Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts / Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook XIV/2015 [1 ed.] 9783666369452, 9783525369456

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Body
Raphael Gross: Editorial
Allgemeiner Teil
Brian Horowitz, New Orleans, La.: Principle or Expediency: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Displays of Violence and the Construction of His Leadership
David Biale, Davis, Calif.: Experience vs. Tradition: Reflections on the Origins of the Buber-Scholem Controversy
Scholem’s Private Views of Buber
Scholem’s Youthful Relationship to Buber
From Buber’s Disciple to Buber’s Opponent
Why Did Scholem Return to Buber in the 1960s?
Brian M. Smollett, New York: Nationalism, Belonging, and Crisis: The Paths of Koppel S. Pinson and Hans Kohn
Formative Years and Influences
Collaboration and Correspondence
Vision and Action after the War
Mediating Jewish Particularism and Humanistic Internationalism
Conclusion
Atina Grossmann, New York: Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India
Deportation as Refuge – Polish Jews under Soviet Rule
Anders Army
Iran
Central Asia
Postwar Era
Conclusion
Schwerpunkt “Jewish Questions” in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention. Herausgegeben von Markus Kirchhoff und Gil Rubin
Markus Kirchhoff/Gil Rubin, Leipzig/New York: Introduction
Israel Bartal, Jerusalem: From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881
The Decline of the Formal Shtadlanim
Between “West” and “East”: Changing Networks
“Old” and “New” Discourse in Jewish Politics
Conclusion: What Changed?
Carsten L. Wilke, Budapest: Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878
Romania as a Target of Jewish Diplomatic Intervention
Competition for Leadership among European Jewry
French and German Activists
Activism for Romanian Jewry: Four National Frameworks
The International Romania Conference in Brussels
Failed Secession
The Twilight of German-Jewish International Advocacy
Conclusion
David Engel, New York: The Elite and the Street: The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy
Jewish Representation – “Old” and “New”
Paris 1919 as a Breakthrough?
The Affair
Conclusion
Philipp Graf, Leipzig: The Bernheim Petition 1933: Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period
Before the League of Nations against Hitler
The Question of Success
Distorted Horizons
Various Means
Legal Procedure
International Politics in 1933
On the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy
Nathan Kurz, London: In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference
Jewish Planning for the Postwar Peace
Jewish Demands and Their Repudiation
Britain’s Cynical Jewish Diplomacy
Romania and Hungary Respond
The Jewish Defeat at Paris in Historical Perspective
James Loeffler, Charlottesville, Va.: “The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective
Zionist Internationalism – The Case of Jacob Robinson
The “First Principles” of Jewish Politics
A Jewish Vision of Transnationalism
Replanting the Sound Seeds of Autonomism?
“The Dissident”
Coda: Robinson in Jerusalem
Markus Kirchhoff, Leipzig: The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern – Re-Reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article
From “Westphalia” to “Westfailure”?
Leo Gross
The “Westphalia” Article
“Westphalia” as a Jewish Issue
Intellectual and Institutional History
Emperor and Empire
Diplomacy of Rights
Enforcing Human Rights and International Law
Conclusion
Miriam Rürup, Hamburg: The Right to be Stateless: Dealing with Statelessness after World War II
Forced and Voluntary Statelessness
The Jewish Experience of Statelessness: National Socialism
After 1945: Jewish Displaced Persons and the Right to Statelessness
Protection of Stateless Individuals: The UN Convention of 1954
Answer to the Trauma of Expatriation? Repatriation in the FRG
Prospects
Carole Fink, Columbus, Oh.: Negotiating after Negotiations: Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund
The Premier Jewish Diplomat: Nahum Goldmann
Goldmann’s New Partner: Willy Brandt
Negotiating a “Post-1965” Agreement
The Final Stage
Conclusion
Schwerpunkt Bruchlinien – Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen seit 1959. Herausgegeben von Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue
Jörg Deventer/Magnus Klaue, Leipzig: Einführung
Irene Aue-Ben-David/Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan, Jerusalem: Observant Ventures: Early German-Israeli Conferences on German History
New Home, Desired Guests: The 1976 Symposium at Tel Aviv University
The Symposium: Logic, Aims and Outcomes
From Jerusalem to Göttingen
After the Conference: A Chair for German History at the Hebrew University
Concluding Remarks
Ari Barell/Ute Deichmann, Beer Sheva: Internationality as Moral Challenge and Practical Success: The Origin and Early Development of the Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences
Historical and Political Background
The Initiators of the Collaboration and Their Motives
The Involvement of Politics, German Industry, and the MPG
The Institutionalization of the Collaboration
Minerva Grants and Fellowships
The Scholar Exchange Program
Early Collaborations in Physics, Biology, and Chemistry
Nuclear Physics
Biology
Immunology
The Institute for Molecular Biology in Braunschweig
Chemistry
Solid-state Crystallography
Collaboration with German Industry
Biophysics
Benefits and Moral Costs
Ethical Aspects of Internationalism
The Inclusion of Other Institutions in the Collaboration
The Scientific Collaboration, Politics, and Society
Sharon Livne/Amos Morris-Reich, Haifa: Early Contacts in Genetics, 1949–1965: A Historical-Sociological Perspective
The Gentner Delegation
Jacob Wahrman
Academic Collaboration
Early Contacts
Correspondences and Collaborations
Individual and Institutional Networks
Science and Political Bridge-Building
Concluding Comments
Jenny Hestermann, Frankfurt am Main: Vor der Diplomatie: Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Brückenbauer?
Gemeinsame Interessen und ihre Grenzen
Die ersten Stipendiaten am Weizmann-Institut
Historische Kontexte: Eichmann-Prozess, Kulturdebatte, Ägypten-Krise
Zusammenfassung und Ausblick
Roni Stauber, Tel Aviv: Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik: Die israelische Diplomatie und das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Nationalsozialismus
Die Bundesrepublik und ihr Verhältnis zur NS-Vergangenheit
Erinnerung und Realpolitik in Israel
Israelische Kritik am Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zu ihrer Vergangenheit
Schlussbetrachtung
Gelehrtenporträt
Lisa Moses Leff, Washington, D. C.: Zosa Szajkowski: Archivdieb und Pionier der französisch-jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung
Der Lehrling der Tscherikowers
Ein Soldat in zwei Armeen
Ein unabhängiger Gelehrter im Amerika der Nachkriegszeit
Schluss
Dubnowiana
Cecile E. Kuznitz, Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y.: YIVO’s “Old Friend and Teacher”: Simon Dubnow and his Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute
Laying the Foundation for Yiddish Scholarship
Dubnow’s Role in YIVO’s Work
The Move to Riga and Visits to Vilna
The Years of World War II
Conclusion
Appendix: Seven Letters of Simon Dubnow Concerning His Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute, Selected and Annotated by Cecile E. Kuznitz, and Transl. from the Yiddish by Vera Szabó
Aus der Forschung
Lutz Fiedler, Jerusalem: Drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung – Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg und das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee
Jüdische Fragen und kommunistische Antworten
Entgrenzte Gewalt: Über die Gründung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees
Entfremdungen inmitten des Krieges
Verfolgung und Ermordung – die Liquidation des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees
Gedächtniskonflikte: Jüdische Erfahrung und sowjetische Erinnerung
Literaturbericht
Elisabeth Gallas, Leipzig: Frühe Holocaustforschung in Amerika: Dokumentation, Zeugenschaft und Begriffsbildung
Rückkehr an den Anfang: Neue Perspektiven auf die Nachkriegszeit
Annäherungen an die Katastrophe, den Churbn und »Hitlers Krieg gegen die Juden«: Sondierung eines Forschungsfeldes in Amerika
Dokumentation und Rechtsprechung
Zeugenschaft und Erinnerung
Begriffsbildung und Historisierung
Was blieb und was bleibt
Abstracts
Contributors

Citation preview

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JAHRBUCH DES SIMON-DUBNOW-INSTITUTS (JBDI) SIMON DUBNOW INSTITUTE YEARBOOK (DIYB) 2016

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Herausgeber Editor

Raphael Gross Redaktion Manuscript Editor Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf Redaktionsbeirat Editorial Advisory Board Marion Aptroot, Düsseldorf · Aleida Assmann, Konstanz · Jacob Barnai, Haifa · Israel Bartal, Jerusalem · Omer Bartov, Providence, N. J. · Esther Benbassa, Paris · Dominique Bourel, Paris · Michael Brenner, München/Washington, D. C. · Matti Bunzl, Urbana-Champaign · Lois Dubin, Northampton, Mass. · Todd Endelman, Ann Arbor, Mich. · David Engel, New York · Shmuel Feiner, Ramat Gan · Norbert Frei, Jena · Sander L. Gilman, Atlanta, Ga. · Frank Golczewski, Hamburg · Michael Graetz, Heidelberg · Heiko Haumann, Basel · Susannah Heschel, Hanover, N. H. · Yosef Kaplan, Jerusalem · Cilly Kugelmann, Berlin · Mark Levene, Southampton · Leonid Luks, Eichstätt · Ezra Mendelsohn (1940– 2015), Jerusalem · Paul Mendes-Flohr, Jerusalem/Chicago, Ill. · Gabriel Motzkin, Jerusalem · David N. Myers, Los Angeles, Calif. · Jacques Picard, Basel · Gertrud Pickhan, Berlin · Anthony Polonsky, Waltham, Mass. · Renée Poznanski, Beer Sheva · Peter Pulzer, Oxford · Monika Richarz, Berlin · Manfred Rudersdorf, Leipzig · Rachel Salamander, München · Winfried Schulze, München · Hannes Siegrist, Leipzig · Gerald Stourzh, Wien · Stefan Troebst, Leipzig · Feliks Tych (1929–2015), Warschau · Yfaat Weiss, Jerusalem · Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Leipzig · Moshe Zimmermann, Jerusalem · Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford, Calif. Gastherausgeber der Schwerpunkte Guest Editors of the Special Issues Markus Kirchhoff/Gil Rubin Jörg Deventer/Magnus Klaue Ehemaliger Herausgeber Editor Emeritus Dan Diner

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JAHRBUCH DES SIMON-DUBNOW-INSTITUTS SIMON DUBNOW INSTITUTE YEARBOOK

XV 2016

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

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Redaktionsanschrift: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur an der Universität Leipzig, Goldschmidtstraße 28, 04103 Leipzig E-Mail: [email protected] www.dubnow.de Lektorat: André Zimmermann Übersetzungen: Markus Lemke (aus dem Hebräischen ins Deutsche), Felix Kurz (aus dem Englischen ins Deutsche), Vera Szabó (aus dem Jiddischen ins Englische), William Templer (aus dem Deutschen ins Englische) Bestellungen und Abonnementanfragen sind zu richten an: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Abteilung Vertrieb Robert-Bosch-Breite 6 D-37070 Göttingen Tel. +49 551 5084-40 Fax +49 551 5084-454 E-Mail: [email protected] / [email protected] www.v-r.de Mit 4 Abbildungen

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-666-36945-2 Weitere Ausgaben und Online-Angebote sind erhältlich unter: www.v-r.de

© 2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U. S. A. www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages

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Inhalt Raphael Gross Editorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Allgemeiner Teil Brian Horowitz, New Orleans, La. Principle or Expediency: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Displays of Violence and the Construction of His Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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David Biale, Davis, Calif. Experience vs. Tradition: Reflections on the Origins of the Buber-Scholem Controversy

. . . .

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Brian M. Smollett, New York Nationalism, Belonging, and Crisis: The Paths of Koppel S. Pinson and Hans Kohn . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Atina Grossmann, New York Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Schwerpunkt “Jewish Questions” in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention Herausgegeben von Markus Kirchhoff und Gil Rubin Markus Kirchhoff/Gil Rubin, Leipzig/New York Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Israel Bartal, Jerusalem From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

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Inhalt

Carsten L. Wilke, Budapest Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 David Engel, New York The Elite and the Street: The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Philipp Graf, Leipzig The Bernheim Petition 1933: Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period . . . . 167 Nathan Kurz, London In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference . . . . . . 187 James Loeffler, Charlottesville, Va. “The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Markus Kirchhoff, Leipzig The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern – Re-Reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article . . . . . . . . . . 239 Miriam Rürup, Hamburg The Right to be Stateless: Dealing with Statelessness after World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Carole Fink, Columbus, Oh. Negotiating after Negotiations: Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

Schwerpunkt Bruchlinien – Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen seit 1959 Herausgegeben von Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue Jörg Deventer/Magnus Klaue, Leipzig Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

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Irene Aue-Ben-David/Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan, Jerusalem Observant Ventures: Early German-Israeli Conferences on German History . . . . . . . . 315 Ari Barell/Ute Deichmann, Beer Sheva Internationality as Moral Challenge and Practical Success: The Origin and Early Development of the Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Sharon Livne/Amos Morris-Reich, Haifa Early Contacts in Genetics, 1949–1965: A Historical-Sociological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 Jenny Hestermann, Frankfurt am Main Vor der Diplomatie: Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Brückenbauer? . . 399 Roni Stauber, Tel Aviv Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik: Die israelische Diplomatie und das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Nationalsozialismus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419

Gelehrtenporträt Lisa Moses Leff, Washington, D. C. Zosa Szajkowski: Archivdieb und Pionier der französisch-jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

Dubnowiana Cecile E. Kuznitz, Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y. YIVO’s “Old Friend and Teacher”: Simon Dubnow and his Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute . 477 Appendix Seven Letters of Simon Dubnow Concerning His Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute, Selected and Annotated by Cecile E. Kuznitz, and Transl. from the Yiddish by Vera Szabó . . . . . . . . . 496

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Inhalt

Aus der Forschung Lutz Fiedler, Jerusalem Drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung – Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg und das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511

Literaturbericht Elisabeth Gallas, Leipzig Frühe Holocaustforschung in Amerika: Dokumentation, Zeugenschaft und Begriffsbildung . . . . . . . . . . 535 Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583

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Editorial Das XV. Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts widmet sich in zwei Schwerpunkten aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln Stationen jüdischer beziehungsweise israelischer Diplomatiegeschichte. Der erste, von Markus Kirchhoff (Leipzig) und Gil Rubin (New York) zusammengestellte und herausgegebene Schwerpunkt befasst sich mit Problemfeldern der Ausgestaltung des modernen Staatensystems seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, die für die europäischen Judenheiten von zentraler Bedeutung waren. Gezeigt wird, in welcher Form Fragen von Staatsbürgerschaft, Emanzipation, Minderheitenschutz und humanitärer Intervention in den modernen Debatten zur internationalen Politik hervortraten und welche Lösungsansätze jüdische Protagonisten entwickelten. Der zweite, in der Verantwortung von Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue (beide Leipzig) liegende Schwerpunkt untersucht mit dem deutschisraelischen Wissenschaftsaustausch seit 1959 einen besonders belasteten Fall internationaler Beziehungen. Anlässlich des vor Kurzem begangenen fünfzigsten Jahrestages der diplomatischen Kontaktaufnahme zwischen beiden Ländern werden vor allem die Widersprüche und Ungleichzeitigkeiten der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit in den Blick genommen. Inwiefern wurde an Traditionen deutsch-jüdischen Geisteslebens angeknüpft und wie bildete sich der Zivilisationsbruch des Holocaust in ihnen nach? Beide Schwerpunkte werden gemäß der Tradition des Jahrbuchs von den jeweils verantwortlich Zeichnenden gesondert eingeleitet. Die Beiträge des Allgemeinen Teils befassen sich mehrheitlich mit Themen aus dem breiten Feld der jüdischen Intellectual History im 20. Jahrhundert. Zu Beginn zeichnet Brian Horowitz (New Orleans, La.) ein politisches Profil von Vladimir Jabotinsky, dem Begründer des revisionistischen Zionismus. Er macht deutlich, dass Jabotinskys Agenda durchaus von Widersprüchen gekennzeichnet war und sein Verhältnis zur Gewalt zwischen prinzipiellen und instrumentellen Überlegungen schwankte. Im Anschluss daran verschiebt David Biale (Davis, Calif.) den Fokus in Richtung jüdischer Theologie. Sein Artikel spürt der Kontroverse zwischen Martin Buber und Gershom Scholem nach, die sich in den 1960er Jahren am Thema des Chassidismus entzündet hatte, deren Ursprünge jedoch, wie Biale zeigen kann, bis in die Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs zurückreichen. Brian M. Smollett (New York) wendet sich den jüdischen Historikern Koppel S. Pinson und Hans Kohn zu, die vor allem als Nationalismusforscher bekannt geworden sind. Er untersucht dabei die Frage, inwiefern sich die politischen Erfahrungen JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 9–11.

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Raphael Gross

des 20. Jahrhunderts in die jeweiligen Theorien der Wissenschaftler eingeschrieben und deren eigenen Aktivismus geprägt haben. Demgegenüber erweitert Atina Grossmann (New York) in ihrer ereignisgeschichtlich angelegten Studie die Historiografie des Holocaust um eine geografische Dimension. Dafür nimmt sie einen bisher wenig beachteten Aspekt jüdischer Erfahrung in den Blick, indem sie den vor den Nationalsozialisten flüchtenden Juden auf ihrem Weg nach Russland, Indien und in den Iran folgt. In der Rubrik Gelehrtenporträt stellt Lisa Moses Leff (Washington, D. C.) mit dem in Polen gebürtigen Historiker Zosa Szajkowski einen ungewöhnlichen Vertreter seines Fachs vor. Obwohl ein Pionier der jüdisch-französischen Geschichte, gelangte Szajkowski vor allem aufgrund zahlreicher Diebstähle von Archivmaterial zu zweifelhafter Berühmtheit. Anschließend skizziert Cecile E. Kuznitz (Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y.) für die Rubrik Dubnowiana die Beziehung Simon Dubnows zum Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (YIVO). Die Autorin unterstreicht die schwankende Bedeutung, die Dubnow für jene zentrale Institution der jüdischen Wissenschaft besaß; darüber hinaus bezieht sie aber auch sein politisches Engagement, das sich an der Idee des Diaspora-Nationalismus ausrichtete, mit ein. Mit sieben Briefen aus der Feder Dubnows, die für diese Jahrbuch-Ausgabe übersetzt und ihr in einem Appendix beigegeben wurden, wird der Leserschaft zudem die Möglichkeit geboten, sich mittels Originaldokumenten vertieft mit dem Verhältnis zwischen Dubnow und dem YIVO zu befassen. In der Rubrik Aus der Forschung stellt Lutz Fiedler (Jerusalem) dar, wie die Hoffnung sowjetischer Juden in die soziale Utopie des Kommunismus, der ihnen den Weg in die Moderne öffnen sollte, durch den Staatsapparat bitter enttäuscht wurde. Fiedler schildert die Desillusionierung entlang der Lebenswege von Wassili Grossman und Ilja Ehrenburg, die zu den profiliertesten sowjetischen Schriftstellern ihrer Zeit zählten, sowie anhand der tragischen Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees. Die Institution war als Reaktion auf den deutschen Angriffskrieg gegen die Sowjetunion gegründet und 1948 wegen »antisowjetischer Agitation« verboten worden. Ihre Mitglieder waren anschließend Verfolgungen ausgesetzt, viele von ihnen wurden ermordet. Das Jahrbuch wird durch einen Literaturbericht von Elisabeth Gallas (Leipzig) abgerundet, der die Entstehung und Entwicklung der frühen Holocaustforschung in Amerika zum Gegenstand hat. Ihre Studie macht deutlich, dass die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der deutschen Verfolgungsund Vernichtungspolitik längst nicht erst mit dem Eichmann-Prozess 1961 anhob, sondern schon während des Zweiten Weltkriegs und in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit stattfand – und dies in einer Vielfalt und Tiefe, in der wesentliche Elemente weit späterer Diskussionen bereits aufschienen. Am Ende dieses Editorials steht ein herzlicher Dank des Herausgebers. Für die wissenschaftliche Redaktion dieses Bandes, im Besonderen für die

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Editorial

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enge Zusammenarbeit mit den Mitherausgebern sowie den Autorinnen und Autoren, richtet er sich an Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf. Die Übersetzungen aus dem Englischen und dem Hebräischen ins Deutsche sowie aus dem Jiddischen und dem Deutschen ins Englische wurden von Felix Kurz, Markus Lemke, Vera Szabó und William Templer in der bewährten Weise vorgenommen. André Zimmermann, der den Leserinnen und Lesern von Publikationen des Dubnow-Instituts bereits aus diversen Impressen bekannt ist, hat nach mehr als zehn Jahren das Lektorat des Jahrbuchs von Monika Heinker übernommen. Auch ihm gilt großer Dank, ebenso wie Jana Duman für ihren Anteil am englischsprachigen Lektorat der Beiträge. Schließlich ist vor allem Ludwig Decke, aber auch Juliane Pfeiffer zu danken, die beide mit viel Engagement und beeindruckender Zähigkeit weit über die formale Vereinheitlichung hinaus an den Beiträgen gearbeitet haben. Im April 2017 trete ich das Amt des Präsidenten der Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin an und lege daher mit der Herausgeberschaft des Jahrbuchs das führende Periodikum des Instituts vertrauensvoll in die Hände meiner Nachfolgerin Yfaat Weiss – verbunden mit den besten Wünschen für die Einrichtung, die engagierten Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter sowie alle Freunde und Förderer. Raphael Gross

Leipzig/Berlin, Frühjahr 2017

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Allgemeiner Teil

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Brian Horowitz

Principle or Expediency: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Displays of Violence and the Construction of His Leadership The question of whether Jabotinsky’s relation to violence was instrumentalist or essentialist, whether his motives to use violence were grounded in principle or in expediency are issues that are treated here. This paper seeks to ask several questions: How did Jabotinsky defend violence and in which context? Was he successful in legitimizing his extreme form of nationalism? Essentially, he portrayed himself as a national liberator, something similar to Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had devoted himself to defense, but at a certain point availed himself of the opportunity to use power. In terms of violence, was Jabotinsky like or different from Garibaldi? My interpretation, as laid out in my reading of his life and works, is of a politician who was deeply contradictory and pulled in diverse directions by the events and ideas of his time. Jabotinsky instrumentalized violence but also conceived of it as an essential part of his program. The image of violence and aggression played a central part in the ideology and practice of his movement, Revisionist Zionism, as well as of the two groups that he organized: Tsohar, the Revisionist political party, and Betar, the youth group. In his programmatic statements that accompanied the establishment of the Revisionist Party in 1925, Jabotinsky insisted on the establishment and maintenance of Jewish armed forces. In the 1930s, some of his followers adopted the look and rituals of European nationalist paramilitary fighters of the time – brown shirts, martial exercises, marching in formation, and firing weapons. Some of his followers extolled a more radical militarism and called for immediate armed revolt against British rule in Palestine. Others were more realistic and saw the need for trained armed troops to complete a variety of tasks, from defending the Yishuv from Arab marauders to helping facilitate illegal emigration to Palestine. However, it is wrong to conflate Jabotinsky’s viewpoint with that of all of his followers. As we shall see, he tended to weigh the value of violence against diplomatic and moral values, in contrast to others, who conceived of violence as an end in itself. My contention is that Jabotinsky used the rhetoric of the far right, but expressed in his words and actions an ambivalence toward the use of force. The secondary literature shares this view generally, although not uniJBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 15–32.

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formly.1 Yaacov Shavit perceives him as an ideological extremist and sees no difference between Jabotinsky and those who came after him who are largely viewed as amoral on the question of the use of political violence. Shavit wrote that “[t]he fundamental assumptions were shaped during the 1930s, taking concrete form during the 1940s. During the 1950s they stood in the wings of the ideological arena in Israel, waiting for an opportunity to break through to center stage. This opportunity presented itself after June 1967.”2

In contrast to Shavit, I interpret Jabotinsky as anything but messianic. Some of his plans appeared utopian, but his methods and conceptions of politics were grounded in the realities of his time. He had little patience for apocalyptic thinking, and for this reason differs from Abba Achimeir, Yehoshua Yievin and Uri Zvi Greenberg. It is critical to acknowledge that Jabotinsky established his own political movement precisely because he did not find what he wanted among the existing groups. An aggressive military stance was not absent in Palestinian Jewish life, as is evident in the Shomer movement.3 But Jabotinsky had a political vision that went beyond guarding Jewish property and was connected with politics in the larger sense. He rejected the class principle, supported unlimited immigration of Jews to Palestine, and proposed the establishment of a Jewish army. Since Jabotinsky’s attitude and connection with violence was not simple, unambiguous, or uniform, we should not be surprised by contradictory statements and actions. In his Revisionist political program, he insisted on the “Legion principle,” the idea that Jews were entitled to a self-defense force “that should be legalized, for without legality it cannot be properly trained, led, and equipped.”4 This force, consisting of Jewish fighters and paid for by the Jewish population of Palestine, would have the role of providing security for the Yishuv. The difficulty of categorizing Jabotinsky’s attitude toward violence is not hard merely because he restrained himself in its use. Rather we face an interpretive question. One view contends that his conception of violence was

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Although my position has support in the secondary literature from Colin Shindler and Yechiam Weitz: Colin Shindler, The Land Beyond Promise. Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, London/New York 1995, 7–19; Yechiam Weitz, Bein Ze’ev Jabotinsky le’Menachem Begin. Kovets meamarim al ha’tenua ha’revizionistit [Between Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Essays on the Revisionist Movement], Jerusalem 2012, 15–33. See Yaacov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948, London 1988, 141. David Ben-Gurion, Chaluzischer Zionismus oder Revisionismus, Berlin 1934. Vladimir Jabotinsky, State Zionism, New York [1934], 8.

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relatively harmless. True, he insisted that young men and women should be trained in the use of firearms, dress in uniform and learn to march. But this is similar to other national movements from East-Central Europe: the Arrow Cross in Hungary, Poland’s Endecja (Narodowa Demokracja), and the Sokol movement in Czechoslovakia.5 Betar, the Revisionist youth movement, recalls Sokol with hiking, paramilitary training, with an emphasis on personal conduct and discipline.6 Another view portrays Jabotinsky as far more dangerous. In the 1930s, he was often criticized as a Jewish fascist. This claim also complicates our understanding, since it is undeniable that Revisionist Zionism contained elements of fascism, the leadership principle, the imagined politics as classless and united behind the leader, the struggle against Communism, and the emphasis on organized force as paramount in politics.7 Even to start answering this question, it is vital to remember that fascism was a “normal” political philosophy in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Zeev Sternhell, for example, has written: “Indeed, to think of fascism as a phenomenon that is inseparable from the mainstream of European history and to consider the fascist ideology as a European ideology that took root and developed not only in Italy and, in a very violent and extreme form, in Germany but also elsewhere can lead to parallels and comparisons that, for many people, are still difficult to accept.”8

It is difficult to accept because for Jews the extreme political right was taboo. In modern times Jews as a minority group in Europe identified primarily with the political left. Jews favored the replacement of conservative elites, greater equality of opportunity, and improvement in the rights of workers, all of which was important for practical and ideological reasons. Thanks to the relative absence among the political left of discrimination

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Benedetto Croce played a role in Jabotinsky’s thinking. Arye Naor argues that “Crocean aesthetics as an active and activating factor in history found expression in Jab’s thinking in the concept of hadar, with which he translated the aesthetic ideal into a central normative rule. The ethos, however, also has a collective dimension and Jabotinsky excitedly described the aesthetics of the collective act in several places: his depiction of the Philistines’ pagan rituals in his novel Samson, his account of the gymnastics of the Sokols in the Czech region of Austria-Hungary, which he lauded in a speech to members of Maccabi, and his description of the aspirations to order, precision and discipline in Betar activity.” Idem, Jabotinsky’s New Jew. Concept and Models, in: Journal of Jewish History 30 (2011), no. 2, 141–159, here 151. Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth. Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania, Ithaca, N. Y., 2015, 6. Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, New York, 2004. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology. From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, Princeton, N. J., 1994, ix f.

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based on ethnicity or nationality, Jews were attracted to the political left. However, Jews on the political left were obligated to shed religious and ethnic affiliation with the Jewish community. On the political right there were few options for Jews because most, if not all, the right-wing parties in Eastern Europe were characterized by anti-Jewish attitudes. Sometimes these parties also represented certain classes of people, such as the nobility, whose interests differed from those of Jews and other members of the lower classes. Wealthy Jews, the so-called shtadlanim who were intercessors with the government could have organized a conservative party of their own, but their modus vivendi of back-door negotiations with power structures made it impossible for them to work openly. In a democracy this would have entailed a challenge to their confidants who were used to secret accommodation.9 In Zionism’s early days under Herzl’s leadership, it was viewed as a movement for the wealthy.10 There was considerable expense involved in purchasing the shekel and the goals of the movement – building up a national home in Palestine – appeared distant from the day-to-day problems of life in Eastern Europe.11 However, Zionist parties soon arose with goals of class equality and immigration to Palestine.12 Zionism on the right centered around the General Zionists who sought an alliance with wealthy non-Zionists to help finance immigration and facilitate relations with the great powers.13 A Jewish radical right probably might have formed in pre-World War I Eastern Europe (as it did in the 1930s), but this would have contravened the spirit of the times. The right was viewed as an ideological scourge responsible for anti-Jewish violence and persecution and was not therefore seen as a viable alternative. Perhaps the Jewish political right was not entirely invisible. Its presence was felt by a percentage of the masses who followed the

19 David Gintsburg apparently conceived of such a party of Jewish oligarchs, but it was never realized. See B. V. Anan’ich, Bankirskie doma v Rossii, 1860–1914 gg. Ocherki istorii chastnogo predprinimatel’stva [Banking Houses in Russia 1860–1914. Essays On the History of Private Entrepreneurship], Leningrad 1991, 103–108. Interestingly, Jabotinsky held Genrikh Sliozberg, the greatest of the intercessors, Baron Horace Gintsburg’s personal assistant, in the highest esteem. See Vladimir Jabotinsky, G. B. Sliozberg, in: Genrikh B. Sliozberg, Diela minuvshikh dnei. Zapiski russkago evreia [Things from the Past. Notes of a Russian Jew], 3 vols., Paris 1933–1934, here vol. 1, Paris 1933, ix–xiv. 10 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1996, 3–9. 11 Ibid., 86. 12 Yitzhak Maor, Ha-tenu’ah ha-Tsiyonit be-Rusiyah. Me-reshitah ve-’ad yamenu [The Zionist Movement in Russia. From Its Origins to Our Day], Jerusalem 1986, 303–308. 13 Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel. From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, New York 3 2007, 191 f.

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adage, “Dina de-malkhuta dina” (The law of the land is the law).14 In other words, they were involved in politics at the local level, serving on councils and using business contacts to influence government policy toward Jews to the extent possible in places where democracy was imperfect or entirely absent. The radical right, with its public displays of nationalism and calls for political mobilization, represented something unfamiliar to Jewish politics. However, the link between democracy and the supremacy of the leader was popular in Europe at the time thanks to Carl Schmitt.15 Jews on the left complained about the leadership principle because the association with military style was similar to those groups that employed anti-Jewish violence. At times even Jabotinsky himself expressed discomfort with the idea of the strongman and he wanted to appear a humanist of the late-nineteenth century.16 As a result of his contradictory rhetoric, Jabotinsky’s conception of violence was unclear. Some followers had the impression that he shared their view of violence as an end in itself rather than as a means toward an end.17 Regarding the strategy of employing the radical right to advance a form of Zionism, Jabotinsky imitated trends in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and tried to change the habits of his group to better adapt it to the existing European rituals of violence.18 To succeed in making their own state, Jews had to become, to some extent, similar to their persecutors who had nationstates. Thus, Jabotinsky invented the Betar youth movement that placed primary emphasis on strict behavior: cleanliness, politeness, respect for others, and chivalry.19 Betar members were also required to practice marching, and use firearms and violence when needed. Jabotinsky’s personal experience with violence emerged from his earliest days as a Zionist in Odessa around 1903, when he joined an armed Jewish self-defense unit.20 During World War I, he helped to establish the Jewish

14 Eliezer Schweid, The Attitude toward the State in Modern Jewish Thought before Zionism, in: Daniel J. Elazar (ed.), Kinship and Consent. The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, London 1981, 127–147. 15 See Carl Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen, Tübingen 1914. 16 This is the viewpoint especially of Raphaella Bilski Ben-Hur, Every Individual, a King. The Social and Political Thought of Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, Washington, D. C., 1993. 17 Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right. From Odessa to Hebron, New York 2015, 191. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris 1979, 22. 19 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Die Idee des Betar. Ein Umriß betarischer Weltanschauung, transl. from the Yiddish into German by I. Goldstein, Lyck 1935, 15. 20 Shlomo Gepstein, Ze’ev Z’abotinsky. Ha-yav, milhamto, hesegav [Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His Life, War, Accomplishment], Tel Aviv 1941, 22.

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Legion that fought under the British aegis. In 1920, he organized a Jewish militia in Palestine that fought to protect Jerusalem during the Arab riot of that year.21 In the 1930s, Jabotinsky advised European Jews to learn to use a firearm.22 During the Arab uprising of 1936 to 1939, he was ambivalent toward political terror and more supportive of havlaga (self-restraint).23 It is difficult to generalize from these different contexts. In Odessa the goal was to protect Jews from a drunken mob, although such action was prohibited by the Tsarist government. In World War I, the goal was to support the British with a view to their ultimately victory in the war, which in turn would give Jews an advantageous position in the post-war peace settlement and the possible creation of a Jewish Palestine. In Palestine the goal was to oppose Arab aggression with a Jewish armed force, which in Jabotinsky’s view would strengthen Zionism’s political position. Jabotinsky’s most significant pronouncements about violence are contained in two articles from 1923, About an Iron Wall. Arabs and Us and The Ethics of an Iron Wall.24 When About an Iron Wall appeared, Jabotinsky was in Paris. He had become well known thanks to a worldwide press campaign that both championed his role during the riots of 1920 and criticized the long prison term to which Britain had sentenced him. Released after three months, Jabotinsky came to America as a representative of Keren ha-Yesod, the Zionist fund. Afterwards he served as a member of the Zionist Executive, but left due to disagreements. In 1924 he took control of the resurrected Zionist newspaper in Russian, Rassvet (Dawn), which would serve as the central press organ of the Zionist Revisionists, the new political party that Jabotinsky established in 1925. The political situation in Palestine in the early 1920s can be characterized as a shift of Britain in the direction of the Palestinian Arabs. Now the mandatory power, Great Britain, had promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to work toward the creation of a national home for Jews in Palestine. Subsequently, Britain scaled back its commitment for a variety of reasons.

21 Joseph B. Schechtman, The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky, 2 vols., here vol 1: Rebel and Statesman. The Early Years, Silver Spring, Md., 1956, 320–342. 22 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Oifn pripetchek [On the Hearth], in: Haynt [Today], 16 October 1931, 9 f. 23 Shmuel Dothan, Pulmos ha-halukah bi-tekufat ha-mandat [The Polemic over Partition during the Mandate], Jerusalem 1979, 131. 24 Vladimir Jabotinsky, O zheleznoi stene. My i araby [On the Iron Wall. The Arabs and Us] in: Rassvet [Dawn], vol. 19, no. 42/43, 4 November 1923, 1–3; idem, Etika zheleznoi steny [Ethics of the Iron Wall], in: Rassvet, vol. 19, no. 44/45, 11 November 1923, 2–4. My quotations come from idem, O zheleznoi stene. In Rechi, stat’i, vospominaniia [On the Iron Wall. Speeches, Articles, Memoirs], Minsk 2004. All translations by Brian Horowitz except where explicitly noted.

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In its first White Paper published in 1922, the British government outlined its plan to limit Jewish immigration. The first High Commissioner, Herbert Louis Samuel, attempted to win the support of Arabs locally and in the Middle East generally through plans to affirm in law the Palestinian Arabs’ majority status in the country.25 Jabotinsky wrote his Iron Wall essays in this context. His first and main point was to advocate that Britain should pursue a policy devoted exclusively to Zionist immigration in Palestine. Secondly, Britain must deliver this message in a manner that would compel Arabs to see no other option. Jabotinsky wrote: “Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say ‘no’ and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.”26

Jabotinsky was aware that many people would object to this militaristic version of Zionism. Harmful consequences could ensue if Zionism were viewed as immoral. To the claim that his assertions were heartless and unethical, he had a ready answer: Jews had a greater right to Palestine because they were homeless.27 In The Ethics of an Iron Wall he wrote: “There are 38 million Arabs. They occupy Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, Egypt, Syria, Arabia and Iraq, a space (not counting the deserts) as big as half of Europe. On average there are 16 Arabs for every English square mile on this huge territory. For comparison it is useful to remember that in Sicily there are 352 individuals for every square mile, and in England 669. It is even more useful to remember that Palestine consists of approximately one of two-hundredths of this territory. But when homeless Jewry asks for Palestine, it turns out to be ‘immoral’ because the locals find it uncomfortable.”28

According to Jabotinsky, it was pointless to argue that the two sides don’t understand each other or that viewpoints have not been clearly presented. In fact, each side was painfully clear about the other’s motives and goals. Contemporary Jewish leaders such as Chaim Weizmann attempted to pursue a

25 Rory Miller, Introduction, in: idem (ed.), Britain, Palestine and Empire. The Mandate Years, Burlington, Vt., 2010, 1–14, here 4 f. 26 Jabotinsky, O zheleznoi stene. My i araby, 267. Translation cit. from (1 August 2016). 27 Idem, Etika zheleznoi steny, 273. 28 Ibid.

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path of obfuscation by claiming miscommunication. Jabotinsky asserted that the main issue – open emigration for Jews with the goal of a Jewish majority in Palestine – revealed the absence of any difference between the “carnivores” and “vegetarians,” militarists or pacifists.29 Actually, Weizmann, among others, would have accepted a Jewish minority status. Jabotinsky insisted that he respected Arab intelligence more than his colleagues, claiming that it was useless to lie about Zionist goals since Arabs understood what was at stake. Lying would not work in any case; no native would be fooled. Only honesty was moral because, by giving fair warning of what was to come, Jews could minimize the suffering that would surely occur. “We should have answered this question before we took the first shekel. And we did answer it positively. If Zionism is moral, i. e. legitimate, then justice should be fulfilled independent of anyone’s agreement or disagreement. And if A, B or C want to interfere by means of force in justice’s fulfillment because they find it profitable, then we can interfere with them again with force. This is ethics, there is no other ethics to speak of.”30

Although the articles concern violence, politics was also a central focus. The articles conveyed to his supporters Jabotinsky’s plans for an expansive Jewish Yishuv that was prosperous, populous, and well defended. The articles were also addressed to Chaim Weizmann, leftist Zionists, the British government, and American Jews. His proposal for an “iron wall” against the Palestinian Arabs was meant first and foremost as a rebuttal of Winston Churchill’s White Paper of 1922 that limited Jewish immigration. Jabotinsky also criticized the British creation of a Hashemite kingdom in Transjordan in 1921, on territory that he had viewed as patrimony for Jewish settlement. Despite irritation with the government, Jabotinsky appealed to the morality of the British people. Although the British government might abandon its commitment temporarily, the British people should remember Jewish suffering that justified an iron wall. The articles mocked Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, whom Jabotinsky accused of cowardice and undue caution. His provocative declarations attempted to force the articulation of ultimate goals, in contrast to Weizmann who attempted to present Zionism as a peaceful ideology. In writing the articles, Jabotinsky was aware that immigration had stalled. Despite the British acquisition of the Mandate in 1920, fewer Jews had arrived than anticipated. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1923 was

29 Idem, O zheleznoi stene. My i araby, 267 f. 30 Ibid., 268. Jabotinsky expressed this same argument in 1937 at his appearance in London before the Royal (so-called) Peel Commission.

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16 or 17 percent, amounting to approximately 160,000. Jabotinsky was confronted with the possibility that either Zionism was not the solution to the Jewish problem or barriers existed to Jewish emigration. Jabotinsky feared that security concerns were scaring off immigrants. A strong statement in support of defense was obligatory in order to neutralize the Arab threat that arose in 1920 and 1921 following the demobilization of the World War I Jewish Legion in 1918. Jabotinsky urged the reconstitution of a Jewish legion with a permanent presence in Palestine. Such an army would consist of members of the Yishuv who would assume the financial burden of defense. He expressed certainty that Jewish armed units would liquidate any physical threat from Palestine’s Arabs. However, the Arabs themselves were not addressed in this statement. They were given a fait accompli. The Iron Wall essays show that Jabotinsky did not conceive of violence as a value for its own sake. It formed part of a larger political strategy as a deterrent against a countervailing force, in this case Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and majority status. According to Jabotinsky, the goal of deterrence worked best with a public display of force, a regular army that was legal, in contrast to an underground militia that was untrained and in danger of arrest.31 The articles also reflect his realization of the weakness of the Yishuv which could succeed only in collaboration with a world power such as England. In his declarations he featured the rhetoric of violence, particularly in claims that Britain should use an iron wall to stop Arab resistance. Critics have noted that Jabotinsky’s pronouncements are largely prescriptive and could even be characterized as unrealistic or utopian.32 However, he intended to gain political popularity by rejecting a gradualist approach and presenting his ultimate vision, that of a majority Jewish Palestine protected by armed force. With regard to the composition of Zionist Revisionism in the 1920s, adherents were primarily Russian émigrés in Europe, Jewish agricultural workers in Palestine (especially from Middle Eastern countries), and young radicals in Riga, Vienna, Harbin (China), and elsewhere.33 This ragtag membership was generally subservient to the Revisionist leadership and to Jabotinsky personally.

31 Idem, Was Wollen die Zionisten-Revisionisten, [Paris] 1926, 16–18. 32 A good example is Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948. A Study of Ideology, Oxford 1987, 61. 33 Joseph B. Schechtman/Yehuda Benari, History of the Revisionist Movement, vol. 1.: 1925–1930, Tel Aviv 1970, 79–82.

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Revisionists employed forms of so-called low-level violence, such as fist fights between agricultural workers with Revisionist sympathies and supporters of the Histadrut, the trade union that was originally founded by Jewish workers in Haifa and became associated later with the Zionist labor movement.34 In 1929, Revisionists blew the shofar at the Western Wall, although the British government had warned against this. In 1929, Abba Achimeir disrupted a lecture at the Hebrew University with a smoke bomb, and later another Revisionist took down the German flag at the German Consulate in Jerusalem.35 Radicalism grew in intensity among some Zionist Revisionists in the late 1920s. When Jabotinsky became the editor of Doar Hayom (The Daily Mail) in 1929, he adopted a message closer to the radical right of Europe and supported the view that the Zionists were entitled to the territory on both sides of the Jordan River. The newspaper featured extremist statements by Jabotinsky himself and younger writers, such as Achimeir, Greenberg, and Yievin. These three admired Jabotinsky, but rejected much of his political program, such as internationalism, the alliance with Britain, and the appeal to universal morality. Although they agreed with him about the need for the harsh treatment of Arabs, they had a different idea of the leader. They had little respect for democracy and advocated a strong leader, such as Jabotinsky himself. In an article from 1930, entitled Letter to Zionist Youth, Achimeir wrote: “Zionism is a goal for which every means is kosher for its attainment […]. It is proper for us to fight with envy and hate. […] Each and every one of us must present the question as one presents the conquest of Israeli advance on both sides of the Jordan River: are you for us or in opposition.”36

In another article he was more explicit about his conception of power. “A creative politics does not wait [for power], but fights. We do not give at the time when we want to give, but fight at the hour when there is the strength to take [it]. We have to nurture in our youth the ‘will to power,’ to use Nietzsche’s expression.”37 Jabotinsky was influenced by his young colleagues’ conception of violence as aesthetic, cleansing, and messianic. In contrast to his earlier perspective on military training that emphasized pageantry, marching, and uni34 Anita Shapira, Ha-ma’avak ha-nikhzav. ’Avodah ’ivrit, 1929–1939 [The Struggle of Disappointment. Hebrew Labor, 1929–1939], Tel Aviv 1977, 197 f. 35 Yonathan Shapiro, The Road to Power. Herut Party in Israel, Albany, N. Y., 1991, 46. 36 Abba Achimeir, Michtav le-noar yehudi [Letter to the Jewish Youth], in: Doar Hayom [The Daily Mail], 21 October 1931, 1. 37 Idem, Betar ba-tfisat olam [Betar on the Edge of the World], in: Ha-Tsiyonut ha-mehapkhanit [Revolutionary Zionism], Tel Aviv 1968, 21 (first publ. 1928).

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forms, he now valorized conspiratorial armed resistance. In his article On Adventurism (1932) he writes: “The essence of the argument is as follows: isn’t it time to reexamine all of Betar’s methods, and perhaps even Revisionism’s? These methods emerged during the years when we believed in quickly attaining radical changes in the political conditions of the Palestinian building-up through peaceful means. But that faith has disappeared. Herzlian Zionism has been pushed almost entirely underground, and thus the methods have to be different. Now one must concentrate on active political protest; the youth especially should go their way; the former ideas of Betar self-education have lost their meaning and have even become a total waste of time. […] ‘Sans-culottes’ make history; Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler succeeded thanks to ‘sans-culottism’; and we should cultivate this spirit ourselves (of course for a different goal).”38

Studies of Jabotinsky in the 1930s portray his reacting to changes within the Revisionist camp.39 Jabotinsky was ambivalent about Achimeir and his group, the Brit ha-Biryonim who he feared wanted to assume control. Desiring Achimeir’s support, he also worried about losing full control over Revisionism. In 1933 at the annual conference of Zionist Revisionism in Prague, the executive committee, which consisted of Jabotinsky’s old friends and veterans, tried to remove him as leader. In response Jabotinsky dissolved the executive committee and took over exclusive power in the organization. A few months later he arranged a referendum on this action and gained 90 percent support.40 It could be argued that this unilateral action was inspired by the aggressive mentality of Brit ha-Biryonim. Much the same could be said of Jabotinsky’s leaving the World Zionist Congress in 1934 and establishing his New Zionist Organization (NZO) in 1935. In his opponents’ eyes Jabotinsky appeared to be without scruples and conscience. His image was hardly improved by the Arlosorov Affair in 1933, in which he defended Abraham Stavsky, the Revisionist convicted of Hayim Arlosorov’s murder. Arlosorov, a rising star in the Labor movement, was murdered in May 1933 on the Mediterranian shores in Jaffo, south of Tel Aviv. The British police and much of the public believed that he had been assassinated for political reasons by a Revisionist.41 It should be noted that Jabotinsky assumed Stavsky’s defense with hesitation and only as a last resort. He maintained Stavsky’s innocence on the grounds of weak evidence and he drew attention to inconsistencies in the 38 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Smysl “avantiurizma” [On Adventurism], in: Rassvet, 24 July 1932, 4. 39 Jan Zouplna, Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Split within the Revisionist Union. From the Boulogne Agreement to the Katowice Putsch, 1931–33, in: Journal of Israeli History 24 (2005), no. 1, 35–63, here 36. 40 Shapiro, The Road to Power, 23. 41 Shabtai Tevet, Retsach Arlosorov [Arlosorov’s Murder], Jerusalem/Tel Aviv 1982.

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British legal case. In support he enlisted the Yishuv’s head rabbi, Rav Kook, and raised additional money for Stavsky’s defense. Furthermore, he rejected the idea that a Zionist would kill another Jew for political gain. Indeed, Jabotinsky felt personal responsibility and wished to counter the accusation of Revisionist collusion in the assassination of fellow Jews. The efforts were crowned with success when Stavsky was released by an appeals court. While Jabotinsky wished to keep his hold on power, there were principles that he considered sacrosanct, such as his opposition to political assassination. Samuel Katz, a close confidant, consulted Jabotinsky about the wisdom of assassinating the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. Katz wrote: “Jabotinsky says no. ‘Would you like to see the Arabs bump off Weizmann or Shertok?’ This argument did not impress me. If the Arabs could have assassinated Jewish leaders they would have done so. Jabotinsky was no doubt swayed by his strong opposition to personal terror.”42

Jabotinsky’s principles were challenged during the Arab uprising of 1936 to 1939. Between the early 1930s and 1936, he had played a role in the creation of Etzel, also known as the Irgun, an underground militia that was intended to provide support for Revisionism. However, Etzel’s leaders and rank-andfile soldiers often acted independently of Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky’s relationship to Etzel was characterized by his lack of knowledge of their specific actions in Europe to facilitate illegal immigration to Palestine. Although Jabotinsky made an agreement with the military leadership of Mapai, Eliyahu Golomb, to respect the strategy of havlaga, many of his members rejected this concept and sought revenge for Arab terror.43 Jabotinsky, however, did not support Jewish terror and saw no political value in, as he remarked, the killing of an Arab on a donkey.44 However, his position shifted with the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by the British. He now acknowledged that British perfidy had created a situation in which Zionist selfdefense even against Britain was required. After Shlomo Ben-Yosef’s hanging in 1938, Jabotinsky began to speak about Britain’s return of the Mandate to the League of Nations and its assumption by another power.45 42 Samuel Katz, Days of Fire, Garden City, N. Y., 1968, 31. Katz also wrote: “I have similar feelings on the subject, but the Mufti was a glaring exception. Looking back now on the Mufti’s later aid to Hitler in planning the extermination of the Jews of Europe, I am all the more sorry I did not accept the proposal at once instead of asking Jabotinsky.” 43 Eliyahu Golomb, Hevyon ’oz [A Strong Potential], 2 vols., Tel Aviv 1950–1953, here vol. 2: Hotsa’at sefarim ’Ayanot [“Spring,” Publisher], Tel Aviv 1953, 91. Shmuel Dothan, A Land in the Balance. The Struggle for Palestine, 1919–1948, New York 1996, 263. 44 Ibid. 45 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission, House of Lords. London, February 11th, 1937, by M. V. Jabotinsky, on Behalf of the New Zionist Organization, London 1937, 20.

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As the actions by Etzel members during the Arab uprising show, Jabotinsky no longer controlled his own movement, although he still was involved in choosing the leaders of Etzel, Betar and Sohar (the Revisionist Party).46 There were varying approaches to the use of violence among these individuals, yet those who endorsed terror against Arabs claimed to be influenced by Jabotinsky. Ironically, Jabotinsky’s pronouncements on violence inspired radicals, although he himself proclaimed a different code of ethics.47 Jabotinsky’s rocky relationship with his followers is evident in his confrontation with Menachem Begin in 1938 at the Third International Conference of Betar in Warsaw. Jabotinsky dismissed Begin’s appeal for an armed uprising in Palestine, and called Begin “a squeaky door,” i. e. someone who makes noise but produces nothing of consequence.48 Furthermore, with Hitler’s growing power, Jabotinsky felt there was no option apart from siding with Britain, despite Britain’s “betrayal” of Zionism.49 In the years before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky argued that the use of force needed moral grounding. Both in his testimony before the Peel Commission and subsequently in his book The War and the Jews, published posthumously in 1942, he reiterated his desire for collaboration between the Zionist movement and Britain. In the early 1930s he had favored the idea of Palestine as a Seventh Dominion of the British Empire.50 Yet his love for Britain was not unconditional and, as noted, he maintained that if Britain could not satisfy Zionism’s legitimate demands, the Mandate should be returned to the League of Nations. In addition to his goal for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, he posed new demands for mass immigration (the so-called Nordau solution): one million Jews should immigrate immediately and ten million altogether over ten years.51 In the light of his moderation toward the end of his life, one might reflect on political conditions in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s that

46 Joseph Heller, Ze’ev Z’botinski ve she’elat ha-havlaga, 1936–1939. Hashkafat olam bemivhan ha-matsi’ut [Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Question of Self-Restraint, 1936–1939. Theory and Practice], in: Shmuel Almog (ed.), Temurot ba-historya ha-yehudit ha-hadasa. Kovets ma’amarim shai li-Shmuel Ettinger [Transition and Change in Modern Jewish History. Essays Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger], Jerusalem 1987, 283–320, here 290 f. 47 Svetlana Natkovich looks at the different images that Jabotinsky used for his self-presentation. See idem, Ben ’anene zohar. Yetsirato shel Vladimir (Ze’ev) Z’abotinski ba-heksher ha-hevrati [Among Radiant Clouds. The Literature of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky in Its Social Context], Jerusalem 2015. 48 Colin Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism. Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right, London 2005, 208. 49 Vladimir Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, New York 1942, 106. 50 Josiah C. Wedgwood, The Seventh Dominion, London 1928, ix. 51 Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, 124.

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caused him to take a more radical direction and then led to his return to a skeptical attitude toward violence. In the interpretation presented here it is essential to consider the political context for Jabotinsky’s change of attitude during this period. He had imagined that the Revisionist Union would take control of the World Zionist Congress in the years after the party was formed. When that did not happen, he gravitated toward certain followers who were articulating a kind of quasi-fascism. These individuals, Abba Achimeir and others, took his bombastic rhetoric literally. Perhaps he assumed at this point that it would be possible to bypass gradualism, as Lenin had done and as Trotsky had predicted, namely that it was possible to achieve the condition of statehood immediately. But Arlosorov’s death had shown that such a historical leap might entail the killing of Jews by Jews and involve large-scale terrorism sans-culottes – without scruples. Jabotinsky rejected this possibility and in the face of Jewish terrorism in the Arab uprising, he reverted to his previous gradualism. In the year after Arlosorov’s death, it came to a series of agreements with Ben Gurion on mutual tolerance and cooperation. Although the Mapai members did not pass them, the attempt appears to show Jabotinsky’s preference for gradualism and peace among Zionists. His support for havlaga underscores this conclusion. What does this account of Jabotinsky’s attitude toward violence imply about Jewish politics? One might conclude that Zionist Revisionists were engaged more in rhetoric than effective action, more involved in fantasy than reality. In comparison with what the Labor Zionists achieved in Palestine, Revisionist Zionists do not have a stellar record of achievement. For example, although Jabotinsky called for a mass exodus, Revisionist Zionists were unable to save the mass of Jews of Eastern Europe through immigration (the Nordau Solution).52 In a similar way, Jabotinsky’s radical moments in the 1920s are of interest in showing that he too dreamed of a revolution without regret or scruples, yet he drew back. Jabotinsky’s inability to foresee the impending war led to a misperception of political realities.53 Although aware of British intransigence on immigration, he still hoped for concessions from the British side. Unfortunately, his reliance on diplomacy would come to be perceived as ineffectual in the eyes of Menachem Begin, Abraham Tehomi, and other Revisionists. For them it was clear in the aftermath of the Evian Conference that Britain did not assign priority to rescuing the Jewish people.54

52 Laurence Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience. The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government, 1936–1939, Boulder, Col., 1993, 211. 53 Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, 125. 54 Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism, 210.

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Perhaps Jabotinsky’s intolerance arose from the fear that Jews would not become the majority population in Palestine. In contrast to those who justified a Jewish Palestine on religious grounds, he explored historical motivations and political principles that served to justify Palestine as a Jewish homeland. His secular and democratic inclinations led him to insist on the will of the majority. Therefore, he supported any means that could produce a majority – especially increased immigration – that could be encouraged by a growth in economic productivity and the containment of Arab violence. One must still reconcile Jabotinsky’s provocative statements of 1923 with his self-definition as a liberal. How is it possible to adhere to a policy of national differences at the Helsingfors Conference of 1906, where Jabotinsky lent support for the equal rights of all nationalities, and subsequently adopt the “iron wall” position? Rather than ask why he abandoned liberalism, one should explore the sources of his subsequent intolerance. What in the political configuration of 1923 gave rise to his idea of the “iron wall,” a conception that entailed unlimited immigration, threats of violence toward Arabs, and claims to the territory of Transjordan?55 In the light of his contradictory pronouncements, it is striking that throughout his life Jabotinsky maintained that his intellectual origins lay in the Helsingfors Conference of 1906, where he articulated the protection of national rights, in particular minority rights, in a multi-national, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional empire.56 Helsingfors, however, does not explain the evolution of his concept of the “iron wall.” For that one must turn elsewhere, perhaps to his perception of British rule over India or Ireland with their minority of British subjects. The British were well known for their ability to rule other nations by dividing and conquering, co-opting elites, and the promotion of selective integration. Ironically, the history of the Russian Empire, which he knew well, should have served as a cautionary tale. Russia ruled over the other nations within its historical borders. The most significant example was Poland, whose complicated history of relations with Russia and rich cultural heritage led to entrenched resistance. Poland also had a large Jewish population. Although

55 Shavit writes: “The territorial integrity of Eretz Israel – particularly that of the part west of the Jordan – was one of the central doctrines of the Right, a historical and political a priori demand. The territorial issue became the focal point of the rightist conception, the cement that bound its members and from which it derived its historical strength. Territorial integrity became the absolute precondition of the realization of all other Zionist aspirations, and the fulfillment of any of the national ideals became conditional upon the fulfillment of the territorial goal.” Idem, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948, 158 (emphasis in original). 56 Brian Horowitz, Ze’ev Jabotinsky ve’iruyi shanat 1905 [Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 1905], in: Zion 80 (2015), no. 4, 503–520.

