Oppenheimer, Franz

(1864–1943)

   German sociologist and Zionist. The son of a Berlin Reform rabbi, Oppenheimer practised as a physician for some years, before abandoning medicine for economics and sociology. He became a lecturer in Berlin, then in 1917 professor at the University of Frankfurt. His interest in agrarian reform led him to advocate co-operative group farming. In 1902 he was introduced to HERZL, who invited him to talk at the Sixth Zionist Congress the following year, on the possible application of his ideas to land settlement in Palestine. This drew him into the Zionist orbit. In 1911, under his influence, the Palestine Office in Jaffa directed by Dr Arthur RUPPIN started an experimental co-operative village at Merhavia, in Galilee. Oppenheimer was thus one of the theoretical founders of the kibbutz system. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Oppenheimer was chairman of a committee set up by a group of German Zionists to safeguard the position of Jews in Russian territory occupied by the German forces. This collaboration with the German authorities was repudiated by Zionist leaders elsewhere, but Oppenheimer was a patriotic German who believed that Germany represented civilization pitted against Russian barbarism. Yet he was ousted from his academic post and forced to leave Germany in 1938. He settled in Los Angeles, where he died five years later. In 1964, the West German government issued a special stamp commemorating the centenary of his birth.