Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine by Dekel Peretz (review)

Reviewed by: Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine by Dekel Peretz Stefan Vogt Dekel Peretz. Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 304 pp. In the past, Franz Oppenheimer has mainly been looked at as a "father of social market economy"—the tame version of capitalism that structured the West German economy until the 1980s. While this is in itself a rather questionable attribution, it certainly does no justice at all to the multifaceted intellectual and political activities of Oppenheimer. In recent years, research on his life and work has increasingly focused on his Jewish and Zionist activities and self-understanding. As a result, the picture of Oppenheimer becomes much more complex. Dekel Peretz's book contributes to this welcome development. It follows the lead of the End Page 251 path-breaking study by Claudia Willms, having at the same time the bad luck of being published only a few years later and thus not having been able to use it.1 This leads to a number of repetitions, but Peretz's study also provides new and original insights. Peretz demonstrates that Oppenheimer's activities in the Zionist movement had a lot to do with his self-image as a German Jew. Through the example of Oppenheimer, he shows that Zionism, at least in its German and Central European manifestation, was not only about the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, but also about the reconfiguration of the position of the Jews within European societies. Peretz also shows that these two goals were closely interconnected. This connection is illuminated from two perspectives. Firstly, the study looks at Oppenheimer's confrontation with racial theory and antisemitism. Secondly, it investigates the intersections between Zionism and German colonialism. As Peretz puts it, Oppenheimer and his circle are used as a case study "to better our understanding of how the entanglement of German Jews in Imperial Germany's racial and colonial discourses contributed to the shaping of German-Jewish identity before the First World War" (9). The book is divided into two parts. In the first two chapters, Peretz analyzes Oppenheimer's biographical path from a practicing physician to an academic sociologist. The focus here is on his critical engagement with racial theories and concepts of "racial hygiene." It becomes clear that even if Oppenheimer remains within the contemporary discourses on "race," he nevertheless occupies a specific position within this field. He insisted that "race" was a dynamic category that could be significantly influenced and altered by social and historical factors, and that these alterations opened up a utopian-socialist perspective. This becomes particularly obvious in Peretz's analysis of the controversy between Oppenheimer and Werner Sombart at the Second German Sociologists' Convention in 1912. He shows that Oppenheimer specifically criticized the unquestioned antisemitic assumptions in Sombart's and other sociologists' theories of race. By turning these assumptions into the object of scholarly critique, Peretz concludes, Oppenheimer denied these racial theorists' authority to speak about Jews, thus pursuing a classic anticolonialist strategy. The third chapter serves as a bridge to the second part of the book and looks at Oppenheimer's path to Zionism. Starting from personal contact with Theodor Herzl, this path led Oppenheimer right into the center of the Zionist movement. As a specialist in cooperative settlements, he gave a programmatic speech at the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 and was elected to the newly founded Commission for the Exploration of Palestine. However, Oppenheimer was not a faithful follower of Herzl, but from the outset supported practical Zionism. In fact, it was Oppenheimer who urged Herzl to make concessions to practical Zionism by supporting his own settlement ideas. This argument is taken up again in the last chapter, where Peretz discusses the attempts to implement Oppenheimer's settlement ideas End Page 252 in Palestine, the failure of these attempts, and Oppenheimer's eventual renunciation of Zionism. Between these two chapters lies the actual centerpiece of the book and its second part, which deals with the journal Altneuland and its circle. In this part, Oppenheimer almost completely disappears from...