Botanical gardens once helped stake a claim to a homeland
Bieling M.
Ethnobotany
The next time you stroll through a university botanical garden, remember that collecting and cataloging plants has long doubled as a way to claim land and authority, not just study nature.
Historians looked at two early 1900s projects in Palestine: agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn's 1910 research station, built partly around his discovery of wild wheat, and the 1931 botanical garden at Hebrew University founded by Otto Warburg and Alexander Eig. Both efforts studied local plants, but they also served a bigger goal: building scientific credibility and political legitimacy for Jewish settlement in the region. The story shows how something as ordinary as a seed collection or a garden plot can carry serious political weight.
Key Findings
Aaron Aaronsohn established the first Jewish agricultural experiment station in Palestine in 1910, building international scientific credibility partly through his research on wild wheat varieties.
Otto Warburg and Alexander Eig founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's botanical garden in 1931 as a parallel effort to catalog and claim authority over Palestinian plant life.
The authors apply Donna Haraway's 'companion species' framework to argue that Zionist plant science co-produced nature and political nation-building rather than treating them as separate pursuits.
chevron_right Technical Summary
This is a history-of-science article showing how early Jewish settlers in Palestine used botany, from a wild-wheat research station to a university botanical garden, as a tool for staking political and territorial claims alongside scientific ones.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Crafting Colonial Companions: Zionist Botany in Palestine, 1900-1930s*.
In the early twentieth century, agricultural research played an important role in the Zionist movement's efforts to increase Palestine's productivity and to facilitate large-scale Jewish settlement...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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