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Poland and Palestine differ in fundamental ways, there are interesting parallels to be drawn from their experience with imperial rule. Russia and Polish relations during the nineteenth century were characterized by violent clashes, including major insurrections in 1830 and 1863. Russian attempts to co-opt Polish elites had not led to pacification, only the crushing of opposition to Russian rule through brute force imposed a certain pacification.57 The imposition of force included the expropriation of the land of rebellious nobles, the exile of many thousands of Poles to Siberia, the suppression of the Polish language in state schools and government service, and the maintenance of a large garrison in the country. The Poles had no choice but to submit, yet they devised a non-confrontational approach known as “Positivism,” characterized by a rejection of revolution in favor of incremental change and economic development. This policy led to relative quiet until 1905 and bears certain resemblances to the “iron wall” approach. Under the Tsarist regime, Jabotinsky had been arrested and imprisoned on minor charges of possessing illegal literature and had spent five weeks in prison.58 He was also aware of the restrictions imposed on Jews in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg and had been arrested for not having a proper residence permit.59 Therefore it seems ironic that he, a victim of Tsarist oppression, was capable of conceiving a severe “iron wall.” Furthermore, he had not been silent about oppression in Russia. He had openly criticized the government in publications and expressed animosity against liberals and former allies such as Pyotr Struve, who professed equal rights for minorities, but gave voice to Russian national superiority at the time of the Cherikov Affair (1907–1909).60 At that time Struve had promoted the priority of Russian culture and saw full assimilation to Russian culture as the only step for the national minorities.61 Jabotinsky also openly criticized Maxim Vinaver, a Jewish member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, whom he mocked as a “traitor,” and he sympathized with Ukrainian national strivings and might have even been inclined to Polish independence if he hadn’t witnessed Polish chauvinism and anti-Semitism.62 57 Stephen D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War. Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire, 1880–1914, Boulder, Col., 1989, 22–24. 58 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “Story of My Life,” ed. by Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis, Detroit, Mich., 2016, 61 f. 59 Ibid., 88 f. 60 Jabotinsky wrote about Struve and other Russian liberals in: idem, Fel’etony [Feuilletons], Berlin 1922, 117, 120, 130, 156 f., 163, and elsewhere. 61 See Petr B. Struve, Intelligentsia i natsional’noe litso [Intelligentsia and the National Face], in: Slovo [Word], 10 March 1909, reprinted in: idem, “Patriotica.” Politika, kul’tura, religiia, sotsializm [“Patriotica.” Politics, Culture, Religion, Socialism], Moscow 1997, 206–208. 62 Idem, Medved’ iz Berlogi [The Bear Out of His Lair], in: idem, Fel’etony, 117–122, here

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But the inherent immorality of the “iron wall” was merely one aspect of the complex puzzle posed by the concept. Practical issues were also involved. History shows that the repression of populations by force alone is problematic.63 Indeed, a polemical article by fellow Revisionist Alexander M. Kulisher offered a strong rebuttal to Jabotinsky’s concept. In Kulisher’s view, the most effective method for colonizing a region is the voluntary assent of the natives. Kulisher explains: “Actually a successful colonization effort is only possible with the agreement and cooperation of a certain part of the local population. The most brilliant example is the colonization of America in the nineteenth century.” Although it should be noted that America subsequently rebelled against British authority. According to Kulisher, Britain won because it followed the way of assent. In contrast, the French followed Jabotinsky’s method. “If someone pursued that politics in America, it was the French in Canada. As a result they were defeated in the war with England, i. e. France had extensive military preparations, ‘garrisons,’ and ‘commanders’ […].”64 Jabotinsky could not have predicted Britain’s painful de-colonization after World War II, but he understood the outcome of the Polish scenario, which involved a successful uprising. In 1918, Josef Piłsudsky, Chief of State of the Second Polish Republic, found the appropriate moment to organize forces in pursuit of the country’s freedom. Subsequently a newly independent Poland attacked Russia in a conflagration that ended in a stalemate at a terrible cost to both countries. These examples, among others, revealed the difficulty inherent in a minority’s attempt to rule over others by force. In addition, the situation of Jews in the Polish-Russian conflict should also have caused concern for Jabotinsky. Each side had pursued Jewish support and yet neither had fulfilled its promises to the Jewish community. Both sides marginalized Jews who had no claim on the allegiance of the warring parties and suffered as a result. By analogy, Jabotinsky might have known that Britain, even with an anti-Arab policy, would be unlikely to keep its promises to the Jews. 120. See also idem, Pis’ma o natsional’nostiakh i oblastiakh. Evreistvo i ego nastroeniia [Letters on Nationalities and Regions. Jews and their Attitudes], in: Russkaja Mysl [Russian Thought], 1 January 1911, 95–114. Also parts of Israel Kleiner, From Nationalism to Universalism. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question, Edmonton/Toronto 2000. 63 Alexander Kulisher, Voennyi Sionizm [Military Zionism], in: Svershenie [Achievement] 1 (1925), 91–97. For more on Alexander Kulisher, see Mark Tolts/Anatoly Vishnevsky, Nezamechennyi vklad v teoriiu demograficheskogo perekhoda. K 125–letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Aleksandra Kulishera [An Unnoticed Contribution to Demographic Transition Theory. On the Occasion of the 125th Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Kulisher, in: Demograficheskoe obozrenie [Democraphic Review], vol. 2 (2015), no. 4, 6–34. 64 Ibid., 96.

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In the light of Jabotinsky’s experiences as a Russian subject, it is difficult to understand his attempt to rule over Palestinians. Indeed he portrayed the Jewish right to rule in moral terms while giving no legitimacy to Palestinian Arab political claims. Jabotinsky did not conceive of Arabs as noble savages or project onto them a negative stereotype as was the case with Orientalism as defined by Edward Said.65 He thought they were backward by Western standards, but he viewed the Palestinians as having the same political desires as Jews: prosperity, dignity, and political control. Nonetheless, his realization of their humanity did not extend in his view to their right to political sovereignty. He was ready to offer the Palestinians a package of individual and national rights adapted from the Helsingfors Conference. He hoped to persuade Arabs that their fate as a minority in a Jewish state would be better than that of the Jews in Eastern Europe, who had been objects of discrimination and victims of pogroms. However, he would appear to have been disingenuous on this score. Although Jabotinsky was an early right-wing politician in the Zionist camp, one cannot portray him as a political innovator. “Iron walls” were appearing in various empires, from South Africa and Ethiopia to India, Iran, and others. Jabotinsky wanted a policy that would attain and preserve Jewish power in Israel. There are indeed many walls in Israel, too. The question of whether he was right awaits a conclusive answer.

65 Edward Said, Orientalism, London 2003.

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Experience vs. Tradition: Reflections on the Origins of the Buber-Scholem Controversy In his 1977 memoir, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (From Berlin to Jerusalem), Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) relates how he first came to know Martin Buber (1878–1965).1 Scholem and Erich Brauer, a friend from the Zionist youth group Jung Juda, had published in 1915 a rather amateurish newspaper entitled Die Blauweiße Brille, aimed against the Blau-Weiss youth movement. They included a caricature of Buber by Brauer, a graphic artist who later became a noted ethnographer at the Hebrew University. Buber, like the Blau-Weiss, came in for the scorn of the two young Zionists for supporting the German war effort in lieu of radical dedication to the exclusive cause of Zionism. According to Scholem, Buber’s reaction to this attack was surprising. He invited the two to come to visit him (Scholem mistakenly places the date of this meeting in March 1916; in fact, it was in the summer of 1915). Buber was exceedingly gracious, according to Scholem, and “listened seriously to my speeches (while Brauer, who was very shy, kept silent).”2 Scholem then goes on to praise Buber’s journal Der Jude – “surely the best Jewish journal in the German language that ever existed” – for fighting for the Jews as Jews,3 adopting a name that was a provocation to both assimilationists and antisemites. Indeed, Scholem went on to publish several important early

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2

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Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Jugenderinnerungen, trans. from the Hebrew by Michael Brocke and Andrea Schatz, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, 76–78. On Scholem’s biography, see Noam Zadoff, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem und zurück. Gershom Scholem zwischen Israel und Deutschland, Göttingen 2016; Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem. An Intellectual Biography, Chicago, Ill., 2017; and David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah, Zionism and the Renewal of Judaism, New Haven, Conn. (forthcoming). On German-Jewish autobiography generally, see Markus Malo, Behauptete Subjektivität. Eine Skizze zur deutschsprachigen jüdischen Autobiographie im 20. Jahrhundert, Tübingen 2009, 159–176. Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, 77: “Er benahm sich großartig und ging auf meine Reden – Brauer, der ein sehr scheuer Mensch war, verhielt sich fast ganz schweigend – ernsthaft und nicht ohne anzudeuten, daß er seine Stellung ändern könnte, ein.” Translation by the author. Unless stated otherwise, all further quotes from German-language sources have been translated by the author. Ibid.: “sicher die beste jüdische Zeitschrift in deutscher Sprache, die überhaupt existiert hat, für die Emanzipation der Juden als Juden, als Volk unter den Völkern.” JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 33–47.

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essays in Der Jude. He concludes the passage on Buber by saying that even though he “later had great and far-reaching differences of opinion with Buber” and “I could not be blind to his weaknesses,” “I always greatly respected him – even revered him – as a person […]. He was totally undogmatic and had an open mind toward different opinions.” The “far-reaching differences of opinion” to which Scholem alludes are no secret. They found public expression in two articles, one released four years before Buber’s death in 1965 and the other two years later.4 The earlier article attacked Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism while the second expanded the scope of the earlier one to take up Buber’s conception of Judaism tout court. As is well-known in scholarly literature, Scholem criticized Buber’s understanding of Hasidism as ahistorical, based on legendary rather that sermonic sources and as a projection of Buber’s existentialist philosophy on a movement whose core theology was actually “acosmic” rather than, as Buber argued, affirming this world. The article on Buber’s conception of Judaism, although less overtly critical, nonetheless starts out by asserting Buber’s “almost total lack of influence […] in the Jewish world which contrasts strangely with his recognition among non-Jews.” The substance of this article, even if not stated explicitly, is designed to explain why.

Scholem’s Private Views of Buber The Buber-Scholem debate from the 1960s has received extensive attention in the scholarly literature.5 Rather than attempting to add to this heavy book4

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Scholem, Martin Buber’s Hasidism. A Critique, in: Commentary 32 (1961), 305–316, and idem, Martin Bubers Auffassung des Judentums, in: Eranos Jahrbuch 35 (1967), 9–55 (Engl.: On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. by Werner Dannhauser, New York 1976, 126–171). A few notable examples are Elisabeth Hamacher, Gershom Scholem und die Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte, Berlin/New York 1999, esp. 12–21; Moshe Idel, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism. A Critical Appraisal, in: Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.), Hasidim Reappraised, London 1996, 389–403; Klaus Samuel Davidowicz, Gershom Scholem und Martin Buber. Die Geschichte eines Missverständnisses, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1995; Laurence J. Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought. Alienation and the Quest for Meaning, New York 1989, 43–70, and idem, Modes of Discourse in Modern Judaism. The Buber-Scholem Debate Reconsidered, in: Soundings 71 (1988), no. 4, 657–681. For a recent discussion, see Rachel White, Recovering the Past, Renewing the Present. The Buber-Scholem Controversy over Hasidism Reinterpreted, in: Jewish Studies Quarterly 14 (2007), no. 4, 364–392, here 364 f., contains a completed bibliography to 2007. For more recent approaches that compares Buber’s and Scholem’s interpretations of Nietzsche, see David Ohana, The Myth of Zarathustra. Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and the Nationalisation of Jewish Myth, in: idem, Modernism and Zionism, New

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shelf, I want to refocus our attention on the complex personal dimension of this relationship, which may shed new light on the origins of Scholem’s later frontal assault on Buber, an assault that caused long-term damage to Buber’s reputation and from which, beyond the grave, he is still trying to recover. I think it is worthwhile to examine this personal dimension starting from the 1960s and then move backwards in time to Scholem’s youth. Several letters from the 1960s belie Scholem’s claim from 1977 that he had always had great respect for Buber as a person and as an intellectual. In 1963, he wrote to Theodor W. Adorno about Buber’s response to his critique of Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism: “Three weeks ago, in the Neue Züricher Zeitung, old Buber published a rejoinder – the lamentable response of a helpless blabberer – to my criticism of his Hasidic interpretations.”6 On 20 June 1965, he again wrote to Adorno, reporting on Buber’s funeral.7 Scholem had been asked to say a few words of eulogy. He admits to Adorno that he was reluctant to speak lest he utter “a bald-faced lie.” Fortunately, his wife Fania provided him with three “talking points” which allowed him to speak without revealing his real feelings about his deceased colleague. And three years after Buber’s death, Scholem wrote to George Lichtheim that the first time he saw a Jew with a picture of Jesus on the wall was when he visited Buber in the Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin in March 1916. The tone of the letter makes it clear that he had viewed it then – as he continued to view it – with a measure of contempt.8

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York 2012, 29–79, and Shaul Magid, For the Sake of a Jewish Revival: Gershom Scholem on Hasidism and Its Relationship to Martin Buber, in: Mirjam Zadoff/Noam Zadoff (eds.), “Scholar and Kabbalist.” The Life and Work of Gershom Scholem, Leiden (forthcoming). Gershom Scholem to Theodor W. Adorno, 22 April 1963, in: Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 8: Theodor W. Adorno/Gershom Scholem. Briefwechsel 1939– 1969, ed. by Asaf Angermann, Frankfurt a. M. 2015, 286: “Eine bejammernswerte Antwort eines hilflosen Schwätzers auf meine Kritik seiner chassidischen Deutungen hat der alte Buber vor drei Wochen in der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung veröffentlicht.” Gershom Scholem to Theodor W. Adorno, 20 June 1965, in: ibid, 354 f.: “Vielen Dank für Ihren Brief vom 10. Juni, den ich erhielt, als ich von der Beerdigung Bubers zurückkam, übrigens zugleich schon mit einer Einladung des Merkur in München, mich in einem Gedenkaufsatz über den Verstorbenen zu äußern. Ich habe das schleunigst abgelehnt und ihm gesagt, daß ich mich leider völlig außerstande sähe die Frage der geistigen Erscheinung Bubers und die Gründe für seinen ungeheuren Erfolg bei den Deutschen und sein völliges Versagen bei den Juden vor der deutschen Leserschaft zu behandeln. Unter uns gesagt, ist das Thema für dialektische Soziologen. Es fiel mir übrigens zu, an seinem Grabe zu sprechen, und ich habe meiner Frau Fania gesagt: nenne mir drei Punkte, über die ich sprechen kann, ohne direkt die Unwahrheit zu sagen. Daß mir das gelungen ist, rechne ich mir hoch an. Dank Fania!” Gershom Scholem to George Lichtheim, 28 January 1968, in: Gershom Scholem, Briefe, vol. 2: 1948–1970, ed. by Thomas Sparr, Munich 1995, 200.

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If we look for Scholem’s private views of Buber earlier, we find similar disdain. Writing to Hugo and Escha Bergmann in December 1947, after the intercommunal war between Jews and Arabs had already broken out, he expresses deep reservations about the advocacy of a binational state by Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, who jointly led the small Ihud group. He regards Magnes as honest, if naïve, but Buber he finds dishonestly cloaking himself “in a phony Elijah mantle.”9 However, Scholem’s attitude toward Buber was not solely negative. In 1933, Scholem got himself appointed to chair a committee to recommend an appointment in the philosophy of religion at the Hebrew University. He used this position to advocate in passionate terms for Buber’s appointment. He also wrote to Buber at the same time conveying his unstinting support for this appointment and for the prospect of bringing him to the Hebrew University. And when Buber finally decided to leave Germany in 1938, Scholem once again advocated for his appointment.10 These documents clearly provide confirmation of Scholem’s much later appreciation for Buber in his memoir.

Scholem’s Youthful Relationship to Buber How are we to evaluate this complex attitude toward Buber, at once contemptuous and admiring? This ambivalence had its origins in the years when Buber and Scholem were both together in Germany, starting even before the First World War. There can be little doubt that the young Scholem’s confrontation with Buber’s writings was a major factor in turning him both to Judaism and Zionism. In this, he was hardly unique. Buber was a highly charismatic figure for young German Jews disillusioned with the assimilationism of their parents, both in his writings and in his personal presence. Many years ago, I interviewed a family friend who had been a member of the Blau-Weiss Zionist youth movement in the late teens and early twenties. She reported that they all went to hear Buber speak, were highly moved – and didn’t understand a word that he said. Understandable or not, Buber had a major impact on German-speaking Jews, as evidenced from the reception of his Drei Reden über das Judentum 19 Gershom Scholem to Hugo and Escha Bergmann, 15 December 1947, in: Gershom Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1: 1914–1947, ed. by Itta Shedletzky, Munich 1994, 331: “im gefälschten Elias-Mantel” (original letter in Heb., see fn. 2, 457 f.). 10 Gershom Scholem to the Hebrew University Survey Committee, 27 December 1933, in: Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 254–256; Gershom Scholem to Martin Buber, 2 February 1934, in: Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. and with a preface by Grete Schaeder, vol. 2: 1918–1938, Heidelberg 1973. See also Gershom Scholem, Martin Bubers Berufung nach Jerusalem. Eine notwendige Klarstellung, in: Frankfurter Hefte 22 (1967), 229–231.

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(Three Addresses on Judaism, 1911). The addresses were particularly wellreceived in Prague where Buber delivered them. The Bar Kokhba Circle of young Zionists, including Scholem’s later mentor and colleague, Hugo Bergmann, invited Buber to speak to them between 1909 and 1911. So identified did the group become with Buber, that the young Scholem would later use the shorthand “Prague” in his diaries to refer to followers of Buber.11 For Scholem and many others, Buber preached a doctrine of religious renewal based on myth against rigidified rabbinism as well as bourgeois acculturation. Recovering an Urjudentum (primordial Jewishness) was very much tied up with Zionism as a movement of cultural renewal. Buber also promoted a “cult of Eastern Jewry,” especially through his Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 1906) and Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend of the Baal-Shem, 1908). Thus, through Buber, Hasidism very early on came to be seen by German readers as the repository of authentic Judaism.12 So, when Scholem credits Buber as one of the most important influences on him, we should take him at his word. Indeed, not only Buber’s recovery of myth and mysticism, but also his religious anarchism were views that Scholem adopted, albeit with significant modifications. In one of his letters to his brother Werner from September 1914, he counters Werner’s historical materialism by referring to what he had clearly read in Buber’s Hasidic tales: “You have perhaps once heard of a mystical sect among us Jews, the Hasidism in Galicia, who teach socialism sans phrase. They stand on the soil of unity and myth, which is life.” And quoting Buber’s Drei Reden über das Judentum: “Before the gates of Rome sits a leprous beggar and waits. He is the Messiah … And for whom does he wait? ‘For you’ …!”13 Buber thus pointed the way for Scholem to an authentic

11 See s. v. “Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba,” in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig hg. von Dan Diner, vol. 6, Stuttgart, 215, 259–262, here esp. 260, and Dimitry Shumsky, Ben Prag li-Yerushalayim. Tsiyonut Prag ṿe-ra’ayon ha-medinah ha-du-le’umit be-EretsYiśra’el [Between Prague and Jerusalem. The Idea of a Binational State in Palestine], Jerusalem 2010 (Germ.: Zweisprachigkeit und binationale Idee. Der Prager Zionismus 1900–1930, trans. by Dafna Mach, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2013). 12 See Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal. Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik, Chicago, Ill./London 2008; and on the neo-Hasidic literary movement of which Buber was the foremost expositor in German, see Nicham Ross, Masoret ahuvah ve-senu’ah. Zehut Yehudit modernit ve-ketiva neo-Hasidit be-fetah hame’ah ha-esrim [A Beloved-Despised Tradition. Modern Jewish Identity and Neo-Hasidic Writing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century], Beersheva [2010]. 13 Gershom Scholem to Werner Scholem, 7 September 1914, in: Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 6: “Du hast vielleicht einmal von einer mystischen Sekte bei uns Juden gehört, den Chassidim in Galizien, die den Sozialismus sans phrase lehrten (lehrten!). Sie standen auf dem

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Judaism that combined messianism and socialism without reducing the first to Orthodoxy and the second to Marxism. Werner, on the other hand, dismissed Buber as a “Kaffeehausanarchist” (coffee house anarchist).14 According to his memoir, Gershom Scholem came quickly to prefer Ahad Ha’am, the prophet of cultural Zionism, to Buber, probably because of the former’s commitment to Hebrew.15 In fact, Buber’s rather halting knowledge of modern Hebrew almost certainly loomed large in Scholem’s critical view of the older man, even though he never says so explicitly. For the young Scholem, learning Hebrew was the mark of the true Zionist. This switch in allegiance did not, however, come as fast or as completely as Scholem implies in his memoir. On the contrary, the entries in his diary from 1913 through 1915 are shot full of Buberian expressions like “Gotteserlebnis” (the experience of God): Scholem’s Buberian period would last even longer. In 1914, Scholem briefly joined the Berlin branch of the Orthodox Jewish organization Agudah Israel, that strongly opposed the secular ideology of Zionism, and was chosen to serve in a leadership capacity. But this romance with Orthodoxy was shortlived and blew up in a stormy meeting in May 1914 when Scholem and his comrades from Jung Juda resigned from the Agudah. In his diary, Gerhard notes: “A month later, I left Orthodoxy. It wasn’t an easy decision. It excited quite a stir. Now to switch over to Martin Buber with full sails, also to socialism.”16 He thus intended to substitute Buber for the God of Orthodoxy. This turn to Buber found public expression on 27 January 1915, when the Berlin branch of the Jung Juda Zionist youth movement held a discussion of Buber’s philosophy. Scholem gave a prefatory lecture, preserved in his published diaries.17 Unlike Ahad Ha’am, Buber preached revolution rather than gradualism. And unlike Herzl, who called for a return to Judaism (albeit not to Orthodoxy), Buber demanded “a renewal of Judaism.” By uncovering the sources of Hasidism, Buber had shown the young generation that Judaism

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Boden der Einheit und des Mythos, der das Leben ist. […] Vor den Toren Roms sitzt ein aussätziger Bettler und wartet, Es ist der Messias … Auf wen wartet er? ‘Auf dich’ …!” Gershom Scholem to Werner Scholem, 13 September 1914, in: ibid., 11. On the relationship between Werner and Gershom, see Mirjam Zadoff, Der rote Hiob. Das Leben des Werner Scholem, Munich 2014, 37–110 (childhood/familiy) as well as Ralf Hoffrogge, Werner Scholem. Eine politische Biographie (1895–1940), Konstanz 2014, 26–41 (childhood/family), 74–112 (debates on World War I). Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, 62 f. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher. Nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. by Karlfried Gründer and Friedrich Niewöhner, 2 vols., here vol. 1, 1913–1917, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, 24, Diary entry, n. d.: “Einen Monat später bin ich von der Orthodoxie weggegangen. Es ist mir nicht leicht gefallen. Großes Aufsehen erregt. Zu Martin Buber mit vollen Segeln, auch zum Sozialismus übergegangen.” Ibid., 111 f., Diary entry, 27 January 1915.

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possessed the same forces of myth and mysticism that the renewal of Judaism required. Against the rationalism of the West, Buber had called for the Jews to align themselves with “the creative peoples of the Orient.” Later that spring, he notes in his diary “I’m back in the mood for Buber. I’m in a deep Buberian spirit” and conceives of writing him a long letter (although he evidently did not do so).18 A week later, the long letter had turned into a plan for a whole book on Buber, although he concedes ignorance about Buber’s biography. It is Buber, he now says, who has come to awaken the somnolent Zionists who only felt themselves united by historical memory and “the demonic power of racial instinct.”19 In their place, Buber found beauty and spiritual renewal in the despised Jews of the East, in Hasidism. He conveyed this truth “not only as he invented it, but as he found it in himself,”20 an existential stance that he would later turn against Buber. Gerhard’s comrades in Jung Juda soon made fun of him as “Buberianer” (Scholem the Buberian). In angry response, he came to see them as abandoning the great spiritual search to which he was devoted and settling instead for a kind of quotidian rationality: “So wondered the wounded youth and as he also recognized their soullessness, he set forth on his own way to Zion.”21 His own way led through Buber, but did not end with him. Buber may have proclaimed Jewish renewal, but he was not himself the redeemer: “He only wanted to prepare the way for one greater who would come after him.” Who was this? He answers in the third person: “The young man […] believed deeply that the soul of Judah wandered among the nations and in the Holy Land, awaiting the one presumptuous enough to free it from banishment and from the separation from its national body. And he knew in his depths that he was the Chosen One […]. […] And the dreamer whose name also signifies that he is the Expected One [is] Scholem, the Perfect One [a word play between Scholem and shalem, perfect, whole]. It is he who must equip himself for his work and begin forcefully to forge the weapons of knowledge.”22 18 Ibid., 103, Diary entry, 8 May 1915: “Zum ersten Mal seit langer Zeit wieder Buber-Stimmung, tiefere Buber-Stimmung empfunden. Plan gespielt, an Buber langen Brief zu schreiben. Aber was soll daraus werden?” 19 Ibid., 118, Diary entry, 22 May 1915: “dämonische Gewalt des Rasseninstinkts”. 20 Ibid., 119: “[und er schrieb diesen Mythos auf,] nicht nur, wie er ihn erfand, nein, wie er ihn in sich selber fand.” 21 Ibid., 117: “Da wunderte sich der verwundete Junge sehr, und als er die Seelenlosigkeit auch dieser erkannte, ging er weg, seinen eigenen Weg zu gehen nach Zion”. 22 Ibid., 120 f.: “Der junge Mensch […] hatte einen tiefen Glauben, daß die Seele Judas herumirre bei den Völkern und im heiligen Lande und auf den warte, der sich vermessen würde, sie zu befreien aus der Verbannung und Trennung von ihrem Volkskörper. Und er wußte tief, daß er der Auserwählte war […]. […] Und der Träumer – den sein Name schon als den Erwarteten kennzeichnete: Scholem, der Vollkommene – rüstete sich für sein Werk und begann gewaltig zu schmieden an den Waffen des Wissens.” On Scholem’s messianic “episode,” see Michael Brenner, From Self-Declared Messiah to Scholar of

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Gerhard’s voracious reading and bibliophilia now seemed to be the necessary for tools for his messianic vocation. Scholem’s messianic mania was therefore wrapped up in his relationship with Buber, which was now entering a crisis. On 22 May 1915, the same day as this diary entry, he penned the following poem about Buber: Martin Buber, who found the expression For the deepest longing of the millions Of our brothers, who live in darkness Our Buber has turned away. On the loud paths of history You have betrayed those who crowned you; In the cries of war and heroic deeds You have suddenly seen other visions. The prophet of Old-New Land lends his word to the war Bows to the land which we have left, Goes with those, whom Jung-Juda hates One road, one way to “Victory.”23

Buber’s support for the war was thus the proximate cause of Scholem’s great disillusionment with the older man and also the reason for demoting him from Messiah to mere herald, John the Baptist to Scholem’s Jesus of Nazareth. As early as December 1914, Buber had delivered a Chanukah address hailing the war as an experience of mystical community. Scholem had evidently not been aware of this speech, since a month later he hailed Buber before his Jung Juda group. But in February 1915, he wrote a letter to the Jüdische Rundschau, signed by over a dozen of his comrades (including his brother Werner), protesting an article by Heinrich Margulies endorsing the war in Zionist terms. This letter, which was never published, got Scholem suspended from school.24 It seems likely that it was his discovery of Margulies’ association with Buber that began to turn him against his erstwhile hero.

Jewish Mysticism. The Recently Published Diaries Present Young Gerhard Scholem in a New Light, in: Jewish Social Studies 3 (1996), no. 1, 177–182. 23 Ibid, 121 f.: “Martin Buber, der den Ausdruck fand / Für die tiefste Sehnsucht der Millionen / Unserer Brüder, die im Dunkel wohnen, / Unser Buber hat sich weggewandt. // Auf den lauten Wegen der Geschichte / Hast du die, die dich gekrönt, verraten; / Im Geschrei der Kriegs- und Heldentaten / Schaust du plötzlich andere Gesichte. // Der Prophet Altneulands leiht sein Wort dem Kriege, / Beugt dem Lande sich, das wir verlassen, / Geht mit denen, die Jung-Juda hassen, / Eine Straße, einen Weg zum ‘Siege’.” 24 Ibid., 89 f. Margulies, however, was no less a committed Zionist than Scholem: He, too, emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s and rose to become a director of Bank Leumi. For more on Margulies, see Vera Regine Röhl, “Es gibt kein Himmelreich auf Erden.” Heinrich Margulies – ein säkularer Zionist, Würzburg 2014.

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From Buber’s Disciple to Buber’s Opponent Scholem’s antipathy to Buber’s position on the war soon developed into a more generalized, if not always coherent, philosophical stance against Buber’s Erlebnismystik (mysticism of experience). It seems that Walter Benjamin, with whom he became friends in June 1915, was perhaps the crucial figure in turning him from a Hasid of Buber to a misnoged. Scholem himself says later that Benjamin was much more radically opposed to Buber than himself. Benjamin argued that Buber represented “das frauenhafte Denken” (feminine thinking), probably in reaction to Buber’s mysticism of experience.25 Benjamin also wrote a letter to Buber in July 1916 declining an invitation to contribute to Buber’s Der Jude. The letter is quite opaque but one thing is clear: Benjamin’s objection to Buber was not primarily political, although he took great exception to Buber’s support for the war, but rather revolved around philosophy of language. Benjamin articulated a kind of “linguistic magic” which receives fuller expression in his essay on divine language from the same year. It was in this context that Scholem and Erich Brauer published their caricature of Buber in the summer of 1915. But it is likely that his account of this meeting in his memoirs turned it into an altogether more polite conversation than it actually was. Given what we know about the young Gerhard, he was brash to the point of rudeness, talking incessantly and brooking no disagreement. Raphael Buber, Martin’s son, described as highly tempestuous one such meeting between the two from a later date. He saw a gangly young man storm into his father’s study and shout at the top of his lungs. When the unruly visitor marched out, the father had to restrain the son from assaulting his guest. “That man,” said Buber, “is named Gershom Scholem and he is destined to become a great scholar.”26 But Buber didn’t take this volcanic act lying down. For example, in 1916, Scholem submitted an article on the Jewish youth movements for publication in Buber’s new journal, Der Jude. When the two met in December, Buber criticized it severely as utterly negative and lacking in any positive proposals.27 Scholem was clearly taken aback and wrote petulantly in his diary that Buber refused to engage in a real dialogue with him. He accused

25 Ibid., 386–388, Diary entry, 23 August 1916. Scholem, Benjamin and Benjamin’s wife Dora all spoke with some evident contempt of Buber’s wife Paula’s “Goijentum.” See further Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin. Die Geschichte einer Freudschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1975, 14, 22, and 40 f., and Walter Benjamin’s letter to Martin Buber, July 1916, in: Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, 449 f. 26 Story related independently to the author by Michael Löwy and Grete Schaeder. 27 Scholem, Tagebücher, vol. 1, 457, Diary entry, 21 December 1916.

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Buber of being only able to speak “out of his system,” as if Buber had a monopoly on dogmatism. In the spring of 1916, Buber published an essay in the first issue of Der Jude entitled Die Losung (The Motto), which stated in even bolder terms the connection between his mysticism of experience and the war. Yet, as vehemently as Scholem railed against both the philosophy and politics of Buber’s position, he nevertheless saw Buber as a potentially sympathetic address or, perhaps, an adversary worth persuading. In a July 1916 meeting in Heppenheim (where Buber had moved earlier in the year), Scholem told Buber about the letter he had organized against Heinrich Margulies and how he was suspended from school for circulating it. Since Margulies’ article was shot through with Buberian expressions (what Scholem and others referred to as “Bubertät”), it is hard to fathom just what Scholem intended by highlighting for Buber his opposition to it. It was almost as if he felt a deep inner need to convert Buber to his own position. In the summer of 1916, Scholem wrote at times feverishly in his diary about Buber. These entries demonstrate Buber’s absolute centrality for the young Scholem trying to chart his own course toward both Judaism and Zionism. At the beginning of August 1916, he writes: “Astronomy is the teaching of the inner laws of Zionism. The Three Addresses on Judaism is not as Jewish as the Theoria motus corporum coelestium of Gauss, the builder of Zion. […] The Messiah will be an astronomer.”28

A few weeks later, we are told that Buber lacks mathematics and, consequently, he is not the prophet of the Messiah. Since Scholem himself was at that time studying mathematics – although not astronomy – it would appear that he was once again entertaining thoughts of himself as the chosen redeemer. By improbably turning the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss into a Zionist, he was evidently expressing repeating the wish of the previous year that his own academic studies might have redemptive meaning. In the fall of 1916, he wrote to his friend Edgar Blum that he had thought much about Buber in the previous summer and had concluded “that I must be and am fundamentally opposed to him.” His movement is a sham movement because its ideology is founded in Erlebnis (experience). Ahad Ha’am – the prophet of cultural Zionist – is truly Jewish and thus the only one who “stands in Zion.” Buber, he says, is spiritually in Heppenheim. His “danger-

28 Ibid., 347, Diary entry, 1 August 1916: “Die Astronomie ist die Lehre von den inneren Gesetzen des Zionismus. Die 3 Reden über das Judentum sind nicht so jüdisch als wie die Theoria motus corporum coelestium von Gauss, dem Erbauer Zions. Buber ist ein Mystiker, die allergrößte Mystik aber ist die Klarheit gewordene. […] Der Messias wird ein Astronom sein.”

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ous and pernicious way does not lead to Zion, but to Prague [that is, to the Buberian circle in Prague]”.29 Scholem’s attack on Buber took public form in a debate that ensued in Siegfried Lehmann’s Jüdisches Volksheim (Jewish Community Center), a kind of club for young Jews from Eastern Europe following socialist and Zionist ideas. Scholem attended a speech on Hasidism by Lehmann in September 1916 and engaged in a fiery debate with the speaker. Although we have no independent account of his behavior, we know what he was capable of from a wonderful portrait that Hans Jonas drew of Scholem in another controversial meeting some years later. Jonas describes Scholem waving his huge hands like a big bird, shouting and interrupting the speaker.30 At the Volksheim, Scholem made Lehmann a proxy for Buber. Lehmann’s talk, he says, was delivered in Buberdeutsch and was devoid of any actual Hasidic sources. Invoking a critique from 1910 by Aron Marcus (a German Jew who had moved to Poland becoming a Hasid), he held that Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism was a form of “aesthetic ecstasis,” whose goal was to make Hasidism salonfähig (socially acceptable). Lehmann – and thus Buber – privileged beauty over truth. Buber believed that Hasidism represented “subterranean” Judaism because he hated Judaism that was “above ground,” that is, the rabbinic tradition. For Scholem, both the subterranean and the “terrestrial” dimensions of Judaism were necessary. Deeply engaged for several years in the study of Talmud, Scholem was already groping toward an inclusive definition of Judaism in which myth and law, the irrational and the rational were all equal parts of the complex dialectic of tradition. Buber sought to detach Hasidism from this tradition and celebrate it as a movement of revolution against Judaism. In these thoughts, delivered orally at the Volksheim, written down in his diary, and in a long letter to Lehmann,31 the eighteen-year-old Scholem

29 Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 55, Gershom Scholem to Edgar Blum, 26 October 1916. Unbeknownst to Scholem, Blum, who was on the Eastern front, had been wounded before he wrote this letter and died soon after. 30 Hans Jonas, Memoirs, ed. and annot. by Christian Wiese, trans. by Krishna Winston, Waltham, Mass., 2008, 51. There is an indirect corroboration of the content of Scholem’s speech at the Volksheim. Kafka’s fiancée, Felice Bauer, was present and wrote to Kafka about it. Kafka took Scholem’s side, albeit it in his usual ironical fashion. Scholem only discovered these letters when they were published in the 1970s, see Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 350–353. 31 For Scholem’s position, see idem, Briefe, vol. 1, 43–52, the letters from 4 October and 9 October 1916. See also Tagebücher, vol. 1, 396–399, and Scholem’s letter to Hartmut Binder of 12 October 1980, in: idem, Briefe, vol. 1, n. 1, 35–352 recounting the controversy. It is ironic that Lehmann, far from inhabiting a purely mystical stance, went on to found the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Palestine and thus contributed greatly to the very Zionism that Scholem purported to advocate.

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already sketched out in nuce the main lines of attack that he would adopt against Buber in the 1960s. Buber’s approach to Hasidism was unhistorical not only because Buber distorted Hasidic texts to fit his philosophy, but equally because he detached Hasidism from the Kabbalistic and rabbinic tradition in which it was grounded. Buber’s view of Judaism was profoundly unhistorical because it was undialectical, based on immediate experience rather than in the historical unfolding of tradition. By 1917, Buber began to retreat from his Erlebnis support for the war and, as Paul Mendes-Flohr demonstrated,32 was already beginning to abandon the mysticism of experience for his dialogic philosophy. But this you wouldn’t learn by (even close) reading of Scholem’s diaries and letters. His vitriol continued to mount. In the summer of 1917, while in the psychiatric ward of the Allenstein military hospital under observation for possible discharge from the army, he wrote to Werner Kraft about Kraft’s declaration that he “hated” Buber.33 Scholem says that he shared Kraft’s “hatred,” calling Buber “demonic” and “anti-Jewish.” But he takes Kraft to task for rejecting Judaism because he cannot stand Buber. Buber does not represent Judaism, despite the pedestal on which many of their generation placed him. Scholem claims that his own immersion in Jewish texts has demonstrated to him how little Buber stood within the tradition. In other words, Buber endangers Jewish renewal because he is taken by many young acculturated German Jews as the embodiment of authentic Judaism. Once they came to reject him, they ended up rejecting Judaism tout court. Scholem makes it clear without saying so that if Kraft is looking for an embodiment of Judaism, it is in Scholem himself! In the fall of 1917, he writes: “In the last period – it is already quite a long time – I have been in continual unconditional enmity against Buber. I have a hundred, difficult objective and personal objections to him.” Buber is not a mystic but a mystical author: “Buber is a false teacher, he teaches the truth, but he teaches it falsely.”34 And, in another place: “The ‘spiritual’ is Martin Buber. I, however, am a Jew.”35 By November, his earlier plan from 1915 to write a biography of Buber had metamorphosed into its opposite, a plan to write a refutation of Buber’s whole corpus:

32 Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue. Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought, Detroit, Mich., 1989, chap. 5. 33 Scholem, Briefe, vol. 1, 94, Gershom Scholem to Werner Kraft, 11 August 1917. 34 Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher, here vol. 2: 1917–1923, Frankfurt a. M. 2000, 61–63, Diary entry, 21 October 1917: “Buber ist ein Irrlehrer, der die Wahrheit lehrt, aber falsch lehrt.” (63, italics in original). 35 Ibid., vol. 2, 213, Diary entry, n. d. [Winter 1917/1918]: “Dies ‘Geistige’ ist Martin Buber. Ich aber bin ein Jude.”

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“One must write a series of critiques of all of Buber’s books: from Rabbi Nachman to the most recent scandal [referring to Buber’ recently published Ereignisse und Begegnungen]. […] In some of these books the abyss, which has swallowed Buber up, finds expression or opens up.”36

For Scholem, the nexus between Judaism and Zionism was key: authentic Judaism could only be realized in Zion and Zion could only be redeemed by authentic Judaism. Buber betrayed both by his teaching of a mysticism of experience. Why exactly this was the case remains, however, ambiguous in Scholem’s writings of the time. Erlebnis, he says at one point, is antinomian, it belongs to the world of tohu or chaos. It would appear that Buber’s call to realize this Erlebnis in the present moment, rather than the utopian future, turned his mysticism into “the wasteland of the Ghetto”37 while authentic Judaism is realized in the realm of history. Scholem rejected Buber’s Zionism just as he rejected the Zionism of the Blau-Weiss youth movement, which took much of its inspiration from Buber: both could realize their aspirations in galut, the Jewish diaspora. Scholem also claims that Buber is not Jewish but rather modern. Scholem’s views of modernity are complex and cannot be fully explicated here.38 On the one hand, his revolt against the bourgeois assimilationism of the German Jews – including his father – constituted a rejection of the modern world as he knew it in early twentieth-century Berlin. Modernity, in his view, led directly to the Great War with its bellicose nationalism. Zionism meant a departure from this world to the East and therefore a revolt against Western modernity. So far, this position was no different from Buber’s. But the story does not end there. Scholem held that the East to which he aspired was not the Orient of the Arabs but something other. While mysticism had provided the motor force that propelled Jewish history, Zionism entered the realm of history by neutralizing its apocalyptic energies. Zionism must preserve a dialectic between the world of tradition and the world of modernity. Buber had cast his lot too much with the latter. In other places, for Scholem, the problem with Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism is that he has turned it into a modern movement or an inspiration for modern Jews. Buber may have appeared to renounce modernity, but he did so in terms that 36 Ibid., vol. 2, Diary entry, 11 November 1917, 77: “Man müßte eine Reihe von Kritiken über alle Bücher Bubers schreiben: vom Rabbi Nachman bis zur jüngsten Schande. […] Denn in irgend[einem] der Bücher muß sich dann der Abgrund äußern oder auftun, der Buber verschlungen hat.” 37 Ibid., vol. 1, 399: “Wüste des Ghettos”. 38 See David Biale, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), in: Jacques Picard et al. (eds.), Makers of Jewish Modernity. Thinkers, Artists, Leaders, and the World they Made, Princeton, N. J., 2016, 335–350; idem, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah and Counter-History, Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

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were ultimately modern. As Scholem came to reject Buber, he treated Buber’s mysticism as the other side of the bourgeois rationalism against which he rebelled. Judaism and Zionism were his answers to both. Scholem thus saw his role as a budding scholar of Judaism to demonstrate that there is an authentic Judaism which is neither that of the rationalists nor that of Buber. This authentic Judaism Scholem would ultimately identify with the Kabbalah, although not to the exclusion of other texts from the Jewish library. Where Buber fastened on only one part of the tradition – primarily Hasidism – Scholem claimed to encompass the whole tradition, all the books in the Jewish library from the halakhic to the mystical, from the philosophical to the mythic. Where Buber’s religious anarchism meant rejecting the authority of tradition, Scholem – who also called himself a religious anarchist – meant something different: rejection of the authority of Sinai but subordination to the whole tradition set in motion by that mythic event. However, at the same time that Scholem was carrying on these fierce polemics against Buber in the pages of his diary and in letters and conversations with his friends, he continued to correspond with Buber and to visit him on occasion. He informed Buber of his various studies of Jewish texts, including the Kabbalah and Hasidism. But these meetings, which he presents in highly idealized terms in his 1977 memoir, were, in fact, marked by great strife. For example, on 22 February 1918, he visited Buber and remarked in his diary: “[…] this should cover my need for Buber for some time.”39 Buber, he complains, was unable to have a serious conversation with him and he also refused to take responsibility for the Buberianer: “it was obvious that he had no idea what I wanted from him.”40 Thus, we have very early on the ambiguous picture of Scholem’s violent rejection of Buber, on the one hand, and his desire to receive Buber’s blessing, on the other. It thus becomes clear that all of the elements of the Scholem-Buber controversy were present during the years of the Great War. Far from just a political dispute over the war, Scholem framed his objections to Buber much more broadly into an argument over what constitutes authentic Judaism as well as the place of Zionism in Jewish renewal. While the details in the articles from the 1960s may have changed and the rhetoric toned down, the fundamental substance remained the same.

39 Scholem, Tagebücher, vol. 2, 137, Diary entry, 22 February 1918: “[…] und habe meinen Bedarf an Buber nun für einige Zeit wieder reichlich gedeckt.” 40 Ibid.: “[…] es war offenbar, daß er gar nicht wußte, was ich eigentlich von ihm wollte.”

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Why Did Scholem Return to Buber in the 1960s? Why, we may ask, did Scholem wait so long – until the end of Buber’s life – to publicize his critiques of Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism and conception of Judaism? One has the sense that Scholem was completing some unfinished business – both scholarly and psychological – in the two articles that framed Buber’s death in 1965. For Scholem, Buber was a lifelong foil, the embodiment of an approach to Jewish mysticism that Scholem had to conquer in order to rule. In fact, a feeling emerges from the letters over Buber’s appointment to the Hebrew University that Scholem relished the turning of the tables: he was now the senior academic and Buber the junior. He could now afford the generosity of praising Buber to the university authorities as the greatest expert in the world in the field of religious philosophy since he himself had become the leading authority on Jewish mysticism. Buber might teach comparative religion, but he, Scholem, would dominate the discipline of Judaica. Yet, for whatever reason, he was not content to leave his youthful Buber complex in the past. In his late adolescence, Scholem was a volcano of rebellion, turning his rage against anyone with whom he disagreed. And this rage as often as not found a target in older men, starting with his father and extending to Buber. By 1925, his father was dead. But Buber remained a kind of voice of reproach, the ghost of Scholem’s own earlier Erlebnis enthusiasm. Perhaps the essays from the 1960s represented a kind of return of the repressed, a desire to settle accounts with a figure who remained both mentor and antagonist, an ambivalence that he was never able to articulate toward his own father. In addition, Buber was enjoying a renaissance in the 1960s, particularly in Germany and the United States. If Scholem continued to see himself as the representative of authentic Judaism – and I very much suspect that he did – then the resurrection of Martin Buber required renewing the polemics of a half-century earlier. That Scholem would heap such fulsome praise on Martin Buber in his 1977 memoir only a decade after he trained his whole intellectual artillery on Buber’s lifework ought to give us pause. On some level, Scholem understood that without Buber, there would have been no Scholem. It might not be exaggerated to say that the intellectual support he could never win from his father, he sought from Buber. But this desire for approval from the older man simultaneously provoked stormy rebellion. These contradictory expressions bear witness to the role that Buber played throughout Scholem’s life, a figure with whom he continued to wrestle, even as he eclipsed his erstwhile rebbe as the greatest scholar of Jewish Studies in the twentieth century.

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Nationalism, Belonging, and Crisis: The Paths of Koppel S. Pinson and Hans Kohn Questions concerning the intersection of Jewish belonging and writing on nationalism have generated a significant body of scholarly literature, especially in recent years.1 Central to most of these studies is a focus on the ways in which several political theorists and scholars, disproportionately of Jewish origin, considered and responded to the contemporary and historical Jewish experience as they sought to reorient attitudes toward polities and nations during, and in the wake of, the immense destruction caused by two world wars and the annihilation of close to 6 million European Jews. As two pioneering scholars in the early stages of the historical study of nationalism in the United States, Koppel Shub Pinson (1904–1961)2 and Hans Kohn (1891–1971)3 represent two highly significant voices in the for1

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Among the many such significant works are: Simon Rabinovitch (ed.), Jews and Diaspora Nationalism. Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, Waltham, Mass., 2012; Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads not Taken. Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn, Bloomington, Ind., 2010; Arie M. Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin. The Journey of a Jewish Liberal, New York 2012; James Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism. Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America, in: AJS Review 34 (2010), no. 2, 289– 308; M. Benjamin Mollov, Power and Transcendence. Hans J. Morgenthau and the Jewish Experience, Lanham, Md., 2002. Little scholarly attention has been given to Koppel S. Pinson, the most notable exception is the excellent intellectual-biographical essay by Arndt Engelhardt, Koppel S. Pinson (1904–1961). Eine jüdische Intellektuellenbiografie in Amerika, in: Nicolas Berg et al. (eds.), Konstellationen. Über Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 65. Geburtstag, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2011, 81–101. There is now a significant and growing scholarly literature on Hans Kohn. First and foremost is the work of Adi Gordon, who has authored an incisive and exhaustive intellectual biography: idem, Toward Nationalism’s End. An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (forthcoming). See also idem, “Ein zo elah ahavah nikhzevet.” Prishat Hans Kohn mehatnu’a ha-ẓiyonit [“Nothing but a Disillusioned Love.” The Departure of Hans Kohn from the Zionist Movement], in: idem (ed.), “Brit Shalom” veha-ẓiyonut ha-du-le’umit. “Hashe’elah ha-arvit” ke-she’elah yehudit [“Brit Shalom” and Binational Zionism. “The Arab Question” as a Jewish Question], Jerusalem 2008, 67–92; idem, The Ideological Convert and the “Mythology of Coherence.” The Contradictory Hans Kohn and His Multiple Metamorphoses, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010), 273–293; idem, The Need for West. Hans Kohn and the North Atlantic Community, in: Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011), no. 1, 33–57. Some recent works include Noam Pianko, Did Kohn Believe in the “Kohn Dichotomy”? Reconsidering Kohn’s Journey from the Political Idea of Judaism to the Idea of Nationalism, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010), 295–311; Hagit Lavsky, Le’umiyut ben te’oriah le-praktikah. Hans Kohn veha-ẓiyonut JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 49–69.

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mation of nationalism studies as a field of academic inquiry, the relationship of European and American Jewish scholarship, and post-war historical and political debates. The intellectual paths of both thinkers demonstrate the immense impact that the rise of fascism, especially in its Nazi forms, had on early theorists of nationalism. Yet as two historians and political thinkers who were also intimately engaged in Jewish questions, their respective emphases on Jewish and universal perspectives began to diverge following the rise of Nazi totalitarianism and especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This reflected the overall diversity of opinion concerning human rights, national identity, and particular versus universal solutions to the desperate problems of Jewish survival in the central decades of the twentieth century. The goal of this study is twofold: first, to elucidate and contrast the paths of Kohn and Pinson in order to demonstrate the complexities of Jewish identity, global commitment, and political vision – even in the case of two scholars whose personal and professional lives were so intertwined. As we will see, while Pinson’s scholarly reputation was built on studies of nationalism and German history, Jewish scholarship, commitment, and activism became central to his life and work. For Hans Kohn, by contrast, Jewish commitments and concerns would move steadily from the center to the periphery of his scholarly and personal agendas. The second aim is a historiographical one: This study is designed to contribute to the all too meager literature on Koppel S. Pinson – a scholar and thinker whose life and work not only linked two of the most prominent early scholars of nationalism, but also stood at the nexus of the most important of twentieth-century Jewish institutions and American Jewish scholarship.

Formative Years and Influences Hans Kohn was born in Habsburg Prague in 1891 and brought up in a largely non-observant, acculturated, German-speaking Jewish family. Like those of many Central-European Jewish intellectuals of his generation, Kohn’s entrée [Nationalism between Theory and Practice. Hans Kohn and Zionism], in: Zion 67 (2002), no. 2, 189–212; Yfaat Weiss, Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism, in: Jewish Social Studies 11 (2004), no. 1, 93–117; Christian Wiese, The Janus Face of Nationalism. The Ambivalence of Zionist Identity in Robert Weltsch and Hans Kohn, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 51 (2006), 103–130; Lutz Fiedler, Habsburger Verlängerungen. Imperienkonzepte im Werk Hans Kohns, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-DubnowInstituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 477–508; Romy Langeheine, Von Prag nach New York. Hans Kohn. Eine intellektuelle Biografie, Göttingen 2014; Brian Smollett, The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Vision in the Life and Thought of Hans Kohn, in: idem/Christian Wiese (eds.), Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience. Essays in Honor of Robert M. Seltzer, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2014, 268–285.

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into Jewish life and thought was marked by rebellion against what he understood as the bourgeois malaise that characterized his parents’ generation, along with its empty Jewish formalities. Kohn became an ardent cultural Zionist in 1909; he was one of the many members of Prague’s Bar Kochba Zionist group who were inspired and transformed by the message of mystical upheaval and Jewish revival in Martin Buber’s Reden über das Judentum (delivered between 1909 and 1911) and the writings of the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927).4 Kohn would later recall in his memoir “Buber’s intellectual breadth preserved our Zionism from cultural narrowness and made our nationalism compatible with a broad humanitarian and cosmopolitan outlook.”5 Yet Kohn and his circle were not immune to the nationalistic fervor that marked the beginnings of World War I. He would enlist in the Austro-Hungarian army, though he was soon captured by Russian forces, spending five years as a prisoner of war in Central Asia and Siberia. In 1920, Kohn returned to Europe and resumed his involvement with the Zionist movement, becoming Director of Propaganda for the movement’s development arm, Keren Ha-Yesod. After some years in Paris and London as a journalist and historian of national movements in the Middle East, he emigrated to Palestine in 1925. There he was one of the principal founders of Brit Shalom, an education-centered organization devoted to Arab-Jewish rapprochement in the context of an ideal bi-national society in Palestine. The Brit Shalom circle, which included such leading scholars, public intellectuals, and political figures such as Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Robert Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann and Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), was short-lived and fractious, and as Hagit Lavsky has shown, emerged largely in response to the rise in influence of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s (1880–1940) Revisionist movement at that time.6 4

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Bar Kochba included several members who became intellectuals of note including Robert Weltsch (1891–1982), Shmuel Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975), and Max Brod (1884– 1968). For a broader study on the Prague’s Bar Kochba Zionist group, see Dimitry Shumsky, Between Prague and Jerusalem. Prague Zionism and the Idea of the Bi-National State in Palestine, Jerusalem 2010 (Germ.: Zweisprachigkeit und binationale Idee. Der Prager Zionismus 1900–1930, trans. from the Hebrew by Dafna Mach, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2013). Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution. My Encounters with History, New York 1964, 69. Though Kohn earned a Doctorate of Law from the Charles University of Prague, his major intellectual influences were outside the University. Much work has been done on Brit Shalom over the past two decades. For the only booklength study to date, see Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism. The Radical Circle in Brit Shalom 1925–1933, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2002. For an in-depth look at the relationship of Brit Shalom and the Revisionist movement, see Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe. The Distinctive Path of German Zionism, Detroit, Mich., 1996. See also, idem, German Zionists and the Emergence of Brit Shalom, in: Jehuda Reinharz/Anita Shapira (eds.), Essential Papers on Zionism, New York/London 1996.

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Kohn’s Zionist phase came to an end in 1929. His growing alienation from the movement as a whole and increasing pessimism concerning the goals of Brit Shalom led him to view the eight days of Arab riots, and especially the brutal response of the British and Zionists, as a point of no return.7 Having written widely on both Jewish and Arab nationalisms, he put forth a grim forecast for the future of the Zionist enterprise. Rejecting a movement that, he believed, could only be sustained by bayonets, he resigned from the Zionist organization, declaring to Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Berthold Feiwel (1875–1937) that “Zionism is not Judaism.”8 After four years of extensive travel as a journalist and teacher – between Jerusalem, Cairo, Zurich, and New York – he relocated to the United States where he was appointed as Professor of Modern History at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After 1948, he moved to New York City, teaching at City College until his retirement in 1961. It was in this American, post-Zionist phase that Kohn became a globally recognized intellectual, historian, and theorist of nationalism. Koppel Shub Pinson was also European-born, but was brought to the United States from Postawy, Lithuania (now in Belarus), a city near Vilna, when he was three years old. Pinson was raised in Philadelphia, where he would attend the University of Pennsylvania. An accomplished student, he was accepted into the doctoral program in History at Columbia University, where he studied under one of the “founding fathers” of the historical study of nationalism, Carlton J. H. Hayes (1882–1964).9 As in the case of Hans Kohn, Carlton Hayes’ formative years were in part defined by religious upheaval. As a university student he converted from the Baptist religion of his youth to Roman Catholicism, a faith that drove his mature social convictions and scholarly focus. As H. Vincent Moses puts it, “Hayes’ Catholic faith made him a formidable opponent of exclusivistic nationalism. He became a prophet. As Hans Kohn was an Isaiah of universal

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For a recent, thorough study of the riots and their impact, see Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, trans. from the Heb. by Haim Watzmann, Waltham, Mass., 2015. Adi Gordon has provided an extensive analysis of Kohn’s break with Zionism, demonstrating convincingly that 1929 represented the culmination of many frustrations and bitter disappointments. See Gordon, “Ein zo elah ahavah nikhzevet,” 67–92. See this letter in Martin Buber, A Land of Two Peoples. Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr, New York 1983, 97. For this characterization of Hayes and Kohn as founding fathers, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London 1983, 4, fn. 7. See also Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, Oxford/ New York 1999, 36. Smith acknowledges Kohn and Hayes as the first to attempt an ordering of nationalism into “definite, recurring types.” For one of the few extensive comparisons of the intellectual biographies of Kohn and Hayes, see H. Vincent Moses, Nationalism and the Kingdom of God according to Hans Kohn and Carlton J. H. Hayes, in: Journal of Church and State 17 (1975), no. 2, 259–274.

