How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied many Zionist professionals in the Yishuv, the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine. Developing ways of life that aligned with the local conditions—especially the climate and endemic diseases—was deemed essential, particularly given the disadvantage these posed for Jewish labor. Safeguarding Jewish health and acclimating to the local conditions were not only seen as crucial to the Zionist project’s success; they were inherent to its goal of shaping a new type of Jew—strong, healthy, and rooted in the land.
Science played a key role in adapting Jewish settlers’ ways of life to the Palestinian environment. Studies have emphasized the dual function of science and technology in advancing Zionist colonization, as both practical and ideological instruments. Practically, science and technology fostered the “material enactment … of a Zionist-dominated technocapitalist order,” laying the groundwork for a future Jewish state.Footnote 1 Ideologically, science and technology served to legitimize Zionist settlement as a vehicle of progress and development.Footnote 2 Recent studies, however, show how science and technology were used not only to cast Zionists as modern settlers, coming to redeem the land from desolation, but also as instruments for “indigenization”— symbolically, as a means to establish the ancient Jewish presence in the land (e.g., via archaeology), and practically, by using scientific knowledge to facilitate the settlers’ “striking roots.”Footnote 3
Food consumption was one arena in which science was employed to advance Jewish adaptation to the new environment. Scholars have noted how early Zionists used the consumption of local foods to mark themselves as “natives.”Footnote 4 Semiosis, however, was not the only mode by which consumption of Palestinian food was supposed to foster Jewish indigenization. In the discourse of scientific nutrition, foods from the Palestinian menu were promoted as best suited to the local conditions. Yet, even those texts that praised Arab cuisine were embedded in a colonial epistemology and its racialized hierarchies of human value. These hierarchies were not without their tensions. It was not merely a lack of acclimation to the local environment that challenged Zionist colonization efforts. The very condition underpinning Zionist claims to superiority—civilized modernity, marked by refined manners and a sedentary lifestyle—was also perceived to foster softness and effeminacy. In contrast, men from subjugated groups, including some colonized populations, with their rough physicality and “primitive” way of life, were often seen as embodying the lost masculinity of civilized men.Footnote 5 These ideas informed Zionist perceptions of Arab workers.
This article focuses on the work of a specific nutrition scholar, Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine from 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question of how to compensate for Jewish workers’ physical inferiority compared to Arab workers through nutrition and psychotechnics—a branch of applied psychology that used principles and methods from experimental psychology to solve practical problems, particularly those related to the workplace.Footnote 6 As a scholar of nutrition, he conducted scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian Arab kitchen and encouraged European Jewish settlers to adopt some of them, correlating their nutrition more to the conditions of the land and thus making it more “rational.”
Although early Zionist physicians and nutrition experts promoted elements from the local Arab diet, Wilbushewich was not a “typical” Zionist nutrition scholar. Operating on the margins of institutional science, he was considered an idiosyncratic scholar by his contemporaries. He also did not embrace Zionist ideology or affiliate with any Zionist organization, although he cooperated with Zionist bodies and devoted much energy to the success of their colonization work. I focus on Wilbushewich because his work illuminates key tensions in Zionist society and culture building. Through Wilbushewich and his work, I aim to demonstrate how “race”—understood as a set of assumptions linking specific human groups with ostensibly innate physical and mental traits—figured within a science-based project of reform in the colonial context of Mandate Palestine. While Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy—between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.Footnote 7
I first discuss the discourse of Zionist nutrition and medical professionals on food consumption and acclimatization, followed by Wilbushewich’s understanding of the predicament of Jewish settlers, “idealistic workers” in particular.Footnote 8 I then examine the two main channels by which he sought to remedy the situation: education in rational nutrition and the new field of psychotechnics.
Nutrition and Climate in the Discourse of Zionist Reformers and Educators
Despite Zionist rhetoric of “return,” European Jews who settled in Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries arrived in a land whose environmental profile was, at best, unfamiliar and, at worst, considered hazardous for Europeans.Footnote 9 Early Zionist assumptions about a natural fit between the “national character” and the land unraveled in the face of local realities.Footnote 10 Educating settlers on how to adapt to the new environment became a thriving Zionist industry.Footnote 11 If controlling endemic diseases topped the health agenda, nutrition education also formed a chapter in the corpus devoted to advancing Jewish health and acclimatization.
