Zionist Perception of the Rural Zvi Efrat Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-En-Scène

Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

Zvi Efrat

Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

The haunt of the rural and the specter Zionist Perception of the Rural of the peasant occupy the Zionist scene of origin. Their perplexing emergence is satirically enunciated in the following citation from Theodor Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat:

Whoever would attempt to convert the Jew into a peasant would be making an extraordinary mistake. For a peasant is a historical category, as proved by his costume which in some countries he has worn for centuries; and by his tools, which are identical with those used by his earliest forefathers […]. The agrarian question is only a question of machinery. America must conquer Europe, in the same way as large landed possessions absorb small ones. The peasant is consequently a type on a course towards extinction. Whenever he is artificially preserved, it is due to the political interests he is intended to serve. It is absurd, and indeed impossible, to make modern peasants on the old pattern. No one is wealthy or powerful enough to make civilization take a single retrograde step […]. Are we, therefore, to attribute to intelligent Jews the desire to become peasants of the old type? […] Under these circumstances the Jews are perfectly justified in refusing to stir when people try to make peasants of them.1

1 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, translated by Jacob M. Alkow, New York 1988, pp. 88-89.

3 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

In this foundational text, Herzl, a journalist and fictionist cum author of political Zionism, responds to the contentious situation that had been developing since the 1880s in Palestine: Jewish leaders, planners, philanthropists, agron- omists and adherents of various back-to-the-land movements – some holding an archaic ideal of a rural economy based on communities of peasants, and others emulating various modern models of colonization2 – were calling upon Jews, mainly Russian Jews escaping pogroms, to forgo urban areas for rural life on Palestine’s ‘moshavot’ (sing. ‘moshava’; a traditional type of agrarian colony whose members farmed their land independently), thereby undermining both the technical positivism of Herzl’s building-manual Der Judenstaat and the bucolic scenery of his later novel Altneuland (1902). But perhaps more than sparring with his contemporaries, Herzl’s dismay seems directed anachronically at his socialist successors in the Zionist organizations (those belligerent prophets of the hinterland whom he would never meet). Indeed, his derisive portrayal of the peasant Jew will be superseded, for decades to come, by accounts and tales ranging from pastoral utopias and agrarian manifestos, to redemptive petitions and apocalyptic sermons, reaching their climax with the following text from 1935 by David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist Labor movement:

There is a warning to be heeded from world history. Anyone who has studied the history of Rome will remember the dramatic chapter known as the Phoenician War. In Hebrew it is referred to as the ‘Canaanite War’. There once was a great military leader, who was close in race to the ancient Hebrews; he had a Hebrew name and a Hebrew title: Hannibal, the Judge of Keret Hadeshet (New City), or Carthage. […] Roman mediocrity defeated Canaanite genius. Because Carthage was a city-state, and Rome was a rural-state, and in the desperate struggle between an urban nation and a rural nation, it was the rural nation that won. All of the commercial wealth of Carthage, and all of the genius of its great military leaders, came to nothing. Hannibal’s heroism was broken in the face of the persistent combat of the farmers of Rome. These farmers were not discouraged by one defeat after another – because they were rooted in the soil and connected to their land. They overcame Carthage and wiped it off the face of the earth, without leaving a trace. And here we have come to build a city-state and to establish an urban nation – while we are surrounded by a people that is connected to the land, not only in this country but in all the neighboring countries. We have the opportunity to establish a large urban state in Tel Aviv and in Haifa, with a million inhabitants or more – but its end will be like that of Carthage.

2 According to sociologist Gershon Shafir, south-eastern Russia. […] Thirdly, Otto “between 1882 and 1900 Baron Edmund de Warburg and Arthur Ruppin, the heads of the Rothschild followed the model of French World Zionist Organization’s Land Development agricultural colonization in Algeria and Tunisia, Company, highly consciously tried to reproduce which was based on the development of the ‘internal colonization’ model developed by privately owned monoculture agriculture. When the Prussian government to create a German this French model floundered, three others majority in some of its eastern, ethnically were suggested in its place, in the first decade of Polish, territories.” Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor the [20th] century. First Aharon Eisenberg […] and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian who directed the Planters’ Society, the largest Conflict, 1882-1914, Berkeley/Los Angeles capitalist company in Palestine before the First 1996, p. 11. World War, recommended a Californian design 3 David Ben Gurion, Zionist Players and their for enabling urban people to move to the Role at this Time, in: David Ben Gurion, countryside. Secondly, members of HaShomer On Settlement: Collected Writings 1915-1965, (The Guard) organization longed to emulate the Tel Aviv 1986, pp. 63-64 (in Hebrew). Cossack’s military colonization of parts of

4 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

Read about the internal situation of Carthage in the days of Hannibal and you will find the image of Tel Aviv: the same disconnected culture, the same rootlessness, the same dependence on an alien, antagonist, rural environment, the same ostensible independence – does the same end await us?3

Ben Gurion’s doomsday interpretation of the Phoenician War sets the official tone from the 1920s and well into the 1950s. The more immigrants flooded the ‘Hebrew Carthage’ and the more ‘ostensible independence’ this city assumed, the bolder and broader the propaganda and concrete action toward colonizing the countryside became. Indeed, beyond rhetoric, the physical manifestation of Zionism’s romance with the rural is astounding: between the 1880s and the 1980s, about 700 new villages, rural towns and garden cities were designed and built in Palestine by and for Jewish citizens, mostly new immigrants (about 250 settlements before Israeli statehood, 450 after). But before we look into actual territorial operations and planning procedures – those demanding an architect protagonist in the Zionist script – let us linger a moment longer on the return of the object of desire, the rural-of-plenty, in modern Jewish writing. The earliest and perhaps the most inspiring fictional depiction of Arcadian Zion appears in a forgotten text, the first utopia written in Modern Hebrew: Voyage to the Land of Israel in the Year 2040, written by the journalist Elhanan Leib Lewinsky and first published in 1892, in Odessa.

