Arthur Ruppin

Arthur Ruppin (1876 to 1943) was a German Zionist and one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv, described after his death as the founder of German-Jewish demography and the father of Israeli sociology. Born in Rawicz, he left school at fifteen to support his family, worked in the grain trade and still completed studies in law and economics. He directed Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics from 1904, moved to Palestine in 1907 and from 1908 led the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, where he organized land purchase and settlement and helped build the first kibbutz, Degania. He headed the Jewish Agency from 1933 to 1935, and in 1926 he joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founded its Department for the Sociology of the Jews. His best-known sociological work was The Jews in the Modern World (1934). He was also a proponent of pseudoscientific race theory, which he applied to Jews, an aspect of his work that Israeli historiography long minimized.