Preface
Why another book on the Second World War, which is probably the most written about subject in human history? Why another book on the Holocaust, which has been movingly described by many survivors and scholars? As a general subject, the age of the dictators, the world war, and the Holocaust have indeed been covered - but has the interaction between Zionism and Fascism and Nazism been adequately explored? And if not, why not?
The answer is quite simple. Different aspects of the general subject have been dealt with, but there is no equivalent of the present work, one that attempts to present an overview of the movement's world activities during that epoch. Of course, that is not an accident, but rather a sign that there is much that is politically embarrassing to be found in that record.
Dealing with the issues brings difficult problems, one of the most difficult arising out of the emotions evoked by the Holocaust. Can there by any doubt that many of the United Nations delegates who voted for the creation of an Israeli state, in 1947, were motivated by a desire to somehow compensate the surviving Jews for the Holocaust? They, and many of Israel's other well-wishers, cathected the state with the powerful human feelings they had toward the victims of Hitler's monstrous crimes. But therein was their error: they based their support for Israel and Zionism on what Hitler had done to the Jews, rather than on what the Zionists had done for the Jews. To say that such an approach is intellectually and politically impermissable does not denigrate the deep feelings produced by the Holocaust.
Zionism, however, is an ideology, and its chronicles are to be examined with the same critical eye that readers should bring to the history of any political tendency. Zionism is not now, nor was it ever, co-extensive with either Judaism or the Jewish people. The vast majority of Hitler's Jewish victims were not Zionists. It is equally true, as readers are invited to see for themselves, that the majority of the Jews of Poland, in particular, had repudiated Zionism on the eve of the Holocaust, that they abhored the politics of Menachem Begin, in September 1939, one of the leaders of the self-styled "Zionist-Revisionist" movement in the Polish capital. As an anti-Zionist Jew, the author is inured to the charge that anti-Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism and "Jewish self-hatred".
It is scarcely necessary to add that all attempts to equate Jews and Zionists, and therefore to attack Jews as such, are criminal, and are to be sternly repelled. There cannot be even the slightest confusion between the struggle against Zionism and hostility to either Jews or Judaism. Zionism thrives on the fears that Jews have of another Holocaust. The Palestinian people are deeply appreciative of the firm support given them by progressive Jews, whether religious - as with Mrs Ruth Blau, Elmer Berger, Moshe Menuhin, or Israel Shahak - or atheist - as with Felicia Langer and Lea Tsemel and others on the left. Neither nationality nor theology nor social theory can, in any way, be allowed to become a stumbling block before the feet of those Jews, in Israel or elsewhere, who are determined to walk with the Palestinian people against injustice and racism. It can be said, with scientific certainty, that, without the unbreakable unity of Arab and Jewish progressives, victory over Zionism is not merely difficult, it is impossible.
Unless this book were to become an encyclopaedia, the material had necessarily to be selected, with all due care, so that a rounded picture might come forth. It is inevitable that the scholars of the several subjects dealt with will complain that not enough attention had been devoted to their particular specialties. And they will be correct, to be sure; whole books have been written on particular facets of the broader problems dealt with herein, and the reader is invited to delve further into the sources cited in the footnotes. An additional difficulty arises out of the fact that so much of the original material is in a host of languages that few readers are likely to know. Therefore, wherever possible, English sources and translations are cited, thus giving sceptical readers a genuine opportunity to verify the research apparatus relied upon.
As readers are committed to discovering by reading this book, the consequences of Zionist ideology deserve study and exposure. That is what is attempted here. As an unabashed anti-Zionist, I clearly conclude that Zionism is wholly incorrect; but that is my conclusion drawn from the evidence. The conclusions are, in short, my own. As for the persuasiveness of the arguments used in arriving at them, readers are invited to judge for themselves.
***
1. Zionism and Anti-Semitism_Prior to the Holocaust
From the French Revolution to the unification of Germany and Italy it appeared that the future foretold the continuing emancipation of Jewry in the wake of the further development of capitalism and its liberal and modernist values. Even the Russian pogroms of the 1880s could be seen as the last gasp of a dying feudal past, rather than a harbinger of things to come. Yet by 1896, when Theodor Herzl published his Jewish State, such an optimistic scenario could no longer be realistically envisioned. In 1895 he personally had seen the Parisian mob howling for the death of Dreyfus. That same year he heard the wild cheers of middle-class Vienna as they greeted the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger after he had swept the election for burgomeister.
Born amidst a wave of defeats for the Jews, not only in backward Russia, but in the very centres of industrial Europe, modern Zionism's pretensions were the noblest conceivable: the redemption of the downtrodden Jewish people in their own land. But from the very beginning the movement represented the conviction of a portion of the Jewish middle class that the future belonged to the Jew-haters, that anti-Semitism was inevitable, and natural. Firmly convinced that anti-Semitism could not be beaten, the new World Zionist Organisation never fought it. Accommodation to anti-Semitism - and pragmatic utilisation of it for the purpose of obtaining a Jewish state - became the central stratagems of the movement, and it remained loyal to its earliest conceptions down to and through the Holocaust. In June l895, in his very first entry in his new Zionist Diary, Herzl laid down this fixed axiom of Zionism:
In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to "combat" anti-Semitism. [1]
In the severest sense, Herzl was a man of his time and class; a monarchist who believed the best ruler "un bon tyran". [2] His Jewish State baldly proclaimed: "Nor are the present-day nations really fit for democracy, and I believe they will become ever less fit for it ... I have no faith in the political virtue of our people, because we are no better than the rest of modern man." [3]
His universal pessimism caused him to misjudge totally the political environment of late-nineteenth-century Western Europe. In particular, Herzl misunderstood the Dreyfus case. The secrecy of the trial, and Dreyfus's soldierly insistence on his innocence, convinced many that an injustice was done. The case aroused a huge surge of Gentile support. Kings discussed it and feared for the sanity of France; Jews in remote hamlets in the Pripet Marches prayed for Emile Zola. The intellectuals of France rallied to Dreyfus's side. The socialist movement brought over the working people. The right wing of French society was discredited, the army stained, the Church disestablished. Anti-Semitism in France was driven into isolation lasting until Hitler's conquest. Yet Herzl, the most famous journalist in Vienna, did nothing to mobilise even one demonstration on behalf of Dreyfus. When he discussed the matter, it was always as a horrible example and never as a rallying cause. In 1899 the outcry compelled a retrial. A court martial affirmed the captain's guilt, 5 to 2, but found extenuating circumstances and reduced his sentence to ten years. But Herzl saw only defeat and depreciated the significance of the vast Gentile sympathy for the Jewish victim.
If a dumb beast were tortured in public, would not the crowd send up a cry of indignation? This is the meaning of the pro-Dreyfus sentiment in non-French countries, if indeed it is as widespread as many Jews estimate ... To put it in a nutshell, we might say that the injustice committed against Dreyfus is so great that we forget that we are dealing with a Jew ... is anyone presumptuous enough to claim that of any seven people two, or even one, favor the Jews? ... Dreyfus represents a bastion that has been and still is a point of struggle. Unless we are deceived, that bastion is lost! [4]
The French government understood realities better than Herzl and acted to head off further agitation by reducing the balance of the sentence. Given the success of the struggle for Dreyfus, French Jewry - right and left - saw Zionism as irrelevant. Herzl savaged them in his Diary: "They seek protection from the Socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order ... Truly they are not Jews any more. To be sure, they are no Frenchmen either. They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism." [5]
Herzl's first opportunity to develop his own pragmatic strategy of non-resistance to anti-Semitism, coupled with emigration of a portion of the Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making, came with Karl Lueger's success in Vienna. The demagogue's victory there was the first major triumph of the new wave of specifically anti-Semitic parties in Europe, but the Habsburgs strenuously opposed the new mayor-elect. Some 8 per cent of their generals were Jews. Jews were conspicuous as regime loyalists amidst the sea of irredentist nationalities tearing the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart. Anti-Semitism could only cause problems for the already weak dynasty. Twice the Emperor refused to confirm Lueger in office. Herzl was one of the few Jews in Vienna who favoured confirmation. Rather than attempting to organise opposition to the Christian Social demagogue, he met the Prime Minister, Count Casimir Badeni, on 3 November 1895 and told him "boldly" to accommodate Lueger:
I think that Lueger's election as Mayor must be accepted. If you fail to do it the first time, then you will not be able to confirm on any subsequent occasion, and if you fail to accede the third time - the dragoons will have to ride. The Count smiled: "So!" - with a goguenard [scoffing] expression. [6]
It was poverty in the Habsburgs' Galicia, as well as discrimination in Russia, that was driving Jews into Vienna and further into Western Europe and America. They brought anti-Semitism with them in their luggage. The new immigrants became a "problem" to the rulers of the host societies, and to the already established local Jewries, who feared the rise of native anti-Semitism. Herzl had a ready-made answer to the immigrant wave that he thought would please both the upper class of the indigenous Jews and the ruling class of Western capitalism: he would oblige them by taking the poor Jews off their hands. He wrote to Badeni: "What I propose is ... not in any sense the emigration of all the Jews ... Through the door which I am trying to push open for the poor masses of Jews a Christian statesman who rightly seizes the idea, will step forward into world-history." [7]
His first efforts at diverting the wind of opposition to Jewish immigration into Zionism's sails utterly failed, but that did not prevent him from trying again. In 1902 the British Parliament debated an Aliens Exclusion Bill aimed at the migrants, and Herzl travelled to London to testify on the Bill. Rather than pass it, he argued, the British government should support Zionism. He met Lord Rothschild but, in Spite of all his public talk about the rejuvenation of Jewry, he dispensed with such cant in private conversation, telling Rothschild that he "would incidentally be one of those wicked persons to whom English Jews might well erect a monument because I saved them from an influx of East European Jews, and also perhaps from anti-Semitism". [8]
In his autobiography, Trial and Error, written in 1949, Chaim Weizmann - then the first President of the new Israeli state - looked back at the controversy over the Aliens Bill. An immigrant to Britain himself, the brilliant young chemist was already, in 1902, one of the leading intellectuals of the new Zionist movement. He had met Sir William Evans Gordon, author of the anti-Jewish legislation; even with hindsight, with the Holocaust fresh in his mind, the then President of Israel still insisted that:
our people were rather hard on him [Evans Gordon]. The Aliens Bill in England, and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomena ... Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them ... The fact that the actual number of Jews in England, and even their proportion to the total population, was smaller than in other countries was irrelevant; the determining factor in this matter is not the solubility of the Jews, but the solvent power of the country ... this cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration, and we cannot shake it off ... though my views on immigration naturally were in sharp conflict with his, we discussed these problems in a quite objective and even friendly way. [9]
For all his talk about sharp conflict with Evans Gordon, there is no sign that Weizmann ever tried to mobilise the public against him. What did Weizmann say to him in their "friendly" discussion? Neither chose to tell us, but we can legitimately surmise: as with the master Herzl, so with his disciple Weizmann. We can reasonably conjecture that the avowed devotee of pragmatic accommodation asked the anti-Semite for his support of Zionism. Never once, then or in the future, did Weizmann ever try to rally the Jewish masses against anti-Semitism.
"Taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties"
Herzl had originally hoped to convince the Sultan of Turkey to grant him Palestine as an autonomous statelet in return for the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) taking up the Turkish Empire's foreign debts. It soon became quite apparent that his hopes were unreal. Abdul Hamid knew well enough that autonomy always led to independence, and he was determined to hold on to the rest of his empire. The WZO had no army, it could never seize the country on its own. Its only chance lay in getting a European power to pressure the Sultan on Zionism's behalf. A Zionist colony would then be under the power's protection and the Zionists would be its agents within the decomposing Ottoman realm. For the rest of his life Herzl worked towards this goal, and he turned, first, to Germany. Of course, the Kaiser was far from a Nazi; he never dreamt of killing Jews, and he permitted them complete economic freedom, but nevertheless he froze them totally out of the officer corps and foreign office and there was severe discrimination throughout the civil service. By the end of the 1890s Kaiser Wilhelm became seriously concerned about the ever growing socialist movement, and Zionism attracted him as he was convinced the Jews were behind his enemies. He naively believed that "the Social Democratic elements will stream into Palestine". [10] He gave Herzl an audience in Constantinople on 19 October 1898. At this meeting the Zionist leader asked for his personal intervention with the Sultan and the formation of a chartered company under German protection. A sphere of influence in Palestine had attractions enough, but Herzl had grasped that he had another bait that he could dangle before potential right-wing patrons: "I explained that we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties." [11]
In spite of the Kaiser's deep interest in getting rid of the Jews, nothing could be done through Berlin. His diplomats always knew the Sultan would never agree to the scheme. In addition, the German Foreign Minister was not as foolish as his master. He knew Germany's Jews would never voluntarily leave their homeland.
