claiming that they’d be better off staying put.
As late as 1958, in an affair only recently exposed, then Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir suggested blocking handicapped and sick Polish Jews from entry.
Conclusion
The Zionist movement measured the worth of Jews according to their marital status, age, health, physical abilities, profession and wealth. There were desirable Jews and undesirable ones, and the Zionist movement and then the State of Israel focused on keeping out the undesirables. Of course, the preferred traits varied over time, depending on whether the Zionist movement needed cash infusions, skilled professionals, headcount or fighters the most. But the nature of the human material available for Zionist co-optation was a constant obsession of the Zionist leadership. The refashioning of the Jewish mind, body and soul out of young, healthy, able-bodied farmers, professionals and fighters lay at the core of the DNA of the Zionist movement.
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