Yet the aspirations of these educational endeavors extended beyond physical health. As in other metropolitan and colonial contexts, such aspirations constituted biopolitical projects of social engineering. Politically flexible, such projects were advanced by state, para-state, and international actors, often toward different ends.Footnote 12 Scholarship on colonial biopolitics considers health and hygiene campaigns as technologies of rule—tools for producing compliant, productive subjects while reinforcing racial hierarchies.Footnote 13 Aspirations aside, interwar colonial nutrition reforms, where they emerged, were typically fragmentary, unevenly implemented, and ineffective in addressing problems often rooted in colonialism itself.Footnote 14
In the Yishuv, nutrition education was initially promoted by women’s organizations—the American Hadassah and the international WIZO—that sought to contribute to the Zionist project through traditionally “feminine” domains. It was not until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, which disrupted Jewish reliance on the Arab market, and especially under the pressures of WWII, that nutrition emerged as a more prominent focus in both Zionist and British biopolitics. As Sherene Seikaly notes, it was war, with its demand for stronger soldiers and more productive workers, that drew British attention to Palestine’s nutritional economy, prompting a tentative expansion of welfare initiatives.Footnote 15
Zionist nutrition educators grounded their work in the principle of “rational nutrition.” Nutrition was considered rational if it provided all the body’s nutritional needs, qualitatively and quantitatively, with minimal investment of money and energy. By the interwar period, nutritional needs were no longer seen as universal. Adequate nutrition had to take into account the needs of specific bodies (in terms of sex, race, age, and health condition) performing specific tasks in specific environmental contexts.Footnote 16 A 1925 Hebrew hygiene textbook, for example, calculated that a bookbinder required only 90 calories per hour of work, compared to 300–330 for a stone cutter or 400–430 for a lumberjack. Even “easy mental labor” was distinguished from “deep and complicated thoughts.”Footnote 17
Climate was believed to be the most significant environmental factor in rational nutrition, due to its effect on metabolism.Footnote 18 The effect of climate, however, was also not universal, but varied according to constitution and “acclimatization.” Since the late 18th century, the concept of acclimatization—understood as “the intended and ‘scientifically’ mediated transplantation of organisms”—became central to colonial science, with scholars seeking to determine if and how Europeans could adapt to tropical environments.Footnote 19 While the reigning approach in the 18th century assumed that Europeans could acclimatize to the tropics by adjusting their ways of life, including by adopting some indigenous habits, the rise of racial determinism in the 19th century led to the perception that innate racial traits were crucial to one’s ability to acclimatize. In the early 20th century, advances in “tropical medicine” and bacteriology shifted the focus from race to acquired immunity, reviving interest in ways of life, including nutrition, as key to disease prevention and acclimatization in tropical environments.Footnote 20
Between the wars, European views on the diets of racialized others also began to shift. The discovery of vitamins in the early 20th century, and the formulation of “the newer knowledge of nutrition,” reframed physical differences—hitherto attributed to race—as outcomes of diet.Footnote 21 Colonial territories offered fertile grounds for comparative research of indigenous diets in their “natural” contexts.Footnote 22 Although ideas of racial difference persisted, the belief that nutritional needs could be met through varied diets sometimes led to a more positive perception of these diets. By the late 1930s, scholars agreed that the same nutritional requirements could be met in many ways; that physical differences between human groups often reflected dietary variation; and that national and ethnic food traditions were environmentally adapted but frequently deficient and should be scientifically improved.Footnote 23
These ideas shaped the discourse of scientific nutrition in the Yishuv. Although the notion of Jewish racial difference was prominent in early Zionism, it was grounded in a neo-Lamarckian outlook that placed environmental factors—Jewish “degeneration” in the diaspora and the anticipated “regeneration” through settlement and physical labor in Palestine—at the center of its racial ontology.Footnote 24 Yet failure to adapt to the local environment threatened such regenerative efforts, as educators frequently warned. In the context of nutrition, experts criticized Jewish settlers for carrying over diaspora habits—especially excessive meat consumption (indeed, excessive consumption in general) and insufficient intake of fruits and vegetables.Footnote 25 Mordechai Brachyahu, head of the Hadassah School Hygiene Department and one of the Yishuv’s leading hygienists, denounced the settlers’ irrational food preparation, their monotonous, protein- and fat-heavy diets low in vitamins, and their ignorance of local produce. He urged them to eat less meat and oil, fewer luxury goods, and more fresh fruits and vegetables suited to the warm climate.Footnote 26