We had hardly begun our journey; we were just two or three hours from Jaffa, when before us lay a new land, with a new people, and new ways of life […]. The country is like one great garden, like a single field sown with vegetables and all sorts of grains. From the window of the coach we can see groves and orchards. […] Fields of grain, wheat, barley and spelt, and herds grazing in the plentiful pasture. Villages and plantations wherever one treads. Twenty, thirty houses – and behold, a village. […] The children of Israel pass through the fields, plowing, hoeing, sowing and reaping, and man and beast are healthy and satiated, bountiful and fresh. The houses are built with pride, clean and beautiful […]. Anyone who beholds this sight will understand that these are masters of their own land who live here […] and the whole village, by its modernity and cleanliness and by the good order that reigns, is like a modern estate, like beautiful toys […]. Such villages are on every road, and every road is like a single village […]. Throughout the days of their exile, in particular during the seventh century, the Jews came to understand the ‘secret of the earth’. They saw and understood that a king, the king of the world, is he who works the fields […]. They learned this great lesson in that University of Exile […]. Working the land – man’s only natural work – has become the legacy of an entire nation, not just one part of the nation, but, simply put, the entire nation. Israel now returns to its ancient ways, as it was in the days of the forefathers – an agrarian nation.4

3 David Ben Gurion, Zionist Players and their (ed.), Yesterday’s Tomorrow. The Zionist Role at this Time, in: David Ben Gurion, Utopia, vol. 2, Jerusalem 1993, pp. 77-78 On Settlement: Collected Writings 1915-1965, (in Hebrew, translated for this article by Tamar Tel Aviv 1986, pp. 63-64 (in Hebrew). Cohen). 4 Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, Voyage to the Land of Israel in the Year 2040, in: Rachel Elboym-Dror

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In the spirit of quasi-Marxist utopian literature and reformist social manifestos of the time, Lewinsky sketches an economic accord underlying his landscape of bliss, based on a crude collectivist bypass to common market-economy (and to commonplace Jewish diasporic habitus):

I did not see many merchants, sellers, or brokers in and around the [village] because merchants whose whole being is trading merchandise for money and money for merchandise, are not to be found here […]. Here one central village houses the granaries, where all the harvests for sale are collected. The granaries are administered by the village delegates, and merchants come from the large cities and buy the harvest […]. And there will be a large cooperative store with all sorts of merchandise and goods, under the administration of the delegates, where it will be possible to attain any merchandise at its original price.

More delirious Jewish travelogues and odysseys were to follow around the turn of the century – most illustrious of which was Herzl’s Altneuland. Herzl, who acrimoniously dismissed the very attempt to re-invent the Jew as a peasant in Der Judenstaat, written only six years before Altneuland, now meticulously builds an exhaustive and seductive mise-en-scène of sumptuous landscapes inhabited by well-informed happy farmers and creative urbanites; a dialectical image of Jewish futuristic autochthony (as the title of the novel indicates); an allegorical model society of radical colonizers under constant intellectual scrutiny. 5 In Lewinsky’s utopia, the account of the social contract and the economic superstructure still seem somewhat offhand and superfluous. In Altneuland, they form the didactic mold of the narrative. Herzl takes special scholarly care to demonstrate his profound familiarity with the history of reformist and utopian practices and to spell out his analysis and critique. A speech delivered by his protagonist, David, at a farmers’ assembly functions both as an erudite exposé and an indoctrination pitch (which, quite hilariously, anticipates the tone of the oratorical tradition that would characterize comrades’ assemblies in Jewish collective settlements):

Don’t imagine I am jesting when I say that Neudorf [New Village] was built not in Palestine, but elsewhere. It was built in England, in America, in France and in Germany. It was evolved out of experiments, books, and dreams. The unsuccessful experiments of both practical men and dreamers were to serve you as object lessons, though you did not know it. […] The 19th century was a curiously backward era. […] muddle-headed visionaries were taken seriously, while sober, practical men were branded as lunatics. Napoleon the Great did not believe that Fulton’s steamboat was practical. On the other hand, the absurd Fourier easily won adherents for his phalansteries, which were intended to provide homes and workshops for several hundred families. Stephenson, the inventor of the railway, and Cabet, the dreamer of Icaria, were contemporaries. […]

5 “Once every 25 years, a ship named ‘Futuro’ be open to visitors, and the guests of the will bring us a select group of intellectuals. ‘Futuro’ will be our distinguished judges.” For us, their words will be like an oracle. We do Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (Old New Land), not intend to create model villages in the land Haifa 1960, p. 144 (in Hebrew, translated like the impressive fantastic villages of Catherine by XXX). the Great’s lover, Potemkin. All of the land will

6 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

Edward Bellamy outlined a noble communistic society in his Looking Backward [in which] all may eat as much as they please from the common platter. […] The scholars among you – and I know that in Neudorf today there are educated peasants – will understand me when I say that they were guilty of a petitio principii. […] […] it is among the English that we find the first traces of the cooperative social order, which we have taken over and adapted. German science, too, has added profound word here. […] When you go to your consumers’ cooperative societies and buy goods of the best quality and at the lowest prices, you have the pioneers of Rochdale to thank for it. And if your Neudorf is a prosperous producers’ cooperative, you owe it to the poor martyrs of Rahaline in Ireland. […] There is nothing here in Neudorf that was not implied in Rahaline. The one difference is, that instead of Mr. Vandaleur [the landlord], we have a large association to which everyone belongs; that is, the New Society.6

Neudorf, then, a village of the new, appears to be the main figure of Altneuland. In the above passage it is constructed teleologically and contextualized within the immediate history of the social avant-garde, but with the progression of the novel, it assumes its poetic autonomy to become the emblem of fresh authenticity and graceful domesticity; an optimal habitat for social creativity, economic equity and technological ingenuity. Neudorf indeed is henceforth both the ultimate metaphor and the prevailing metonymy of the emergent Zionist civilization. It is the ‘building block’ of the colonization enterprise and the marker of its transformative force. Neudorf’s prototype must now be built and it should be structured according to scientific theories and empirical methodologies. Franz Oppenheimer, a German-Jewish economist, sociologist, and leading theorist of agrarian settlement, who already developed his own principles of ‘scientific planning’, based on his experience with the German colonization project in Prussia, was chosen, by Herzl himself, to mastermind the prototype.7 After Herzl’s death, Oppenheimer’s commission was formally approved by the Zionist organizations and by 1909 he was assigned with the planning of the settlement of Merchavia, located at the heart of the Jezreel Valley. The arrival of the architect at the Zionist scene will have to wait for over a decade. Only in 1920, after the eventual collapse of the scientifically devised and controlled prototype of Merchavia,8 did the World Zionist Organization (WZO), and specifically Arthur Ruppin, founder and director of the WZO’s local office in Palestine and so-called ‘father of Zionist settlement’, decide to entrust an architect with the most precarious of tasks: the mediation, interpretation and enactment of the various Zionist territorial, social and scenic projections.

