What did early zionists think about non European jews?

Yes, early Zionist thinkers were aware of and some did consider what role Zionism would play for particularly Middle East and North African Jews, and some were aware of some more “remote” groups particularly Yemenite Jews. The creation of the idea of a “world Jewry” began to emerge after Emancipation in Europe the 19th and 20th centuries, when Jews are granted citizenship first in France and then in other western European nations (although this was not a linear process, with many setbacks). Zionism (as we know it today) emerged in the late 19th century as a response to multiple factors: antisemitism and anti-Semitic violence particularly in eastern Europe; but also feelings from Zionist leaders that Jews are a unique race (influenced by larger trends in racial thinking in social sciences and politics at the time), and fears from Jewish leaders of assimilation and the “loss of the Jewish race.” Many early Zionist thinkers felt that because Jews were a unique race (I would use the term race, and not nationality) they would only have secure liberation and an end to antisemitism when also given their own ethnic nation-state—like the prevailing attitude in Europe of nationalism at the time. But in order to make this happen, a major project needed to be compellingly articulated and disseminated: 1. to conceptualize the concept of a “world Jewry;” and 2. that its homeland was in Palestine. The project of creating world Jewry came about before Herzl was even born, for instance, we can see it in the Alliance Israélite Universelle founded in Paris who opened “civilizing mission” schools for Jews in French Algeria, Morocco, Baghdad, Turkey, and Palestine.

Yemenite Jews were already living in Palestine by the time the first Zionist settlements were set up in the 1880s. As Ottoman subjects, after the tanzimat reforms of the mid-19th c, moving around the empire for minority subjects became easier and Yemeni Jews relocated relatively easily to Palestine, for a mix of religious and economic reasons. Some were politically Zionist themselves, while others felt more of a religious (not nationalist) reason for being there. I can’t speak at length on the history of Yemenite Jews and Zionism as it’s not my exact expertise. I can say that I have come across some…strange…writings by European Zionist Jews about Yemenite Jews. “Racist” could be one way to describe them. At the very least they were racial, as in trying to sort peoples into discrete racial categories, and trying to make sense of who Yemenite Jews were as those who were decidedly not white but still part of this “world Jewry” gathering in Palestine. This is happening at the same time that Zionist Jews were trying to figure out who Jews were as a race: European? Middle Eastern? Something both, neither? Zionists in the pre-state period wanted to “acclimate” European Jews to the new physical climate of Palestine and (re)vitalize a “new Jew” that was physically fit, a manual laborer in the fields and on the land, and who could live as a native in Palestine. The term “new Jew,” I think, is somewhat of a misnomer. Max Nordau and other Second Aliyah Zionists wanted to remake the Jews away from what they saw as nebbish, weak, and emasculated Jews of Europe, but they also saw this as something old -- “becoming native” was a project of return to what they felt Jews used to be: Orientals. And so in looking at Yemenite Jews (and other Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews after the state was founded, when most of that immigration happened), they saw both the past and the future at once:

“According to a legend elaborated by some Zionists, the Yemenite Jews were in fact the mysterious Jews of Cheivar, nomadic heroes destined at the time of redemption to lead the Jewish people in the liberation of their homeland. The young people and writers of the Second Aliya told themselves that if a distant tribe like the Yemenites had reached Palestine, maybe there were still Jewish Bedouin tribes to be found, and some of them went to search for the Jewish tribes in Transjordan.” (Almog 186)

Arthur Ruppin, notable sociologist and planner of the economic structure of agricultural settlement, thought and wrote about Jews and race at length. He classified both the difference between Jews and other races and the differences between Jews of different “types.” He also classifies Jews as a race paradoxically part of and separate from Europe. Jews can bring with them to Palestine “European experiences and technique” which “contribute in a great measure to the speedy development, not only of Palestine, but of the surrounding countries.” However, rather than seeing this as a way to create a European outpost in the Levant, he imagines instead a revitalization of the Jewish race in their true native land: “in this way the Jews, together with the Arabs, who are their nearest relatives in race, might create a new culture in the Near Orient, which would be equivalent to the cultures of Europe and America.” (these quotes are from primary source documents which I have accessed in the Central Zionist Archives – happy to provide citations on request)

More on what I have come across in my own research: there were a number of early Zionist thinkers and planners, well represented among social scientists and agricultural scientists in particular, who understood Jews as part of both a unified race yet one that was, depending on who you asked, segmented or stratified. Isaac Elazari-Volcani (née Yitzhak Wilkansky) was a Socialist Zionist agronomist and member of Hapoel Hatzair (later merged with Ahdut Ahava to become Mapai, David Ben-Gurion’s party). He was instrumental in the scientific planning of Zionist agricultural settlement during the second and third aliyot (immigration waves) and the main agricultural research station in Rehovot is named for him. I’m arguing in my research that Elazari-Volcani planned agricultural settlement based on racial understandings of Jewish labor and how different racial populations of Jews fit into the physical environment of Palestine – just as other colonial scientists did in the late 19th and early 20th century when trying to figure out how white settlers could “acclimate” to tropical climates in colonial settings (for more see David Livingstone on environmental determinism). Here’s one quote from his writings in the 1920s, as he deliberated whether the Jordan Valley (which is water rich and fertile soil) should be a targeted site of settlement: he offers some skepticism of trying to settle the Valley, noting “the climate here is very trying, the heat enervates the worker and malaria is a constant visitor in this locality… Even the Yemenites, who have grown up under the sun of the East, cannot acclimatize themselves to this spot.”