In contrast, Palestinian Arab cuisine—though not impeccable—was regarded by nutrition experts as well adapted to the local climate and produce, and such experts encouraged European settlers to familiarize themselves with this cuisine and learn from it. As early as 1912, Dr. Hillel Yaffe wrote in Shmirat ha-Briʿut la-Po‛alim be-Erez Israel (Health Maintenance for Workers in the Land of Israel): “There is a general rule of hygiene: eat and drink according to the customs of the land. Of course, this should not be taken to extremes… but this rule is generally true.”Footnote 27
Arab foodways were praised for not only suiting the local environment but also being “natural.” According to an accepted tenet of nutrition discourse, different cuisines developed “instinctively,” in harmony with the local produce and climate. Modern civilization, food processing, and global trade, by contrast, were seen as corrupting diet and harming health.Footnote 28 In Higyena: Ḥelek Klali (Hygiene: A General Part), Brachyahu lamented: “… our food and its preparation is too civilized, never has man felt himself so weak and tired as now… civilization… refines the organs, depriving them of work, and so they degenerate out of idleness and laziness.”Footnote 29 This image was contrasted with the image of indigenous people as living in their natural surroundings, eating a simple diet, and living a more healthy life in general than Civilized Man.Footnote 30 Thus, Brachyahu praised the Arab way of roasting meat, “forgotten by man” as cuisines became sophisticated, and Hadassah physician Yaacov Zass, discussing the importance of chewing for the teeth and digestive process in Hahigyena shel ha-Guf ve-ha-Ruach (The Hygiene of the Body and the Mind), wrote: “our Arab neighbors are ‘artists’ in chewing; some people are able to swallow a whole portion… during the time it takes an Arab to swallow a small piece of pita bread with onion.”Footnote 31
At the same time, some writers praised the richness of Arab cuisine. Thus, Brachyahu noted that Arabs prepared dozens of tasty dishes from eggplants, marrows, and tomatoes, shunned by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, as they did not know how to use these fruits and vegetables.Footnote 32 Lilian Cornfeld, a nutrition advisor to various British and, later, Israeli bodies, even credited “Orientals” with culinary instincts that aligned with science, remarking that they “know how to fry scientifically, that is, with much hot oil.”Footnote 33 This appreciation grew during WWII, as nutrition experts turned to Middle Eastern cuisines for simple, nutritious, and locally sourced dishes.Footnote 34 Despite their alleged flaws, these cuisines were increasingly recognized as valid sources of culinary inspiration. Among the first to encourage settlers to adopt ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian Arab menu was Moshe Wilbushewich.
Moshe Wilbushewich and the Predicament of the Jewish Settler Diet
While many health and hygiene manuals in the Yishuv addressed nutrition, probably no other nutrition scholar placed the shaping of the Jewish diet at the center of a comprehensive plan with goals beyond nutrition proper as Moshe Wilbushewich (Fig. 1). Much of his career evolved around food. Born in 1869 to a wealthy family in the Grodno district of Russia, he was one of six siblings, including notable Zionist figures Mania Wilbushewich-Shochat, Gedaliah Wilbushewich, and Nahum Wilbush. Starting as a miller on the family estate, Moshe became an autodidact in mechanics and chemistry. In 1895, he joined Gedaliah’s technical office in Minsk, and later became the technical manager of an oil factory they helped establish. In the following years, Moshe patented numerous inventions, including a method for solidifying vegetable oil, which brought him considerable wealth—most of it later nationalized by the Bolsheviks. Twice he took a break from the industry to audit courses in Leipzig and Zurich, studying experimental psychology, philosophy, sociology, and theology under figures such as Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Ostwald. Before settling in Palestine in 1924, he visited the country twice, in 1912 and 1919, to explore options for industrial development. In the second visit, he and Nahum developed an ambitious plan for an oil factory next to a customs free port in Caesarea, and adjacent to it a village for the workers, who would also be shareholders in the firm. When the British government denied them of drilling rights next to the Caesarean antiquities, Moshe and Nahum redirected the project to Alexandria. Following various social measures Moshe implemented in the factory, such as an eight-hour workday, he was investigated on suspicion of Bolshevism and eventually deported in 1924.Footnote 35 He returned to Palestine, left industry, and set up a nutrition and psychotechnics lab in his Haifa apartment. In 1935, he founded the “Moshe Laboratory” for bioclimatology and rational nutrition on the grounds of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also lived until he was forced to evacuate during the war of 1948, when the campus became an Israeli enclave under Jordanian rule. He moved to the town of Holon, living with his student and colleague Abraham Rivner, until his death in 1952.Footnote 36
Figure 1. Wilbushewich’s ticket to the Berlin exhibition “Die Ernährung,” 1928, CZA A211/90/4.
