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Introduction German and German-trained chemists and biochemists laid the foundations of many scientific developments that later took place in Israel. Here we review and evaluate the careers of these immigrant scientists, and their sciences, in a Middle Eastern context. They belonged to two distinct groups. The first group consisted of Zionists, among them Andor Fodor and Max Frankel, who in the 1920s started chemical and bio-chemical research at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a particular emphasis on proteins and amino acids. When they arrived, chemistry was the most mature and widely applied of the physical sciences, while biochemistry was emerging rapidly.1 The second group was made up of both Zionists and non-Zionists fleeing from Nazi Germany. They included Adalbert and Ladislaus Farkas, and Ernst David and Felix Bergmann, who brought chemical research in Mandate Palestine to an international level. As an academic discipline, chemistry had advanced mainly in Germany, where theories of structure and the most sophisticated methods of synthesis in organic chemistry had been developed. After 1890, the new subdiscipline of physical chemistry also made rapid strides, including in electrochemistry and the study of gas reactions. It is significant that several scientists responsible for these advances were of Jewish descent. They included the German Nobel laureates Adolf Baeyer (whose mother was Jewish), Otto Wallach, Richard Willstätter, and Fritz Haber. Others, such as the biomedical scientist Paul Ehrlich, who also received the Nobel Prize, created new areas of study based on chemistry, in this case leading to the first drugs that attacked sites of infection within the body. Several Jews made their reputations in industry, particularly Heinrich Caro, technical leader at Germany's Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (BASF), and [End Page 34] Ludwig Mond and Ivan Levinstein, who both emigrated from Germany to England around 1860, and independently founded forerunners of Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).2 In most cases, as in the case of Haber, German Jewish scientists were skeptical of those among their profession who lobbied for a Jewish homeland, particularly before the 1930s. Even after the Nazi's anti-Jewish decrees, Mandate Palestine offered little appeal to the majority of those who fled from Germany. The Farkases and Bergmanns were notable exceptions, and contributed to the pervasive German influence on science in Mandate Palestine, and, later, Israel. We examine that influence through individual scientists, and show how the German way of conducting science became transformed as a consequence of academic, economic, and military situations. One characteristic of science in Germany was the existence of large institutes headed by a single professor endowed with enormous power, including over the employment and promotion of co-workers. In chemistry, this had a tremendous impact on the relationship with industry, something that was later imitated, though on a small scale, in Mandate Palestine. Industrial chemistry in Germany and other European countries was mainly based on abundant resources of coal, the source of energy, coke for iron and steel works, and coal tar, whose products were transformed into dyestuffs, explosives, and pharmaceuticals. Coal was absent in the Middle East, and this in many ways determined the direction of chemistry in the Jewish homeland, particularly a strong interest in biochemistry. This included fermentation, the study of which was connected with natural product chemistry. The standard story is that Chaim Weizmann first anticipated the importance of developing a chemical industry in Palestine using biochemical processes after his 1897 visit to the country. The Austrian financier Johann Kremenetzky later promised financial backing, provided that commercial processes for the manufacture of chemicals from agricultural products could be made available. Though this did not materialize, and there were difficulties with Kremenetzky during 1909, Weizmann took up the study of bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1910, while at the University of Manchester, Weizmann explored fermentation as a route to synthetic rubber, which was in short supply...
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