Emanuel Marx (; 8 May 1927 – 13 February 2022) was a German-born Israeli social anthropologist, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He was a winner of the Israel Prize in 1998 for sociological research, and was an honorary member of the British Royal Anthropological Institute.
Biography Emanuel Marx was born and raised in Munich, Germany. His paternal grandfather came to Palestine together with four brothers and sisters in 1882 and settled in Jerusalem. A few years later the grandfather and another brother returned to Germany. The extended family was religious, but the grandfather's family was already secular. His maternal grandfather came to Germany from Poland, set up a cardboard factory and was successful in his business. His father, Yitzhak, was a native of Germany and a clerk in an insurance company, while his mother, Rebecca, a native of Poland, grew up in Germany and ran a leather goods store. They had two sons, Emanuel and Shimon. Emanuel Marx attended a Jewish school in the city of Munich. In 1938, on Kristallnacht, his father was thrown into Dachau; he was released two months later. In early 1939 the parents sent the two sons as Kindertransport refugees to relatives in Manchester, England. They feared that they themselves would not be able to leave Germany. A few months later, the father was thrown back into a concentration camp, but was released in September 1939 when he received an to migrate to Palestine. Marx and his brother joined their parents in Palestine in January 1940. The family settled in Jerusalem, and the father fulfilled his dream and became a bookseller. Marx attended the Ma'aleh religious high school. In 1946, a year of service began as one of the Notrim in the Beit She'an Valley, where in fact he took courses with the Haganah. The day after 29 November 1947 he was drafted into active service in the Haganah, and served there and later in the IDF until the end of the war in 1949. He was in the "Moriah" battalion that took part in the battles in Jerusalem. At the end of the war he passed the .
At the end of the war he began studying sociology, economics, and the modern history of the Middle East at Hebrew University, graduating with a master's degree in 1958. His prominent teachers were Martin Buber, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, and his favourite teacher David Ayalon. He wrote a master's thesis on the Bedouin, under the guidance of Eisenstadt. In his work he tried to connect Orientalism with sociology. For the purpose of the work he stayed for three months among the 'Azazme Bedouin in the Negev. The Bedouin became the focus of his interest over many years. During his studies he worked for a year in the regular army, then for five years as a librarian at the National Library of Israel, then from 1955 to 1959 served as an assistant to , the Adviser on Arab Affairs in the Prime Minister's Office. At the same time, he worked with Meir Yaakov Kister on establishing an Oriental studies strand in Israeli high schools . While researching the Negev Bedouin, Marx found that functionalist sociology in the tradition of Talcott Parsons, which he had pursued until then, did not help explain the reality he encountered, and he discovered anthropology as a scientific discipline. He finally decided to train in the field, which in those days was not taught in the country. In 1959 he won a scholarship from the British Council and went on to study for a doctorate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in England, at the time the centre of the "Manchester School" of anthropology, from which he graduated in 1963. His doctoral supervisor was Professor Emrys Peters and his other teachers included Prof. Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Bill Epstein. He did field work for a year and a half in the Abu Gwe'id tribe in the Negev. The topic of the doctorate was "Sociological analysis of kinship and corporate groups among the Bedouin in the Negev". The doctoral dissertation differed from other papers written at the time in that it incorporated the social context into sociological analysis. As a result, he realized that the "typical Bedouin lifestyle" of these tribes was nothing more than a result of the imposing a blockade on them and preventing them from participating in the broader market economy.
At this time the Faculty of Social Sciences was established at Tel Aviv University, and Marx was invited to establish an anthropology department there, the first anthropologist to receive a regular academic appointment in the country. At the same time, Gluckman had negotiated generous funding from Sidney Bernstein and his family for a series of studies into the assimilation of new migrants in Israel, of which Marx was made field director, giving Marx a stream of field students to supervise, and establishing a solid basis of research associated with the new group.Zuckerman Archive: Bernstein Israeli Research Trust, via Archives HubEmanuel Marx (1975), "Anthropological Studies in a Centralized State: Max Gluckman and the Bernstein Israel Research Project". Jewish Journal of Sociology 17(2), pp. 131–150 (online)Moshe Shokeid (2004), "Max Gluckman and the making of Israeli anthropology", Ethnos, 69(4), 387-410 Orit Abuhav (2015), In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. , pp. 41-44 and pp. 53 et seq.Yehuda Goodman and Joseph Loss, "The Other as Brother: Nation-Building and Ethnic Ambivalence in Early Jewish-Israeli Anthropology", Anthropological Quarterly 82(2) 477-508 Marx taught at Tel Aviv University from 1964, when he was appointed a lecturer, and in 1979 he was appointed full professor. In 1995 he retired from teaching and became Professor Emeritus. In 1976, Marx established an anthropological research department at the Ben-Gurion University Desert Research Institute in Sde Boker and headed it until 1989. This unit served as a centre of attraction for researchers engaged in nomadic societies. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Manchester, Berkeley, Brandeis, Cape Town, Oxford, Aegean Islands, and Copenhagen. In 1997 he was elected an honorary member of the British Royal Anthropological Institute.