Herzl looked elsewhere, even turning to the tsarist regime for support. In Russia Zionism had first been tolerated; emigration was what was wanted. For a time Sergei Zubatov, chief of the Moscow detective bureau, had developed a strategy of secretly dividing the Tsar's opponents Because of their double oppression, the Jewish workers had produced Russia's first mass socialist organisation, the General Jewish Workers League, the Bund. Zubatov instructed his Jewish agents to mobilise groups of the new Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) to oppose the revolutionaries. [12] (Zionism is not a monolithic movement, and almost from the beginning the WZO has been divided into officially recognised factions. For a list of the Zionist and Jewish organisations found herein, see the Glossary.) But when elements within the Zionist ranks responded to the pressures of the repressive regime and the rising discontent, and began to concern themselves about Jewish rights in Russia, the Zionist bank - the Jewish Colonial Trust - was banned. This brought Herzl to St Petersburg for meetings with Count Sergei Witte, the Finance Minister, and Vyacheslav von Plevhe, the Minister of the Interior. It was von Plevhe who had organised the first pogrom in twenty years, at Kishenev in Bessarabia on Easter 1903. Forty-five people died and over a thousand were injured; Kishenev produced dread and rage among Jews.
Herzl's parley with the murderous von Plevhe was opposed even by most Zionists. He went to Petersburg to get the Colonial Trust reopened, to ask that Jewish taxes be used to subsidise emigration and for intercession with the Turks. As a sweetener for his Jewish critics, he pleaded, not for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, the western provinces where the Jews were confined, but for its enlargement "to demonstrate clearly the humane character of these steps", he suggested. [13] "This would,, he urged, "put an end to certain agitation." [14] Von Plevhe met him on 8 August and again on 13 August. The events are known from Herzl's Diary. Von Plevhe explained his concern about the new direction he saw Zionism taking:
Lately the situation has grown even worse because the Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We used to be sympathetic to your Zionist movement, as long as it worked toward emigration. You do not have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez a un converti [You are preaching to a convert]. But ever since the Minsk conference we have noticed un changement des gros bonnets [a change of big-wigs]. There is less talk now of Palestinian Zionism than there is about culture, organisation and Jewish nationalism. This does not suit us. [15]
Herzl did get the Colonial Trust reopened and a letter of endorsement for Zionism from von Plevhe, but the support was given solely on the proviso that the movement confine itself to emigration and avoid taking up national rights inside Russia. In return Herzl sent von Plevhe a copy of a letter to Lord Rothschild suggesting that: "It would substantially contribute to the further improvement of the situation if the pro-Jewish papers stopped using such an odious tone toward Russia. We ought to try to work toward that end in the near future." [16] Herzl then spoke publicly, in Russia, against attempts to organise socialist groupings within Russian Zionism:
In Palestine ... our land, such a party would vitalise our political life - and then I shall determine my own attitude toward it. You do me an injustice if you say that I am opposed to progressive social ideas. But, now, in our present condition, it is too soon to deal with such matters. They are extraneous. Zionism demands complete, not partial involvement. [17]
Back in the West, Herzl went even further in his collaboration with tsarism. That summer, during the World Zionist Congress in Basle, he had a secret meeting with Chaim Zhitlovsky, then a leading figure in the Social Revolutionary Party. (World Zionist Congresses are held every two years, in odd years; the 1903 Congress was the sixth.) Later Zhitlovsky wrote of this extraordinary conversation. The Zionist told him that:
I have just come from Plevhe. I have his positive, binding promise that in 15 years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition: the Jewish revolutionaries shall cease their struggle against the Russian government. If in 15 years from the time of the agreement Plevhe does not effectuate the charter, they become free again to do what they consider necessary. [18]
Naturally Zhitlovsky scornfully rejected the proposition. The Jewish revolutionaries were not about to call off the struggle for elementary human rights in return for a vague promise of a Zionist state in the distant future. The Russian naturally had a few choice words to say about the founder of the WZO:
[He] was, in general, too "loyal, to the ruling authorities - as is proper for a diplomat who has to deal with the powers-that-be-for him ever to be interested in revolutionists and involve them in his calculations ... He made the journey, of course, not in order to intercede for the people of Israel and to awaken compassion for us in Plevhe's heart. He traveled as a politician who does not concern himself with sentiments, but interests ... Herzl's "politics" is built on pure diplomacy, which seriously believes that the political history of humanity is made by a few people, a few leaders, and that what they arrange among themselves becomes the content of political history. [19]
Was there any justification for Herzl's meetings with von Plevhe? There can be only one opinion. Even Weizmann was later to write that "the step was not only humiliating, but utterly pointless ... unreality could go no further". [20] The Tsar had not the slightest influence with the Turks, who saw him as their enemy. At the same time, in l903, Herzl accepted an even more surreal proposition from Britain for a Zionist colony in the Kenya Highlands as a substitute for Palestine. Russian Zionists began to object to these bizarre discussions, and they threatened to leave the WZO, if "Uganda" was even considered. Herzl had a vision of himself as a Jewish Cecil Rhodes; it hardly mattered to him where his colony was to be situated, but to most Russian Zionists the movement was an extension of their biblical heritage and Africa meant nothing to them. A deranged Russian Zionist tried to assassinate Herzl's lieutenant, Max Nordau, and only Herzl's premature death prevented an internal collapse of the movement.
However, direct contacts with tsarism did not stop with Herzl. By l908 the ranks were willing to allow Herzl's successor, David Wolffsohn, to meet the Prime Minister, Piotr Stolypin, and Foreign Minister Alexandr Izvolsky, over renewed harassment of the Colonial Trust bank. Izvolsky quickly came to terms on the minimal request and indeed had a friendly discussion with the WZO's leader: "I might almost say that I made a Zionist of him," wrote Wolffsohn triumphantly. [21] But, needless to say, Wolffsohn's visit led to no changes in Russia's anti-Jewish legislation.
The First World War
Zionism's egregious diplomatic record in the pre-war period did not stop the WZO from trying to take advantage of the debacle of the First World War. Most Zionists were pro-German out of aversion to tsarism as the most anti-Semitic of the contending forces. The WZO's headquarters in Berlin tried to get Germany and Turkey to support Zionism in Palestine as a propaganda ploy to rally world Jewry to their side. Others saw that Turkey was weak and certain to be dismembered in the war. They argued that, if they backed the Allies, Zionism might be set up in Palestine as a reward. To these, it hardly mattered that the Jews of Russia, that is the majority of world Jewry, stood to gain nothing by the victory of their oppressor and his foreign allies. Weizmann, domiciled in London, sought to win over the British politicians. He had already made contact with Arthur Balfour, who, as Prime Minister, had spoken against Jewish immigration, in 1905. Weizmann knew the full extent of Balfour's anti-semitism, as he had unburdened himself of his philosophy to the Zionist on 12 December 1914. In a private letter, Weizmann wrote: "He told me how he had once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth and that he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates." [22]
While Weizmann intrigued with the politicians in London, Vladimir Jabotinsky had obtained tsarist support for a volunteer Jewish Legion to help Britain take Palestine. There were thousands of young Jews in Britain, still Russian citizens, who were threatened with deportation to tsarist Russia by Herbert Samuel, the Jewish Home Secretary, if they did not "volunteer" for the British Army. They were not intimidated; they would fight neither for the Tsar nor his ally, and the government backed down. The legion idea was a way out for the embarrassed Allies.
The Turks helped make the scheme into a reality by expelling all Russian Jews from Palestine as enemy aliens. They were also unwilling to fight directly for tsarism, but their Zionism led them to follow Jabotinsky's co-thinker Yosef Trumpeldor into a Zion Mule Corps with the British at Gallipoli. Later Jabotinsky proudly boasted of how the Mule Corps - and the aid of the anti-Semites in Petersburg-helped him to obtain his goal:
it was that "donkey battalion" from Alexandria, ridiculed by all the wits in Israel, which opened before me the doors of the government offices of Whitehall. The Minister of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg wrote about it to Count Benkendoff, the Russian Ambassador in London; the Russian Embassy forwarded reports on it to the British Foreign Office; the chief Counsellor of the Embassy, the late Constantine Nabokov, who afterward succeeded the Ambassador, arranged for the meetings with British ministers. [23]
The Balfour Declaration and the fight against Bolshevism
The end of the war saw both Jewry and Zionism in a totally new world. The WZO's manoeuvres had finally paid off - for Zionism, but not for Jewry. The Balfour Declaration was the price that London was prepared to pay to have American Jewry use its influence to bring the United States into the war, and to keep Russian Jewry loyal to the Allies. But although the declaration gave Zionism the military and political backing of the British Empire, it had not the slightest effect on the course of events in the former Tsarist Empire, the heartland of Jewry. Bolshevism, an ideology principally opposed to Zionism, had seized power in Petersburg and was being challenged by White Guard tsarists and Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic forces financed by Britain, the United States, France and Japan. The counter-revolution consisted of many elements which had a long tradition of anti-Semitism and pogroms. This continued, and even developed further, during the civil war and at least 60,000 Jews were killed by the anti-Bolshevik forces. Although the Balfour Declaration gave Zionism the lukewarm support of the backers of the White Guardist pogromists, it did nothing to curb the pogroms. The declaration was, at best, a vague pledge to allow the WZO to try to build a national home in Palestine. The content of that commitment was as yet completely undefined. The WZO's leaders understood that the British government saw the crushing of the Bolsheviks as its top priority, and that they had to be on their best behaviour, not merely in terms of insignificant Palestine, but in their activities in the volatile East European arena.
Western historians call the Bolshevik revolution the Russian Revolution, but the Bolsheviks themselves regarded it as triggering a world-wide revolt. So also did the capitalists of Britain, France and America, who saw the Communist success galvanising the left wing of their own working classes. Like all social orders that cannot admit the fact that the masses have justification to revolt, they sought to explain the upheavals, to themselves as well as the people, in terms of a conspiracy - of the Jews. On 8 February 1920, Winston Churchill, then the Secretary for War, told readers of the Illustrated Sunday Herald about "Trotsky ... [and] ... his schemes of a world-wide communistic state under Jewish domination". However, Churchill had his chosen Jewish opponents of Bolshevism - the Zionists. He wrote hotly of "the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr Weizmann in particular". "Trotsky," Churchill declared, was "directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal ... The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people." [24]
The British strategy of using both anti-Semites and Zionists against "Trotsky" rested ultimately on Zionism's willingness to co-operate with Britain in spite of the British involvement with the White Russian pogromists. The WZO did not want pogroms in Eastern Europe, but it did nothing to mobilise world Jewry on behalf of the Jews beleaguered there. Weizmann's statements at the time, as well as his memoirs, tell us how they saw the situation. He appeared at the Versailles Conference on 23 February 1919. Once again he enunciated the traditional line on Jewry shared by both anti-Semites and Zionists. It was not the Jews who really had problems, it was the Jews who were the problem:
Jewry and Judaism were in a frightfully weakened condition, presenting, to themselves and to the nations, a problem very difficult of solution. There was, I said, no hope at all of such a solution - since the Jewish problem revolved fundamentally round the homelessness of the Jewish people - without the creation of a National Home. [25]
The Jews, of course, presented no real problem - neither to the nations nor to "themselves" - but Weizmann had a solution to the non-existent "problem". Once again Zionism offered itself to the assembled capitalist powers as an anti-revolutionary movement. Zionism would "transform Jewish energy into a constructive force instead of its being dissipated in destructive tendencies". [26] Even in his later years Weizmann could still only see the Jewish tragedy during the Russian Revolution through the Zionist end of the telescope:
Between the Balfour Declaration and the accession of the Bolsheviks to power, Russian Jewry had subscribed the then enormous sum of 30 million rubles for an agricultural bank in Palestine; but this, with much else, had now to be written off ... Polish Jewry ... was still suffering so much in the separate Russo-Polish War, that it was incapable of making any appreciable contribution to the tasks which lay ahead of us. [27]
Weizmann saw Zionism as weak in all respects with only a toe-hold in Palestine. Eastern Europe was "a tragedy which the Zionist movement was at the moment powerless to relieve". [28] Others were not so torpid. The British trade unions organised an embargo of arms shipments to the Whites. French Communists staged a mutiny in the French Black Sea fleet. And, of course, it was the Red Army that tried to protect the Jews against their White murderers. But the WZO never used its influence, either in the Anglo-Jewish community or in the seats of power, to back up the militant unionists. Weizmann completely shared the anti-Communist mentality of his British patrons. He never changed his opinion on the period. Even in Trial and Error, he still sounded like a high Tory writing of "a time when the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution were fresh in everyone's mind" (my emphasis). [29]
The minority treaties at the Versailles Peace Conference
Russia was out of control, but the Allies and their local clients still dominated the rest of Eastern Europe; now that the WZO had been converted by the Balfour Declaration into an official Voice of Israel, it could no longer remain taciturn about the fate of the huge Jewish communities there. It had to act as their spokesman. What it wanted was for the Jews to be recognised as a nation with autonomy for its separate schools and language institutions, as well as for the Jewish sabbath to be recognised as their day of rest. Since reliance on imperialism was the backbone of Zionist strategy, the Comite des Delegations Juives - essentially the WZO in tandem with the American Jewish Committee - presented a memorandum on national autonomy to the Versailles Conference. All the new successor states to the fallen empires, but neither Germany nor Russia, were to be compelled to sign minority-rights treaties as a precondition of diplomatic recognition. At first the idea was taken up by the Allies, who realised that minority rights were essential if the tangled national chauvinists of Eastern Europe were not to tear each other to pieces and pave the way for a Bolshevik take-over. One by one the Poles, the Hungarians and the Romanians signed, but their signatures were meaningless. The rapidly growing Christian middle classes in these countries saw the Jews as their entrenched competitors and were determined to dislodge them. The Pole who signed their treaty was the country's most notorious anti-Semite, the Hungarians declared their treaty day a day of national mourning and the Romanians refused to sign until the clauses guaranteeing sabbath rights and Jewish schools were deleted from their treaty.
