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Shades of White: African Climate and Jewish European Bodies, 1903–1905

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the East Africa Plan and the ensuing, tempestuous Zionist debate between the years 1903 and 1905. While the prevailing literature typically couches this debate in ideological, political, and cultural terms, this paper by contrast aims to highlight the racial and environmental discourses that were intertwined with these perspectives. In specific, I analyse a range of arguments for and against the Plan, focusing on the East African climate and its potential physical and mental effects on Jewish European settlers. On this account, the utilisation of climate as an argument in the context of the East Africa Plan was predominantly embedded in a common scientific colonial discourse, relying upon European knowledge and expertise on the allegedly enervating effect of tropical climates on white European bodies. I furthermore claim that climate became a favourite argument within this debate owing to its attributes as an abstract, amorphous, and fluid concept, which was also a concrete and empirically proven condition. This liminality rooted in the concept of climate impeccably suited the tantalising position of Jews as both similar to and different from Europeans.