Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel

• In Event: At the Intersections: Respectability, Race, and Gender

Abstract

Rudolphina Menzel (née Waltuch, 1891–1973) was a Viennese-born Jewish chemist whose pioneering research on canine psychology and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Rudolphina was known throughout Europe as one of the foremost researchers on canine cognition, as well as one of the most famous breeders and trainers of police dogs. She was a sought-after consultant at the German military dog training institute in Berlin throughout the 1920’s until the Nazis seized power in 1933; she was also a fervent Zionist who was primarily responsible for inventing the entire canine infrastructure in what came to be the State of Israel - and for training hundreds of dogs to protect Jewish lives and property in pre-state Palestine. Teaching Jews to like dogs and training dogs to serve Jews became Menzel’s unique kind of Zionist mission. This paper provides a synopsis of Rudolphina’s life and work. We learn how service dogs trained by her and according to her methods conferred myriad advantages to Zionist settlement activities, both by protecting Jewish property and saving Jewish lives. We see how Rudolphina’s deep knowledge of dogs enabled her to solidify and deepen patronage relationships with the British mandate government in ways that provided both tangible and intangible benefits to the Jews of Palestine. We learn how different Jewish prejudices and predispositions towards dogs and pet-keeping more broadly, revealing new nuances of the intracultural tensions between Jews of different backgrounds, classes and dispositions. The remarkable ways Rudolphina managed and rationalized the troubling overlaps between Nazi eugenics and the eugenic practices intrinsic to dog breeding raises added questions. Her invention of a national dog breed for Israel using the indigenous dogs of Palestine reveals an additional wrinkle in the dynamics of colonialism. Further complicating her legacy is the fact that dogs bred and trained according to her methods were routinely used as weapons against Jews in Europe and Arabs in Palestine - and yet she also trained dogs that provided vital services for both.

Author

• Susan M Kahn