There never was the slightest chance of success for the utopian plan. Balfour soon realised what problems the treaties would create for the Allies in Eastern Europe. On 22 October, he told the League of Nations that the accusing states would be assuming a thankless duty if they attempted to enforce the treaty obligations. He then argued that since the treaties preceded the League, it should not obligate itself to enforce them. [30] The assembled lawyers then accepted legal responsibility for the treaties, but provided no enforcement machinery.
Jews could not be bothered to use the meaningless treaties. Only three collective petitions were ever sent in. In the 1920s Hungary was found to have a numerus clausus in its universities. In 1933 the still weak Hitler felt compelled to honour the German-Polish Minority Convention, which was the only such treaty applicable to Germany, and 10,000 Jews in Upper Silesia retained all civil rights until treaty term in July 1937. [31] Romania was found guilty of revoking Jewish citizen rights in 1937. Such petty legalistic victories changed nothing in the long run.
The only way the Jews could have had any success in fighting for their rights in Eastern Europe was in alliance with the working-class movements which, in all these countries, saw anti-Semitism for what it was: an ideological razor in the hands of their own capitalist enemies. But although social revolution meant equality for the Jews as Jews, it also meant the expropriation of the Jewish middle class as capitalists. That was unacceptable to the local affiliates of the WZO, who were largely middle class in composition with virtually no working-class following. The world Zionist movement, always concerned for British ruling-class opinion, never pushed its local groupings in the direction of the left, although the radicals were the only mass force on the ground that was prepared to defend the Jews. Instead, the WZO leaders concluded that they lacked the strength to struggle simultaneously for Jewish rights in the Diaspora and build the new Zion" and by the 1920s they abandoned all pretence of action on behalf of Diaspora Jewry in situ, leaving their local affiliates - and the Jewish communities in these countries - to fend for themselves.
The Zionist alliance with anti-semitism in Eastern Europe
Most of the Jews in Eastern Europe did not see the Bolsheviks as the ogres that Churchill and Weizmann believed them to be. Under Lenin the Bolsheviks not only gave the Jews complete equality, but they even set up schools and, ultimately, courts in Yiddish; however, they were absolutely opposed to Zionism and all ideological nationalism. The Bolsheviks taught that the revolution required the unity of the workers of all nations against the capitalists. The nationalists separated "their" workers from their class fellows. Bolshevism specifically opposed Zionism as pro-British and as fundamentally anti-Arab. The local Zionist leadership was therefore forced to turn to the nationalists as possible allies. In the Ukraine that meant Simon Petliura's Rada (Council), which, like the Zionists, recruited on strictly ethnic lines: no Russians, no Poles and no Jews.
Ukrainia
The Rada was based on village schoolteachers and other language enthusiasts, steeped in the "glorious" history of the Ukraine - that is Bogdan Zinovy Chmielnicki's seventeenth-century Cossack revolt against Poland, during which the enraged peasantry massacred 100,000 Jews whom they saw as middlemen working for the Polish Pans (nobles). Nationalist ideology reinforced the "Christ-killer" venom which was poured into the illiterate rural masses by the old regime. Anti-Semitic outbreaks were inevitable in such an ideological climate, but the Zionists were taken in by promises of national autonomy, and rushed into the Rada. In January 1919 Abraham Revusky of the Poale Zion took office as Petliura's Minister for Jewish Affairs. [32] Meir Grossmann of the Ukrainian Zionist Executive went abroad to rally Jewish support for the anti-Bolshevik regime. [33]
The inevitable pogroms started with the first Ukrainian defeat at the hands of the Red Army in January 1919, and Revusky was compelled to resign within a month when Petliura did nothing to stop the atrocities. In many respects the Petliura episode destroyed the mass base of Zionism amongst Soviet Jews. Churchill lost his gamble: Trotsky, not Weizmann and not Revusky, was to win the soul of the Jewish masses.
Lithuania
Lithuanian Zionist involvement with the anti-Semites was likewise a failure, although, fortunately, Lithuania did not generate significant pogroms. The nationalists there were in an extremely weak position. Not only did they face a threat from Communism, they also had to struggle against Poland in a dispute over the territory around Vilna. They felt compelled to work with the Zionists, as they needed the support of the considerable Jewish minority in Vilna, and they also overestimated Zionist influence with the Allied powers whose diplomatic assent was a requirement if they were ever to gain the city. In December 1918 three Zionists entered the provisional government of Antanas Smetona and Augustinas Voldemaras. Jacob Wigodski became Minister for Jewish Affairs, N. Rachmilovitch became Vice-Minister for Trade and Shimshon Rosenbaum was appointed Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs.
The bait again was autonomy. Jews would be given proportional representation in government, full rights for Yiddish, and a Jewish National Council would be given the right of compulsory taxation of all Jews for religious and cultural affairs. Non-payment of tax would only be allowed for converts. Max Soloveitchik, who succeeded Wigodski at the Jewish Ministry, enthused that "Lithuania is the creative source of the future forms of Jewish living". [34]
By April 1922 the Lithuanian government felt it could begin to move against the Jews. The Vilna Corridor was definitely lost to Poland and the Polish Army stood between Communism and the Lithuanian border. Smetana's first move was to refuse to guarantee the institutions of autonomy in the constitution. Soloveitchik resigned in protest, and went to join the WZO Executive in London. The local Zionists tried to deal with the problem by forming an electoral bloc with the Polish, German and Russian minorities. This little extra muscle made the government slow its pace, and Rosenbaum was given the Jewish Ministry by Ernestas Galvanauskas, the new Prime Minister. By 1923 the onslaught began again with parliamentary speeches in Yiddish being forbidden. By June 1924 the Jewish Ministry was abolished; by July Yiddish store signs were outlawed; in September the police scattered the National Council, and Rosenbaum and Rachmilovitch moved to Palestine. By 1926 Smetana had set up a semi-Fascist regime which lasted until the Second World War take-over by Stalin. In later days Voldemaras and Galvanauskas openly assumed the role of Nazi agents in Lithuanian politics.
Zionist accommodation with anti-semitism
The essentials of Zionist doctrine on anti-Semitism were laid down well before the Holocaust: anti-Semitism was inevitable and could not be fought; the solution was the emigration of unwanted Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making. The inability of the Zionist movement to take Palestine militarily compelled it to look for imperial patronage, which it expected to be motivated by anti-Semitism to some degree. Zionists additionally saw revolutionary Marxism as an assimilationist enemy which persuaded them to ally against it with their fellow separatists of the anti-Semitic right-wing nationalist movements in Eastern Europe.
Herzl and his successors were proven correct. It was an anti-Semite, Balfour, who enabled Zionism to entrench itself in Palestine. Although Israel was ultimately established through armed revolt against Britain, if it had not been for the presence of the British Army during the early years of the Mandate, the Palestinians would not have had the slightest problem pushing Zionism out.
But we are victims here of a sleight-of-hand trick. Balfour did give Zionism its toe-hold in Palestine, but did the British Mandate protect the Jews against their enemies in Europe?
Anti-Semitism could always be fought. It was not only fought, it was defeated in France, Russia and the Ukraine without any help from the World Zionist Organisation. Had the people of those countries followed the dictates of the Zionists, the anti-Semites would never have been defeated.
The policies of the early WZO were continued, in all essentials, by Chaim Weizmann, the main leader of the organisation during the Hitler epoch. Those elements in the WZO who wanted to make a stand against Nazism in the 1930s always found their main internal enemy in the President of their own movement. Nahum Goldmann, himself to become a post-Holocaust President of the WZO, later described in a speech the fierce arguments on the subject between Weizmann and rabbi Stephen Wise, a leading figure in American Zionism:
I remember very violent discussions between him and Weizmann, who was a very great leader in his own right, but who rejected every interest in other things. He did take an interest in saving German Jews in the period of the first years of Nazism but World Jewish Congress, fight for Jewish rights, not that he denied their need, but he could not spare the time from his Zionist work. Stephen Wise argued with him "but it is part and parcel of the same problem. If you lose the Jewish Diaspora you will not have a Palestine and you can only deal with the totality of Jewish life. [35]
Such was Zionism, and such its leading figure, when Adolf Hitler strode on to the stage of history.
Notes
1. Marvin Lowenthal (ed.), The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.6.
2. Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, p.141.
3. Ludwig Lewisohn (ed.), Theodor Herzl: A Portrait, pp.293-4.
4. Ibid., pp.219-20.
5. Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol.II, pp.672-3.
6. Lowenthal, Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.71.
7. Ibid., p.100.
8. Ibid., p.366.
9. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, pp.90-1.
10. David Yisraeli, Germany and Zionism, Germany and the Middle East, 1835-1939 (Tel Aviv University, 1975), p.142.
11. Patai, Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol.III, p.729.
12. George Gapon, The Story of My Life, p.94.
13. Patai, Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. IV, p.1521.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p.1525.
16. Ibid., p.1538.
17. Amos Elon, Herzl, pp.381-2.
18. Samuel Portnoy (ed.), Vladimir Medem - The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, pp.295-8.
19. Ibid.
20. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p.82.
21. Emil Cohen, David Wolffsohn, p.196.
22. Meyer Weisgal (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol.VII p.81. After the Holocaust Weizmann could not reveal the anti-Semitism of Zionism's great patron. He changed the record in Trial and Error: "Mr Balfour mentioned that, two years before, he had been in Bayreuth, and that he had talked with Frau Cosima Wagner, the widow of the composer, who had raised the subject of the Jews. I interrupted Mr Balfour ..." (p.153).
23. Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Story of the Jewish Legion, p.74.
24. Winston Churchill, Zionism versus Bolshevism, Illustrated Sunday Herald (8 February 1920), p.5.
25. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p.243.
26. Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p.348.
27. Weizmann, Trial and Error, pp.240-1.
28. Ibid., p.242.
29. Ibid.. p.218.
30. Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minority Treaties a Failure?, pp.79-80.
31. Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked shall be made Straight, p.72.
