Nutrition Science, Palestinian Food, and Jewish Settlers’ Acclimatization: The Work of Moshe Wilbushewich

Abstract How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewish- compared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.