The Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, or CV), which was founded in 1893 and active until 1938 when the Nazis prohibited its activities, was the largest and most influential Jewish organization in Germany. It had 72,000 members in 1924 and 60,000 in the early 1930s. It was established to combat antisemitism as well as to advocate for the legal, political, and cultural equality of German Jews. Moreover, it aimed to nourish patriotic attachment to Germany among Jews living in the country. As the first paragraph of its charter put it, the CV strove “to strengthen citizenship and social equality as well as the unflinching cultivation of German patriotism” (17). In this respect, the CV expressed the emancipatory hopes of the French Revolution that attempted to create a more equal society, largely by way of granting and defending civil, political, and legal rights to individual citizens.

If the Nazis intended to overturn the French Revolution and, indeed, the modern revolution of equality itself, then how could an organization founded in its defense and, even more, one founded to combat antisemitism possibly function in Nazi Germany? How could the CV possibly continue to agitate for the symbiosis of Germans and Jews after 1933 without seeming to be myopic? That the CV might have been myopic was a conclusion that some drew even before the Nazis came to power. Already in 1920, Albert Einstein thought that the CV's continued efforts to ensure Jewish equality through assimilation were misguided: not only would they not succeed in challenging antisemitism but they did not nourish the sense of dignity among Jews that Einstein thought was central to combatting antisemitism and ethno-cultural nationalism.

Einstein's view might underplay, however, the complexity of the CV's activities––a complexity that this collection of six essays reveals in rich detail, based on the large archival holdings of the CV's main office in Berlin that the Soviets brought to Moscow in 1945 and that were rediscovered in 1990.

The first essay, written by Daniel Siemens, establishes the basic argument that courses through the rest of the book. After emphasizing the dilemma in which the CV found itself as an institution that had long committed itself to life in Germany, he demonstrates that the CV seemed fully aware of the difficult position in which it found itself from the very beginning of the Nazi seizure of power. Nevertheless, the CV sought to do as much as it could to improve the lives of Jews living in Hitler's Germany. It was thus, in Siemens's estimation, a “dynamic” interest organization concerned with “practical questions” of everyday life (22). Similarly, Anna Ullrich's essay on the CV's perception of the attitudes of non-Jewish Germans toward antisemitism shows that the institution was very sober in its outlook. It did not expect that non-Jewish Germans, even if they might not be rabid antisemites or staunch supporters of the Nazis, would come to assist Jews as a persecuted and stigmatized minority group.

The next essay, by Thomas Reuß, offers a microhistory of Beuthen on the German-Polish border in Upper Silesia. In Beuthen, the CV cooperated with the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation of Germany) to combat the economic effects of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, by petitioning local officials and Nazi Party leaders. Though these petitions did little to stymie the escalating Nazi persecution of the Jews, they nevertheless showed the willingness of the CV to work with German Zionists, despite their ideological differences, when it came to the issue of combating antisemitism.

Turning to a different aspect of the CV's campaign against antisemitism, Regina Grundmann examines the CV's involvement in the publication of two books that defended Judaism against attacks by Julius Streicher on the Talmud. Such an intense defense of Judaism by the CV turned it into the epitome, in the words of Joseph Goebbels, “of everything against which National Socialism is directed” (152).

Martin Herholz's contribution focuses on the Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend (The German-Jewish Youth League). This organization, which the CV played a part in establishing, nourished an appreciation of Jewish culture, while remaining firmly committed to the prospect of Jews living in Germany. In this sense, it reflected the enduring belief among some Jews in the German-Jewish symbiosis that the Nazis sought to destroy. The final essay in this volume is by Frank Wolff and examines the CV's approach to migration. Although the CV emphasized integration rather than migration, it established in 1936 an agricultural training farm in Groß-Breesen to prepare Jews steeped in German-Jewish culture to emigrate to Jewish settlements in Argentina and Brazil. Even when approaching the issue of emigration, the CV aimed to cultivate a sense of German-Jewish identity.

Despite the tremendous challenges that the CV faced in Nazi Germany, this volume convincingly shows that it steadfastly remained committed to its belief in the ideas of equality and German-Jewish emancipation. If to some such a resolute belief might seem obtuse, to others it shows the courage of German Jews to fight for their ideals, no matter what the Nazis said about them and did to them.