32. Abraham Revusky, Encyclopedia Judaica, vol.14, col.134.
33. Meir Grossmann, Encyclopedia Judaica, vol.7, col.938.
34. Samuel Gringauz, Jewish National Autonomy in Lithuania (1918-1925), Jewish Social Studies (July 1952), p.237.
35. Nahum Goldmann, Dr Stephen S. Wise, A Galaxy of American Zionist Rishonim, pp.17-18.
***
2. Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil):_The Roots of Zionist Racism
It was anti-Semitism - alone - that generated Zionism. Herzl could not ground his movement in anything positively Jewish. Although he sought the support of the rabbis, he personally was not devout. He had no special concern for Palestine, the ancient homeland; he was quite eager to accept the Kenya Highlands, at least on a temporary basis. He had no interest in Hebrew; he saw his Jewish state as a linguistic Switzerland. He had to think of race, for it was in the air; the Teutonic anti-Semites were talking of the Jews as a race, but he soon discarded the doctrine, and gave a paradoxical discussion with Israel Zangwill, one of his earliest adherents, as the instance for his rejection. He portrayed the Anglo-Jewish writer as:
of the long-nosed Negro type, with wooly deep-black hair ... He maintains, however, the racial point of view - something I can't accept, for I have merely to look at him and at myself. All I say is: we are an historical unit, one nation with anthropological diversities. [1]
Unconcerned with religion, he even proposed that an atheist, the then world-famous author, Max Nordau, should succeed him as the WZO's President. Again, the disciple was less liberal than the master. Nordau was married to a Christian, and was afraid that his wife would be resented by the Orthodox among the ranks. [2] He was already married when he converted to Zionism and, despite his own Gentile wife, he soon became a confirmed Jewish racist. On 21 December 1903 he gave an interview to Eduard Drumont's rabid anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole, in which he said that Zionism wasn't a question of religion, but exclusively of race, and "there is no one with whom I am in greater agreement on this point than M. Drumont". [3]
Although only one national branch of the WZO (the Dutch Federation in 1913) ever went to the trouble of trying formally to exclude Jews living in mixed marriages, cosmopolitan Zionism died an early death with Herzl in 1904. [4] The WZO as such never had to take a position against mixed marriage; those who believed in it rarely thought to join the obviously unsympathetic Zionists. The movement in Eastern Europe, its mass base, shared the spontaneous folk-religious prejudices of the Orthodox communities around them. Although the ancient Jews had seen proselytising and marriages to Gentiles as adding to their strength, latter pressure from the Catholic Church caused the rabbis to begin to see converts as a "troublesome itch" and they abandoned proselytising. With the centuries, self-segregation became the hallmark of the Jews. In time the masses came to see mixed marriage as treason to Orthodoxy. Although in the West some Jews modified the religion and formed "Reform" sects and others abandoned the God of their forefathers, the traffic was essentially away from Judaism. Few joined the Jewish world either by conversion or marriage. If Western Zionism developed in a more secular atmosphere than that of Eastern Europe, the bulk of its members still saw mixed marriage as leading Jews away from the community rather than bringing new additions to it.
The German university graduates, who took over the Zionist movement after Herzl's death, developed the modernist-racist ideology of Jewish separatism. They had been powerfully influenced by their pan-Germanic fellow students of the Wandervögel (wandering birds or free spirits) who dominated the German campuses before 1914. These chauvinists rejected the Jews as not being of Germanic Blut; therefore they could never be part of the German Volk and were thoroughly alien to the Teutonic Boden or soil. All Jewish students were compelled to grapple with these concepts which surrounded them. A few moved left and joined the Social Democrats. To them this was just more bourgeois nationalism and was to be fought as such. Most remained conventionally Kaiser-treu, stout nationalists who insisted that a thousand years on the German Boden had made them into "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion". But a portion of the Jewish students adopted the wandervogel ideology whole and simply translated it into Zionist terminology. They agreed with the anti-Semites on several key points: the Jews were not part of the German Volk and, of course, Jews and Germans should not mix sexually, not for the traditional religious reasons, but for the sake of their own unique Blut. Not being of Teutonic Blut, they perforce had to have their own Boden: Palestine.
At first glance it would appear strange that middle-class Jewish students should be so influenced by anti-Semitic thought, especially as at the same time, socialism, with its assimilationist attitudes towards the Jews, was gaining considerable support in the society around them. However, socialism appealed primarily to the workers, not to the middle class. In their environment chauvinism predominated; although intellectually they repudiated their connection with the German people, in fact they never emancipated themselves from the German capitalist class, and throughout the First World War the German Zionists passionately supported their own government. For all their grandiose intellectual pretensions, their völkisch Zionism was simply an imitation of German nationalist ideology. Thus the young philosopher Martin Buber was able to combine Zionism with ardent German patriotism during the First World War. In his book Drei Reden ueber das Judentum, published in 1911, Buber spoke of a youth who:
senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood, which he feels to be the antecedents of his I, its perseverance in the infinite past. To that is added the discovery, promoted by this awareness, that blood is a deep rooted nurturing force within individual man; that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood; that our innermost thinking and our will are colored by it. Now he finds that the world around him is the world of imprints and influences, whereas blood is the realm of a substance capable of being imprinted and influenced, a substance absorbing and assimilating all into its own form Whoever, faced with the choice between environment and substance, decides for substance will henceforth have to be a Jew truly from within, to live as a Jew with all the contradiction, all the tragedy, and all the future promise of his blood. [5]
The Jews had been in Europe for millenniums, far longer than, say, the Magyars. No one would dream of referring to the Hungarians as Asiatics, yet, to Buber, the Jews of Europe were still Asians and presumably always would be. You could get the Jew out of Palestine, but you could never get Palestine out of the Jew. In 1916 he wrote that the Jew:
was driven out of his land and dispersed throughout the lands of the Occident yet, despite all this, he has remained an Oriental One can detect all this in the most assimilated Jew, if one knows how to gain access to his soul ... the immortal Jewish unitary drive - this will come into being only after the continuity of life in Palestine ... Once it comes into contact with its maternal soil, it will once more become creative. [6]
However, Buber's völkisch Zionism, with its assorted strands of mystical enthusiasm, was too spiritual to appeal to a wide following. What was needed was a popular Zionist version of the social-Darwinism which had swept the bourgeois intellectual world in the wake of Europe's imperial conquests in Africa and the East. The Zionist version of this notion was developed by the Austrian anthropologist Ignatz Zollschan. To him the secret value of Judaism was that it had, albeit inadvertently, worked to produce a wonder of wonders:
a nation of pure blood, not tainted by diseases of excess or immorality, of a highly developed sense of family purity, and of deeply rooted virtuous habits would develop an exceptional intellectual activity. Furthermore, the prohibition against mixed marriage provided that these highest ethnical treasures should not be lost, through the admixture of less carefully bred races ... there resulted that natural selection which has no parallel in the history of the human race ... If a race that is so highly gifted were to have the opportunity of again developing its original power, nothing could equal it as far as cultural value is concerned. [7]
Even Albert Einstein subscribed to the Zionist race conceptions and in so doing he reinforced racism, lending it the prestige of his reputation. His own contributions to the discussion sound suitably profound, but they are based on the same nonsense.
Nations with a racial difference appear to have instincts which work against their fusion. The assimilation of the Jews to the European nations ... could not eradicate the feeling of lack of kinship between them and those among whom they lived. In the last resort, the instinctive feeling of lack of kinship is referable to the law of the conservation of energy. For this reason it cannot be eradicated by any amount of well meant pressure. [8]
Buber, Zollschan and Einstein were but three among the classic Zionists who pontificated learnedly on race purity. But for sheer fanaticism few could match the American Maurice Samuel. A well-known writer in his day - later, in the 1940s, he was to work with Weizmann on the latter's autobiography - Samuel addressed the American public in 1927 in his I, the Jew. He denounced with horror a town which he readily conceded that he only knew by repute - and that the evidence would make us think was the free-living artists' colony at Taos, New Mexico:
there came together into this small place, representatives of the African Negro, the American and Chinese Mongol, the Semite and the Aryan ... free intermarriage had set in ... Why does this picture, part actual, part fanciful, fill me with a strange loathing, suggest the obscene, the obscurely beastly? ... Why then does that village which my fancy conjures up call to mind a heap of reptiles breeding uglily in a bucket? [9]
"To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-semite"
Although Blut was a recurrent theme in pre-Holocaust Zionist literature, it was not as central to its message as Boden. As long as America's shores remained open, Europe's Jews asked: if anti-Semitism could not be fought on its home ground, why should they not just follow the crowd to America? The Zionist response was double-barrelled: anti-Semitism would accompany the Jews wherever they went and, what was more, it was the Jews who had created anti-Semitism by their own characteristics. The root cause of anti-Semitism, Zionists insisted, was the Jews' exile existence. Jews lived parasitically off their "hosts". There were virtually no Jewish peasants in the Diaspora. The Jews lived in cities, they were alienated from manual labour or, more bluntly, they shunned it and preoccupied themselves with intellectual or commercial concerns. At best, their claims of patriotism were hollow as they wandered eternally from country to country. And when they fancied themselves as socialists and internationalists, in reality they were still no more than the middlemen of the revolution, fighting "other people's battles". These tenets combined were known as shelilat ha'galut (the Negation of the Diaspora), and were held by the entire spectrum of Zionists who varied only on matters of detail. They were argued vigorously in the Zionist press, where the distinctive quality of many articles was their hostility to the entire Jewish people. Anyone reading these pieces without knowing their source would have automatically assumed that they came from the anti-Semitic press. The Weltanschauung of the youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair (Young Watchmen), originally composed in 1917, but republished again as late as 1936, was typical of these effusions:
The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline. [10]
Similarly, in 1935 an American, Ben Frommer, a writer for the ultraright Zionist-Revisionists, could declare of no less than 16 million of his fellow Jews that:
The fact is undeniable that the Jews collectively are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives. [11]
This style of Jewish self-hatred permeated a great deal of Zionist writing. In 1934 Yehezkel Kaufman, then famous as a scholar of biblical history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and himself a Zionist, though an opponent of the bizarre theory of the Negation of the Diaspora, aroused furious controversy by culling the Hebrew literature for yet worse examples. In Hebrew the ranters could really attack their fellow Jews without fear of being accused of providing ammunition for the Jew-haters. Kaufman's Hurban Hanefesh (Holocaust of the Soul) cited three of the classic Zionist thinkers. For Micah Yosef Berdichevsky the Jews were "not a nation, not a people, not human". To Yosef Chaim Brenner they were nothing more than "Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded, dogs". To A.D. Gordon his people were no better than "parasites, people fundamentally useless". [12]
Naturally Maurice Samuel had to apply his fine hand to concocting libels against his fellow Jews. In 1924, in his work You Gentiles, he fabricated a Jewry driven by its own sinister demiurge to oppose the Christian social order:
We Jews, we the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which is not your nature to build ... those of us who fail to understand that truth will always be found in alliance with your rebellious factions, until disillusionment comes, the wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us. [13]
Labour Zionism produced its own unique brand of Jewish self-hatred. In spite of its name and pretensions, Labour Zionism was never able to win over any significant section of the Jewish working class in any country cf the Diaspora. Its members had a self-defeating argument: they claimed that the Jewish workers were in "marginal" industries, such as the needle trades, which were unessential to the economy of the "host", nations, and therefore the Jewish workers would always be marginal to the working-class movement in the countries of their abode. Jewish workers, it was claimed, could only wage a "healthy" class struggle in their own land. Naturally poor Jews showed little interest in a so-called labour movement that did not tell them to put their all into fighting in the immediate present for better conditions, but rather to concern themselves about far-off Palestine. Paradoxically, Labour Zionism's primary appeal was to those young middle-class Jews who sought to break with their class origins, but were not prepared to go over to the workers of the country of their habitation. Labour Zionism became a kind of counter-culture sect, denouncing Jewish Marxists for their internationalism, and the Jewish middle class as parasitic exploiters of the "host", nations. In effect they translated traditional anti-Semitism into Yiddish: the Jews were in the wrong countries in the wrong occupations and had the wrong politics. It took the Holocaust to bring these Jeremiahs to their senses. Only then did they appreciate the common voice in their own message and the Nazis' anti-Jewish propaganda. In March 1942 Chaim Greenberg, then the editor of New York's Labour Zionist organ, Jewish Frontier, painfully admitted that, indeed, there had been:
a time when it used to be fashionable for Zionist speakers (including the writer) to declare from the platform that "To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-Semite". To this day Labor Zionist circles are under the influence of the idea that the Return to Zion involved a process of purification from our economic uncleanliness. Whosoever doesn't engage in so-called "productive" manual labor is believed to be a sinner against Israel and against mankind. [14]
"Grist to the mills of Nazi propaganda"
If, without further facts, anyone were told that the early Zionists were racists, it would be automatic to assume this to be a part of the colonialist aspects of Zionism in Palestine. In reality this is not so; Blut Zionism would have evolved even if Palestine were to have been completely empty. Enthusiasm for Blut und Boden were part of Zionism before the first modern Zionist ever left Europe.
