On 31 January 1933, one day following Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Jüdische Rundschau (JR), the mouthpiece of German Zionism, editorialized that never before had it been so important to consolidate confidence in Judaism and its future. The Jewish Volk was the bearer of immortal values, the carrier of an incomparable history – a ‘fact’ that should be recalled in such times of trouble and danger.Footnote 1 This opinion piece neatly encapsulated the strategy adopted by German Zionists at the prospect of the Nazis' rise to power. From the early 1930s onwards, these writers had railed against what they considered hopeless attempts at assimilation and warned about enduring antisemitism that now posed a real existential threat. Taking a different tack from their liberal counterparts, whom they criticized for assuming a conciliatory position towards the Nazi party, the Zionists embarked on a course aimed at rehabilitating the Jews’ image, which was already under Nazi assault. For them, the success of National Socialism was clear evidence of the need for the Jewish community as a whole – the majority of whose members had rejected the Jewish national ideology – to embrace Zionism. As the president of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD), Kurt Blumenfeld, declared in 1932, the time had come for Jews to endorse the Jewish national idea. For Blumenfeld, an adequate solution to the Jewish question would be found not in other countries but only through reaffirmation of Jewish national pride.Footnote 2
Blumenfeld's plea for a national Jewish revival in the face of rising Nazi dominance bore fruit. Jewish and Hebrew culture, stimulated mainly by German Zionism, underwent an unprecedented resurgence in the first five years of the Nazi regime. A significant number of Jews reasserted their Jewish identity through engagement with all manner of things Jewish. Special institutions for adult Jewish education were established, and cultural meetings were held in various Jewish venues. Jewish youth movements, literature, libraries, press, and theatre all expanded. And though this expansion was also related to the official exclusion of Jews from non-Jewish society, many Jews did not yield to the Nazi attempts at cultural degradation.Footnote 3 Moreover, as recently discussed by historians such as Wolf Gruner and Michael Wildt, Jews also challenged anti-Jewish policies through manipulation and demonstrative actions, while reaffirming their Jewish pride.Footnote 4
Thus, the Jewish social and cultural activities and defiance attempts – dealt with in the extensive literature on the Jews' response to their segregation – constituted the main thrust of a renewed confirmation of Jewish belonging and identity. Yet, a further examination of the German Zionist discourse in the early years of the Nazi dictatorship, when the Jewish press had not yet been closed down, reveals a component of revitalized Jewish identity that has been largely overlooked by scholars: race or racial belonging. While not the core of the discussion about the Jewish renaissance, racial, anthropological, and sociological characteristics of Judaism were topoi of German Zionists from 1933 to 1938.
Indeed, several scholars have pointed to the ethnic and völkisch origins of Zionism as a nationalist Jewish ideology aimed at the reconstruction of a distinct Jewish identity in an independent state after the disappointment with the expected emancipation. As part of the emerging radical nationalism in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany, the dividing lines between majority and minority, between in-group and out-group, were sharpening decisively, and prompted a Jewish reaction. Francis Nicosia has argued recently that secular and racial antisemitism generated a national-separatist Jewish response. And while civic emancipation and assimilation sapped Jewish religious identity, a more organic perception of nationhood began to crystallize.Footnote 5 It incorporated ethnic and völkisch elements that were widespread in German nationalist circles. These romantic elements, as demonstrated by George Mosse, strongly influenced nascent Zionist organizations throughout Germany. Since the early nineteenth century, the German concept of Volk had denoted a metaphysical and eternal entity which was constituted of all the German people – a people with absolute values. It reflected the natural, wild, and emotional character of the people, while the family was regarded as its biological foundation. The late nineteenth-century völkisch concepts were of neo-romantic mysticism and foregrounded the irrational forces of nature and genuine essence of the people, in contrast to the present, ‘artificial’ one. Among rising Jewish national groups this concept included the idea of a ‘community of one's blood’ as defined by Martin Buber, which helped to forge a Jewish national consciousness.Footnote 6 National Jewish identity in this period also penetrated various organizations, which, notwithstanding their criticism of Zionism, voiced a self-consciously Jewish selfhood, while realizing the failure of emancipation.Footnote 7 Yet the fact that the Jewish national movement had an ethnic foundation from its very beginnings was not exceptional among the numerous national parties and organizations in central Europe. Zionism, in this regard, was to some extent a product of national ideas that nourished contemporary anti-Jewish attitudes.
Beyond the examination of the völkisch–cultural nature of early Zionism, several studies have considered the Jewish, and especially Zionist, discussion of race since the late nineteenth century. I might mention here the early research of Joachim Doron, Annegret Kiefer, and John Efron, while among recent studies the most relevant are those of Mitchell Hart, Todd Endelman, Raphael Falk, and Veronika Lipphardt. This work has exposed the ‘scientific’ racial aspects embedded in the emerging Jewish national ideology. Moreover, it contended that in particular Zionist scientists in Germany, and to some extent also in England, Russia, and the United States, employed the language of science and academic research in the fields of anthropology, biology, medicine, and sociology in order to reaffirm the distinctiveness of the Jewish people and its all-embracing, integrating characteristics. Even Social Darwinism found its way into the argumentation of these Zionists during those years.Footnote 8 However, as the above-mentioned researchers took for granted that the science of race had become a useless weapon in the fight against antisemitism and assimilation under the Nazi regime,Footnote 9 Zionist engagement with the racial features of Jewishness during the 1930s has not been given adequate scholarly attention. For others, contemporary German Jewry underwent an ideological crisis that blurred long-standing divisions between liberal, Zionist, and Orthodox Jews, all the while attempting to adhere to basic enlightened values of emancipation and assimilation.Footnote 10
In this article, I will consider the Zionist discourse of race between the Nazis' ascension to power in 1933 and the disintegration of Jewish organizations and public activities in Germany in the wake of the November 1938 pogrom.Footnote 11 I will analyse this discourse through an examination of the German Zionist press and other related publications, on the background of the early, rather scientific, Jewish discussion in the matter, and through reference, in certain aspects, to views of Jews with different cultural and political orientations. I suggest that the accommodation of racial ideas and definitions – some borrowed from the Nazis themselves – by various Zionists was intended to popularize a renewed meaning of Jewish identity among persecuted and humiliated German Jewry. This accommodation served to distance the later discourse from the earlier, more scholarly, one. Such strategy would be used as a defence against increasing exclusion and intimidation, and for the consolidation of political ends and hopes. The adaptation of such racial classification – originating among Zionist academic elite in the fin de siècle – functioned both to counter Nazi accusations and to invigorate in an unprecedented manner national sentiment among Jews.