6 Herzl 1960 (note 5), p. 165. administered farm, run by the workers them- 7 “As early as 1902 [Herzl] honored me with an selves, now jointly operating as an ‘agrarian- invitation to co-operate in his great movement, productivist-collaborative workers union’; as I was then, I believe, the only economist who and in the third and final stage, a permanent had occupied himself ex officio with problems cooperative agrarian settlement is formed on a of settlement. I frankly declared to Dr. Herzl nearby property leased from the communal that his views about the possibility of coloniza- farm. Merchavia struggled for several years until tion of Palestine in the way he proposed were it was finally dismantled in 1918 due to tensions impracticable […].” Franz Oppenheimer, between the settlers and the Zionist institu- Merchavia. A Jewish Cooperative Settlement in tions. According to several accounts, the farmers Palestine, Cologne/New York 1914. found it difficult to accept the system of an 8 Oppenheimer designed Merchavia in three authoritative administration led by an appointed evolutionary stages: in the first stage, a training agronomist, which Oppenheimer considered to farm is established and managed by an be indispensable in the initial stage. Neither did appointed agronomist; in the second stage, the they agree with the principle of payment training farm is transformed into a self- according to productive achievements.

7 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

Richard Kauffmann (1887-1958), Richard Kauffmann – a rather unknown young architect with no built œuvre, was selected Architect of the by Ruppin and immediately nomi- nated as no less than head planner Zionist Movement of the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) – the company formed by the WZO to function as the main land-acquisition agent in Pal- estine. Kauffmann, at once, becomes literally the architect of the Zionist movement and its highest authority on matters of planning on all scales for decades to come. So much so that he would often be the sole originator of rural ur-forms, urban paradigms and building typologies that make up the distinctive composition, expression and ambiance – in short, the heritage – of the Zionist colonization project.9 Kauffmann studied at the Technische Hochschule in Munich (with Erich Mendelsohn) and was greatly influenced by the garden-city concepts of Theo- dor Fischer. After his studies he worked for Georg Metzendorf where he was involved in the design of a group of houses for the Krupp estate Margarethen- höhe near Essen. In 1914 he received a prize for a small housing project in Bickendorf near Cologne. Kauffmann just started his own office in Frankfurt when he was drafted to the Prussian army in 1915. In 1919 he received first prize for his urban plan of the garden city of Raigorod near Kharkiv and in the same year he moved to Norway, where he worked for Paul Oscar Hoff and won several urban competitions. In Palestine, Kauffmann had a prolific career that could hardly be matched by that of any of the great architectural masters of the 20th century. Through- out the 1920s, 30s, and 40s he designed well over 100 rural settlements and countless garden-neighborhoods, garden-cities, public and residential buildings and urban villas, many of which are considered architectural land- marks. But undoubtedly it is his very first assignment, his first architectural project in Palestine – the design of the workers’ moshav of Nahalal – which remains his most iconic work, both in its perfect paper version and in its extant physical form (fig. 1). Kauffmann, in contrast to his predecessor, has no scientific hypothesis, applicable precedents, or tested routine at hand; actually, not even a proper discipline to count on. At least, this is what could be inferred from his accounts of the conceptual and perceptual void he initially confronts. Already in the early 1920s he self-portrays himself as a pioneer exploring terra incognita. In retrospect, he may be looked upon as a perceptive agent, well aware of the historical opportunity he has chanced upon, preparing the blank ground for his own rise as the greatest spatial iconographer of Zionism. Prolific an architect as he would become, Kauffmann was a hesitant writer, who basically re-wrote for over three decades the same synopsis of his professional biography and re-published it with certain revisions. All the versions of

9 I use here the term ‘Zionist Project’ as an be noted that the post-war State building allusion to the ‘Israeli Project’, a term I coined project was conducted according to a different two decades ago to describe the State building set of regional, urban and architectural notions enterprise of the 1950s-70s. There is certainly and standards, often directly polemical to direct political, ideological and strategic Kauffmann’s heritage. See Zvi Efrat, The Israeli continuity between these two projects, or two Project. Building and Architecture 1948-1973, phases of the same national(izing) process; exh.cat. Tel Aviv 2004 (in Hebrew). however, in the context of this paper it should

8 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V fig. 1: Richard Kauffmann, his Planning Jewish Agricultural Set- Moshav Nahalal, plan, 1922. 10 Central Zionist Archive tlements in Israel (Palestine) were introduced by the explication of the (most conducive) double-vacuum that existed – in situ and in practicum – in the field of rural planning:

Planning and layout for Jewish settlements started under more favorable aspects in Palestine than elsewhere. Here, virgin soil awaited cultivation, very little and poor work of any sort existed, and the mistakes com- mitted elsewhere served as a warning example and helped to further an organic growth adapted to the need of the country. As regards the problem of town-planning in connection with agricultural settlements in general, mention should be made of the fact that when these were started upon, no previous work or layout whatsoever were available which could have served as a model. Villages and rural settlements in the whole world had sprung up in an almost haphazard way and even today they are very rarely planned beforehand anywhere. Already the definition of the science and art of ‘town planning’ in English; ‘urbanisme’ in French; and ‘Städtebau’ in German, very charac- teristically shows that rural planning has been in the past, and remains in the present, the most neglected step-child of modern physical planning, still young in itself. Accordingly, design and layout had to be started entirely anew and had to be developed and improved upon by new initiative, knowledge, and experience.