Race Zionism was a curious offshoot of racial anti-Semitism. True, these Zionists argued, the Jews were a pure race, certainly purer than, say, the Germans who, as even the pan-Germanics conceded, had a huge admixture of Slavic blood. But to these Zionists, even their racial purity could not overcome the one flaw in Jewish existence: they did not have their own Jewish Boden. If the Teutonic racists could see themselves as Übermenschen (supermen), these Hebrew racists did not see the Jews in that light; rather, it was the reverse. They believed that because they lacked their own Boden the Jews were Untermenschen and therefore, for their "hosts", little more than leeches: the world pest.
If one believes in the validity of racial exclusiveness, it is difficult to object to anyone else's racism. If one believes further that it is impossible for any people to be healthy except in their own homeland, then one cannot object to anyone else excluding "aliens" from their territory. In fact the average Zionist never thought of himself as leaving civilised Europe for the wilds of Palestine. In life it is obvious that Zionist Blut und Boden provided an excellent rationale for not fighting anti-Semitism on its home ground. It was not the fault of the anti-Semites, it was because of the Jews' own misfortune of being in exile. The Zionists could tearfully argue that the loss of Palestine was the root cause of anti-Semitism and the regaining of Palestine was the only solution to the Jewish question. Everything else could only be palliative or futile.
Walter Laqueur, the doyen of Zionist historians, has asked in his book, A History of Zionism, if Zionist insistence on the naturalness of anti-Semitism was not just "grist to the mill of Nazi propaganda". [15] It certainly was. Laqueur's question can best be answered with another question: is it difficult to understand the gullible reader of a Nazi newspaper, who concluded that what was said by the Nazis, and agreed to by the Zionists - Jews - had to be right?
There would be worse: any Jewish movement that prattled on about the naturalness of anti-Semitism would, just as "naturally", seek to come to terms with the Nazis when they came to power.
Notes
1. Marvin Lowenthal (ed.), The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.78.
2. Amos Elon, Herzl, p.255.
3. Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, p.322.
4. The WZO is structured by national states, and elections are held on a national basis for the World Zionist Congress; the various ideological tendencies which are world-wide in their structure, run in the various national elections for delegates.
5. Martin Buber, On Judaism, pp.15-19.
6. Ibid., pp.75-7.
7. Ignatz Zollschan, Jewish Questions (1914) pp.17-18.
8. Solomon Goldman, Crisis and Decision (1938), p.116.
9. Maurice Samuel, I, the Jew, pp.244-6.
10. Our Shomer "Weltanschauung", Hashomer Hatzair (December 1936), p.26.
11. Ben Frommer, The Significance of a Jewish State, Jewish Call (Shanghai, May 1935), p.10.
12. Yehezkel Kaufman, Hurban Hanefesh: A Discussion of Zionism and Anti-Semitism, Issues (Winter 1967), p.106.
13. Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, p.155.
14. Chaim Greenberg, The Myth of Jewish Parasitism, Jewish Frontiers (March 1942), p.20.
15. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p.500.
***
3. German Zionism and Collapse of the Weimar Republic
German Jewry was deeply loyal to the Weimar Republic which had put an end to the discriminations of the Wilhelmine era. Germany's Jews, (0.9 per cent of the population) were generally prosperous: 60 per cent were businessmen or professionals; the rest artisans, clerks, students, with only insubstantial numbers of industrial workers. Most were for liberal capitalism, with 64 per cent voting for the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP). About 28 per cent voted for the moderate Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). Only 4 per cent voted for the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), and the rest were scattered rightists. Weimar looked safe to all of them as they saw the Nazi vote drop from 6.5 per cent in 1924 to a mere 2.6 per cent in 1928. None thought horror lay ahead.
Until the late 1920s Hitler had wasted his time trying to recruit the working class into his National Socialist German Workers' Party, but few were interested: Hitler had been for the war, they had finally revolted against it; Hitler was against strikes, they were good trade unionists. When the Depression finally brought him a mass following it was the peasants, not the workers, who poured into his movement. Weimar had changed nothing for them; 27 per cent still tilled less than one hectare (2.471 acres), another 26 per cent worked less than 5 hectares (12.5 acres). In debt to the banks even before the crisis, these rural Christians were easily persuaded to focus on the Jews who, for centuries, had been identified with pawnbroking and usury. The Christian professional class, already steeped in sabre and beer volkism from their university days, and the small shopkeepers, resenting the superior competition from the large Jewish department stores, were the next to break away from the coalition that had ruled Weimar from its inception and join the Nazis. From a tiny 2.6 per cent in 1928 the Nazi vote soared to 18.3 per cent in the elections of 14 September 1930.
Religious Jewry turned to its traditional defence organisation, the Centralverein, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith; now, for the first time, the department-store owners, who had become a prime target for the attentions of the Nazi brownshirts, began to contribute to the CV's efforts. The CV's elderly leadership could not understand the collapse of capitalism. They were simply stunned when their party, the DDP, suddenly jack-knifed and turned itself into the moderately anti-Semitic Staatspartei. However, younger members of the CV pushed aside the old leadership and were able to get the CV to use the department-store money to subsidise the SDP's anti-Nazi propaganda. After the DDP's betrayal, the SPD picked up approximately 60 per cent of the Jewish vote. Only 8 per cent went Communist, and they received no CV largess for the stated grounds that they were militantly against God; the real concern was that they were equally militant against the CV's financial angles.
Each German Jewish association saw Hitler's ascent through its own special mirror. The young CV functionaries saw that the SPD's working-class base stayed loyal to it and that Jews continued to be integrated into the party at every level. What they did not realise was that the SPD was incapable of defeating Hitler. Before the First World War the SPD had been the largest socialist party in the world, the pride of the Socialist International. But it was no more than reformist and throughout the Weimar Republic it failed to establish the firm socialist base which would have allowed the German working class to resist the Nazis. The onset of the Depression found their own Hermann Müller as Chancellor. Soon their right-wing coalition partners decided the workers would have to bear the weight of the crisis and replaced him with Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Zentrumspartei. The "hunger chancellor", raised taxes on the lucky ones with jobs to pay ever-smaller benefits to the increasing millions of unemployed. The SPD leaders knew this was suicide but tolerated, Brüning, fearing he would bring Hitler into his coalition if they turned away from him. Therefore they did not fight against the cuts in the dole. Brüning had nothing to offer the desperate middle class and more of them put on brown shirts. The SDP's ranks, Jews and non-Jews alike, passively stood by and watched as their party succumbed.
The Communist KPD also defeated itself. Lenin's Bolshevism had degenerated into Stalin's "Third Period" ultra-leftism, and Rosa Luxemburg's Spartakusbund into Ernst Thälmann's Rote Front. To these sectarians everyone else was a Fascist. The Sozialdemokraten were now "Sozial Faschisten" and no unity was possible with them.
In 1930 the two working-class parties combined outpolled Hitler 37.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent. He could have been stopped; it was their failure to unite on a militant programme of joint physical defence against the brownshirts and in defence against the government's onslaught against the standard of living of the masses that let Hitler come to power. Since the Second World War Western scholars have tended to see the KPD "betraying" the SPD through Stalin's fanaticism. In the Stalinist camp the roles are reversed; the SPD is blamed for leaning on a broken reed like Brüning. But both parties must share the responsibility for the debacle.
"It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us"
If the SPD and the KPD must bear their full measure of guilt for Hitler's triumph, so too must the Zionistische Vereinigung fuer Deutschland (the Zionist Federation of Germany). Although conventional wisdom has always assumed that the Zionists, with their dire view of anti-Semitism, warned the Jews of the Nazi menace, this is in fact not true. In 1969, Joachim Prinz, the former President of the American Jewish Congress - in his youth a fire-eating Zionist rabbi in Berlin - still insisted that:
Since the assassination of Walther Rathenau in 1922, there was no doubt in our minds that the German development would be toward an anti-Semitic totalitarian regime. When Hitler began to arouse, and as he put it "awaken" the German nation to racial consciousness and racial superiority, we had no doubt that this man would sooner or later become the leader of the German nation. [1]
Yet a diligent search of the pages of the Jüdische Rundschau, the weekly organ of the ZVfD, will not reveal such prophecies. When a Jew was killed and several hundred Jewish stores looted in a November 1923 hunger riot in Berlin, Kurt Blumenfeld, the Secretary (later President) of the ZVfD, consciously played down the incident:
There would be a very cheap and effective kind of reaction, and we ... decisively reject it. One could incite deep anxiety among German Jewry. One could use the excitement to enlist the vacillating. One could represent Palestine and Zionism as a refuge for the homeless. We do not wish to do that. We do not wish to carry off by demagoguery those who have stood apart from Jewish life out of indifference. But we wish to make clear to them through [our] sincere conviction where the basic error of Jewish galuth [exile] existence lies. We wish to awaken their national self-awareness. We wish ... through patient and earnest educational work [to] prepare them to participate in the upbuilding of Palestine. [2]
The historian Stephen Poppel, certainly no enemy of the ZVfD, categorically states in his book, Zionism in Germany 1897-1933, that after 1923 the Rundschau "did not begin to take systematic, detailed notice of anti-Jewish agitation and violence until 1931". [3] Far from warning and defending the Jews, prominent Zionists opposed anti-Nazi activity.
It had been the German Zionists who had most fully elaborated the ideology of the WZO before 1914 and in the 1920s they developed the argument to its logical conclusion: Judaism in the Diaspora was hopeless. There was no possible defence against anti-Semitism and there was no purpose in trying to develop Jewish cultural and community institutions in Germany. The ZVfD turned away from the society in which they lived. There were only two Zionist tasks: instilling nationalist consciousness in as many Jews as would listen and training youths for occupations useful in the economic development of Palestine. Anything else was useless and palliative.
In 1925 the most vehement protagonist of total abstentionism, Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the massive Encyclopedia Judaica, laid down the full implications of the Zionist approach to anti-Semitism.
If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism. If our people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity, reducing the domain of their life. It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity Instead of establishing societies for defense against the anti-semites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defense against our friends who desire to defend our rights. [4]
German Zionism was distinctive in the WZO, in that the ZVfD leaders opposed taking any part in local politics. To Blumenfeld, Grenzüberschreitung (overstepping the borders) was the dreaded sin. Blumenfeld completely accepted the anti-Semitic line that Germany belonged to the Aryan race and that for a Jew to hold an office in the land of his birth was nothing more than an intrusion into the affairs of another Volk. In theory the ZVfD insisted that every single one of its members should eventually emigrate to Palestine, but of course this was completely unrealistic. Some 2,000 settlers went from Germany to Palestine between 1897 and 1933, but many of these were Russians stranded there after the revolution. In 1930 the ZVfD had 9,059 paidup members, but the dues were nominal and in no way a sign of deep commitment. For all Blumenfeld's enthusiasm, Zionism was not an important element in the Weimar Republic.
