2026-04-29T11:30:39Z https://jewish-textual-architectures.online/oai

oai:jta:source-11.en 2025-03-03T00:00:00Z

en Palestine and the world of tomorrow by Eric Mendelsohn, F.R.I.B.A.Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects https://jewish-textual-architectures.online/source/jta:source-11 Erich Mendelsohn Institute for the History of the German Jews Online Ressource The author of the text is the architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953) from Allenstein, East Prussia. He emigrated from Germany in March 1933. In the same year, he founded new offices in London and in 1935 in Jerusalem, between which he travelled. The short text (18.5 p.) published by Jerusalem Press Ltd. in Palestine, then a British Mandate, in an unknown edition has no illustrations. It was published in February 1940, when Mendelsohn was living in Palestine with his wife. They had left London in the early summer of 1939 due to the recognizable threat of war. However, the situation in Palestine was also difficult. Mendelsohn’s building projects suffered from the Arab uprising between 1936 and 1939. In September 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. The following month, the British Mandate government imposed a ban on immigration to Palestine. The 53-year-old architect, who had already visited Palestine for the first time in 1923, when there were still far fewer European immigrants living in the country, wrote the text at a politically extremely turbulent time. He starts the text with a review of 6,000 years of history of the Mediterranean and its neighbors. In his view, Ottoman rule led to the decline of Palestine, which is nevertheless “the only solution to the perpetual conundrum” facing European Jews today. However, he notes that Palestine is not an uninhabited country, but on the contrary part of the Arab world. Therefore, the fate of Palestine depends on Jews and Arabs seeing themselves as members of the common Semitic family and developing the country together. It is a demand towards both sides. 2025-03-03