Throughout his years in Palestine, Moshe Wilbushewich was driven by his desire to establish the Zionist project on scientific grounds. Shunning Zionism ideologically and supporting peaceful cooperation between Jews and Arabs, he was nonetheless committed to the vision of transforming Palestine into a Jewish center, which he believed would bring prosperity to all the country’s inhabitants. He was a follower of chemist Wilhelm Ostwald’s “sociological energetics,” namely, the application of energy conservation laws to human society, and sought to realize his imperative of energy efficiency through rationalizing human conduct and food consumption.Footnote 37 At the same time, Wilbushewich framed his pursuit of efficiency and waste avoidance through the biblical injunction of bal tashchit—the commandment prohibiting the needless destruction or waste of useful resources.Footnote 38
A central concern for Wilbushewich was how European Jewish settlers could adjust their ways of life and eating habits to their new environment to optimize their energy economy and minimize waste. In a lecture on nutrition, he argued that, over time, a process of co-adaptation occurs between a region’s climate, its agricultural produce, and its inhabitants.Footnote 39 This co-adaptation, he explained elsewhere, is evident in the intimate knowledge indigenous people possess about how to make the most of local plants.Footnote 40 But when one element in this triad changes—as it did in the Zionist case, with the move to Palestine—the balance is disrupted. For Wilbushewich, this imbalance was apparent in the settlers’ imported foodways, which were ill-suited to the local climate and their altered living conditions. While the climate was a given, both the produce and people’s behavior could be adapted.Footnote 41
The Arab consumption of olive oil was one of Wilbushewich’s examples of co-adaptation between indigenous people and the products of the land.Footnote 42 In contrast to the dominant Zionist view that cast Arabs as responsible for the land’s alleged decline, Wilbushewich assumed a state of harmony between the Arabs and the land: having lived in the country for centuries, he wrote, they developed a tradition and instincts attuned to its climate and agricultural resources.Footnote 43 While he did propose adapting the products of Jewish farms to align with Jewish ways of life—for example, cultivating wheat with a higher protein content—Wilbushewich maintained that, ultimately, Jewish settlers could adjust themselves to the land faster than the land would adapt to them.Footnote 44
From his earliest days in Palestine, Wilbushewich was most occupied with the workers in the Zionist labor movement. These workers, celebrated as icons of national revival, were seen as the vanguard of Jewish “productivization.” Yet, in practice, much of their productive energy was lost to illness—primarily intestinal diseases—which led to the loss of many workdays.Footnote 45 Moreover, Jewish workers’ attainment and consequent earning capacity lagged behind that of Arab workers.Footnote 46 The economic crisis of the late 1920s further intensified labor competition and unemployment, fostering a growing sense of frustration and despair amid the workers’ ranks.Footnote 47
For Wilbushewich, part of the problem lay in the fact that many of the idealistic workers were not fit for manual labor. Willpower and self-sacrifice were not enough—not everyone, he believed, was born equipped for physical work, just as not everyone was equipped for intellectual work. Too many of the workers succumbed to the burden of practical tasks or gave up, rendering their sacrifice futile. The solution was to be found in the emerging field of psychotechnics, particularly its aptitude-testing methods for identifying individuals’ inherent capabilities. By assigning people to occupations that matched their skills and dispositions, their performance could be optimized.Footnote 48
However, the workers’ predicament was not limited to those unsuited for physical labor. As Wilbushewich observed, compared to native Arab workers, European Jewish workers consumed two to three times more calories to perform the same task. Two other factors accounted for the higher work attainment of Arab workers. First, Arabs could work just as well with both the right and left hand, enabling them to maintain output even in uncomfortable positions. Second, they could perform the same task for hours without requiring a sense of the work’s purpose, whereas knowing the purpose of the work influenced the performance of “Europeans.”Footnote 49 In this, Wilbushewich departed from the labor-Zionist insistence that Jewish workers could, in principle, equal Arab workers in any form of physical labor. Instead, he conceded a physical advantage to Arab workers, positioning Jewish workers more squarely as “civilized European men.”Footnote 50
In early 1925, Wilbushewich studied the nutritional habits of members of The Labor Battalion (Gdud Haʿavoda)—a nationwide organization of Zionist labor and colonization communes, co-founded by his sister Mania. Drawing on data collected over the course of a year in both Jerusalem and Tel Yosef, he found that although the members consumed between 4,000–5,000 calories a day, they nevertheless exhibited clear signs of malnutrition.Footnote 51 Wilbushewich concluded that this was the result of insufficient intake of essential nutrients, especially vitamins, caused by inadequate food preparation, which also impaired digestion.Footnote 52 Subsequent studies he conducted among the workers confirmed that a diet poorly adapted to the climatic and environmental conditions of Palestine––thus, an “irrational” diet––was the central cause of their distress.Footnote 53 Other professional observers also corroborated his concern about the inadequacy of the workers’ diet.Footnote 54
Wilbushewich believed that European Jews’ intellectual advantage could help them compensate for the physical advantage of Palestine’s native population—by conducting scientific studies of the land, its climate, and its produce and deploying scientific methods to facilitate Jewish acclimatization.Footnote 55 As early as 1926, he developed a comprehensive plan to promote rational nutrition in the Yishuv, which involved his own laboratory, Kupat Holim, the Hadassah Medical Organization, the Botanical Experiment Station in Tel Aviv, the Technion, and the Hebrew University. The plan encompassed scientific studies of the local conditions, nutritional and botanical experiments, public education campaigns, and the establishment of training courses for specialists in rational nutrition who would then disseminate this knowledge among Jewish workers.Footnote 56 Wilbushewich argued that the existing nutritional standards were inadequate for Palestine, advocating for the development of a new coefficient tailored to the local conditions and based on empirical research.Footnote 57 His proposal also called for the study of plants and edible weeds traditionally consumed by “the inhabitants of the country.”Footnote 58 In the original version of the plan, he envisioned the Hebrew University as the body in charge of coordinating and supervising the work of all other institutions.Footnote 59 In the following year, he offered Hadassah leadership over the initiative.Footnote 60
In the framework of this plan, Wilbushewich was to assume the roles of scientist, inventor, and educator. Following his study on the nutritional conditions in the Labor Battalion, he experimented with feeding several volunteers from the battalion according to the principles of rational nutrition, with promising results.Footnote 61 In 1927, he established an “Experiment Group” in his home and laboratory in Haifa. Composed of ten “science thirsty volunteers,” including Mania (Fig. 2),Footnote 62 the group conducted nutritional experiments (often on themselves), investigated local dietary practices, and collaborated with various medical institutions, scientific bodies, and professional associations.Footnote 63 Although Wilbushewich’s broader plan never materialized as a fully coordinated and institutionalized program, he continued to work relentlessly toward its goals, conducting scientific nutritional studies and spreading education in rational nutrition. In the sections that follow, I discuss the two main fields of knowledge and practice by which Wilbushewich sought to realize his vision of energy optimization through scientifically rationalizing everyday life: nutrition and psychotechnics.