When the warning signs of the Nazi surge appeared in the June 1930 elections in Saxony, where they obtained 14.4 per cent of the vote, the Berlin Jewish community put pressure on the ZVfD to join a Reichstag Election Committee in conjunction with the CV and other assimilationists. But the ZVfD's adherence was strictly nominal; the assimilationists complained that the Zionists put barely any time or money into it, and it dissolved immediately after the election. A Rundschau article by Siegfried Moses, later Blumenfeld's successor as head of the federation, demonstrated the Zionists, indifference to the construction of a strenuous defence:
We have always believed the defense against anti-Semitism to be a task which concerns all Jews and have clearly stated the methods of which we approve and those which we consider irrelevant or ineffective. But it is true that the defense against anti-Semitism is not our main task, it does not concern us to the same extent and is not of the same importance for us as is the work for Palestine and, in a somewhat different sense, the work of the Jewish communities. [5]
Even after the election in September 1930 the Zionists argued against the notion of creating an effective front against the Nazis. A.W. Rom insisted in the Rundschau that any defence could only be a waste of time. To him "The most important lesson we have learned from this election is that it is much more important to strengthen the Jewish community in Germany from within than to conduct an external fight." [6]
The ZVfD leaders could never effectively unite with the assimilationists on defence work. They were total abstentionists politically, and they were volkists; they did not believe in the CV's fundamental premiss that the Jews were Germans. Their concern was that the Jews should emphasise their Jewishness. They reasoned that if Jews started to consider themselves a separate national minority, and stopped interfering in "Aryan" affairs, it would be possible to get the anti-Semites to tolerate them on a basis of a "dignified" coexistence. The assimilationists would have none of this; to them the Zionist position was just an echo of the Nazi line. There is no doubt that the assimilationists were correct. But even if the Zionists had convinced every Jew to support their stance, it would not have helped. Hitler did not care what the Jews thought of themselves; he wanted them out of Germany and, preferably, dead. The Zionist solution was no solution. There was nothing the Jews could have done to mollify anti-Semitism. Only the defeat of Nazism could have helped the Jews, and that could only have happened if they had united with the anti-Nazi working class on a programme of militant resistance. But this was anathema to the ZVfD leadership who, in 1932, when Hitler was gaining strength by the day, chose to organise anti-Communist meetings to warn Jewish youth against "red assimilation". [7]
The Zionist Minorities
As Hitler rose to power, minorities within the ZVfD increasingly ignored Blumenfeld's strictures against political action and either worked with the CV or looked to the other political elements for their salvation. Georg Kareski, a banker, had long been in disagreement with Blumenfeld over the ZVfD President's basic indifference to intemal Jewish community politics, and in 1919 he had established a Jüdische Volkspartei to run in the Berlin Jewish community elections on a programme with greater emphasis on Jewish schooling. In 1930 Kareski surfaced in the larger German political arena as a candidate for the Reichstag on the Catholic Centre ticket (he lost) and an "Organisation of Jewish Centre Party Voters" was set up by his co-thinkers. The spectacle amused a Social Democratic wag:
The homeless Jewish bourgeoisie has in great part sought shelter with the Center Party - Christ and the first Pope were Jews, so why not? Wretched individuals who do violence to their ideas and purposes out of anxiety over "Socialist expropriation". What Hitler is to the Christians, the Center Party is to the Jews. [8]
Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church had made the German Catholic hierarchy very distrustful of anti-Semitism; they feared it would pave the way for further attacks on the Catholic minority as well. In addition, individual bishops, mindful that Jesus was a Jew and that therefore racial anti-Semitism was incompatible with Christianity, had even refused communion to Nazi members. But there had always been anti-Semites among the leaders of the Centre, and after the 1929 Lateran accord with Mussolini there was growing pressure from the Vatican for a Centre-Nazi accommodation in the name of a fight against Communism. However, Kareski could not see the direction in which class interest was pushing the Catholic upper class, and he completely misjudged Franz von Papen, who took over as a Centre Chancellor after Brüning. Kareski reassured his rich Jewish friends that "the Papen government has written the protection of the Jews on the flag". [9] In reality von Papen had always been an anti-Semite and in the end, after he had lost the chancellorship, he was part of the camarilla that convinced President Hindenburg to summon Hitler to power.
On the Zionist left the German branch of the Poale Zion backed the incompetent leadership of the SPD. Before 1914 the SPD refused to associate with Zionism, which it saw as separating the Jews from other workers, and only those elements on the far right of the SPD that supported German imperialism in Africa patronised the Labour Zionists, whom they saw as fellow socialist-colonisers. The Socialist International only established friendly relations with Poale Zion during and after the First World War, when the left-wing anti-colonialist forces joined the Communist International. The Labour Zionists joined the SPD with one central purpose: to gain support for Zionism. As long as the leaders of the SPD had good things to say about Zionism, they, in turn, replied with similar endearments. By 1931 the Labour Zionist leaders in Palestine began to envision a victorious Hitler, but they had no alternative stratagems for the SPD and there is no record of the Poale Zion leaders in Palestine ever publicly quarrelling with their erstwhile comrades in the SPD leadership.
"Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralising phenomena"
The basic Zionist attitude toward the Nazis was that nothing could really be done to stop them, but they felt obliged to do something. The Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel tells us, very vaguely, that the German Zionists tried to persuade Chancellor Brüning to issue a strong declaration against Nazi anti-Semitism by "stressing the influence of Zionists upon the governments of various nations". Brüning never replied, "nor were the Zionists successful in their attempts to obtain governmental support of emigration to Palestine as a constructive outlet for internal pressure". [10]
Any such statement from Brüning would have been meaningless, unless he had been prepared to crush the Nazis. Any announcement that the government was aiding Jews to leave would have been counterproductive in encouraging the Nazis to increase their efforts in the certainty that the regime was weakening in its defence of Jewish rights. However, Brüning did nothing because the Zionists were bluffing that they had any influence upon "the governments of various nations", especially Britain.
Weizmann, the prestigious scientist and President of the WZO, who was well connected in London, did next to nothing for German Jewry. He had never liked them, nor did he have any sympathy for their defence efforts against anti-Semitism. As early as 18 March 1912 he had actually been brazen enough to tell a Berlin audience that "each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews." [11] In his chat with Balfour, in 1914, he went further, telling him that "we too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believed that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralising phenomena". [12] He visited Germany several times in the last years of Weimar. His friends there told him that they did not even want Jews elsewhere to demonstrate on their behalf. Rather, he should get British Conservatives to let it be known that Hitler would discredit himself with them by anti-Semitic actions. Weizmann approached Robert Boothby, a Conservative MP, who told him that quite frankly most Tories saw Hitler as saving Germany from Communism and were far less concerned about his anti-Semitism. [13] By January 1932 Weizmann concluded that emigration of some of Germany's Jews lay ahead. Although he had lost the support of the World Zionist Congress in 1931, had stepped down as President of the organisation and was thus unburdened by office, he did nothing further to mobilise the world or Jewry against Hitler.
In Germany itself the ZVfD never tried to bring the Jews out into the streets, but the Rundschau felt free to threaten that the Jews would come out - in New York. In reality, not one demonstration against Hitler was organised in America by the Zionists before he came to power. Rabbi Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress, did get together with the assimilationists of the American Jewish Committee to ask the leaders of German Jewry how they could help. The German Jewish bourgeoisie merely thanked them for the gesture and assured the Americans that they would be contacted if things got worse. Wise wanted to try for a statement from President Hoover but even that was too radical for the American Jewish Committee, and Wise dropped the matter. Wise and Nahum Goldmann did organise a World Jewish Conference in Geneva in the summer of 1932, but Goldmann, extremely committed, was unwilling to work with assimilationists. [14] Zionism was a minority movement in Jewry at that time; the conference did little more than preach to the converted, and only a minority of the converted at that, since neither Weizmann nor Nahum Sokolow, who had succeeded him as President of the WZO, attended. Nothing came of the meeting and indeed neither Wise nor Goldmann appreciated the full seriousness of the situation. Goldmann, always a believer in the influence of the Great Powers, told the l932 ZVfD convention that Britain and France, and Russia, would never let Hitler come to power. [15] Stephen Wise retreated even further into that world where perhaps things would not be "as bad as we dreaded". On hearing of Hitler's coming to power, he felt the only real danger lay in Hitler's failing to keep his other promises. Then "he may finally decide that he must yield to his fellow Nazis in the matter of anti-Semitism". [16]
"Liberalism is the enemy; it is also the enemy for Nazism"
Given that the German Zionists agreed with two fundamental elements in Nazi ideology - that the Jews would never be part of the German Volk and, therefore, they did not belong on German soil - it was inevitable that some Zionists would believe an accommodation possible. If Wise could delude himself that Hitler was the moderate in the Nazis' ranks, why could not others talk themselves into believing that there were elements in the NSDAP who might restrain Hitler? Stephen Poppel has touched on this debate within the ZVfD:
Some Zionists thought that there might be respectable and moderate elements within the Nazi movement who would serve to restrain it from within ... These elements might serve as suitable negotiating partners for reaching some kind of German-Jewish accommodation. There was serious division over this possibility, with Weltsch [editor of the Rundschau], for example, arguing in its behalf and Blumenfeld sharply opposing it. [17]
Nor was Robert Weltsch alone. Gustav Krojanker, an editor at the Jüdischer Verlag, the oldest Zionist publishing house in Europe, also saw the two movements' common roots in volkist irrationalism, and drew the conclusion that Zionists should look positively at the nationalist aspects of Nazism. A benign approach toward their fellow volkists, he naively reasoned, would perhaps bring forth an equivalent benevolence toward Zionism on the part of the Nazis. [18] As far as Krojanker and many other Zionists were concerned, democracy's day was over. Harry Sacher, a Briton, one of the leaders of the WZO in the period, explained Krojanker's theories in a review of Krojanker's book, Zum Problem des Neuen Deutschen Nationalismus:
For Zionists, Liberalism is the enemy; it is also the enemy for Nazism; ergo, Zionism should have much sympathy and understanding for Nazism, of which anti-Semitism is probably a fleeting accident. [19]
No Zionist wanted Hitler to come to power, no Zionist voted for him and neither Weltsch nor Krojanker collaborated with the Nazis prior to 30 January 1933. Collaboration only emerged later. But these notions were the logical result of decades of Zionist justification for anti-Semitism and failure to resist it. It cannot be argued in their defence that the Zionist leaders did not know what was going to happen when Hitler came to power. He had said more than enough to guarantee that, at the very least, the Jews would be reduced to second-class citizenship. In addition, they knew that Hitler was an admirer of Mussolini and that ten years of Fascism in Italy had meant terror, torture and dictatorship. But in their hostility to liberalism and its commitment to Jewish assimilation, and as opponents of Jews utilising their full democratic rights within the parliamentary system, the Fascist aspect of Nazism never unduly disturbed the leaders of the ZVfD. It never occurred to these sectarians that they had a duty to democracy to mobilise in its defence. The grave implications of another Fascist regime, this time with an avowed anti-Jewish position, in the very heart of Europe, completely eluded them.
Dante has false diviners walking backwards, their faces reversed on their necks, tears pouring from their eyes. For ever. So it is for all who misunderstood Hitler.
Notes
1. Herbert Strauss (ed.), Gegenwart Im Ruckblick (Heidelberg, 1970), p.231.
2. Stephen Poppel, Zionism in Germany 1897-1933, p.119.
3. Ibid.
4. Jacob Agus, The Meaning of Jewish History, vol.II, p.425.
5. Margaret Edelheim-Muehsam, Reactions of the Jewish Press to the Nazi Challenge, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol.V (1960), p.312.
6. Ibid., p.314.
7. Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, p.30.
8. Donald Niewyk, Socialist, Anti-Semite and Jew, p.213.
9. Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain, p.209.
10. Eliazer Livneh, Germany: Relations with Zionism and Israel, Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel, vol.I, p.385.
11. Benyamin Matuvo, The Zionist Wish and the Nazi Deed, Issues (Winter 1966/7), p.9.
12. Chaim Weizmann to Ahad Ha'am, in Leonard Stein (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol.VII, p.81.
13. Shlomo Shafir, American Jewish Leaders and the Emerging Nazi Threat (1928-1933), American Jewish Archives (November 1979), p.172.
14. Ibid., p.175.
15. Walter Laqueur, History of Zionism, p.499.
16. Shafir, American Jewish Leaders and the Emerging Nazi Threat, p.181.
17. Poppel, Zionism in Germany, p.161.
18. Herbert Strauss, Jewish Reactions to the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany, p.13.
19. Harry Sacher, review of Gustav Krojanker, Zum Problem des Neuen Deutschen Nationalismus, Jewish Review (London, September 1932), p.104.
***
4. Zionism and Italian Fascism, 1922-1933
The World Zionist Organisation's attitude toward Italian Fascism was determined by one criterion: Italy's position on Zionism. When Mussolini was hostile to them, Weizmann was critical of him; but when he became pro-Zionist, the Zionist leadership enthusiastically supported him. On the day Hitler came to power they were already friends with the first Fascist leader.