I
In 1907, the German Zionist physician Elias Auerbach wrote in the then-leading journal for studies of race and biology – Archive für Rassen und Gesellschafts-Biologie (AfRGB) – that ‘the Jews are a classic object for racial research since more than any other race we can find in them a fusion between history and measurement (Geschichte und Messung)’.Footnote 12 Auerbach here echoed a scientific trend that had been maturing since the late nineteenth century. Jewish scientists in Europe and the United States, especially the Zionists among them, were engaged in an ongoing debate on the racial origins and features of Jewish identity. This discussion was affected by two main factors: racial antisemitism and a sense of ‘Jewish degeneration’. In the new, allegedly scientific, concept of race, Judaism was being gradually secularized and Jews were conceived as an anthropological-historical group, not solely as a religious minority. Such a concept encouraged a racial antisemitism that did not necessarily imply a failure of the ideas of emancipation and assimilation; rather, it confirmed the ‘unassimilability’ of the Jews.Footnote 13 This new kind of antisemitism paralleled several demographic and structural changes among the Jewish population in Germany and other parts of Europe. The Jewish birth rate was decreasing at a higher rate than that of the non-Jewish population, mainly thanks to intermarriage. Expanding Jewish urbanization and modernization were also held responsible for the enervation of Jewish life. Concerned Zionist scientists saw these developments as a sign of the decline of the Jewish people. Only a renewed Judaism, stimulated by ethnic and racial nationalism, could halt such a disaster.Footnote 14 To be sure, the use of ethnic and racial categories became increasingly an international as well as a transnational phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. Racial concepts helped to forge national identities by drawing on two main disciplines: biology and anthropology. Biologically, they indicated the physical features of specific people while anthropologically, they constructed national narratives of people who did not yield to racial mixture. These concepts encouraged the outlining of political borders, as well as nurtured antagonism between different groups or people, and at times transcended national-political boundaries. Whereas in Europe the merger of national and racial identities seemed more ‘natural’, racial discourse in the United States won increasing attention in the wake of the Civil War as a result of the need to craft a coherent political particularism.Footnote 15 In Germany, this disposition towards racial characteristics was in line with scientific racism and völkisch notions that had been developing alongside the national identity of the nascent nation-state since the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 16 Thus, the growing engagement of German Zionists with the concept of race should be considered as part of the overall intense German discussion of race and national identity.
In Germany, Zionism was advocated mainly by a circle of secular and educated Jews. Unlike the Central Organization of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein), which struggled against antisemitism while promoting assimilation,Footnote 17 Zionists functioned as an oppositional minority within the German Jewish establishment. Throughout the period of the German Empire, the Kaiserreich (1871–1918), Zionists endeavoured to cultivate the notion that Jewishness meant distinct nationality.Footnote 18 Promoting the national peculiarities of Judaism and its prospects for regeneration, Zionist scientists leveraged anthropology, sociology, biology, medicine, and statistics to reconceptualize Jews as a race.Footnote 19
Several years prior to the publication of Auerbach's above-mentioned article in the AfRGB, the German Zionist physician and race expert Aron Sandler tried to counter assaults on Zionism made by those who favoured assimilation and racial mixing. Along with other contemporary Zionists, among them Max Nordau and Ahad Ha'am, he considered assimilation a ‘malaise that afflicted the body and soul of German Jewry’.Footnote 20 Reviewing various theories on racial classifications, Sandler concluded that racial belonging, defined also according to physical and psychological features, had its own importance. Therefore, the ‘Jewish race’ was characterized by its own qualities even if it originated from more than one racial cradle.Footnote 21
The Jewish sociologist Arthur Ruppin also affirmed the racial aspect of Judaism. In his work The Jews of today (1913), Ruppin wrote that earlier literature had overestimated the purity of the Jewish race, and that in reality Jews had assimilated foreign ethnic elements to a very limited extent. Nevertheless, in contrast to the central European nations, Jews could be considered a ‘well characterized race’. Ruppin further made use of a Social Darwinian notion, arguing that Jews did not merely retain their ‘great natural racial gifts’, but that these ‘gifts’ had been strengthened through ‘a long process of selection’.Footnote 22 In a later German edition of his research, he acknowledged the contribution of another Zionist, the Austrian physician and anthropologist Iganz Zollschan who, in 1909, published the work The race question with special reference to the theoretical foundations of the Jewish race.Footnote 23 Zollschan was also a point of reference for the Zionist dermatologist from Munich Felix Theilhaber. Both Ruppin and Theilhaber found in Zollschan's work support for their arguments about the Jews' ability to avoid ‘miscegenation’, thus preserving their racial qualities.Footnote 24