Figure 2. Moshe, Mania, and another woman, probably at the laboratory, undated, Beit Hashomer Museum Archive, Kfar Giladi.
Nutrition Studies and Nutrition Education
Rationalizing the diet of Jewish settlers involved both scientific studies of varied topics (the biochemical composition of local products, the most efficient ways to prepare them, the effects of the climatic conditions on metabolism, etc.) and nutrition education. Nutrition education was pursued mainly by training nutrition teachers primarily for institutional and communal kitchens. The group also promoted rational nutrition through newspaper articles and public lectures.Footnote 64 Through the training courses, articles, and lectures, Wilbushewich tried to introduce elements from the Palestinian menu into the Jewish diet.
Following his experiments with the Labor Battalion, Wilbushewich offered his home and services, free of charge, for training a small group to implement his teaching in workers’ kitchens, hoping to expand it nationwide.Footnote 65 The first course began in December 1929, with WIZO’s financial support, and lasted almost a year.Footnote 66 Six women enrolled, who lived in a house close to the laboratory and received a monthly stipend.Footnote 67 By July 1930, there was already a list of candidates for the second course, for which ten were to be selected, and admission standards were raised to include basic knowledge of German or English—the main languages of nutritional science—as well as cooking experience.Footnote 68 Demand for the course was high, given the high prospects for finding a job as a nutrition teacher.Footnote 69
Throughout the course, the students gained both theoretical and practical knowledge of nutrition, cooking, and home economics. The curriculum included subjects such as physiology, household chemistry and physics, nutrition theory, the psychology of nutrition, food waste, energy economy, kitchen psychotechnics, and cooking theory. Practical training included cooking, kitchen organization, household budgeting, and nutrition instruction. Each month focused on a specific topic (e.g., oil, carbohydrates), combining lectures and practical work.Footnote 70
As part of the course, students made weekly visits to local markets to purchase products for experimentation, analyzing usable versus discarded parts and evaluating cost efficiency based on preparation energy and nutritional value. They also assessed the efficiency of various cooking pots and appliances. Course participants kept two records: a collective account tracking monthly food expenditures, purchases, and waste; and an individual log for each participant, which included the appropriate amount of food for twenty-four hours, established based on Pirquet’s “Pelidisi index”—a body measurement index, calculated to include, besides sitting height, a clinical assessment of general health—and type of work performed, alongside a note of actual daily food intake.Footnote 71 Participants also analyzed their own feces to determine the digestion rates of different foods and preparation methods, as well as monitored their weight daily. Once a month, they were examined by a Hadassah doctor and tested with a respiration calorimeter (an instrument for measuring gas metabolism, Fig. 3).Footnote 72
Figure 3. Dr. Chemistry Lida Wilbushewich, “Shitot Ḥadashot bi-Vḥinot Psykhotekhniyot: Me-Avodotav shel Moshe Wilbushewich,” Tekhnika ve-Mada 10, no. 12 (1947): 4, CZA A211/185.
As noted, Wilbushewich believed Jewish settlers should engage with Palestinian-Arab cuisine and adopt some of its ingredients, methods, and techniques.Footnote 73 A 1926 course outline on scientific food preparation, prepared by Wilbushewich and his team, emphasized experimenting with local products “so far utilized by Arabs only,” such as tahini, oil cake (kusba), and various wild greens, and learning traditional Arab preparation and preservation methods.Footnote 74 The plan for the instructors’ course included assistance in cooking by a locally born Sephardi or Arab woman.Footnote 75 At a planning meeting, Mania proposed evaluating the cook’s use of local ingredients and the digestive effects of their preparations..Footnote 76 During their market visits, students were instructed to pay close attention to the vegetables brought by Arab villagers.