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vision, Hayes was an Amos who railed against idolatry.”10 Indeed, it was Carlton Hayes’ analysis of nationalism not only as a modern religion, but as modern idolatry which made his work pioneering. Writing in 1926, he asserted that “Nationalism is a religion now common to the great majority of mankind.”11 In addition to his scholarly contributions to the early study of nationalism, Hayes was also politically engaged and, most notably, served as the United States Ambassador to Franco’s Spain from 1942 to 1945. While for Kohn, modern nationalisms existed on a spectrum between universal/civic and particularistic/ethnic poles,12 Hayes believed that nationalism was categorically insidious. Contrasting “internationalist patriotism”13 to nationalism, he declared “Nationalism is either ignorant and prejudiced or inhuman and jaundiced; in both cases it is a form of mania, a kind of extended and exaggerated egotism.”14 Under Hayes’ direction, Pinson focused his graduate work on the relationship between religious movements and the emergence of nationalism, specifically in the context of German history.15 His dissertation Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism was completed in 1934 and published as a book that same year. In his preface to the work, Pinson credited his teacher Carlton Hayes with being the first to point out “the emotional and psychological similarities between religion and nationalism.”16 Yet, while his work focused on the development and secularization of Pietist emotional and psychological categories, Pinson nowhere indicates that this was necessarily a negative phenomenon. Rather, he analyzes the role of Pietist thought in the development of a type of nationalist-intellectual he terms the “enlightened Pietist.” Pinson defines such a thinker as “an individual deeply imbued with emotional enthusiasm and a sense of dependence so strongly emphasized in Pietist religious literature from Spener to Schleiermacher, but

10 Ibid., 263 f. 11 Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism as a Religion, in: idem, Essays on Nationalism, New York 1926 (reprint 1966), 93–125, here 118. 12 See Brian M. Smollett, Reviving Enlightenment in the Age of Nationalism. The Historical and Political Thought of Hans Kohn in America (unpublished PhD thesis, City University of New York, 2014), esp. chap. 3 and 4. 13 For Hayes, “internationalist patriotism” recognized a natural love and affinity for one’s home country, but maintained good will toward other political communities, and did not lead to the apotheosis of the nation-state. 14 Hayes, Nationalism. Curse or Blessing?, in: idem, Essays on Nationalism, 245–275, here 275. 15 Not only was Hayes a very close advisor to Pinson, but their friendship and extensive correspondence lasted until Pinson’s death. See New York Public Library, The Koppel Pinson Collection, Box 1, Carlton Hayes Correspondence. 16 Koppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, New York 1968, 7. The first edition was published by Columbia University Press in 1934.

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who no longer could find the support which he craved solely in his Christian religion but was forced to seek a secular outlet for his enthusiasm and his feeling of social kinship. This outlet was provided by the national group.”17

Five years earlier, in his biographical study of Martin Buber, Hans Kohn used a highly similar paradigm to describe the rise of Zionism, most especially for Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber, for whom Chassidism and Enlightenment combined to create a spiritual-cultural form of Zionism.18 Though trained as a scholar of Modern Germany, Pinson was thoroughly educated in Judaica and Hebrew as well. He attended Gratz College while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and studied under Salo W. Baron (1895–1989) when he was a graduate student at Columbia.19 As he worked on his dissertation, Pinson took on the first of many editorial positions as an assistant editor for historical studies of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences from 1929 to 1934. As Arndt Engelhardt has emphasized, this encyclopedia, which was initiated and edited by Alvin Johnson (1874– 1971), one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, and Edwin R. A. Seligman (1861–1939), an economist at Columbia University, was part of a broader trend in the earlier decades of the twentieth century to transform and preserve core social scientific knowledge through such extensive projects. Not only did the massive Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences catalog knowledge, but its editors specifically set out to include cutting edge research from the leading scholars in a variety of fields. In the case of Jewish studies, Pinson secured important contributions from Ismar Elbogen (1874– 1943), Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), Salo Baron, and Hans Kohn, thus integrating Jewish history and culture into the broader array of standard socialscientific research available in the English language.20

17 Ibid., 26 f. 18 Hans Kohn, Martin Buber. Sein Werk und seine Zeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte Mitteleuropas 1880–1930, Cologne 1961, 15. Kohn here argued that Buber achieved a more dynamic balance of the two spiritual trends – a view he would likely have altered in later years. See also Kohn’s similar statements about Zionism generally and Buber in particular in Perakim le-toldot hara’ayon ha-ẓioni, ḥelek bet [Chapters in the History of the Zionist Idea, vol. 2], Warsaw 1930, 18. 19 Engelhardt, Eine jüdische Intellektuellenbiografie in Amerika, 84. Baron himself would later author a significant and wide-ranging study of nationalism: Modern Nationalism and Religion, New York, 1947. This work has yet to receive due attention both in terms of its place in Baron’s scholarly œuvre, and as an example of studies of nationalism written during the first few years following World War II. 20 See Engelhardt’s in-depth description of the project, ibid., 91–98.

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Collaboration and Correspondence Pinson’s recruitment of Kohn as a writer for the Encyclopedia commenced what would become a thirty-year lasting correspondence and deep friendship. As a graduate student and young scholar interested in German nationalism and Jewish history, Pinson looked to Kohn for affirmation and felt great affinity for Kohn’s emphasis on the roles of religion and Enlightenment in the rise of modern nationalism and his special attention to the nature of Jewish nationalism. Kohn, for his part, welcomed these parallels. Upon reading Pinson’s dissertation, he commented that Pinson’s formula, nationalism as “religious revival x Enlightenment,” reflected his own theory of Jewish nationalism as “Hassidism x Haskalah.”21 Soon after Kohn settled into his position at Smith College Pinson, then teaching at the New School, convinced him to serve as one of the primary editors for a new journal for Jewish studies with a focus on social science to be published by the Conference on Jewish Relations.22 The masthead of Jewish Social Studies included Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–1947), Salo Baron, Hans Kohn and Koppel Pinson, who long served as the journal’s managing editor. Tensions would soon develop between the editors concerning the focus of the journal, its title, and the respective roles of the various co-editors.23 Writing to Pinson in the early stage of planning, Kohn insisted that he would be “very happy” to resign from his position as an active editor if it would help put an end to the existing frictions, and simply serve as a member of the journal’s editorial board.24 Nevertheless, Kohn continued as one of the co-editors of Jewish Social Studies from 1937 until 1941, after which time he served as a mainly symbolic chair of the journal’s editorial board. Already by 1939, Kohn emphasized to Pinson that Jewish Social Studies was not a personal priority, explaining that editorial duties had become too much of a time burden and

21 Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York (henceforth LBINY), Koppel S. Pinson Collection, AR 4310, Box 1, Folder 1/1A, Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 16 July 1934. 22 Jewish Social Studies was initially supported by the Conference on Jewish Relations. The philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen served as president of the conference at the time of the journal’s founding, Salo Baron was a vice president. 23 See Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron. Architect of Jewish History, New York et al. 1995, 230–235. The details of this “affair” are rather mundane. Liberles notes that while Baron was away in 1937, Hans Kohn was appointed by Pinson as a co-editor. Though Baron expressed great respect for Kohn, he felt his presence was redundant and further confused both the journal’s social-scientific orientation and the division of labor among editors. 24 LBINY, Koppel S. Pinson Collection, AR 4310, Box 1, Folder 1/1A, Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 29 August 1937.

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that the only reason he had initially agreed was because he believed it would help Pinson in his capacity as managing editor.25 While Kohn and Pinson corresponded concerning editorial responsibilities, mutual friends and family, and potential joint projects (none of which seemed to materialize), their letters came to focus also on the dire world events that were unfolding. Alarmed at the growth and ideology of National Socialism in Germany, Pinson wrote to Kohn in 1932 of his plans to write a treatment of Nazi ideology aimed at American audiences, still largely ignorant of the dangerous movement across the Atlantic. Kohn responded approvingly, also noting that such a book would likely sell quite well – a concern that could be appropriately discussed prior to the rise of a Nazi state the following year.26 With the ascendency of the Nazi state, both Kohn and Pinson were driven to explicate the German crisis to English-speaking audiences. Although Pinson himself never authored his planned volume on National Socialism, he did translate and update the foundational study of Nazism by the French political and intellectual historian Henri Lichtenberger (1864– 1941).27 Hans Kohn, in particular, devoted these years to exhaustive public and intellectual activity. Between 1936 and 1942, he published through Harvard University Press a number of anti-isolationist and pro-democracy studies or “position papers” on the global crisis that, he believed, was unprecedented in the history of Western civilization. Replete with sharp contrasts such as freedom vs. determinism, barbarism vs. civilization, and Anglo-American liberal democracy vs. the fascist one-party state, Kohn’s works were designed to awaken an overwhelmingly isolationist American public to the global implications of events abroad.28 His magnum opus, The Idea of Nationalism, published in 1944, was a capstone to this period. Tracing the tension between universal and particular poles of identification through the history of Western civilization, Kohn concluded with the eighteenth century. Nazism, he believed, was the only force to shatter this dynamic matrix of tension that had defined the course of Western history. What was necessary,

25 Ibid., Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 6 February 1939. 26 Ibid., Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 30 June 1932. 27 Henri Lichtenberger, The Third Reich, ed. and trans. from the French by Koppel S. Pinson, New York 1937. Pinson did later author an extensive and masterful study of modern German history that included both the Nazi period and a careful analysis of the post-war scene. See idem, Modern Germany. Its History and Civilization, New York 1954. 28 Kohn himself understood these works as a specific unit. In the final installment, World Order in Historical Perspective, he begins, “This volume concludes a series of books of which the first was written in 1936, when the Second World War started; this, the fourth, appears in 1942 …” See idem, World Order in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Mass., 1942, vii.

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he asserted, was a return to the balance advocated by the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, most notably Immanuel Kant. Close to the heart of his tome, Kohn made the following declaration about Kant’s cosmopolitan political vision as articulated in the 1795 treatise Towards Perpetual Peace – as important an insight into Kohn’s thought as it was into Kant’s vision: “Kant founded his project upon a deep insight into the nature of man and of ethics. His little book, a mature fruit on the mighty tree of eighteenth century Enlightenment and rationalism, in whose shade the twentieth century will have to build the city of man if it is not to be engulfed by the widening desert of death.”29

In the post-war period, Kohn devoted himself exhaustively to this ideal “City of Man,” as an architect and advocate of North Atlantic unity. NATO, and the new United Nations, he believed, was the twentieth century’s best approximation of Enlightenment-inspired institutions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the loftiest of enlightened principles.30 What was particularly striking about Kohn’s work from his arrival to the United States and through the war years was his comfort with speaking as an insider, as an American. Unlike Pinson, Kohn rarely spoke, either publically or in correspondence, to specifically Jewish elements of the crisis. Yet, he would not become a citizen of the United States until 1941 and with friends suffering under the Nazi’s draconian legislation and, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia and occupation of Prague, with close kin in jeopardy, Kohn turned to Pinson frequently and often desperately for assistance. Kohn and his wife Yetty (Jetty) housed two “refugee boys” in Northampton, one of them being the son of Robert Weltsch.31 Though he had helped his brother Fritz to send his sons to England, Fritz himself and his wife Grete were still in Prague. Kohn wrote to Pinson in September of 1939, “no news from Fritz (who is still in Prague) and Franz (in Paris). I am rather worried about them, especially Fritz and his family.”32 When a certain Dr. Leyyel, one of Pinson’s friends, was able to secure an affidavit for a friend of Kohn’s, Kohn was pessimistic, doubting that conditions in Slovakia would allow his friend to leave for many years. Yet he believed that at least the possibility and accompanying effort would provide needed morale: “some comfort to him – a ray of hope.”33 More names and requests for affidavits would come, and in one particularly urgent letter, Kohn asked for any and all assistance possible in help29 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. A Study in Its Origins and Background, New York 1944, 258 (emphasis by the author). 30 Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, 178. 31 LBINY, Koppel S. Pinson Collection, AR 4310, Box 1, Folder 1/1A, Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 18 June 1939. 32 Ibid., Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 7 September 1939. 33 Ibid.

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ing secure a grant-in-aid for Martin Buber.34 The tragic capstone to this period of their correspondence was sent on 15 August 1945. Kohn wrote to Pinson on the fate of his brother and sister-in-law in Prague, “Fritz and Grete are dead. They were transported to a Polish extermination camp from Theresienstadt in the fall of 1944 – the last transports!”35 Pinson responded within three days. All he could do was offer consolation, “Pre-Hitler Prague will always be associated in our minds with the memories of these two noble souls – May they rest in peace.”36

Vision and Action after the War Both Kohn and Pinson were transformed by World War II and the destruction of European Jewry, along with some of their own close relations. Yet the focus of these scholars during the first decades of the post-war period demonstrates the extent to which, while ideologically akin as liberals and with similar interests as historians, they significantly differed in the relative attention they paid to problems of Jewish peoplehood and survival in the wake of what was both a Jewish and global catastrophe. At the end of World War II, Kohn, along with Arthur Kuhn (1876–1954), an expert on international law, and the intellectual historian Jacob Salwyn Schapiro (1879–1973), co-authored the American Jewish Committee’s platform on human rights. The emphasis in this pamphlet, entitled “To the Counsellors of Peace,” was primarily on the weaknesses in minority rights policies following the World War I, where the Jews, they argued, were particularly vulnerable. Unlike other minorities who could appeal to the nation states in which they represented a majority to push their agenda on the international scene, the Jews were inherently disadvantaged. Tellingly, the authors did not propose a Jewish commonwealth as a solution, as was the conclusion of the Biltmore conference a few years earlier, but suggested a universal solution which, as Naomi Cohen rightfully observed, did not detail specific rights for groups but rather focused on universal ideals and the importance of methods for enforcement.37 Marc Dollinger has given significant attention to the role of the United Nations in both the consciousness and politics of different Jewish groups. According to Dollinger, “The United 34 Ibid., Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 7 November 1939. 35 Ibid., Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 15 August 1945. 36 LBINY, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259, Box 3, Folder 9, Letter from Koppel S. Pinson to Hans Kohn, 18 August 1945. 37 Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist. A History of the American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966, Philadelphia, Pa., 1972, 270.

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Nations offered American Jews an ideal political compromise: the AJC valued the UN for its commitment to universal rights, while American Zionists waged their most important Jewish nationalist campaign there after Great Britain relinquished its mandate of Palestine to the new body.”38 Ultimately, however, the universal ideas that the AJC representatives believed would protect Jews and other minorities in the new world order were met with unease by the victor nations – the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union – who feared that strong and detailed language about human rights could be used as a tool for internal interference.39 Gradually, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish community in general, moved away from the type of universality advocated in this platform and Kohn, lacking a Jewish organization in which he could embed himself, became increasingly estranged from the Jewish community and even more consumed with global questions and concerns. A letter from Pinson to Kohn on the tenth anniversary of the first issue of Jewish Social Studies in the year 1949 reveals Kohn’s distance from both the journal and Jewish intellectual life. After inviting Kohn to a panel on “The Jewish Catastrophe of 1939–45,” Pinson tried to preempt Kohn’s rejection, “I know that you are busy and I also know that your initial reaction to this request might be ‘no.’ But I should like you to do me a great personal favor and accept.”40 Pinson acknowledged Kohn’s lack of recent involvement with the journal, but, aware of Kohn’s views toward the intellectual state of the American Jewish community and the new State of Israel, he appealed to their mutual frustrations and the initial shared goals that had led them to start the journal: “I need not tell you that Jewish scholarly undertakings, not devoted primarily to ‘combatting antisemitism’ or ‘helping Israel,’ are not having a too easy time of it these days.”41 The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, in particular, alienated Kohn from popular opinion in the established Jewish community, especially the American Jewish Committee, where he had been most engaged. In 1956, following the support of the American Jewish Committee of Israel during the Suez Crisis, Kohn angrily resigned, stating that nothing could then be done to bring him back to the Committee. All of his reasons, Kohn emphasized, were

38 Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion. Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, Princeton, N. J., et al. 2000, 114. 39 Ibid., 115–118. 40 Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections, Palo Alto, Salo Baron Papers, Box 45, Folder 6, Letter from Koppel S. Pinson to Hans Kohn, 4 January 1949. 41 Ibid.

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“connected with the attitude followed by the American Jewish Committee towards the State of Israel […] I am deeply convinced that the attitude of the American Jewish Committee runs counter to the real interests of the Jews in the State of Israel, and ultimately to the good conscience of American Jewry.”42

By this point, with only a few exceptions, Kohn had largely withdrawn from Jewish life and scholarship. For Pinson, however, the decade and a half between the end of World War II and his untimely death was marked by intense engagement in Jewish scholarship and devotion to the remnants of European Jewry. Already in 1942, he had edited a volume on antisemitism, this volume was put out in a second and expanded edition in 1946 by the Conference on Jewish Relations. Essays on Antisemitism included the first two main parts of an article Pinson had authored the previous year for Jewish Social Studies on AntiSemitism in the Post-War World.43 The extreme antisemitism of the Nazis, and most especially its racialist element, he observed, had exposed the dangers of this virulent hatred to the vast majority of those opposed to the Nazis. “For most people fighting the Nazi’s,” he asserted, “the following formula came to hold: The Enemy = Nazi = Antisemite.”44 This led many, most notably the Catholic and Protestant Churches to reassess the dangers of antisemitism during the war. However, he warned quite presciently that the impact of the war on the spread of antisemitism and the immense demographic upheavals, including transfers of property, would likely cause great difficulty for Jews returning, or seeking to return, to their native lands and to their former homes and possessions: “We must not delude ourselves into a utopian dream that the victorious end of the war and the triumph over Nazism will purge the world of the cardinal tenet of Nazi doctrine.”45 Further, citing the increased popularity of population transfers as solutions to postwar ethnic problems, Pinson raised concern that in such a post-war climate, the Jews would be bound to suffer most. Significantly, Pinson also integrated the plight of Soviet Jewry into his analysis. Acknowledging that “no state has done more to eliminate antisemitism than the Soviet Union,” Pinson pointed to the central problem that would only become a priority for the American Jewish community decades later: “those of us who are committed to a positive philosophy of Jewish life cannot feel satisfied with the elimina42 LBINY, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259, Box 3, Folder 10, Letter from Hans Kohn to Louis Lempel, 7 April 1957. 43 Koppel S. Pinson, Antisemitism in the Post-War World, in: Jewish Social Studies 7 (1945), no. 2, 99–118. 44 Idem, Anti-Semitism in the Post-War World, in: idem (ed.), Essays on Anti-Semitism. With a Foreword by Salo W. Baron, 2nd revised and enlarged ed., New York 1946, 3–17, here 4. 45 Ibid., 9.

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tion of antisemitism if that also means the elimination of Judaism, and that is the grave danger in Soviet Jewry.”46 In November of 1945, Pinson took a year of leave from his faculty position at Queens College and travelled to Europe, where he spent a full year as Educational Director for displaced Jews in German and Austria under the auspices of the American Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).47 As Hasia Diner has explained, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was the organization “most responsible for using the millions of dollars raised in America and for bringing the basics of food, clothing, shelter and medical care. ‘The Joint’ delivered the items and sent workers, child care specialists, doctors, and other health professionals and educators to the camps.”48 While in Germany, though not permitted in the Russian zone, Pinson travelled to almost all of the major DP camps. There he actively tried to secure needed resources, and arranging for classes “based on the needs of displaced persons who have already asked for instruction in English, Hebrew, Yiddish literature and related subjects.”49 Pinson would quickly realize that the need for organization and resources in the chaos of post-war Central Europe would present major roadblocks to his goals. Reporting back to the Joint Distribution Committee at the end of his first month, Pinson summarized “the achievements of the Education Division of the American Joint Distribution Committee during the month of November may be summarized very briefly as being almost nil […]. It is not my intent at this time, nor at any other time in the future to present in my reports anything but a sober picture of the realities in the situation as I see them without adornment or coloring. In those terms we have done practically nothing.”50

46 Ibid., 12. 47 Pinson was among the Queens College’s inaugural faculty when it opened in 1937, and he continued to teach there until his death. The History Department at Queens College continues to award the “Koppel Pinson Prize” to the most academically accomplished history major. 48 Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, New York et al. 2009, 162. Diner is one of the few historians who has integrated Pinson into the narrative of post-Holocaust American Jewish history. See also Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies. Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton, N. J., et al. 2007, 197 f. 49 Archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (henceforth JDC Archives), New York Collection, 1945–54, Folder L–R, 1945–54, Press Release. Dr. Koppel Pinson Reaches Europe to Organize Educational Program for Jews in Former Concentration Camps, 9 Nov 1945. 50 JDC Archives, New York Collection, 1945–54, Folder Germany: Educational, Religious and Vocational Activities 1945–47, Koppel S. Pinson, Report of the Educational Director of the American Joint Distribution Committee in Germany and Austria for November 1945, 1 December 1945.

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The reasons, Pinson went on to cite, had to do not only with the lack of resources and facilities, but with the lack of mobility: “Our main job is to get out and meet the Jews in the various communities and camps of Germany and Austria […]. Thus far it has been impossible for either Mr. [Jacob] Joslow or myself to move even five miles outside of Frankfurt to the nearby camp of Zeilsheim.”51

After enumerating various needed resources, Pinson pressed for more public awareness of the challenges DP camps and their administrators faced: “I might add, it might be a good thing that the entire American public be made a little more aware of this situation. If they were, they would not be carping so much about what the JDC has not done.”52 Though Pinson would continuously face frustrations in trying to secure needed resources and educational materials for the DPs, he would travel over 30,000 miles over the course of his year as director. Related to his position as Educational Director was the oversight of the identification and transport of Jewish books and cultural artifacts housed at the Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD), the central collection point for unclaimed Jewish property in the American zone.53 Nancy Sinkoff has identified the OAD as a focal point of “the major figures of the transnational, postwar Jewish intelligentsia […] who were grappling with – and often competing with one another over – the fate of postwar European Jewry and its stolen cultural property.”54 It was also, as Elisabeth Gallas, Dana Hermann and Sinkoff have shown, a point of contention between different Jewish organizations and ideologies. Pinson, who was active in efforts on behalf of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO), also wished to secure books for various DP camps that were desperate for educational resources. He was thus caught between diasporic organi-

51 Ibid. M. Jacob Joslow (1897–1993) worked with Pinson, especially on educational programs for the many orphaned children in the camps. He took over as JDC Educational Director in Germany once Pinson returned to the United States. 52 Ibid. 53 In one of Pinson’s letters marked “Strictly Confidential,” we learn of several manuscripts and library collections that were clandestinely transported from Germany to Paris so as to avoid the “danger of being lost to living Jewish communities.” Pinson points especially to “valuable books from the USSR, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Germany.” These transports were done with the “unofficial” help of the US Army and, in this particular case, made use of empty ambulances returning to Paris from Heidelberg. Pinson notes that official policies of restitution would necessitate the return of such materials to their countries of origin. See JDC Archives, Geneva Collection, 1945–54, Folder: Germany: Miscellaneous 1946, Koppel S. Pinson to Dr. Joseph Schwartz, 29 July 1946. 54 Nancy Sinkoff, Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Cultural Property, in: American Jewish History 100 (2016), no. 1, 117–147, here 120. For more arguments on this, see Elisabeth Gallas, “Das Leichenhaus der Bücher.” Kulturrestitution und jüdisches Geschichtsdenken nach 1945, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2013.

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zations such as YIVO and Zionist establishments such as the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The question of where the common property of the Jewish people belonged led to immense pressures and later convincing accusations of impropriety.55 Upon his return to the United States, Pinson authored one of the first studies of Jewish DPs. Pinson realized that with the lack of reliable statistical information and the frequent substitution of rumor for fact in the chaos of immediate post-war Germany, he could not take a traditional social-scientific approach to this group.56 Rather, he tried to understand them with what we might best describe as a psycho-anthropological approach. He opens this study with a clarification of definitions and demographics. The DP camp took many forms, he explains, “the term DP camp is, in reality, only a juristic concept. For otherwise DP camps present a varied picture. Some […] are former German military barracks and present all the familiar features of barrack life. […] In Stuttgart the Jewish DP camp is but a group of apartment buildings on Reinsburger Strasse [i. e. Reinsburgstraße].”57

These were just a few of the varieties of settings that Pinson pointed to, other DP camps ranged in location from former summer resorts to military hospitals and monasteries. What allowed these various sites to be defined as DP camps were essentially their residents and their governance: “A DP camp, therefore, may be defined as a community of Displaced Persons governed by a UNRRA team.”58 The Jewish residents of these DP camps, who Pinson numbered at approximately 200,000, included former partisans, who had operated as guerilla groups during the war, often seeking refuge in forests; infiltrees, which included those who fled their homes and hid deep in the Soviet Union only to be repatriated to hostile post-war communities, and the kotzetler or kotzetnik, a former camp inmate. While partisans and infiltrees had suffered physical and mental trauma, Pinson reports that they demonstrated sufficient

55 Space does not allow a full exposition of Pinson’s role in these affairs. Sinkoff speaks of widespread rumors of Pinson’s diversion of materials intended for DP camps for his own library. See also Dana Herman, Hashavat Avedah. A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., (unpublished PhD Thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 2008), esp. 169– 176. Following the smuggling of valuable manuscripts to Palestine, largely initiated by Gershom Scholem, Lucy Schildkret reported to military officials that Pinson likely had 4,000–5,000 OAD volumes in his own possession in New York; ibid., 176. 56 Koppel S. Pinson, Jewish Life in Liberated Germany. A Study of the Jewish DP’s, in: Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947), no. 2, 101–126. 57 Ibid., 105. 58 Ibid. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) functioned until 1947. Both the Joint and the Jewish Agency operated under their auspices in the DP camps.

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capacity for organization, growth and recovery. The kotzetler, however, were unique. Both physically and psychologically traumatized, they showed little ability for labor or prolonged attention. Most, even if raised religiously, had lost their religious interest. In looking to the future they, like other Jewish DPs, exhibited a substantial “Palestinocentrism.” This being a result, Pinson claimed, of both propaganda and the fear that even in the United States, such tragic events could once again occur.59 What did these DPs need most, according to Pinson? Aside from basic supplies, Jewish books (which Pinson helped bring to them), and money, they needed specific types of leaders: “a great measure of leadership, direction, initiative and above all inspiration and moral support must be provided by Jews who come in from the outside. […] They need people, warm-hearted, full-blooded, intelligent and cultured Jews, who can supply that initial drive that added push.”60

Only then, he believed, would these Jews be capable of resettling in Palestine or the United States with the skills necessary to survive and even thrive. Only a couple of years following his return from Europe, Pinson authored an article for Jewish Social Studies on the great Russian-Jewish historian and diaspora nationalist, Simon Dubnow.61 His timing is telling on a number of levels. Having returned from the sites of the destruction of Ashkenazi Jewry, Pinson saw fit to bring the voice of their arch-historian to the Jewish public. Published only months after the establishment of the State of Israel, Pinson noted Dubnow’s pragmatic acceptance of Zionism, but also cited Dubnow’s belief that the central, and most dangerous, flaw of political Zionism was its “denial of the Galuth.”62 Further, Pinson himself expanded, that “even with the present-day triumph of the ideal of Jewish statehood those who have a deeper historical perspective may still warn those who stake the entire future of the Jewish people upon the realization of a Jewish state in Palestine with the words of Dub59 Ibid., 116. 60 Ibid., 126 (emphasis in original). Hasia Diner has expressed the view that Pinson overlooked “the organizations that the DP’s themselves created.” See idem, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 163. Without contesting the overall point, I wish to add two considerations. First was the issue of resources and organization. In this regard, Pinson was greatly concerned about the superior organization accompanied by Zionist propaganda that the Jewish Agency brought to the DP camps. This augmented the “Palestinocentrism” of which he spoke. Second was the centrality of both morale and diasporic solidarity to Pinson’s view. Not only did the DPs need resources, but they needed educators, especially for the many orphaned children in the camps. Jewishly knowledgeable and sensitive volunteers were thus not only a necessity, but the responsibility of a far more resourceful American Jewry. 61 Koppel S. Pinson, The National Theories of Simon Dubnow, in: Jewish Social Studies 10 (1948), no. 4, 335–358. 62 Ibid., 353.

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now: ‘Do not forget that extreme Zionism of this kind may inflict damage if bitter reality will not come up to the glowing hopes […]. One must take into consideration what will happen to the group of Zionists if the hope that excites their spirits will be dissipated by unforeseen deceit or will be turned into empty messianism.’”63

A decade following this article, Pinson published the volume Dubnow: Nationalism and History with the Jewish Publication Society.64 Though some of Dubnow’s historical writings had been available in English, Pinson’s volume brought Simon Dubnow’s central political writings for the first time to the wider English-speaking audience. Most prominently, the book featured Pinson’s new translation of Dubnow’s Letters on Old and New Judaism, in which Dubnow developed his theory of Jewish autonomism within the context of what he hoped would become a liberal, multinational Russian Empire.65

Mediating Jewish Particularism and Humanistic Internationalism While Pinson spoke and wrote of the most existentially pressing Jewish matters after the war, Kohn also focused his attention on Europe, but functioned on a far more elite level. With the founding of NATO in 1949, Kohn invested a great deal of hope in North Atlantic spiritual unity. He traveled to Germany several times, beginning in 1946, and ultimately published a volume which included several German historians, Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) foremost among them, who sought to reconceptualize approaches to the German past in the wake of Nazism. Hans Kohn’s response to Pinson upon receiving a copy of Nationalism and History is strongly indicative of his move away from Jewish concerns and his significant shift toward more universal and global priorities. Praising the volume, he wrote: “It recalls to me the older days long gone by when I read and wrote on the history of Jewish nationalism.”66 63 Ibid. 64 Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History. Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. with an Introductory Essay by Koppel S. Pinson, Philadelphia, Pa., 1958. 65 Dubnow’s Letters on Old and New Judaism were originally published in the Russian-Jewish Journal Voskhod between 1896 and 1906. For the most thorough analyses of Dubnow’s thought, see the work of Robert M. Seltzer, esp. Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism.” Diaspora Nationalism and the World History of the Jews, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2014. See also Viktor E. Kelner, Simon Dubnow. Eine Biografie, Göttingen/Oakville, Conn., 2010; Anke Hilbrenner, Diaspora-Nationalismus. Zur Geschichtskonstruktion Simon Dubnows, Göttingen 2007. 66 LBINY, Koppel S. Pinson Collection, AR 4310, Box 1, Folder 1/1A, Letter from Hans Kohn to Koppel S. Pinson, 17 March 1958 (emphasis by the author).

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Indeed, despite a few scattered essays, largely critiques of Zionism and the current state of Israel, nowhere did Kohn write on a Jewish level of the immense loss of World War II. In his 1964 memoir, for example, the word “holocaust” appears twice. The first instance refers to the World War I. “In 1914,” Kohn recalled, “no one foresaw that the war would become a protracted holocaust.”67 The second usage was meant to emphasize the vital role of the United Nations: especially in an age of nuclear weapons, this transnational organization, Kohn insisted, “must try to prevent current world tensions from leading to a holocaust.”68 Hans Kohn came to believe that the Jewish problem was but part of a global problem of the age of nationalism: how to recognize human dignity in all, when the primary form of social organization was highly particularized and nationalized. As an opponent of statist Zionism, we may have expected Kohn to embrace non-statist national solutions to the Jewish problem, yet these too he rejected. Turning to the Jewish question in his 1958 Menorah article, Zion and the Jewish National Idea,69 Kohn expressed some admiration for Diaspora nationalists such as Simon Dubnow and Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), but as in his earlier essay he gives short shrift to these alternatives: “Dubnow and Birnbaum, whatever the validity of their theories, testify to the variety and breadth of Jewish life throughout all the ages and in its many homelands. Its unifying link has been a spiritual conception which, fundamentally ethical, has found expression in changing forms.”

Yet, Kohn asserted, “It is an oversimplification to believe that there exists one ‘solution’ to the Jewish problem. The Jewish problem is not the same in various ages, in various countries, nay, even in various individuals. The form of modern Jewish life in the context of East-European society with its theories of ethnic nationalism and national minorities was and will be different from Jewish life in the West, above all in the United States.”70

One of the few notable exceptions in Kohn’s changed focus was his work on an edited volume of the writings of Ahad Ha’am.71 While Kohn’s decision to explicate the “agnostic rabbi’s” thought to American Jewish audiences is 67 Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, 83. 68 Ibid., 177. 69 Hans Kohn, Zion and the Jewish National Idea, in: The Menorah Journal 46 (1958), no. 1–2, 17–46. On the background of this journal and the Menorah association, see Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism. The Menorah Association and American Diversity, Bloomington, Ind., et al., 2011. 70 Kohn, Zion and the Jewish National Idea, 46. 71 Ahad Ha’am, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic. Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. by Hans Kohn, New York 1962.

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indicative of the concerns and values that he shared with Pinson concerning Jewish nationalism, we cannot compare the two projects in terms of time, commitment, or originality.72 Kohn’s edition consisted of reprints of prior translations, to which Kohn appended an expanded version of an article he had written for Commentary magazine a decade earlier, itself largely composed of recycled material from his early writings.73 Though he does offer an insightful and informed reading of Ahad Ha’am, with due attention to his roots, Russian-Jewish intellectual culture, and debates within the Zionist movement, Kohn’s depiction of Ahad Ha’am as someone who in his “intellectual honesty and self-discipline, his sober and responsible realism […] and his contempt for rhetoric and demagoguery associate him more closely with men like John Stuart Mill or Thomas Masaryk than with such a visionary nationalist as Mazzini,” resonates with Steven Zipperstein’s observations about the general problems of early biographical studies of Ahad Ha’am. As Zipperstein explains, insofar as Ahad Ha’am himself was an “elusive” figure, with few constructive political essays, he lent himself to a number of interpretations, often “devotional” in tone and statuesque in depiction.74 Through Kohn’s essay, we revisit the very factors that led to his own alienation – both in 1929 and following 1948. Most notably, we find a figure whose primary concerns are the dangers of statehood and the treatment of Arabs.75 The failures of the Zionist movement on these fronts led to Ahad Ha’am’s despair. Though in Palestine, he longed for London.76 The murder of an Arab boy led him to proclaim “if this be the Messiah, let him come and let me not see him.”77 Pinson too believed his subject had current relevance on multiple levels – Dubnow’s attention to issues of human dignity, his lack of cynicism concerning Enlightenment, even during the Nazi period, and his conviction that 72 Based on the author’s email correspondence with Hillel Halkin, 4 April 2013. Halkin, then an editor at Schocken Books, has recalled the frustration of working directly with Kohn on the project: “Hans Kohn was not asked to edit the essays themselves, which had already been translated and edited in other places. He was simply asked to write an introduction to them. […] It was sloppily written, and when I contacted him and politely told him that I thought certain changes should be made in it, his answer was ‘Do whatever you think necessary – there is no need to consult me about it.’” 73 Hans Kohn, Ahad Ha’am. Nationalist with a Difference, in: Commentary, 1 June 1951, 558–566. 74 Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet. Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism, Berkeley, Calif., et al. 1993, xxi. 75 Alan Dowty has evaluated the role of the Arab question in Ahad Ha’am’s writings and concluded that it was a proportionately minor part of his overall agenda. See idem, Much Ado about Little. Ahad Ha’am’s “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” Zionism, and the Arabs, in: Israel Studies 5 (2000), no. 2, 154–181. 76 Ahad Ha’am, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic, 29. 77 Ibid., 27.

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one could balance Jewish particularity with belief in universal human dignity. In fact, for Dubnow, as Pinson points out, this was the ultimate level of freedom for the Jews in the context of the wider world. Though the political solution that Dubnow proposed may have been already anachronistic, Pinson found inspiration and relevance in Dubnow’s writings on individual freedom, understanding of Jewish collectivity and universal human dignity. Further, for American Jews, now the world’s largest Jewish community, Pinson believed that Dubnow’s thought would resonate strongly – especially for “those Conservative and Reform Jews” who, while living a largely secular life, felt tied to Jewish history, culture, and Zionism, yet still considered America their home and English their favored tongue. For them, Pinson hoped, Dubnow’s thought would give “theoretical formulation and philosophical grounding to help him clarify his position as a Jew in the United States.”78 For Kohn, however, and despite his use of Ahad Ha’am as a tool of critique, such clarity had to emerge from the realization that “ultimately the Jewish problem is but part of the human problem. […] Enlightenment and Emancipation have to be defended and revitalized everywhere and at all times. This is the difficult task of modern life of which the Jews form part. As a result of their history they are, wherever they live, in an exposed position. For wherever Enlightenment and Emancipation are rejected or scorned, they will be endangered, morally or physically, more than others.”79

Conclusion The paths of Koppel Pinson and Hans Kohn provide two illustrative examples of the extent to which the crises of the twentieth century weighed heavily on early articulations of nationalism – its theories and its history. They also demonstrate the complex spectrum of Jewish belonging and political commitment among Jewish intellectuals during this period. As we have seen, Kohn and Pinson came of age in very different contexts. However, they were brought into dialogue and friendship through related scholarly pursuits, and with the rise of Nazism and the catastrophe of World War II, by fear for Jews abroad and by what both considered to be an age of fatally radical nationalism. Yet during these years, the very issues that led to their convergence of interests also forged their divergent emphases. Their approaches to the crises 78 Koppel S. Pinson, Simon Dubnow. Historian and Political Philosopher (Introduction), in: Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 1–69, here 62. 79 Kohn, Zion and the Jewish National Idea, 46.

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of the post-World War II order brought these differences into relief. Both strove to advocate, through their scholarship and activism, a political and intellectual foundation on which to build a new vision of a post-war world that would protect Jews and other minorities. Yet, Kohn’s mature (mainly American) intellectual and political efforts fell squarely into articulating visions of and working for a rebuilt Europe, North Atlantic Unity, and a cosmopolitan liberalism that he believed was nothing short of salvific in a nuclear age and Cold War context. It would be through such universal institutions and ideas, Kohn believed, that “enlightenment and emancipation” would be revived, safeguarding Jewish lives and those of other vulnerable groups. Pinson too shared these more global concerns, especially as they related to contemporary Germany, its historical roots, and its future. Yet, unlike in the case of Kohn, we find in Koppel Pinson a far more embedded and complex balance of Jewish and more universal priorities. His work on behalf of European Jews and Jewish refugees during World War II would lead into his efforts at salvaging and tending to the remnants of European Jewry along with the remains of their cultural heritage. As such, Pinson lived, thought and worked at the center of Jewish organizational and intellectual life, through which he sought solutions to the most vital challenges of the central decades of the twentieth century.

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Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India In recent years, studies of the Holocaust have increasingly focused on its aftermath, on questions of memory and memorialization, but also on the acknowledged irony that the “cursed bloody soil” of occupied Germany became a postwar haven for some quarter of a million Jews, the DPs (displaced persons) who constituted the tiny surviving remnant (She’erit Hapleta) of East European Jewry.1 Much less attention has been paid to another irony: that Stalin’s Soviet Union had provided the crucial if extremely harsh and generally involuntary refuge, first in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR and then in Central Asia for the majority of that remnant. Twothirds to 80 percent of all Polish Jews who survived World War II (altogether perhaps 10 percent of 3.3 to 3.5 million Jews who had resided in prewar Poland) did so because they escaped Nazi occupation, often at the very last minute, and were “deported to life” in the Soviet Union.2 Once we start to 1

2

This article is part of an ongoing project and should be considered as research in progress. The entire topic of Jewish evacuation, deportation, and survival in the Soviet Union as well as the experience of refugees in Iran and India is only now receiving increased scholarly attention. A different version of this article will be published in Mark Edele/Sheila Fitzpatrick/Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, Detroit, Mich. (forthcoming 2017). Research for this article was supported by a Spring 2015 Fellowship of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University and a Spring 2015 Diana and Howard Wohl Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There are no accurate data and no consensus on the number of Jews who fled western Poland or lived within the redrawn Soviet border of summer 1939, how many Poles or specifically Jewish Poles were deported, how many then migrated to Central Asia, how many remained in the Soviet Union, how many survived to be repatriated to postwar Poland, and how many then fled again, mostly to the DP camps and communities in the US-occupied zones of Germany. There they became the distinct majority, at least 70 percent of all Jewish DPs and probably 85 percent of all Jewish Poles, the largest group by far among all Jewish DPs. See e. g. the important contributions in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26 (2012), no. 1, on Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union. For an older brief survey, see Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917. Paradox of Survival, 2 vols., here vol. 1, New York 1990, 335–397. See also the new evaluation of statistics, in: Mark Edele/Wanda Warlik, Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 71–97.

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look for and listen to these experiences – as historians are now finally beginning to do – we find a dizzying array of stories: about flight from war and persecution, forced migration, relief and rescue efforts, extreme trauma and sheer endurance, as well as the twists and turns of wartime relations among the Soviet Union, the Polish government-in-exile, Great Britain and its empire, the US, and transnational Jewish organizations. Another reading of war and Holocaust emerges if we remap the Jewish experience of death, survival, and continual displacement – a series of catastrophes, each with its own “after” – via the geographical margins outside the Nazi-controlled epicenter: in the Soviet interior, and colonial and semi-colonial regions in Central Asia, Iran, and even India. This essentially lost history has gone missing in the cracks among Jewish, East Central European, and Soviet historiographies, where its traces can certainly be found, but has not made it, in any sustained manner, into either the standard national or Holocaust narratives. The story of Eastern European Jews in the Soviet Union during the war remains largely unmarked in museum and cinematic (including documentary) representation, two key sites of public memory and scholarly work.3 Even after the boom in Holocaust studies and commemoration over the past decades, the status of this largest cohort of East European survivors

3

the Soviet Second World War, in: Edele/Fitzpatrick/Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust. Consider for example the (current) permanent exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial, which lacks any display referencing the Soviet Union. On the other hand, its official definition is extremely broad: “The Museum honors as Survivors and Victims any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945,” (22 November 2016). Yad Vashem’s current definition acknowledges that “[n]o historical definition can be completely satisfactory” and includes “Jews who lived for any amount of time under Nazi domination, direct or indirect, and survived.” They have now added to an evolving interpretation, “[f]rom a larger perspective other destitute Jewish refugees who escaped their countries fleeing the invading German army, including those who spent years […] deep in the Soviet Union, may also be considered Holocaust survivors,” a statement that has potential financial implications for Jews who survived in the Soviet Union and are now seeking eligibility for reparations, (22 November 2016). The Soviet aspect is highlighted in the old exhibit at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, but it is only briefly referenced in Polin, the new Museum of Polish Jewish History. The stories are there – in memoirs, in some Shoah Foundation and other oral history interviews and documentary films, in reminiscences and diaries now being compiled and translated from (mostly) Yiddish or Polish by the second and third generation; in the only recently available voluminous and difficult to navigate DP files stored in the International Tracing Service (ITS) records in Bad Arolsen, and apparently in still inaccessible NKVD archives.

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remains contested and unclear. They have been classified as “indirect” or “flight” survivors, or simply folded into a collective “Holocaust survivor” category with their specific wartime experience effaced, mentioned, if at all, only in passing. Nor has the turn to transnational history led to a more complex entangled wartime history of relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees, or with Soviet citizens of multiple nationalities and ethnicities, including mostly Muslim Uzbeks and Kazakhs, and Soviet, including local Bukharan, Jews. And yet, the – to many still surprising – fact is that the forced migration away from the Soviet territories first attacked by the Germans provided the main chance for East European Jewry’s survival. The fact bears repeating because it still seems so alien to the dominant narrative: the so-called “Asiatics” who survived the extreme hardships of the Soviet “refuge” in the Soviet interior and then Central Asia would constitute the numerical, if not the most visible or articulate, core of the She’erit Hapleta.4

Deportation as Refuge – Polish Jews under Soviet Rule Several hundred thousand mostly Polish Jews, perhaps as many as one and a half a million – the great majority of whom would not survive but the group from which the majority of DP survivors would emerge – were gathered, along with non-Jewish Poles and Ukrainians, within the redrawn Soviet borders of summer 1939 after the Germans crossed into western Poland in early September. Some Jews had fled the advancing Wehrmacht into those parts of eastern Poland that had become Soviet after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Families faced wrenching difficult, often split-second decisions about whether to flee or not, about who should go or who should stay. Sometimes grandparents’ stories of German soldiers’ civilized behavior in World War I, a father’s conviction that his business connections could protect the family, or a mother’s desperate sense that at least part of the family should try to escape, were persuasive.5 All these moves of fleeing or staying were made “in panic and uncertainty,” within moments, days, or occasionally weeks, depending on the changing progress of the battlefront, without any possibility of knowing the full situation, much less any inkling of what 4

5

For the term “Asiatics,” see e. g. Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue. Brichah, New York 1970, 26–31. Bauer is referring to youth movement activists (especially the socialist Hashomer Hatzair) who returned to liberated Poland and quickly took on leadership roles in (re)organizing Zionist groups as well as clandestine routes to Palestine and the US zones of occupied Germany and Austria. Eliyana Adler, Hrubieszów at the Crossroads. Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28 (2014), no. 1, 1–30.

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would soon transpire under Nazi control. Families expected that they would be re-united, and in a familiar migration pattern, more men than women, more younger than older people, fled, acts that would become dramatically evident in the demographics of the ghettos and death camps as well as in the composition of survivor communities.6 Sometimes the Germans forced Jews across the border, sometimes the Soviets let them in or even encouraged Jews to flee, sometimes they turned them back; by November they were demanding permits, but still Jews continued to run for their lives. Having escaped the Nazis, these Jews from western now German-occupied Poland then in 1940 faced deportation as suspect foreigners in a land now allied with Germany, to forced labor or so-called “special” camps in what is generally referred to in memoirs as “Siberia,” but in fact could serve as a cipher for other parts of the vast USSR, including the Urals, Kazakhstan, and autonomous republics such as Komi near the Arctic Sea west of the Urals. Some Polish Jews who had fled aroused suspicion by registering to return to the German side, precisely in order to find family members who had been left behind or because of false rumors that conditions had stabilized and were less harsh than under Soviet control – by March, all Polish currency had been invalidated, leading to further desperate impoverishment – sometimes out of fear of being forced to accept Soviet citizenship in the “passportization drive” of 1940 or driven into the interior, ever further away from their families and the homes to which they hoped to return, sometimes simply because they could find no kosher food. At the same time, local Jews in what had been eastern Poland – an arbitrary mix of merchants, shopkeepers, Zionists, the orthodox, and the (only apparently) plain unlucky – who were just adjusting, more or less successfully to novel Soviet rule, were also deported. They were rounded up in four waves, in the winter and spring of 1940 and once just before the war on the eastern front started in 1941, together with the refugees from the Germans and a larger group of non-Jewish Poles.7 While the Soviets were arresting 6

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Shimon Redlich, Life in Transit. Jews in Postwar Lodz, 1945–1950, Boston, Mass., 2010, 54, notes the reversal of the prewar Jewish gender ratio. In 1931, Lodz counted 109 females for 100 males; after 1945, among a much smaller cohort, 54.3 percent were men and 45.7 percent female. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1987, 125, estimates that between 1939 and 1941, c. 1.5 million Polish citizens, including “perhaps as many as 400,000 Jews had been forcibly exiled and interned in the Soviet interior.” In an indication of how unstable the statistics are, Katherine R. Jolluck, Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile, in: Robert Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, Ithaca, N. Y., 2005, 210–232, here 212, notes that the number of deported Poles is estimated at anywhere between 320,000 and one million, most of them women and children. Jan T. Gross counts 880,000 Poles deported in February, April, June 1940, and June 1941: c. 150,000 drafted

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Jews as “enemies of the people,” or “capitalists,” the non-Jewish Poles who shared their fate suspected them as pro-Bolshevik and disloyal, for having fled east from the Germans, for having seen or heard enough about Nazi antisemitism and their actions in western Poland to prefer or even welcome the Red Army’s presence.8 Such initial optimism about the new life under Soviet rule, especially among the young, turned into fear when the NKVD started to pressure Jewish and non-Jewish Poles to move further into the interior and the deportations began.9 Multiple memoirs and testimonies describe the shock of this journey in essentially similar detail: the arrests in the middle of the night or the early morning hours with at most a few hours to collect as many belongings as possible, the lack of food and water or any privacy on unheated boxcar trains, which carried them in fits and starts eastward under brutal conditions which some – or many, again there are no accurate figures – did not survive. By this “twist of history” – versions of the term appear with telling frequency in survivors’ retrospective accounts10 – which intersected in complicated ways with the general mass evacuation (rather than “deportation”) of civilians, including c. 1.2 million Soviet Jews, into the vast Soviet interior after the German invasion in summer 1941, as well as broader deportations of non-Jewish Poles and other suspect “foreigners” (including probably a million plus ethnic Germans), several 100,000 Polish Jews escaped the exterminatory German onslaught that followed the invasion in June 1941. As David Lautenberg (Laor), a young Zionist activist who in 1942 became into Red Army, 180,000 detained as POWs, and some 20,000 sent as “volunteer” labor. About half (440,000) were sent to labor camps and prisons, the other half to “special settlements.” One quarter were children, 14 or younger. Almost one third were Jewish (52 percent ethnic Poles, 30 percent Jews, and 18 percent Ukrainians and Byelorussians). See Gross’ introduction in idem/Irena Grudzińska-Gross (eds.), War Through Children’s Eyes. The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941, foreword by Bruno Bettelheim, trans. by Ronald Strom and Dan Rivers, Stanford, Calif., 1981, xxii– xxiii. See also Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils. Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941, trans. by Naftali Greenwood, Philadelphia, Pa., 1995, 335–337, and Anna Shternshis, Between Life and Death. Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941, in: Kritika 15 (2014), no. 3, 477–504. Smaller numbers of German and especially Austrian Jews who had fled to the Baltic republics in 1938 were then also deported when Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were sovietized in 1940. 18 David Engel, in the Shadow of Auschwitz, 61, states unequivocally, “The Jews in the regions east of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line did indeed, by and large, greet the invading Soviet forces not as conquerors, but as liberators.” Newer research suggests more ambivalent responses. 19 See Bob Golan, A Long Way Home. The Story of a Jewish Youth, 1939–1949, ed. by Jacob Howland, with a preface by Bette Howland, Lanham, Md., 2005, 13–37. 10 See e. g. Mietek Sieradzki, By A Twist of History. The Three Lives of a Polish Jew, Introduction by Antony Polonsky, London 2002.

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the director of the orphanage in Tehran11 set up for the Jewish children who escaped Central Asia, succinctly stated, “The Soviet deportations were not planned to save Jewish lives. However, that is what transpired.”12 Jewish deportees labored in factories, mines, forests, or on collective farms; enduring hunger, disease, exhaustion, mistreatment, and sheer shock and bewilderment at their sudden uprooting into completely unfamiliar terrain and circumstances. Mostly urban Poles struggled to adapt to demanding and often dangerous work in an extreme climate, learning to fell trees at literally breakneck speed. Reports about relations between Christian and Jewish Poles vary, although the dominant tone is one of mutual mistrust and dislike, if not outright enmity.13 Conditions in the archipelago of urban and village settlements, collective and state farms, prisons and labor camps varied widely, not to say wildly, and it is especially the descriptions of the prison camps that use a language of incarceration more commonly associated with the Holocaust; people died, went crazy, became zombies (Russ. dachadyaga, the Soviet version of Muselmänner).14 However, in contrast to the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland, these conditions did not specifically or exceptionally affect Jews but, to one degree or another, all Poles, Jewish or not, and in many ways as war came, all inhabitants of the beleaguered Soviet Union.

Anders Army Spring 1941 brought the promise of more food, but then in June also the shock of war, and Molotov’s stunning radio announcement that the GermanSoviet Pact had collapsed and hostilities begun. The Polish government-inexile was not entirely opposed to a German action that would eventually lead 11 This article uses the most common current English spelling, “Tehran,” except when referring to or quoting sources where the Iranian capital is often written as “Teheran.” 12 Devora Omer, The Teheran Operation. The Rescue of Jewish Children from the Nazis. Based on the Biographical Sketches of David and Rachel Laor, trans. from the Hebrew by Riva Rubin, Washington, D. C., 1991, 59. The title speaks directly to the paradoxes of this history because strictly speaking, the children were rescued from terrible conditions in Soviet Central Asia and not from the Nazis. 13 Jolluck, Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile, 214 f., notes that 67 percent of Polish women’s testimonies gathered by the Polish government-in-exile have negative references to Jews. Her finding that women and children mainly populated the special camps because men had been more likely to be arrested, drafted, or able to evade deportation is not reflected in Jewish memoirs. Further research on gender is clearly necessary. 14 See the recollection of David Laor (former Lautenberg), cit. in: Omer, The Teheran Operation, 68. A more common transliteration is dokhodgiaga.

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to a weakened if ultimately victorious Soviet Union. Nonetheless, shortly after the German invasion, with the Soviets in dire need of Allied support and the Poles subject to British and American pressure from their seat in London, Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile agreed to an “amnesty” for all imprisoned Polish citizens. The 30 July Sikorski-Maiskii Agreement provided for two key developments: the formation of a Polish army under General Władysław Anders (just released from prison in Moscow) intended to eventually fight for the fatherland in the European theater and the release of Poles, Jewish and not, from the special camps. There followed another confusing chaotic migration, with freed deportees intently studying unfamiliar maps for potential destinations within certain permitted zones. Following “rumors of warm climates and abundance of fruits and other food products” or sometime simply an attractive sounding place name and the associations provided by a well-known novel with the enticing if dangerously misleading title Tashkent, City of Bread, the “amnestied” embarked on a rush south to what they imagined were better and safer conditions in the Central Asian republics.15 Huddled in and around train stations, forced to keep moving when denied entry to the overwhelmed Uzbek capital, the “amnestied” were greeted instead by widespread hunger, severe overcrowding and poverty, typhus, dysentery, and cholera, crime and despair. The general confusion and hardship were exacerbated by the upheaval of mass evacuations of Soviet citizens, Jewish and not, particularly the cultural, technocratic, and educational elite, away from the advancing front into Uzbekistan, a gargantuan undertaking later stigmatized in antisemitic terms as the “Tashkent Front” where “Avram speculated while Ivan fought.” After “liberation” from the horrors of the camps and special settlements came another catastrophic situation in Central Asia; in some ways conditions became even worse because now the former deportees were refugees without even the promise of bread for work. Central Asians were bewildered by, and often resentful and suspicious of, this sudden influx of Christian and Jewish “western” Soviet evacuees and 15 Quote from Susan T. Pettiss/Lynne Taylor, After the Shooting Stopped. The Story of an UNRRA Welfare Worker in Germany, 1945–1947, Victoria, B. C., 2004, 146, diary entries for 11 and 13 December 1945, recording intake interviews with Jewish “infiltrees” arriving in Munich after they fled antisemitism in the postwar Poland to which they had been repatriated. On the general topic of Soviet wartime evacuation to Central Asia, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station. Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, Ithaca, N. Y., 2009. Alexander Neverov’s 1923 novel Tashkent. City of Bread, referring to the famine of 1921, had been adapted into a popular children’s book and translated into Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and was especially well known among Jews. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (henceforth USHMM Archives), RG-75.002, contains 156,000 registration cards of Jewish refugees who arrived in Tashkent by February 1942.

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Polish refugees, sometimes however also astonishingly generous given their own poverty and deprivation. These close everyday encounters with strangers perceived as both “primitive” and “exotic” by “Westerners” (later themselves called “Asiatics”), in whose mud huts the refugees rented rooms, were mediated, it is important to add, in gendered ways that require much more research. Men were more likely to work the black market or in Soviet enterprises (or be drafted into the Red Army), while women engaged in negotiations over food, medical care, social mores, and housing.16 From 1941 to 1942 (and according to some records, into mid-1943), all Polish refugees, Jewish and not, were at least minimally supported by the London-based Polish government-in-exile, which in turn was dependent on its British host government and private donations, including from North America, for its funding. The government-in-exile maintained an official embassy in the temporary wartime Soviet capital Kuibyshev on the Russian/ Kazakh border (now Samara) as well as some 300 welfare offices throughout Central Asia.17 Thousands of Jews, often half-starved survivors of labor camps, still technically Polish citizens, flocked to the Anders Army recruiting stations in the Volga region and in Kuibyshev. Initially they were a virtual majority of potential recruits, between 40 and 60 percent. Most however were rejected; targets of antisemitic suspicion and branded as a potential “fifth column” for a later Stalinist takeover of Poland, they were subjected to humiliating inspections and tests, and insinuations that they were unreliable Polish patriots and certainly not good fighting material. Most Polish Jews were thereby excluded from the only escape route out of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the British, powerfully influential in the Polish exile seat in London, were also not eager to see large numbers of Jewish refugees cross 16 On wartime conditions in Tashkent, see Paul Stronski, Tashkent. Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966, Pittsburgh, Pa., 2010, esp. 72–144, who discusses the impact of evacuation and Sovietization but barely mentions Jews, much less the Polish Jews. The prize-winning 1962 Soviet-Uzbek film Ty ne Sirota (You Are Not an Orphan) directed by Shukhrat Abbasov during a “thaw” period, depicts in a tribute to cross-ethnic solidarity during the “Great Patriotic War” the semi-documentary story of an Uzbek peasant couple who take in a multinational group of fourteen orphans, notably including a Jewish boy who is presented as especially traumatized, while their own son is doing his duty at their front. See Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust. Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe, New Brunswick, N. J., 2013, 60–62. One kolkhoz, Phat Abad in Bukhara, managed by Uzbeks, is remembered as a particularly warm environment for Jewish children. 17 Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Digitized JDC Text Archive, New York Collection, 1933–1944, Folder #422, Memorandum titled The Position of the Polish Refugees in Russia, issued by Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 31 July 1942 (Digital item #448812), citing Polish Telegraphic Agency, 23 June 1942 report. See also Keith Sword, The Welfare of Polish-Jewish Refugees in the USSR, 1941–43. Relief Supplies and Their Distribution, in: Norman Davies/Antony Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939– 46, New York 1991, 145–160.