These early theorizations of Sandler, Ruppin, Zollschan, and Theilhaber formed the basis for the Jewish science of race, paving the way for the cultivation of such ideas among German Zionists in the years of the Weimar Republic. In 1919, for example, Auerbach opined in the monthly journal Der Jude that intermarriage had rendered unintelligible the idea of ‘pure race’. Exceptional in this sense were the Japanese and the Jews, to whom he ascribed exclusive racial qualities.Footnote 25 During the 1920s as well, Ruppin discussed intermarriage, writing that it influenced the ‘racial composition (Rassenzusammensetzung)’ of Jews.Footnote 26 Other contemporary German Zionists leveraged different scientific data in order to reaffirm the peculiarities of the Jewish people. The Jewish social scientists Jakob Thon, Alfred Nossig, Max Nordau, for instance, demonstrated on the basis of statistical data mined from the Bureau of Jewish Statistics (Verein für jüdische Statistik) during the years 1904–31, that the Jewish birth rate was in steady decline. Yet they held that Jews could recover higher fertility with new knowledge gained from scientific fields such as biology, sociology, racial science, and medicine.Footnote 27
Whether or not these works of German Zionists constitute a Jewish science of race is a matter of historiographical debate. On the one hand, they propagated the idea of a Jewish race while using scientific terminology to introduce ideas about the racial origins and peculiarities of the Jewish people. Like many of their non-Jewish counterparts, they placed their scientific results in the service of their national ideology. On the other hand, that scientific racism lacked conceptual clarity allowed for multiple interpretations: the terms Rasse, Volk, Stamm (tribe), and Nation were fuzzy, implying racial-biological meanings but anthropological, sociological, and cultural ones, too.Footnote 28 Moreover, the early Zionists' racial discourse – which in itself was not adopted by all Zionists – did not envision a struggle between Jews and other races; as demonstrated by John Efron, it was free of chauvinistic argumentation.Footnote 29 Nevertheless, by turning ideas of blood relations, inbreeding, racial gifts, and historical selection and evolution into categories that differentiated the Jews from other peoples, these Zionists could not entirely evade biological determinism, even if couched in humanistic concepts of transnational alliance.Footnote 30
But regardless of the scientific validity of theories and studies introduced by these Zionists, the fact is that this early racial discourse was conducted almost exclusively by scholars who were working to establish a Jewish identity through scientific idioms, thus salvaging Judaism, or rather Jewishness, from the perils of assimilation. Apart from a handful of references to the topic in the Jewish press, the notion of the racial nature of Judaism did not filter down to the bulk of Jewish society, which in any case was not equipped with the scholarly apparatus to engage with the discussion. At times, this racial reading of Judaism received harsh criticism from other Zionist, Orthodox, and assimilationist Jews. The first of these lamented the rejection of religious heritage in favour of the ‘dark urgings of the blood’.Footnote 31 Some Orthodox persons voiced the view that it was alienation from Torah and mitzvot (commandments) that was the key to the decline of Judaism, and without them birth policy would be ineffective. For the assimilationists, Jews were characterized mainly by a certain moral superiority that could not be reduced to statistics. And yet, these critics could not ignore the fact that European Jewry was undergoing a demographic decline.Footnote 32
II
The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 marked a shift in this early racial argumentation. Now transcending academia, racial images, representations, and language were widely disseminated throughout German society by means of aggressive propaganda. Religious and civic identity lost importance as criteria of belonging in favour of biological–racial definitions, while the new regime intensively propagated the idea of an Aryan–Jewish racial conflict. Public opinion was thus subjected to unprecedented manipulation. Against this background, racial identity became decisive, and was popularized through the German press, schools, youth movements, media, art, and sports. Among Jews as well, the racial discourse was freed from the halls of academia and set loose among the people. Fin de siècle Zionists ceased to be the sole spokesmen of such ideas. From the early 1930s on, the Jewish press and various other popular publications spearheaded the dissemination of racial ideas in the struggle against humiliation and dehumanization.
This popularization of a racial lexicon among Zionists during the 1930s signalled a change in the national and political orientation of German Jews. More and more, Jews understood that assimilation – formerly conceived of as the price of emancipationFootnote 33 – had become irrelevant, and a growing support of Zionist ideas and institutions became manifest. After 1933, the ZVfD turned from a marginal association into a mass organization of Jews who sought to resolve their identity crisis and receive support for emigration. Membership of the ZVfD grew from 7,000 at the end of 1932 to more than 22,000 in 1935. The National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden), which had dominated since its establishment in 1933 by liberal-assimilationist Jews, saw a rising number of Zionists, while its name was changed in 1935 to the National Representation of Jews in Germany (Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland). In fact, after the promulgation of racial legislation, the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, even the most radical opponents of a national Jewish awakening, such as members of the National Union of Jewish War Veterans (Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) gained little attention.Footnote 34 Of course, racial antisemitism was evident in other European states in this period, such as in France, Austria, Rumania, and Poland.Footnote 35 In no place, however, was it so striking as in Germany, where Jews were subjected to unprecedented harsh racial propaganda, segregationist policies, and violent actions. Nowhere until 1938 did Jews face the existential threat that they did under the Nazi regime and its official racial policy.