Studying indigenous foodways involved both collecting information and conducting scientific analysis of various ingredients and combinations. In 1928, Wilbushewich reached out to Palestinian physician and ethnographer Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, citing his “thorough knowledge of the customs of the natives,” and asked where to find information on local diets.Footnote 77 One Arab dietary habit Wilbushewich found commendable was the pairing of legumes—a good source of protein in a poor country—with greens, which together could form a complete protein based on their composition of amino acids. While legumes with sauerkraut were good, he wrote, “the vegetables of the Arabs” were better, since different legumes were paired with different greens. Wilbushewich proposed identifying these combinations and scientifically analyzing their amino acid content.Footnote 78 To this end, he arranged to have herbs and wild vegetables used in Arab cooking brought to the laboratory, along with their Arabic (and if possible, Hebrew and Latin) names and information on preparation methods.Footnote 79 He also contacted the Agricultural Experiment Station of the Zionist Organization in Tel Aviv for relevant materials.Footnote 80 After an article on local edible plants appeared in the professional agricultural journal Ha-Sade (The Field) in August 1930, Wilbushewich urged the authors to notify the public which amino acids were contained in each of the plants, so that people would be able to use them as complements to legumes. He also asked the authors to add the Arab name to the Latin and Hebrew ones, making it easier for people to purchase them in the market for public kitchens.Footnote 81
Tahini was one of the key Palestinian foods Wilbushewich sought to introduce to Jewish settlers. He noted that, since European Jews were unaccustomed to liquid oils, the sesame emulsion was a climate-appropriate, locally grown alternative, which was both affordable and highly nutritious.Footnote 82 Many of the recipes developed in the laboratory featured tahini: onion cutlets with tahini, beet and pumpkin roast with tahini, fried eggs with tahini, fish with tahini, etc.Footnote 83 These dishes were tested on course participants to assess their physiological effects and were intended for inclusion in a cookbook tailored to local conditions.Footnote 84
Wilbushewich and his team also promoted Arab foods and eating habits through their columns in Davar (Word)—the daily newspaper of the Histadrut, the foremost Zionist labor union. These columns were dedicated to education on nutritional matters, for example, “the nutritional value of vegetables,” “on meat,” and “milk and its germs.”Footnote 85 A June 1930 column on legumes, for instance, highlighted the Arab habit of pairing legumes with greens as one of several ways to increase their nutritional value. Another column on oil featured an extended discussion of tahini, while a separate piece was dedicated entirely to tahini-based recipes (Fig. 4).Footnote 86
Figure 4. A column on the use of tahini by Wilbushewich’s lab. Mitokh ha-Maʾabada shel Moshe Wilbushewich, “Madrikh le-Meshek ha-Bayit: Ha-Shimush be-Tḥina,” Davar, 18 April 1930.
Letters sent to the laboratory by individuals and agricultural collectives attest to its status as an authority on nutrition. In a January 20, 1930 letter from Kibbutz Kfar Gilʿadi-Tel Ḥai, for instance, the writer inquired about the nutritional value of tahini, whether it was safe, how much could be consumed daily, and whether it should be prepared with lemon or with sugar. The laboratory’s response outlined tahini’s nutritional content, praised its benefits, and listed various recipes. The laboratory also invited the kibbutz to send someone for clarifications, if needed, and requested feedback on recipes that did not come out well.Footnote 87
Psychotechnics
If nutrition supplied the body with usable energy, Wilbushwich’s other main field of scientific interest—psychotechnics—focused on establishing the best ways to utilize individuals’ energies by applying the methods and instruments of experimental psychology to rationalize vocational choice and work performance. The purpose of psychotechnics, as Wilbushewich described, was to prevent loss of energy and time; allow workers to experience a sense of joy and fulfillment in their work; and mediate between individuals’ needs and aptitudes and the needs of the national economy.Footnote 88 While tangential to his primary occupation with nutrition, psychotechnics was nonetheless connected to nutrition, in Wilbushewich’s oeuvre, in two main ways: through attempts to apply psychotechnical methods to kitchen work and through the study of gas metabolism in individuals and groups, not only to support vocational consultation but also to develop locally adjusted nutritional recommendations.