From 1989 to 1990, he served as an academic advisor to the Oxford University Refugee Research Center. From 1992 to 1995, he served as the director of the , a body designed to develop science relations between Egyptian and Israeli universities. In those years, among the several achievements were the opening of Egyptian libraries and research institutes, including the American University in Cairo, to researchers and students from Israel; joint studies have been conducted by researchers from the two countries; Egyptian scientists visited and lectured in Israel; Egyptian professors translated leading works from modern Hebrew literature into Arabic, and the works were first published by an Egyptian publisher; and new libraries were opened in which historic documents of the Jewish and Karaite communities in Egypt were preserved.
Marx was married to Dalia, a teacher and educational consultant, and they had three children and eight grandchildren. He died on 13 February 2022, at the age of 94.
His research
Bedouin of the Negev Marx's first book, Bedouin of the Negev, was an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation, published by the University of Manchester Press in 1967. An updated version was published in Hebrew in 1974. For this book he won the Ben Zvi Prize in 1973. Marx claimed in the book that the "closure" imposed by the military administration on the Bedouin did not serve security needs, but was intended to prevent them from entering the labour market, in order to make it easier for new Jewish immigrants to find employment. The gradual takeover of the Negev lands by the state created a class division between Bedouin landowners who were considered "real" and landless Bedouins who were considered "peasants", and each class developed its own patterns of residence and migration and ways of marriage. The tribe became a unit of government of the state, and the main function of the corporate origin-groups was to protect lands.
A Refugee Camp in the Mountains This report was written by Marx together with the economist Professor Yoram Ben-Porat and the historian Professor . It was published in English in 1971 under the title Some Sociological and Economic Aspects of Refugee Camps on the West Bank, published by Rand in the United States. A full text of the study was published in Hebrew in 1974 by the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. It deals with the Palestinian refugee camps in the occupied territories, for the purpose of writing they did field work in the Jalazone refugee camp near Ramallah in 1968 and later in other camps in Gaza and the West Bank. The researchers found that the refugees were well involved in the life of the economy, that most of the camps had become suburbs of nearby towns, and that the houses in the camps gradually passed into the possession of their occupants and were sold in the free market. Hence the researchers found that a significant portion of the camp population were not refugees at all. Their main conclusion was that the refugee camps had become urban working-class neighborhoods, and that it was better to improve the living conditions in the refugee camps than striving to eliminate them. In their view, the solution to the refugee question would be found in a formalization of their ownership of their current real estate, and in the payment of fair compensation for the property lost to them, and not necessarily by their resettlement.
Further articles about refugees Throughout his academic career, Marx has written articles on Palestinian refugees. Since the 2000s he has dealt with mostly a question of the payment of compensation to Palestinian refugees as a condition for a lasting peace settlement in the region, and with the question of the abolition of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. In the opinion of Marx the organization did much in its early years to settle the refugees, to provide them with primary education, and to integrate them into the labour market. Over the course of its existence, the number of officials increased and the number of services provided to refugees decreased, and its work focused on education services. UNRWA is today held captive by its 24,000 officials, most of them teachers, who are preventing the transfer of its services to the Palestinian Authority.Emanuel Marx, "The question of compensation for Palestinian refugees" (שאלת הפיצויים לפליטים הפלסטיניים), Israeli Sociology 3 (2), (2001), 371-381. (Hebrew)Emanuel Marx, "Refugee Compensation: Why the Parties have been Unable to Agree and Why it is Important to Compensate Refugees for Losses". In The Palestinian Refugees: Old Problems - New Solutions, eds. Joseph Ginat and Edward J. Perkins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, (2001), pp. 102-108.
The Social Context of Violent Behaviour: A Social Anthropological Study in an Israeli Immigrant Town