During their first years in power, the Nazi authorities left a relatively broad space for Zionist activities in Germany, as they regarded this movement as promoting the organized emigration of Jews. Nazi support for Jewish emigration enabled Zionists to sponsor Jewish national education and training activities. The JR increased its circulation and won unprecedented popularity. Its readership grew from 10,000 in 1932 to 40,000 in 1933. Edited by Robert Weltsch, this bi-weekly journal, founded in 1896, raised a certain national Jewish enthusiasm among persecuted Jews, especially through the publication of courageous editorials. In a way that was exceptional among publications of its kind, the JR renewed a sense of Jewish national pride in the face of dehumanization. In this regard, the JR became a beacon of ideological and practical guidance during the years 1933–8. Yet this very influence was related also to Nazi press policy.Footnote 36
From March 1933 onwards, the German press was tightly controlled by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. While the non-Jewish press was instructed to follow explicit ideological guidelines, the Jewish press was urged to cease publishing ‘anti-German’ propaganda. From 1936 and on, Jewish journals were forbidden to deal with specifically German issues. The recurrent reference made in the Zionist press to the racial essence of Jewishness generated little criticism among the Nazi authorities. Indeed, they had no difficulty with racial self-definition by Jews. Max Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber, had the power to interfere in the content and production process of Jewish publications, but did nearly nothing to alter the content of these publications, at least until 1937–8. It appears that the Jews' engagement with their racial identity corresponded with the efforts of Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry to foster racial separation between ‘Aryans’ and Jews also through public linguistic practices. Paradoxically then, until 1938, Jews enjoyed a certain degree of freedom of expression as long as it was confined to Jewish themes. Similarly, books written by Jews were printed in Germany by specific publishers, thus further contributing to the public discourse on race. In November 1938, the Jewish press ceased distribution after all editors were summoned by the Gestapo and ordered to close down their journals.Footnote 37 Thus, we see that while Jews were persecuted and humiliated under the Nazi regime, at least until 1938 they used a strategy of self-identity rehabilitation. This strategy was twofold in nature, drawing on both the representations of Jews employed by the Nazis and on Jewish racial peculiarities as envisaged by Jews themselves already from the turn of the century.
In the early phase of Hitler's rule, a handful of Zionists clung to the hope that some sort of reconciliation was possible between the new regime and the Jews. The ZVfD sought the consent of the authorities for appropriate living conditions and rights for the Jews, until the process of emigration from Germany could be set in motion.Footnote 38 Daniel Fraenkel showed that the ZVfD issued an official declaration addressing Hitler, while suggesting the creation of an ethnic-Jewish enclave under Zionist custodianship in Germany.Footnote 39 Other Zionists, however, such as JR editor Robert Weltsch, wrote several months before the Nazi electoral victory in July 1932 of the impending end of the ‘liberal epoch’ due to growing radical nationalism and antisemitism in Germany. He lamented the approach of easing the weight of tradition and forging new relations between Jews and their surroundings – an unsuccessful experiment that in his view drove Jews to reconsider their identity. Here, Weltsch was building on Martin Buber's theorizations in Three speeches about Judaism (1916). Following Weltsch, Buber conceived of Judaism as not having just a ‘biological quality’ (biologische Qualiät) but also as constituted of particular laws, ethics, and norms, as well as ‘fate and mission’, which point to the deepest and most profound level of Jewish existence.Footnote 40 In Three speeches, Buber drew on the idea of ‘biological quality’ when he argued that while Jews did not share a common land, language, or lifestyle, they did share blood origins. Blood, said this German Zionist philosopher, maintained the bonds between Jews and determined the tone and tenor of their life.Footnote 41 Seeking a national Jewish regeneration, Buber did not avoid völkisch ideas of blood and even race, and deemed Judaism a community of blood that transcended moral and cultural features. Turning to Buber for answers to the question of Jewish identity, Weltsch adopted the Zionist concept of a Jewish renaissance that by no means eschewed völkisch nationalism, and of which Buber was a leading advocate.Footnote 42
The assumption by Hitler of the chancellorship produced a further call to reorientation to Jewish life. In April, the JR published the bulk of Herzl's introduction to his 1896 essay The Jewish state, with a short preface by the editor. In a passage that deals with the assimilation of Jews, Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, affirmed that such a process could take place only as long as the Jews enjoyed political well-being. Therefore, he continued, if a statesman wants his nation to benefit from the ‘Jewish racial impact (jüdische[r] Rasseneinschlag)’ he should ensure their enduring political welfare.Footnote 43 Herzl was not, however, advocating the formation of a Jewish state on a racial basis. Clearly, he did not deny this dimension of Judaism, but he also stressed that the Jewish question had a national nature and its solution should correspond to that of other ‘people of culture’.Footnote 44 Weltsch seems to have adopted Herzl's cautious approach, dealing in an indirect way with the racial identity of the Jews through discussions of the matter by earlier Zionist writers, while at the same time avoiding any biological determinism or racial hierarchy. His was a national and cultural conceptualization of race, rather than a scientific one.
Some Zionists introduced less timid observations on the matter. In an editorial from August 1933, the JR argued that when Jews reaffirmed their ‘Rassentum’ they should avoid ‘racial pride’ (Rassenhochmut), while recognizing the greatness and originality of other races. To this rather liberal and pluralistic concept of race, the journal added that ‘racial division’ (Rassenscheidung) was only a basic division between peoples, and above all races was the ‘unity of the human spirit’.Footnote 45 An article in the same issue, entitled ‘Voices of blood’, explained that in the wake of recent events many Jews had become aware of their ‘blood connections’ (Blutzusammenhänge), although the significance of blood had been affirmed already at the beginning of the century in the writings of the Jewish Renaissance movement. Nevertheless, Jews ought to keep in mind that their belonging to a certain collective based on blood relations should not end in intolerance or rejection.Footnote 46 These articles suggest a different understanding of racial identity than the one propagated by the Nazis. The Zionist organ did not eschew racial categorizations of Germans and Jews, and even admitted that Rassentum was undoubtedly of ‘historical and cultural-historical importance, indeed of crucial momentum’.Footnote 47 However, such a concept implied the positive cultural diversity of the human race and avoided racial hierarchy. In the JR, racial difference went from being a discriminating criterion to a pluralistic and tolerant one.