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the border into Iran and move into Iraq and then Palestine for further training, fearing exactly what did in fact transpire, that many of the Poles, Jewish recruits, once arrived at their goal in Palestine, would desert. Indeed, 3,000 out of at least 4,000 did exactly that, including the most prominent among them, Menachem Begin (although he apparently managed to secure official permission),18 a situation that worried the British struggling to keep order in their Mandate but did not seem to overly concern the Poles, who were just as happy to move on toward Italy without their Jewish comrades. Perhaps more than any other wartime experience, the recruitment process for the Anders Army inflamed tensions between Jewish Poles and the government-in-exile, although the Poles and Soviets managed to blame each other for limiting the number of Jews in the Anders Army, and it was the continually wavering Soviet commitment to support and materiel for the exile Army that ultimately forced its rather quick exit to Iran.19 Jewish representatives also accused the Polish authorities of allowing (or coercing) Jews to be granted Soviet citizenship at a dangerously fast rate, thus undermining their professions of loyalty and assuring that fewer Jews would ever be able to return to a liberated Poland. In a poignant indication of how the situation in Nazi-occupied Europe was (mis)understood by those isolated in the Soviet Union, Jewish Poles complained in 1942 that this policy represented “an easy way to get rid of a great number of Jews. This may create extremely great difficulties for these people when hundreds of thousands will want to return to their families after the war.”20

Iran Between mid-1942 and early 1943, the situation of Polish refugees, who already had to contend with hunger, epidemics, and housing shortages, as well as the death and separation of family members in an entirely alien 18 See Menachem Begin, White Nights. The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, New York 2014 (first publ. 1957). 19 For detailed discussion, see Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 124–209. 20 Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Digitized JDC Text Archive, New York Collection, 1933–1944, Folder #422, Memorandum titled The Position of the Polish Refugees in Russia, issued by Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 31 July 1942 (Digital item #448812), citing statement by Jewish Labor Committee and referring also to report received by Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report, 17 June 1942, on “Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Relief Distribution.” See also Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, esp. 114–156, on “Russia,” and Yosef Litvak, Jewish Refugees from Poland in the USSR, 1939–1946, in: Zvi Gitelman (ed.), Bitter Legacy. Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, Bloomington, Ind., 1997, 123–150.

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environment, became even more precarious, due to the worsening of relations – leading to a final breakdown in April 1943, after Stalin had rejected an investigation of the discovery of the Katyn graves – between the Soviet Union and the London-based anti-communist Polish government-in-exile. Jews, who had been aided, albeit in an often discriminatory fashion, along with all other Polish refugees, by their national representatives, were now utterly on their own in an exotic, unfamiliar, and volatile exile. In response to this new emergency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint, JDC), the major Jewish relief organization, established in the United States at the beginning of World War I, set up an operation headquartered in Tehran, which, together with the Jewish Agency and various landsmannschaftn of Polish Jews in Palestine, sent donated food and supplies to suffering relatives in Soviet Central Asia through the so-called “Persian Corridor.” The JDC first inaugurated a modest parcel service from Tehran into the Soviet Union starting in August 1942; not coincidentally just after the Anders Army arrived in Iran with over 100,000 Polish soldiers and civilians, perhaps 115,000 in all, starting with a first wave in March/April 1942, followed by another group at the end of August. Despite bitter protests from Jewish volunteers and organizations, only a very limited number of Jews, probably around 4,000 altogether, were able to join this exodus from Central Asia. They included somewhere between 700 to 1,000 children, who endured a nightmarish journey through Uzbekistan to the port city of Krasnovodesk in Turkmenistan on the shore of the Caspian Sea about 1,000 miles west of Tashkent, and then by ship to the Persian port of Pahlavi (now Bandar-e Anzali), or in some cases overland from Ashkabad to Mashad.21 In transit camps run by the Polish army, children, many of whom had been transferred from an orphanage in Samarkand, were subjected to their first showers with soap, medical inspections and immunizations. Others recorded much harsher experiences, with starving, ill, and terrified children left to sleep under tents in the blazing sun after a horrific sea voyage.

21 Reports on the numbers, composition, and timing of the Anders Army as it evacuated the Soviet Union into Iran vary. The most recent assessment estimates 113,000 people, including 6,000 till 7,000 Jewish civilians and soldiers – a significantly higher number than is usually cited; see Edele/Wardik, Saved by Stalin?, Table 4. The gender division among the Anders civilian evacuees is unclear; there were Polish nurses, including some Jewish women, serving directly with the Army. Despite efforts – confirmed in the US diplomatic files that I have so far examined – to evacuate at least 50,000 more children, Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzińska-Gross report in idem (eds.), War Through Children’s Eyes, xxii f., that 15,000 to 20,000 were transported to Iran. Even this figure highlights the small number of Jewish children, who have nonetheless been given the name “Teheran children.” Among multiple sources, see also the documentary The Children of Teheran by Yehuda Kaveh, David Tour and Dalia Guttmann (Israel, 2007).

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At the same time, Jewish Agency representatives or young delegates from Zionist youth movements tracked down Jewish children who had smuggled themselves into Polish transports and tried to convince wary youngsters that it was now safe to disclose their Jewish identity, perhaps to remove a crucifix that had facilitated the escape from Central Asia with Polish orphans. They moved on to transit camps outside of Tehran, in the shadow of Mount Demavend, passing through “a modern city […] a bustling modern metropolis appeared before our eyes, with brightly lit shops, noisy traffic, and crowded streets.”22 Remarkably, US State Department files reveal that the arrival of large numbers of Polish children in the camps near Tehran generated intense shock among American officials, for whom the condition of children entering from the Soviet Union apparently provided their first encounter with the extreme ravages of war and displacement. On 5 April 1942, in a letter that began by expressing condolences to the head of the American Red Cross whose wife had just died, the organization’s representative in Tehran wrote to his headquarters in Washington about a humanitarian crisis that he termed “this awful holocaust.” At a time when one would have expected Red Cross officials to be aware, for example, of the siege of Leningrad, if not the precise conditions in Nazi ghettos and camps, not to mention the general harshness of life during wartime in the colonial Middle East, Maurice Barber could not contain his panic about what he had already termed in his report to the Red Cross Director for the Middle East stationed in Cairo, “perhaps the greatest civilian emergency of the war.” “The sick children,” he wrote, “are haunting shadows – literally skin and bones”, and warned that the situation among the Poles in southern Russia was even more tragic. “They are,” he informed Washington, “dying by the thousands. Fifty percent of all Polish children in Russia have already perished from starvation, exposure and disease,” and concluded: “I did not mean to make this letter so long and please forgive me – but I have never in my life been more moved than I have been by the tragedy of these Polish refugees in Russia and now in Persia.”23

22 Golan, A Long Way Home, 92. 23 National Archives and Records Administration (henceforth NARA), State Department Refugee Files 840.48, Microfilm Box 1284, Roll 31. Maurice Barber (American Red Cross representative in Tehran) to Hon. Norman Davis (Chairman of the American Red Cross Headquarters), 5 April 1942. Transmitted with despatch no. 247, 12 April 1942, from the American Legation at Tehran, Iran. For an earlier – and frequently repeated – reference to “greatest civilian emergency,” see Maurice Barber to Ralph Bain (Director of the American Red Cross, Middle East). Transmitted with dispatch no. 239, 2 April 1942, from the American Legation at Tehran to Bain, Cairo.

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A young Zionist activist recruited as the Director of the Jewish Children’s Camp, set up on the grounds of a former Iranian military base outside Tehran, remembered his charges as “pale, gaunt and famished. They had a haunted expression in their eyes […]. They were like little battle-weary soldiers, exhausted by gunfire, expulsion, imprisonment, and wandering across Siberia’s endless forgotten wastelands to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other places whose names they had never heard until they were dragged through them like beasts in cattle trucks […].”24

These depictions of trauma, composed at the time and decades later, both foreshadowed and rehearsed the early sketches of liberated Holocaust survivors. The children, whether Jewish or not, stole and hoarded food and clothing and clung to each other, tormented by desperate promises made to their parents – which they had often not been able to keep – that they would take care of younger siblings. Visually as well, the photographs of the Polish and Polish Jewish refugee children taken before or shortly after their arrival in Iran are strikingly similar to the photographs we associate with Holocaust survivors.25 As similar as these depictions are and as terrible as the conditions of the Polish refugees seemed to American officials, Jewish activists complained that the Jewish refugees suffered particular hardship, left on their own or actively discriminated against by the representatives of the Polish Red Cross and the Polish government-in-exile. The children, who were housed in a separate tent camp adjacent to the Polish one, reported antisemitic taunts and much tension between the groups. On the other hand, in one of the paradoxes more familiar to us from the postwar DP camps, the Zionist promise provided a sense of futurity that the Polish children in Soviet exile did not have; as David Laor, the young camp director, saw it, the “Polish children were actually envious of the Zhids they tormented as the onion stinkers […]. They knew that the Jewish children would soon be on their way to Palestine, their homeland. Whereas they had left a defeated homeland and would soon be sent to another exile, never knowing when they would return home. This was a different, new encouraging feeling – Poles envying Jews.”26

Hoping to alleviate the critical situation of the Jewish children, Harry Viteles, a JDC emissary, traveled to Tehran from Jerusalem via Baghdad, in November and December 1942. His goal was to gather information about 24 Laor, cit. in Omer, The Teheran Operation, 144. Barely older than his charges, he had managed to use both Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement and Polish governmentin-exile connections to smuggle himself out of the Soviet Union. 25 See the photographs in ibid., and in Gross/Irena Grudzińska-Gross (eds.), War Through Children’s Eyes, xv f. 26 Laor, cit. in Omer, The Teheran Operation, 184.

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the situation in the Soviet Union from Jews in, or traveling with, the Anders Army, to organize a local JDC relief committee in Tehran, and to investigate increasing “general relief” for the much larger number of refugees in Central Asia. Viteles’ schedule was hectic; he spoke with diplomatic, military, and civil authorities of the American, British, and Polish exile governments; the American Red Cross, the Polish Red Cross, the Polish Delegation for Refugees, residents of the American and British and Iranian Jewish communities, and representatives of the Jewish Agency, emissaries of pre-state Palestine (the Yishuv), as well as numerous refugees from both Western and Eastern Europe. Some sources have estimated that there were as many as 450,000 refugees altogether in Iran during the war, most of them from the Soviet Union,27 although Viteles reported that fewer than 1,800 of some 26,000 Polish civilians, most of them housed in refugee camps, were officially registered as Jews. Viteles did note some Iranian resistance to this rather large group of refugees on their terrain, already basically occupied by the British and Soviets, observing that “the more religious and conservative section of the Iranian population was reported to be much concerned about the effect of the purported ‘idleness and gay life’ of the Polish refugees.” Moreover, the substantial local Jewish community itself seemed particularly anxious about “the increase of immorality among the young women” included in the small number of Jewish refugees, some 150 to 200, who had settled outside the camps in the Iranian capital itself. “About 20 Jewish ‘Bar Maids’ and ‘Waitresses,’ most of them from very good families,” seemed to support themselves in a quite disreputable manner. At the same time, however, the JDC representative stressed that, “thus far, there has been no direct criticism against Jewish refugees; the Iranians and others always refer to Polish refugees.”28 At least some of the small number of West and Central European Jewish refugees in Iran, most of them in Tehran, were drawn into working with the 27 See the ongoing research by Lior Sternfeld, University of Texas at Austin: esp. idem, Reclaiming Their Past. Writing Jewish History in Iran during the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Early Revolutionary Periods (1941–1989) (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Texas, Austin 2014). For a brief mention of the refugee crisis in wartime Iran, see idem, Jewish-Iranian Identities in the Pahlavi Era, in: International Jewish Middle East Studies 46 (2014), 602–605. 28 Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Digitized JDC Text Archive, Records of the New York Office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1933–1944, Folder #713, Harry Viteles, Confidential Report on Visit to Baghdad (2.XI to 9.XI 1942) and to Teheran (11.XI to 2.XII 1942), 31 December 1942 (Digital item #486793). The detailed report is 47 pages long; interestingly I have (so far) found no mention of Viteles’ visit in the US diplomatic files, which deal extensively with the crisis of the Polish refugees in Iran.

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“Teheran children.” The experience and activity of those refugee Jews who worked and lived in Tehran over a longer period, including on this relief project, certainly bears considerably more investigation. They too had lost their homes, livelihoods, professions, and contact with families left behind, with no sense of what future they might face. But they were also Europeans, oddly privileged, adventurers, in exotic colonial or semi-colonial non-Western societies. As described in a marvelous unpublished memoir by a female refugee physician from Munich, “We are all uprooted and put down in this utterly alien culture,” replete with “adventurers, spies, foreign agents” and the “wildest rumors.”29 At the same time, however, these German and Central European Jews, who generally had arrived in the 1930s, were often able to find first refuge and then work in the forcibly modernizing Iran of Reza Shah Pahlavi (and then in occupied Iran) as engineers, architects, construction managers, teachers, legal advisors, secretaries, and physicians. Wartime conditions for refugees in Iran were, moreover, relatively luxurious, with only some rationing. Their fortunate circumstances were highlighted by the dramatic arrival of the Polish orphans in hideous condition, whom refugee physicians helped to care for under the supervision of the chief medical officer assigned to the American Military Mission in Iran. Viteles for his part was particularly concerned with the “Jewish Children’s Camp,” where between seven and nine hundred youngsters (officially “orphans” but often children placed in orphanages by a desperate parent hoping to secure them a route out of the Soviet Union and eventually to Palestine) who had escaped with the Polish army were awaiting transit to Palestine. After multiple delays and diplomatic wrangles, particularly Iraq’s refusal to sanction a quicker overland journey, the children finally left Tehran on 3 January 1943, traveling by truck on terrifyingly serpentine roads to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Shapour. They then endured a miserable two-week sea journey, ducking mines and German submarines, to Karachi, where they spent two weeks in a camp, supported by wealthy Indian Baghdadi Jews and a mysterious (British) Indian Army officer who turned out to be a German Jew working as an undercover Haganah operative. Now outfitted with British colonial tropical helmets, the “Teheran children” boarded another ship, sailing through the Red Sea, past the port of Aden where they were not allowed to disembark due to British fears of Arab unrest, and on to Suez where, after having crossed the Red Sea, they were, in a partial resonant (but as far as I can tell so far, not articulated) re-enactment of the Exodus story, transferred to Egyptian trains which finally, after years of exile in

29 Marianne Leppmann (Hempel) (unpublished memoirs; with permission of the family).

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the Soviet Union and months of transit in the Middle East and South Asia carried them into Palestine. Some 1,230 children, adolescents, and accompanying adults arrived at yet another camp in Atlit near Haifa on 18 February 1943 – just as the ghettos in their homeland were being liquidated – to a warm but shocked welcome from Yishuv officials and Jewish soldiers: “The soldiers stood watching with tears in their eyes, looks of pity on their faces,” probably wondering, as the men of the Jewish Brigade did a couple of years later when they first encountered the camp survivors in the DP camps, whether these desperate wounded children could ever become the pioneers or the soldiers, the “human material,” that the Yishuv needed. As so often happens in this wartime story, the moment of relief also produced new anguish: “The children were suffering from the trauma of leaving the place they had lived for six months [Tehran] in comparative security […]. Another step further away from the families in Russia. Another journey into the unknown […].”30

Viteles in the meantime had grasped the central point that “the presence of eighteen hundred Jews in Teheran, 75 percent of whom are certificated for Palestine, is in itself not a serious problem.” The more critical issue was, as the JDC envoy urgently noted, “the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees still in Russia – whether they remain there or eventually are evacuated.” Tehran was already a center of wartime intrigue and operations by the time JDC activity moved into full gear. The British and Soviets had divided Iran into southern and northern occupation zones in August 1941 when the Allies invaded, causing some, as reported by one refugee memoirist “rather perfunctory fighting” in Tehran for three days but preempting any further flirtation with the Nazis by Reza Shah Pahlavi (whose “modernization” policies had benefited a small number of German Jewish refugees who were admitted as technical experts or academic advisers) and installing his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as titular leader.31 In late 1943, the city was of course the site of a conference at which Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt confirmed mutual war aims. Tehran became therefore the center of a major Jewish relief effort focused on shipping vital goods for consumption and trading to the much larger number of Jews trying to endure the war in the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the JDC recognized, as expressed in Viteles’ confidential report, that the success of the planned extensive relief effort emanating from Middle Eastern 30 Laor, cit. in: Omer, The Teheran Operation, 222 and 247. A second smaller group of 110 arrived on 28 August 1943. 31 On covert German activity in Iran after their expulsion in 1941, see Adrian O’Sullivan, Nazi Secret Warfare in Occupied Persia (Iran). The Failure of the German Intelligence Services, 1939–45, New York 2014.

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countries would depend on the JDC’s “not be[ing] suspected of Zionist or any political activities.” This position lead to ongoing conflicts with the Jewish Agency and ultimately would shift only in the aftermath of the Holocaust.32 “Thin indeed was the ice which we were skating on in wartime Iran,” wrote Marianne Leppmann, remarking on both the German threat and the more immediately threatening Russians, whose presence as occupiers was “felt to be something sinister and dangerous. Several people we knew failed to come home after an errand in the city and were never heard from again.” Yet, on the rare occasions when David Laor, the director of the Jewish Orphanage, was able to go into the city, usually to collect precious medications from a Persian Jewish pharmacist, he incredulously wandered the crowded streets, “gazing into the showcases of the many jewelry shops, where the jewelry glittered as though there were no war anywhere in the world.”33 The Iranian capital might have been the only place in the world where refugee Jews actually begged German diplomats to stamp “J”s in their passports in order to evade the rumored British round-up of German nationals as enemy aliens. Previously, even as the NSDAP had already established a local branch in 1933, followed by a Hitler Youth group and a Working Group of German Women Abroad, German mission officials had maintained extensive contacts with Jewish refugees in Tehran at least through the late 1930s. They routinely queried the Gestapo in the refugees’ hometowns as to whether there were objections to renewing any passports, including those of persons identified as Jude. Almost always, a letter, its bright red borders on thick paper still well preserved in stark contrast to the other disintegrating records in the mission’s Foreign Ministry files, arrived, assuring that there were no Bedenken (qualms) about another one year renewal. Only in 1940 did the Gestapo add the proviso that Jewish Germans must make no effort to ever re-enter Germany, on the danger of imprisonment.34 The British closed the German mission and ordered all German nationals detained in the summer of 1941; the men were transported to internment camps (called concentration camps by their inmates) in Palestine, India or even Australia, and the women and children sent back to Germany. German Jews, however, were given shelter for an entire week in the courtyard of the British 32 Viteles estimated two to three hundred thousand Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union, but the figures vary in virtually every report. All quotes and references from Viteles’ report, see fn. 28. 33 Leppmann (unpublished memoirs); Laor, cit. in: Omer, The Teheran Operation, 205. 34 Deutsche Gesandtschaft Teheran, Passport Division, Außenamt (Foreign Ministry) Files. Parcel 21, III 4, vol. 7–9 contains requests (mostly approved) for extensions of German passports for Teheran, through April 1939.

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Embassy, insuring that they would avoid being picked up by Iranian police who, it was said, were unlikely to be able to distinguish amongst Jewish and “Aryan” Germans. Those German passports renewed with a “J” were, as Dr. Leppmann remembered, “worth their weight in gold.”35 By 1942, Iran emerged as the center of a dramatic Allied confrontation with the ravages of war as the Polish refugees – several tens of thousands including women and children – poured in from the Soviet Union. They confronted American diplomats and Red Cross officials not only with a humanitarian disaster – which was eventually controlled – but with an even more complex geopolitical dilemma. The Americans, in a rehearsal of Cold War conflicts, had to navigate the competing demands of virulent Polish anticommunism, the US commitment to Lend Lease and support of the Soviet war effort, and British ambitions for semi-colonial control of Southern Iran. For all their sympathy with the plight of the refugees from Central Asia, State Department officials warned that Iran should not become a “dumping ground” for wartime refugees because it “occupies a most important place in the current Near Eastern picture, and this Department is anxious to do everything possible to maintain our relations with that country on a cordial basis.”36 Not coincidentally, given its multinational cosmopolitan military and civilian population and central position for Lend Lease and refugee relief efforts, Tehran also became the key site for arguably the most extensive and challenging Jewish relief and rescue mission during the Holocaust. Between July and November 1943, the JDC, cooperating somewhat uneasily with the Jewish Agency, both operating out of Tehran, worked out the details of what would become a lifeline to the several hundred thousand Polish Jews scattered throughout Central Asia. The JDC agreed to acquire supplies, some purchased and some donated from Lend Lease stocks, do major fundraising in the US, and run the parcel program for which it set up a central warehouse and virtually independent post office to avoid Iranian customs duties and inspections. The Jewish Agency undertook to raise smaller amounts of money from friends and relatives of the “Asiatics” in Palestine; the goal was to ship at least 5,000 parcels a month. Since the Soviets banned all aid shipments to “sectarian” groups, each c. ten-pound parcel, filled with everything from blankets to sugar and tea and soap and matzoh – both for immediate use and for black market barter – had to be addressed to individual recipients, their names laboriously gathered by refugees and Anders Army members now working out of Tehran and sometimes Jerusalem. It is not clear 35 Leppmann (unpublished memoirs). 36 NARA, 840.48, Film 1284, Roll 32, Department of State Records, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Draft for letter to American Red Cross in Tehran, 27 May 1942.

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how many of these painstakingly assembled parcels actually reached those who most needed them, but by 1944 some 10,000 packages a month were making their way on Red Army trucks from Tehran to the Iranian-Soviet border and then onwards via various routes for delivery throughout Central Asia.37 The JDC operation, multifaceted, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous, was spread across the Middle East. It had outposts in Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem, as well as in British India, where other European Jews survived, many of them as internees in camps for “enemy aliens.” Others, especially non-Axis nationality Polish Jews as well as the local Jewish community worked out of the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay. In 1944, the JRA counted 409 members and was cooperating with the JDC on the same relief “scheme” for Jewish refugees in Russia as well as a special fund for Polish Jewish refugees in transit.38 Rescue efforts were headquartered in Tehran with its small collection of German and Austrian Jewish refugees, thousands of Poles, and relatively easy access to Soviet Central Asia. Palestine was one node in this circuit – it was certainly not uninvolved – but it was only one, and not the main site. The process involved delicate negotiations with multiple parties, the Soviet Union, Iran, Great Britain, the United States, the Polish government-inexile, the Polish Red Cross, and various international Jewish aid groups, including the Joint, the Jewish Agency, the Yiddish socialist Bund and numerous smaller relief groups from Australia to South Africa, India, and London. These groups all had differing politics, about Zionism, about relations to Poles, as well as about the advisability of general aid to the USSR through the Soviet War Relief rather than a specifically Jewish operation. But they all shared the increasingly desperate goal of rescuing those European Jews who might still be saved – and most of those were struggling to survive in Soviet Central Asia.

37 Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Digitized JDC Text Archive, New York Collection, 1933–1944, Folder #425, Charles Passman, Statement on Relief Activities of the JDC for Refugees in the USSR, 31 May 1944 (Digital item #449408). See e. g. a postcard from April 1943 addressed to JDC Tehran, thanking (in pencil-scrawled Yiddish) the JDC for a shipment of matzoh (and surely more). Found in USHMM Archives. 38 Jewish Relief Association of Bombay, Annual Report 1944, Hans S. Grossmann papers, personal collection.

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Central Asia Indeed, it is from the testimonies of the “Teheran children” collected after they arrived in Palestine that we have some of the most harrowing descriptions of the desperate conditions Jewish refugees faced in Central Asia. “My father and mother got sick with typhus […]. They died on the same day. We cried all night and the next day buried them ourselves […]. There were no doctors because they had all been mobilized for the front […]. In Kazakhstan we all got sick with typhus, and after eleven days Mama died. My eldest brother, who was nineteen, also died […]. My father got sick with dysentery and after days died in the hospital. Only my brother and I remained out of the entire family […]. Seven of us left Poland. Three died of hunger and diseases. There were seven of us, and only my twelve-year old brother Abram and I remained […]. Of the fifteen people in our family exiled to Russia, six remained. It was the same in other families.”39

Unquestionably, many who had fled to the Soviet side of what had recently been Poland, and been initially reassured by Soviet promises that “we Jews are just as equal as everybody else” came eventually to see their wartime situation more darkly, as a passage from “Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell.”40 But most realized, “Better to have been deported […] as a capitalist and enemy of the people than to fall into the hands of the Nazis as a Jew. […] in the end we were alive. Our exile had saved our lives. Now we felt ourselves supremely lucky to have been deported to Siberia.”41

When confronted with the enormity of the German Final Solution, their difficult refuge in the Soviet Union appeared to some, as Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky note in an excellent first article on the subject of immediate postwar memory, as a kind of gan eydn (paradise).42 Memoirs recall utterly contradictory experiences: a parent dying of dysentery or typhus in an Uzbek mud hut or working the risky but necessary black 39 Henryk Grynberg, Children of Zion, trans. from the Polish by Jacqueline Mitchell, with an afterword by Israel Gutman, Evanston, Ill., 1997, 142 f. (first publ. in Polish 1994). The work “consists of fragments of interview records compiled in Palestine in 1943 by the Polish Centrum Informacji na Wschód [Eastern Center for Information] on the basis of the testimony of Jewish children evacuated from the Soviet Union to Palestine.” Ibid., ix. In a striking conflation, these reports are dedicated in equal fashion “To the memory of the fathers, mothers, and children whose bones marked the ways and stations of torture in the inhuman expanses of Eastern Europe, Siberia, and Central Asia.” Ibid., dedication page. They should be compared to the autobiographical statements by mostly (but not entirely) non-Jewish Polish children as collected by the Anders Army, published in Gross/ Grudzińska-Gross (eds.), War Through Children’s Eyes. 40 See Larry Wenig, From Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell, Hoboken, N. J., 2000, 72. 41 Esther Hautzig, The Endless Steppe. Growing Up in Siberia, New York 1968, 226. 42 Laura Jockusch/Tamar Lewinsky, Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24 (2010), no. 3, 373–399.

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market trade on the Lenin Streets of Central Asian cities, while children read Pushkin and Lenin in school. Young people, looking quite dapper and wellfed in group photographs, pursued violin lessons and language courses or even medical training with some of Moscow and Leningrad’s most gifted artists and leading academics in makeshift evacuated high schools and universities even as, in a frequently repeated phrase, others were “dying like flies.” Refugees cheered the progress of the Red Army while simultaneously condemning the NKVD and the pervasive corruption of the Soviet system. They recalled Uzbek suspicion of both Christian and Jewish “Westerners,” but also the sharing of Pilaf meals and wedding celebrations, afternoons spent in the local teahouses (Chaikhane) or even sightseeing at the grand mosques and mausoleums in Samarkand and Bukhara.43 Connections with local Bukhara Jews, while intermittent, also offered opportunities for Jewish wedding and circumcision rituals. Moreover, despite the fear engendered by the NKVD, the limits of Stalinist power in Central Asia and the sheer concentration of so many Jews in one area enabled the survival of significant Jewish cultural and political life, including informal networks of Zionist youth movement activists. With their expertise in forging papers and maintaining clandestine cohesion, “Asiatic” left-wing Hashomer Hatzair and Dror activists took on early leading roles in the Brichah (flight) networks that moved Jewish survivors out of postwar Poland toward areas in US-occupied Europe. In that sense, the Soviet Union played a key role not only as a preserver of Yiddish culture but as an incubator of the Zionism that later flourished in – and is so clearly associated with – the DP camps.44 “But we survived” is the refrain of the survivors who endured in the Soviet Union. It is a statement with a very different valence than the “we survived” of those who experienced Nazi occupation.

43 See Regina Kesler, Grit. A Pediatrician’s Odyssey from a Soviet Camp to Harvard, ed. by Michael G. Kesler, Bloomington, Ind., 2009, as well as the memoir of the man she would marry in Boston: Michael G. Kesler, Shards of War. Fleeing To and From Uzbekistan, Durham, Conn., 2010. On these very varied experiences see also the memoir by Miriam Finder Tasini, Where Are We Going, New York 2012. The photo collection of the USHMM contains remarkable (posed) photographs of well-dressed and fit-looking refugees. 44 On Hashomer Hatzair contacts in Uzbekistan, see Omer, The Teheran Operation; on the re-organization of Zionist movements, see Bauer, Flight and Rescue; and on the indispensable contribution of repatriates to DP cultural life, see Tamar Lewinsky, Displaced Poets. Jüdische Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 1945–1951, Göttingen 2008. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 121, even suggests that Polish Jewish refugees transferred Zionist ideas and movements back into the Soviet Union after 1939, a process that might well have borne fruit decades later in the Free Soviet Jewry movement.

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Postwar Era In July 1945, after the end of the European war in May, an agreement between the Soviet Union and the new Polish regime organized the repatriation of Polish citizens to what had become for Jews, a “vast graveyard.” Perhaps 200,000 refugees returned to Poland; earlier estimates speak of a total of 230,700 repatriates until 1949, while some recent research suggests lower numbers.45 Some of the first to arrive were soldiers in the pro-Communist Berling Army. Attached to the Red Army after the breakdown of relations between the Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet Union and the departure of the Anders Army, it fought with and followed the Soviets all the way to Berlin. Most Jews returned after long, circuitous, and arduous journeys between February and July 1946 – just as, not coincidentally, postwar antisemitic violence reached a climax with the pogrom in Kielce on 4 July. Others trickled back even later after their release from Soviet camps and prisons. When the trainloads of Jewish repatriates arrived in Łódź, Radom, Cracow, and Warsaw, the few survivors of ghettoes, camps, hiding, and partisan units “turned out to welcome the repatriates and gape. They came not to stare at rags and pinched faces – any Jew who survived the Nazis inside Poland was familiar enough with these things.” In a world where, among the 3.3 million Polish Jews “alive when Hitler invaded that land,” there were “hardly more than a hundred Jewish families [that still] stood intact,” they “came instead to gaze on walking miracles – whole Jewish families, complete with fathers, mothers and children!”46 Or as other repatriates recalled, “When the women saw our children they could not believe their eyes. They all said, ‘You still have children! Ours have all been killed by the Nazis.’” Often, despite their awareness of German atrocities on the Eastern Front, it

45 Yosef Litvak, Polish-Jewish Refugees Repatriated from the Soviet Union at the End of the Second World War and Afterwards, in: Davies/Polansky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, 227–239, estimates 230,700 repatriates until 1949, c. 54.5 percent male and 20.2 percent children up to 14. He also asserts that “between 85 and 90 % of all Polish refugees in the Soviet Union were repatriated.” Ibid., 234. For a different view, see Albert Kaganovitch, Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II, in: Yad Vashem Studies 38 (2010), no. 2, 85–121, and, idem, Stalin’s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26 (2012), no. 1, 59–94. Researchers in Russia and Israel, in cooperation with the USHMM, are currently trying to set up a data base of Soviet and non-Soviet Jewish refugees in the unoccupied Soviet Union. See also Vadim Dubson, Toward a Central Database of Evacuated Soviet Jews’ Names, for the Study of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories, in: ibid., 95–119. For lower estimates and careful discussion of the unclear statistics, see Edele/Warlik, Saved by Stalin? 46 The J.D.C. Digest 5 (1946), no. 5, 1.

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was at these border-crossings that the “Asiatics,” first came face to face with incontrovertible evidence of the “Final Solution,” rumors that had been hopefully discounted as Soviet propaganda.47 In Poland, the relatively large groups of Jews returning from the Soviet Union formed the core of a brief efflorescence of post-Shoah Yiddish culture in Łódź, or Stettin/Szczecin, and Breslau/Wrocław in the western “recovered territories” from which Germans had been expelled and where repatriates were often settled. Indeed, it is important to note that for some young Jews, liberated Poland in the early postwar years was not only a “graveyard” but a place for “temporary euphoria,” with “enthusiasm and support for an optimistic and future-oriented vision of the country,” including active Zionist youth movements, Hebrew and Yiddish schools, theater, music, film, and even a baby boom (with 500 newborns born in 1947 in the Jewish hospital in Łódź). The liminal Jewish revival both reflected what had been preserved in the Soviet Union and anticipated and helped to shape the vibrant Zionistdominated social and cultural life in the DP camps. The unexpectedly numerous presence of these repatriates – and not the tragically smaller numbers emerging from the camps, partisan encampments – served, however, not only as a catalyst for cultural and Zionist political life but also as a provocation for the postwar antisemitic violence which triggered the flight of Jewish survivors from Poland. By 1948, the Jewish experiment in postwar Poland was essentially over – a short-lived “life in transit” – having migrated to another transitional space, the DP camps of US-occupied Germany. Historians of the Holocaust and postwar Germany picked up the story of the “survivors” there, without, however, examining the experiences they brought with them.48

47 Edith Sekules, Surviving the Nazis, Exile, and Siberia, London/Portland, Oreg., 2000, 120. Yitzhak Erlichson remembered his return: “We began to grasp the whole horror. In Russia there had been people who said that the bad news coming out of Poland was a little exaggerated. In part we had been glad that the Russian radio was encouraging a hatred of the Nazis. And in part we had tried to calm ourselves, hoping that these were indeed exaggerations […]. But now the bloody spectacle lay before us.” Idem, My Four Years in Soviet Russia, translation and introduction by Maurice Wolfthal, Boston, Mass., 2013, 177 (first publ. in Yiddish, Paris 1953). 48 See Redlich, Life in Transit, esp. 31, 38, 42, 44, 65, and 75. On postwar pogroms and antisemitism, see esp. Jan T. Gross, Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation, New York 2006, and idem/Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Golden Harvest. Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust, New York 2012. For detailed (and mostly anguished reflections) on immediate postwar conditions, see the quickly published reports by Yiddish journalists who traveled to Poland from the US. See, for example, Samuel L. Schnayderman (Schneiderman), Between Fear and Hope, trans. from the Yiddish by Norbert Guterman, New York 1947, and Jacob Pat, Ashes and Fire, trans. by Leo Steinberg, New York 1947.

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Political and ideological as well as psychological factors, most importantly the pressures of the Cold War, the dominance of a unified narrative that subsumed all Jewish DPs under the rubric of the She’erit Hapleta, and the enduring sense among the “Asiatics” that their painful story was not worth telling in the face of the catastrophe that befallen those who been left behind, have shaped and distorted history and memory. The repatriates who arrived “home” in Poland starting in late 1945 became part of the undifferentiated collective of survivors, which was in many ways only invented after the war, first in Poland and then in the DP camps. Shocked by the devastation they confronted, a recognition made perhaps even more difficult to bear by the new knowledge that they had been the “lucky ones,” they accepted that role, especially as they found themselves forced to flee again. They joined the semi-organized but also panicked flight of Jewish survivors into occupied Germany and Austria, as stateless refugees, without papers or with false papers, carrying their children born in Uzbekistan or in transit, their backpacks containing the last of precious black market goods from the bazaars of Central Asia often tossed or stolen along the way. They crossed more borders from Poland through Czechoslovakia into Austria or through the Soviet zone into the American sector of Berlin. Seeking safety among the American victors, they moved now from East to West rather than West to East, hoping to emigrate further out of “cursed” Europe, to Palestine, the US, Canada or Australia. Members of the Historical Commissions set up in Poland or the DP centers to document and commemorate the Khurbn – as the DPs referred in Yiddish to the catastrophe that we generally name as the Holocaust or even more recently, the Shoah – who had themselves survived in the Soviet Union, mostly silenced their own experiences and recorded only the stories of the camps, the ghettos, and the partisans. Journalists and poets who published in the lively DP press focused on memoirs of persecution and resistance, Zionist politics, and everyday life of the displaced, but hardly ever on the struggle for survival in Siberia or Central Asia. Actors and actresses on DP camp stages donned striped pajamas and played victims in German camps even if they themselves had arrived as “infiltrees” from Poland after having survived in the Soviet Union. They suppressed their own traumatic stories in order to find a desperately needed home among a community of survivors. But the memories of camps, partisans, ghettoes, and hiding they performed or claimed were not their own, a circumstance which may partly explain the reluctant response of many survivors to the call to collect and record events that most of them had not experienced.49 And when Jews finally left the DP 49 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, New York 2012; Lewinsky, Displaced Poets; Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holo-

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camps and communities, would-be immigrants, especially to a reluctant US, and mindful of escalating Cold War tensions, they supported a thriving industry of false documents, backdating their entry into Germany or inventing new (later) birthdates for children to disguise their Soviet birthplace.50 At the same time, the early silence may very well have been not only the result of deliberate repression and privileging of the “direct survivor” story but also simply a reflection of the fact that unlike the exceptional stories of survival under the Nazis, the Soviet wartime story was so common that it did not warrant much mention; it was the “default” taken-for-granted backstory.51 Moreover, the desperate seeking of “normality,” where “What happened during the war seemed so unbelievable, so psychotic, that we had to suppress the events in order to maintain our sanity and start a normal life again,” may also have blocked much emphasis on divergent experiences.52

caust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957, New York/Cambridge, Conn., 2010, esp. 237. On the contested place of the Soviet experience in immediate postwar memory of the Khurbn, see Markus Nesselrodt, “I bled like you, brother, although I was a thousand miles away.” Postwar Yiddish Sources on the Experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet Exile during World War II, in: East European Jewish Affairs 46 (2016), no. 1, 47–67. 50 This strategic “lying” on DP intake cards or immigration applications may have also distorted our sense of how many Jews actually survived in the Soviet Union. For an example of a falsified birthdate, see Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons. Growing Up American after the Holocaust, New York 2004. Newly available ITS (International Tracing Service) records will facilitate necessary research. See also the stunning first and last Polish-Jewish film about the Holocaust, Undzere Kinder (1948/49), in which two Yiddish comedians come back to Lodz and stage “ghetto plays” which bear no resemblance to the actual conditions some in the audience endured. The subtext, unmarked but completely obvious at the time, is that the two actors, Shimon Dzigan and Yisroel Schumacher, famous and beloved performers in prewar Poland, had not experienced the Nazi occupation but returned from the Soviet Union in 1947 after years in Stalinist prison and labor camps. Indeed, the non-explicit and assumed status of the Soviet story may be quite typical. 51 This interpretation has been quite insistently suggested to me by several friends and colleagues who grew up in DP communities, as children of both camp and flight survivors. 52 Kesler, Grit, 107. See John Goldlust, A Different Silence. The Survival of More than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II as a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia, in: Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 21 (2012), no. 1, 13–60. See also Markus Nesselrodt’s brief piece, From Russian Winters to Munich Summers. DPs and the Story of Survival in the Soviet Union, in: Rebecca Boehling/Susanne Urban/René Bienert (eds.), Freilegungen. Displaced Persons, Leben im Transit. Überlebende zwischen Repatriierung, Rehabilitation und Neuanfang, Göttingen 2014, 190–198.

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Conclusion An overarching and often undifferentiated story of “the” Holocaust, its victims and survivors, has therefore effaced the highly ambiguous role of the Soviet Union as the site where – with critical if limited support from American Jewish aid organizations – the great majority of Jewish DPs had survived the war.53 Given such a “remapped” history, arguments about definitions of “survivors,” generally considered in terms of differences among prewar refugees and survivors of Nazi occupation, become even more vexed. In fact, if we exclude the “Asiatics,” the number of actual survivors (and their descendants) becomes dramatically smaller, with hard to imagine consequences for our by now well established rituals of commemoration, which if anything, are expanding rather than narrowing the range of those included. Today “survivors” are counted and identified collectively but we generally do not actually know the story of their wartime experience, nor have they been recognized as such when they apply as individuals for reparations. Indeed, anxiety about explicitly disaggregating that collective persists today, certainly but not only, in Germany. As the generation with any living memory of the Holocaust inexorably disappears, those committed to preserving memory fear that postwar German (and Allied) accusations positioning most Jewish DPs as refugees from Communism and not “genuine” victims of Nazism might be re-activated. If the majority of survivors had in fact experienced the more “normal” horrors of wartime rather than the particular catastrophe of genocide, then, this scenario suggests, German guilt is relativized and the unique nature of Jewish persecution during World War II obscured. At the same time, however, a precisely opposite conclusion might emerge: that understanding how very few “direct” survivors there really were and that much of the “saved remnant” had survived only because it had escaped Nazi control, only underscores the deadly sweep of the “Final Solution.” Polish and Polish Jewish testimonies about the Soviet experience reveal hauntingly similar traumas in strikingly similar language, but also point to crucial differences. Jews carried the additional burden of antisemitism expressed by both Soviets and fellow Poles, and in the aftermath of their Soviet exile, they, unlike non-Jewish Polish repatriates, confronted geno-

53 On the Joint’s determined efforts, see in general, Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky Digitized JDC Text Archive, New York Collection, 1933–1944. The 1943 appropriation for aid to refugees in the Soviet Russia totaled $ 1.275,000. See also Mikhail Mitsel, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Programs in the USSR, 1941–1948. A Complicated Partnership, in: Atina Grossmann/Linda Levi/Maud Mandel/ Avinoam Patt (eds.), JDC at 100, Detroit, Mich. (forthcoming 2017).

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cide, the virtually total annihilation of their prewar lives, homes, and families. What then is at stake, in terms of memory politics and history, if the complex and confusing story of the Polish Jews in the Soviet Union and its connections to Iran and even India is inscribed into the Holocaust Studies narrative (rather than for example being sequestered in Polish Jewish history or even Soviet Jewish history)? Polish and Polish Jewish experiences have been narrated separately; we need to know much more about their encounters in the Soviet camps and in Central Asia, and what their differing memories signaled after the war. In Poland certainly, the surprise repatriation of some 200,000 Jews from the Soviet Union further inflamed Polish resentment about putative Jewish collaboration with the unpopular Soviet occupation and Communist regime. In Germany, Jewish DPs rarely, if ever, shared the implacable anti-communism of Polish and Baltic DP “nations in exile.” We would confront more clearly the fraught slippage – in both contemporary and retrospective accounts – between descriptions of National Socialist and Soviet terror. We would have to consider the ways in which the language of a “concentration camp universe” is insistently present in accounts of Soviet internment and how reactions to encounters with the traumatized, emaciated “Teheran children” both anticipate and mirror depictions of Nazi camp survivors. Furthermore, the many pragmatic rather than vengeful “close encounters” among surviving Jews and defeated Germans appear in a different light when we acknowledge that for many Jewish DPs, their most recent, visceral experiences of persecution – as well as assistance – had been at the hands of Poles and Soviets rather than Nazis. The black market activities of DPs in postwar Germany, on the (in)famous Möhlstraße in Munich or the Hermannplatz in Berlin, perceived as exotic bazaars by Germans and Allies, read differently when understood not in the context of the extreme conditions of exchange in Nazi ghettos and camps or the traditions of the shtetl, but in relation to the barter and rationing systems that supported survival in Siberian labor camps and on Lenin Streets in Fergana, Frunze, or Bukhara. Restrictive postwar US immigration politics might look different when analyzed in the context not only of antisemitism and xenophobia, but of security-obsessed Cold War suspicions that immigrant Jewish DPs might harbor Communist sympathies. Jews knew, at the very latest at the moment they crossed the border into postwar Poland, that their survival was the result, if unintended, of Stalin’s policies. And despite their profoundly ambivalent memories of the Soviet Union, many survivors, Zionists, and international Jewish organizations such as the Joint or the World Jewish Congress, as well as early Israeli politics, did not share the intense anti-communism of the Western powers or the East European “nations in exile.” That ambivalent

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awareness, and not only bitterness about antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazis, may well have contributed to Jewish DPs’ political distance from other staunchly anti-communist Baltic and Polish DP groups with whom they shared space in occupied Germany.54 Their confounding tales of survival, of forced labor in Soviet camps and collective farms, hardship and exoticism in Central Asia, were – and are – difficult to integrate into a coherent narrative, into personal as well as public memory and mourning rituals. It is not an accident that numerous memoirs include maps, as if they might explain to their authors as well as others these unlikely journeys, tracing routes traversing Poland, the Soviet Union, Iran, India, Palestine, and Poland again, generally followed by renewed flight and displacement to American-occupied Germany (and Austria and Italy) and continued migration to the US, Israel, parts of the British Commonwealth in Australia, Canada, and South Africa, as well as to almost all other corners of the globe. Yet, if one actually takes into account the Nazi death machine and the near total devastation of East European Jewry, it stands to reason that the c. 250,000 survivors who consolidated themselves into the staunchly Zionist (in spirit if not in destination) She’erit Hapleta could not possibly have all emerged from hiding, passing on the “Aryan side” or partisan groups, or, as it were, walked out of Treblinka or other death camps where so many of the victims of liquidated ghettoes were murdered. Nonetheless, ongoing anxieties still govern a certain reluctance to expose this history, to explain that the “survivors,” certainly the Polish ones, had for the most part survived a more perhaps “normal” wartime experience of incarceration, flight, and desperate privation – with many deaths but no “Final Solution” and a chance at survival. In the face of the emerging Cold War, and in a survivor culture more and more dominated by Zionism, the majority of Jewish DPs, some in camps populated almost entirely by “infiltrees” from postwar Poland who had returned from the Soviet Union, needed to negotiate their own excruciatingly complicated encounters with Nazism, Stalinism and the “Orient.” Their trajectories remap and reconfigure the history of the Holocaust, rendering it transnational and multidirectional in new ways. They challenge us to understand the Holocaust, its victims and survivors, more deeply, comprehensively, and in comparative context.55

54 On general DP politics in postwar Germany, see Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, Ann Arbor, Mich., 2011. 55 On the concept of multidirectionality, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, Calif., 2009.

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Schwerpunkt “Jewish Questions” in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention

Herausgegeben von Markus Kirchhoff und Gil Rubin

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Introduction The history of the Jews has always been shaped by international, rather than by merely local developments, as was pointed out in 1940 by Jewish historian Salo W. Baron (1895–1989): “[I]t is true that as a permanent minority group scattered over a large part of the globe the Jews have of necessity been more sensitive to international developments than almost any other people. It is also particularly true that the Jewish question has always in a sense been an international question.”1

While Baron believed this insight held true for the entire span of Jewish history, he argued it was particularly important for an understanding of the history of the Jews in the modern period. The decline and collapse of Europe’s multiethnic empires, the creation of new nation-states, and the consolidation of new forms of international organization and protection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had underscored the extent to which the political status of the Jews correlated with international developments. In consequence, the efforts to protect Jewish rights beyond the framework of the nation-state became a central preoccupation of Jewish politics. The aim of this section, “‘Jewish Questions’ in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention,” is twofold. It seeks to point to the significance of the modern Jewish political experience for a number of key questions of international politics, such as international law and organization, transnational philanthropy, humanitarian diplomacy and intervention, minority rights, human rights, and collective claims. Furthermore, by focusing on the history of the diplomatic efforts of Jewish individuals and organizations to defend Jewish rights through the international system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it aims to enrich the growing writing of Jewish history in this field. In terms of periodization, the topic of this section encompasses the time of transition from the pre-modern to modern period and reaches far into the twentieth century. It is specifically concerned with a diasporic history. The 1

Salo W. Baron, Reflections on the Future of the Jews of Europe, in: Contemporary Jewish Record 3 (1940), no. 4, 355–369, here 369. The fact that this essay appeared in 1940, and the vague hope Baron uttered in it that even Nazi Germany with foreign territories under its control would eventually provide such an imperial setting for Jews, adds a peculiar note to this writing. Generally, as for its long-term dimension, Baron’s analysis seems fitting and is quoted here in this regard. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 101–108.

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foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 is a moment of utmost importance in this unfolding of history, and changed the meanings of the term “diaspora” considerably. Nevertheless, Jewish statehood in this context does not constitute an absolute caesura, but rather a new factor entering the picture – the history of the Jewish diasporas did not simply come to an end in 1948. Modern Jewish political history of the nineteenth up to the middle of the twentieth century was primarily bound to the conduct and fate of the states in which Jews lived. For a people living in dispersion, formally used to structures of autonomy in pre-modern contexts, the ascendance of the European nation-state system meant a challenge in many regards. Historically, Jews had been situated more within imperial contexts. Again Baron, in his writings on the history of the Jews’ changing political status, repeatedly emphasized these imperial settings: “[F]rom the inception of the Diaspora, down to the last century or two,” he wrote, the political status of the Jew had been governed “much more by the decrees of a Darius or a Caesar, by the enactments of a caliph or pope, or by the decisions of a universal council of all Western Christendom, than by the ever changing attitudes of their local rulers.”2 The consolidation of nation-states in the modern period challenged, in his view, the primacy of the international context over local and national developments as a determining factor in Jewish history. Still, in his own writings on the modern period, Baron emphasized the importance of the international context and the inter-relationships among Jewish communities to understanding the history of Jewish rights. His doctoral dissertation, published in 1920, examined Jewish efforts to secure legal equality at the 1814– 1815 Congress of Vienna, and he dedicated a large section of his magnum opus A Social and Religious History of the Jews (1937) to studying the impact of the international system on the Jews. The belief in the primacy of the international contexts for determining the political status of the Jews holds true for a number of Jewish scholars and political activists who devoted their work to an understanding of how the international system shaped the political status of the Jews and the struggle for Jewish rights. At the beginning of the twentieth century, emancipationoriented American and British Jewish scholars and societies took the lead. Cyrus Adler, working in conjunction with the American Jewish Historical Society and the American Jewish Committee, of which he was a founder, published his Jews in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States in 1906, a study which formed the basis for the later edition of these sources in 1945 under the title With Firmness in the Right. American Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840–1945 (editors: Cyrus Adler and Aaron M. Margalith). Max Kohler in 1916 presented the results of similar research in his study 2

Ibid.

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Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States. American Contributions toward Their Removal, with Particular Reference to the Congress of Berlin, and in his work on Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815) and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), published in 1919. At the same time in Britain the prominent British-Jewish diplomat and historian Lucien Wolf and the Jewish Historical Society of England presented, in view of the Paris Peace Conference, a compilation of documents on Jewish international diplomacy in the modern period, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question. These studies, which appeared up to the end of World War I, were mainly concerned with past developments in the nineteenth century. They dealt with such occurrences as the 1840 Damascus affair or international repercussions of persecution and pogroms. Their typical subject, however, were the great conferences and congresses as well as major diplomatic correspondence which addressed, or at least indirectly touched upon, Jewish concerns: the Congress of Vienna 1814–1815, the Conference of Paris 1856 concluding the Crimean War, the Congress of Berlin 1878, and the American-Russian correspondence about the discrimination against American-Jewish businessmen by the Russian government, leading in 1912/13 to the termination by the US-government of the decades old American-Russian trade agreement. These examples point to what might be called an empire of diplomacy – supranational structures at least between the Great Powers which formed the “European Concert.” From an American-Jewish perspective in these years, the United States seemingly became a corrective to the disintegration of this constellation, as the European powers were ever less inclined to concert their actions but cultivated their rivalry instead. The first American moment in this regard was the Hay Note of 1902 in which Secretary of State John Hay reminded the signatories of the Berlin Treaty of 1878 of their will at that time, and still ongoing obligation, to secure equal rights for the Jews of Romania. The interwar era constituted a period of renewed Jewish involvement in international politics and a new generation of Jewish authors concerned with the pressing issues of that time, including, most importantly, questions of minority protection, as well as the corresponding treaties and activities of the League of Nations. Contemporary Jewish authors of sourcebooks and studies on these matters typically understood their work as part of diaspora nationalism and/or Jewish-national Gegenwartsarbeit, especially devoted to the needs of Eastern European Jewries, the majority of Jewry at the time. Two of these protagonists, Leon Chasanowitsch and Leo Motzkin, published a documentation of sources, Die Judenfrage der Gegenwart, already in 1919. A leading American-Jewish advocate of diaspora nationalism at the time was Oscar Janowsky who, in 1933, published the authoritative study The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919).

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During World War II, the World Jewish Congress’ Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA), the American Jewish Committee’s Research Institute on Peace and Postwar Problems, and a number of scholars working on Jewish postwar planning conducted studies on the history of the Jewish fight for rights in the international system. Perhaps the most prominent study among them is Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?, written collaboratively by Jacob Robinson, Oscar Karbach, Max M. Laserson, Nehemiah Robinson, and Mark Vishniak, and published by the IJA in 1943 in New York. Several other studies on the international circumstances of the future of Jewish life after the Holocaust were produced by the IJA. In recent years, research has returned to engage with many of the same concerns that animated this group of internationalist Jewish scholars and activists. The reappearance of former spaces, contexts, and complexities secluded for decades due to the Cold War, or such “turns” in the humanities as the spatial turn or those towards empire and diaspora may be counted among the most important reasons for this. At the same time, there is once again considerable interest in a number of questions of international law. The ever-expanding list of literature on Jews and the modern international system is too long even to name here the most important titles and authors only, but a number of sub-areas of research may be discerned. From a chronological point of view, a first major set of research is devoted to all aspects of Jewish diplomacy – rights, migration, philanthropy, and education – in the nineteenth century, including important retrospects into more pre-modern contexts. A second sub-field then is the short and dramatic era of little more than two decades from the end of World War I up to World War II. A further area is that of developments between 1939 and 1948, years which witnessed the Holocaust as such, the phenomenon of Jewish displacement, and the foundation of the State of Israel, and, in that same year, also the United Nation’s Genocide Convention, initiated by Raphael Lemkin, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, authored in parts by René Cassin. The aftermath of these events, as mirrored not least in the persisting question of restitution, constitutes the last of these research fields. All these above-mentioned eras and areas are directly addressed or touched upon in the following nine contributions on “‘Jewish Questions’ in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention.” The articles derive from an international conference of the same title held at the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig in June 2014.3 Individual in their topic and 3

A conference report in German appeared in H-Soz-Kult: (19 December 2016). As organizers, we wish to thank our colleagues at the Simon Dubnow Institute as well as the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for their support. The conference and the publication of these articles also took place in

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approach, these articles seem conveniently interrelated to comprise, we hope, a volume in itself. In discussing certain forms and questions of modern international politics, it is, of course, useful to set these against earlier, pre-modern forms. As regards modern Jewish diplomacy, the phenomenon of shtadlanut, traditional intercession, provides an able starting point. Shtadlanut is the expression of an age-old Jewish political tradition, and part and parcel of communal autonomy and institutions. Numerous Jewish communities entertained a professional shtadlan for pleading issues of their communities with local, regional or imperial authorities and rulers. In his article From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881, Israel Bartal takes into view the three instances of the Yampol blood libel of 1756, the Damascus affair of 1840, and the pogroms of 1881/82 in the Southern provinces of the Russian Empire. Not only does this overview demonstrate the revolutionary transition of Jewish advocacy, which from the 1840s onwards made use of the press and involved Jewries of different countries across Europe. It also shows that, in Eastern Europe, modern Jewish diplomacy was able to bridge between adherents of otherwise opposing fractions, between the religiously most conservative and the most progressive secular-minded. Contemporary Jewish diplomacy, secular in nature, could nevertheless be considered a “sacred” duty, reminiscent of traditional intercession as probed generations earlier. Thus, Jewish diplomacy in the nineteenth century well transcended inner divisions, and contributed to the solidarity of Jewries in East and West. However, that picture differed considerably when it came to the relationship among Jewish elites in Western Europe. In the 1870s, German-Jewish leaders sought to join the efforts to protect Jewish rights, feeling particularly responsible for the rights of Romanian Jewry. This is the topic of Carsten L. Wilke’s article Competitive Advocacy. The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878. It shows how leadership was negotiated between French and German Jews, and points to the impact of nationalism and rivalry between the powers as reflected in their respective Jewries’ acting, or limitations of acting internationally. Thus, this formative phase of competitive Western Jewish political organization reflects problems of Jewish diplomacy in general. Apart from aligning initiatives with the policies of the given state, these challenges also included the question of legitimization, given the fact that these matters for long lay in the hands of nonelected elites. This picture also holds true for later decades. Turning to the interwar period and its new international order, David Engel’s essay The Elite and the conjunction with the work of the Academy Project “Encyclopedia of Jewish Cultures” of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig.