According to Kauffmann, the essential lack of indigenous agrarian culture to emulate (a disavowal symptomatic of virtually any modern colonization project) and the disciplinary lack of knowledge and experience in rural planning11 dictate a paradoxical condition from which the act of architecture springs: the need to invent an instantaneous and highly rational settlement that is ultimately also an organic organism, naturally and pictorially embedded in the landscape. I quote here at some length since I find in these candid lines by Kauffmann the most vivid depiction of what could loosely be referred to as Zionism’s rural imaginary:

In our case, all these presumptions of historic village growth did not exist. On the contrary, the task has been an entirely different and unprecedented one. A previously fixed number of farmers had to be

10 An early version, possibly not the earliest, of 11 Kauffmann’s peculiar insistence on the lack of this text was Richard Kauffmann, Planning of any models for rural planning should be further Jewish Settlements in Palestine, in: The Town examined in accordance with planning maga- Planning Review, 12, 1926, pp. 93-116. The text zines of the time, found in his library with his was revised time and again by Kauffmann over own handwritten footnotes, describing types several decades. I quote here from a 1954 of Prussian rural settlements; some seem manuscript found by the researcher Anke Kühnel pertinent to the Zionist colonization. Research in the remains of Kauffmann’s private library, on this topic is conducted by Joachim Trezib kept by his granddaughter in Jerusalem. and Anke Kühnel.

9 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

settled each under absolute identical conditions regarding size, buildings and implements of each individual farm. The whole village had to be erected at once or at least in a very short time in its entirety. This task became even more responsible and daring an undertaking because it meant the adjustment of an entirely new, unproved and possibly alien type into the rural landscape. From the start it had been clear that on account of their very foundations, these settlements would be more rigid in appearance than the historic picturesque village, while one of the most important aims of planning would be to preserve the rural character of the landscape […]. In designing the layout for the different types of our village, the aim should always be borne in mind to create a functional organism fulfilling to the utmost the task it is expected to perform. It should be as efficient as a biological organism or machine, where each individual part as well as the whole is being so composed, within a well balanced body […]. This primary aim […] provides in itself the foundations of its satisfactory appearance and the harmoniously balanced shape of the village.

The deficiencies elaborated thus far are juxtaposed by Kauffmann with a distinctive excess, a programmatic surplus, an over-determination of the socio-ideological objective underlying any spatial scheme. The official architect of Zionism may have to originate and formulate a discipline, a genre, a proto-typology, an instant picturesque, etc., but he must accept an already given and profoundly revered sub-structure:

All Jewish agricultural settlements are either cooperative, collective, or communal […]. The aim is not only attaching the Jewish farmer to the soil, but beyond and above that, preventing any form of exploitation of hired labor […]. It may well be worth mentioning here that the sociological structure of our settlements sprang up entirely from within, from the voluntary creative will of the farmers themselves, emanating from their ideas of social life and work. It has never been dictated by decree from above as is the case in other colonizations […].

The implicit paradox in presenting one of the most centralized and archi- tecturalized inner colonization projects of early 20th century as a grass roots voluntary movement of creative farmers prevails and characterizes the Zionist project all along. This paradox is not merely demagogical, but often times it is the generator of certain spatial paradigms, and other times it is the source of tensions and debates between the Zionist institutions and the settler communities. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of top-down imposition of form and formality (announcing the arrival of the master-architect on the rural scene), that was nevertheless also always attributed to the “voluntary creative will of the farmers themselves”, is the design of the workers’ moshav of Nahalal, Zionism’s most recognizable self-branding as radical pioneering of the rural. The program for the settlement-type of the workers’ moshav was developed by Eliezer Yaffe, founder of the Jewish-American Young Farmer Movement. His program was based on principles of commonality, mutuality, equality, self-labor, and national land, much like Oppenheimer’s model of Merchavia, but it placed a greater emphasis on privacy, personal initiative, and the ‘nat-

10 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

fig. 2: Richard Kauffmann, Moshav Nahalal, perspective, 1922. ural’ evolution of the nuclear family. After the failure of Merchavia, an open Central Zionist Archive debate regarding the social structure of future settlements erupted within both administrative and workers’ circles. While the devout socialists believed that the principle of collectivism should be doubly reinforced, the pragmatists concluded that collectivism was too contrived and repressive and should function only as a transitional construct, effective for purposes of land occu- pation and agrarian training. In 1919, Yaffe published a manual, directed at this latter group, for workers’ moshavim, detailing recommended rules and regulations, quantifying the optimal number of families and plot sizes, and circumscribing the layout and scope of public spaces. Once the location of Nahalal, the first workers’ moshav, was decided – on a hilltop in the heart of Jezreel Valley – it seems that all the young Richard Kauffmann had to do was draft a plan and perspective of Yaffe’s prescription (fig. 2). And so he did: his perfectly oval scheme imprints the terrain with a powerful emblem; an image at once hermetic, panoptic, and defensive, while radiating outwards and drawing in the landscape; a totalizing structure that consecrates the cohesive community and its communal center, but also an effective system of land parcelization and demarcation of private property. Technically speaking, the design of Nahalal is based on the following principles: eight radial roads extending from the central public space to the village perimeter, thereby subdividing it into eight equal sections; two round belts surrounding the central area, designated for public buildings, communal facilities and a public garden; a subdivision of the external belt into equally-sized farmers’ lots, with dwelling in front and private farm in the back; and transversal axes intersecting the circles and shortcutting the circulation. Between the ring formed by the farmers and the communal heart of the settlement are placed the homesteads of the non-agricultural settlers, the teachers, the artisans and craftsmen. In this way, writes Kauffmann, “it