Yet there was a further standpoint with regard to the Jewish race among German Zionists. Rabbi Joachim Prinz's We Jews (1934) disparaged the assimilationist trend of modern Judaism, as well as the mixed marriages and conversions that resulted from it. He suggested as an alternative an acknowledgement of the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state founded on the idea of a nation and racial purity could win respect for a Jew who admitted his racial peculiarity. Only after a Jew avowed his affiliation to a certain Volkstum and to a certain race could a dialogue between Jews and other peoples begin.Footnote 48 Prinz considered the embracing of the racial criterion of collective identity as fundamental to Jewish life. Moses Calvary, a German Zionist educator, shared this view and called for a reaffirmation of the Jewish Volkstum. In his 1936 work The new Judaism (Das neue Judentum), Calvary pointed to the importance of Jewish blood connections above and apart from the value of Jewish religious heritage. ‘It is our conviction’, he wrote, ‘that blood was decisive for the preservation of Judaism.’Footnote 49
III
As exclusion and persecution at the hands of the Nazis intensified, Jews sought ways to apply their renewed conceptualizations on identity. Zionists encouraged the cultivation of national Jewish peculiarities through the study of racial themes among Jews. Further dissemination of racially oriented ideas among the Jewish community drew largely on similar notions raised by Zionists at the early twentieth century. Yet this propagation of racial identity through the field of Jewish education and studies from 1933 also shows that Zionists accommodated the racial category and used racial assaults and allegations against Judaism as a means to demonstrate their opposite, positive, and rehabilitating meaning in regard to Jews.
In the summer of 1933, Zionist physician and anthropologist Ignaz Zollschan called for a thorough investigation of the racial ideology that had recently won unprecedented importance specifically in regard to Jews. In an address he published in the JR, Zollschan asked the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to establish an institute for sociological and anthropological research. He explained that the goal of such an institute would not be political – the struggle against antisemitism – but rather scientific. Zollschan sought to examine the ‘anthropological type’ of Jews, and the ‘autochthonic’ nature of the Palestinian population. In an attempt to reinforce the significance of his study, Zollschan indicated the parallel between the heterogeneity of the populations in Palestine and New York by referring to two memoranda he submitted with the German-American Jewish anthropologist Franz Boaz to Columbia University in 1925 and 1926. The investigation of diverse populations, as the article implies, is of importance for medical questions concerning ‘racial biology, racial hygiene and eugenics’.Footnote 50
Zollschan's efforts to collaborate with Boas failed, however. The latter had growing reservations about Jewish nationalism and did not share Zollschan's view on the racial essence of Jewish social conduct and practices, independent of their historical or geographical context. Boas held that Jews were deeply assimilated into their surrounding societies and that it was impossible to draw conclusions about earlier racial types of Jews on the basis of existing Jewish populations. Since races were populations and these were made up of individuals, it was most unlikely that populations could be considered racial types.Footnote 51
In 1934, Zollschan published in Vienna a booklet criticizing the use of the racial factor for ‘cultural morphology’. Though Austria was not yet under Nazi rule, the publishing house (Reinhold Verlag) had a branch in Leipzig, Germany. Nevertheless, the booklet opened with criticism against the current use of racial concepts. Zollschan decried the inappropriate, ‘mystic-romantic-irrational’ employment of racial ideas in the service of propaganda, and in a manner that contradicted Intellektualismus and Rationalismus.Footnote 52 For Zollschan, the quality of races other than the Nordic one could be proven: excavations indicated that non-Indo-Germanic peoples, such as ancient Jews, Egyptians, and Chinese, had ‘bodily racial marks’ confirming that ‘Nordic elements’ had also been common among them. It was only through later miscegenation that the ‘racial character’ of the leading classes was transformed.Footnote 53
Zollschan attempted to recontextualize information that pointed to the inferiority of the Jews. The characteristics that designated the inferiority of certain races were relabelled universal ones.Footnote 54 The qualities of the ‘superior race’ became common to several races, among them the Jews. Zollschan did not reject outright the racial category, but rather endowed some of its exclusive Nazi characteristics with more general relevancy. Hence, the racial inferiority of other peoples was mitigated as they appeared to share features with the Nordic race. Notably, in the same period Zollschan, together with the Jewish botanist Hugo Iltis, tried to establish an international panel to exert pressure on the Nazi leadership to halt racial antisemitism.Footnote 55
The efforts to establish racial studies as part of the increasing exclusion of Jews, on the one hand, and their attempts to rehabilitate their own national and ethnic pride, on the other, were also manifested in the Jewish educational system in Nazi Germany. The number of Jewish children who attended Jewish schools grew steadily from 1933 onwards. While in 1932 about 14 per cent of Jewish children were enrolled in these schools, the proportion rose to 23 per cent in 1934 and to 52 per cent in 1936. The numbers increased further as Jewish children were prohibited from attending German schools in November 1938. This process also affected scholastic goals.Footnote 56 As the Jewish school system expanded, a need to adjust the teaching programme became apparent, and the JR began publishing special supplements dedicated to Jewish education. One of the earliest supplements discussed the importance of acquainting young Jewish students with disciplines such as the natural sciences. The correlation between the Jewish people and nature, which was evident in the view of the Creation as it appeared in the Bible and the Talmud, made this necessary. The story of the Creation in the Book of Genesis should be taught in a manner that would not contradict Darwin's scientific theory of evolution. And yet, the writer of the article stressed that with regard to the ‘biology of the racial question’, one should remember the Talmudic lesson that while human beings had a common origin, they envied each other;Footnote 57 in other words, all races partook of the same essence but still quarrelled with each other. While we hear nothing more on the teaching of biology and race within Jewish schools, the writer's emphasis on the close relations between nature and the Jewish people, as well as his respect for Evolutionsgedanken (ideas about evolution), suggests that this theme was considered appropriate for Jewish pupils.