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Street. The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy examines the tension between Jewish elites and the popular opinion of the Jewish masses. The essay focuses on the Schwarzbard affair: In Paris, in 1926, Scholem Schwarzbard, a Ukrainian-born Jew, publicly assassinated the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, whose role in orchestrating the pogroms against Jews in Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of World War I remains a subject of vigorous historical debate, and caused a month-long international controversy – an affair. Taken to French court, Schwarzbard was finally acquitted. Engel shows how the reaction to the assassination and subsequent trial differed markedly between the Jewish press, which hailed Schwarzbard as a Jewish national hero, and Jewish diplomats, who feared the implications of the Schwarzbard affair for the future of Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Overall, Engel draws on this case to challenge the narrative of the democratization of Jewish politics after the war, and highlights the significant ways in which Jewish diplomatic leaders were at odds with their public and displayed many political characteristics traditionally associated with shtadlanut. Beyond internal misgivings, the Schwarzbard affair points to the core question of Jewish diplomacy in the interwar era: Lacking international recognition, by which means was it possible to safeguard Jewish security and rights? Naturally, many hopes centered on the League of Nations at Geneva to which supervision of the protection of minorities had been delegated. Most illuminating in this regard is Philipp Graf’s case study The Bernheim Petition 1933. Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period. While Germany was not a signatory of the series of minorities treaties imposed by the Great Powers on the new states of East Central Europe after World War I, it had signed a bilateral minorities treaty with Poland concerning the rights of Germans and Poles in the divided region of Silesia. In 1933, following the Nazi rise to power, the Comité des Délégations Juives petitioned the League of Nations based on this treaty to prevent the application of German anti-Jewish policies to Jews living in German Upper Silesia. In recovering the history of this petition and the successful efforts of Jewish diplomats to prevent the application of anti-Jewish measures to Jews at least in that region, Graf calls on historians to read this episode as a case of success that indicates some of the strengths of the interwar visions of minority rights, rather than undermine Jewish diplomacy in general as inconsequential in light of the subsequent extermination of European Jewry. The system of minority protection fell apart in the late 1930s. Nevertheless, Jewish leaders sought to use diplomatic methods to revive the idea of minority protection in Eastern Europe once again after World War II. Nathan Kurz’ paper In the Shadow of Versailles. Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946

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Paris Peace Conference offers a careful study of the last efforts of Jewish leaders to secure minority rights for Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the immediate postwar years. Focusing on the largely understudied 1946 Paris Conference, Kurz shows how these Jewish postwar efforts were met with an attitude of deep reluctance among the Great Powers. Far from being a major concern of international politics like in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, in 1946, Jewish demands as such were largely ignored, or just utilized by British, but also Romanian and Hungarian delegates within their differing agendas. For many Jewish leaders, the conference symbolized the end of a long tradition – beginning in the nineteenth century – of Jewish international activism for Jewish rights. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, Zionism had become a new and important element within Jewish diplomacy. Contrary to one-sided perception, the Zionist movement, in total, never just focused on achieving a separate Jewish state. Here, James Loeffler’s article “The Famous Trinity of 1917.” Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective offers a new reading of the history of an important tradition of Zionism in the interwar period – Zionist internationalism. Focusing on the career of the Lithuanianborn Jewish international lawyer Jacob Robinson, Loeffler shows how between the wars the mainstream of Zionist political thought was shaped by a dual commitment to both the protection of Jewish rights and autonomy in Eastern Europe, and to Jewish state-building in Palestine. Tracing Robinson’s activities in the postwar years, the paper also highlights the various ways in which the interwar tradition of Zionist internationalism remained active after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. After 1948, Robinson balanced his activities as an international lawyer on behalf of Jewish interests with a direct role in the foreign policy work of the new Israeli state. In all of its forms, Jewish diplomacy has been confronted with the basic structures and “regularities” of international politics. Especially due to an article published by Galician-born, Austrian-American Jewish international lawyer Leo Gross in 1948 on the tercentenary of the Peace of Westphalia, it is the “Westphalian system” of states which – in disciplines like international relations and international law – became regarded as the very foundation of international politics. In his paper The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern. Re-reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article, Markus Kirchhoff first traces episodes of Gross’ biography, who combined theory of law, mainly inspired by Hans Kelsen, with analyzing major structures of international organization. He then sets out, along several cases in point, to expressly consider “Westphalia” as a basic reality of the modern political condition of the Jews. Thus, this paper attempts to take into view international legal history and Jewish political history at the same time.

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As one of the consequences of the harsh realities of the “Westphalian system,” based on states pursuing their double, inner and outer sovereignty towards their own population and within the international arena, statelessness has become one of the signatures of the twentieth century’s catastrophic history. Taking the United Nation’s 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons as a starting point, Miriam Rürup dedicates her article to The Right to be Stateless. Dealing with Statelessness after the World War II. On the one hand, the article shows how statelessness became a phenomenon particularly inscribed into Jewish experience. On the other hand, it points out that the experience of statelessness may imply more than just victimhood. In the immediate post-war era, displaced persons found a “home” and shelter just due to their statelessness. Rürup further pursues this example in terms of voluntary statelessness as a perplexing option an individual may choose in certain circumstances. In view of the Holocaust, restitution as a measure of justice has become a chapter of Jewish diplomacy. Within this context, the concluding article of this section comes back to Nahum Goldmann as a figure embracing several layers of Jewish internationalism and diplomacy of the twentieth century at once. As the “stateman without state,” as he termed himself in his biography, he most prominently represents that tradition of Zionist internationalism which always remained most committed to the fate of the Diaspora. Having grown up in Germany from World War I onwards, the devoted Zionist Goldmann later on became president of the World Jewish Congress and of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany. His last, and long lasting effort to secure support for survivors of the Holocaust is portrayed by Carole Fink in her article Negotiating after Negotiations. Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund. It considers the negotiations between Goldmann and West German officials beginning in 1969 for reparations for thousands of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, who had been excluded from the 1952 Luxembourg agreement. These protracted negotiations resulted in the creation of the Hardship Fund in 1980 that provided payments far below what Goldmann had originally expected. The outcome here reflects the context of new West German economic and political attitudes toward the Jewish past in the 1970s.

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From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881

The Decline of the Formal Shtadlanim In the early modern period, in the Ashkenazi diaspora and the Sephardic and Oriental communities, shtadlanut – which can be translated as “intercession” or “intervention” – was a central and highly important instrument in the management of the relations of Jewish communities with non-Jewish systems of government and administration. The Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean Basin required the services of shtadlanim, whether those who were officially appointed and received their wages from the kahal treasury or from the budget of one of the regional or national councils (ve’adim), or those who were wealthy and influential members of the community and who enjoyed good relations with rulers, administration officials, and the nobility who owned the towns and villages in which the Jewish communities resided. The shtadlanim were chosen by the communities and councils for their proven experience in conducting relations with personages and institutions, for their mastery of the languages of the state, and for their rhetoric abilities. The letters of appointment of shtadlanim from the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, copies of which have been preserved in the minute books of the kingdom’s councils, demonstrate how vital this role was in maintaining the legal status and the economic interests of the kingdom’s communities.1 A significant portion of the formal shtadlan’s routine activities on behalf of the local community or council was dedicated to resolving none other than fiscal affairs: representing communities on issues relating to taxes, levies, and payment of debts. The formal shtadlan was also involved in the ratification of legal documents pertaining to the status of the communities. Alongside the permanent shtadlanim, the salaried employees of the Jewish 1

Israel Halpern (ed.), Pinkas va’ad arba’ araẓot. [Records of the Council of the Four Lands], rev. and ed. by Israel Bartal, Jerusalem [1990] (first publ. 1945), 311–313; Simon Dubnow (ed.), Pinkas ha-medinah o pinkas va’ad ha-kehilot ha-rashiyot bi-medinat Lita’. Koveẓ takanot u-fesakim mi-shenat 383 ad shenat 521 [Records of the Land or Records of the Main Community Council in Lithuania. A Collection of Regulations and Rules from Year (5)383 to Year (5)521 (1623 to 1761)], Berlin 1925, 301 f. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 109–130.

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corporation, occasionally external ones also operated. In times of distress, danger, and internal religious controversies that required the use of external forces, the communities and councils turned to ad hoc shtadlanim for assistance. These were well-connected people who used their financial relationships with the senior officials of different countries in order to achieve the goals of those who sent them.2 This was the case in the middle of the 1750s, when the highly influential financier, Baruch Yavan, operated as a shtadlan on behalf of the Council of the Four Lands – the central body of Jewish authority in Poland between the sixteenth and eighteenth century – in order to suppress the radical messianic movement led by Jacob Frank. Yavan, who was close to Heinrich von Brühl, the strong man at the court of King of Poland Augustus III and one of the most influential statesmen in the European continent in the middle of the eighteenth century, took advantage of his connections in the courts of Europe’s rulers in order to influence the policies of the Pope in Rome, the Royal Polish court, and the decision makers in Saint Petersburg.3 The institution of shtadlanut was an inseparable part of the sociopolitical fabric in European countries. The Jewish corporations, similar to other ethnic-religious corporations in early modern Europe, managed their affairs semi-autonomously and were not directly subordinate to the administration of the local, regional, or imperial authorities. In the absence of a unified central government, shtadlanut was a vital channel of communication between the corporation and the legal and taxation systems within which it was integrated. The methods of the shtadlanim on the eve of the modern era corresponded to a social-ethnic reality in which feudal components, the legacy of centuries past, were intermingled with the first characteristics of the centralist-absolutist state. The disappearance of the formal shtadlan was one of the clear signs of the sociopolitical change experienced by Jewish communities in the multi-ethnic empires, in the one hundred years stretching from the partition of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century to the 1881/82 pogroms in Russia. The abolition of the autonomous communities, the decline of the feudal-cor2

3

Israel Bartal, Politikah yehudit terom-modernit. “Va’ade ha-araẓot” be-Mizraḥ Eropah [Pre-Modern Jewish Politics. “Land Councils” in Eastern Europe], in: S. N. Eisenstadt/ Moshe Lissak (eds.), Ha-ẓiyonut veha-ḥazarah la-historiah. Ha’arakhah me-ḥadash [Zionism and the Return to History. A Reappraisal], Jerusalem 1999, 186–194; Scott Ury, The Shtadlan of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Noble Advocate or Unbridled Opportunist, in: Polin 15 (2002), 267–299; François Guesnet, Politik der Vormoderne. “Shtadlanut” am Vorabend der polnischen Teilungen, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow Instituts/ Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 235–255. Paweł Maciejko, Baruch Yavan and the Frankist Movement. Intercession in an Age of Upheaval, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005), 333–354.

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porate order in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, and the integration of the Jewish subjects in the administrative units of the centralist state fundamentally changed the channels of communication between the Jews and the authorities. However, while the role of the communal shtadlan became a thing of the past along with other positions in the pre-modern community, the need for the vital services provided by the holders of this position remained. As a collective entity, the Jews in the post-corporative era did not disappear from the ethnic-social map. In the absence of the kahal or the Councils, whose authorities were curtailed and eventually completely revoked, informal shtadlanut remained, operating voluntarily and also spreading to areas of influence that were unknown in the pre-modern environment. Furthermore, as the political-cultural divide between the Jewish communities on the eastern and southern fringes of Europe and their coreligionists in the industrializing west of the continent grew wider, “Western” Jewish philanthropists, statesmen, businessmen, and activists of modern organizations began to fill the roles of informal shtadlanut for the benefit of Jews in distress. In this period, at times of crisis, the Jewish communities in the East and South of Europe turned to the informal shtadlanim in Western and Central Europe for help. These new shtadlanim used their status in non-Jewish societies, their political connections or their business activities in order to aid the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin countries. The disappearance of the formal shtadlan from the political-diplomatic arena along with the abolition of Jewish autonomy and its replacement with voluntary activists who often operated on the initiative and with the funding of postcorporate Jewish organizations (some of them traditional in character, others clearly modern) occurred gradually and at a varying pace in each country. In the following, this article will examine the incarnations of shtadlanut at three points of time in which Jewish shtadlanut was applied on a transnational scale in response to grave crises. From one crisis to the other, it will be pointed out what continued, what changed, and what was new. The three crises all caused a stir among the Jewish diaspora at the time and generated a network of wide-ranging, connection-rich activities aimed at assisting the Jews in distress. Nevertheless, the world in which Elyakim Selig, the shtadlan of the Council of the Four Lands, operated in Western Europe during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was completely different from the German and English world in which major Jewish operators worked to alleviate the distress of Russian Empire Jews during the violent events of the “storms in the South” in 1881 and 1882.4 The political circumstances, the status of the Jewish communities, and the web of relationships between the Jews and 4

See Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, Philadelphia, Pa., 2005, 143–156.

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their environment had completely changed from the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The first point in time chosen was the blood libel that occurred in 1756 in Jampol (nowadays Ukrainian Yampil, Khmelnytskyi Oblast), a small town in western Ukraine, close to Krzemieniec (Kremenets), which at the time was in the south-east region of the Polish Kingdom. Following the libel, an emissary on behalf of the Council of the Four Lands of Poland – a Talmudic scholar named Elyakim Selig – embarked on a lengthy journey throughout the European continent. He headed to Rome in order to acquire from the Pope an official refutation of the accusation that the Jews use Christian blood to bake their Passover matzoth. Later the emissary traveled to Warsaw, where he, along with Rabbi Meir of Dubno, the parnas of the Council, went to the trouble of publishing the papal documents disproving this accusation. The Jampol blood libel and its legal and financial aftermath continued to reverberate in the Polish Kingdom during the final decades of its independent existence.5 The second point in time, that shall be stressed here, is the year 1840 which also involved a blood libel, namely, the accusation that the Jews of Damascus, Syria, murdered a Catholic priest for religious purposes. The Damascus affair generated a shared international front of statesmen, philanthropists, and Jewish public figures from Western countries that used their influence and connections for the benefit of their brethren in the Middle East. The effect of the Damascus affair on the rise of Western-modern Jewish organizations and the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism was still apparent decades after the affair itself petered out.6 To conclude the comparative discussion of Jewish shtadlanut, the wave of violent pogroms against Jews that erupted in the southern regions of the Russian Empire is the third point to mention. The pogroms that occurred between the spring of 1881 and the spring of 1882 brought about the establishment of a dense network of rabbis, statesmen, journalists, authors, and public figures that connected activists in Russia with Jewish people and organizations whose connections and influence extended beyond the borders of the Empire and continued to exist for years after the violent events subsided. The 1881/82 pogroms were a historic landmark in the annals of global Jewish immigration, as well as a highly significant date in the development 5

6

Halpern, Pinkas va’ad arba’ araẓot, 424–428, and 433 f.; Majer Bałaban, Le-toldot hatenu’ah ha-frankit [Toward a History of the Frankist Movement], 2 vols., Tel Aviv 1934– 1935, vol. 1, 127–133, vol. 2, 282–285 and 290–292; Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude. Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816, Philadelphia, Pa., 2011, 103–126. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair. “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840, Cambridge 1996, 432–445.

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of early Zionism and the beginning of the new Jewish settlement in Palestine.7 Throughout the comparative discussion of Jewish activity for the communities during the three crises of 1756, 1840, and 1881/82, the following questions should be addressed: 1. Did the activities of the previous type of shtadlanim, which operated in the early modern era, continue in the European states in the nineteenth century? 2. If such activity did take place, how could it continue to produce results at a time in which the system of government and administration that for centuries had enabled the success of the traditional method of shtadlanut no longer existed? 3. What were the new types of action taken by those who replaced the pre-modern shtadlanim? 4. What changes occurred in the non-traditional methods of operation, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the last decades of the nineteenth century?

Between “West” and “East”: Changing Networks The Jampol blood libel occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century in a town owned by a Polish noble family, in a kingdom in which the lives of the Jews proceeded according to the privilege formulated centuries before and reaffirmed from time to time. The historian Majer Bałaban (1877–1942) reconstructed the events of the libel as follows: “In Jampol, located in Volhyn district, close to Krzemieniec, the corpse of a wellknown drunk was found near the Horin River on the Christian Great Sabbath [Easter Sunday] that fell on the 4th day of the Jewish Passover in 1756. The monks jumped at that find, but the Jews preceded them and asked a recognized doctor to examine the corpse. It was clarified that the corpse didn’t have any wounds. The Jesuits decided to bury it far away from the city, but before they finished the burial there came a group of monks that took back the corpse to one of the churches in the town. […] Indeed, while on the way to the church the mob started claiming that the poor drunk’s corpse was full of bleeding wounds and blows. The Jews demanded again a doctor’s examination of the corpse, and with the report they stood in front of the judge in Krzemieniec. The judge didn’t believe the mob and the Jews of Jampol were released and the body returned for burial. But the mob in Jampol did not give up and immediately filed a request with the owner of the town, Michal Kazimierz Radziwiłł, concerning a second inquiry into the same matter. Radziwiłł accepted the request but again the judges acquitted the Jews. The Christians still did not give up and referred the matter to Bishop Wolowic who demanded a third trial from Radziwiłł, and when the latter attempted to refuse, the Bishop threatened him with the interdiction of the church. Radziwiłł gave in and gave permission for a third trial on the same charge, first appointing three noble 7

Idem, Prophecy and Politics. Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917, Cambridge 1981, 49–132.

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judges. These were replaced by three priests who were appointed by the bishop and the accused were tortured. No one admitted anything in spite of the fact that they were tortured with such cruelty that two of them fell down dead in the hands of the hangman.”8

One of the prominent community leaders, Rabbi Elyakim, son of Rabbi Asher Selig, succeeded, while risking his life, in escaping from the jail in Krzemieniec. He came before the Council of the Four Lands in tears to tell of the terrible things happening to him and his brethren. This was the beginning of a major shtadlanut project that brought Rabbi Elyakim to Rome. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the power of the central government (i. e. the king’s administration) in the districts was very weak, so that in practice, the semi-autonomous mechanisms of power of the high nobility directed the course of affairs. In many cases, the Jews of the “private towns” in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were almost completely cut off from the loose royal administration and were under the authority of the local noble in whose estate they resided. The power of the ultra-montane Catholic church was significant, and Polish bishops, themselves noblemen who enjoyed status and influence, were engaged in power struggles with the senior families of the nobility (even though at the same time they were part and parcel of the noble elite). In the decades preceding the Jampol libel, there was a significant increase in the number of cases in which Jews of the Commonwealth were accused of murder for ritual purposes, with senior church figures initiating and circulating these accusations throughout the kingdom.9 Jewish politics in premodern Poland, as reflected in Rabbi Elyakim Selig’s mission to Rome, was an organic part of the decentralized system of government, operating within it according to what was accepted practice, customary, and even anchored in the formal procedures of the constitutional monarchy, in which the feudalcorporate order was still in full force. The Jews of Jampol relied on the protection of the owner of the city, a powerful magnate from the Radziwiłł family. The owner of the town, who benefited from the economic activity of the Jewish residents, stood by them, while the Christian burghers attempted to hamper their Jewish rivals – as was the case throughout the centuries in every town, large or small, in the Kingdom of Poland – and cooperated with the bishop. The legal, binding document that the owner of the town and the Jews used to justify their demand for protection from the ritual murder libel was the privilegium, which guaranteed their rights. The danger to the wellbeing of the Jews in the event of libel charges came from the increasing power of the Church. 8 9

Bałaban, Le-toldot ha-tenu’ah ha-frankit, 105 f. Zenon Guldon/Jacek Wijaczka, Procesy o mordy rytualne w Polsce w XVI–XVIII wieku [The Trials of Ritual Murders in Poland in the 16th to 18th Centuries], Kielce 1995; Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 93–102.

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However, since the protection of one magnate or the other could not suffice in such cases, and since this was a widespread phenomenon that did not seem likely to disappear from the Polish-Catholic environment, the Jews attempted to deal with it by applying external pressure on the local Catholic Church. This was possible through the use of shtadlanut in the papal-ecclesiastical route, by approaching the Pope or at least his representatives in Warsaw and attempting to produce a binding papal document – a bulla – that would condemn the charges of ritual murder leveled against the Jews. Another possible route of shtadlanut was to use connections in the royal system to make it recognize the falsehood of the claim that Jews require blood in order to bake matzoth for Passover. And indeed, these were the two goals that should be achieved by Rabbi Elyakim Selig, the emissary empowered by the Council of the Four Lands, convening at the town of Starokonstantynów (Starokostiantyniv) adjacent to Jampol. A supra-communal corporate organization employed a shtadlan ad hoc in order to strengthen the effect of an old legal document and anchor it in the Catholic Church system as well as in the systems of the royal administration. The fact that the Jews of Poland turned to persons and institutions in Western Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century was not due to any type of recognition in the superiority of the enlightened, advanced, and well-organized world over the backward, benighted, chaotic Kingdom of Poland. Rome was chosen as a target of shtadlanut, since the center of power that had to be influenced resided there. The initiators of shtadlanut operations in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe employed people in the Western communities who maintaned connections with those in the corridors of power. Thus, for instance, the emissary Elyakim Selig approached rabbis and leaders in the communities of northern Italy and the southeast of France who had connections in the city of Rome and could enable him to operate in the papal court in the Vatican. As the representative of a Jewish corporation, he approached the leaders and activists of parallel Jewish corporations and employed through them means of shtadlanut that were well-worn and widely recognized in the prevailing political and social reality: apologetic discourse, gifts, and bribes. In the letters that the shtadlan addressed to organizations and figures in order to enlist support and funding, he spoke openly of the need to bribe secretaries, officials, and clergy. The traditional discourse of shtadlanut used by the emissary sent to Rome to battle the Christian blood libel repeated in various forms the play of words that linked money with blood (in Hebrew the same word, damim, signifies both blood and money).10

10 Halpern, Pinkas va’ad arba’ araẓot, 427.

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In sum, the mission to Rome and the intercession with the papal nuncio in Warsaw, which the sources show imposed huge costs, ultimately yielded a papal document declaring that there was no basis for accusing Jews of murder for ritual purposes. The document, which put an end to the wave of blood libels that had swept through the kingdom since the early eighteenth century, was issued in print and disseminated through Jewish initiatives.11 This episode, in which the Jewish supplicants made wise use of the internal differences within the Church, shows the nature of pre-modern Jewish political power. In the context of the noblemen’s republic that emerged in the early modern period, in which opposition to Jewish economic power developed and religious positions calling for the curtailment of Jewish-Christian contacts became more powerful, the agents of the Jewish corporate entity successfully harnessed to their cause various local and international agents, that curbed, time and again, the influence of Catholic religious extremism. In the eight decades that elapsed between the journey of the emissary of the Council of the Four Lands to Rome and the Damascus blood libel of 1840, the Jewish communities in Western and Central Europe experienced major legal, social, and cultural shifts, resulting in wide gaps between them and the Jews in the multi-ethnic empires in the eastern and southern fringes of the continent. The networks of relations between the communities of France, England, Holland, and Germany and the Jewish masses that lived in the territories of the Russian and Ottoman Empires also changed radically: they were affected, motivated, and conducted in the context of a discourse of “West” versus “East.” The social and cultural integration processes occurring in the modernizing states quickly wiped out the ethnic-religious, premodern corporation in the Western countries, along with their cultural and organizational characteristics. At the same time, among other changes, the position of formal shtadlan also disappeared from the political landscape of the West, and the modus operandi of the ad hoc shtadlan, if he could still be termed thus, changed as well. Jews began to integrate into the state administration and political life of their environment and to operate in political frameworks that were shared with other sectors of society. Alternate Jewish frameworks, some of which were established with the state’s recognition and others completely voluntary, began to represent in an unprecedented manner new types of Jewish collective identity. In the case of the involvement of Jewish figures in assisting their persecuted brethren in the Damascus affair, new methods were employed, demonstrating the Western character of Jewish politics, and a new discourse appeared, completely unfamiliar to those living in the time of 11 Documenta Judaeos in Polonia concernentia. Ad acta metrices Regni suscepta et ex iis fideliter iterum descripta et extradita, Warsaw 1763.

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the Jampol blood libel. The historian Jonathan Frankel defined this innovation, which distinguished the methods of the shtadlanut that were discussed above from the methods of Western Jewry, in the following terms: “Even though nobody had so intended it at first, the measures adopted in response to the ritual-murder charges, when added together, gradually took on the character of a full-scale political campaign. Long-familiar patterns of political behavior shaped many of the initiatives, but even more striking was the degree to which the Jews in certain countries – most notably France and England – were prepared to innovate. Direct appeals to public opinion, employing the language of contemporary civil discourse, and the methods appropriate to the time and place, came to be seen as of key importance. The traditional and the modern intermingled in the Jewish politics of the Damascus affair.”12

This was the state of affairs in Western Europe, while the collective status of the Jews at the eastern and southern fringes of the continent proceeded to change at a different pace. Indeed, there too changes occurred in the status and authority of the Jewish corporations, but the legal, social, and cultural outcomes of these changes were not the same. Close to one half of the Jews in the world lived in the Russian Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century, and there the Jewish corporations were abolished only at the midpoint of the century. Furthermore, even after abolition of the kahal in 1844, the system of estates continued to exist in the Empire, and to a great extent it preserved the old network of relations between the Jews and the Polish nobility, and expanded the relations with the imperial administration. In any case, in 1840 the autonomous, corporate community that had existed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued to operate, with the recognition of the Russian government and in coordination with it. Furthermore, Jewish voluntary organizations that were prominently conservative and had acted before the formal abolition of the kahal continued informally to fill many of the community’s traditional functions. Thus, the heads of the yeshivas and the Hasidic tzaddikim continued to take upon themselves shtadlanut roles throughout the nineteenth century. In several cases they cooperated with figures from the West, such as Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), in an attempt to influence the Tsarist government policies towards its subjects.13 12 Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 109. 13 Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics. Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia, New York 1989, 68–83; David Assaf/Israel Bartal, Shtadlanut ve-ortodoksiah. Ẓadikey Polin be-mifgash im hazmanim ha-hadashim [Shtadlanut and Orthodoxy. Tzaddikim in Poland in Encounter with the New Times], in: Israel Bartal/Rachel Elior/Chone Shmeruk (eds.), Ẓadikim ve-anshe ma’aseh. Meḥkarim be-ḥasidut Polin [Tzaddikim and Men of Action. Studies of Hasidim in Poland], Jerusalem 1994, 65–90; Marcin Wodziński, Hasidism, “Shtadlanut,” and Jew-

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There were also cases in which Hasidic leaders approached local maskilim and asked them to engage in shtadlanut. For the maskilim, shtadlanut was a mission, and they particularly excelled in authoring apologetic texts intended to protect the Jews from the accusations heaped upon them, including the libel regarding the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes. The Tzaddik Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin (1796–1850) used the good connections of the maskil Isaac Baer Levinsohn (Ribal; 1788–1860) with the Russian government and his mastery of several European languages in order to promote the writing and publication of an apologetic book called Efes Damim and to encourage its publication in various languages. The book begins as follows: “And these lords have already promised to give him [Ribal] money to pay for the translation to the languages of the nations and for printing […] and the renowned great pious Rabbi, R. Israel of Ruzhin, may his light shine, also has already sent some assistance and an honorable letter to this scholar regarding this matter.”14

The publication of the book, which was intended to serve the same purpose as the brochure printed in Warsaw by the parnas of the Council of the Four Lands almost eighty years earlier, demonstrates the change and continuity in the patterns of shtadlanut from the days of Elyakim Selig’s mission from Jampol to Rome, to the days of Hasidic-maskilic shtadlanut in the beginning of the reign of Tsar Nicholas I in Russia.15An obvious innovation is evident in the fact that a “native” maskil, who viewed himself as a kind of imperial agent and also as a spokesman for the ideas of Western enlightenment, cooperated with the representatives of traditional society – not because he was under their authority but out of a desire to “better” them. The use that the Hasidic tzaddik made of Ribal was a matter of necessity, solely for the purpose of protecting the common Jewish interest. It should be mentioned here that Ribal was related to Rabbi Elyakim, the emissary to Rome, and to Rabbi Meir of Dubno, the parnas of the Council of the Four Lands who printed the papal documents regarding the falsehood of the blood libels; documents that he used for the apologetic essay were passed within Ribal’s family (that lived in Krzemieniec, where the Jampol blood libel trial took place) from one generation to the next.16 This means ish Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. The Case of Isaac of Warka, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005), no. 2, 290–320. 14 Cit. in David Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut. R. Yisra’el me-ruz’in u-meḳomo be-toldot haḥasidut [The Regal Way. The Life and Times of R. Israel of Ruzhin], Jerusalem 1997, 288–290, quote 289; idem (ed.), The Regal Way. The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, Stanford, Calif., 2002, 198–202. See also idem, Untold Tales of the Hasidim. Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism, trans. from the Heb. by Dena Ordan, Waltham, Mass., et al. 2010, 22 f. 15 Ibid., 288–290. 16 Halpern, Pinkas va’ad arba’ araẓot, 438 f.

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that we have here a unique case of a shtadlanut dynasty whose members metamorphosed from the corporate-traditional type to the maskilic figure disseminating the spirit of the West in the regions of the East. One must also take note of the textual link that the Ribal’s essay created between the Jampol blood libel and the shtadlanut journey to Rome and the Damascus affair: the book Efes Damim was translated to English by Louis Loewe (1809– 1888), Sir Moses Montefiore’s secretary, as part of the public diplomacy campaign against the blood libel, and was published in 1841.17 Thus, the documents acquired by the emissary of the Council of the Four Lands of Poland on his journey in the middle of the eighteenth century served as material in the public struggle over the 1840 event in Damascus. Though not formally, Russian government officials in practice recognized the power and influence of the alternate organizations mentioned above that replaced to a great extent the role of the kahal in the large Jewish population living in the western provinces of the Empire. An influential Hasidic leader, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Shneerson, and the head of a major Lithuanian yeshiva, Rabbi Isaac of Volozhin, were invited to represent the Jewish population in discussions regarding the plans for a comprehensive reform initiated during the very same year in which the Damascus affair occurred. The result was the Kiselev reform that, among other things, led to the abolition of the kahal in Russia.18 In the Ottoman Empire, as well as in the provinces that had been separated from it, in the years prior to the Damascus affair (1831–1840) the Jewish religious group de facto was still a recognized organizational entity in the context of religious Muslim law. Alongside the Jews who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire and under the authority of the sharia court and Jewish communal judgment, there lived significant groups of Jews with foreign citizenship from European countries. These Jews enjoyed the protection of the consuls and were under the authority of the laws of countries such as England, France, Austria, or Prussia. The relations between the Jews who were subjects of the Empire and the local powers (tribal leaders, heads of elite families, etc.) on the one hand and the Sublime Porte in Constantinople on the other were conducted, until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, in the traditional manner of shtadlanut, and were based on the preservation of the laws of protection in the spirit of sharia and on gifts given to those

17 J. B. Levinsohn, Efes Damim. A Series of Conversations at Jerusalem between a Patriarch of the Greek Church and a Chief Rabbi of the Jews, Concerning the Malicious Charge against the Jews of Using Christian Blood, trans. from the Heb. by Louis Loewe, London 1841. 18 Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews. The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855, Philadelphia, Pa., 1983, 43–96.

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who provided protection. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Sephardi community in Jerusalem spent more than 50,000 piasters per annum on protection, bribes, gifts, and favors.19 Thus, in both the Russian and Ottoman Empires, political, social, and economic conditions prevailed in which the traditional type of shtadlanut could continue to exist. In the international Jewish operation conducted in 1840 for the Jews of Damascus, the two types of shtadlanut met and intermingled: shtadlanim who operated in the pre-modern manner were aided by figures from the West and were exposed to new methods and a discourse that was completely different from the one they were familiar with. One of the most prominent differences in the methods of shtadlanut between the Jampol libel and the Damascus affair was the open and direct manner in which Jews from Western states intervened. Furthermore, Jewish figures, including Sir Moses Montefiore from Britain20 and Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880) and Salomon Munk (1803–1867) from France, cooperated between themselves as subjects of European countries.21 They and their contacts understood the very fact that they were European subjects in terms of the superiority of the power and values of the West over the local Middle Eastern population in general and their co-religionists in need of aid in particular. In addition, the new type of shtadlanut cooperation between Jewish subjects of European powers reveals a clear post-corporate phenomenon: the emergence of a trans-national awareness of a Jewish identity of a new type – an identity that served as an alternative to the declining traditional connection in the era of emancipation. In a recent study about the relationships of the forerunner of national-religious Zionism, the Rabbi of Toruń in Pomerania, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), with the new Jewish philanthropy, the historian Asaf Yedidya defined this new identity as the following: “Jewish philanthropy and diplomacy in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, which were led by the ‘Benefactors and Notables of Israel’ [Jewish philanthropists from England, France and Germany], indeed were not nationalist or proto-nationalist in the Zionist sense; rather, they were emancipative. They were an alternate form of Jewish solidarity in the modern era, manifested in the realignment of social ties and

19 A detailed list of the sums paid to Muslim dignitaries, and local rural leaders was submitted to Sir Moses Montefiore in 1855. See Israel Bartal, Galut ba-areẓ. Yishuv EreẓYisra’el be-terem ẓiyonut. Koveẓ meḥkarim u-masot [Exile in the Homeland. The Jewish Community in Palestine before Zionism. A collection of Studies and Essays], Jerusalem 1994, 197–200. 20 On Montefiore’s shtadlanut, see: Israel Bartal, Moses Montefiore. Nationalist Before His Time, or Belated “Shtadlan?”, in: Studies in Zionism 11 (1990), no. 2, 111–125. 21 Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore. Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, Cambridge, Mass./ London 2010, 133–157.

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connections between Jewries in various countries, of relief activities and statesmanship and institutional structures. Philanthropy and diplomacy actually expressed the politicization of Jewish solidarity and a transitional stage between traditional shtadlanut and modern nationalism.” 22

The cooperation between Rabbi Kalischer and modern figures and institutions, while he interpreted them and their activities in traditional messianic terms, demonstrates very well the way in which the new Jewish politics meshed with traditional patterns and modern values. In April 1881, when the riots broke out in the southern provinces of the Russian Empire (the “storms in the south”), almost forty years had elapsed since the abolition of the kahal. On the face of it, several alternate, official organizations operated in Russia after 1844, engaging in tax collection and representation of the Jews as a collective, and doing so with the recognition of the government.23 In Russia appointed officials also operated who served as “state rabbis” (in Russian, kazenny ravin) and fulfilled different bureaucratic functions, such as registering births and deaths.24 Alongside these, and acting without official recognition, voluntary organizations with a collective identity continued to operate. These included charitable societies, the courts of the Hasidic tzaddikim, or (in Lithuania and Belarus) supra-communal yeshivas. In the middle of the nineteenth century, all of these functionaries, whether they operated on behalf of the government and with its recognition or without any official connection to the imperial bureaucracy, also assumed the role of shtadlanut. In addition, the activities of the ad hoc shtadlanim in Eastern Europe also continued the ways of Baruch Yavan and Elyakim Selig and used methods known to us from the time of the Jampol blood libel. These men were largescale entrepreneurs who were granted the right to settle in the inner provinces of the Empire, provided financial services to the Imperial government or to senior state officials, or else served as contractors for major economic projects that changed the Empire in the decades preceding the “southern storms.” One of the most prominent and influential people of this group was the founder of a Jewish dynasty of businessmen, Joseph (Evzel) Ginzburg (1812–1878), who made his fortune in leasing taxes on alcoholic beverages, and was rewarded in 1870 with the title of Baron. There were also cases of 22 Asaf Yedidya, From Rothschild to Cremieux. “Israel’s Notables” in the Thought and Activity of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (Heb.), in: Cathedra 155 (2015), 47–72, here 49. 23 Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917, Jerusalem 1981; Azriel Shochat, Ha-hanhagah be-kehilot Rusiah im bittul ha-“kahal” [Community Leadership in Russia after the Abolition of the “Kahal”], in: Zion 42 (1977), 143–223. 24 Idem, Mosad “ha-Rabanut mi-ta’am” be-Rusiah. Parashah be-ma’avak ha-tarbut ben ḥaredim le-ven maskilim [The “Crown Rabbinate” in Russia. A Chapter in the Cultural Struggle between Orthodox Jews and “Maskilim”], Haifa 1975.

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shtadlanut by Jewish figures from the West on behalf of the Jews of Russia. In 1844, a few years after he was involved in a shtadlanut campaign regarding the Damascus affair, Sir Moses Montefiore embarked on similar campaign in the court of Tsar Nicholas I. This was at the very same time in which the Empire began implementing a radical reform in the status of the Jews, including the abolition of the kahal.25 It was already noted that Hasidic leaders in Eastern Europe were in contact with the British philanthropist regarding his campaign before it began and while it was conducted, so that in this visit to Eastern Europe, local shtadlanut efforts of informal, voluntary organizations in Russia combined with those of a prominent representative of Western Jewish philanthropy. The entire range of types of aforementioned, informal shtadlanut that were employed in Eastern Europe after the abolition of the kahal – whether by persons and organizations in the Empire or by Western shtadlanim – appeared in a distinct manner following the onset of the wave of riots in the spring of 1881. Wealthy Jews from the capital Saint Petersburg met with representatives of communities from the Pale of Settlement and attempted to influence government policy toward the Jewish population. These efforts proved to be unsuccessful.26 The despair arising from the weak influence of the Saint Petersburg business elite evoked a variety of responses in the Jewish public throughout the Empire, and encouraged the emergence of alternative leadership groups, including those that were related to the first national societies of the Hibbat Ziyon movement.27 One of these responses generated an exceptionally large and comprehensive international shtadlanut initiative that entailed the cooperation of personages, organizations, and various factions throughout the Jewish diaspora, and that was maintained for months for the purpose of arousing world public opinion in Europe and North America in favor of the victims of the pogroms. The goal was to harness the support of public opinion in Western countries in order to convince influential figures to intervene with the governments in their countries, so that these would work diplomatically in Saint Petersburg and effect a change in Russian internal policy. A comprehensive media cam-

25 Green, Moses Montefiore, 174–198. 26 Ben-Zion Dinur, The Projects of Count Ignatiev to Solve the Jewish Question (Heb.), in: He-avar 10 (1963), 5–82; John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, Cambridge 2011. 27 Israel Klausner, Be-hit’orer am. Ha-aliyah ha-rishonah me-Rusiah [Awakening Nation. The First Aliyah from Russia], Jerusalem 1962; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 49–132; Israel Bartal, Geschichte der Juden im östlichen Europa 1772–1881, trans. from the English by Liliane Granierer, Göttingen 2010, 163–165 (Engl.: The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, trans. from the Heb. by Chaya Naor, Philadelphia, Pa., 2005; first publ. in Heb. 2002).

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paign, started about six months after the onset of the pogroms, brought about the appearance of news items concerning the pogroms in the British, American, German, French, Italian, and Dutch presses. This campaign involved a network that spread throughout the western districts of the Russian Empire and gathered testimony from the provinces in which the pogroms were occurring to smuggle it through the western border. It was operated by ultraorthodox activists from Lithuania, who struggled mightily against the Haskalah movement, along with radical maskilim and members of the Hibbat Ziyon movement, including prominent figures such as the socialist poet Judah Leib Levin (1844–1925) from Kiev and the Warsaw historian Saul Pinhas Rabinowitz (1845–1910). The members of this diverse group initiated the gathering of news from primary sources in the cities and towns in which the pogroms occurred, wrote them down and transferred this material to the city of Kaunas in Lithuania, to the confidants of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor (1817–1896), one of the leading Talmudic scholars of Eastern Europe. From there the material was smuggled across the Russian border to Germany, to the city of Memel in East Prussia. There, Rabbi Isaac Ruelf (1831–1902) translated and edited the testimony and disseminated it to a series of influential and well-connected correspondents in Central and Western Europe. The participants in this shtadlanut initiative worked to get these items published in the world press, at the same time also trying to influence the government in Russia to change its attitude toward the Jewish subjects. One of the high points of the operation was the publication of two large articles on 11 and 13 January 1882 in the London Times, that revealed in great detail what had occurred in Russia, but had been concealed and denied by official government representatives. Almost nine months after the first pogrom had occurred in the south of the Empire, public opinion in Britain received greatly influential information regarding the fate of Russia’s Jews. The articles were partly written in Hebrew and Yiddish by Jewish maskilim in Ukrainian towns, edited in Kaunas by Rabbi Spektor’s secretary, the indefatigable ultra-orthodox and anti-Zionist activist Jacob Halevi Lipschitz (1838–1921), and carried across the border by Spektor’s son, the merchant and later rabbi Zvi Hirsch Rabinowitz (1848–1910). There they were prepared for publication in German and then sent to England, where they were handed over to Lord Rothschild, translated from German to English, eventually finding their way to the prestigious London newspaper. In this media project, in which people from diverse social circles in Eastern and Western Europe worked together, one can identify pre-modern methods of shtadlanut alongside methods of the modern era. As they had already done decades ago, the traditional community in Eastern Europe cooperated once again with Jews who had undergone acculturation processes and strayed from the old way of life. As in the 1830s and 1840s, when rabbis

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and tzaddikim worked with Western-European philanthropists and local maskilim, in the 1880s the leaders of traditional circles agreed once again to engage in an alliance of shtadlanut with their modernist opponents, not because they identified with their worldview or supported their political opinions but, rather, due to their recognition of the fact that it was precisely the maskilim who could successfully execute the shtadlanut tasks.

“Old” and “New” Discourse in Jewish Politics The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem contain files regarding the first days of the Hibbat Zion movement, including dozens of the letters that were smuggled from Russia to Western Europe. These letters, written in Hebrew and Yiddish, some of which were camouflaged as texts dealing with halachic questions, bore the Hebrew code name heye im pifiyot (be with the mouths), a name borrowed from a piyyut in the High Holidays’ prayer book. The exact same code name was used by Jewish shtadlanim in Europe in prior centuries. The letter of appointment of Rabbi Nissan Ben Yehuda (Judowicki), the formal shtadlan of the Council of the Four Lands of Poland, from 1730 was signed with the salutation heye im pifiyot.28 A century later, in 1846, Rabbi Binyamin Diskin (1818–1898), the Rabbi of Łomża in Poland, prayed for the success of Sir Moses Montefiore’s mission as he passed through the town on his way to an interview with Tsar Nicholas I, and greeted him too with the salutation heye im pifiyot.29 At the time, Montefiore was travelling to Russia in an attempt to delay the decree ordering the deportation of the Jews from the regions near the western border of the Empire. The fact that Rabbi Spektor and the members of his new shtadlanut network used the old motto demonstrates that the people who initiated and executed the shtadlanut activities at the end of the nineteenth century were aware that they were continuing an age-old tradition practiced by their predecessors in the communities of Central and Eastern Europe. Heye im pifiyot is a prayer that is recited in Ashkenazi communities for the success of the prayer leader, and by implication also used to wish for the success of all those who act on behalf of Jews in distress. Nonetheless, despite the sense of the members of the heye im pifiyot network that they were a new link in the age-old chain of shtadlanut, they all understood very well that they were compelled to operate in a new field, and that the traditional methods of inter28 Halpern, Pinkas va’ad arba’ araẓot, 312. 29 Yom-Tov Lewinski (ed.), Sefer zikaron li-kehilat Lomzah [A Memorial Volume of the Jewish Community of Łomża], Tel Aviv 1952, 23.

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cession and the old discourse of shtadlanut would not suffice, if they would be at all effective. As in the days of the Damascus affair, the shtadlanim at the time of the pogroms in Russia aimed to influence the course of events by using modern Western media, i. e. the German, English, and French presses, to shape public opinion in order to pressure the governments and other decision makers. At the time of the affair, much use was made of undermining the image of Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, who was considered a progressive leader engaged in Western-style reforms. His position toward the Jews, it was claimed, was decisive proof that he was not worthy of being considered “Western”: “[The] extreme disgrace which the barbarous enormities perpetrated at [Damascus] reflect upon his administration […] and […] the astonishment which Europe will feel at finding that under the ruler of the chief who has prided himself upon promoting civilization […] atrocities such as these not [as] acts of an ignorant rabble […] but [as] the deliberate exercise of power by the pasha to whom the […] city of Damascus has been entrusted.”30

The struggle to gain the favor of public opinion and not just the support or sympathy of government officials, nobility, or influential figures in the ecclesial hierarchy was important in the view of the new diplomats at the time of the Damascus affair. They understood very well the political power and public effect of news items published in the press and wished to enlist the press to shape the image of the Jews. They strove to connect the Jewish issue with the discourse of enlightenment and emancipation. At the time of the Damascus affair, Adolphe Crémieux, one of the prominent figures in the new Jewish diplomacy, wrote explicitly about the harm that could be caused by a hostile press publishing false news items to the desired link between what is good for the Jews and the ideas of progress: “Is it really true that in France, in Paris, those newspapers which are the most devoted to the ideas of progress and liberation (no less than those whose political and religious ideas lag farthest behind our times) have accepted the absurd and monstrous stories emanating from Alexandria and Beirut about the murder of Father Thomas and his servant? And that they have done so without challenge and in deplorable haste? Is it possible? Can it be that in 1840 this despicable calumny born in the infamous prejudices of medieval Christianity is not rejected in disgust but is being repeated? Can it be that true-believing Jews are described as feeding, during their Passover, upon the blood of Christians whom, as a sacred duty, they kill with their own hands?”31

30 The National Archives, Public Record Office, FO 78/403, no. 9, Palmerston to Hodges, 5 May, 116 f., cit. in: Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 128. 31 Archive israélite de France, Nouvelles: Sur le Serment “More Judaico,” 78, cit. in: ibid., 112, fn. 5.

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About forty years later, the members of the heye im pifiyot network strove to use the press in order to create a public opinion in the West sympathetic to the Jewish issue in Russia, which would help to influence England, Germany, and other countries put diplomatic pressure on the Russian government to improve its attitude toward the Jewish subjects. The central position that public opinion assumed in the heye im pifiyot project can be deduced from the following words written in Kaunas in the autumn of 1881 and sent as a rabbinic response titled Nahal Yitzhak (Isaac’s Brook) to Dr. Asher Asher (1837–1888) in London: “A. The advice of our Father Jacob assisted our people greatly every time the people of Jacob were in distress [meaning, giving bribery]. B. To arouse the press all over Europe to protest the evil thoughts and deeds of the government and to yell bloody murder about its evil deeds and abominations, and to arouse the publishers of the big and famous journals in Europe, such as the ‘Times’ and ‘Standard’ and the like and their exalted writers to speak out incessantly and yell bloody murder about the wicked government, and to expose the deceit of the ministers and their intentions regarding the goal of their attack on the Jews, to give the unruly nation something to do, to encourage thievery and sate them with the blood of the Jews, to devastate, stun, and destroy them – so that they will forget about the government and leave it be.”32

While intending to use bribery in order to change government policy toward the Jews – a true and tried instrument in Eastern Europe and in this case aimed particularly at the Russian Minister of the Interior, Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev (1832–1908) – an all-European media campaign had been discussed. In Kaunas they were well aware of the tremendous power of public opinion in the West. As a result, they adopted the Western discourse, even though it did not always correspond to their own views and opinions. Thus, Rabbi Spektor’s confidants chose to present Russia to the readers in England and Germany as a country that remained outside the camp of enlightenment and progress: “In this situation we are close to four million Jews in our country […] but here today our distress is as large as the ocean and who will succor us, when we are imprisoned here by monsters and forced to accept our tribulations with love and justify the sentence of the cruel and savage, whose malice and cruelty and abominations are a thousand times greater than the malice of Romania, Persia, and Morocco. Everything that the evil savages have perpetrated in the southern regions of our country, evil deeds the likes of which have not been seen in the entire world, not even in Asia and Africa, but rather only in the history books of the Middle Ages. […] [In] the Middle Ages only the mischief of the mob and the jealousy of the benighted caused riots, but the governments 32 Jacob Halevi Lipschitz, Zikhron Ya’akov. Historiyah Yehudit be-Russya u-Polin shenot 520–656, 1760–1896 [Zichron Ya’akov. Jewish History in Russia and Poland, 1760–1896], 3 vols., Kaunas 1924–1930, here vol. 3, Kaunas 1930, 25.

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themselves shielded the Jews, and when the mischief of the mob multiplied, the government itself rose up and devastated it. Not so today, in our country. The very government itself incited the mischief of the mob against us and even now it will incite and lure the mob also to destroy and ruin our people […].”33

In another place the letter from Kaunas explicitly refers to the Western discourse of human rights, a discourse that was at one and the same time enlightened and colonial: “The rights to life, to make a living and participate in the economy that the government desires to deprive of the Jews, to the point that doing so will force four million people in Russia into starvation […] what is the cause of this? Surely no more than the wickedness of the conduct of the government itself! European civilization has taught the rules of life and the true law to give freedom and justice to those entire created in God’s image, and only through freedom and its rights have the savage peoples also learned justice and the righteous path. Yet the government of Russia, which boasts of its enlightenment, has chosen to instruct the people of Israel in the ways of the cruel governments of ancient times […].”34

The representation of Russia as a non-European political entity, which does not recognize even the most basic human rights, allowed the Eastern European orthodox group to connect with the Western discourse and even present itself as a partner in a Western front shared by Jewish organizations with a clear modern character and prominent statesmen and clergy in Britain. As the author of the Nahal Yitzhak pamphlet wrote: “To swiftly arouse the heads of the ‘Board of Deputies’ and the ‘Anglo-Jewish Association’ in London and other societies in Vienna, Berlin, and Rome […] anyone who can aid us and rescue us from our dire straits to do as follows: To act upon all the exalted publishers and writers, all the famous people in the enlightened countries, the honest and honorable Christians, so that they come out with strident articles that will fight the fight of our people and expose the deceitful plots of the [Russian] ministers, but not as representatives of the Jews, since then the value would be lost and no benefit will be gained of course.”35

Unsurprisingly, the Jewish media activity in 1881 and 1882 fed the negative antisemitic image of the Jews as rulers of the world media. A fascinating affair, reminiscent of what happened in the media arena in the 1840s, relates to an initiative of the leading British newspaper The Daily News that, in full cooperation with the Russian embassy in London, aimed to refute an item published in the Times regarding the violent acts against the Jews. A special correspondent was sent to the cities and towns in which the pogroms had occurred to check the accuracy of the reports about Jewish women being raped by the rioters. His argument, enthusiastically supported by Russian 33 Ibid., 22 f. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 Ibid., 26.

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government officials, was that the Jews had greatly exaggerated the events and purposely damaged the image of Russia as a civilized country. The members of the Kaunas circle, for their part, did not sit on their hands, and acted locally and internationally to subvert the credibility of the reporter. In the secret letters, the reporter was granted the code name dayenu (Heb., “it would have been enough for us”) taken from a popular song in the Passover Haggadah. While the widespread, modern media initiative proceeded, the members of the heye im pifiyot network also operated in methods more similar to those applied in the middle of the eighteenth century by Baruch Yavan and the emissary of the Council of the Four Lands, Rabbi Elyakim Selig of Yampol. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), one of the foremost leaders of German neo-orthodoxy, who was also a member of the heye im pifiyot network, received material about the pogroms and Russian government policy from the center in Kaunas. Hirsch, who served as a rabbi in Frankfurt am Main, used his contacts with a certain noble German house that had marital ties with the Russian royal family in order to influence the family of Tsar Alexander III to stop the wave of pogroms. A similar activity was conducted in Denmark as well, with the participation of Rabbi Isaac Ruelf of Memel (1831–1902) and Rabbi Abraham Alexander Wolf from Copenhagen (1801–1891). Here too, the goal was to take advantage of the marital ties between the royal Danish family and the House of Romanov.36 One may note a clear difference between shtadlanut in the royal courts and among the nobility in the middle of the eighteenth century and similar interventions a century later. While in the former, the activists were communal wheelers, dealers and secular leaders, most of the activists in the latter were rabbis. This difference clearly reflects what happened in Europe following the decline of communal autonomy: the rise of rabbis in the leadership status in the post-corporate Jewish society. Thus, the rabbis in the postcorporate era joined the corps of voluntary diplomats. There was also a difference in the discourse: the rabbis in Germany and Denmark who interceded for the Jews of Russia approached the relatives of the Russian Tsar, believing that they were facing a new breed of rulers, one that supports the ideas of enlightenment and progress. Thus, for instance, Rabbi Adolf Jellinek of Vienna (1821–1893) believed that Princess Dagmar, daughter of the Danish king and spouse of Tsar Alexander III, who grew up in an atmosphere of liberty with a father who was considered one of the more liberal princes in Europe, would not agree to the policy of the Russian government and would protect her Jewish subjects.37 36 Israel Halpern, Yehudim ve-yahadut be-mizraḥ Eropah. Meḥkarim be-toldotehem [Jews and Judaism in Eastern Europe. Historical Studies], Jerusalem 1968, 357–370. 37 Ibid., 357.

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Conclusion: What Changed? The comparison between the three cases dealt with in this essay in 1756, 1840, and 1881/1882 leads to the conclusion that in the years that elapsed between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), a new, unprecedented type of Jewish diplomatic activity emerged and developed in Europe and North America. The new Jewish diplomacy that was employed for the benefit of Jewish communities in distress was clearly a product of the processes of emancipation, acculturation, and integration that gradually expanded from the Atlantic coast eastward and southward, reshaping the Jewish communities in Western and Central European countries. A type of “new (Westernized) Jew” appeared, who felt at home in his European or North American country, took an active part in economic life and political activity, enlisted to aid Jewish communities on the eastern and southern fringes of Europe, and in many cases filled the role of the old type of shtadlan. Ostensibly, the goals of this Western Jew were similar to those of the shtadlan of the corporate-era. Like the representatives of the bygone autonomous community, the new diplomat applied pressure on the government to gain relief for the distressed Jewish subjects; he demanded and initiated protection from damage to life and property, intervened in order to delay the publication of anti-Jewish writings, applied pressure to annul laws and canceled changes in the status of the Jews, initiated improvements in economic conditions, and attempted to gain freedom of movement and permission to emigrate for his brethren in need. However, unlike the traditional type of shtadlan, the new Jewish diplomat began to use a discourse that was unprecedented in pre-modern Jewish society: The discourse of patronage and protection of subjects changed to a civil rights in the spirit of post-1789 emancipation. This was a Western-liberal approach that demanded the application of concepts such as “civilization,” “progress,” and “enlightenment” – instead of the age-old apologetic arguments focusing on the benefits to the ruler and on preserving the corporate status of the Jewish subjects. Furthermore, the Jewish native in the Russian and Ottoman Empires was presented in the new diplomatic discourse as a human being with equal rights and duties, who eventually would gain civil equality as did his co-religionists in France, England, or Germany. Shtadlanut for the “non-European” brethren in the modern era was part of a package deal in which the Ostjuden in Russia and the Oriental Jews in the Ottoman Empire were supposed to amend their ways and become like their supporters from the West. The new diplomacy was run by members of the new Jewish elites and in time was channeled toward cooperation with the new Jewish philanthropic

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organizations that operated on the eastern and southern fringes of Europe, with the local Jewish elites, and also with activists that identified themselves with the new trends that had seeped in from the West and changed the shtadlanut discourse. As civil society in European countries expanded and the mass media networks became stronger (beginning from the 1830s, the Jewish press also experienced a quantum leap in geographic distribution and scope), the agents and recipients of the new shtadlanut increasingly recognized the importance of public opinion and the vital role of mass dissemination of information. A significant portion of the new Jewish diplomacy was meant to be executed in public and find its way into the pages of Europe’s newspapers. Furthermore, essays in newspapers or public meetings were meant to influence decision makers, and at times replaced the secret interview or the sealed letters. The “medium” and the “message” became so intertwined that in 1881, an orthodox Lithuanian rabbi despaired of changing the policy of the Russian government using the old shtadlanut methods, and took part in a media operation in the heart of the West and even adopted the discourse of enlightenment and emancipation. Nevertheless, the traditional methods of shtadlanut continued and the previous discourse also did not disappear completely. As we have shown, this continuity was due to the ongoing need for pre-modern channels of communication in the various parts of the Jewish diaspora, even after the demise of the corporations, owing to the varying pace of social processes, which actually greatly increased in the nineteenth century. Another reason was the continued existence of dynasties in the Jewish elite that were involved in shtadlanut at least from the middle of the eighteenth and up to the end of the nineteenth century (such as the Rothschild family) and that were part of a network of connections that crossed borders and linked Jewries differing from each other in the extent of their exposure to modernization processes. Therefore, it is no wonder that just as Lord Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1840–1915), from the English branch of the banking family, applied explicitly modern methods in London, in coordination with the heye im pifiyot circle in Kaunas, he also acted behind closed doors – again in full coordination with Rabbi Spektor and his people – to persuade the King of Denmark, who was the Tsar’s father-in-law, to influence his son-in-law to improve his attitude toward the Jews.38

38 Ibid., 358.

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Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878 Romania as a Target of Jewish Diplomatic Intervention With its ethnocentric regime of citizenship that withheld equal rights from Jews, the Kingdom of Romania was during the last third of the nineteenth century a major target of political intervention attempts on the part of European and American Jewish elites. Moldavia and Wallachia, two principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, had acquired political autonomy in 1829. They united in 1859, adopted the name “Romania” in 1861, and crowned, in 1866, the Prussian prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as the constitutional monarch Carol I. Romania’s full independence finally gained international recognition at the Berlin Congress in 1878.1 During those fifty years of nation-building, the development of agriculture and commerce made the Romanian lands, especially the northern regions of Moldavia, into a haven for more than 200,000 Jews fleeing the despotic regime of the Tsars. In defense of economic privilege, the new Romanian bourgeoisie, though copying French constitutionalism in other respects, adopted an increasingly intractable anti-Jewish attitude. Article 7 of the 1866 Romanian constitution, which stipulated that “only foreigners of Christian faith may become Romanians,” effectively transformed Romania’s Jews into rightless aliens. Historians agree on the socio-economic motivations behind this Christian exclusivism. “Liberal political elites in Romania utilised citizenship as an efficient instrument of ‘social closure’ in order to foster national integration, to control social change and to reduce competition for resources from concurrent economic elites.”2

At the time, British abolitionist groups had given the first examples of international human rights advocacy.3 Jewish contemporaries tried various means 1

2

3

Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821–1878, Cambridge/New York 1984; Paul E. Michelson, Conflict and Crisis. Romanian Political Development, 1861–1871, New York et al. 1987; Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Budapest/New York 2001. Constantin Iordachi, The Unyielding Boundaries of Citizenship. The Emancipation of “Non-Citizens” in Romania, 1866–1918, in: European Review of History 8 (2001), no. 2, 157–186, here 158. Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement. A History, Princeton, N. J., et al. 2012, 42. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 131–155.

