Colonialism and the Jews (The Modern Jewish Experience) Highlight

Ashkenazi Zionists, in turn, considered their Middle Eastern brethren to be degenerate yet improvable “human material,” to employ the commonly used term from the interwar period.19 Those who had been least exposed to Western influences (for example, the Jews of Yemen) were seen as petrified exemplars of the ancient Hebrews (Galapagos Jews, as it were). Precisely because they were believed to be true Orientals, however, Yemenite Jews were also perceived as “natural laborers” who could compete successfully with Arabs, performing backbreaking agricultural work at low wages. (With this goal in mind, in 1912 the ZO’s Palestine Office recruited Yemenite Jews to immigrate to Palestine; a contingent of them labored on the lands of the Kinneret training farm, only to be summarily expelled in 1930 when the land was needed for new immigrants from eastern Europe.20)