This brings us to the German educational policy to which Jewish schools were also subordinated. The Nazi authorities coerced the Jewish school system into instructing pupils about Rassenkunde. Yet, a ministerial decree concerning this matter was issued only in September 1933, after the JR had offered its view on the topic, and official regulations for teaching the subject were announced as late as January 1934. In Jewish schools, Naturkunde (natural history) was actually taught primarily in biology lessons and through the discussion of themes such as heredity, racial characteristics, and hygiene. However, instruction of these subjects did not follow Nazi concepts. Jewish teachers contested the pseudo-scientific aspects of Nazi theories on race. They emphasized positive Jewish ‘hereditary hygiene’,Footnote 58 which had existed for centuries, although such an idea appeared to relate to racial hygiene as a historical-cultural category and not merely a biological one. This Jewish concept, however, still retained some of the natural racial classification as it preserved the hereditary element in the definition of a certain group's identity.
The apparent institutionalization of racial concepts in German Zionism was discernible in other fields of education, and in particular sports. While Jewish educators did not necessarily make explicit racial references in this area, the meaning they ascribed to sports suggests that it was perceived as more than just physical exercise. In fact, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, Zionists leaders in Germany admitted that sports might also function as a means in the struggle against antisemitism. In order to counter racial assaults about the physical inferior features of Jews and to rejuvenate the Jewish body, Zionists advocated exercise. During the early twentieth century, the Jewish body featured as a topos in the Jewish sports press, where characterization of Judaism drew on categories such as Stamm, Volk, Nation, and Rasse. Yet Zionist and Jewish engagement with the topic was also developed as part of the general German discourse on sports. After the First World War, sports attracted even greater interest. Unlike the pre-war years, when it was perceived as a necessary part of military training, during the 1920s sports increasingly became a praxis of national importance as it preserved the nation's well-being and had ‘hygienic benefits’ by providing corporal immunity against disease. As such, sports constituted part of the ‘culture of the body’ (Körperkultur), which was also a manifestation of racial features.Footnote 59
The president of the Jewish sports organization Makkabi, Alfred Rabau, responded to the evident exclusion of Jews in the wake of the Nazi seizure of power by encouraging the foundation of separate Jewish sports associations. According to Rabau, the new associations should not be a provisional solution, but should instil ‘Jewish ideals’ among youngsters, and make them proud of their Volk. Sports invested young Jews with a proper sense of honour and valour, necessary attributes when confronting rivals.Footnote 60 Later, in October 1934, the new president of Makkabi, Hans Friedenthal, stated at a conference of the organization that sports should not only aspire to excellence but should also cultivate the ‘new Jewish type’ that would characterize the Jewish ‘renaissance movement’.Footnote 61
The importance that Zionists attached to sports seemed to echo German engagement with this praxis under the Nazi regime. Indeed, sports education had been part of the curriculum of some German states starting from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, at no time prior to the Nazi era was sports conceived as indispensable for racial cultivation. The Nazis insisted on daily sports training in schools as well as in universities. This was necessary for shaping a strong Aryan body, and was crucial to breeding.Footnote 62 Within Zionism, the topic gradually acquired a more ethnic meaning. Already at the second Zionist congress in 1898, Max Nordau spoke of the need to cultivate a new type of Jew who also possessed physical qualities required for the Jewish renaissance. Friedenthal's remark of 1934 about the need to promote ‘a new Jewish type’ was clearly in line with Nordau's ideal of ‘muscular Judaism’ (Muskeljudentum),Footnote 63 and countered the racial claim of the inferiority of the ‘crooked Jews’ (krumme Juden). Practically, these ideas were applied through the expansion of Jewish sports activities and contests from 1933 onwards, especially among school children. About 2,000 Jewish children from Berlin participated in the 1935 and 1936 annual ‘Jewish Youth Day’ in which athletics took centre stage. The number grew to 6,000 in 1937 and 1938, the year that Jewish children were barred from attending school, whether German or Jewish.Footnote 64
The physical education of Jewish children and youth was also conceived by the Zionists as part of parents’ national responsibility. Children's physical fitness and appearance became a source of pride to parents and to the Volk. In early 1934, the editors of JR explained that it seemed opportune to acquaint Jewish women with an important speech delivered by Martin Buber in 1901 to Jüdischer Frauenverein, and reprinted in 1916. The editors noted that only the last part of the speech would be reproduced, but this was precisely the part that dealt with the physical aspects of the rebirth of the Jewish peopleFootnote 65 – a fact that in itself indicates the continuity of racial ideas among Zionists. Women, declared Buber, bore a great burden in the renewal of their Volk. The mother could cultivate a solid personality only if she attended to the peculiarity of the Jewish ‘tribe’ (Stamm). According to Buber, the Jewish mother should not feel ashamed if her child ‘looks like a Jew’; on the contrary, she should feel proud. The Jewish mother should ensure her children's physical education, thus fostering the harmonious development of their strength and the spontaneous behaviour that the Jew was so much in need of. While Buber held that such care on the part of the mother would in the future create a Jew who was ‘utterly Jewish and utterly human’ (ganz Jude und ganz Mensch), a Jew with universal qualities, he concluded by again calling for the Jewish woman to rescue the ‘people's soul’ (Volksseele) and to love her Volk.
