Arthur Ruppin was a German Zionist proponent of pseudoscientific race theory and one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv. Appointed director of Berlin's Bureau for Jewish statistics in 1904, he moved to Palestine in 1907, and from 1908 was the director of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, organizing Zionist immigration to Palestine. In 1926, Ruppin joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founded the Department for the Sociology of the Jews. Described posthumously as the "founder of German-Jewish demography" and "father of Israeli sociology", his best known sociological work was The Jews in the Modern World (1934).

Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century aiming for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people, particularly in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports the development and protection of Israel as a Jewish state. It has also been described as Israel's national or state ideology.