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of influencing Romanian policies: petitions to Romanian politicians by local Jews,4 public displays of patriotism, appeals from abroad, indirect intervention through foreign governments and diplomats, press campaigns addressing European public opinion, and boycott threats by financial entrepreneurs. All these initiatives proved to be utterly fruitless, and, according to some contemporary observers, even had an effect contrary to that intended, as Romanian authorities and public opinion turned the defense of illiberal constitutional principles into a matter of national pride. Human rights interventionism only fortified the conspiracy fiction entertained by the Romanian leaders. Legal discrimination, administrative harassment, pogroms, and a particular vicious kind of incitement to antisemitic violence remained endemic until World War I.

Competition for Leadership among European Jewry The historical significance of the protracted international efforts undertaken by European Jews cannot be reduced to the meager success they had in influencing Romanian lawmakers. Instead, they should be considered in their ability of shaping the work of Western Jewish activists themselves, who developed their self-organized political structures, advocacy, and relief networks mainly in the course of their rallying for the Romanian cause. Jewish diplomatic history is peculiar insofar as its power center is not a state apparatus preexisting the diplomatic effort; nor is it based on a leader who is first mandated and then followed. The very standing of the leaders and authorities is only determined by their successful political action in the international field. In Moses Maimonides’ medieval theology, the only possible criterion of the Messiah is that he has completed his redemptive task;5 likewise the Jewish politician must be recognized post factum. If the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux rose to the status of a plenipotentiary of European Jewry, this was mainly due to his successful intervention in the Damascus affair in 1840. At the time he negotiated with Muslim authorities and Chris4

5

Beate Welter, Die Judenpolitik der rumänischen Regierung 1866–1888, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1989; Iulia Onac, “Die antisemitische Hydra hebt den Kopf.” Aspekte der jüdischen Reaktion auf den Antisemitismus in Rumänien vom Ende des 19. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Ulrich Wyrwa (ed.), Einspruch und Abwehr. Die Reaktion des europäischen Judentums auf die Entstehung des Antisemitismus (1879–1914), Frankfurt a. M. 2010, 269–280. Moses Maimonides, Hilkhot Melakhim 11,8; see Francesca Y. Albertini, Die Konzeption des Messias bei Maimonides und die frühmittelalterliche islamische Philosophie, Berlin/ New York 2009, 261, 376 and 408.

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tian diplomats he also had to struggle with his Jewish co-delegate, Sir Moses Montefiore, on their joint trip to Egypt. The two men’s competition for leadership amongst European Jewry culminated in a tough dispute between their wives, Amélie Crémieux and Judith Montefiore.6 The Alliance Israélite Universelle, over which Crémieux presided in the sixties and seventies, had to justify its authority and legitimacy continuously by stressing its advance over other Jewish actors, and was eager in its publications to bring its past victories to mind. The competition for representation among European Jewry has not yet been the object of a serious study. On the one hand, most classical works on the Alliance Israélite Universelle consider the society’s universalistic principles as mere rhetoric masking its French national culture and agenda,7 irrespective of the society’s diaspora-wide constituency, in which French Jews accounted for less than fifteen percent in 1885.8 On the other hand, historians who are aware of the mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon of Jewish transnational organization often describe it in too harmonistic terms. The “statecraft of the stateless,”9 as Jewish political action has been named, is not without conjuring up the mother of all utopias: the stateless society. Scholarly publications exploring the stateless space of Jewish politics have occasionally referred to irenic, even romantic notions of community and solidarity. Cornelia Wilhelm, in an article on the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, stresses the egalitarian network character of this association: “Just as in America, the growing network of international lodges contributed to an international ‘place for community’ […]. [It] enhanced a practical sense of solidarity on an international level and served as a forum for communication and self-assertion.”10

16 Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair. “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840, Cambridge 1997, 337–341. 17 Simon Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l’Israélite. Histoire d’une mutation 1770–1870, Paris 1989, 318; Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling, 1860–1925, Bloomington, Ind., 1990, 23; Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France. From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. by Jane Marie Todd, Stanford, Calif., 1996, 284; Linda Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France, Stanford, Calif., 2006, 198. 18 Carsten Wilke, Das deutsch-französische Netzwerk der Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1914. Eine kosmopolitische Utopie im Zeitalter der Nationalismen, in: Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 34 (2007/08), 173–199, here 181. 19 Aaron S. Klieman, “Shtadlanut” as Statecraft by the Stateless, in: The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 2 (2008), no. 3, 99–113. 10 Cornelia Wilhelm, Community in Modernity. Finding Jewish Solidarity within the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 297–319, here 319.

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In the German version of Wilhelm’s essay, “community” is not translated as Gemeinde, but as Gemeinschaft, evoking an organic communion rather than a hierarchic political association.11 Occasionally, historians have detected dimensions of power play behind the apparently smooth surface of communal solidarity. However, the description of these tensions follows all too often Zosa Szajkowski’s simplistic image of “[t]he conflicts between the German and French Jews.”12 The nature of the relations between these floating Jewish platforms of transnational intervention and their respective state authorities apparently demands a less schematic description. Markus Kirchhoff has justly stressed the crucial distinction between two parallel sets of policy-making, by power and by influence, by commanding the state and by influencing those in command.13 As Dan Diner has noted, the transnational pursuit of Jewish interests through diplomacy can only unfold within a consensual climate of interstate relations. Therefore, Diner writes, the decline of the European concert of powers in the late nineteenth century also led to enhanced opposition between Jewish national groups.14 In the following pages, the emergence and transformation of Jewish transnational structures will be envisioned in circumstances that notions of community, solidarity, and consensus cannot adequately describe. The article explores the way in which activism on behalf of the Jews of Romania accredited, diversified and replaced the networks among Jewish elites, and, more particularly, how European Jewish leadership was negotiated between France and Germany under the complicated conditions created by the 1870/ 71 war. These developments will be read as examples of how, in Jewish political practice, agency is constructed and leadership legitimized through public success, along with the production and entertainment of a favorable public opinion. This competitive aspect will be incorporated into historiographical conceptualizations that have framed Jewish diplomatic action in recent research.

11 Idem, Gemeinschaft in der Moderne. Jüdische Solidarität im Unabhängigen Orden B’nai B’rith, in: Christina von Braun/Wilhelm Gräb/Johannes Zachhuber (eds.), Säkularisierung. Bilanz und Perspektiven einer umstrittenen These, Berlin/Münster 2007, 129–158, here 157. 12 Zosa Szajkowski, Conflicts in the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Founding of the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Vienna Allianz and the Hilfsverein, in: Jewish Social Studies 19 (1957), no. 1–2, 29–50, here 34. 13 Markus Kirchhoff, Einfluss ohne Macht. Jüdische Diplomatiegeschichte 1815–1878, in: Dan Diner (ed.), Synchrone Welten. Zeitenräume jüdischer Geschichte, Göttingen 2005, 121–146. 14 Dan Diner, Ubiquitär in Zeit und Raum. Annotationen zum jüdischen Geschichtsbewusstsein, in: Diner (ed.), Synchrone Welten, 13–34, here 28 f.

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French and German Activists The years between the Franco-Prussian War and the Berlin Congress in 1878 were a liberal age seeing the fulfillment of Jewish hopes of emancipation in Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy, a time in which the visionary first decade of the Alliance Israélite Universelle15 was interrupted by the French military defeat, and the scene was set for a diversification of Jewish politics. In the wake of Sedan, initiatives of Jewish representation, committees, even entire associations, sprang up in “London, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Rome, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, as well as in Paris” – to quote one historian’s quite detailed list.16 These leaders, whose diversity was to some extent (though not solely) based on geographical dispersion, did not intend to reproduce the collective cohesion that the Alliance had come to broker, but they strove for a balance between autonomous rivals. “There was a sort of concert of powers in European Jewry,” Lloyd Gartner writes.17 Whereas the Alliance had intended to unite political intervention efforts under the umbrella of a formal association with central and local committees, meetings, bulletins, democratic elections, and financial balances, Jewish politics after 1871 once again relied on the “informal collaboration of rich corresponding Jews”18 who cooperated with certain coreligionists in press and parliament and through these channels approached their respective governments. Fritz Stern’s much-quoted sentence “Romania became a test case of Jewish power”19 refers to this context. The German banker Gerson von Bleichröder rose to fame as “the main political instrument for Western Jewry”;20 his activity in favor of the Romanian Jews was everywhere per15 On the messianism of the early years, see Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 249–252 and 258–262; Wilke, Das deutsch-französische Netzwerk der Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1914, 179 f. Generally on this institution, see idem, Art. “Alliance Israélite Universelle,” in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig ed. by Dan Diner, 7 vols., here vol. 1, Stuttgart 2011, 42–50. 16 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge/New York 2004, 15. 17 Lloyd Gartner, Roumania, America, and World Jewry. Consul Peixotto in Bucharest, 1870–1876, in: American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58 (1968), no. 1, 25–117, here 54. 18 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron. Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire, New York 1977, 355: “[T]he richer and more influential Jews of Europe had established an informal network of cooperation; in an age that was proud of its tolerance and enlightened humanity, they had one great weapon at their disposal: publicity.” 19 Stern, Gold and Iron, 369. Stern’s German version is even more assertive; see idem, Gold und Eisen. Bismarck und sein Bankier Bleichröder, Munich 2008, 514: “Rumänien wurde zum Testfall jüdischer Macht.” 20 Stern, Gold and Iron, 369.

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ceived as a challenge, if not a brush-off, to the Alliance and its attempt at a democratic representation of global Jewish interests. Historians today, no less than contemporaries, have seen the Berlin Jewish activists’ clout epitomized in the international Jewish conference they organized in October 1872 in Brussels, where the Alliance president and board were guests among others. The meeting was, as Carol Iancu and Carole Fink have likewise concluded, the “first ‘Jewish summit’ in modern times”:21 “On his first assignment, Bleichröder and the Berlin Romania[n] Committee mobilized the Jewish world. The Jewish communities of Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, as well as of Switzerland and The Netherlands petitioned their governments on behalf of Romanian Jewry […].”22

The Alliance stepped to the background, as Markus Kirchhoff writes: “Jewish diplomacy shifted its center of gravity towards unified Germany, which now had also emancipated the Jews […].”23 This historical representation of a rising German-Jewish power center is in need of contextualization and reassessment from the vantage point of transnational cooperation and rivalry. The following pages will study in particular the German correspondence of the Alliance, kept in its Parisian archives.24 Part of this correspondence, namely letters referring to the Berlin Congress, has been researched and published by Carol Iancu in his volume Bleichröder et Crémieux, published in 1987.25 More documents remain unedited, but were consulted by Gelber, Iancu, Stern26 and others, and a third part has not yet been surveyed and used in scholarship. Instead of the customary focus on Bleichröder, it seems instructive to examine the viewpoints of half a dozen German Jews who intervened in the Romanian politics of the Alliance. We should not reduce this group to a closed block, but differentiate between the alliances and political strategies present among its members. As the internal German-Jewish rifts show, the rivalries between transnational actors do not simply duplicate the conflicts between their states.

21 Carol Iancu, Bleichröder et Crémieux. Le combat pour l’émancipation des Juifs de Roumanie devant le Congrès de Berlin. Correspondance inédite (1878–1880), Montpellier 1987, 28; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 16. 22 Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 21. 23 Kirchhoff, Einfluss ohne Macht, 139. 24 These sources are the object of my continuing research project on the German branches of the Alliance. 25 Iancu, Bleichröder et Crémieux. 26 Nathan Michael Gelber, The Intervention of German Jews at the Berlin Congress 1878, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 5 (1960), no. 1, 221–248, here 223–227; Stern, Gold and Iron, 581 f.

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Activism for Romanian Jewry: Four National Frameworks When Adolphe Crémieux, a former member of the French revolutionary government, and then Acting President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, addressed Romanian politicians in 1866, evoking his liberation of the black slaves in the French colonies and insisting on the basic claims of humanity, the Bucharest mob responded with a pogrom that resulted in the pillage of the capital’s Great Synagogue. His intervention could not stop the proclamation of the infamous constitutional article 7 and the hardships that it caused almost immediately. In May 1867, the Minister of the Interior, Ion C. Brătianu, ordered the expulsion of poor Jews from the city of Iaşi, which was carried out arbitrarily and with great brutality.27 Crémieux decided at this point that he had “to expose this entire affair to all of Europe and to all civilized nations.”28 The French and British press reported the issue and condemned the Romanian authorities’ measures, while the German papers remained indifferent. The campaign set in motion by Crémieux could only rely in Germany on the rare local committees and individual activists of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Crémieux’s commitment to the Romanian cause became not only the most important trigger of sympathies for the Alliance, but had also an impact on the political self-consciousness of German Jewry. This development is all the more remarkable as the Alliance had faced massive initial difficulties in finding adherents East of the Rhine.29 Not a single German Jew had been involved when the society for “universal” Jewish political representation was founded in Paris in 1860. The German-Jewish opinion leader Ludwig Philippson had found unambiguous terms to denounce and condemn this as well as any other transnational political action undertaken in defense of Jewish interests. Though Philippson had been among the promoters of the conferences of Reform rabbis between 1844 and 1846, he shared the German Jews’ common reluctance to organize themselves in a larger framework for other than merely religious purposes.30 This principle was only softened in the course of the German unification process. In summer 1869, a meeting of delegates from forty-eight Jewish communities was convened in Leipzig to discuss tasks of community organization, charity, and apologetics. This Gemeindetag (assembly of commu27 Carol Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919. From Exclusion to Emancipation, Boulder, Col., 1996, 40–44. 28 Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 15. 29 Carsten Wilke, La fraternité sauvegardée. Les militants français et allemands de l’Alliance israélite universelle à l’épreuve de la guerre (1868–1873), in: Archives Juives 46 (2013), no. 2, 59–80, here 61. 30 Kirchhoff, Einfluss ohne Macht, 121–123.

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nities) was eventually institutionalized in a free association called DeutschIsraelitischer Gemeindebund (German-Israelite Community Federation). The assembly claimed a neutral stance in the controversy between Orthodoxy and Reform, as religious matters were discussed separately in a “Synod” held at the same time. However, this measure failed to generate confidence, as the personal overlap between the two assemblies was far too obvious. Moritz Lazarus, at that time lecturer for Philosophy at the Prussian War Academy, for example, was a board member of the Gemeindetag and, at the same time, the President of the Synod, which displayed a strong Reform tendency.31 In his personal opinions on religion, Lazarus was a fervent liberal: “Every age is justified in disregarding, more, is in duty bound to disregard, the written law whenever reason and conviction demand its nullification.”32 In Leipzig, grim opponents of the Alliance’s transnationalism confronted the latter’s activists, who would have liked the Gemeindetag to become a sub-network of the Paris society. The outreach of the Gemeindetag towards the Alliance did not go beyond a formal greeting and a declaration of commitment to common values.33 The universal Jewish society in Paris, however, had one significant advantage over the Gemeindebund and the Synod: It could bridge the religious schism that paralyzed German Jewry. In the spirit of the democratic centralism of its French environment, the society’s Central Committee used to correspond directly from Paris with all its local branches. The regional grouping of committees started in Baden and Silesia not earlier than 1876, and a “German office” of the Alliance only emerged in Berlin in 1906. The Paris-centered system allowed Orthodox and Reform-minded militants to belong to the same association without ever having to correspond with each other, as all the coordination was handled neutrally by the French. Corresponding directly with Crémieux in 1867, the banker Isidor Platho,34 one of the Alliance’s early activists in Berlin, confessed that only the society’s reports had taught him the extent of the Romanian Jewish misery.

31 Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Decades after 1848, in: idem/Michael Brenner (eds.), German Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation 1780–1871, New York 1996, 318–348, here 321, and 326–328. 32 Moritz Lazarus, The Ethics of Judaism, trans. from the German by Henrietta Szold, Philadelphia, Pa., 1900, 120 f.; see Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914, Ithaca, N. Y., 1975, 181–184. 33 Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1847–1871. Zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation, Düsseldorf 1977, 267–269. 34 Co-owner of the bank house Platho & Wolff, see his portrait on the website (8 August 2016).

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Jews in Germany would obviously be attentive to the oppressive regime that held sway under the reign of Carol I. Platho revealingly asserts: “We here did not have any previous knowledge, neither from the press nor from private correspondence, of the cruel and abject measures that are taken in a country whose crown is worn by a Prussian prince. We regret this all the more as one may presume that the latter cannot have had any knowledge of the repulsive excesses going on in his country and that he would have made them stop if our government had been petitioned by us to inform him. This has now happened by our Prime Minister, after one of our members reported the case to him in agreement with me.”35

Platho shared the Alliance documents with the press and dispatched one of his friends to Prime Minister Bismarck.36 This must have been Professor Lazarus, who tried indeed to speak to Prussian government circles, but admitted that he had no success in his efforts, since the officials did not bother to receive him.37 Only a few years later, the Jewish press would come to the conclusion that the scandal of anti-Jewish politics in Romania had actually triggered transnational activism among German Jewry.38 Indeed Crémieux’s campaign for emancipation in Romania was one of the foremost selling arguments that Moritz Landsberg (1824–1882), a rabbi in Liegnitz of Lower Silesia and doubtlessly the most enthusiastic German Alliance activist during those years, put forward in the early calls and leaflets by which he endeavored to recruit Alliance members in Germany. He made the Jews of that region 35 Paris, Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (henceforth AAIU), Archives historiques, Allemagne I A 1, 4 June 1867: “[…] daß wir hier, weder durch die Presse, noch durch Privat-Nachrichten von den grausamen u. verwerflichen Schritten eines Landes nicht früher Kenntniß erhielten, dessen Krone ein Preußischer Prinz trägt, der, da er wohl, wie wir mit Fug u. Recht annehmen dürfen, nicht selbst Kenntniß von dem verabscheuungswürdigen Treiben in seinem Lande gehabt, dasselbe gewiß hätte einhalten lassen, wenn auch unsere Regierung auf unser frühzeitiges Anrufen ihn darauf aufmerksam gemacht hätte. Dies letztere ist nun auch Seitens unseres Minister-Präsidenten, auf Vortrag eines unserer Mitglieder, mit dem ich darüber conferirt, geschehen.” 36 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne I A 1, 1 April 1868. Platho reports, “daß inzwischen auch seitens befreundeter Personen energische Schritte bei dem Minister-Präsidenten gemacht worden, und es wird uns heute auf das Entschiedenste versichert, daß sowohl, Folge dessen, Seitens des Ministerpräsidenten an unsere Vertreter in Rumänien, als auch Seitens Sr. Maj. des Königs directe Weisungen an den Fürsten Carl ergangen sind. Zudem ist eine Petition Seitens des Vorstands der hiesigen jüdischen Gemeinde in Vorbereitung begriffen.” 37 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, Lazarus to Loeb, 1 June 1869. 38 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (henceforth AZJ), no. 18, 29 April 1873, 295 f.: “Der bisherige praktische Verlauf zeigte, daß Paris im Stande war, besonders Italien und die ferneren westlichen Länder an sich zu ziehen, hingegen in Deutschland und Oestreich verhältnißmäßig nur wenig Partisanen gewann, bis in Deutschland durch das Elend der westrussischen Juden und die Bedrängnisse der rumänischen ein stärkerer Eifer erwachte.”

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believe that the Alliance was even powerful enough to strip a Jew-hating Romanian prime minister of his power: “As it is well known concerning the Jews of Romania in particular, it is mainly owed to the continuous efforts of the Alliance that a better era has dawned for them and that Bratiano [sic], that country’s Haman, has been overthrown.”39 During the Franco-Prussian War, when an anonymous letter sent to the editor of the Israelitische Wochenschrift first played with the idea of a shift of center from besieged Paris to triumphant Berlin, the author acknowledged that France once had an easier approach to Romania, largely due to the “prestige” of the French nationality, “which, standing behind the Alliance, could work miracles for the poor persecuted Jews in Romania, the Orient, and elsewhere.” Now however, the author asserted, the Alliance was weakened and the burden of its heritage had fallen on the shoulders of German Jewry.40 The two Jewish nations rivalled each other even in Romania where, as Rabbi Antoine Lévy of Iaşi reported, communities were split between members of the Paris Alliance and the partisans of the Leipzig-based Gemeindebund.41 Paris, however, remained the center of Alliance leadership even after the city had been besieged, vanquished and occupied by the German armies. More remarkably, French and German activists renewed their collaboration shortly after the war.42 The General Assembly even voted to open the Central 39 Two examples in Paris, AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 10 November 1868: “Seine Interventionen dieser Art, die er, in Verbindung mit einer lebhaften Agitation in der Presse, während seines achtjähringen [sic] Bestehens leider schon so oft hat müssen eintreten lassen (meines Wissens besonders bei den Regierungen von Marocco, Tunis, Persien, Türkei, Griechenland, Rußland, und Serbien u. Rumänien) waren vielfach von dem besten Erfolge begleitet; was er namentlich für die Juden in Rumaenien erst im Laufe dieses Jahres gethan, ist ja noch in unser Aller Erinnerung […] Einem solchen Vereine uns anzuschließen, muß uns Pflicht und Ehrensache sein.” Ibid., Pologne III B, November 1869, 2: “Was insbesondere die Juden Rumäniens betrifft, so ist es, wie bekannt, hauptsächlich den unaufhörlichen Bemühungen der Alliance zu danken, daß für dieselben endlich eine bessere Zeit angebrochen, daß namentlich der Haman jenes Landes, Bratiano, gestürzt ward” (emphasis here and henceforth in the original). 40 Israelitische Wochenschrift, no. 47, 23 November 1870, 381 f.: “Daß schon numerisch die französischen Juden nicht mehr in der Lage sein werden, einen bestimmenden Einfluß zu üben; abgesehen davon, daß die wesentliche Bedeutung der Alliance in dem prestige des französischen Namens bestand, den Frankreich jetzt so theuer bezahlen muß, der aber, hinter der Alliance stehend, in Rumänien, im Orient und anderswo für die armen, verfolgten Juden Wunder gethan hat. Deutschland ist der Erbe, allerdings nicht der lachende Erbe, des französischen Ruhmes und Einflusses. Ein Wort Deutschlands wiegt jetzt schwer in der Wagschale; seine Macht wird überall anerkannt, sein Einfluß muß ein fast unbegrenzter werden. Wird das Wort zu Gunsten der leidenden Juden gesprochen werden?” 41 Szajkowski, Conflicts in the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Founding of the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Vienna Allianz and the Hilfsverein, 34. 42 Carsten Wilke, Völkerhass und Bruderhand. Ein deutsch-französischer Briefwechsel aus dem Jahr 1871, in: Kalonymos 11 (2008), no. 4, 1–5.

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Committee to a large number of non-French, and most notably German members. In the midst of their difficult process of reconciliation, the two Jewish centers confronted the humanitarian crisis caused by Romania’s antiJewish policy. In January and February 1872, the populace in Bessarabia, incited by Orthodox clerics, went on a rampage against their Jewish neighbors, beating many of them to death, raping women, destroying properties and profaning synagogues and tombs.43 The Romanian authorities’ reaction to the violence was scandalous, as they acquitted the perpetrators and imposed punishments on their victims. The news stirred up political motions all across European Jewry, expressed by means of their associations and representatives. In France, where the Alliance enjoyed official protection, its envoy Albert Cohn could talk in March to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles de Rémusat.44 The latter’s Italian counterpart, Emilio Marquis Visconti-Venosta, received in Rome the president of the Livorno branch of the Alliance.45 The activists could bring about that an international protest note was signed in Bucharest on 18 April by the consuls general of all powers (except Russia), which denounced the biased handling of the pogrom by the Romanian judges.46 This time, the plight of the Romanian Jews was debated publicly in the European legislative assemblies. On 19 April 1872, the English-Jewish parliamentarian Sir Francis Goldsmid spoke before the House of Commons and secured support from the former Secretary of State, Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, for representations of English diplomats with the Romanian authorities.47 The Anglo-Jewish Association published a brochure The Jews in Romania by Israel Davis; and on 30 April, British Jewish leaders gathered in the London City Hall for a “meeting” – the Bulletin de l’Alliance gives this technical term of British democracy as an untranslatable foreign expression. This assembly appointed a delegation, which was received by Earl Granville, the Secretary of State.48 In spite of these successes in the diplomatic arena, the Alliance praised the power of public opinion as the best means to promote humanitarian goals. Its advocates pointed out how successful Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount of Palmerston, an opposition politician at the

43 44 45 46 47

Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919, 57. Bulletin de l’Alliance israélite universelle (henceforth BAIU), July 1871, 97. Ibid., 104 f. Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919, 57 f. Published in The Times, 20 April 1872; Debatte über die Lage und Behandlung der Juden Rumäniens und Serbiens, in der Unterhaussitzung des englischen Parlaments am 19. April 1872, London 1872. BAIU, 1871/72, 112–126, Interpellation de Sir Francis Goldsmid à la Chambre des communes le 19 avril 1872. 48 Ibid., 105; BAIU, July 1872, 2.

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start of the Crimean War, had called in the press for British military protection of the Ottoman domains against Russia.49 The political activity of German-Jewish elites followed wholly different patterns. In Berlin a public manifestation of Jewish pressure would have been problematic. During the same month of March 1872, Gerson von Bleichröder, who had just been ennobled, used his individual contacts to Bismarck in order to strike the deal that Fritz Stern described in detail in Gold and Iron:50 Bleichröder and other members of the German-Jewish financial elite would take over the Romanian railway debt and bail out the investors, many of them belonging to the arch-conservative Prussian nobility; Bismarck in exchange would promote the legal improvement of the Romanian Jews by the diplomatic channels at his disposal. The “Iron Chancellor” would demand immediately, in cooperation with the English, French, and Austrian governments, concrete measures to guarantee the protection of the Romanian Jews from the outbursts of violence that were expected for the upcoming orthodox Easter days. Whereas Crémieux favored public opinion, parliamentarism and direct negotiations, confidentiality was essential for Bleichröder’s strategy. As the latter wrote to the Alliance Central Committee, “nothing of these measures should be published in the press, because this is not the wish of our Imperial Chancellor.”51 Bleichröder formed a Berlin committee of bankers who suspended credit offers to Romania; their call on European colleagues to do the same was endorsed by the Alliance.52 In the figures of Crémieux and Bleichröder, Iancu saw the French human rights ethos clashing with German Realpolitik.53 However, there existed an awkward contrast between Bleichröder’s search for discretion and his Berlin associates’ need to boast publicly of the political protection they allegedly received from Bismarck as well as from the power circles around the German prince in Bucharest. In Bleichröder’s absence, but with the participation of his brother Julius, a number of representatives of the Berlin Jewish elite constituted in Berlin a Committee for the Romanian Jews.54 Its president was Professor Moritz Lazarus; among its most renowned members were the medical doctors Salomon Neumann and Samuel Kristeller, the lawyers Heinrich Meyer Cohn and Heinrich Bernhard 49 Interpellation de Sir Francis Goldsmid à la Chambre des Communes le 19 avril 1872, in: BAIU, 1871/72, 120: “Si les Juifs d’Europe faisaient appel aux consciences chrétiennes des nations, ils recevraient sans doute une telle réponse qu’elle frapperait de terreur et d’épouvante ceux qui se livrent à de pareilles persécutions contre leurs frères.” 50 Stern, Gold and Iron, chap.: Rumania: The Triumph of Expediency, 351–393. 51 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, Bleichröder, 30 March and 6 April 1872. 52 BAIU, July 1872, 8. 53 Iancu, Bleichröder et Crémieux, 99; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 21 f. 54 Stern, Gold and Iron, 370.

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Oppenheim, the councillor Meyer Magnus, the entrepreneurs Wilhelm Herz, Ferdinand Reichenheim, Michael Levinstein, and Benjamin Liebermann, as well as the novelist Berthold Auerbach. Besides editing a German brochure with the documents collected by the Alliance,55 Salomon Neumann was responsible for the contact with the Parisian colleagues. He informed them rather vaguely that a committee had been created that “occupies itself with the situation of the Romanian Israelites” and was collecting money in response to urgent calls by the American diplomat Benjamin Peixotto.56 Peixotto was a Jewish lawyer from San Francisco, whom US President Grant had installed as the official American Consul in Bucharest in order to show the Romanians that “[t]he United States, knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nativity, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal views.”57 The Romanian Committee in Berlin convoked a program session on 3 May 1872. Among the participants were three Jewish members of the imperial diet (Ludwig Bamberger, Leopold Sonnemann and Isaac Wolffsohn), two members of the Berlin city council (Magnus and Neumann), and four entrepreneurs bearing the title of Kommerzienrat. The plan of denying Romania any support for her state debt and promoting abstention among Jewish business circles was adopted unanimously,58 though the Committee’s new policy of economic boycott contradicted to some extent the general line of Bleichröder’s commitment to the Romanian railway bailout. Quite generally, the attitude towards Romania could only be inconsistent, as the Jewish associations had to call for Romania’s economic boycott, but at the same time praise the patriotic identification of Romanian Jews with the interests of their fatherland. Much of the Jewish activities in this cause reveal a double bind structure: On the one hand, Jewish advocacy exposed the vicious hate speech and hypocrisy of Romanian politicians; on the other hand, it vowed loyalty to the very same politicians, now treated as the guardians of the beloved fatherland. The authors of a tide of antisemitic broadsides in the Romanian press knew to exploit this dilemma. If ever the domestic Jews complained of their fate, the journalists would claim that, in doing so, they proved their ungrateful, impertinent and unassimilable character, as well as their collaboration with the subversive foreign Alliance.59

55 Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim, Die Judenverfolgungen in Rumänien, Berlin 1872, 20. 56 BAIU, July 1872, 2 f. and 14. 57 Letter from Grant to Peixotto, cit. in Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, New York 1993, 84. 58 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, May 1872. 59 Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919, 104 and 133.

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The International Romania Conference in Brussels To coordinate the various national initiatives in favor of the Romanian Jews, the Committee convoked a conference on 29 and 30 October 1872 in Brussels, in the meeting hall of the Belgian Jewish Consistory.60 However extraordinary this German-Jewish initiative of convening an international conference may have been, it was not entirely unique. It had been preceded in October 1869 by a Franco-German emergency conference on the Western Russian famine disaster that the Paris Alliance leaders had convoked in Berlin;61 and it was to be followed in December 1876 by a third international meeting that the Alliance would organize in Paris. The location and organization of the Brussels conference mirrored quite closely the Berlin meeting that the Paris organization had organized before the French defeat, crossing European space. Only three years later, the relations of symbolic power had been inverted: The Berliners invited the Alliance leaders to a neutral foreign capital in the French-speaking region. Salomon Neumann was assigned to address the Parisians amiably; he presented the Romanian Committee as “in some way […] a branch of our local Alliance committee.”62 He laid a focus on the organization of educational and charitable measures, but would not exclude political and press activities from the agenda.63 Crémieux, the French Chief Rabbi Lazare Isidor, Albert Cohn, the historian Joseph Derenbourg, and three more members of the Alliance board indeed appeared in Brussels.64

60 As the conference proceedings seem to be lost, the following presentation is based on the published reports. See Compte rendu provisoire de la conférence de Bruxelles, in: BAIU, July 1872, 55–59; Die Conferenz der Rumänischen Hülfscomités, in: AZJ, no. 46, 12 November 1872, 906–908; Belgien: Brüssel, in: Der Israelit, no. 46, 13 November 1872, 953. See also Stern, Gold and Iron, 370 f.; Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919, 64; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 15 f.; Kirchhoff, Einfluss ohne Macht, 139; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 92; Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore. Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, Cambridge, Mass., 2010, 401. 61 Wilke, Das deutsch-französische Netzwerk der Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1914, 183; idem, La fraternité sauvegardée, 64. 62 BAIU, July 1872, 19. See AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne I A 1, Neumann, 28 August 1872: “Eine recht baldige definitive Zusage, daß das Centralcomité der Alliance israélite universelle an der Conferenz Theil nehmen wird, wäre um so erwünschter, da unser rumänisches Comité (in gewisser Art – wie Ihnen zur Zeit auch mitgetheilt – eigentlich ein Filial unseres Localcomités) auf diese Theilnahme einen besonderen Werth legt.” 63 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne I A 1, Neumann, 11 September 1872: “Wie in unserer ersten desfallsigen Proposition schon ausgesprochen, hatten wir als hauptsächlichen Zweck der Conferenz die Verbesserung der moralischen und materiellen Zustände der rumänischen Juden in’s Auge gefasst, womit jedoch die Frage wegen der etwaigen weiteren politischen und publizistischen Action nicht ausgeschlossen sein sollte.” 64 BAIU, July 1872, 22 f.

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After the 1869 Berlin event, the uncommon experience of a Franco-German gathering among Jews had been highly praised in the Alliance publications; now, an almost identical infatuation with Jewish internationalism characterized German press reports from the Brussels conference: “French, English, German, Belgian, Dutch, delegates from faraway America, emissaries from Romania” gave “an excellent proof that the same feeling of solidarity unites all the Israelites without distinction of their various nationalities.”65 A board was elected, which symbolically constituted a diplomatic representative body for European Jewry: Crémieux was elected as its president and the three vice-presidents were Sir Goldsmid from London, Professor Lazarus from Berlin, and the journalist Leopold Kompert from Vienna.66 The decisions made at the conference show how problematic Jewish international solidarity appeared from a patriotic point of view. The problem was defined as one of human rights, not of Jewish interests; participants gave the blame for anti-Jewish violence neither to the prince nor to the Romanian people, but carefully spoke of “artificially excited party rancors.” Adopting a strategy of soft rhetoric pressure, the Romanian Jews were encouraged to submit a petition to the Romanian parliament. An executive committee, again with Crémieux as president but located in Vienna, was to assure that the Romanian crisis be handled according to the usual Alliance methods of cultural improvement, including the transfer of humanitarian aid, and the intellectual and moral development of the disfavored Jewish masses through schooling and enlightened publications.67 Issuing a pledge to the fraternity of Romanians of all creeds, the Brussels conference did not discuss the earlier plans for an economic boycott, and it emphatically rejected Benjamin Peixotto’s call for emigration to America. One may doubt that the establishment of the Vienna Committee was ever a serious option; at least the Central Committee of the Alliance did not receive any nominations by November.68 Still, the manifestation of Jewish international influence went too far for many observers. The Brussels summit was seen by the rightist press in Prus65 Die Conferenz der Rumänischen Hülfscomités, in: AZJ, no. 46, 12 November 1872, 906. 66 Ibid., Compte rendu provisoire de la conférence de Bruxelles, here 56. 67 See on this model Aron Rodrigue, La mission éducative (1860–1939), in: André Kaspi (ed.), Histoire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle de 1860 à nos jours, Paris 2010, 227– 261. 68 BAIU, July 1872, 31, with a report on the Central Committee session of Nov. 20, 1872: “Le Conseil de l’Anglo-Jewish Association annonce que sir Francis Goldsmid a été nommé réprésentant de l’Angleterre à la commission exécutive dont la création a été décidée à Bruxelles et qui devra s’occuper spécialement des affaires roumaines. Aucune autre nomination n’a encore été notifiée au Comité central.” This passage is just as laconic in the manuscript proceedings of the session; see AAIU, Archives de Moscou, PV II, fol. 88r.

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sia as the birth of a third anti-patriotic international network, besides those of the Catholics and the Communists.69 Even some Jewish journals reprehended the delegates for what they considered unduly ambitions. Ludwig Philippson disagreed with the refusal of the conveners to make the debates public. Hostile voices, he argued, could now suspect that Jews were eager to hide something: either a secret powerful stratagem or, inversely, their very impotence. Philippson would have preferred for the conference to simply conclude on a dignified declaration of pro-Romanian sentiments, a reasonable argument in favor of political equality, with trust in “the irresistible power of the spirit.”70 Still less interested in power politics was the commentary that Rabbi Abraham Geiger published in his review. He opposed any sort of “political missionarism” in favor of the Romanian Jews: Each Jewish group was to help itself. The experience with human rights interventionism on the Balkans had left Geiger disillusioned: European powers had basically followed Christian prejudices; and their anti-Islamic crusading could not achieve anything better than the establishment of such “miscarriages” as Greece and Romania. The Romanian Jews should labor hard to reduce their own flaws and vices; then they would become citizens like their German coreligionists. No charitable donations, no foreign school system would help, at best a rabbinical seminary could initiate re-education from the top. Geiger concluded: “Abandon all this Alliance and Gemeindebund circus, if it only serves to organize begging writ large or to launch the export business of culture.”71 In sum, even inside Germany there was an vocal opposition against Bleichröder’s kind of political realism, which assumed that there was no way to persuade the Romanians by reasonable argument or righteous act, but that they had to be overruled by sheer external pressure. Bleichröder, indeed, 69 AZJ, no. 50, 10 December 1872, 992: “Die Kreuzzeitung denuncirt nun gar den Congreß des Wohlthätigkeitscomités für die Sache der rumänischen Juden als – eine dritte ‘Internationale’ neben der rothen und schwarzen. Man kann solchen hirnverbrannten Blödsinn eben nur als ein Symptom des nahen Verendens des Junkerblattes registriren. Aber alle diese Scherze sind doch seltsame und wohl zu beachtende Zeichen der Zeit.” 70 Die Conferenz in Brüssel, in: AZJ, no. 47, 19 November 1872, 926–928. 71 Geist oder Geld?, in: Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, 10 June 1872, 161–165, here 162: “Aber hüten wir uns auch vor jedem politischen Missionswesen, wenn es auch zunächst von humanen Gesichtspunkten ausgeht. […] Derartigen Sympathien, einer christlichen und nationalen Romantik, die sich gegen die ‘Unwissenheit, den Unglauben des Islam, die rohen Türkenhorden’ echauffirte, verdanken wir die Fehlgeburten des Königreichs Griechenland, des geeinten Fürstenthums Rumänien. Die Früchte dieser Großthaten für Gerechtigkeitspflege, Geistesbildung und Gesittung liegen am Tage.” Ibid., 165: “Lasset ab von allem Allianzen- und Gemeindebund-Firlefanz, wenn er nur dazu dienen soll, den Bettel im Großen zu organisiren oder Bildungs-ExportGeschäfte zu machen!” See also Die Berichte der “Allianz,” in: Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben 10 (1872), 216–221.

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confessed that “I am certain that there is no sympathy whatsoever with our demands, neither among the Romanian government nor among the people.”72

Failed Secession The immediate effect of the Brussels conference was a sudden gain in prestige of the Berlin Jews, which Lazarus tried to use in order to strengthen his position inside the Alliance. In his public pronouncements, he stressed the fact that the Romanian Committee had emerged from the society’s Berlin branch, led by him; and that this branch urgently needed reorganization before any more meaningful work could be done. In a word, he claimed a decisive empowerment for himself and his followers. Simultaneously with the activation of the Romanian Committee in March 1872, its activists had circulated plans for the federalization of the Alliance. They envisioned nothing less than the foundation of an autonomous “Federation of German Israelites” that should take over most of the functions of the Alliance in Germany and become in some sort the international arm of the Gemeindebund. The Berliners created the impression that they were commanding a network of Romanian sub-committees in various other cities – Lazarus named branches in London, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. The committee had been collecting funds to support the victims of the Bessarabian pogrom, but its leaders were wary to send the money to Romania: They believed to have the right to keep part of it for “a continuous activity for the improvement of the moral and material conditions of the Jews in Romania.”73 The Berliners were determined to profit from the favorable moment. Only one month after convoking the conference in Brussels, on 24 November 1872, its organizers Lazarus, Neumann, Kristeller, Levinstein, and Oppenheim announced that the Federation would be founded within three weeks. Their manifesto lamented the “lack of any organization in Germany” for transnational advocacy and especially for the coordination of Romanian relief action.74 The intent to severe the important German Alliance clientele 72 See Bleichröder’s letter to the Central Committee, 21 February 1878, cit. in Iancu, Bleichröder et Crémieux, 134: “Je ne dois vous céler ma conviction que le sort de nos coreligionnaires en Roumanie ne sera jamais amélioré, si ce n’est par la force majeure de la volonté européenne […] je suis sûr qu’il n’y a pas de sympathie pour nos demandes, ni dans le gouvernement roumain, ni dans la population.” 73 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, 18 June 1872. 74 Archiv der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum, Bochum 4 (microfilm no. 838), 24 November 1872: “Die Theilnahme für die Sache der Alliance in Deutschland wurde aber in einem ganz besonderen Maasse wachgerufen, als sich uns so bestimmte

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from the Central Committee in Paris provoked a stormy reaction all across the Empire, with Berlin, Hamburg and a number of Prussian committees strongly pushing for secession and most of the provincial, especially West German, branches resisting the move.75 Israel Schwarz, the rabbi of Cologne, circulated a declaration inviting all German Alliance members to protest: “We do not doubt that you will go hand in hand with us, who are joined with full sympathy by the committees in Frankfurt, Munich, Magdeburg, Lyck, Memel, Stettin, Königsberg and others, when we proclaim that we will not separate ourselves from the Central Committee in Paris and that we emphatically reject any initiative that would destroy the great achievement of the international unity of our coreligionists.”76

Pressured by Landsberg and other German activists faithful to Paris, the Central Committee denied the Berlin branch its desired autonomy, which prompted the exit of Lazarus, Kristeller and Oppenheim from the Alliance network in April 1873.77 Before the negotiations broke down, Lazarus had been offered a seat in the society’s Central Committee, but he refused it. The French Jewish paper Archives israélites criticized the Central Committee for its unashamed courtship of Lazarus: “Why has the Central Committee defiled its dignity with an inappropriate condescendence by recommending to the vote of its members a man who has always shown that he is motivated by the most despicable feelings towards the Alliance and towards France? ‘No peace with the wicked, says the Eternal One’ [Isaiah 48:22].”78

One should not precipitately affirm the nationalist source of these animosities according to the interpretive grid canonized by Zosa Szajkowski. Neither had “relations between the [!] German Jews and the Alliance deteriorated,”79 nor should Lazarus’ boastful self-promotion as the voice of Ger-

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und so wichtige Aufgaben darboten, wie sie aus dem Nothstande der westrussischen und rumänischen Juden hervorgingen.” Wilke, La fraternité sauvegardée, 71–73. AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne VI B 46, 9 December 1872: “Wir zweifeln nicht daran, daß Sie mit uns, welchen sich die Comités in Aachen, Frankfurt a/M, München, Liegnitz, Magdeburg, Lyck, Memel, Stettin und Königsberg u[nd] m[ehrere] a[ndere] mit ganzer Sympathie angeschlossen haben, Hand in Hand gehen werden, wenn wir erklären, daß wir uns von dem Central-Comité in Paris nicht lostrennen und alle Sonderbestrebungen, durch welche das große Werk der internationalen Zusammengehörigkeit unserer Glaubensgenossen zerstört wird, mit Entschiedenheit von uns weisen.” AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, 13 April 1873. Univers israélite 28 (15 June 1873), 627: “Pourquoi le Comité central, contrairement à sa dignité et par une condescendance mal placée, a-t-il recommandé au choix des électeurs cet homme, qui s’est toujours montré animé des plus détestables sentiments contre l’Alliance et contre la France? ‘Pas de paix aux méchants! dit l’Éternel.’” Szajkowski, Conflicts in the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Founding of the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Vienna Allianz and the Hilfsverein, 35.

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man Jewry be taken literally.80 It would be far more exact to argue that rival power centers were crystallizing in Germany, one in Berlin around Lazarus, and the other outside the capital around Rabbi Moritz Landsberg, the Central Committee’s unconditionally faithful representative in Liegnitz, Lower Silesia. But even this would schematize too much the complex power struggle among the German-Jewish elites and the Central Committee’s readiness to come to terms with the ambitious circle in Berlin. Rabbi Landsberg had not been invited to Brussels, because the Lazarus group had controlled the invitations and, as he thought, the Central Committee had not sent any.81 He was probably not aware of the fact that the Alliance leaders had indeed suggested several participants to Neumann, but not him.82 Landsberg, an implacable opponent of Lazarus, could not be assured that his friends in Paris would choose him over the latter, so that he felt compelled to remind the Central Committee of his greater merits: “Since the Berlin meeting of October 1869, I have never had any doubt about Lazarus’ [mixed] feelings towards the Alliance. Besides personal and national jealousies, which may also strongly enter into the balance, he cannot belong to the Alliance with any warmth, because he makes propaganda for the German Gemeindebund, which has entered into competition with the Alliance, and because he is president of the Synod, whose hostility to the Alliance is, though not explicitly pronounced, nonetheless a manifest reality.”83

Landsberg was certainly not mistaken in his assessment of the Synod’s dismissive attitude towards international Jewish solidarity. The Synod’s spiritual leader, Abraham Geiger, had been clear enough in his scornful pronouncements. The Liegnitz rabbi saw the Berlin professor as the isolated leader of a disunited local Alliance branch,84 whose personal, corporate and 80 Archives israélites 34 (1 June 1873), 35: “[N]ous voudrions aussi qu’on n’élevât pas, à tout propos, à la hauteur d’une rivalité politique les vues divergentes qui se manifestent au dehors en matière israélite: c’est vraiment abuser du nom fatal de M. de Bismark [sic] que de lui donner M. le professeur Lazarus comme prête-nom.” 81 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 27 October 1872. 82 Moritz Tauber of Prague, for example, was invited at the request of the Alliance. See AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne I A 1, Neumann, 18 October 1872. 83 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne III B, 18 March 1872: “Ueber Lazarus’s Gesinnungen gegen die Alliance war ich seit der Berliner October-Versammlung im Jahre 1869 niemals in Zweifel; er kann, abgesehen von persönlichen und nationalen Eifersüchteleien, die bei ihm wohl auch stark in die Waagschale fallen mögen, der Alliance nicht mit Wärme angehören, weil er für den deutschen Gemeindebund Propaganda macht, der mit der Alliance in offenbare Conkurrenz geraten ist, und weil er Präsident der Synode ist, deren Gegnerschaft gegen die Alliance wenn auch nicht offen ausgesprochen, so doch thatsächlich vorhanden ist.” (italics in original). 84 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne III B, 7 June 1872: “[V]on den sechs Mitgliedern des Lokalkomités (Herren Sanitätsräthe Neumann und Kristeller, Dr. Cassel, Banquiers Platho und Lewinstein, und endlich P. G. Lewy), die ich sämmtlich besuchte, waren zwar

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nationalistic ambitions demanded a spectacular source of international prestige. This was the Romanian activism. Landsberg repeatedly voiced his conviction that for Lazarus and his small group, the entire Romanian Committee served as a mere means in order to garner the public support it needed for carrying out the change of guards in the Jewish diplomatic world. In his eyes, splitting the Alliance was the next step. “It almost transcends my understanding how at the Brussels Congress, Lazarus could claim and receive such an importance that he separated the Alliance from the Romanian issue. Were the Germans not there in a most definite minority? By the way, he viewed the function of the Romanian Committee from the outset only to serve as an instrument against the Alliance: I have seen this already when I visited Berlin during the last spring, but now everything has become publicly evident.”85

An anonymous French member of the Alliance delegation at the Brussels conference reported that Lazarus had used this forum to express his harsh criticism against the Paris leadership of the Alliance (this is probably why the proceedings were kept secret). Lazarus claimed that because of its centralist hierarchy, the Central Committee had been an obstacle to the joint project, started in 1869 by German Alliance members, to educate Jewish orphans of the Russian famine in Germany.86 This accusation glossed over the fact, as the French witness reports, that the orphans’ relief was handled autonomously by a border committee located in Königsberg.87 Lazarus insisted upon the idea that all further activities in the Romanian cause should Alle Gegner der von Lazarus und Dr. Makower intendirten Separation (letzterer ist übrigens ausgetreten, von der Niederlegung des Präsidiums Seitens des Ersteren wußte man jedoch nichts), aber nicht Einer der Meinung des Anderen in Betreff der Erhaltung oder Modifikation der gegenwärtigen Organisation der Alliance.” 85 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne III B, 1 December 1872: “Wie aber Lazarus auf dem Congress in Brüssel ein solches Gewicht haben und finden konnte, daß er die Alliance von der rumänischen Sache trennte, ist mir fast unbegreiflich; die Deutschen waren ja dort in der entschiedensten Minorität. Uebrigens hat ihm von vorn herein das rumänische Comité nur zur Handhabe gegen die Alliance dienen sollen; das habe ich schon bei meiner Anwesenheit in Berlin im vergangenen Frühling gesehen. Nun, jetzt liegt Alles offen zu Tage.” 86 Wilke, La fraternité sauvegardée, 65. 87 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 11 November 1872: “La conférence de Bruxelles n’a malheureusement pas amené une entente cordiale entre M. Lazarus et l’Alliance. M. Lazarus s’est opposé à ce que des questions générales, intéressant l’Alliance, fussent traitées dans la réunion, et il n’a négligé aucune occasion d’attaquer notre œuvre, et il nous a semblé que dans toutes ses paroles perçait une animosité profonde. Il a dit entre autres que le Comité central aurait été un obstacle à l’assistance des Polonais, quoiqu’il ne puisse pas ignorer que nous avons laissé au Comité de Koenigsberg une entière liberté d’action et que ce comité a fait beaucoup de bien. Il s’est évertué à séparer de l’Alliance le Comité constitué à Vienne pour les intérêts roumains et nous avons cédé sur ce point, de peur que la conférence n’aboutît à aucun résultat. Bien d’autres raisons nous font croire à l’hostilité de M. Lazarus.”

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be separated from the Alliance and coordinated by the executive committee located in Vienna. The Alliance secretary, Isidore Loeb, remembered that Crémieux and his friends tended to give in to the stubbornly proposed demands of the Berlin minority headed by Lazarus, simply because they feared his accusation of inflexible centralism. As a consequence, the German patriotism characteristic of the Berlin Reform Jewry gained far more ground than it could have been expected.88 Little more than a month after the Brussels Conference, the conflict between the parties of Lazarus and Landsberg reached its showdown at a conference in Berlin, when Lazarus launched his move to detach the German Alliance branches from the Central Committee in Paris. Lazarus ultimately failed to profit from the prestige he had won in Brussels for carving out a position as the leader of the German Alliance members. Universalist ideology was more convincingly preached from Paris, the aged Crémieux commanding an authority that no European Jew could match. Moreover, the Alliance leadership had earned sympathies with its extension of the Central Committee. The most original feature of the Berlin initiative apparently was its ambiguous use of the press: Taking advantage of Bleichröder’s confidential activism in favor of Romanian Jewry in order to gain a more prominent place in a competition for influential positions in Jewish international politics, Lazarus made merely tactical use of the public sphere in which mass organizations and press attention were major factors of prestige. Germany, however, was an incompletely democratized society, in which Jewish activists could not hold public “meetings” in the city hall or advance their cause by means of polemical broadsides in the press. Lazarus had to present his leadership as the necessary intersection between Bleichröder’s secret advocacy and modern techniques of public relations.

The Twilight of German-Jewish International Advocacy Lazarus quit the society after his secession move failed, but upheld occasional contact with the Central Committee. For instance, in 1874, he asked the Alliance leaders to carry out a poll among all Romanian Committees concerning the general refusal of engagement in financial activities beneficial to the Romanian state, a policy that the Romanian Committee of Berlin 88 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 3 December 1872: “Wie es Herrn Lazarus gelungen ist die Allianz ein wenig zu beseitigen bei der Bruxeller Conferenz, ist leicht verständlich. Herr Lazarus wollte nicht nachgeben, unsere Delegirten haben nachgegeben (obschon sie die Mehrzahl gehabt hätten), damit man nicht sagen solle, sie haben aus Eigennützigkeit oder Stolz die Arbeiten der Conferenz vereitelt.”

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still backed at the time.89 In 1876, other members of the Berlin branch, especially the bankers Levinstein and Platho, were active in obstructing a German-Romanian commercial treaty that would have included discriminating clauses against Jews, as the treaties with Austria-Hungary and Russia already did. However, stakes were low for this long and ultimately won fight, because, as everybody recognized, German Jews would hardly settle in Romanian villages. Even without anti-Jewish clauses, the commercial treatises France, Italy, England, and Germany concluded with Romania only confirmed the internationally tolerated discrimination against Galician and Russian Jews, who were those most likely to migrate to Romania.90 The symbolical gain from such international networking was larger than the actual advance achieved against anti-Jewish legislation. This became particularly manifest during the last of the three mentioned Jewish international summits, celebrated in December 1876 in Paris, with the only object to elaborate and sign a memorandum to the great powers. The Alliance invited its foreign guests to a banquet in the Grand Hôtel, where eleven speeches were held, each in its speaker’s mother tongue. Again, an executive committee was elected, with Crémieux as its president and four vice-presidents: “one Englishman, one American, one Belgian, and Dr. Kristeller from Berlin.”91 Bleichröder interrupted his correspondence with the Alliance between 1872 and 1878, so that Salomon Neumann was the only one among the initial Berlin circle of Romania activists whose participation in the society was continuous. At the approach of the Berlin Congress in 1878, he suggested reinvolving Lazarus in the issues concerning Romania, and the correspondence was indeed revived. On 13 March 1878, he recommended that all large Jewish communities of Germany send a joint petition to Bismarck. Lazarus intended to ask the French and Italian activists to approach their respective governments, “because we do not have any direct contact with the Italian Committee for Romania, nor with the Alliance, and do not even know its address.”92 After the competition and falling-out of 1872/1873, networks

89 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, Lazarus to Loeb, 6 February 1874. 90 Die rumänische Judenfrage im ungarischen Abgeordnetenhause, in: AZJ, no. 1, 2 January 1876, 3–8; Der rumänische Handelsvertrag im österreichischen Reichsrathe, in: AZJ, no. 10, 7 March 1876, 150–152; Die rumänischen Handelsverträge, in: AZJ, no. 15, 11 April 1876, 233 f.; Der Handelsvertrag zwischen Deutschland u[nd] Rumänien, in: AZJ, no. 26, 27 June 1876, 411; Die rumänischen Handelsverträge, in: AZJ, no. 31, 1 August 1876, 494 f.; Zeitungsnachrichten. Rumänien: Bukarest, AZJ, no. 51, 19 December 1876, 824. 91 Zeitungsnachrichten. Frankreich: Paris, AZJ, no. 52, 26 December 1876, 841. 92 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, Lazarus to Loeb, 26 February and 25 March 1878.

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had to be rebuilt from scratch in spring 1878. Historians such as Carol Iancu date the cooperation between Bleichröder and Crémieux in the Romanian cause only from this moment.93 If German Jews, in the greatest collective effort they had ever undertaken until that time,94 could not assume the international role that even staunch Alliance activists expected them to play after the military victory at Sedan and the propagandistic victory in Brussels,95 this may be due to recognition of their limited political space of maneuver. Rabbi Salomon Cohn, head of the Alliance branch in Tarnowitz, Upper Silesia, commented that the authors of the secession call were overestimating their social power. According to Cohn, German Jewry still lived under a regime of tolerance, in which a ruling majority allows others to live besides it out of a feeling of humanity, whereas France was a pluralistic society in which no group has an advantage over the other; this opened to the French Jewish elites a field of diplomatic and political action that remained closed to German Jews.96 Germany was ruled out as a possible source of protection because of its political system. At the time already, a wide-spread interpretation pointed to German government policy, and Bismarck’s personal alliances with the Prussian conservatives, as the reason for the failure of the initiatives in favor of the Romanian Jews. The chancellor, who had merely financial interests in 93 Iancu, Bleichröder et Crémieux, 36 f. 94 Stern, Gold and Iron, 373. 95 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 8 December 1872, Hermann Joël (rabbi in Hirschberg) to Landsberg: “Die Sache liegt aber jetzt ganz anders. Frankreich hat Vormacht an Deutschland abtreten müssen u[nd] letzteres wird zur Abweisung eventualer Angriffe auf Juden in Europa einen größeren Schutz gewähren. Und es ist nicht erfindlich, weshalb Paris u[nd] nicht Berlin, der weitaus größere Sammelpunkt jüdischer Jntelligenz, zugleich der Centralpunkt der jüdischen Alliance sein soll.” 96 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne IV B, 5 December 1872: “[Es] hat den Anschein als wenn Berlin selbständig oder richtiger in Concurrenz mit Paris treten wolle, es ist dieses nicht allein eine Zerklüftung, es ist auch eine Überschätzung der vorhandenen Kräfte, denn so lange wir Deutsche noch, selbst derjenige Theil, der die Gleichberechtigung unserer Glaubensgenossen will, an dem Worte ‘Toleranz’ laboriren (ich wiederhole deshalb laboriren: die Toleranz hat eigentlich die Bedeutung, wir sind die Herrschenden und nur das ausgebildete Gefühl der Menschlichkeit befiehlt uns die Duldung, deshalb wir in Gnaden die Gleichberechtigung auf dem Papiere gewähren), so lange wird auch bei möglichen vorkommenden Fällen [der] nothwendige diplomatische politische Einfluß zu Gunsten unserer Glaubensgenossen uns fehlen; ein Anders ist es in Frankreich, wo bei allen wechselnden Epochen es ein feststehender Grundsatz bleibt, das [sic] die Gesellschaft von Menschen, die den Staat bilden, eben so als sie verschiedenen Berufsklassen, eben so auch verschiedene Bekenntnisse haben, und keine von diesen eine Berechtigung heraus haben darf. Selbst der jetzige Präsident Thiers, der in den 40er Jahren zur Zeit der Damascus-Affaire Minister war und den damaligen französischen Gesandten Ratti-Menton gegen die Juden unterstützte, unterlag damals dem Einflusse Crémieux’, ändert auch heute in der Anschauung der Gleichberechtigung Aller nichts, vielmehr wird der Einfluß in diplomatischer und politischer Beziehung derselbe geblieben sein.”