As a revolutionary, Mussolini had always worked with Jews in the Italian Socialist Party, and it was not until he abandoned the left that he first began to echo the anti-Semitic ideas of the northern European right-wing. Four days after the Bolsheviks took power, he announced that their victory was a result of a plot between the "Synagogue", that is, "Ceorbaum" (Lenin), "Bronstein" (Trotsky), and the German Army. [1] By 1919 he has Communism explained: the Jewish bankers - "Rotschild", "Warnberg", "Schyff" and "Guggenheim" - were behind the Communist Jews. [2] But Mussolini was not so anti-Semitic as to exclude Jews from his new party and there were five among the founders of the Fascist movement. Nor was anti-Semitism important to his ideology; in fact it was not well received by his followers.
Anti-Semitism in Italy had always been identified in the public mind with Catholic obscurantism. It was the Church which had forced the Jews into the ghettos and Italian nationalists had always supported the Jews against the Popes, whom they saw as opponents of a united Italy. In 1848 the walls of the Roman ghetto were destroyed by the revolutionary Roman Republic. With their defeat the ghetto was restored, but the final victory of the nationalist Kingdom of Italy in 1870 brought an end to discrimination against the Jews. The Church blamed the Jews for the nationalist victory, and the official Jesuit organ, Civiltá Cattolica, continued to insist that they had only been defeated by "conspiracies with the Jews [that] were formed by Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, Farini and De Pretis". [3] But this clerical ranting against the heroes of Italian nationalism merely discredited anti-Semitism, particularly among the anti-clerical youth of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie. Since the essence of Fascism was the mobilisation of the middle class against Marxism, Mussolini listened carefully to his followers' objections: what was the point of denouncing Communism as a Jewish conspiracy, if the Jews themselves were not unpopular?
"True Jews have never fought against you"
As with many another, Mussolini originally combined anti-Semitism with pro-Zionism, and his Popolo d'ltalia continued to favour Zionism until 1919, when he concluded that Zionism was merely a cat's-paw for the British and he began to refer to the local Zionist movement as "so-called Italians". [4] All Italian politicians shared this suspicion of Zionism, including two Foreign Ministers of Jewish descent - Sidney Sonnino and Carlo Schanzar. The Italian line on Palestine was that Protestant Britain had no real standing in the country as there were no native Protestants there. What they wanted in Palestine was an international "Holy Land". In agreeing with the position of the pre-Fascist governments on Palestine and Zionism, Mussolini was primarily motivated by imperial rivalry with Britain and by hostility to any political grouping in Italy having a loyalty to an international movement.
Mussolini's March on Rome of October 1922 worried the Italian Zionist Federation. They had no love for the preceding Facta government, given its anti-Zionism, but the Fascisti were no better on that score, and Mussolini had made clear his own anti-Semitism. However, their concerns about anti-Semitism were lifted immediately; the new government hastened to inform Angelo Sacerdoti, the chief rabbi of Rome and an active Zionist, that they would not support anti-Semitism either at home or abroad. The Zionists then obtained an audience with Mussolini on 20 December 1922. They assured the Duce of their loyalty. Ruth Bondy, a Zionist writer on Italian Jewry, relates: "The delegation, on its part, argued that Italian Jews would always remain loyal to their native land and could help establish relations with the Levant through the Jewish communities there." [5]
Mussolini bluntly told them that he still saw Zionism as a tool of the British, but their pledge of loyalty softened his hostility somewhat and he agreed to meet Chaim Weizmann, the President of the WZO, who attended on 3 January 1923. Weizmann's autobiography is deliberately vague, and often misleading, on his relations with the Italian, but fortunately it is possible to learn something of the meeting from the report given at the time to the British Embassy in Rome. This explains how Weizmann tried to deal with the objection that Zionism wore Britain's livery: "Dr Weizmann, whilst denying that this was in any way the case, said that, even if it were so, Italy stood to gain as much as Great Britain by a weakening of Moslem power." [6]
This answer cannot have inspired too much confidence in Mussolini, but he was pleased when Weizmann asked permission to name an Italian Zionist to the commission running their settlement in Palestine. Weizmann knew the Italian public would see this as Fascist toleration for the WZO, which would make it easier for Zionism amongst wary Jews, frightened at the thought of coming into conflict with the new regime. Mussolini saw it the other way around; by such a cheap gesture he would win support both at home and abroad from the Jewish community.
The meeting produced no change in Italian policy toward Zionism or the British, and the Italians continued to obstruct Zionist efforts by harassing tactics on the League of Nations Mandate Commission. Weizmann never, then or later, mobilised opposition to what Mussolini did to Italians, but he had to say something about a regime that actively opposed Zionism. He spoke out, in America, on 26 March 1923:
Today there is a tremendous political wave, known as Fascism, which is sweeping over Italy. As an Italian movement it is no business of ours - it is the business of the Italian Government. But this wave is now breaking against the little Jewish community, and the little community, which never asserted itself, is today suffering from anti-Semitism. [7]
Italian policy toward Zionism only changed in the mid-1920s, when their consuls in Palestine concluded that Zionism was there to stay and that Britain would only leave the country if and when the Zionists got their own state. Weizmann was invited back to Rome for another conference on 17 September 1926. Mussolini was more than cordial; he offered to help the Zionists build up their economy and the Fascist press began printing favourable articles on Palestinian Zionism.
Zionist leaders began to visit Rome. Nahum Sokolow, then the Chairman of the Zionist Executive and later, in 1931-3, the President of the WZO, appeared on 26 October 1927. Michael Ledeen, a specialist on Fascism and the Jewish question, has described the political outcome of the Sokolow-Mussolini talks:
With this last meeting Mussolini became lionised by Zionism. Sokolow not only praised the Italian as a human being but announced his firm belief that Fascism was immune from anti-Semitic preconceptions. He went even further: in the past there might have been uncertainty about the true nature of Fascism, but now, "we begin to understand its true nature ... true Jews have never fought against you".
These words, tantamount to a Zionist endorsement of the Fascist regime, were echoed in Jewish periodicals all over the world. In this period, which saw a new legal relationship established between the Jewish community and the Fascist state, expressions of loyalty and affection for Fascism poured out of the Jewish centers of Italy. [8]
Not all Zionists were pleased with Sokolow's remarks. The Labour Zionists were loosely affiliated to the underground Italian Socialist Party via the Socialist International and they complained, but the Italian Zionists were overjoyed. Prosperous and extremely religious, these conservatives saw Mussolini as their support against Marxism and its concomitant assimilation. In 1927 Rabbi Sacerdoti gave an interview to the journalist Guido Bedarida:
Professor Sacerdoti is persuaded that many of the fundamental principles of the Fascist Doctrine such as: the observance of the laws of the state, respect of traditions, the principle of authority, exaltation of religious values, a desire for the moral and physical cleanliness of family and the individual, the struggle for an increase of production, and therefore a struggle against Malthusianism, are no more or less than Jewish principles. [9]
The ideological leader of Italian Zionism was the lawyer Alfonso Pacifici. An extremely pious man, he ensured that the Italian Zionists were to become the most religious branch of the world movement. In 1932 another interviewer told of how Pacifici also:
expressed to me his conviction that the new conditions would bring about a revival of Italian Jewry. Indeed, he claimed to have evolved a philosophy of Judaism akin to the spiritual Tendenz of Fascism long before this had become the rule of life in Italian polity. [10]
Establishment of Relations between Mussolini and Hitler
If the Zionists at least hesitated until Mussolini warmed to them before they responded, Hitler had no such inhibitions. From the beginning of the Fascist take-over, Hitler used Mussolini's example as proof that a terror dictatorship could overthrow a weak bourgeois democracy and then set about smashing the workers' movements. After he came to power he acknowledged his debt to Mussolini in a discussion with the Italian ambassador in March 1933. "Your Excellency knows how great an admiration I have for Mussolini, whom I consider the spiritual head of my 'movement' as well, since if he had not succeeded in assuming power in Italy, National Socialism would not have had the slightest chance in Germany. [11]
Hitler had two cavils with Fascism: Mussolini savagely oppressed the Germans in the south Tyrol which the Italians had won at Versailles, and he welcomed Jews into the Fascist Party. But Hitler saw, quite correctly, that what the two of them wanted was so similar that, eventually, they would come together. He insisted that a quarrel with the Italians over the Tyrolians would only serve the Jews; therefore, unlike most German rightists, he was always willing to abandon the Tyrolians. [12] Furthermore, in spite of the fact that he had no knowledge of Mussolini's earlier anti-Semitic remarks, in 1926, in Mein Kampf, Hitler declared that in his heart of hearts the Italian was an anti-Semite.
The struggle that Fascist Italy is waging, though perhaps in the last analysis unconsciously (which I personally do not believe), against the three main weapons of the Jews is the best indication that, even though indirectly, the poison fangs of this supra-state power are being torn out. The prohibition on Masonic secret societies, the persecution of the supra-national press, as well as the continued demolition of international Marxism, and, conversely, the steady reinforcement of the Fascist state conception, will in the course of the years cause the Italian government to serve the interests of the Italian people more and more, without regard for the hissing of the Jewish world hydra. [13]
But if Hitler was pro-Mussolini, it did not follow that Mussolini would be pro-Nazi. Throughout the 1920s the Duce kept repeating his famous "Fascism is not an article for export". Certainly after the failure of the Beer Hall putsch and the Nazis' meagre 6.5 per cent in the 1924 elections, Hitler represented nothing. It required the Depression and Hitler's sudden electoral success, before Mussolini began to take serious notice of his German counterpart. Now he began to talk of Europe going Fascist within ten years, and his press began to report favourably about Nazism. But at the same time he repudiated Hitler's Nordic racism and anti-Semitism. Completely disoriented by his philo-Semitism, the Zionists hoped that Mussolini would be a moderating influence on Hitler when he came to power. [14] In October 1932, on the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, Pacifici rhapsodised about the differences between the real Fascism in Rome and its ersatz in Berlin. He saw:
radical differences between the true and authentic Fascism - Italian Fascism, that is - and the pseudo-Fascist movements in other countries which ... are often using the most reactionary phobias, and especially the blind, unbridled hatred of the Jews, as a means of diverting the masses from their real problems, from the real causes of their misery, and from the real culprits. [15]
Later, after the Holocaust, in his autobiography Trial and Error, Weizmann lamely tried to establish an anti-Fascist record for the Italian Zionists: "The Zionists, and the Jews generally, though they did not give loud expression to their views on the subject, were known to be 'anti-Fascist'." [16] Given Mussolini's anti-Zionism in the early years of his Fascist career, as well as his anti-Semitic comments, Zionists hardly favoured him in 1922. But, as we have seen, they pledged their loyalty to the new power once Mussolini assured them that he was not anti-Semitic. In the first years of the regime, the Zionists knew he resented their international affiliations, but that did not bring them to anti-Fascism and, certainly after the statements in 1927 by Sokolow and Sacerdoti, the Zionists could only be thought of as Mussolini's good friends.
Notes
1. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p.12.
2. Ibid., p.13.
3. Daniel Carpi, The Catholic Church and Italian Jewry under the Fascists, Yad Vashem Studies vol.IV, p.44n.
4. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p.14.
5. Ruth Bondy, The Emissary: A Life of Enzo Sereni, p.45.
6. Daniel Carpi, Weizmann's Political Activities in Italy from 1923 to 1934, Zionism (Tel Aviv, 1975), p.225.
7. Chaim Weizmann, Relief and Reconstruction, American Addresses (1923), p.49.
8. Michael Ledeen, Italian Jews and Fascism, Judaism (Summer 1969), p.286.
9. Guido Bedarida, The Jews under Mussolini, Reflex (October 1927), p.58.
10. Paul Goodman, Judaism under the Fascist Regime, Views (April 1932), p.46.
11. Carpi, Weizmann's Political Activities in Italy, p.238.
12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.628.
13. Ibid., p.637.
14. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p.49.
15. Ibid., p.29.
16. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p.368.
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5. German Zionism offers to collaborate with Nazism
Werner Senator, a leading German Zionist, once remarked that Zionism, for all its world Jewish nationalism, always politically assimilates to the countries within which it operates. No better proof of his remark exists than the political adaptation of the ZVfD to the theories and policies of the new Nazi regime. Believing that the ideological similarities between the two movements - their contempt for liberalism, their common volkish racism and, of course, their mutual conviction that Germany could never be the homeland of its Jews - could induce the Nazis to support them, the ZVfD solicited the patronage of Adolf Hitler, not once but repeatedly, after 1933.
