Humanist Settlers: The University as a Territorial Project

• In Event: National, Transnational and International Histories of Sociology and Social Thought

Abstract

This paper examines the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a case in which a knowledge institution became a territorial project with the assistance of colonial expertise. Established in 1925 in Mandatory Palestine, the university is usually framed as a Zionist national enterprise, with attention focused on its symbolic significance rather than its mundane material formation. I argue that building the Mount Scopus campus on Jerusalem’s northeastern frontier was also a project of creating proto-national territory, one enabled in crucial ways by colonial rule.
While it is often remembered as a “German” university shaped by refugee scholars in the 1930s, this paper recovers an earlier layer of expertise and institutional knowledge that shaped the institution in the 1920s. It traces the work of British-Jewish administrators, lawyers, engineers, and Mandate officials who drew on colonial administrative and legal expertise, often formed in India and other imperial settings, to manage security, planning, and land consolidation. Leveraging the university’s recognition as a public institution, they gained access to exceptional legal tools, including expropriation. The paper argues that the university’s universal, humanist mission did not stand apart from colonial and nationalist projects but helped convert academic space into territorial space.

Author

• Adi Livne, Visiting Assistant Prof., Jewish Studies, Middlebury College