11 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

was sought to create a living organism with a natural culminating center in harmony with the spirit of this particular type of settlement”. Nahalal was built precisely as drawn by Kauffmann and it remains fossilized as such to this very day. But was it indeed an original work of architecture without precedents as Kauffmann claims in his writing? In her book Garden Colony and a School Farm as Models for the Zionist Cooperative Settlements, Ruth Hanin-Rabinowitz argues that Kauffmann’s scheme was based on a prior, and certainly familiar to him, circular settlement plan, drawn up by the agronomist Yaakov Oettinger – head of the Agrarian Settlement Department of the World Zionist Organization between 1914 and 1924 – in his 1916 pamphlet Methoden und Kapitalbedarf jüdischer Kolonisation in Palästina. Hanin-Ra- binowitz illustrates the direct affinity between Kauffmann’s and Oettinger’s schemes, attributing this affinity to the full control of the Zionist institutions over the entire planning apparatus.12 More astounding is her revelation that Oettinger’s scheme itself was pure plagiarism. According to her, his scheme leads directly not merely to Ebenezer Howard’s generic garden-city diagram, but specifically to the garden colony that appeared in a report by the Commit- tee on Land Settlement for Discharged Sailors and Soldiers in the April 1916 issue of Garden Cities and Town Planning Magazine. This report, entitled ‘Land Settlement after the War’, contains a circular diagram of a ‘Fruit and Market Garden Colony’, which, according to Hanin-Rabinowitz, is identical to Oettinger’s scheme. And so it happens that Zionism’s most graphic rural archetype, the ultimate visual synthesis of utopian morphology and rustic domesticity, is in fact a plagiarized version of an English garden colony. An insertion, as Kauffmann confessed, of a “possibly alien type into the rural landscape”. After Nahalal, Kauffmann will design dozens more workers’ moshavim, all following the same structural principles, but none as schematic, efficient and hermetic (fig. 3). The picturesque (Kauffmann’s recurring notion) is gradually released as the architect gains more experience. Sociology structures and accommodates, geography shapes and architecture re-forms. The series moshav is proliferating at a growing pace, but each moshav is custom-tailored to the terrain, networked to its regional cluster, endowed with its own singularity (fig. 4). Repetition by difference, by permutation of the type, becomes Kauffmann’s mode of operation in the design of new rural settlements. The generic and industrially reproducible type of moshav will take over only after the establishment of the State and the final dismissal of Kauffmann from national planning tasks.13

Meanwhile, the imported ‘alien type’ From Moshav to of the garden-colony that informed the birth of the moshav, reincarnated, Kibbutz strangely enough, at the origin of the ideologically and structurally most idi- osyncratic Zionist rural habitat – the ‘kibbutz’. Whereas the cooperative moshav was still based on the principle of land parcelation, and in this sense could draw on various traditions of urban and suburban planning and specifically

12 Ruth Hanin-Rabinowitz, Garden Colony and and especially immediately after, is a story yet a School Farm as Models for the Zionist to be researched and told. It is related to the Cooperative Settlements, Haifa 2006, pp. 65-70 deepening hegemony of the Labor parties (in Hebrew). within the Zionist organizations and their pre- 13 The exclusion of Kauffmann from regional ference for modernist planning theorists and and urban planning on a national scale several practitioners. years before the establishment of the State

12 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

fig. 3: Richard Kauffmann, Kfar Yehoshua, plan, 1927. Central Zionist Archive on geometrical garden city schemes, with the communal setup of the kibbutz fig. 4: Richard Kauffmann, the very notion of parcelation was problematized, indeed discarded altogether. Kfar Atta, plan, 1926. Central Zionist Archive The architectural history of the kibbutz is detailed in several recent publi- cations,14 but a brief account is needed here in order to introduce Kauffmann’s imperative role in the evolution of this settlement type. The World Zionist Organization’s wish for centralized planning and control of the agrarian training farms and the cooperative settlements, as laid out in Oppenheimer’s model of Merchavia (and personified in the figure of the managing agronomist), led to a confrontation with the immigrant farm workers, especially those belonging to revolutionary circles such as the Young Worker’s Party (HaPoel HaTza’ir). These indoctrinated workers considered the official Zionist attitude to be a betrayal of the class struggle and began to argue for independent communist workers’ settlements, autonomous of the Zionist institutions. The first training farm taken over by its workers and re-constituted as an independent commune was Degania, located at the Jordan Valley. The new self-managed autarchic settlement type was called ‘kvutza’ (literally ‘group’) and it advocated close- knit community life based on a small, predetermined number of members and manual agricultural labor. The architecture of the small kvutza, an adaptation of the Prussian farm, sought to anchor the intimate spiritual partnership of the group members in its tight spatial scheme, based on two principal zones – one residential and one agricultural – connected to one another as a large farm, at the center of which was the common yard. The notion of a fixed-size community was manifested in a fixed-shape hermetic structure. However, the small kvutza was much too exclusive and spiritual to meet the growing demand among young immigrants for collective settlements. Therefore, various spontaneous communal associations, or ‘labor battalions’, soon began to emerge. The most significant proposal for the organization of a larger and more diversified community, numbering hundreds and even thousands of members, was the idea of the ‘large kvutza’, or the ‘large kibbutz’ (literally ‘grouping’),

14 See for example: Galia Bar-Or/Yuval Yasky Hebrew in 2011); Elissa Rosenberg, An All Day (eds.), Kibbutz: Architecture Without Precedents, Garden - The Kibbutz as a Modernist Land- exh.cat., Israeli Pavilion, 12th Biennale of scape, in: Journal of Landscape Architecture, 7, Architecture, Venice, Tel Aviv 2010; Freddy 2012, pp. 32-39. Kahana, Neither Village Nor City. The Archite- cture of Kibbutz (eBook, 2015; published in

13 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

which was proposed in 1923. Unlike the unmediated mono-culture ideology of the small kvutza, the large kibbutz envisioned a community engaged in a variety of fields, including industry, culture, intellectual life, and education. Such a community required the establishment of a new settlement form, with flexible boundaries for a ‘large and growing’ settlement that is not circum- scribed from the outset, but can expand and develop continuously. Evidently, the proponents of the large kibbutz were aware of the need for a paradigm shift and articulated their project in relation both to the Marxist dialectical bind of agriculture and industry, and to the anarchist notions of a society based on voluntary associations.15 Yitzhak Tabenkin, the leading ideologue of the large kibbutz, wrote an inspiring treatise entitled On the Problems of Kibbutz Building, initially delivered as a speech at the opening of the first building course of Kibbutz Ein Harod. He lectures as follows to the future construction workers (my emphasis):

