Arthur Ruppin (Hebrew: ארתור רופין; 1 March 1876 – 1 January 1943)[1] was a German Zionist and one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv.

[5] Nonetheless, he was able to complete his studies in law and economics, and came second place in a prize competition established by the Krupp Steelworks concerning the uses of Social Darwinism in industry.

[a] While at the university, Ruppin accepted the crude racial views of his age, including the idea that Jews were an inferior race, whose liabilities as a group could only be overcome by assimilation, outbreeding with Germans and Slavs.

In 1907 he was sent by David Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), then in the Ottoman Empire, to investigate the possibilities for development of agriculture and industry.

His work made Practical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of the Second Aliya, the last wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War I. Ruppin became the chief Zionist land agent.

Ruppin exercised considerable influence in the cultural formation of East European Jews who performed aliyah and were to rise to positions of importance in later decades, such as David Ben-Gurion, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Joseph Shprinzak, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Zalman Shazar, and Levi Eshkol.

In terms of historic origins, Ruppin believed that early Jews were a non-Semitic agricultural people, living in the Land of Israel up to the destruction of the First Temple.

Ruppin believed that realization of Zionism required "racial purity" of Jews and was influenced by works of anti-semitic thinkers, including some Nazis.

[12] His variables, later to prove influential in Israel, were worked out over a classification between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Babylonians, and "special types" who didn't fit into the former categories, namely such as Yemenites and Bukharans.