Rudolphina Menzel in Israeli Culture and Historiography

Canine Pioneer - The Extraordinary Life of

RUDOLPHINA MENZEL

Edited by Susan Martha Kahn, Brandeis University Press, 2022

Given the magnitude of Rudolphina Menzel’s contributions to

the protection of the Yishuv, her important military role during

the War of Independence, her pioneering work with the blind in

Israel, and her international reputation as one of the foremost cynolo-

gists of her day, why are her accomplishments not more well-known in

Israel, either in the popular imagination or in Israeli historiography? To

date, only two unpublished theses have been written about Rudolphina

Menzel in Hebrew, and only a few mainstream features have appeared in

Israeli newspapers.1 The scattered references to her in various Hebrew-

language encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, and websites are few

and far between.

Rudolphina’s virtual disappearance from the contemporary national

memory in Israel is made more curious by the fact that she was a well-

known public figure during her lifetime. Articles by and about her dog

training often appeared in the popular Hebrew-language press. Dozens

of articles by and about her appeared in Davar in the 1940s. The open-

ing of her guide-dog institute was featured in a 1953 article in Haaretz.2

Coverage of her expert testimony based on her experience with tracking

dogs appeared in the Herut newspaper in 1965,3 and a review of the

Menzels’ children book about dogs and cats appeared in Maariv in 1969.4

The first and only Hebrew-language encyclopedia reference to

Rudolphina Menzel appears in the Encyclopedia of the Pioneers of the

Yishuv and its Builders published in 1947. The entry on Rudolphina is

not comprehensive and includes few details about her biography, her

areas of expertise, and her professional status:

In 1928 Menzel brought with her husband the proof that each person has

an individual scent (special to him). The Menzel couple worked together

with the German and Austrian police and military, lecturing at several

international scientific congresses on issues related to dog psychology and working with dogs. In 1935 they presented at a congress held in Frankfurt

the first results from their study on the heredity of behavioral traits of

dogs based on their research of 7 generations of Boxers. In 1934, Menzel

visited Israel at the invitation of Yaakov Pat, one of the commanders of

the Haganah. in 1937 they were the main lecturers on dog psychology at

the International Congress of Cynologists held in Paris. That same year,

an institute for the study and training of dogs was established in Kiryat

Motzkin in Haifa at the request of the Haganah. During the Second World

War, at the request of Moshe Sharett, many dogs were prepared for the

war effort of the Allied armies abroad.5

Over three decades later in September 1973, shortly after her death,

the entire issue of the Hebrew-language dog magazine Hakelev was

devoted to tributes of Rudolphina written by friends and associates,

including:

“She Was an Important Person” by Hans Raba from Switzerland

“Doctor Menzel: An Evaluation by a Student” by Rafael Freedong

“My Years with Dr. Menzel” by Ephraim Benhar

“The Way of Dr. Menzel” by Abraham Tzur6

In 1987, an additional tribute appeared on the website of the Israeli

Kennel Club written by her former assistant Ester Cohn, though it was

subsequently removed.7 In 2006, Ester and her husband Alex published a

more formal article in the Hebrew-language journal Animals and Society

about working with the Menzels in the 1940s.8 Here, the Cohns describe,

among other things, how Ester first met Rudolphina when she came to

her girl scout troop to do a dog demonstration in order to recruit volun-

teers for her canine institute.

Rudolphina’s presence on contemporary Hebrew-language websites is

negligible. In 2010, an article posted on the Israel Defense Force Archive’s

website featured an online exhibition of the canine corps in the Israeli

army and included a short article about Rudolphina’s role training dogs

for the Haganah.9 In 2013, the Central Zionist Archives posted a short

biography of Menzel called “Rudolphina’s Dogs” on their website. The

post provided a brief overview of her life and mentioned that Menzel

trained police dogs in Austria to follow commands in Hebrew, noting

“with an ironic sense of humor reserved only for history itself, the first

dogs of the German army, which would later become the Nazi army,

obeyed instructions in Hebrew only.”10 The website for the Israeli Center

Rudolphina in Israeli Culture and Historiography 133

for Guide Dogs makes mention of the guide-dog institute she established

in 1952: “There had been a woman who trained guide dogs in the 1960s

named Dr. Rudolphina Menzel; however, when she passed away, the

program was abandoned.”11 Finally, there is a short entry in Hebrew

about Rudolphina on Wikipedia, which provides a general overview of

her life as recounted in the previously mentioned sources.12

Rudolphina’s disappearance from the Israeli popular consciousness

is compounded by her invisibility in Israeli historiography. Her gender

may have contributed to this absence, given traditional academic biases

against centering women in history.13 Yet in the past few decades, feminist

historians have worked tirelessly to restore women to the Israeli national

narrative and to memorialize their contributions to Israeli institution-

building, politics, and culture.14 Certainly Rudolphina’s gender doesn’t

explain why she remained invisible even to them.