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the Romanian railways, secured Bleichröder’s support with the promise of Jewish emancipation, but in 1878, he finally obtained the bailout from Romania with the promise of not pursuing Jewish emancipation any longer.97 A similar explanation later developed by the secretary serving the German office of the Alliance, Markus Klausner, was that the agreement between Bismarck and Bleichröder only remained in force for the six years between 1872 and 1878. Klausner evoked a succession of events that ultimately led to the end of Bismarck’s cooperation in the Romanian Jewish cause. On 26 February 1873, the Jewish parliamentarian Eduard Lasker, leader of the left wing in the National Liberal Party, gave his famous speech denouncing the so-called “founders,” that is, the German financial elites, who had mismanaged the boom caused by French reparations. In this speech, Lasker mentioned conservative-minded leaders of the high aristocracy as the main culprits, which the latter strongly resented. Bismarck, who after the Kulturkampf had to struggle for the reestablishment of his alliance with the conservatives, allowed them to blame the Gründerkrach on the German Jews, and consequently abandoned the Romanian Jews to their fate.98 After Bismarck’s pact with the Liberals was over, the Reich ceased to be part of the small group of powers that could be enlisted for humanitarian intervention outside the countries where Jewish emancipation was the rule. The already small window of possibilities was definitively shut in the aftermath of the Berlin Congress by the rise of the antisemitic movement. In a letter written to the Central Committee of the Alliance in 1885, the historian Heinrich Graetz counts only three countries, namely France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, as possible allies in the fight against Romania’s “impertinent mockery made of the stipulated emancipation.” He offered to broker a contact to Hungarian Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, in secret, of course.99

97 Stern, Gold and Iron, 387–389. 98 AAIU, Archives historiques, Allemagne D, 14 November 1909. See the same reconstruction of the course of events in Mosco Marcu, Ce que les Juifs roumains doivent à la Prusse. Un marché allemand, Paris 1916, 10–16. 99 AAIU, Archives historiques, Pologne XI B, 15 February 1885, Heinrich Graetz to Isidore Loeb: “Wenn nicht die französische Regierung im Verein mit der italienischen und österreich-ungarischen erwärmt werden kann, energisch gegen die freche Verhönung der stipulirten Emanzipation zu protestiren, dann giebt es keine Hilfe für die unglücklichen rumänischen Glaubensgenossen. Die Regierungen dieser drei Länder, welche von Antisemitismus frei sind, dürften dafür gewonnen werden können, besonders Minister Jerrý [Béla Orczy?] und Tisza in Ungarn. Ich könnte unter der Hand durch meine Freunde in Budapest erfahren, ob sich Tisza einem Protest anschließen würde, der auch von Frankreich ausginge. Soll ich diesen Schritt thun?” (italics in original).

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Conclusion In Germany, the political situation prevented a modernization of the political means (parliamentarianism, economic pressure, public opinion), and enforced the continuity of the secret understanding between the great state bankers and the government that perpetuated the dynamics of premodern shtadlanut. The Brussels Conference was no exception to this rule, as Abigail Green writes: “This landmark development owed more to the old-fashioned influence of the court Jew than it did to the activities of a modern Jewish lobby.”100 Until the foundation of the Hilfsverein in 1901, no effort was made by German Jews to realize international politics in a separate manner. Those interested in maintaining an ideal of universal Jewish solidarity as well as some sort of a unified world organization could only militate on the side of their French coreligionists in the ranks of the Alliance. Their religiously conservative and politically liberal worldviews placed these activists in a clear opposition to the Berlin Jewish leaders, committed to religious reform and German patriotism. The internal fragmentation of German Jewry is one of the reasons why Lazarus’ option of a full separation from Paris came out to be less popular than the transnational connection inside the Alliance. Because of these internal disagreements, the international competition between French and German Jewish leaders was far more complex than a mere reflection of the balance of powers.

100 Green, Moses Montefiore, 401; see also idem, Sir Moses Montefiore and the Making of the “Jewish International,” in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008), no. 3, 287– 307.

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The Elite and the Street: The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy What follows is an effort to explore the evolution in the Jewish world of the so-called new or democratic diplomacy that supposedly became the norm in the conduct of international affairs after World War I. This purported shift in the manner in which states sought to govern the relations among them is commonly associated with the first of US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, articulated in January 1918: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”1 Wilson’s notion was that “the public view” would invariably have a salutary effect upon the conduct of political leaders because, as he put it in discussing his terms for ending the war in Europe, “the counsels of plain men have become […] more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs, who still retain the impression that they are playing a game of power […].”2 In accordance with this estimation he rejected what he called Germany’s “monarchical autocrats” as partners for peace, insisting that he would negotiate a permanent peace treaty only with a government that he took to represent the will of the German people as a whole.3 In doing so, he was widely regarded as having given practical voice to the principle that international relations must correspond to the democratically-expressed will of the peoples that endowed governments with sovereignty, and that the diplomats

1 2

3

See the text of the Fourteen Points, (31 May 2016). On War Issues and Peace Program, New York, 27 September 1918, in: Supplement to the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Covering the Second Term of Woodrow Wilson, March 4, 1917, to March 4, 1921, publ. by Bureau of National Literature, [New York] 1921, 8598. The Secretary of State [Robert Lansing] to Swiss Chargé (Oederlin), October 23, 1918, in: United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Supplement 1: The World War, 2 pts, here pt. 1, [Washington, D. C.] 1918, 381–383, here 383, (31 May 2016). JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 157–166.

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who negotiated the substance of those relations were empowered to do so only insofar as they were authorized by popular mandate.4

Jewish Representation – “Old” and “New” Some of the most prominent Jewish spokesmen who endeavored to advance what they regarded as collective Jewish interests in the international arena during the years between the two world wars depicted themselves as operating in full compliance with these new diplomatic principles. Thus, for example, Josef Tenenbaum (1887–1961), who was present in Paris during the Peace Conference on behalf of a body known as the Jewish National Council of East Galicia, and who later held important positions in the American Jewish Congress, claimed that whereas “the ways of the traditional Jewish representation in matters governmental has been shtadlanut, intervention by proxy, the representatives who participated in the Committee of [Jewish] Delegations to the Peace Conference in Paris 1919 were delegated as well as dedicated men, chosen by the people in elections at Congresses, Conventions, and Jewish National Councils.” “The new technique of delegating powers,” he insisted, “was democratic and representative.” Moreover, he observed, these delegates approached their task differently from the traditional shtadlanim. As he put it, “The Jewish delegates came to present legal arguments, not requests; not to beg or bribe but to demand what was theirs by right and not by sufferance.”5 The narrative of triumphant Wilsonianism at the Peace Conference was challenged even as it was being articulated by Wilson himself.6 In contrast, the narrative of a postwar democratization of Jewish international politics has faced considerably less questioning, whether public or scholarly. 4

5

6

Harold Nicolson, Diplomacy, Oxford 31963, 41–43; Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, London 21946, 24–36. YIVO Archives, New York (henceforth YIVO), RG 283, box 1, file 2: Joseph [sic] Tenenbaum, The Struggle for Jewish Rights at the Peace Conference, Paris 1919 (unpublished typescript; italics in original). Note, e. g. , the entry in the diary of Harold Nicolson (then a junior member of the British delegation to the Peace Conference), 29 May 1919, regarding Wilson’s statement to the heads of government of France, Great Britain, and Italy that “the test [of the peace settlement] is what the people themselves waant [sic].” Nicolson observed: “There is no question of his sincerity. Yet he must know somewhere inside himself that our minds long ago have slid away from all such altitudes.” Idem, Peacemaking 1919, New York 1965, 351. See also Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations. A Personal Narrative, Boston, Mass., 1921, 213–242.

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Such scrutiny will immediately notice the ahistorical caricature of shtadlanut that is typical of this version of history. Shtadlanim actually operated according to a wide variety of patterns. Many were in fact not only delegates of their communities but paid employees of them. The terms of their employment were often recorded in the community pinkas, a public document. So too, at times, were the results of their activities. In many known instances community leaders accompanied and supervised them on their missions. Moreover, their diplomatic toolbox, as it were, included not only pleas and bribes but also suits and arguments at law, based upon the official charters that secured their rights of residence.7 In fairness, Tenenbaum and other participants in the so-called new Jewish diplomacy who belittled shtadlanut lacked the benefit of the historical research that supports our current picture. What they pejoratively termed shtadlanut actually involved an anachronistic use of the word. They were referring not to people who held an official communal office called shtadlan but instead to the executives of organizations like the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Anglo-Jewish Association, or the American Jewish Committee, all of which were products of the era of emancipation, when the corporate communities that had employed and regulated shtadlanim in the past had lost their legal standing vis-à-vis the governing power. These executives were indeed responsible not to any officially constituted or recognized community but to a small number of more-or-less self-appointed spokesmen for the Jews in a particular state. During the decades prior to World War I those spokesmen increasingly took it upon themselves to represent the needs and interests of Jews in the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires and in new states formed on former imperial territories vis-à-vis both their own governments and the international community.8

7

8

Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis. Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, New York 1993, 71 f., and 107–110; Scott Ury, The “Shtadlan” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Noble Advocate or Unbridled Opportunist?, in: Polin 15 (2002), 267–299; François Guesnet, Politik der Vormoderne. “Shtadlanuth” am Vorabend der polnischen Teilungen, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon-Dubnow-Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 235–255. Eli Bar-Chen, Prototyp jüdischer Solidarität. Die Alliance Israélite Universelle, in: ibid., 277–296; Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France, Stanford, Calif., 2006, 157–199; David Loewe, The Anglo-Jewish Association. Past and Present, in: Alan Stephens/Raphael Walden (eds.), For the Sake of Humanity. Essays in Honour of Clemens N. Nathan, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2006, 203–216; Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore. Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, Cambridge, Mass., 2010, 370–372; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist. The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966, Philadelphia, Pa., 1972, 19–36; Matthew M. Silver, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America. A Biography, Syracuse, N. Y., 2013, 79–124.

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But during the war years some Jews in those empires asserted their right to represent themselves and demanded their own place at the table where the anticipated postwar peace settlement would be negotiated.9 Toward the end of the war Jews in several eastern European regions and states organized Jewish national councils to express their demand. A similar development took place in the United States, where in 1915 and 1916 the leadership of New York’s Federation of Jewish Organizations effectively forced the American Jewish Committee to summon “a conference of delegates from Jewish societies throughout the country, chosen by their membership, for the sole purpose of considering the Jewish question as it affects our brethren in belligerent lands.”10 In June 1917 more than 330,000 ballots were cast for what would come to be known as the American Jewish Congress, which, when it convened in December 1918, publicly proclaimed a “Jewish Bill of Rights” and selected a nine-member delegation to present it to the peacemakers in Paris.11

Paris 1919 as a Breakthrough? This was the new state of affairs that Tenenbaum and other proponents of it proclaimed. In view of the historical moment at which it occurred, it is not surprising that they trumpeted it as a Jewish expression of the Wilsonian moment in world history, one in which, among other things, the old-line elites that had dominated international Jewish politics for more than half a century became subject for the first time to true, effective popular control. And perhaps it was. But if so, it was a fleeting moment indeed. Just as Wilson’s publicly proclaimed commitment to openness did not prevent the US peace delegation from fortifying its quarters at Paris’ Hôtel de Crillon 19 Comité des délégations Juives auprès de la Conférence de la Paix, Les droits nationaux des Juives en Europe orientale. Recueil d’études, Paris 1919; Oscar Isaiah Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919), New York 1966, 272–282. 10 Ninth Annual Report of the American Jewish Committee, in: American Jewish Yearbook 18 (1916/17), 288–410, here 312, (31 May 2016). See also Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 91–98; Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community. The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922, New York 1970, 218–227. 11 Morris Frommer, The American Jewish Congress. A History (unpublished PhD thesis, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Oh., 1978), 2 vols., here vol. 1, 103 f., and 110– 112; David Engel, Art. “American Jewish Congress,” in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, ed. by Dan Diner, 7 vols., Stuttgart 2011–2016, here vol. 1, Stuttgart 2011, 72– 77.

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like “an American battleship” so that important meetings could be held in secret,12 so too did the new tribunes of the Jewish street quickly turn themselves into organizational executives not all that different from the older diplomatic elite whose time had supposedly passed. And just as Wilson found himself rebuked in his own country by the very instruments of popular control for which he claimed to speak, so too did the new ostensibly democratic Jewish elite prove unable to control a populace whose wisdom it quickly came to doubt. The first shift is evident in the subsequent histories of both the American Jewish Congress and the various East European Jewish national councils after the Peace Conference. As Tenenbaum noted incidentally in trumpeting the demise of shtadlanut, the institutional expression at the Peace Conference of the popular will supposedly embodied in all of these groups was the Committee of Jewish Delegations (Comité des Délégations Juives). This body was formally constituted on 25 March 1919 by seven representatives of the American Jewish Congress, ten members of the Jewish National Councils of Congress Poland, East Galicia, Ukraine, Russia, and Italy, and two additional participants, one a resident of London, the other of Paris.13 Shortly thereafter the Jewish National Councils of West Galicia and Czechoslovakia sent delegates (the designation “Czecho-Slovakia” was actually used avant la lettre in the minutes of one of the Committee’s early meetings, as well as in its first public memorandum),14 and several prominent Jews from England and Palestine participated in Committee activities as well.15 At the outset, the Committee decided that, like the American Jewish Congress, it would operate only for the duration of the Peace Conference.16 But by the end of 1919 it transmuted itself into a permanent structure for the purpose of, in the words of its by-laws, “fulfill[ing] the tasks of the Jewish people which are not in the power of the individual Jewish Communities, especially the defence of […] Jewish interests before the League of Nations.”17 This new organization was supposed to be composed of representatives from 12 Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, 225 (diary entry, 7 January 1919). 13 Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem (henceforth CAHJP), Inv. 1855, Sitting of 25 March 1919; Le Comité des délégations Juives, Dix-sept ans d’activité, Paris 1936, 2; Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge/New York 2004, 196. 14 CAHJP, Inv. 1855, Full Sitting of the Committee, 7 April 1919; Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (henceforth CZA), L6/610, Comité des Délégations Juives to the President and Members of the Peace Conference, 10 May 1919. 15 CAHJP, Inv. 1855, Sitting of the [sic] 28 March 1919. 16 CZA, A126/52/12, Das Comité des Délégations Juives […] setzt seine Arbeit fort solange die Geschäfte der Friedenskonferenz dauern (untitled memorandum, hand dated “1919”). 17 CZA, A126/668, Waad Haarazoth. The Board of Jewish Delegations, n. d.

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each country in which Jews numbered more than 5,000 (presumably throughout the world; the by-laws did not specify any geographic limits to its purview). The representatives were to be chosen “by the Jewish congresses of the country,” who were in turn to be “elected by universal suffrage.” Each country would be entitled to select one delegate for every 200,000 Jews within its borders.18 This plan, however, could not be sustained, because governments in Eastern Europe crippled the operation of the national councils and other instruments of Jewish autonomy, to the point where they were unable to organize the required elections.19 The Committee of Jewish Delegations thus quickly found itself reduced to a small coterie of associates recruited and appointed by Executive Secretary Leo Motzkin, who was in effect employed by his own appointees. Much the same happened when the American Jewish Congress decided to constitute itself as a permanent organization, in violation of its original charge to disband within a year of the Peace Conference’s adjournment. Unable to generate sufficient public interest in a second defense agency alongside the American Jewish Committee to permit a broadly-based election, delegates to the permanent Congress were chosen by existing Jewish organizations. The Congress itself convened only infrequently and exercised little control over the organization’s operation, whose direction was determined virtually exclusively by one individual – Rabbi Stephen Wise.20 Thus for all of the contrasts their respective spokesmen liked to draw between them, the principal Jewish exemplars of the “old” and the “new” diplomacy did not differ all that much from one another. For the most part the Committee of Jewish Delegations and the American Jewish Congress went about their daily business in much the same way as did the Alliance, the American Jewish Committee, or the Joint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. In particular, to the extent that any of these thoroughly elite bodies concerned themselves with opinions on the Jewish street, they sought to shape those opinions far more than to be guided by them. All were prepared in principle to give voice to popular views, but only insofar as that voice could be mobilized in support of the political positions and strategies that they formulated without prior regard for it. The Committee of Jewish Delegations and the American Jewish Congress may have been a bit quicker to turn to the street than were their “older” counterparts, but they insisted no less that popular passions be controlled. 18 Ibid. 19 CZA, A405/76, Report on the Activity of the Committee of Jewish Delegations during the Last Six Weeks, n. d. 20 Frommer, The American Jewish Congress, vol. 1, 169–203.

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The Affair Just how greatly they distrusted those passions and tried to restrain them was demonstrated vividly in their initial response to the May 1926 assassination of Ukrainian exile leader Symon Petliura in Paris by the immigrant Jewish anarchist Scholem Schwarzbard.21 The assassin described his deed as an act of retaliation for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews in Ukraine in 1919, when his target had headed a Ukrainian national government: Since national and international judicial institutions had not held Petliura responsible for these crimes, Schwarzbard had taken it upon himself to do so. Jews throughout the world instantly adopted Schwarzbard as a national hero. Within days of the event Jewish newspapers from New York to Melbourne, from Sfax in Tunisia to Harbin in Manchuria, anointed the assassin the great avenger of Jewish blood and began taking up grass-roots collections for his legal defense. That popular behavior dismayed the leaders of the Committee of Jewish Delegations. Only a week after the assassination, Leo Motzkin wrote to Simon Dubnow, one of his appointed associates, complaining about the “irresponsible reports and comments” on the event circulating in the Jewish press and insisting that “public statements should be uniform and […] well thought out.”22 To that end Motzkin convened a central Schwarzbard Defense Committee under Committee of Jewish Delegations auspices, whose members Motzkin chose himself without consulting any of the local activists who had taken an independent interest in the case. Quickly the Schwarzbard Defense Committee decided to try to reduce Jewish press discussion of the affair to a minimum. On 27 June 1926, for example, it wrote to the New York Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward with a plea “not […] to raise too much noise” about it or even to disclose the new Committee’s existence.23 Around the same time, Marvin Lowenthal, who headed the small European office of the American Jewish Congress, informed Stephen Wise of the Committee’s initial steps, commenting that it did not wish them to become a subject of public discussion. He himself called the adulation Schwarzbard had received from throughout the Jewish world “as injudicious as [it was] well-meaning.” Complaining that “offers of money and advice and moral support were in general coupled with the idea of securing these 21 For details about this incident, see David Engel (ed.), The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927. A Selection of Documents, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016, 7–94 (introduction). 22 YIVO, RG 80/437/37452–37443, Motzkin to Dubnow, 4 June 1926, cit. in: ibid., 164– 167, here 164 f. 23 CAHJP, P243/3, Schwarzbard Defense Committee to Editorial Board, in: Jewish Daily Forward, 27 June 1926, cit. in: ibid., 185–189, here 186.

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necessaries by public appeal and public demonstration,” he warned that “nothing could be more inadvisable.” “The money that will be needed can surely be collected without propaganda and publicity,” he insisted; “anything but silence […] is not only unwise, it is unnecessary.”24 There were several reasons for this aversion to open diplomacy. The most important was that Motzkin and his associates did not wish discussion of Schwarzbard’s deed to damage their relations with the Ukrainian diaspora – Europe’s other significant stateless minority. Since the end of the World War they – along with their “old-style” antagonists for leadership of the Jewish diplomatic effort – had sought a horizontal alliance with Ukrainian political groups aimed at cajoling the League of Nations into activating what had hitherto been, as far as Jews were concerned, its rather dormant minorities protection mechanism. In Schwarzbard’s act they saw a new opportunity to kick that mechanism into operation. They would argue that responsibility for the deed actually belonged to the international community, for had the League taken adequate action against the 1919 violence in Ukraine while it was occurring – as Jewish diplomats, both “old” and “new,” had demanded – the assassin would not have felt the need for revenge. Hence their strategy called for presenting the violence not as a Petliura-directed Ukrainian national project but as the result of a general breakdown of public order that timely international action could have rectified. In what was likely its earliest formulation of its attitude toward Schwarzbard’s impending trial, the Committee of Jewish Delegations stated emphatically that it “must do everything to avoid damaging the relations between the Jewish masses and the Ukrainians in any way.”25 And Motzkin reassured his friend Arnold Margolin, a prominent Jewish attorney from Kiev who had been a high-ranking official in Petliura’s government, that “we have a powerful desire to do everything so that the mutual relations between Ukrainians and Jews will not become fouled over this trial.”26 But the Jewish street would not go along. From the outset popular sentiment favored a strategy that exculpated Schwarzbard by portraying Petliura as a mass murderer who deserved to die. That was the sentiment expressed in letters that poured in to the assassin and to his wife from the day his deed became known. It was the sentiment that underlay the appeals from local defense committees that appeared in Jewish newspapers throughout the world. It was a sentiment that the Jewish diplomatic elite, both “old” and “new,” hoped to stifle. But the elite could not do so. Sensing the effort to 24 American Jewish Historical Society, New York, Stephen S. Wise Papers, box 91, Marvin Lowenthal to American Jewish Congress, 25 June 1926, cit. in: ibid., 183–185. 25 CAHJP, P10/4/1, Untitled document beginning “Das Verteidigungs-Komitee wegen Pogrom-Angelegenheiten,” cit. in: ibid., 160 (document 17). 26 CAHJP, P243/4, Motzkin to Margolin, 17 July 1926, cit. in: ibid., 209–213.

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suppress popular feeling, the worldwide Jewish press, which in the past had proven largely amenable to elite direction, now turned itself into a platform not only for lionizing the assassin but for vilifying a man Ukrainians figured as a martyr. And in the process, Jewish leaders who had tried in the past and who continued to try to make common cause with Ukrainians in pursuit of Jewish interests found themselves broadly discredited. Jewish newspapers branded them with derogatory epithets like moshkos, yidlekes, and yahudim, implying that they lacked honor.27 The New York-based anarchist periodical Fraye arbeter shtime (for which Schwarzbard himself had reported) attacked the many Jewish “diplomats, patriots, philanthropists, academics, financiers, journalists, and socialists” who failed to find an appropriate response to “the gruesome, inhuman events” in Ukraine following World War I, and whose continued efforts to “professionalize” the business of defending the physical security of Jews threatened “to weaken and to uproot the sense of justice, responsibility, and sacrifice” that Schwarzbard demonstrated.28 In Palestine, right-wing journalist Yehoshua Heschel Yeivin belittled what he called the quintessential elite Jewish response to the pogroms: gathering statistics of the casualties and publishing the results. He compared that response invidiously to that of “the Armenians,” who, he claimed, had undertaken to punish “the Turks” for the infamous massacres of World War I not by “collect[ing] material about those acts” but by killing the “pasha-executioners” immediately.29 Menachem Ribalow, editor of the influential Hebrew weekly Hadoar, even went so far as to charge that some members of the Jewish diplomatic elite had actually helped Petliura escape justice by insisting that he personally harbored no ill-will toward Jews.30 It did not take long before the Committee of Jewish Delegations understood that if it wished to retain a leadership position in the Jewish world it could not allow itself to stand against these popular passions. Thus, within months, pressure from below led the Committee to a position that effectively precluded avoidance of a severe rupture in Jewish-Ukrainian relations – something it had hoped to prevent. It was forced into this position not by any actions on the Ukrainian side but by the Jewish street. This appears to have been the first time in which the street dictated policy to the elite. 27 Menachem Ribalow, Petliura shehik-atsamot [Petliura, May His Bones Be Ground to Dust], in: Ha-doar, 4 June 1926, no. 26, 506, cit. in: ibid., 167–174, here 171; Abraham Liessin, Sholem Shvartsbord, in: Di tsukunft [The Future], July 1926, 375 f., cit. in: ibid., 189–199, here 188, and 192. 28 [N. a.], Di hinrikhtung fun dem pogroms-ataman [The Execution of the Pogrom Commander], in: Fraye arbeter shtime [Free Workers’ Voice], 4 June 1926. 29 Yehoshua Heschel Yeivin, Al yedi’ah ahat [Concerning One News Item], in: Davar, no. 310, 4 June 1926, 2, cit. in: Engel (ed.), The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927, 174–178, here 174 f. 30 Ribalow, Petliura shehik-atsamot [Petliura, May His Bones Be Ground to Dust].

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Conclusion Yet, even this turn of events did not indicate that Jews would henceforth practice the new democratic diplomacy. Instead it prompted the elite, both “old” and “new,” to experiment with new ways of regaining control over a popular will that it continued to regard as capricious, and of channeling popular discontents into what it considered politically useful directions.31 In other words, Jewish diplomacy between the world wars and beyond has been marked by a tension between the Wilsonian ideal of popular control and the diplomats’ own preference for independence from popular restraint – a tension not unlike the one that has characterized virtually all international diplomacy for the past hundred years. The ways in which Jews have tried to negotiate that tension has a fascinating history of its own. But elucidating that history will have to await another occasion.

31 David Engel, Being Lawful in a Lawless World. The Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard and the Defense of East European Jews, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006), 83–97.

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Philipp Graf

The Bernheim Petition 1933: Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period

Before the League of Nations against Hitler “A Jew May Thwart Hitler. Germany ‘in the Dock’ at Geneva?” – This was the headline in the 22 May 1933 edition of the Daily Express (London) reporting on an event at the seat of the League of Nations in Geneva. Evidently, Franz Bernheim, a Jew from Upper Silesia, had submitted a petition to the League of Nations in Geneva in which he accused the German Reich, several months after the handover of the reins of power to the National Socialists, of having violated a number of minority rights regulations in the German part of Upper Silesia. In his complaint, he demanded that the Council of the League should fulfill its mandate and “declare null and void for Upper Silesia the laws, decrees and administrative measures in contradiction to the aforementioned fundamental principles and insure that they shall have no validity, […] to give instructions that the situation guaranteed by the convention shall be restored and that Jews injured by these measures shall be reinstated in their rights and shall be given compensation.”1

Franz Bernheim (1899–1990), brother-in-law of the communist publisher Wieland Herzfelde, had been dismissed from his job in a department store in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, as a result of his Jewish background, and had fled at the end of April 1933 to Prague. He apparently had possessed the courage to summon Germany before the League of Nations, using his personal case in an attempt to have the disenfranchisement of the German Jews raised for discussion before that forum. Associated with the complaint that soon came to be known as the “Bernheim petition,” major dailies and large sections of the international public also harbored the hope that the German Reich might in this way, if not forced to abandon its policies toward Jews, at least be pushed to a point, where it had to make a public position statement. “It will be seen,”

1

The petition is documented in: American Jewish Year Book (1933/1934) (Review of the Year 5693), 74–78; Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933. Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008, 303–311. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 167–186.

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wrote the Times in London, “that this petition provides the opportunity for a fierce attack on the Hitler Government for its treatment of the Jews.”2 Bernheim’s complaint was based on Article 147 of the German-Polish Accord on Upper Silesia, the so-called Geneva Convention, signed in May 1922 under the supervision of the League of Nations, in order to prevent the discrimination of the German and Polish minorities in the respective parts of the divided Upper Silesian area. Art. 147 read in detail: “The Council of the League of Nations is competent to deliver a judgment on all individual or collective petitions relating to the provisions of the present Part and directly addressed to it by members of a minority. When the Council forwards these petitions to the Government of the State in whose territory the petitioners are domiciled, this Government shall return them, with or without observations, to the Council for examination.”3

While in 1922 no one had even dreamt that in the near future the Jews in Upper Silesia could fall under those regulations pertaining to petitions, now this Article allowed them to make use of the Geneva Convention. Astonishingly, the petition indeed proved successful. Accompanied by huge media interest, which hailed the petition as a victory over Hitler,4 Bernheim’s plea was placed several times on the agenda of the Council of the League of Nations.5 Upon instructions from Berlin, the German head of delegation to Geneva, Legationsrat Friedrich von Keller, declared on 26 May that the Reich would respect its international obligations in Upper Silesia. He further explicated that if “in Upper Silesia the regulations of the Geneva Convention have been infringed, then that was done mistakenly by subordinate authorities’ acting based on erroneous interpretations of the laws.”6 On 6 June, the Council ruled that Germany had to revoke the antiJewish laws in Upper Silesia and was instructed to report on the progress of this at the next scheduled session of the Council during the fall.7 The indivi2 3

4

5 6 7

Treatment of Jews in Upper Silesia. Petition to League Council, in: The Times, 22 May 1933, 13. The convention is documented in: Georg Kaeckenbeeck, The International Experiment of Upper Silesia. A Study in the Working of the Upper Silesian Settlement, 1922–1937, London 1942, 567–823, here 640. See e. g.: Reich to End Curbs on Jews in Silesia, in: New York Times, 27 May 1933, A4; Die Juden in Oberschlesien. Deutschland in Genf isoliert, in: Prager Tagblatt, 28 May 1933, 1; Völkerbundsrat, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 31 May 1933, 1; Die Petition über die Lage der Juden in Oberschlesien, in: Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), 27 May 1933, 1; La Situation des Juifs en Allemagne viendra devant le Conseil, in: Journal de Genève, 28 May 1933, 4. League of Nations (ed.), Minutes of the Seventy-Third Session of the Council, 22, 26 and 30 May, 6 June 1933. Ibid, Minutes of the Seventy-Third Session of the Council, 26 May 1933. Ibid, Minutes of the Seventy-Third Session of the Council, 6 June 1933.

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dual case of Bernheim was passed on to the court of arbitration in Upper Silesia. There, in June 1933, a Committee of Jewish Communities was established, which succeeded in implementing the rescission of the anti-Jewish legislation over the course of the next year. Until the Geneva Convention expired in 1937, Upper Silesia thus constituted a kind of enclave of the Weimar Republic within Nazi Germany: Jews were restored their former civil rights; the ban on Jewish ritual slaughter from April 1933 was lifted and, later on, the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 was suspended; even distribution of Julius Streicher’s notorious journal Der Stürmer was prohibited.8 Although lending the petition its name, Franz Bernheim was actually only a supernumerary behind the complaint. Initially, as a result of the huge public interest, it had been largely concealed that the Bernheim petition was actually a concerted initiative by a group of Jewish minority rights activists associated with the Paris-based Comité des Délégations Juives, established in 1919. Members of the Executive Board of this Committee, Emil Margulies (1877–1943), Leo Motzkin (1867–1933), Nathan Feinberg (1895–1988) and Jacob Robinson (1889–1977), had sought robustly in the spring of 1933 to galvanize a discussion on the situation of the Jews at the international forum of the League of Nations. In searching for such option of intervention in favor of the Jews in Germany, they had stumbled onto the Geneva Convention, which was the only treaty that offered a chance to raise the question of the German Jews, now degraded to a minority, for discussion before an international forum. By discussing one part (Upper Silesia), it was their hope to rivet public attention on the whole (the German Reich).

The Question of Success Given the outcome of the Bernheim petition, one can contend that no other initiative of Jewish diplomacy in the interwar period – from efforts to rescind the numerus clausus regulations at Hungarian universities in the 1920s to evoking condemnation of anti-Jewish violence in Romania in 1927 – had been crowned with such success. Nonetheless, the indisputable achievements of the Bernheim petition stand in striking contrast with the 8

Georg Weissmann, Die Durchsetzung des jüdischen Minderheitenrechts in Oberschlesien 1933–1937. Mit einer Einleitung von Dr. Franz Meyer, in: Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 6 (1963), 148–198; with new insights on the Upper Silesian case as an exemption: Brendan Karch, A Jewish “Nature Preserve.” League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia, 1933–1937, in: Central European History 46 (2013), no. 1, 124–160.

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rather negative interpretations of Jewish minority diplomacy in the interwar era. This position has been formulated most prominently by Hannah Arendt. In her letter to the lawyer Erich Cohn-Bendit in January 1940, entitled “The Minority Question,” she expressed her contempt for the Comité, saying it had been nothing more than “an unpaid legal firm” at the League of Nations, which “had never been appointed to engage in any kind of policy-making.”9 In her opus magnum, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt repeated her judgment, although now embedded in her scientific analysis of the “perplexities of the rights of man” (the “Aporien der Menschenrechte”).10 Historical research likewise sketches a cautious picture both of the Bernheim petition as well as of Jewish minority diplomacy as a whole. Carole Fink, for example, has termed the Bernheim petition a “peculiar document,”11 while David Engel in his works has repeatedly projected an image of Jewish non-governmental representation in the interwar period marked by a lack of impact, and based solely on happenstance and fortunate constellations.12 In general, these assessments will not be contradicted here. Nonetheless, it appears fruitful to challenge the overall image of a “lack of success” of Jewish diplomacy by looking at the individual case. The article explores the question of how the undeniable success of the Bernheim petition relates to this image of diplomatic failure. It does so by considering four corresponding parameters which shaped the outcome of the petition in 1933 as well as its later perception: 1) the question of a possible distorted perception of the event due to the later extermination of European Jewry; 2) the contextualization of the petition within the array of other initiatives of Jewish diplomacy of the day; 3) the specific character of the Geneva Convention; 4) the highly favorable international political climate in the spring of 1933.

19 Her actual wording in German was in fact much more derogative, calling the Comité “eine unbezahlte Advokatur, [die] niemals dazu bestimmt [gewesen] war, irgendeine Politik zu machen.” See Hannah Arendt, Zur Minderheitenfrage. Brief an Erich Cohn-Bendit, Paris, Januar 1940, in: idem, Vor dem Antisemitismus ist man nur noch auf dem Monde sicher, 225–234, here 225. 10 Idem, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, Totalitarismus, Munich 82001, 559–625. 11 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. Jews, the Great Powers, and International Minority Protection, 1881–1938, Oxford 2004, 331 f. 12 David Engel, Perceptions of Power. Poland and World Jewry, in: Jahrbuch des SimonDubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 17–28. See also the contribution by David Engel in this volume.

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Distorted Horizons For one, the question of the success of Jewish diplomacy in 1933 and the interwar period has been distorted by a later event – the Holocaust. One may indeed be tempted to treat the petition as marginal, as a “footnote of history,” as Lucy Dawidowicz has dubbed it,13 given the backdrop of the later catastrophe. Unconsciously – and this is truly a constant epistemological challenge for the interpretation of German-Jewish history in the 1930s – the shadow of the Holocaust falls upon every event in its immediate prior or subsequent vicinity.14 In the present case, for example, the urgent wish to put the National Socialists in their place might be read into the petition – as if a more favorable result of the complaint could have prevented the later catastrophe. Such an unconscious, exaggerated expectation of the Bernheim petition, shaped by the later calamity, eventually ignores reality. Here, a shift of perspective, both in terms of time and space, might prove helpful: It doubtless remains true that the Comité was indeed one of the first Jewish initiatives which became active in 1933 on behalf of the German Jews. Its horizon, however, referred back to the year 1919 and could not foresee what would happen in 1941 and thereafter. This rather trivial fact becomes ever clearer if one acknowledges that the Comité’s members in the spring of 1933 were acting against the backdrop of the minority treaties passed in Paris in 1919, aiming to approach the situation in Germany precisely by use of these legal means. Strictly speaking, minority rights constituted the raison d’être of the Comité. Already when it was formed in March 1919 in Paris, the aim was to be able to appeal to the Peace Conference with the demand that the successor states of the former empires in Eastern Europe be obligated to adopt special clauses pertaining to minority rights. This, in turn, appeared to have become necessary, since with the end of hostilities, millions of persons had been displaced beyond the borders of their nations of origin, quite apart from whether states had been newly established, or had changed in size. The newly formed states viewed these minorities within their borders as a threat to their state sovereignty, only just gained. Thus, the minorities were in danger, in the context of the ongoing process of constituting the new politics, of being discriminated against on the basis of their national origin.

13 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945, New York 1975, 183 (fn.). 14 Dan Diner, “Gestaute Zeit.” Massenvernichtung und jüdische Erzählstruktur, in: idem, Kreisläufe. Nationalsozialismus und Gedächtnis, Berlin 1995, 125–139; David Jünger, Jahre der Ungewissheit. Emigrationspläne deutscher Juden 1933–1938, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016.

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Among these national minorities there were some six million Jews now living in these new states. Under its wing, the Comité brought together the Jewish National Councils that had been established across Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1919, which aspired to implement the collective claims of these Jews in future as public entities. In the course of the collapse of the empires, these National Councils had been set up everywhere in Eastern Europe in order to react to the concomitant political vacuum, and to present themselves as contacts for discussion in regard to Jewish concerns vis-à-vis the states newly established or then in the process of creation.15 Among these were the Jewish Congress in Russia, the Jewish-Polish Pre-Conference, and the Jewish National Councils in the Bukovina, Ukraine, Eastern Galicia, Czechoslovakia and Austria. They were supported by the American Jewish Congress and the Canadian Jewish Congress, which over the final year of World War I had passed similarly formulated demands, as well as by organizations such as Poale Zion, the socialist Bund and the Zionist World Organization. In the Comité, the representation of these Jewish bodies active at regional or national level was combined with the notion over the longer term of placing the rights of Jewish collectives, which had previously been championed by Jewish notables, on a democratic basis. Ideally what was envisaged was a superordinate Jewish body with its seat in the League of Nations, which would be recognized as a contact for discussion by the international community of nations.16 After it had finally proved successful at the Paris Peace Conference to obligate the newly established or expanded states – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Turkey and later also the Baltic states – to accept the inclusion on articles for the protection of minorities in their constitutions,17 the Comité continued its work, dropping the addition “auprès de la Conférence de la Paix” from its name, and from then on concentrated on monitoring adherence to the minority rights that had been entrusted to the newly created League of Nations in Geneva.

15 Marcos Silber, Art. “Nationalräte”, in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (henceforth EJGK). Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig ed. by Dan Diner, vol. 4, Stuttgart 2013, 328–337. See also, on the history of the Ukrainian example, Jonathan Frankel, The Dilemmas of Jewish National Autonomism. The Case of Ukraine 1917–1920, in: Peter J. Potichnyi/Howard Aster (eds.), UkrainianJewish Relations in Historical Perspective, Edmonton 1988, 263–280. 16 Leon Chasanowitsch/Leo Motzkin (eds.), Die Judenfrage der Gegenwart. Dokumentensammlung, Kopenhagen 1919, 71. 17 Erwin Viefhaus, Die Minderheitenfrage und die Entstehung der Minderheitenschutzverträge auf der Pariser Friedenskonferenz 1919. Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Nationalitätenproblems im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 1960; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, part 2.

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The Comité thus represented one example of that Zionist “work for the present” (Gegenwartsarbeit) still largely overlooked by research today. That activity did not focus just on Palestine as a national home, but also simultaneously on improving the situation of the Jews in countries in Eastern Europe. In this context, it pursued ideas that had been developed in Tsarist Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. These proceeded on the assumption that the diasporic situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe might best be secured by collective rights.18 Throughout the entire interwar period, the Comité championed the rights of Jews in East-Central and Eastern Europe under the banner of Gegenwartsarbeit: It organized emergency aid for Ukrainian Jews persecuted in the pogroms of 1919/1920, supported Jewish communities with their petitions to the League of Nations, and sought to provide the international public with information on their situation. In 1927, it was the leading body involved in accompanying Scholem Schwarzbard legally and in the media in connection with the Paris-based trial against him; a year earlier, in an act of personal justice, he had assassinated Symon Petliura, former President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the person deemed instigator of the Ukrainian pogroms.19 In addition, much space was accorded to cooperation with other national minorities, efforts that culminated in the creation in Geneva in 1925 of a European parliament for minorities, the European Congress of Nationalities, and the continuing work of the Comité in this institution until 1933. The close cooperation with Germans living abroad distant from the Reich (Auslandsdeutsche), which was fundamental for the Congress of Nationalities, resulted from the community of interests and experiences shared by both groups, Jews and Auslandsdeutsche, as historical minorities in Eastern Europe.20 It is thus not surprising that in the spring of 1933, such efforts, tried and tested in the 1920s in the sphere of minority policy, were now directed towards a country that previously had not figured on the agenda of the problem cases like those in Eastern Europe, namely National Socialist Germany. Strictly speaking, the Bernheim petition represented an attempt to exert an impact on the situation in Germany by means of a set of instruments formed in connection with Eastern Europe by Jewish NGOs. In doing so, they certainly were aware that something novel was underway in Germany, that is, 18 Anke Hilbrenner, Diaspora-Nationalismus. Zur Geschichtskonstruktion Simon Dubnows, Göttingen 2006; Grit Jilek, Nation ohne Territorium. Über die Organisierung der jüdischen Diaspora bei Simon Dubnow, Berlin 2013. 19 David Engel (ed.), The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927. A Selection of Documents, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016. 20 Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, Der Europäische Nationalitätenkongreß 1925 bis 1938. Nationale Minderheiten zwischen Lobbyistentum und Großmachtinteressen, Marburg/ Lahn 2000.

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the total revocation of the Emancipation, and they were definitely shocked that this was transpiring in a country where they had deemed such a development impossible. However, not knowing in what direction the situation in the Reich would turn, the Comité was in fact evaluating the events in Germany primarily in relation to their traditional clientele in Eastern Europe. There, in the East, the German example of unsanctioned harassment of a population group threatened to become a paradigm for those countries like Poland, Hungary, and Romania, which had been stripping their Jewries of their rights since the end of World War I. What was at stake in the eyes of the Comité in the spring of 1933 was not so much the looming catastrophe in Germany, but the ultimate deterioration of the fragile system of minority protection of 1919 as such.

Various Means Second, the Bernheim petition was only one of three measures of which the Comité made use in 1933, as the minutes of a meeting on 9 April in Paris make clear,21 and thus should not be viewed in isolation. Petitioning the League of Nations was unquestionably deemed the most important option, since it promised the greatest effect. Leo Motzkin’s initial intention was to become active on the basis of Art. 11, Sec. 2, of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stated that it was the “friendly right of each Member of the League to bring to the attention of the Assembly or of the Council any circumstance whatever affecting international relations which threatens to disturb international peace or the good understanding between nations upon which peace depends.”22

Motzkin was thinking in particular there of Great Britain, which as a great power and founding member of the League of Nations had the necessary political authority to implement such a political proposal. However, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, rejected such ideas early on in the British House of Commons. “I am advised,” replied Simon on 11 April 1933 to inquiries from MPs, “that there is no Article of the Covenant under which the Government could properly bring this matter before the next meeting of the Council of the League of Nations.”23 Inquiries directed to the British

21 Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem (henceforth CZA), Record group A 126 (Leo Motzkin), 54/1, Die Frage der Verfolgungen der Juden in Deutschland vor dem Völkerbund. 22 George Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations, London 1973, Appendix. 23 Jews in Germany – Questions to Sir J. Simon, in: The Times, 31 March 1933, 7.

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government, which the British Zionist Norman Bentwich had informed Motzkin he was to sound out, then proved indeed fruitless. After that, and as a result of comments by his associates Jacob Robinson and Nathan Feinberg, based in Kaunas and Geneva, eyes turned to the Geneva Convention. Both Robinson and Feinberg, writing to Motzkin in Paris from the beginning of April on, repeatedly pointed out to him that utilizing the Geneva Convention depended less on the favorable view held by a member state, since in the case of a conflict the Convention envisaged concrete measures.24 Both men undoubtedly had been quite familiar for some time with the Convention. Even though Jewish organizations had to date made no use of the right to intervention by the League as spelled out in the Geneva Convention, since there had simply been no necessity for that, its existence probably had been known, not least by the very active and robust use made of the Convention by the German minorities. In the years up until 1933, these minorities had submitted dozens of petitions on the Convention’s basis,25 the last of which in March 1933 at the 71st session of the Council of the League of Nations.26 This had also been no secret to Robinson and Feinberg, both authors of extensive studies on the problem of minorities in the interwar period.27 However, while Robinson, who had followed the debates in the British House of Commons in the press, proceeded on the assumption of having an international Jewish organization appear as claimant on the basis of Art. 72, and possibly even an association of several organizations so as to give a complaint the necessary weight,28 Feinberg preferred invoking Art. 147, i. e., a petition brought by a single individual. As an acknowledged expert on the practice of previous judgments regarding Upper Silesia, he assumed that the petition by a non-member of the Upper Silesian minority, i. e., a foreign organization, as Robinson had suggested, would have less chance for success, and a more limited room for maneuver than the petition submitted by a member of the minority. In any event, that at least could be 24 CZA A 306/126, Robinson (Kaunas) to Motzkin (Paris), 1 April 1933; CZA A 126/616, Feinberg (Geneva) to Motzkin (Paris), 5 April 1933. 25 See Gemischte Kommission für Oberschlesien (ed.), Amtliche Stellungnahmen des Präsidenten der Gemischten Kommission für Oberschlesien/Zbiór Urzędowy Poglądow Prezydenta Komisji Mieszanej dla Górnego Śląska, 2 vols., Berlin 1937. 26 Petitions of the “Deutscher Volksbund” of August 1st and October 25th, 1932, and Petitions from Guido Bienek of August 12th and October 17th, 1932, in: Minutes of the Seventy-First Session of the Council, 26 March 1933. 27 Jacob Robinson, Das Minoritätenproblem und seine Literatur. Kritische Einführung in die Quellen und die Literatur der europäischen Nationalitätenfrage der Nachkriegszeit, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des völkerrechtlichen Minderheitenschutzes, Berlin/Leipzig 1928; Nathan Feinberg, La question des minorités à la Conférence de la paix de 1919– 1920 et l’action juive en faveur de la protection internationale des minorités, Paris 1929. 28 CZA A 306/126, Robinson (Kaunas) to Motzkin (Paris), 1 April 1933.

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concluded from the previous handling of similar cases before the Council.29 Robinson and Feinberg were seconded by their fellow campaigner based in Leitmeritz in Bohemia, Emil Margulies (1877–1943), a lawyer and head of the Jewish Party (Židovská strana) in Czechoslovakia, founded in 1925. For his part, Margulies, probably through contacts with Zionists in Upper Silesia, had learned about the Geneva Convention, and had already begun to search in Prague, a city then overflowing with refugees from the Reich, for a prospective individual who might serve as a claimant. In addition, he had already asked a number of international and national Jewish organizations whether they would be interested in participating in a collective petition in accordance with Art. 72 of the Geneva Convention.30 Along with concentrating on the League of Nations, the Comité launched further measures as well. At the same time, it envisioned persuading numerous non-governmental organizations (part of which it was a member) to pass resolutions condemning the anti-Jewish politics in the Reich, such as the annual conferences of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies31 and the International Labour Organization based in Geneva32 (both meeting in June), as well as the European Congress of Nationalities, which was scheduled to meet regularly in September in Bern. While the first two initiatives proved successful, since both conferences passed corresponding resolutions, the Comité suffered a bitter defeat in the Congress of Nationalities in the autumn of 1933. The German minorities in the Congress supported the side of the new rulers and prevented any condemnation of German policy regarding the Jews.33 If the German delegates previously had vehemently condemned the discrimination of population groups by any state on the basis of their origin – although always without specific mention of the respective state – they now conceded the German government the unhampered right to exercise “dissimilation,” that is, the reverse of the assimilation of a population group. In a perfidious manner, they made the rhetorical concession to the German Jews that in accordance with the motto of their congress over many years, the Jews now were also permitted to demand the principles that the European Congress of Nationalities had always stood for since its inception.34 29 30 31 32

CZA A 126/616, Feinberg (Geneva) to Motzkin (Paris), 5 April 1933. Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933, 143–147. Ibid, 239–242. League of Nations (ed.), International Labour Conference. Seventeenth Session, Geneva 1933, Record of Proceedings, Geneva 1933, 687. 33 Hildrun Glass, Ende der Gemeinsamkeit. Zur deutsch-jüdischen Kontroverse auf dem Europäischen Nationalitätenkongress 1933, in: Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2 (2004), 259–282. 34 Ibid, 275 f.; Bamberger-Stemmann, Der Europäische Nationalitätenkongreß 1925 bis 1938, 278 f.

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The third measure focused on influencing public opinion, part of which was the publication of the well-known documentation Das Schwarzbuch. Die Lage der Deutschen Juden (The Black Book. The Situation of German Jews) in January 1934.35 Compiled in Paris on behalf of Leo Motzkin by the German-Jewish publicist and fierce Hitler-enemy Rudolf Olden (1885– 1940), the book contained a precise enumeration of all anti-Jewish regulations, decrees and laws since the Nazi takeover, documenting, by means of official German press reports, the deprivation of rights of the German Jews. Its aim was to refute the argument repeatedly advanced by German propaganda that National Socialist legislation on the Jews served solely one purpose: the maintenance of law and order.36 All three measures represented the customary means of Jewish non-governmental diplomacy, designed to counterbalance and offset the lack of state sovereignty, and they all had been put to the test over time before. Cooperation in non-governmental organizations, which advocated the reform of the League of Nations and its procedure of minority protection, went back to the year 1925, when the Comité had joined the European Congress of Nationalities.37 And it had also approached the League of Nations a number of times before, for example in 1927 together with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, when a petition was submitted protesting the anti-Jewish numerus clausus in Hungary.38 The publication of documentations such as the Black Book was also a common practice. One of the first publications authored by Motzkin had been the two-volume documentation Die Judenpogrome in Russland (The Jewish Pogroms in Russia, 1910).39 After World War I, documentation volumes followed on the situation of the Jews in Oriental countries (1919),40 and also on the devastating pogroms in Ukraine (1927).41 Taken together, 1933 was paradoxically the most eventful and in a certain sense most successful year in the work of the Comité, since it was able to employ all three elements at the same time.

35 Comité des Délégations Juives (ed.), Die Lage der deutschen Juden. Das Schwarzbuch – Tatsachen und Dokumente, Paris 1934 (reprint Frankfurt a. M. 1983), 22. 36 See Raya Cohen, Art. “Schwarzbuch”, in: EJGK, vol. 5, Stuttgart 2014, 400–402. 37 Frank Nesemann, Minderheitendiplomatie. Leo Motzkin zwischen Imperien und Nationen, in: Dan Diner (ed.), Synchrone Welten. Zeitenräume jüdischer Geschichte, Göttingen 2005, 147–171. 38 Martin Scheuermann, Jüdische Petitionen vor dem Völkerbund. Der ungarische Numerus Clausus als Beispiel, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005), 131–150. 39 A. Linden (Leo Motzkin), Die Judenpogrome in Russland, 2 vols., Cologne 1910. 40 Comité des Délégations Juives auprés de la Conférence de la paix (ed.), Les droits nationaux des Juifs en Europe Orientale, Paris 1919. 41 Comité des Délégations Juives, The Pogroms in the Ukraine, Paris 1927.

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Members of the Comité, by the way, harbored only few illusions about the actual outcome of their efforts. Rather, the limited scope of their possible influence was quite clear to them from the very beginning. As Jacob Robinson confided in a letter to Nathan Feinberg already in mid-April 1933, he saw the action they were planning primarily as a “moral condemnation” of the Reich and did not think that it could lead to an extensive improvement of circumstances in Germany itself.42 He wrote Feinberg that there was certainly a chance the German government might lessen the pressure on the Jews, but what had already been implemented, he surmised, would probably not be revoked. Despite his prognosis, however, he pleaded for pressing on with their plan, since on the one hand, they had no choice – and on the other, the situation was so bad that it could hardly be made any worse by the submission of a petition. In an earlier letter to Motzkin, Robinson had added that it could be considered established “that by means of such a petition, the opportunity will be provided to extend the problem geographically and to spark a global discussion, which will make a definite impression, if not on contemporary Germany, then nonetheless at least on the countries not yet contaminated.”43

Legal Procedure A third level is that of the actual success of the Bernheim petition in the narrower sense. Strictly speaking, the success of the petition in 1933 – the public condemnation of Germany and the demand that the legal situation in Upper Silesia be restored – was grounded on the legal procedure itself as well as on its effective employment. As such, it differed clearly from earlier cases. Regarding the legal procedure, the Comité took advantage of the fact that the Geneva Convention of 1922 on Upper Silesia went far beyond the general procedure of minority protection. In contrast to the Polish minority treaty of 1919 and its mere 12 articles, which had served as a model for all further minority treaties, this Convention was far more extensive and thus offered less latitude of judgment. In addition, it contained more extensive regulations when it came to those entitled to submit a complaint. The appointment as regulated in the Geneva Convention of one Minority Office for each area, which was to serve as the contact for initial complaints (Art. 148), a Mixed Commission, consisting in each case of two representa42 CZA A 306/73, Robinson (Kaunas) to Feinberg (Geneva), 20 April 1933 (Heb.). 43 CZA A 126/616, Robinson (Kaunas) to Motzkin (Paris), 1 April 1933.

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tives and one independent individual as well as an arbitration court, was a decisive contribution toward enhancing the transparency of complaints. Most prominently, it permitted individuals to appeal directly to the Council of the League. The greater effect of the Geneva Convention was due to its limited sphere of application to a clear and well-defined region, and also its temporal limitation to 1937, which both were the product of a certain eagerness to experiment on the part of the lawyers involved in its drafting in 1922.44 Moreover, the regulations of the Convention proved flexible enough, so that Bernheim, as a member of the Jewish minority, which had not been determined as such in 1922, was eventually allowed to make his claim. A quite substantial difficulty, however, was involved in the employment of Art. 147 in the first place, since this required submission by an individual who was prepared to file a petition in his or her own name – which in turn constituted a quite serious potential threat for the petitioner. The existence of a functioning procedure, however, was not necessarily tantamount to its successful employment. Thus, it was also important in respect to the Bernheim petition to note a series of resolutions by the League of Nations Council from 1923; these were applied in an extremely strict manner to all complaints submitted, as many as approximately one hundred per year.45 They formed the basis for any petitions submitted to the League of Nations and decided in a preliminary examination, before the actual main negotiation, whether a complaint had any chance at all for the initiation of a procedure. These supplementary rules and regulations, also called the RioBranco Report, named after its rapporteur, had been passed at the 26th session of the Council of the League of Nations in September 1923 in addition to the accords and treaties worked out on minority protection in 1919. They were issued to weaken the continuing criticism of the complaints disagreeable to them coming from the states obligated to include provisions for minority rights; at the same time, they also were applicable to the Upper Silesian plebiscite area.46 The so-called “receivabilities,” i. e., “conditions” for evaluating if petitions could be accepted, stated that a petition had to be based on the treaties regarding minorities and/or the Geneva Convention; other condi-

44 Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933, 109–111. 45 In 1932 alone there were 131 petitions submitted, 115 of which were declared “inadmissible”. See Kurt Stillschweig, Die Juden Osteuropas in den Minderheitenverträgen, Berlin 1936, 184. 46 Report by M. de Rio-Branco, and Resolutions adopted by the League Council on September 5th, 1923 [Rio-Branco Report], in: League of Nations (ed.), Protection of Linguistic, Racial Or Religious Minorities by the League of Nations. Resolutions and Extracts from the Minutes of the Council, Resolutions and Reports Adopted by the Assembly, Relating to the Procedure to be Followed in Questions Concerning the Protection of Minorities, Geneva 1929, 20–27.