The goal of the ZVfD became an "orderly retreat", that is, Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation of Jews to Palestine, and they immediately sought contact with elements in the Nazi apparatus whom they thought would be interested in such an arrangement on the basis of a volkish appreciation of Zionism. Kurt Tuchler, a member of the ZVfD Executive, persuaded Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS to write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. The Baron agreed on the condition that he visited Palestine first, and two months after Hitler came to power the two men and their wives went to Palestine; von Mildenstein stayed there for six months before he returned to write his articles. [1]
Contact with a central figure in the new government came in March 1933, when Hermann Goering summoned the leaders of the major Jewish organisations. In early March, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, had declared that, as of 1 April, all Jewish stores and professionals would be boycotted; however, this campaign ran into an immediate snag. Hitler's capitalist backers were extremely worried by the announcement by rabbi Wise of a planned counter-demonstration to be held in New York on 27 March, if the Nazis went ahead with their boycott. Jews were prominent throughout the retail trade both in American and Europe and, fearing retaliation against their own companies, Hitler's wealthy patrons urged him to call off the action. But the Nazis could hardly do that without losing face, and they decided to use German Jewry to head off Wise; thus Hermann Goering called in the Jewish leaders.
German Zionism's influence in Weimar did not merit its leaders' participation, but because they conceived themselves as the only natural negotiating partner with the Nazis, they secured a late invitation. Martin Rosenbluth, a leading Zionist, later told of the incident in his post-war autobiography, Go Forth and Serve. Four Jews saw Goering: Julius Brodnitz for the CV, Heinrich Stahl for the Berlin Jewish community, Max Naumann, a pro-Nazi fanatic from the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (VnJ), and Blumenfeld for the Zionists. Goering launched into a tirade: the foreign press was lying about atrocities against Jews; unless the lies stopped, he could not vouch for the safety of German Jewry. Most important, the New York rally had to be called off: "Dr Wise is one of our most dangerous and unscrupulous enemies." [2] A delegation was to go to London to contact world Jewry.
The assimilationists declined, claiming that as Germans they had no influence with foreign Jews. This was false, but they hardly wanted to assist in their own destruction. Only Blumenfeld volunteered, but insisted he be allowed to speak truthfully about the Nazi treatment of Jews. Goering did not care what was said to get the rally called off; perhaps a description of the grim situation might make foreign Jews halt for fear of provoking worse. He did not care who went or what arguments were used as long as the deputation agreed to "report regularly to the German embassy". [3]
The ZVfD finally sent Martin Rosenbluth and Richard Lichtheim. Fearing exclusive responsibility for the outcome of their strange mission, they prevailed upon the CV to let them take along Dr Ludwig Tietz. Although not a Zionist personally, the wealthy businessman was "a good friend of ours". [4] The trio arrived in London on 27 March and immediately met forty Jewish leaders at a meeting chaired by Nahum Sokolow, then President of the WZO. They later met a battery of British officials. The delegates saw two tasks before them: to use the severity of the situation to promote Palestine as "the logical place of refuge", and to head off all anti-Nazi efforts abroad. They called Wise in New York. Rosenbluth described the incident thus in his memoirs:
Mindful of Goering's charges... we conveyed the message ... Getting the cryptic rest of our message across to him was somewhat more difficult, since it was necessary to speak in obscure terms in order to confound any possible monitors. Subsequent events proved we had made clear our hidden plea, and that Dr Wise had understood we wanted him to stand firm and under no circumstances cancel the meeting. [5]
There is no evidence that any effort was made to signal Wise to this effect. Through the research of an Israeli scholar, Shaul Esh, it is now known that the deputation tried to head off demonstrations in New York and Palestine. According to Esh, later that evening they sent cables:
not in their own name, but in the name of the Zionist Executive in London. The telegrams requested that the recipients immediately dispatch to the Chancellery of the Third Reich declarations to the effect that they do not condone an organised anti-German boycott ... the Zionist Executive in London learned of this several hours later, they sent another cable to Jerusalem to delay the dispatch of an official declaration to Hitler. [6]
Later, in his own autobiography, Challenging Years, Stephen Wise mentioned receiving their cable, but he did not record any cryptic message from the delegation. [7] It is reasonable to assume that he would have recorded it, if he had thought any such attempt was made. In reality, Wise repeatedly raged at the ZVfD in the following years for persistently opposing every attempt by foreign Jews to struggle against the Hitler regime.
The London proceedings were typical of all further ZVfD behaviour. In 1937, after leaving Berlin for America, Rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote of his experiences in Germany and alluded to a memorandum which, it is now known, was sent to the Nazi Party by the ZVfD on 21 June 1933. Prinz's article candidly describes the Zionist mood in the first months of 1933:
Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which - after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed - the new status of German Jewry could be considered. The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal! ... In a statement notable for its pride and dignity, we called for a conference. [8]
The document remained buried until 1962, when it was finally printed, in German, in Israel. "Pride" and "dignity" are words open to interpretation but, it is safe to say, there was not one word that could be so construed today. This extraordinary memorandum demands extensive quotation. The Nazis were asked, very politely:
May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence ... Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one's own tradition ...
... an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry ... a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life ...
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group ...
... fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one's own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development.
Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state ...
For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.
The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda - such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways - is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build ... Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state. [9]
This document, a treason to the Jews of Germany, was written in standard Zionist cliches: "abnormal occupational pattern", "rootless intellectuals greatly in need of moral regeneration", etc. In it the German Zionists offered calculated collaboration between Zionism and Nazism, hallowed by the goal of a Jewish state: we shall wage no battle against thee, only against those that would resist thee.
Obsessed with their strange mission, the ZVfD's leaders lost all sense of international Jewish perspective and even tried to get the WZO to call off its World Congress, scheduled for August 1933. They sent their world leadership a letter: "It will have to express sharp protests,, their lives could be at stake at a time when "our legal existence has enabled us to organise thousands and to transfer large sums of money to Palestine". [10] The Congress did take place as we shall see, but the ZVfD had nothing to worry about as the Nazis chose to use the occasion to announce that they had made a deal with world Zionism.
"Seeking its own national idealism in the Nazi spirit"
The Jewish public knew nothing about von Mildenstein's journey to Palestine in the company of a member of the Zionist Executive, nor about Rosenbluth and Lichtheim's trip to London; nor did they know about the memorandum, nor the request to call off the Zionist Congress. However, they could not miss what was appearing in the Rundschau, where assimilationalist German Jewry was roundly attacked. The CV complained bitterly of Zionist "siegesfanfaren" as the Rundschau rushed to condemn the guilty Jews. [11] The editor, Robert Weltsch, took the occasion of the 1 April boycott to assail the Jews of Germany in an editorial: "Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride":
At times of crisis throughout its history, the Jewish people has faced the question of its own guilt. Our most important prayer says, "We were expelled from our country because of our sins" ... Jewry bears a great guilt because it failed to heed Theodor Herzl's call ... Because the Jews did not display their Jewishness with pride, because they wanted to shirk the Jewish question, they must share the blame for the degradation of Jewry. [12]
Even as the Nazis were in the process of throwing the left into concentration camps, Weltsch attacked the left-wing Jewish journalists:
If today the National Socialist and German patriotic newspapers frequently refer to the type of the Jewish scribbler and the so-called Jewish press ... it must be pointed out ... Upright Jews have always been indignant at the raillery and the caricature directed by Jewish buffoons against Jews to the same extent, or even a greater extent, than they aimed them at Germans and others. [13]
Although the left-wing press had been under attack from the day the Nazis came to power, the Jewish newspapers were still legal. Naturally they were censored; if a journal printed something untoward, it would be closed down, temporarily at least. However, the Nazis did not force the Zionists to denounce their fellow Jews.
After the Holocaust Weltsch was quite contrite about the editorial, saying that he should have told the Jews to flee for their lives, but he never claimed that the Nazis made him write the piece. Weltsch was not a Fascist, but he was too much the Zionist sectarian to have really thought through his ideas about the world at large. As were most of the leaders of the ZVfD, he was quite convinced that "egotistical liberalism" and parliamentary democracy were dead at least in Germany. Internationally, they were still for the British in Palestine, but the Rundschau's correspondent in Italy, Kurt Kornicker, was quite openly pro-Fascist. [14] The ZVfD's leaders became convinced that Fascism was the wave of the future, certainly in Central Europe, and within that framework they counterposed the "good" Fascism of Mussolini to the "excesses" of Hitlerism, which they thought would diminish, with their assistance, as time went by.
Racism was now triumphant and the ZVfD ran with the winner. The talk of blut began to take hold with a statement by Blumenfeld in April 1933 that the Jews had previously been masking their natural blood-sanctioned apartness from the real Germans, but it reached Wagnerian proportions in the 4 August Rundschau with a long essay, "Rasse als Kulturfaktor", which pondered on the intellectual implications for Jews of the Nazi victory. It argued that Jews should not merely accept silently the dictates of their new masters; they, too, had to realise that race separation was wholly to the good:
We who live here as a "foreign race" have to respect racial consciousness and the racial interest of the German people absolutely. This however does not preclude a peaceful living together of people of different racial membership. The smaller the possibility of an undesirable mixture, so much less is there need for "racial protection" ... There are differentiations that in the last analysis have their root in ancestry. Only rationalist newspapers who have lost feeling for the deeper reasons and profundities of the soul, and for the origins of communal consciousness, could put aside ancestry as simply in the realm of "natural history".
In the past, the paper continued, it had been hard to get Jews to have an objective evaluation of racism. But now was the time, indeed past time, for a bit of "quiet evaluation": "Race is undoubtedly a very important, yes, decisive momentum. Out of "blood and soil" really is determined the being of a people and their achievements." Jews would have to make good for "the last generations when Jewish racial consciousness was largely neglected. The article warned against "bagatellised" race, and also against the CV, who were beginning to abandon their traditional assimilationist ideology in the wake of the disaster, but "without changing basically".
Challenging the racist bona fides of their rivals was not enough. To prove that the "Jewish Renaissance Movement" had always been racist, the Rundschau reprinted two pre-1914 articles under the title "Voices of the Blood". "Das singende Blut" by Stefan Zweig and "Lied des Blutes" by Hugo Salus rhapsodised about how "the modern Jew... recognizes his Jewishness... through an inner experience which teaches him the special language of his blood in a mystical manner".
But although these mimics of the Nazis were confirmed racists, they were not chauvinists. They did not think they were racially superior to the Arabs. The Zionists were even going to uplift their benighted Semitic cousins. Their volkism was only a warped answer to their own "personality problem", as they put it: it allowed them to reconcile themselves to the existence of anti-Semitism in Germany without fighting it. They hastened to reassure their readers that many modern nations and states were racially mixed and yet the races could live in harmony. Jews were warned: now that they were to become racists, they should not become chauvinists: "above race is humanity". [15]
Although racism permeated through the ZVfD's literature, foreign Jewish observers always saw Joachim Prinz as its most strident propagandist. A Social Democratic voter before 1933, Prinz became rabidly volkist in the first years of the Third Reich. Some of the violent hostility towards Jews in his book Wir Juden could have been inserted directly into the Nazis' own propaganda. To Prinz the Jew was made up of "misplacement, of queerness, of exhibitionism, inferiority, arrogance, self-deceit, sophisticated love of truth, hate, sickly, patriotism and rootless cosmopolitanism ... a psychopathological arsenal of rare abundance". [16]
Prinz was deeply contemptuous of the rational and liberal traditions which had been the common basis of all progressive thought since the American Revolution. For him the harm that liberalism had done was compensated for only by the fact that it was dying:
Parliament and democracy are increasingly shattered. The exaggerated harmful emphasis on the value of the individual is recognised to be mistaken; the concept and reality of the nation and the Volk is gaining, to our happiness, more and more ground. [17]
Prinz believed that an accommodation between Nazis and Jews was possible, but only on the basis of a Zionist-Nazi accord: "A state which is constructed on the principle of the purity of nation and race can only have respect for those Jews who see themselves in the same way. [18]
After he came to the United States Prinz realised that nothing he had been saying in Germany sounded rational in a democratic context and he abandoned his bizarre notions, further proof that the German Zionists had simply adapted ideologically to Nazism. [19] But perhaps the best illustration of the Zionists' Na