Defending Home: The Centralverein, Zionism, and Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Modern Jewish History in Europe and Israel

Abstract

Four years before Theodor Herzl established the modern Zionist movement as a political and nationalist response to rising European anti-Semitism, a small group of German Jews founded a purely legal Jewish defense organization – the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens. Though initially founded in 1893 to provide German Jews with legal representation in cases of anti-Semitism, by the 1920’s the Centralverein had become both the most prominent German-Jewish institution as well as one of the loudest and most unequivocal opponents of Zionism in Germany. The Centralverein viewed Jewish nationalism and its calls for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine as an acute threat to continued German-Jewish integration into Weimar German society. It was not just that the CV regarded Zionism as harming integration as such, but rather that it strengthened traditional anti-Semitic claims of Jewish disloyalty. Despite their official break with the Zionist movement in 1919, the Centralverein nevertheless continued collaborating with the Zionist movement on select social and political projects – a fact that the CV’s leadership purposefully withheld from its members.

Using documents, reports, and publications in the Wiener Library’s Centralverein collection, this project examines how the Centralverein used this public rejection of Zionist principles as a further means to demonstrate Jewish loyalty to Germany, and to thereby combat rising political anti-Semitism. In doing so it also contextualizes the CV’s anti-Zionist rhetoric within German Jews’ larger efforts to integrate into German society during the first decades of the 20th Century. This paper therefore first examines the ways in which the Centralverein both perceived and engaged with the growing Zionist movement in Germany during the Weimar Republic before turning to an analysis of how this anti-Zionist rhetoric facilitated both the creation and adaptation of networks within the German Jewish community aimed at combating rising anti-Semitism and fostering the development of a synthesized Jewish and German identity.

Author

• Sarah Johnson, UCLA