The fusion of the universal and the particular in the new Jew reflected the humanistic values with which Buber sought to endow Zionism. But his desire for a renewed Jew in Zionsland clashed with his vision of one ‘utterly Jewish and utterly human’. For Buber, at least in his earlier writings, asserted a close correlation between aesthetics, art, blood, and soil. As Margaret Olin has demonstrated, his ideas about a Jewish renaissance evoked specific attributes of tribal blood relations rather than universal traits. These ideas – reprinted in the JR more than thirty years after he penned them – echoed the völkisch notions of German nationalists who wrote about the soul of the nation rather than the universal concept of civilization. Moreover, although Buber considered racial characteristics to be the result of climate and other historical conditions, he did not refrain from using antisemitic stereotypes in regard to ancient Judaism.Footnote 66 For instance, the term Stamm – which did not exclusively denote race, as it was also associated with a large familial or tribal organization, or a group of specific ethnic origin and blood relations – had been applied by Jewish writers since the end of the nineteenth century to physical, anthropological, sociological, and racial traits.Footnote 67 Antisemitic stereotypes, the ‘Jewish look’, physical abilities, and even behaviour – characteristics used to portray Jewish racial inferiority – all now acquired different, constructive values. Negative images and features were thus transformed into ones indicating positive Jewish qualities. The 1934 reprint of Buber's 1901 plea with its implied racial dimension seems therefore to be a further effort on the part of the Zionist newspaper to rekindle national Jewish sentiment. Together with other ideas about the training of children, it heralded a new beginning for the Jews’ life in their own land. There, through the pioneering activities of youth, as the same newspaper wrote in 1938, ‘the Jewish Volk will be in a position to produce a new, revived species (Geschlecht) from its blood’.Footnote 68
But the Zionist press also challenged the prevailing reliance on racial concepts about Jews, reflecting disagreement on this matter. In 1937, for example, the journalist and cultural critic Herman Sinsheimer wrote in the JR that Jews ought to be proud of being the ‘people of scripture’ (Volk der Schrift). Their holy books were the basis of Christianity and Islam as well. Recalling the writings of the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Sinsheimer asserted that this small people was held together by virtue of its spiritual power. Every consideration of Judaism, whether as ‘Volk, Stamm, Rasse’, remains ‘empty of any substance’ if it does not acknowledge the centrality of the Jewish Holy Scriptures.Footnote 69
IV
Discussions of the racial essence of Judaism in the Zionist press and publications, and the emphasis they placed on enhancing physical abilities and appearance, related mainly to cultural and national-political aspects of Jewish life. The accommodation of such racial concepts seems to indicate a desire to regenerate Jewish identity in a period when the failure of assimilation appeared decisive. However, a further theorization on Judaism and race preoccupied some German Zionists, one that focused on biological and medical elements of the ‘Jewish race’ and its potential improvement by eugenicist methods. This discussion was conducted mainly by physicians and won only limited attention in the public discourse. Yet, it reflects an attempt to validate the physicians’ contentions by tracing ‘purifying’ biological elements manifested throughout Jewish history. Moreover, their claims melded science and history in order to counter the Nazi-propagated image of Jewish inferiority. Consequently, it enhanced the racial dimension of Jewish identity.
Eugenics had been part of the scientific lexicon since the late nineteenth century, but it was a rather fuzzy term. Zionist physician Felix Theilhaber, for example, thought about eugenics in terms of intense Jewish reproduction.Footnote 70 During the Nazi period, Theilhaber published an article in the JR in which he lamented the low Jewish birth rate in Germany, which he considered a consequence of the modern economy. He called for the recovery of the community through increasing reproduction (JR 15 Sept. 1933).Footnote 71 Theilhaber's views were also published in the Jewish weekly Israelitisches Familienblatt in 1935.Footnote 72 Arthur Ruppin, however, held different views on the matter. In his 1931 work Sociology of the Jews, Ruppin wrote that the only means to avoid degeneration was to prevent ‘individuals with degenerating characters’ from reproducing. He added that since Jewish law considered the marriage of every girl to be a religious obligation, Jewish communities gave epileptics, halfwits (Halbidioten), the blind, and the deaf the chance to marry. Thus, in contrast to the Christians, there was no ‘self-purification of the race’ (Selbstreinigung der Rasse) among the Jews.Footnote 73 Still other Jews thought about eugenics in terms of increasing awareness of the parents of their own health while planning to enlarge their family.Footnote 74 A few Jewish scientists seemed to echo certain aspects of the Nazi concept of eugenics, albeit sporadically.