Psychotechnics emerged in the early 20th century as a branch of experimental psychology designed to apply psychological and psychophysical knowledge and testing techniques to practical ends, particularly in the area of vocational choice and working life.Footnote 89 No less geared toward rationalizing the work process, psychotechnics positioned itself as a corrective to Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” which sought to maximize efficiency and productivity by scientifically analyzing and standardizing labor processes, yet disregarded workers’ aptitude and satisfaction.Footnote 90 While no human activity remained outside the purview of the psychotechnical ambition, at its core was the goal of matching “the right man for the right job” through aptitude tests and instruments for measuring sense perception.Footnote 91 By the early 1920s, psychotechnical institutes had been founded in many industrialized countries, along with an International Association of Psychotechnology, which Wilbushewich and his team joined in 1926 as the self-appointed representatives of the Yishuv.Footnote 92
Wilbushewich promoted psychotechnics in the Yishuv as both a field of study and practical tool, working to implement its methods in organizations such as the Labor Battalion, the Haifa Association of Steel Workers, and the Engineers and Architects’ Association.Footnote 93 In 1926, together with Dr. Ing. Willi M. Cohn of Berlin, Wilbushewich drafted a plan for a vocational counseling bureau in Palestine based on psychotechnic methods of assessing the dispositions, qualities, and capabilities of consultees, hoping to garner the support of the Zionist Organization, the Hebrew University, and the Technion.Footnote 94 Gaining support from the Technion president, Wilbushewich helped integrate psychotechnic methods into the institution’s vocational school, acquiring instruments for its metalwork courses and appointing a member of the Experiment Group to teach psychotechnic methods.Footnote 95 In 1928, an “Eretz Israeli Association for Psychotechnics” was established by the Technion, with Wilbushewich as chair. As he announced in a press notice on the establishment of the association, psychotechnical work was spreading in the fields of construction, metalwork, rational nutrition, education, and agriculture.Footnote 96
Wilbushewich conducted two series of psychotechnic studies. The first aimed to improve workers’ diet through women’s mediation. In the summer of 1927, he and Mania toured some twenty kibbutzim, investigating women’s attitude to kitchen work through conversations with 1,196 women and a questionnaire, answered by 224 (Fig. 5). Questions included willingness to work permanently in the kitchen for pay, interest in learning hygienic and rational cooking, differences between cooking for oneself or others, and satisfaction from successful dishes.Footnote 97 In his presentation of this study at the fifth Congress of Applied Psychology, in Utrecht in 1928, Wilbushewich noted that the women’s attitude to kitchen work was more intellectual than economic: most rejected permanent communal kitchen work, even if paid, and half believed cooking should be done in turns (as was indeed the case in kibbutzim). Overall, women saw kitchen work as unrewarding and unproductive, partly, Wilbushewich hypothesized, because they were not trained to do it better. Referring to the technical appliances from the Berlin exhibition “The Nutrition,” which aimed to rationalize the “new household,” he asked his audience for advice on which psychotechnic means to introduce into the Holy Land, so that women would enjoy food preparation no less than eating.Footnote 98
Figure 5. Questionnaire booklets from kibbutzim at the Central Zionist Archive, CZA A211/55/1.
The second project studied differences in energy expenditure between different people, both men and women, performing different types of physical and mental tasks. Wilbushewich was primarily interested in the difference between Jews and Arabs, and the role of acclimatization in establishing this difference, for which purpose he compared Arabs, indigenous Sephardi Jews, and European Jews.Footnote 99 As previously noted, Wilbushewich assumed that not all people were equipped for performing the same work and having a person engage in a work below his abilities was as inadvisable as engaging in a work beyond them.Footnote 100 He also believed that European Jews were less fit for physical labor, requiring twice the energy to perform the same tasks as indigenous Arabs and Sephardi Jews.Footnote 101 Between 1928–1934, Wilbushewich conducted psychotechnical studies of more than 1,000 people, using a respiration calorimeter on 400, to measure carbon emission during different activities. His goal was to develop methods for determining individually suitable career paths as well as a locally adjusted caloric formula to set consumption guidelines and maximum work hours in different kinds of jobs.Footnote 102 Participants were first examined by a physician to ensure they were in good health and then measured lying down, sitting, standing, and during performance of various mechanical tasks (e.g., pumping water, lifting weight, rotating a wheel) and mental tasks (e.g., solving mathematical questions, reading, looking at artwork). Before participating in the experiment, participants had to rest for eighteen hours to ensure measured energy came from their own body reserves.Footnote 103
Wilbushewich’s measurements revealed individual variation in basal carbon burning—the amount of carbon burned for the operation of the internal organs—which he categorized into three levels: low, intermediate, and high. As the level of a person’s development and sensitivity increases, he argued, so increases their basal carbon burning (presumably based on the assumption that complex and sophisticated thoughts required more energy than “simple thoughts”).Footnote 104 He also discovered, to his surprise, that the level of carbon burning somewhat increased during mental work, but intellectuals spent less energy on mental work than at complete rest. In contrast, individuals suited for physical labor expended less energy performing physical tasks than mental ones, and less than intellectuals doing the same physical tasks. These findings underscored that when a certain work matched one’s physical constitution and mental disposition, it demanded less energy and less recovery time than if performed