The important thing for us when studying the forms of human habitats is to arrive at the recognition that the city and the village are not natural, eternal forms, that they are transient forms […] and that a new type of settlement will evolve in the future: neither a city nor a village, but an integration of both. This view was supported by Fourier, Owen, Chernys- hevsky and others. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels predicted the “combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country […]”.16

Zionist discourse, as argued above, has aspired since its inception to reform and re-articulate both the city and the village, but has yet to come up with a practicable proposal for the hybridization-by-obliteration of the two. What makes the double-negation of Tabenkin and his fellow kibbutzniks – “neither a city nor a village” – so transgressive is precisely the resulting logic and sequen- tial image of a perfectly synthetic community, fabricated as an organic whole, instantaneously integrated in the indigenous terrain, wiping out all traces of architectural labor. Clearly, the cross-breeding of conventional taxonomy required architects to sketch the possible structure and shape of the new amalgam. The preliminary kvutza and kibbutz structures of the 1910s could no longer accommodate the emerging aspirations of the ‘immense’, and hypothetically ever-expanding, crossbreed of the ‘village of industry’. The 1920s, therefore, witnessed the emergence of the ‘architectural’ kibbutz, a kibbutz conceptualized and drawn to details by a professional architect. Although kibbutz members themselves never relinquished full participation in the design process of their own habitat, and never ceased to express their skepticism regarding the moral or intellectual capacity of professionals (as evident for example in Tabenkin’s words, below), the kibbutz, from here on, would be a total work of architecture.

Our task of building is not a matter of a profession that has to be learned from what is already there. Architecture for a socialist city will grow out of socialist thinking. The profession alone cannot solve problems of

15 Galia Bar-Or discusses the influence of the The Initial Phases: A Test Case, in: Bar-Or/ Russian anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin Yasky 2010 (note 14), pp. 17-48. and his 1898 book Fields, Factories and 16 Yitzhak Tabenkin, On the Problem of Kibbutz Workshops (London 1912) on debates within Building (1921), in: Bar-Or/Yasky 2010 the kibbutz movements; see Galia Bar-Or, (note 14), pp. 52-53.

14 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V fig. 5: Richard Kauffmann, the goal. It is incapable of Kibbutz Ein Harod and Kibbutz Tel Yosef, plan, 1926. determining the form of “what Central Zionist Archive we will build and how we will build it”.17

Once again, it was Richard Kauffmann who was destined to become the first kibbutz architect and it was he who was accredited for developing a work method that would enable the settlers’ participation in the preparation of the program and the actual planning. In retrospect, we may ascertain that, attentive as he may have been to the settlers’ notion of “what we will build and how we will build it”, he was also responsible for introducing a highly formalized scheme, which would dominate kibbutz design throughout the 1920s and have a lingering effect on the spatial organization of kibbutzim throughout the century. If Kauffmann’s first rural archetype, Nahalal, was an application of a perfectly circular and largely circulating diagram of the British garden colony, as related before, his early kibbutz designs will be drawn, so I suggest, from his formative educational and professional association with the Deutsche Garten- stadt-Gesellschaft, the German garden-city association, whose environmen- tal and architectural reform was infused with both Heimat rural nostalgia, neo-classical formal composition, and pre-Werkbund ‘organic functionalism’. Indeed, Kauffmann’s 1920s kibbutz schemes could aptly be described as ‘proto-modern’: transitional forms suspended between tight neoclassical layouts, picturesque topographical sets and modernist free-plan displays. By the 1930s and 40s, these transitional forms will be swept away, never to re-surface, by a big wave of new kibbutz master plans drawn by the architects of the newly established internal planning departments of the various kibbutz movements. Kauffmann designed a scheme for the small kvutza of Geva in 1923, based on the enclosure and inner court of the Prussian farm, but his first momentous contribution to the architecture of the Zionist communes was his 1926 master plan for Ein Harod and Tel Yosef, two adjacent large kibbutzim sharing a common service and education zone (fig. 5). This plan is striking because of its conspicuous urban manifestation and ceremonial composition. It looks like a collage of ready-made city fragments projected on the raw landscape. Against the grain of its revolutionary fiber, the kibbutz of the 1920s seems to be assembled out of dislocated, reprocessed and re-charged urban formulae. Tabenkin’s radical double negation of the urban and the rural is mis-in- terpreted by Kauffmann as a romantic vision of the urban in the rural. The notion of a dynamic community in search of a new spatial form with flexible boundaries is answered with an architectural fait accompli. Kauffmann’s kibbutz is born complete, fully equipped with a zoning scheme, axes of symmetry, internal thoroughfares and an array of public facilities. A close examination of his plan for Ein Harod reveals some principles that will prove durable throughout the various permutations of kibbutz architecture during the com- ing decades: the residential zones are arranged in a fan structure around the common public zone and dining hall (a multifunctional building that also served as an administrative center), the ‘collection room’ (perhaps a reference to a museum?), and a large plaza and lawn, which serve as gathering places for

17 Tabenkin 2010 (note 16), p. 53.

15 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

fig. 6: Richard Kauffmann, Kibbutz Yagur, plan, 1926. the entire community. Industrial and agricultural zones are located down the Central Zionist Archive slope from the settlement, and the district-level culture, health, and education institutions are located higher up the hill. Kauffmann’s initial complaint concerning the lack of precedents for rural planning was soon turned into an outburst of resourceful adaptations of Gar- tenstadt layouts, as could be observed in his various kibbutz plans of the 1920s, such as those of Yagur, Heftziba, Beit Zera, Gvat, and others (fig. 6). Obviously, a certain ideological common ground is shared by the European land reform societies and the Zionist communes, but the particular thrust of the various garden-city movements, their pointed critique of the congested and polluted metropolis, is utterly contrived within a pre-industrial setting, with no cities in the horizon and no ‘urban malaise’ to speak of. The displacement of the garden-city remedy to the countryside in effect disseminates the malady of urban planning in the rural and re-affirms the essentially synthetic character of any breed of settler-colonialism. The first phase of kibbutz planning was over already in the mid-1930s when the various kibbutz movements established their own independent planning, engineering and building departments and began to develop a distinctive spatial model based quite literally on their daily routine and social rituals. Kauffmann’s skillful adaptations of formal layouts were found conceptually unsuitable and spatially inflexible. The general urban propensity and the principle of zoning, distinctive of his plans, were already axiomatic, though now they were expressed in organic designs based primarily on the integrity and fluidity of the communal open space, or gardenscape, as it will be referred to. Structurally as well as symbolically, kibbutz architecture is now crystallized as a single undivided space, with no inner boundaries, separation fences, or any other hallmarks of land subdivision and private property. The modernist doctrine of zoning – often criticized for mechanically decom- posing the city and deflating the vitality of the mixed-use street – has the opposite effect, a cohesive one, in the scale of the rural community. It is the