Rudolphina’s area of expertise may be part of the reason she has been

overlooked by Israeli historians. According to a recent study, there are

few intellectual biographies of Israeli scientists in Hebrew; most of the

biographies written in Hebrew to date focus primarily on political figures:

Zionist leaders, Israeli statesmen, and military heroes.15

Her age and her country of origin may be additional reasons Israeli

historians have overlooked her. Rudolphina immigrated to Palestine at

the age of forty-seven and made all her contributions in her later years,

confounding common myths that the country was built by young pioneers.

Perhaps she has been overlooked by Israeli historians because they were

unduly influenced by popular cultural biases that positioned German-

speaking Jews as bourgeois, elitist, and culturally foreign. But these

are also unsatisfactory explanations for Rudolphina’s absence from the

national narrative. The lives of many relatively older Israelis, let alone

many notable German-Jewish immigrants from the 1920s and 1930s,

have been copiously documented and their contributions memorialized

by Israeli historians.

While unlikely, perhaps Menzel’s professional contributions to the

state’s defensive apparatus have been deliberately concealed because the

role military dogs play in Israeli national security was classified as top

secret. Or perhaps Rudolphina’s association with the Canaan dog con-

tributed to her marginalization. Ambivalence about dogs in general,

and the Canaan dog in particular, has deep roots in Israeli society. The

cultural challenges facing the Canaan dog were threefold: the traditional

Jewish ambivalence to dogs made Israeli Jews unlikely enthusiasts for a

134 Canine Pioneer

national dog breed; the breed’s generally skittish disposition often made

it difficult to train and enjoy; and its association with the Bedouin played

into a general—if selective—antipathy towards Arab cultural objects,

even more so because the Canaan dog holds little symbolic or cultural

value for the Bedouins themselves (unlike salukis, horses, or camels).16

While her gender, profession, age, country of origin, and association

with the Canaan dog may have something to do with Rudolphina’s relative

invisibility in Israeli national memory, these oversights, absences, and

omissions are better explained by the fact that she did not fit neatly into

any recognizable Israeli social categories. She was not a mother, she was

not a farmer, she was not a politician, she was not a soldier, and she was

not a war hero. If she had sacrificed her life for the Yishuv in the war

with the Nazis or during the establishment of the state and the Israeli

wars, she might have become a commemorated heroine like the partisan

Sarah Aaronson or the paratrooper Hannah Szenes.

Moreover, Rudolphina did not occupy any of the professions tradi-

tionally associated with women: she was not a nurse, a social worker, or a

teacher in the traditional sense. She resisted easy categorization in other

ways as well: she was an urban, cosmopolitan woman who trained dogs

to work in fields, forests, and mountains. She worked with the blind at

a time in Israeli history when cultural sensitivity and understanding of

the disabled was limited. Moreover, she confounded traditional gender

expectations in at least two ways: by being a woman who wielded power

over men as an acknowledged expert and by maintaining a strikingly

egalitarian relationship with her husband.

I suggest that the traditional categories of Israeli historiography need

to be stretched to appreciate Rudolphina’s unique contributions to Israeli

society. Although she was not a mother, she was a nurturer whose “chil-

dren” were dogs who contributed to national wellbeing. Although she

was not a farmer, she understood the textures and smells of Israeli soil

as part of her work with scent hounds. Although she was not a politi-

cian, she was a highly persuasive campaigner who mobilized thousands

to realize her vision. Although she was not a soldier, she trained dogs to

be soldiers, who in turn played key roles in providing security for Jew-

ish lives and settlements. Although she was not a “teacher,” she taught

hundreds of dog handlers how to train and breed dogs, thereby laying the

foundation for successive generations of expert dog training. Although

she was not a nurse, her efforts to organize public health officials and

veterinarians to eradicate rabies and other canine diseases played an

Rudolphina in Israeli Culture and Historiography 135

essential role in improving overall public health conditions in the country.

The canine infrastructure she established has evolved into a diverse and

robust network of Israeli veterinary services, animal shelters, dog parks,

dog beaches, and dog-training programs.

Much research remains to be done on Rudolphina’s remarkable contri-

butions to Israeli culture, politics, and society—particularly with regard to

her foundational work in creating the Israel Defense Force’s elite canine

corps Oketz and her pioneering work in providing support for the sight-

less. There are some indications that greater Israeli interest in her may

be emerging. Rudolphina’s life story was included in True Legends: Fifty

Women to Grow Up with in Israel, a 2019 Hebrew-language children’s

book about Israeli national heroines.17 In it, an illustration appears of

Rudolphina giving commands to three bouncing dogs—a Canaan dog,

a Boxer, and a Pointer—and is captioned with a quote she and Rudolph

wrote in their final children’s book: “Friendship with the dog is the

shortest and most convenient way for a person who wants to get closer

to the animal world.”18