by someone less fit for it. Moreover, interest in a work and recognition of its value also helped reduce fatigue and regain strength. Based on these examinations, Wilbushewich distinguished between the type of people more easily tired by intellectual work than physical work and vice versa, warning that a mismatch would result in excessive energy expenditure, quick tiredness, and loss of work capacity. Hence, determining who was fit for which jobs was of great importance to the national economy. Wilbushewich presented his findings in two psychotechnics congresses: to the seventh International Psychotechnic Congress in Moscow in 1931, he sent an interim report on “The Results of Medical-technical Experiments Conducted between Local Arabs and Immigrant Jews in Haifa between 1928 – June 1931”; and at the eighth International Congress in Prague in 1934, he presented a report on “Psychotechnic Investigations of Carbon Burning during Physical and Mental work,” advocating the inclusion of gas metabolism examinations in the standard psychotechnic tests—an idea that, after debate, was accepted.Footnote 105
On the face of it, Wilbushewich attributed the Arabs’ physical advantage to acclimatization, which led to better use of the ingested foodstuffs and less waste, rather than to innate racial traits.Footnote 106 His experiments confirmed that native populations, when performing the same tasks, expended roughly half the energy of Ashkenazi workers. Yet, it was only Arabs and Sephardi Jews who were allegedly acclimatized—not orthodox Ashkenazi Jews who had been living in the country for generations.Footnote 107 Moreover, he assumed that the mental life of Ashkenazi workers was necessarily more “complex” than that of their Arab and Sephardi counterparts, and therefore Ashkenazi workers required more calories.Footnote 108
He also used his findings to justify the Zionist claim for unequal pay to Arab and Jewish workers—a claim typically justified by invoking the Jews’ “higher standard of living.”Footnote 109 Defying conventional economic logic, he argued that Jewish workers merited higher pay because they had to invest more energy to perform the same amount of work. He also added: “the Jew needs intellectual nourishment… for him to act, and this costs expensively. The payment is a kind of advance payment. We appreciate not only the work performed, but the work to come.”Footnote 110
Conclusion
Wilbushewich was part of a broader Zionist effort to reform Jewish settlers’ ways of life by instilling scientifically sanctioned models of conduct and consumption. His specific impact is therefore difficult to isolate. His most conspicuous contribution to Israeli food culture was likely the invention of a bread made out of germinated wheat grains (leḥem ḥai).Footnote 111 He was among the first to place nutrition on the public agenda in the Yishuv, and one of the earliest nutrition scholars to advocate adoption of particular ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen—foods that have since been appropriated to construct an “Israeli cuisine.” Psychotechnics, in contrast, never gained significant traction in the Yishuv and Israel, losing much of its broader appeal in the 1940s; today, psychotechnics survives primarily in the context of military placement tests and, to a lesser extent, employment screening.Footnote 112 However, Wilbushewich’s work vividly reveals the racial syntax—and its accompanying tensions—underpinning the harnessing of science in the service of Jewish settlers’ acclimatization.
This racial syntax did not always rely on explicit terminology; it was embedded in assumptions about embodied differences—assumptions crystalized through the conjunction of global discourses and the specific context of Zionist colonization.Footnote 113 Zionists constructed the Jews both as and as “not quite yet” civilized settlers, who had come to lift the country out of Oriental backwardness, as well as native to Palestine—their ancestral homeland, to which they had returned after 2,000 years of exile. Both figures were racialized constructions, each marked by its own ambivalences and tensions. The figure of the civilized settler was associated with Western modernity, scientific and technological advantage, and intellectual superiority, but also with frailty, indulgence, and alienation. The figure of the “native” was associated with primitiveness, simplicity, and docility, but also with rootedness, authenticity, and bodily vigor.Footnote 114 These tensions—between and within these two constructs—became particularly pronounced in the context of labor market competition with the country’s “authentic natives.”Footnote 115
Wilbushewich’s solution for the predicament of Jewish workers was to mobilize the Jewish intellectual advantage—namely, science—to compensate for their physical disadvantage. Both psychotechnics and nutrition science were intended to “rationalize” job placement and food consumption, with the goal of maximizing productivity and minimizing waste. Rationalizing the Jewish diet relied on adopting ingredients and dishes from Palestinian Arabs, whose diet was seen as having naturally evolved to fit the conditions of the land. These scientific discourses, however, were permeated with assumptions of racial difference, from the association of Arabs with “nature,” to assumptions concerning innate physical and mental differences between Jewish and Arab workers, to the manifestations of these differences in dietary calculations and recommendations. If acclimatization was seen as a trait of the country’s “authentic” natives, then the effort to use science to achieve Jewish acclimatization was inherently self-defeating—undermining its own logic by reifying the very distinctions it sought to overcome.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Research Authority of the Open University of Israel (grant no. 41300), for which I am grateful. I am especially thankful to Maya Raanan for her assistance with the research. I also thank Joel Gordon and the three anonymous International Journal of Middle East Studies reviewers for their engaged reading and thoughtful comments, as well as Snait Gissis, Alma Igra, Gadi Algazi, Tamar Novick, Erela Teharlev Ben-Shachar, Smadar Sharon, and the members of the Food Studies Research Group at Tel Aviv University for their valuable feedback at various stages in the development of this project.
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