Wolfgang von Weisl

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Binyamin Ze'ev (Wolfgang) from Weisl

Binyamin Ze'ev (Wolfgang) von Weisl (born March 27, 1896 in Vienna ; † February 24, 1974 in Gedera , Israel ) was a Zionist activist and, as an employee of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, one of the pioneers of the revisionist Zionism movement . He was an Austrian nobleman, doctor, journalist and one of the most important Islam experts of his time.

Life

The Viennese years

His father, Ernst von Weisl, a respected lawyer, had received his title of nobility from Emperor Franz Joseph I and was one of the first Viennese Jews to join Theodor Herzl's Zionist ideas . His conviction that they must do everything for the return of the Jews to their supposed homeland Erez Israel also influenced his son. At the age of 11, Wolfgang von Weisl published the first Zionist article in the Wiener Handelsblatt, in which he called for the relocation of Yemeni Jews to Palestine . He began studying medicine at the University of Vienna , which he had to interrupt when he was drafted as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian army when the First World War broke out in 1914. He was awarded the Iron Cross . After the war ended, a Jewish brigade set up a Jewish brigade in Vienna to fend off anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and Jewish property.

In Palestine and Israel

Since 1922, after finishing his studies, von Weisl lived as a practicing Zionist mostly in Palestine. Years later, when an Austrian ambassador asked him why he had not returned to his beloved Vienna in 1945, von Weisl replied: "As a medical student in Vienna I saw the graffiti on the toilet walls:" Jews out! " And I always read toilet literature very carefully. ” He got to know Ze'ev Jabotinsky while working for the Jewish National Fund .

In 1924 von Weisl began his career as a reporter and Middle East correspondent for the Vossische Zeitung and other newspapers of the Ullstein publishing house as well as the Wiener Neue Freie Presse . His articles have been translated and published worldwide. Von Weisl was a guest at the courts of all the rulers of the Middle East: He attended the last meal of Caliph Abdülmecit II before his deposition and was received by Hussein , King of the Hejaz . He met King Ibn Saud , Sultan Al-Atrasch , the leader of the Druze uprising against the French occupation forces in Syria, Emir Abdallah of Transjordan and accompanied King Fuad of Egypt on his visit to Germany. He submitted a plan to Faisal I , King of Iraq, which could have changed the course of the emerging Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine: He proposed relocating Palestinian Arabs to Iraq in order to cultivate the vast unused land there. Faisal was taken with it; Von Weisl failed because of the negative attitude of the British mandate power. Von Weisl opposed British policy, which in 1923 had separated the mandate east of the Jordan as the emirate of Transjordan. Instead, he demanded the undivided Holy Land for a Jewish state from the British. That is why he, like his colleague Arthur Koestler , supported the revisionist party HaTzionim HaRevizionistim (HaTzohar) founded by Jabotinsky in 1925 and wrote for the revisionist newspapers Doar HaYom (in German: Daily Mail) and Hazit HaAm (in German: People's Front).

In 1929, together with five German ministers and the widow of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin , he took part in the legendary Zeppelin trip from Berlin via Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea , where he opened a bottle of wine "for the good of the people of Israel and their homeland". During the bloody riots of August 1929, he was attacked by an Arab with a knife. The Manchester Guardian reported that he was stabbed. His friends have already written an obituary for him in which Weisl referred to, among other things, the " Mark Twain in German". But he survived and recovered.

As early as 1931 he warned of the rise of Hitler and an impending world war . He called on the Jews in Germany to get to safety: "Pack your things and go to Palestine, legally or illegally, but go." In 1935 he began to organize the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine.

In September 1946 he was arrested by the British in Latrun and went on a hunger strike . During the war of independence in 1948 von Weisl commanded an artillery unit at Be'er Scheva .

It was only after his death in 1974 that his last articles were published, completing his broad literary and journalistic oeuvre. He wrote on politics, the military, medicine, theology, philosophy, psychology, travel, and even astrology. His series about Therese Neumann , originally published in the Vossische Zeitung in August and September 1927, was published in a special edition; Within a few days, 800,000 of them were sold. On September 9, 2014, the Israeli post office honored Weisl with the issue of a special postage stamp for NIS 9.70. It shows him and the airship "Graf Zeppelin" over Tel Aviv in 1929.

Publications

  • The struggle for the Holy Land. Palestine today. Ullstein, Berlin 1925
  • The Konnersreuth Mystery. Vossische Zeitung , Berlin 1927
  • Karl May in the Orient. In: Karl May yearbook KMJB. Karl-May-Verlag, Radebeul 1927
  • Between the devil and the Red Sea. Rides and adventures in Western Arabia. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1928
  • Karl May and Islam. In: Karl May Yearbook 1929
  • (together with Essad Bey ): Allah is great. Decline and rise of the Islamic world from Abdul Hamid to Ibn Saud . Publishing house Dr. Rolf Passer, Leipzig 1936
Review , Zs. "Gerechtigkeit", March 4, 1937, via ANNO
Review , Zs. "The Voice", February 9, 1937, via ANNO
  • The Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Illegal transport. Sketch for an autobiography. Olamenu, Tel-Aviv 1971 (series of publications by the Zwi Perez Chajes Institute)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 853.
  2. ↑ a b c בקפלי ההיסטוריה: ניבה פון וייזל (Hebrew) http://www.irgun-jeckes.org (accessed August 16, 2012)
  3. ↑ Report of Gershon Agronsky by the testimony of Wolfgang von Weisl the Parliamentary Investigation Commission headed by Sir Walter Shaw (Shaw Commission) on November 15, 1929. In: Jewish Telegraphic Agency , November 17, 1929th
  4. ↑ Manchester Guardian , August 24, 1929.
  5. ^ Gabriele Anderl: Wolfgang von Weisl . In: Angelika Hagen, Joanna Nittenberg (ed.): Flucht in die Freiheit . Vienna 2006. ISBN 978-3-9500356-4-3 .
  6. ^ Gabriele Anderl: Generation Conflicts. The Zionist emigration from Austria to Palestine in the interwar period . In: Frank Stern, Barbara Eichinger (ed.): Vienna and the Jewish experience 1900-1938. Acculturation - Anti-Semitism - Zionism . Böhlau Vienna 2009. ISBN 978-3-205-78317-6 . Quote p. 88.
  7. ↑ a b Issues 4, 1921, to 16, 1933 are digitized by the German National Library and can be viewed at their 2 locations.
personal data
SURNAME Weisl, Wolfgang von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Zionist activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1974
Place of death Gedera