Paper short abstract:

My talk will focus on a group of German (or German-trained) botanists who tried to settle Palestine by the implementation of botanical knowledge and methods: I will show how botany and plants illustrate processes of transfer of knowledge over geographical, cultural, and disciplinary borders.

Paper long abstract:

I will try to explore the transfer of knowledge and the importance of transnational scientific discourses in the first third of the 20th century when a group of German or German-trained scientists decided to "create facts" in Palestine by the implementation of botanical methods. They founded (German-inspired) experimental stations, university departments, museums, and botanical gardens - all of these institutions serving both ideological and practical goals.

The protagonists of "Botanical Zionism", the people who sought, collected, classified, planted, rated, and bred plants considered their profession as a necessary substrate for successful Jewish settlements. I wish to research plants and their connection to scientific, mainly botanical and agricultural, but also geographical, cartographical, zoological, and cultural practices, which were all more or less rooted in colonial science.

The "Botanical Zionists" were obsessed with scientific explorations and expeditions; they searched for the "Urweizen" and the origin of the biblical manna. Botany and agriculture were therefore systematic for a science that pretended to be objective but was nevertheless shaped by ideology. I will try to document the evolution of plants and plant science in Palestine: How did colonial-scientific practices institutionalize? How did plants arrive at the lab, the field, the curriculum? Was knowledge also circulating inside Palestine? Did the Zionist botanists implement native knowledge? Which knowledge is considered "scientific" at all? By dealing with these questions the scientific background of the "Botanical Zionists" and the transfer of knowledge that they fostered will be further examined.