During their first year in power, Nazis passed the sterilization law, which carried clear eugenic intentions – to prevent the birth of children to parents with supposedly hereditary diseases. In the same year, Goebbels ordered all German organizations to be educated according to the ‘eugenic way of thinking’.Footnote 75 In June, shortly before the promulgation of the law, Zionist physician Dr Dreyfuss, head of the medical council (Obermedizinalrat) in the city of Ludwigshafen, wrote an article in the JR, where he appeared to advocate biological eugenics. Dreyfuss questioned the existence of pure races in Europe, including the Jewish one, due to intermarriage, war, and the penetration of foreign elements. Yet, the Zionist doctor believed that Jews could still be considered the purest race, since they excluded children born of mixed marriages. Some Jewish ‘familial tribes’ (Familiensstämme), like Cohen and Levy, were of special ‘racial purity’ (Rassenreinheit), he noted. And though ‘foreign racial [elements]’ (Fremdrassige) had penetrated Judaism, historical conditions had helped Jews to maintain their reproduction ability. Foreign races even used the Jewish one in order to improve their own. Dreyfuss goes even further in that he does not disavow altogether the notion of ‘elements ‘unworthy of living’ (‘lebensunwerter’ Elemente) – a eugenicist concept developed in Germany by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in the early 1920s, and adopted later by the Nazis as a guiding principle. While he held that eugenics was of interest to Jews, he hedged this view with the point that sterilization and extermination (Vernichtung) of such ‘elements’ involved religious and moral problems, and because of the Jewish worldview such ideas were not practicable within Judaism.Footnote 76
Eugenicist notions were held also among non-Zionist Jewish doctors, who granted them additional meaning. Max Marcuse, for instance, a German Jewish dermatologist and sexologist, thought about the benefits of eugenics in its strictest sense – improvement of breeding. The health of the parents was the most important factor, regardless of their alleged racial affiliation.Footnote 77 From 1933 on, as demonstrated by Veronika Lipphardt, ‘Jewish eugenics’ seem to have become institutionalized when in the summer of that year the Jewish gynaecologist Wilhelm Nussbaum founded the Organization of Jewish Genetic Research and Eugenics (Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft für jüdische Erbforschung und Eugenik) in Berlin, which later became the Organization for Jewish Genetic Research and Hereditary Care (Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft für jüdische Erbforschung und Erbpflege) and existed until summer 1935. The activities of this organization ranged from consultation in the field of heredity biology to measurements of different organs of the body and other genetic examinations of Jews. Nussbaum concluded that Jews did not constitute a ‘pure race’ but were a people of ‘racial mixtures’ (Rassenmischungen). This conclusion did not necessarily contradict eugenics, which aimed at ‘healthy breeding’. Nussbaum set up his clinic at the Jewish hospital in Berlin, after he successfully convinced the Jewish community of the need for such an advisory institution.Footnote 78 Heredity biology was therefore acknowledged as an integral part of the medical services offered by an official Jewish institution, but its racial aspect, at least among certain physicians, was blurred.
Orthodox Jews, too, engaged in the discourse of eugenics. In 1916, the American rabbi Max Reichler wrote an essay on ‘Jewish eugenics’ in which he explored the reasons for the Jews' survival through the ‘onslaughts of Time’. Reichler asserted that biblical and rabbinical law contained eugenic principles. Such work pointed to a need ‘to utilize all influences that might improve the inborn qualities of the Jewish race’.Footnote 79 During the Nazi regime, and in the wake of the promulgation of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the main print organ of German Orthodox Jewry Der Israelit published two articles by the Berlin Jewish physician Dr Jacob Levy, under the title ‘Hereditary health (Erbgesundheit) – a task of the German Jews’. Levy saw hereditary health as a matter of eugenics which, in itself, was highly relevant to Jews. Various developments in the Jewish world, such as assimilation, changes in sexual life, and conversion had threatened Jewish existence even before the Nazi rise to power. He saw a possible solution to this threat in two variations of ‘hereditary health’. One was the creation of suitable living conditions, and the other was the prevention of reproduction among ‘inferiors’ (Minderwertige). A mere increase in the Jewish population did not meet the challenges the Jewish people were facing.Footnote 80 For Levy, hereditary mental features were necessary for the cultivation of the Jewish race.Footnote 81
Thus, while they made regular recourse to ethics, German Zionists, as well as Orthodox Jews, did not reject fully the notion of eugenics. Within the context of contemporary racial discourse, and especially under Nazi domination, and as part of the expectations for a Jewish renaissance even under growing persecution, the belief in the ability of Jews to salvage their mental and physical qualities became more salient than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This turn towards eugenic and racial cultivation did not constitute the main stream of Jewish national revival, but it nonetheless cannot be dismissed as a negligible trend. Indeed, it ought to be considered part of the larger scope of Zionist views about the meaning and future of Judaism.
V
Anticipating already in the early 1930s the ultimate failure of emancipation and assimilation within German society, German Zionists endeavoured to invigorate Jewish identity and sought ways to realize political ends embedded in Zionist ideology. Racial, anthropological, and ethnic criteria for defining Jewishness and Jewish people had long featured in the construction of national Jewish identity. In fact, they were evident to some extent within Zionism from its very inception. Jewish scientists used newly developed concepts in the fields of anthropology, medicine, and race in order to invest Judaism with more natural and scientific attributes. Their national ideology and scientific vocation were merged in order to produce a more organic and firmer platform for a future nation-state for Jews. Under the Nazi regime, the racial nature of Judaism won popularity among Jews themselves. As the Nazi authorities made race into the main category for defining certain groups, German Zionists tried to counter racial allegations against Jews and their continuous degradation by using similar concepts. They used the space allowed them for a Jewish discourse that countered their racial categorization by the Nazis, but they also integrated the alleged racial character of the Jews into their conceptualization of Jewish nationalism. Unlike the Nazis, however, the Zionists did not draw heavily on biological determinism. Theirs were more pluralistic and tolerant notions of race. And yet, more than ever before, race appeared to some Zionists as a legitimate and constructive factor in reasserting their Jewish identity, thus challenging the inferior image imposed on them, and supporting their claim for national independence amidst a hostile environment. Thus, German Zionists’ reference to the Jews' racial nature was not only a reaction to Nazi propaganda and its policy of exclusion. Rather, it was as well a popularization of previously held concepts that were now taken beyond the scientific sphere to serve as the building blocks of national, political, and cultural views among persecuted German Jewry.