16 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

fig. 7: Richard Kauffmann, Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, plan, 1949. principle of zoning, in fact, which allows the kibbutz to substitute the axial Central Zionist Archive rigidity of the garden-city layout with the elasticity of the free-plan; to do away with internal parcelization, and to operate as a unified performative space. Architect Samuel Bickels, the most prominent theorist and practitioner of kibbutz architecture since the mid-1930s, deconstructs the already trivialized signifier of the ‘garden’ which became a commonplace prefix to any modernist planning and re-formulates it as figure rather than ground:

Our planning has to be organic: neither an autonomous suburb nor a rural body. The kibbutz expression of internal gardenscape is an ‘inclu- sive garden’, in which the individual lives in the framework of the commonality, and not of a parceling for ‘private’ enterprise.18

Kauffmann will continue to design kibbutz settlements during the 1930s and 40s, but his plans will gradually change and abandon the hierarchical scheme, the orthogonal axes and the decorative gardening in favor of flowing spaces with soft contours and free figure-ground compositions. His later plans – such as the ones for Nir Am (1943), Kabri (1947), Metzova (1947), Ein Hayam (1948), Rosh Hanikra (1949), Shoresh (1950) and Ein HaNetziv (1950) – look quite similar to the ‘built collectives’ produced by the kibbutz self-planning departments (fig. 7). The architecture of the kibbutz, and to a lesser degree that of the moshav, generated vast civic space and a colossal cultural sphere. The over-determined communal facilities, or ‘social condensers’, offered a copious index of large buildings: culture house, members’ club, library, music room, performance hall, often a museum or gallery, and above all, a dining hall, the ultimate stage of the collective ritual. The rural turned into a field laboratory for innovative experiments in new building-types, attracting architects who rep- resented the cultural elite of the time. Neudorf, the fictional object of Zionist

18 Samuel Bickels, On Some Problems of Gardening, in: Bar-Or/Yasky 2010 (note 14), pp. 147-165, esp. p. 147.

17 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

fig. 8: Richard Kauffmann, proposal for a kibbutz-in- a-building at Kiryat Anavim, 1923. Central Zionist Archive

fig. 9: Richard Kauffmann, proposal for a dining hall with a tower in Kibbutz Tel Yosef, 1926. Central Zionist Archive

yearning, at last assumed its peculiar iconography: amidst rustic landscapes, crude agricultural structures, and Spartan dwellings – often still in tents or wood cabins – gleaming masterworks of bleached, stylized, self-reflexive (and self-indulgent) architecture sprouted and claimed their aesthetic authority. The conspicuously modernist mise-en-scène in the Jewish urban settings in Palestine of the 1930s (especially, but not only, in Tel Aviv and Haifa) became an emphatic hyperbole in the countryside, producing an astounding collage of curiosities, contradictions and misappropriations. The image of the (architectural) ‘machine in the garden’, recurrent in official Zionist graphic and visual art, did not signify mere Puritan productivism, but likewise manifested Zionism’s designed otherness, its estrangement from the native texture, its preeminence as émigré culture. On this scale, too, Kauffmann had the leading role and he was often responsible for setting architectural precedents (designing the first permanent dining halls) and dictating new design and building standards (such as proper consid- eration of shading and ventilation). In contrast to his quasi neo-classical master plans, his building had distinctly modernist expression. Some of his remarkable proposals, such as the kibbutz-in-a-building at Kiryat Anavim (1923, fig. 8), a project somewhat akin to Fourier’s phalanstère, or the streamlined dining hall with observatory tower for Tel Yosef (1926, fig. 9), did not materialize, but many other communal facilities – like the dining hall at Ein Harod (fig. 10), the people’s culture house at Nahalal, or the school at Degania – and numerous residential projects – ranging from one-story pitched-roofed row dwellings as in Tel Yosef (fig. 11) to the two-to-three-story flat-roofed blocks of Yagur, and displaying variations on minimum-private-existence – were actually built and determined the shape and mode of things to come in the Zionist rural.

18 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

fig. 10: Richard Kauffmann, dining hall, Kibbutz Ein Harod, 1930. (Photographer unknown) Kibbutz Ein Harod archive fig. 11: Richard Kauffmann, residential units, Kibbutz Tel Yosef, 1928. (Photographer unknown) Central Zionist Archive

Kauffmann, like many of his fellow pro- Kauffmann and the Concept of fessionals, bureaucrats and intellectuals in Arthur Ruppin’s circle,19 was an indis- Rural Urbanism pensable agent of the Zionist colonization apparatus, but he was never a settler himself and remained an émigré, a German Jew who could hardly speak the local languages for his entire life in Palestine and in Israel, a civil servant (even if he was a private architect for most of his career) who could not possibly acknowledge the settlers’ anarchist dialectics of neither/nor and instead took upon himself to relentlessly articulate an architecture of both/and, a synthetic and sustainable figure of rural urbanism that will seamlessly mediate between the various ideological thrusts and pragmatic draws of the Zionist movement. An opportunity to construct such a figure, on a scale much larger than that of the rural communes, came already in the early 1920s, when Kauffmann was commissioned by the American Zion Commonwealth to design the urban settlement (‘moshav ironi’) of Afula, or Emeckstadt as it was nicknamed. Afula was to be an actual city, a new city at the heart of Jezreel Valley, the only new city ever attempted by the Zionist authorities (before statehood), and Kauff- mann was facing again the predicament of planning without precedents. In his 1926 version of Planning of Jewish Settlements in Palestine he makes sure to distinguish between the building and the planning of a new town:

The construction of a new town from the beginning is rarely attempted anywhere, so few town-builders receive the opportunity it affords. […] One town has in recent times been freshly built in Palestine, namely Tel Aviv, near Jaffa. […] Unfortunately, this town was not built according to a coherent plan and, therefore, shows all the serious defects resulting from such anarchic procedure.20

Kauffmann then goes on to establish the solid rationale behind the creation of the new town of Afula:

There are two aspects, which will be the determining factors for the rise of a town at this particular spot. Firstly, south-to-north trade routes will intersect here the most important trade routes running west to east. Secondly, it is the central point of an extensive and fertile agricultural Hinterland, the plain of Megiddo and of the Emek Jesreel. When they are laid down, the west to east traffic arteries will be of special importance.

19 See Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Pro- 20 Kauffmann 1926 (note 10), p. 101. duction of Pre-Israeli Culture (Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 31), Leiden/Boston 2011.

19 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

fig. 12: Richard Kauffmann, Afula (Emeckstadt), per- spectives, 1925. Central Zionist Archive

After the harbor of Haifa is built, they will form the simplest and easiest means of communication from this part of the Mediterranean coast through Palestine to the countries of the east.

So evidently, Afula is not simply a local service town, but envisioned by Kauff- mann as a regional center and a junction of traffic connecting the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern. It must hinge, symbolically and practically, around a central train station, and hybridize industrial, commercial, service, agricultural and residential functions. But, beyond these general pre-conditions, Kauffmann admits that he has no further data to rely upon in order to design the city:

Many factors had to be reckoned with which apart from their not being and not having been, available in statistical form, cannot even be foreseen today. In this respect, therefore, the plan had to be based on more or less vague assumptions.

Over and beyond such professional honesty, Kauffmann does not hesitate to inform his readers about what he sees as the awkward demands of his clients which dictate a certain mode of land subdivision, flatten his urban design and delimit the city’s public space.

The land round Afula was acquired by the two above mentioned Socie- ties, the American Zion Commonwealth and the Meshek, for the purpose of being divided into plots, sold and developed. Within the residential radius of the town an average size for each plot was determined upon from the start, precluding a more or less stepped structure of building and, with that, variety in the types of edifices. […] Further, the land purchasing companies from the very beginning limited the space available for public purposes to 33 per cent in the southern part of the town, a percentage which had shrunk to 15 per cent, in the north-eastern portion.

20 Die Stahlkraft der Projekte / The Agency of the Projects V

Kauffmann nevertheless puts his faith in the ‘art of town planning’ and believes that, against all odds, he managed to achieve a ‘harmonious whole’ and all the parts of his cre- ated organism operate rationally and smoothly. One issue though seems to bother him the most: the size of the residential plots as determined by the American clients. He is perplexed by the stipulation of 4 dunam per lot and regards it as the greatest threat to the very feasibility of his future city:

Particularly in planning and shaping the residential districts, did the Companies decree of four dunam to each lot prove the greatest stumbling block. The limitation almost endangered the organic structure, particularly as it may be assumed that around 80 per cent of all the dwellings will be of the smaller type required by workmen, minor officials and the middle class.

Kauffmann certainly has a point. Finally a city is rising in the Zionist horizon; a metropolitan nucleus and fig. 13: Richard Kauffmann, a cosmopolitan hub in a pre-national and pre-industrial geography. Quite Afula (Emeckstadt), master plan, 1925. evocatively, his gloomy charcoal perspective drawings of the urban heart of Central Zionist Archive Afula convey not a bright city of tomorrow, in the tradition of the utopian avant-garde, but actually a backwardly image of a 19th century robust, congested and polluted European city (with camels in the foreground, fig. 12). As the exquisite master plan for Afula clearly indicates, Kauffmann does not see a picturesque Gartenstadt, or a fancy City Beautiful, nor an idealized Cité Industrielle, or an extruded Ville Contemporaine (published in 1922, only a year before Afula’s first master plan), but, quite the contrary, a rigorous re-enactment of a pre-modernist, pre-reformist, pre-zoned, collage city with a dense core, alternating urban scales and fabrics, mixed use perimeter blocks, interwoven public facilities and various residential districts with oversized plots, too small for extensive agriculture, much too big for self-gardening by the working and middle classes (fig. 13). In effect, during the same years he incessantly ‘misappropriates’ the garden-city paradigm in new rural settlements, Kauffmann presents a subtle critique of both the rural utopia and the prevalent urban dogma of his time. And what about the enigma of the prescribed four dunams that so aggra- vated Kauffmann? Well, it seems likely that this measure, which equals precisely one acre, came with the American clients and was derivative of American mixed notions of rural pioneering and car-based (sub)urbanism. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City of 1932, which was based entirely on the module of 1 acre, was

21 V Zvi Efrat: Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-en-Scène

fig. 14: Richard Kauffmann, Afula (Emeckstadt), panoramic indeed published several years after Emeckstadt, but the fundamental precepts perspective, 1925. and units of the American designed sprawl were already well-established and Central Zionist Archive reverberated in Zionist circles of planners and developers. Kauffmann’s city, alas, was not built, at least not according to his vision (fig. 14). In fact, no other paradigm-shift from the various garden city or garden colony models and their vicissitudes will ever be made by the Zionist colonizing authorities (or by Kauffmann himself) before and after statehood, and arguably until today. Zionism’s pastoral fancy reincarnates time and again in new rurban settlements and new peripheral towns which, certainly for the last decades, are mostly dormitory communities with no socio-agrarian impetus whatsoever and no civic memories to reactivate. As for Kauffmann himself, he kept his monopoly as chief planner of the WZO for decades, well after he left his official position at the Palestine Land Development Company and worked as a private architect, but during the 1940s he was gradually marginalized by the circles of planners closer to the hegemonic Labor movement. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 he was completely excluded from the team of planners assembled by Arieh Sharon to devise the national master plan of Israel and accelerate Zionism’s rural doctrine.