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tions were that they should not advocate any separatist demands, should not be anonymously authored, should contain no violent language and not be based on unidentifiable sources, and that an earlier case could not be repeated.47 Since the numerous petitioners, themselves scarcely versed in law, were not always familiar with the fine points of these regulations, quite a few ended up in the archives of the League of Nations administration. The Bernheim petition threatened to clash with these regulations in two respects. Since Margulies, who had coordinated the petition from Leitmeritz, also had his eye on utilizing, in addition to Art. 147, Art. 72 of the Geneva Convention, which allowed non-members of the minorities in Upper Silesia such as foreign organizations to turn to the League of Nations in connection with petitions, he had contacted the network of Jewish organizations across Europe at his disposal and asked them to submit petitions directly to a postal address in Geneva, from which he then would put together and submit a collective petition to the League in keeping with Art. 72. However, the lack of uniformity in form and content of the petitions, whose potential signatories had not been given any definite requirements and restrictions by Margulies, infringed the most inconspicuous and yet most important and consequential point in the five criteria: that of the legal basis. Since the wish to extend the discussion beyond Upper Silesia on all of Germany – which constituted after all the political nucleus of the complaint – had no directly actionable basis in the Geneva Convention, the petition would be rejected right from the outset, without having even the smallest impact, and would vanish into the archives of the League of Nations. It would then have suffered the fate of countless petitions with their authors remaining uninformed about the rejection and left, as the international law expert Kurt Stillschweig put it, “with having to draw [their] conclusions from the silence of the Secretariat.”48 Yet even if Margulies’ mass complaints surmounted the hurdle of

47 In specific regard to petitions concerning minority protection, it stated there that these: “a) Must have in view the protection of minorities in accordance with the treaties; b) In particular, must not be submitted in the form of a request for the severance of political relations between the minority in question and the state of which it forms a part; c) Must not emanate from an anonymous or unauthenticated source; d) Must abstain from violent language; e) Must contain information or refer to facts which have not recently been the subject of a petition submitted to the ordinary procedure.” Ibid., 26. See also Otto Junghann, Das Minderheitenschutzverfahren vor dem Völkerbund, Berlin 1934, 106–113; Stillschweig, Die Juden Osteuropas in den Minderheitenverträgen, 180–184; and Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz kontra Konfliktverhütung?, 34 f. 48 Stillschweig, Die Juden Osteuropas in den Minderheitenverträgen, 182–184. – This did not change until a resolution passed by the Council on 13 June 1929. From this point on, the petitioner usually received from the Secretary General notification regarding the rejection of his or her complaint; in addition, the number of petitions declared “inadmissible” were made known every year in the Official Journal of the League of Nations.

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the extremely rigorous formal requirements stipulated by the League’s Secretariat, German diplomats were free to contest and dispute the acceptance of the petitions as an act of transgression of competences by the League of Nations – with good prospects of success as they were indeed replete with obvious errors.49 Once this problem had been eliminated, another conflict emerged. Margulies had learned on 12 May 1933 that the Jewish Club (Koło Żydowskie) of the Sejm deputies, an influential Jewish-Polish association in Warsaw, had already sent off its complaint. But the Jewish Club had not mailed it to Feinberg’s address in Geneva, where Margulies intended to collect his petitions, but rather personally to the Secretary General of the League of Nations, Sir Eric Drummond. If the Polish petition had arrived as the first one in the Secretariat of the League of Nations, the danger was that it could activate point 5 of the “receivability” conditions for petitions, stating that petitions were not permitted to refer to a situation for which there was already a complaint.50 Now, the Polish petition threatened to annul all petitions that followed from Margulies’ petition movement, although not those based on Art. 147, simply because, without any prior agreement, it had been the first received. It would subsequently then be regarded and dealt with as the petition on whose basis it would be decided whether or not a procedure would be instituted. However, on the basis of its expected rejection, the petition movement would thus have come to an end as quickly as it had begun. Only by means of forging an informal contact with the administration of the League of Nations did Feinberg succeed in having the Polish petition put on hold for the time being.51 In this connection, it was quite convenient for Feinberg, who had good contacts coupled with insider knowledge about the procedural pathways in Geneva, that in the spring of 1933, the officials in the League of Nations were very favorably disposed when it came to the fate of the Jews. Thus, Secretary General Sir Eric Drummond doubtless had sympathies for the case of the Jews, which induced him, for example, to recognize the necessary urgency of Bernheim’s petition, required in the procedure of acceptance; without that recognition it would not have been dealt with at the spring Council meeting. The Comité received support in connection with this question from Lord Robert Cecil, an institution himself within the League of Nations. He persuaded Drummond, in keeping with Comité wishes, to make the Bernheim petition a priority.52 Despite his great empathy in dealing with 49 50 51 52

CZA A 306/72, Feinberg (Geneva) to Margulies (Leitmeritz), 3 May 1933. See Societé des Nations (ed.), Résolutions et Extraits des Procès-verbaux du Conseil, 23. CZA A 306/74, Feinberg (Geneva) to Goldmann (Geneva), 12 May 1933. Nathan Feinberg, Ha-Ma’arakha ha-Yehudit Neged Hitler al Bimat Hever ha-Le’ummim

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the petition at hand, in his treatment of the complaint, Drummond had to evaluate the reaction of the German member so as in any case to avoid a new crisis in the League of Nations, which was still reeling from the unilateral withdrawal by Japan from the organization a few months before.53 Eventually, the Comité had stepped onto the stage of international politics.

International Politics in 1933 Finally, and in addition to the existence of the Geneva Convention as a direct pathway to the Council of the League as well as staff members of the League of Nations sympathizing with the Jewish cause, the prerequisites in May 1933 were especially favorable. In the spring of 1933, a number of member states were interested in generating some sort of moderating influence on the new regime in Germany. This was specifically true of the Council members France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, who, as close neighbors of the Reich, were extremely worried about the new regime in Berlin and its unconcealed rejection of the Versailles system. And they were surprisingly eager to express these concerns during the sessions. While France’s security fears had been quite notorious in the interwar years, faced with the rising great power aspirations of Germany,54 Poland and Czechoslovakia had additional worries: They feared the destabilizing influence of the new Nazi government on the numerous German minorities within their own territorial borders, whose areas of settlement were directly adjacent to the Reich – and who in the spring of 1933 were threatening to embrace the positions espoused by National Socialism.55 For this reason as well – and not just due to concern for the German Jews – they had to be interested in maintenance of the status quo, i. e., in a well-functioning League of Nations, despite all the objections that they themselves had brought forward pertaining to the procedure regarding minorities. (Ha-Petitia shel Bernheim) [The Jewish Struggle against Hitler at the League of Nations (The Bernheim Petition)], Jerusalem 1957, 60. 53 Japan had opposed all demands for ending its occupation of Manchuria, in violation of international law. In March 1933, as a reaction to sanctions against it that had been announced, Japan without further ado declared its withdrawal from the League. See Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations, 207–241. 54 Raphaëlle Ulrich, René Massigli and Germany, 1919–1938, in: Robert Boyce (ed.), French Foreign and Defense Policy 1918–1940, London 1998, 132–148, here 141–143. 55 Roman Debicki, Foreign Policy of Poland, 1919–1939. From the Rebirth of the Polish Republic to World War II, New York 1962, 69–74; Manfred Alexander, Die Tschechoslowakei und das Deutsche Reich zwischen Versailles und München, in: Arnold Suppan (ed.), Edvard Beneš und die tschechoslowakische Außenpolitik, Frankfurt a. M. 22003, 99–119.

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If France and Czechoslovakia mainly associated their own existential fears with the Bernheim case, Poland became an advocate for a further reason. With reference to the deprivation of legal rights of German Jews, Germany could, for the first time, now itself be accused and found guilty of discrimination against minorities – a charge that Germany had directed repeatedly against Poland in regard to protection of the German minorities there during the 1920s. None had forgotten, for example, the action publicly staged by German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann during the League Council meeting in December 1928, when he had accused Poland of violating the minority accords and visibly stressed that by pounding his fist on the Council table.56 In addition, Poland saw the discussion before the Council as a possibility for demanding anew that minority protection had to be generalized and extended to all member states – and thus getting rid of their own unwanted obligations.57 By contrast, Great Britain adopted a more restrained position. Interested in good relations with the Reich, it clearly exercised reserve in comparison with France, Poland and Czechoslovakia when it came to criticism of Berlin.58 Somewhat similar to the Italians, who as senior ideological partner of the Reich had abstained in the vote the British envoy Anthony Eden had refrained in the debate from joining the chorus of his colleagues and their clearly articulated rhetoric in condemning the German member, even if the British had endorsed Lester’s report. Moreover, the conference on disarmament held in parallel and the Four-Power Pact talks between Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy ultimately also contributed to toning down the condemnation of Germany, which otherwise might have been expressed even more pointedly. In any case, both negotiations were shaped by one overriding consideration: The integration of the German Reich into European politics, which more than a decade after the war’s end still had not been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, must not be further endangered. But these constituted constellations on whose end the Jewish diplomats around Motzkin were unable to exert any influence whatsoever. However, the smaller nations represented in the Council, such as Guatemala and Norway, were able to argue in a far freer way; they were less tied to considerations in foreign policy in respect to a great power, and their position was oriented more to the League of Nations’ ideal of equal rights. Their 56 On Stresemann’s “pounding on the table at Lugano” and its previous history, see Bastiaan Schot, Nation oder Staat? Deutschland und der Minderheitenschutz. Zur Völkerbundspolitik der Stresemann-Ära, Marburg/Lahn 1988, 201–213. 57 Pawel Korzec, Polen und der Minderheitenschutzvertrag (1919–1934), in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 22 (1974), 515–555, here 537–540. 58 Paul W. Doerr, “Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst.” British Foreign Policy 1919– 1939, New York 1998, 155–167.

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argumentation was not entirely unselfish, since ultimately, due to the lesser degree of influence that they enjoyed, they were far more interested in a well-functioning League of Nations. Against this background, the circle around Motzkin was even still able to speak of their good fortune: Public opinion in the spring of 1933 was strongly aligned against Germany, and thus played into the hands of a complaint. Otherwise, as in comparable cases in the 1920s, when the fate of various Jewish petitions encountered but little interest, there would probably not have been anywhere near the level of solidarity as was expressed in the spring of 1933. And even Germany showed itself ready to cooperate eventually. As already noted, the German representative explained that the implementation of anti-Jewish legislation in Upper Silesia had been due to mistakes by “subordinate authorities” and declared that the Reich would honor its responsibilities. Pervasive as a factor here was also the impression many shared within the German administration that the already existing isolation of the Reich when it came to foreign policy in the spring of 1933 should not be further exacerbated; nor should its reputation acquired in the 1920s as the “advocate for the minorities” be rashly endangered.59

On the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy Now, what does this mean for the possibilities of influence and the limits of Jewish diplomacy in the interwar period? Its most important hallmark, along with the existence of a regulated procedure, was the link with the foreign policy interests of the various powers. This at the same time evoked a longstanding characteristic of Jewish diplomacy since the nineteenth century. Numerous examples from more recent Jewish history, such as Bismarck’s intervention at the Berlin Congress 1878 or the Hay note of 1902, both on behalf of Romanian Jewry, had shown that the readiness by one or more great powers to become active in the Jewish question was decisive for the implementation of Jewish matters.60 In Bismarck’s case, the German chancellor was reacting to the support from his Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder in connection with a railroad project in Romania threatened with failure.61 By contrast, the intervention by the American senator John Hay in 59 Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933, 194–207. 60 Markus Kirchhoff, Einfluss ohne Macht. Jüdische Diplomatiegeschichte 1815–1878, in: Diner (ed.), Synchrone Welten, 121–146. 61 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron. Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire, New York 1977, 351–393. See also Carsten Wilke’s article in this volume.

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1902 – which by the way also concerned Romania’s non-compliance with the corresponding articles of the Berlin Congress – was prompted by American fears that a mass influx of destitute and poorly educated Romanian Jewish immigrants would aggravate the already strapped economic situation in the United States.62 This general constellation of Jewish diplomacy comes once again to the fore given the actual outcome of the Bernheim petition. In the fall of 1933, the rapporteur to the Council, the Irish delegate Sean Lester, filed his closing report on the Bernheim case with the League administration. Although he was aware that not much had changed yet in Upper Silesia with regard to the anti-Jewish legislation (this changed only during the subsequent months), Lester saw no means of bringing the case back onto the agenda of the Council. Since the Germans had reiterated their statement that the Geneva Convention would be respected, Lester had little basis at hand to voice doubts about this statement without causing a diplomatic affront.63 While this outcome most definitely shattered the hopes of the Comité to renew the discussion on Germany proper before the League, it was a rather common occurrence with regard to the procedure of filing petitions. Yet the unspectacular end to the petition would not have been as fateful as it appears today had other options for intervention remained open. The problem was that by the autumn of 1933, the system of 1919 was already beginning to unravel.64 In October, Germany resigned unilaterally from the League, and even if it had been assigned a minority treaty in 1919, it probably would have distanced itself from this in the future as well. The decline in influence of the League of Nations went along with the breakdown of the system of minority protection as a whole. When Germany started to regulate the question of minorities in bilateral treaties, as it did for instance in the 1934 German-Polish agreement, this approach was gratefully adopted by several states with minorities in Eastern Europe, such as Poland, which later that year unilaterally terminated its obligations. Thus, the system of collective security was gradually replaced by a politics of power. However, without a functioning institution like the League of Nations, which was ready to guarantee the procedure, there could likewise no longer be any sustainable nongovernmental diplomacy. Accordingly, the activities of the Comité and its successor, the World Jewish Congress, became up to 1939 ever more fruitless and as a rule were doomed to failure. The successful intervention on behalf of the Jews of the Saarland, who were surprisingly permitted in 1935, 62 Gary D. Best, To Free a People. American Jewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe, 1890–1914, Westport 1982, 42–63. 63 Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933, 268–273. 64 Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations, 207–241.

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in a decision brokered by Mussolini, to leave the mandated territory that had been incorporated in the Reich, taking along all their belongings, occurred once again on the periphery. And this was on the basis of a special treaty still in effect from the “old days” – the regulations that came into force in 1920 as part of the Versailles peace treaties, according to which the Saarland was placed under the supervision of the League of Nations for a period of fifteen years – and thus scarcely representative of the broader overall situation. Nonetheless, and this brings this article back to the initial question, the representatives of the Comité arrived at a basically positive assessment of the minority protection regime. In 1943, Jacob Robinson, in his study Were the Minorities’ Treaties a Failure?, argued that the main reason behind the failure of the minority protection system had not so much been related to the procedure (even if this could have been improved). Rather, the system foundered to a large extent due to the reluctance of the treaty states to adequately implement it. Robinson’s general assessment was “that despite all the faults and shortcomings, some inherent and others external, the experience of twenty years does not justify the condemnation of a most remarkable experiment; an experiment that could not but share the fate of the political organism in which it lived – the League of Nations itself.”65 Years later, in 1965, Robinson asserted (interestingly enough, in reaction to Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem) that one good example of the functioning of the procedure combined with simultaneous action by the international community had specifically been that complaint submitted in the spring of 1933 – the Bernheim petition.66 Translated from the German by William Templer

65 Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?, New York 1943, 260–265, here 261. 66 Idem, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight. The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative, New York 1965, 72 f. and 279.

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In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference When, precisely, did public Jewish advocacy for minority rights scale back to the point of irrelevance? Plenty of scholarly attention has been lavished on the extent to which Jewish promotion of the cause, particularly between the midnineteenth century and the 1920s, helped constitute the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities as an accepted international norm.1 However, there has been little sustained examination of the extirpation of these energies, arguably because the answer seems so obvious as to preclude its very study. In short, it is widely assumed that the mass murder of European Jewry caused leading Jewish public figures to abandon completely a commitment to minority rights that had served as their raison d’être for at least two generations.2 This narrative of wholesale abandonment after the Shoah requires qualification. In recent years, scholars have begun to detect residual support for minority rights after 1945 among some Jewish thinkers such as Oscar Janowsky, Simon Rawidowicz, and Raphael Lemkin, but these excavations have proceeded with the assumption that such visions never entered the sphere of practical politics.3 In fact, as it turns out, for some the demand for 1

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Influential treatments include David Engel, Perceptions of Power. Poland and World Jewry, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 17–28; Abigail Green, Intervening in the Jewish Question, 1840–1878, in: Brendan Simms/D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian Intervention. A History, Cambridge 2011, 139–158; Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge 2004; Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe. The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919, Oxford 1992. For an important piece that situates Jews alongside other minorities, see Eric D. Weitz, From the Vienna to the Paris System. International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions, in: The American Historical Review 113 (2008), no. 5, 1313–1343. See esp. the work of Mark Mazower: idem, Hitler’s Empire. How the Nazis Ruled Europe, New York 2008, 600; idem, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton, N. J., 2009, 121 f., 134, and 142 f. Also see Gil Rubin, The End of Minority Rights. Jacob Robinson and the “Jewish Question” in World War II, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 55–71. James Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism. Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America, in: AJS Review 34 (2010), no. 2, 289–308; David N. Myers, Between Jew and Arab. The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz, Waltham, Mass., 2009, 77; Michael R. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 187–209.

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minority rights would remain a sine qua non for the reconstruction of European Jewish life in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, even as the future of Jewish communities on the continent seemed more in doubt than ever. Just because the European Jewish population had been reduced to less than a fifth its prewar size does not mean the minority consciousness that long governed Jewish political activity instantaneously vanished. Nowhere was it clearer that certain mentalités had survived the turmoil of the Holocaust than when Jewish representatives made minority rights part of the package for European Jewish reconstruction they presented to a post-World War II peace conference.4 This article seeks to resurrect the 1946 Paris Peace Conference as a pivotal moment for the atrophying of minority rights in Jewish political practice. The conference itself has been long forgotten, often confined to a few passing remarks on the origins of the Cold War and the Sovietization of East Central Europe. Unlike in 1919, when the Allied victors convened at Versailles a postwar conference with sweeping possibilities for the transformation of international order, after World War II an increasingly fragmented set of Great Powers – the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – dealt with peacemaking in piecemeal fashion. Whereas after World War I the peace treaty with Germany was linked to the creation of the League of Nations, the principal Allied powers after 1945 separated the creation of the United Nations from peacemaking in Europe. Divisions among the Americans, Soviets and British precluded the conclusion of a formal peace treaty with Germany at Potsdam, but the principal Allied powers agreed to charge the newly-formed Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) with the more immediate task of drafting peace treaties with Germany’s wartime allies: Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland. Between September 1945 and July 1946, the CFM – composed of the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union – met in London, Moscow, and Paris, and hashed out the terms of peace they would impose upon the defeated states. With over two dozen points on which they could not agree, the CFM decided to call for an “advisory” peace conference in the summer of 1946 at Paris’ Luxembourg Palace. Including twenty-one nations which

4

Marrus, Three Jewish Émigrés at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin, in: Ezra Mendelsohn/Stefani Hoffman/Richard I. Cohen (eds.), Against the Grain. Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, Oxford/New York 2013, 240–254. Recent studies of Jewish postwar reconstruction in the aftermath of the Holocaust have focused particularly on the French context. See esp. Laura Hobson Faure, Un “plan Marshall juif.” La présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954, Paris 2013; Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief. The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust, Oxford 2015; Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide. Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France, Durham, N. C., 2003.

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fought against the Axis powers as well as the ex-enemy states, the conference met from 29 July to 15 October 1946 to consider and recommend changes to the CFM’s draft treaties. Of the ninety-four amendments adopted at Paris, the CFM incorporated seventy-one in the final terms signed in February 1947. This series of treaties formally ended World War II with the exenemy states and imposed upon them both territorial losses and reparations to help rebuild the economies of their devastated neighbors.5 This second peace conference of the twentieth century has been generally excised from Jewish historiography as a seemingly minor episode that distracts from the more dramatic struggle for Palestine. In fact, the only two articles dedicated to the Jewish position at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference were written by participants to the proceedings themselves, the Anglo-Zionist Israel Cohen and the young Jacob Talmon (born as Jacob Fleiszer).6 Unlike the many studies of 1919, there is not a single archival-based account of the ways in which a Jewish delegation made up of North American and European Jewish leaders tried to navigate through a series of competing interests among the United States, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and several smaller powers. While the vastly different context of 1946 arguably accounts for its scholarly marginalization, to those present at the historical moment, the differences brought into relief by the conference between the Jewish position in 1919 and 1946 was what gave the post-World War II gathering much of its importance. Finally, the conference illustrated, perhaps for the first time, how the Cold War imperative of finding a middle ground between two opposed blocs would endlessly complicate the defense of Jewish rights abroad.

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Among the few studies that deal with aspects of the conference as a subject in itself are Edward Chaszar, The Problem of National Minorities before and after the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947, in: Nationalities Papers 9 (1981), no. 2, 195–206; Inis L. Claude, National Minorities. An International Problem, Cambridge, Mass., 1955, 125–144; Andrew Martin, Human Rights in the Paris Peace Treaties, in: British Year Book of International Law 24 (1947), 392–398; Stephen D. Kertesz, The Last European Peace Conference, Paris, 1946. Conflict of Values, Lanham, Md., 1985; Ignác Romsics, The Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, in: Hungarian Studies 17 (2003), no. 1, 57–64; Dan D. Vataman, Romania at the Paris Peace Conference (July 29–October 15, 1946), in: Journal of European Studies and International Relations 2 (2011), no. 1, 61–77. Israel Cohen, Jewish Interests in the Peace Treaties, in: Jewish Social Studies 11 (1949), no. 2, 99–118; Jacob Fleiszer, The Jewish Question at the Peace Conference of 1946, in: Metzuda 5–6 (1948), 162–194 (Heb.). Talmon later republished his piece as Jacob L. Talmon, The Jewish Question at the Peace Conference in 1946 (Heb.), in: Gesher 16 (September 1970), 39–64. Talmon also produced a much longer unpublished version: Jacob Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference (typescript, 1947), consulted at Johns Hopkins Library Special Collections. I owe special thanks to Arie Dubnov for bringing this source to my attention.

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Jewish Planning for the Postwar Peace To begin, it is worth considering both the extent to which the postwar meeting in Paris had been anticipated by Jewish activists for years and the ways planning for it changed over time. In the midst of World War II, Jewish groups in the United States and Britain began planning for a grand future peace conference just as the one that had taken place in 1919. Following similar civil society initiatives among other religious and interest groups, the World Jewish Congress’ Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) and the American Jewish Committee’s Institute on Peace and Postwar Problems were both created in 1941.7 Initially, such Jewish “think-tanks” assumed that Jews’ relationship to international order would be similar to that in 1919, and focused on rights protection and the rehabilitation of the survivors of war. In effect, they were searching for ways to duplicate the perceived success of Jewish diplomats at Versailles in getting their case heard and their demands taken up by the peacemakers.8 Such efforts were, in essence, an exercise in the transmission of institutional memory. In 1942, the AJC’s Institute, in fact, produced a pamphlet outlining specifically how Jewish communities in Europe and North America prepared for and responded to the opportunities of 1919.9 By 1943, it had become clear that major demographic, territorial, and intellectual transformations of the war would produce an entirely different world from that which emerged from World War I. To start, the idea of minority rights, so long in vogue, now began to be replaced in wartime dis-

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On the IJA, see Dan Diner, Between Empire and Nation State. Outline for a European Contemporary History of the Jews, 1750–1950, in: Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, Bloomington, Ind., 2013, 61–79, here 72–74; Zohar Segev, The World Jewish Congress During the Holocaust. Between Activism and Restraint, Berlin 2014, 184–201. For a brief account of Jewish postwar planning in the United States, see Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations. The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945, Detroit, Mich., 1999, 29–35. For contemporaneous accounts that posit Jewish influence in the making of the 1919 minorities’ treaties, see Nathan Feinberg, La question des minorités à la Conférence de la paix de 1919–1920 et l’action juive en faveur de la protection international des minorités, Paris 1929; Oscar Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919), New York 1933; Max Kohler, The Origin of the Minority Provision of the Peace Treaty of 1919, in: Luigi Luzzatti (ed.), God in Freedom. Studies in the Relations between Church and State, New York 1930, 751–794; Kurt Stillschweig, Die Juden Osteuropas in den Minderheitenverträgen, Berlin 1936; Mark Vishniak, La protection des droits des minorités dans les traités internationaux de 1919–1920, Paris 1920. AJC Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems, Jewish Post-War Problems. A Study Course, Unit 3: How the Jewish Communities Prepared for Peace During the First World War (1942), New York 1943.

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course by “human rights.” As several scholars have documented, for the Allies, the pronouncement of this war aim was in part intended to bury the discredited minority rights regime associated with the League of Nations.10 Such intentions did not go unnoticed by some Jewish observers, who fretted about replacing an international commitment to negative rights (protection against discrimination) and to positive rights (protection against assimilation) with a series of vague promises. Characteristic of this concern was the advice given in fall 1944 by renowned international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht to Jacob Robinson at the World Jewish Congress (WJC) that “it is of the greatest importance that the idea of an International Bill of the Rights of Man should not be permitted to be used for the purpose or with the effect of whittling down the existing protection of Jewish rights.”11 If human rights were to replace minority rights, such a development would hardly be welcomed uncritically in Jewish circles attuned to international affairs. Yet as more and more knowledge became available about the extent and types of devastation wrought during the war, it became clear that minority rights could not singularly encapsulate the range of issues facing rebuilding Jewish communities in Europe. As Robinson recalled in 1947, the WJC transitioned from a focus on an “updated Versailles” to a mosaic scheme emphasizing “reparation and indemnification, war criminals, personal rights.”12 Subsequently, the WJC’s 1944 War Emergency Conference promulgated a series of resolutions that posited an inseparable relationship among rights protection, indemnification, war crimes and free emigration as preconditions for the reconstruction of the European Jewish world.13 The AJC’s parallel efforts showed a similar diversification, as its Institute began probing the issues of restitution, indemnification and war criminals while the AJC’s

10 Mark Mazower, The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950, in: The Historical Journal 47 (2004), no. 2, 379–398; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights. Visions Seen, Philadelphia, Pa., 2003, 147–154; A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire. Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention, Oxford et al. 2001, 208–219, and 326–328. 11 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (henceforth USHMM), WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 11, Hersch Lauterpacht to Jacob Robinson, 5 October 1944. On Lauterpacht’s similar preference that some form of minority rights protection be introduced into the post-World War II architecture, see Hersch Lauterpacht, An International Bill of the Rights of Man, New York 1945, 220. 12 Cit. in Boaz Cohen, Dr. Jacob Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the Elusive Jewish Voice in Nuremberg, in: Dan Michman/David Bankier (eds.), Holocaust and Justice. Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials, Jerusalem 2010, 81–100, here 87. 13 World Jewish Congress (British Section), War Emergency Conference of the World Jewish Congress, Atlantic City, November, 1944. Addresses and Resolutions, London 1945, 3.

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famed 1944 Declaration of Human Rights included calls for “fair redress” and the provision to refugees of “aid and comfort to find new homes” that had little to do with human rights as such.14 However, Jewish postwar planning never seemed to consider the possibility that there simply would not be another grand postwar peace conference like Versailles in 1919. The analogous moment – a gathering of the nations concerned with the architecture of international order which drew intense media attention – came and passed with the 1945 San Francisco Conference, but the future of Europe was deferred until later. Only when they discovered the CFM would be drafting peace treaties for the ex-enemy states did Jewish interest groups translate their postwar planning material into concrete demands. While in 1919, rancorous intra-Jewish divisions manifested themselves in the transmission of diverse appeals to the peacemakers, in early 1946 the AJC and the WJC (along with the British Board of Deputies and the American Jewish Conference) made remarkably similar demands to the CFM regarding the reconstruction of East Central European Jewry. Just as had been done in many statements since 1944, both groups mixed entreaties for future protection with remedies for past violations, and each called for emigration rights. Predictably, the WJC made a strong bid for a minority rights clause, proposing the “inalienable right of Jewish communities to maintain and foster their collective, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural identity and institutions with legal protection […] with assistance from the state.”15 More surprising was that in marked contrast to its wartime philosophy, the AJC included an article promising Jews of the ex-enemy states the right to “establish and maintain schools and cultural and religious institutions” as well as clauses on non-discrimination in the disbursement of public funds and the use of one’s “own language” before courts and in “private, cultural and commercial relations.”16 For an organization which had defined its human rights program in total opposition to any form of positive minority rights, this departure was striking.17 Such formulations recall the compro14 Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist. The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966, Philadelphia, Pa., 1972, 265–292; James Loeffler, The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism. The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 “Declaration on Human Rights,” in: Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015) no. 2, 274–295. 15 World Jewish Congress (British Section) (ed.), Statements Submitted to the Conference of Foreign Ministers, 28 June 1946 […] by the World Jewish Congress, Board of Deputies of British Jews, American Jewish Conference, London 1946, 1. 16 American Jewish Committee (ed.), Human Rights in the Peace Treaties. Proposals of the American Jewish Committee, New York 1946, 19. 17 James Loeffler, “The Conscience of America.” Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American Foreign Policy at the 1945 United Nations San Francisco Conference, in: Journal of American History 100 (2013), no. 2, 401–428, here 409 f.; idem, The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism, 7.

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mise struck at the 1918 American Jewish Congress convention by Louis Marshall to campaign for minority rights for the Jewish minorities of Central and Eastern Europe despite the AJC’s ideological disinclination to do so; sociopolitical conditions in Central and Eastern Europe in which nationality was not interchangeable with citizenship dictated for Marshall the need to support minority rights for the region’s Jews.18 Again in 1946, for the AJC minority rights could simply be a cause restricted to Central and Eastern European Jewry whose forms of social and cultural organization were different from the liberal democratic West.

Jewish Demands and Their Repudiation When the draft treaties emerged from the closed sessions of the CFM, Jewish groups found their interests had been totally disregarded. There were no provisions related to minority rights in treaties with states such as Romania and Hungary that had been among the worst violators of the interwar treaties. Instead, all the principal Allied powers had provided was a vague clause obligating ex-enemy states to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The banishment of minority rights from the draft treaties requires contextualization. Prevailing trends in international thought and practice after the war regarding minorities moved to more radical solutions. Unlike 1919, officials no longer held up the formula of ethnic self-determination paired with international minority protection as the best solution to Europe’s longstanding minority problems. Instead, international political thought had come to regard the creation of ethnically homogenous European states through population transfer and domestic assimilation as an important part of a stable postwar order. In conjunction with Hitler and Stalin’s extensive use of forced population transfer during World War II, the Allies gave the practice of population transfer a stamp of validity both during and after the war. At Tehran in 1943, a Great Power agreement to redraw Poland’s borders westward after the war sanctioned as legitimate the transfer of millions of Germans from the territories to be given to the Poles. Then, at Potsdam, the United States, Soviet Union, and Britain went further, publicly consenting to the transfer of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.19 18 Matthew M. Silver, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America. A Biography, Syracuse, N. Y., 2013, 348. 19 For more on this decisive shift, see Pertti Ahonen et al., People on the Move. Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath, Oxford et al. 2008; Matthew Frank, Reconstructing the Nation-State. Population Transfer in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1948, in: Jessica Reinisch/Elizabeth White (eds.), The Disen-

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Jewish activists were more than aware of the declining fortunes of minority rights. While it was clear to them that they had to avoid any reference to “minority status or minority treaties” if their postwar demands had any chance of being accepted, there was little consensus on what such different references would mean.20 The favored solution was to appeal for “group rights,” deliberately avoiding the terminology that was “reminiscent of the League of Nations and 1919.”21 Yet what more imprecise phraseology actually meant remained unclear, as one WJC member criticized this provision as “so general that it actually means nothing.”22 As it has been consistently difficult for societies to harmonize measures of cultural autonomy with national citizenship, this postwar iteration of minority rights seemed a substitute until a framework for democracy could emerge in East Central Europe. The most crucial difference from 1919, however, was the most obvious one: The Eastern European Jewish heartland had vanished in Nazi fury. The Jews of the ex-enemy countries, primarily Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy, now numbered fewer than 700,000. In effect, the attention and efforts of the Jewish delegation at Paris would focus overwhelmingly on Romania and Hungary, because of both the larger sizes of the communities and the troubled history of the “Jewish Question” in each national context. In 1946, the Romanian Jewish community was the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe outside the Soviet Union, due in part to some Romanian reluctance to deport all its Jews under German pressure. However, the 350,000-plus community, constituting half of its prewar size, was far from homogenous; amidst some out-migration, the Romanian Jewish community was a mix of concentration camp returnees, arriving refugees from across Europe, persons returned to Romanian sovereignty after the reincorporation of Northern Transylvania, and a large contingent of repatriated persons from the territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina ceded to the Soviet Union.23 Moreover, the issue of Jewish citizenship in Romania had been problematic since the foundation of the independent state from the territories of Walachia and Moldavia in the late nineteenth century, and long featured as a target of Western Jewish advocacy dating back to the 1866 adoption of the

20 21 22 23

tanglement of Populations. Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9, Basingstoke et al. 2011, 27–47. London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3121/C11/9/1/1, Board of Deputies of British Jews Collection, Adolph Brotman to Selig Brodetsky, 2 May 1945. USHMM, WJC London Archives, C2/1593, Alex Easterman, Notes of Press Meeting at Congress House, 2 July 1946. USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series A, Box 73, Folder 9, World Jewish Congress, Minutes of the Office Committee, 2 May 1946. Liviu Rotman, Romanian Jewry. The First Decade after the Holocaust, in: Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry, New York 1994, 287–331.

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county’s constitution.24 Romanian nationalism had a particular virulent antisemitic strain that depicted Jews as foreign parasites and a threat to the national body politic. Under racial laws implemented in Romania between 1937 and 1944, Jewish rights had been stripped and Jewish property seized.25 After the armistice, the precarious legal standing of many Romanian Jews and their lack of assets were major hurdles in the way of postwar reconstruction. Scholars have shown that without a prolonged process of denazification, antisemitism retained a prominent place in Romanian political culture after the war. The reluctance of the new Romanian regime to fully restore Jewish citizenship rights, to compensate those who suffered under anti-Jewish laws, and to return seized property gave little hope that Jewish life could thrive again in Romania.26 Although considerably diminished in size and suffering economic and social dislocation, the Romanian Jewish community retained much of its major wartime (and Zionist-leaning) leadership. Many of these leaders would come to Paris to represent their community’s interests; they were only allowed to attend by the Romanian Communist regime as a gesture to win support amongst their Jewish constituents.27 Indeed, both the Communist and the Social-Democratic parties in Romania would make public declarations pledging to address the issues raised in the course of the treaty negotiations.28 Those Romanian Jewish representatives who arrived in Paris in summer 1946 included the following: Chief Rabbi Alexandre Safran, who would be expelled from the country just one year later; Arnold Schwefelberg, a prominent Bucharest jurist who served as head of the WJC Romanian Section reestablished in 1944; Misu Benvenisti and Misu Weisman, two prominent lawyers from “Old Romania”; and Ernest Marton and Theodore Fischer, two Zionists who had served in the Romanian parliament.29 The size 24 For the Romanian context, see Carol Iancu, Jews in Romania, 1866–1919. From Exclusion to Emancipation, Boulder, Col./New York 1996. See also the article by Carsten Wilke in this section of the 2016 Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute. 25 The study of the Romanian Jewish Holocaust has grown in recent years. See Henry L. Eaton, The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust, Detroit, Mich., 2013; Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944, Chicago, Ill., 2000; Marcu Rozen, The Holocaust under the Antonescu Government. Historical and Statistical Data about Jews in Romania, 1940–1944, Cluj-Napoca 2006. 26 Carol Iancu, Being Jewish in Romania after the Second World War, in: Eliezer Ben Rafael/Thomas Gergely/Yosef Gorni (eds.), Jewry between Tradition and Secularism. Europe and Israel Compared, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2006, 50–59. 27 Hildrun Glass, Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen. Zur Geschichte der Juden in Rumänien 1944–1949, Munich 2002, 256. 28 Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 121–123. 29 Lucian-Zeev Herşcovici, Art. “Şafran Family,” in: YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon David Hundert, New York 2010, (22 December 2016); Leon Volovici, Art. “Schwefelberg, Arnold,” in: YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, (22 December 2016); Zvi Hartman, A Jewish Minority in a Multiethnic Society during a Change of Governments. The Jews of Transylvania in the Interwar Period, in: Shvut 9–10 (2000), no. 25–26, 162–182. 30 Alice Freifeld, Identity on the Move. Hungarian Jewry between Budapest and the DP Camps, 1945–48, in: Randolph L. Braham/Brewster S. Chamberlin (eds.), The Holocaust in Hungary. Sixty Years Later, New York 2006, 177–200; Victor Karády, Post-Holocaust Hungarian Jewry, 1945–1948. Class Structure, Re-Stratification and Potential for Social Mobility, in: Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 3: Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-Ethnic World, Oxford/New York 1987, 147–160; Kinga Frojimovics, Different Interpretations of Reconstruction. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress in Hungary after the Holocaust, in: David Bankier (ed.): The Jews are Coming Back. The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after WW II, Jerusalem 2005, 277–292, here 281.

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wake of Nazi persecution. In both cases, too, communist regimes promised ideological opposition to antisemitism but also pledged to end Jewish separatism and sought to bring Jewish institutions under direct control of the state.31 Such was the situation on the ground that Western Jewish groups faced as they tried to determine how to get their desiderata into peace treaties as the conference opened. Procedurally, the only way they could make changes to the drafts was through amendments sponsored by one of the twenty-one attending states. However, the ambiance in Paris was not conducive to substantial alterations. The assembly was not a peace conference of victors lined up against the defeated but rather one in which several conflicting groups sat arrayed against one another. The victors were divided amongst themselves (East-West blocs), the defeated powers were equally split (Romania-Hungary), and a defeated power opposed a victor (BulgariaGreece). Moreover, the conference operated in secrecy, delegates kept no official minutes, the four principal Allied powers ensured that the meetings of each country commission were closed, and states simply announced decisions after the fact.32 When eleven different Jewish groups largely from North America and Western Europe arrived at Paris in July 1946, they made a collective decision that whatever further demands they might make would have to be done in collaboration. Some specifically invoked the haunting memory of 1938 in Évian in which dozens of Jewish organizations made separate and fruitless entreaties for countries to receive Jewish refugees.33 In a major departure from 1919 – when factionalism precipitated by Zionism and organizational jealousy produced a series of fractured Jewish voices in Versailles – Jewish groups led by the WJC and AJC pledged to meet periodically to discuss views, share information and cooperate in putting together their amendments collectively. After almost a month of effort, the joint Jewish working group 31 Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets. The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948, Cambridge et al., 2006, 141–162; Karády, Post-Holocaust Hungarian Jewry, 1945–1948; Liviu Rotman, The Politics of the Communist Regime Concerning the Jews. Contradictions, Ambivalence, and Misunderstanding (1945–1953), in: Ion Stanciu (ed.), The Jews in Romanian History. Papers from the International Symposium, Bucharest, September 30–October 4, 1996, Bucharest 1997, 230–247; Bela Vago, Communist Pragmatism toward Jewish Assimilation in Romania and Hungary, in: idem (ed.), Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times, Boulder, Col., 1981, 105–126. 32 Such impressions are reinforced in the contemporary account of the well-known British diplomat Harold Nicholson. See idem, Peacemaking at Paris. Success, Failure or Farce?, in: Foreign Affairs 25 (1947), no. 2, 190–203. 33 AJC Archives Online (henceforth AJC Archives), AJC Subject Files, War and Peace File, 1 August 1946, Simon Segal to John Slawson.

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emerged with a new memorandum which now asked for a total of fifty-six entirely new clauses or articles to be inserted into the existing draft treaties.34 Many of these amendments were requested by the leaders of Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian Jewry who represented their communities’ interests to the joint working group. Only the Romanian and Hungarian leaders called strongly for group rights to be inserted into their specific treaties, while the Bulgarians specifically requested they be omitted.35 In other words, the reappearance of minority rights on the postwar Jewish agenda was not simply a top-down imposition by concerned Western Jewry but commanded the backing of segments of the remaining local Jewish leadership as crucial for the continuation of Jewish social and religious life in Europe. For instance, Romanian representative Schwefelberg advocated the provision of “collective Jewish rights” as necessary for existence in “multinational” states; on the question of whether or not multinational states would even be a feature of postwar Europe, he remained silent.36 Despite these painstaking efforts, the conference did not even officially circulate the Jewish memorandum, and many delegations simply dismissed it. Not even Norway or Australia would take up the Jewish amendments.37 Particularly shocking for the AJC was the dismissive attitude of the United States. Coming just over a year since its leaders Joseph Proskauer and Jacob Blaustein had fruitfully cooperated with State Department officials at San Francisco, the AJC had expected the US would award it a consultative role in Paris.38 But the United States would refuse to give the AJC such official status, calling the San Francisco arrangements “unique,” and declined to set

34 Along with the AJC and WJC, the Jewish delegation included the Agudas Israel World Organization, Alliance Israélite Universelle, American Jewish Conference, the AngloJewish Association, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives, South African Jewish Board of Deputies, and the Vaad Leumi of Palestine. 35 See the interventions by Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian representatives in: USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 24, World Jewish Congress, Meeting of the WJC in Paris (Morning), 12 August 1946; ibid., World Jewish Congress, Minutes of Meeting of Experts, 17 August 1946; ibid., Folder 25, World Jewish Congress, Minutes of a Plenary Meeting of the Working Committee, 18 August 1946; ibid., Folder 24, World Jewish Congress, Minutes of Final Meeting of Experts, 18 August 1946. 36 Arnold Schwefelberg, La conférence des organisations juives à Paris (août-septembre 1946), in: La Vie Juive. Bulletin d’information du Congrès Juif Mondial, no. 2, October 1946, 4. 37 For extended discussion of these failed efforts, see Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 79–89. 38 AJC Archives, AJC Subject Files, War and Peace File, Simon Segal to John Slawson, 18 July 1946.

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up a meeting between Blaustein and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes.39 As one State Department official wrote Byrnes privately after receiving a Jewish delegation, the Americans now “favored a different approach to the problem of minorities” and were unwilling to do anything to further a “special status for Jews” as inserting additional clauses specifically to protect one group “would seem to imply that the assurances given minorities in general will not be adequate.”40 Such an American distaste for minority rights stemmed from an understanding of relations between society and state – where minorities fought against discriminatory treatment on the basis of distinct traits – that differed considerably from the historical conditions prevailing in Europe, where minorities struggled to maintain their distinctiveness against assimilatory pressures.41 That the peacemakers in 1946 included the Soviet Union cannot be emphasized enough. Instead of a pseudo-state engulfed in civil war, revolution, chaos, and absent from Paris as was the case with Soviet Russia in 1919, the Soviet Union now had a firm grip on Eastern Europe. The overriding Soviet goal was to seek legitimacy for continued occupation and a consolidation of its power into a bloc of friendly states.42 From the onset, there was no chance the USSR would have allowed any kind of international supervision in its sphere of influence. The Soviets would be particularly cagey in dismissing Jewish demands as unnecessary, preferring to champion their own solution to antisemitism in closed meetings with Jewish representatives.43 By late August, some Jewish representatives began to reassess the larger political environment. Robinson despaired of the “complete absence of the slightest note taken by the members of the delegations of our numerous memoranda. Not only is the word ‘Jew’ taboo, but even camouflaged provisions which could have been interpreted as concerned with Jews are also

39 AJC Ibid., Jacob Blaustein to James F. Byrnes, 25 July 1946; ibid., Simon Segal to John Slawson, 1 August 1946; USHMM, WJC London Archives, C2/1593, Selig Brodetsky, Louis Lipsky, and Stephen S. Wise to Paul-Henri Spaak, 8 August 1946; ibid., James F. Byrnes to Louis Lipsky and Stephen S. Wise, 8 August 1946; AJC Archives, AJC Subject Files, War and Peace File, Francis H. Russell to Jacob Blaustein, 16 August 1946. 40 Samuel Reber, Memorandum for the Secretary, August 19, 1946, in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Paris Peace Conference: Documents, vol. 4, Washington, D. C., 1970, 838 f. 41 Charles F. Marden, Minorities in American Society, New York 1952. 42 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars. From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, New Haven, Conn., et al. 2006, 304 f. 43 USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 26, Nahum Goldmann/ Alex Easterman, Note of Conversation with Mr. A. I. Vichinsky at the Embassy of the U. S.S.R., 27 August 1946; ibid., Nahum Goldmann to Andrei Vishinsky, 29 August 1946; ibid., Nahum Goldmann/Alex Easterman to Andrei Vishinsky, 3 October 1946.

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missing.”44 American Jewish leaders Louis Lipsky and Stephen Wise sent a strong note of protest to Byrnes, noting how the conference’s disregard for Jewish demands was “inconsistent with the view regarding the future of European Jewry expressed by leading statesmen,” including Ernest Bevin, members of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, and Herbert Morrison.45 Finding no traction for their array of amendments, the Jewish delegation now made a substantial tactical retreat. It decided to pare down the fifty-six demands to focus on human rights and reparations. In particular, the Jewish representatives sought more explicit mention of the freedom of association and of equality in economic activity, employment, and “preserving and developing cultural identity.”46 According to Talmon, the issue with the clauses on restitution and compensation related to the prevailing interpretation of the category of persons who were not “United Nations nationals” but treated as “enemies” by the Fascist states. The Jewish delegation had assumed Jews would fall into this class, but they discovered the CFM crafted this language to refer to “branches of international oil and other companies.” Moreover, if Jews were simply treated like other United Nations nationals, their property and assets could be seized in reparation schemes flowing from the ex-enemy states to the Allies.47 Despite these concerns, none of the Jewish claims would ever be officially discussed. The message being delivered by European statesmen was hard to miss: the Jewish Question was no longer an integral part of European civilization.

Britain’s Cynical Jewish Diplomacy However, it is not true that Jewish demands were entirely ignored at the conference. Instead, they were harnessed by other actors to achieve their own political ends. Britain found it could advance its goal of seeking to maintain global power status by appearing to take up the Jewish cause. After all, it had been in the midst of the Potsdam Conference that the British people elected Clement Attlee’s Labour to succeed the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, and the activist Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had come to office with a dogged commitment to 44 Ibid., Box 133, Folder 8, Jacob Robinson, Verbatim Interim Report on Our Activities at the Paris Peace Conference, 13 September 1946. 45 USHMM, WJC London Archives, C2/1593, Louis Lipsky and Stephen S. Wise to James F. Byrnes, 3 September 1946. 46 USHMM, WJC New York Archives, B144/17, World Jewish Congress et al. (eds.), Statements Submitted to the Paris Peace Conference, 8. 47 See Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 62 f.

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maintain Britain’s preeminent status as a world power. Such aspirations were, of course, at odds with the reality of economic dependency on the United States – Britain essentially emerged from the war bankrupt – and the Atlee-Bevin government would oversee a major imperial retreat from some of Britain’s most important colonial holdings. At the same time, such British decline was gradual; in fact, when American scholar William T. R. Fox introduced the term “superpower” into general circulation in 1944, he identified three superpowers, with the United Kingdom slotted alongside the United States and Soviet Union. It was at the conference table that Britain could most punch above its actual weight and lay a claim to superpower status.48 At the heart of British maneuvering at Paris in 1946 was a curious mix of anti-Communism, imperial reassertion, and preoccupation with ongoing violence in Palestine. Aware that geopolitical realities had made the resurrection of the Anglo-American alliance the surest path to continued British relevance in the world, Bevin’s Foreign Office sought to counter Soviet dictates and ensure that Pax Americana replaced Pax Britannica. Meanwhile, Labour postwar realism expressed itself in part through a condescending posture towards some of Europe’s small states, including those in the Soviet sphere of influence, as threatening to international stability. Finally, there was little question that aside from India, holding onto Palestine was a central part of Britain’s attempt to survive as a Great Power.49 This combination of attitudes manifested themselves in a political reversal that took place rather suddenly in the midst of the conference. Initially, Foreign Office officials in London as well as members of the UK delegation in Paris had rebuffed Jewish entreaties.50 As the Jewish delegation recognized,

48 These themes are discussed at length in Michael L. Dockrill/John W. Young (eds.), British Foreign Policy, 1945–56, New York 1989; R. M. Douglas, The Labour Party. Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951, London 2004; Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951, Oxford 1984; John Saville, The Politics of Continuity. British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government, 1945–46, London 1993; Geoffrey Warner, Ernest Bevin and British Foreign Policy, 1945–1951, in: Gordon A. Craig/Francis L. Loewenheim (eds.), The Diplomats, 1939–1979, Princeton 1994, 103–135; Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War. The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945–1951, in: Journal of British Studies 26 (1987), no. 1, 54–82. 49 Stanley M. Max, The United States, Great Britain, and the Sovietization of Hungary, 1945–1948, New York 1985; Joseph Gorny, The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948, London 1983; Paul D. Quinlan, Clash Over Romania. British and American Policies toward Romania, 1938–1947, Oakland, Calif., 1977. 50 British National Archives, Kew (henceforth BNA), FO 371/57338, C. B. B. HeathcoteSmith to James Majoribanks, 29 July 1946; USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 26, Alex Easterman, Interview between S. S. Silverman, M. P. and Mr. Easterman and Mr. Hector McNeil, at the Hotel George, 8 August 1946; BNA, FO 371/57342, United Kingdom Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (henceforth UK Delegation), Meeting [Minutes] No. 11, Paris Peace Conference, 7 August 1946;

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the principal Allied powers were operating by a common agreement to support the treaty drafts largely as they had arrived; only smaller powers and the ex-enemy states submitted some 200-plus amendments to the treaties between July and August.51 By late August, however, the British made a Uturn. Legal adviser Gerald Fitzmaurice announced to his delegation the UK had now prepared an amendment “designed to meet fears expressed by the Jewish organizations that the existing draft treaties did not contain sufficient guarantees against [sic] non-discrimination.”52 Were the British really now listening to Jewish appeals for minority rights? At one earlier meeting, the New Zealand section of the UK delegation – specifically citing Jewish representations as their inspiration – “expressed doubt whether the human rights clauses would be effective in protecting minorities from oppression” and argued it was worth considering how “they might have been of some value” during the heyday of the League in the 1920s; obviously not all states were as eager as the Anglo-American powers to bury minority rights once and for all.53 Yet the substance and form of the UK’s amendment suggested it was nothing more than a passing acknowledgement of Jewish demands and one that had little to do with minority rights at all. The British suggested a new article be added obligating the domestic legislation of ex-enemy countries to not discriminate on the basis of “race, sex, language or religion, […] in reference to their person, property, business or financial interest, status, political or civil rights, or any other matter.” The order of the terms indicated its terms of emphasis. Initially introduced in the Romanian and later added to the Hungarian treaty, Article 3a (inserted between the third and fourth articles) was in the eyes of the British meant to make the human rights article “more specific” and “safeguard the position of the Jews, particularly with reference to their property rights.”54 Many observers questioned the extent to which this new amendment added anything new to the existing clause on human rights; such ambiguity was evident even in the strongest argument the Brit-

51

52 53

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BNA, FO 371/57348, UK Delegation, Meeting [Minutes] No. 23, Paris Peace Conference, 21 August 1946. USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 26, Jacob Robinson, Amendments Submitted by Delegations to the Paris Conference. Analysis and Implications for Jewish Cause, 27 August 1946. BNA, FO 371/57355, UK Delegation, Meeting [Minutes] No. 31, Paris Peace Conference, 30 August 1946. BNA, FO 371/57343, UK Delegation, Circular No. 7, Note of Discussion. Political and Territorial Clauses of the Draft Treaties with Roumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, 8 August 1946. BNA, FO 371/57356, UK Delegation, Meeting [Minutes] no. 35, Paris Peace Conference, 4 September 1946.

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ish delegate could muster in favor of his country’s proposal: “two guarantees were better than one.”55 Why would the British suddenly decide to present themselves as the champions of the Jews of East Central Europe? Foreign Office sources are conspicuously silent on the matter, but it is evident that sheer realpolitik was at play. The British actions at Paris have to be understood in the context of escalating violence in summer 1946 between Mandate and Jewish forces, including the infamous King David Hotel bombing, as well as within Britain’s struggle to contain illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. It was imperative to regain footing in the eyes of international public opinion after harsh British crackdowns on an anticolonial insurgency generated bad headlines. The British, anxious to stem the tide of antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe, had found that after the July 1946 pogrom in Kielce, Poland, Jews increasingly sought illegal entry into Palestine; as Britain interred many of those who tried to reach the country, it also tried to ensure that survivors stayed in their countries of origin.56 Moreover, aware that Soviet authorities were sanctioning the use of Romania and Hungary as bases for illegal immigration to Palestine, Britain specifically tried to use the possibility of improved terms of peace in Paris as a lever to coax more control of Jewish migration on the part of the Soviet satellite states.57 Such self-serving motives did not go unnoticed. Among the flurry of Soviet denunciations of the UK amendment was the declaration by USSR Ambassador to the United States Nikolai Novikov that the British were trying to “use” the Peace Conference “as a lightning conductor from the unfortunate events […] of terror, murder, oppression, and bomb-throwing committed against the Jews of Palestine.”58 Most alarming to Jewish observers was the way the British took credit for assuaging their demands after the amendments passed. In fact, Jewish spokesmen had never indicated, as the

55 BNA, FO 371/57360, UK Delegation, British Record of the 9th Meeting of Roumanian Political and Territorial Commission, 10 September 1946; BNA, FO 371/57362, UK Delegation, British Record of the 12th Meeting of the Bulgarian Political and Territorial Commission, 17 September 1946. 56 Jan T. Gross, Fear. Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation, New York 2006, 139. British reactions and countermeasures have been studied in detail in Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics. Britain, the United States and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948, Chapel Hill, N. C., 2001; Fritz Liebreich, Britain’s Naval and Political Reaction to the Illegal Immigration of Jews into Palestine, 1945–1949, London 2004. 57 Arieh J. Kochavi, Indirect Pressure. Moscow and the End of the British Mandate in Palestine, in: Israel Affairs 10 (2004), no. 1–2, 60–76, here 65–67. 58 BNA, FO 371/57364, UK Delegation, British Record of the 14th Meeting of the Bulgarian Political and Territorial Commission, 20 September 1946.

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British publicly declared, that they had been “satisfied” with the changes.59 Instead, as one WJC internal memo explained, the Jewish delegation interpreted British efforts as “gestures of support, though by no means in the manner and along the lines which we requested.”60 Most passing accounts of the Paris Peace Conference have taken British rhetoric about Jewish aims at face value without probing for the logic of political expediency lurking beneath.61 What was most striking about the way the British proposal would become understood was that despite its professed subtext, the word “Jew” or “Jewish” never actually appeared anywhere in the text. The British argued publicly that their clauses met the demand for the “absence of any specific mention of Jewish rights.”62 Indeed, in internal UK meeting minutes, the item appears as “amendments on Jewish rights.”63 The dissonance between the universal terms of the amendment and its particularist anchoring puzzled others. After all, Jews were not the only remaining minority in Hungary (Germans, Roma) and Romania (Magyars, Serbs, Ukrainians, Slovaks and Germans), and they were not the only aggrieved party (Communists) that could seek to claim compensation for damages incurred under Fascist domination. Soviet representatives did not hesitate to point out that although the UK insisted the clause served Jewish interests, “no specific mention was made of them.”64

Romania and Hungary Respond The most immediate result of the British actions and their professed Jewish inspiration was to provoke the delegations of the ex-enemy states. Prior to the conference, Romania and Hungary both prepared to deal with Jewish wartime claims to be advanced against them, with Hungarian Foreign Minister János Gyöngyösi privately anticipating in February 1946 that “atrocities committed by the defeated countries against the Jews will definitely be one 59 BNA, FO 371/57364, UK Delegation, British Record of the 9th Meeting of the Deputies Held at the Quai d’Orsay, 19 September 1946. 60 USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 26, Maurice Perlzweig, Memo to the Office Committee, 1 October 1946. 61 A representative example is Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 328–332. 62 BNA, FO 371/57356, UK Delegation, British Record of the 6th Meeting of the Roumanian Political and Territorial Commission, 3 September 1946. 63 BNA, FO 371/57363, UK Delegation, Meeting [Minutes] no. 49, Paris Peace Conference, 20 September 1946. 64 BNA, FO 371/57356, UK Delegation, British Record of the 6th Meeting of the Roumanian Political and Territorial Commission.

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of the most important questions at the peace negotiations;” the delegations of Romania and Hungary each formulated extended notes designed to counter the Jewish memorandum.65 The hostile Romanian note – which appeared on 30 August, exactly one day after a cordial meeting between the Jewish and Romanian delegations – mounted its most vociferous attack on the group rights claims, arguing that such provisions would merely separate Jews into a body isolated from the rest of the nation.66 Upon learning the British would be introducing an amendment, the Romanians immediately prepared another set of rejoinders that argued the added provision would be harmful because it infringed upon Romanian sovereignty, stoked domestic antisemitism, and failed to take account of the extent to which such issues were sufficiently handled by domestic legislation.67 Over the course of the conference, Romania issued nearly a dozen statements about the Jewish amendments.68 The Hungarians also advanced similar arguments.69 In both cases, the governments deliberately downplayed both the number of Jewish victims and the extent of their complicity in mass murder in what were some of the very first historical accounts of the Holocaust in both Hungary and Romania.70 The Romanians in particular were driven by an interest in depicting themselves as never having willingly fought on the side of the Axis powers. One AJC member called the Romanian version of events “sensational.”71 In spite of vociferous protestation from the Soviet bloc, the amendment passed both the Romanian and Hungarian Political and Territorial Commissions. After its enactment, the Romanian delegation denounced the amendment as making the country “subject to a humiliating trusteeship system conceivable only in the case of backward nations.”72 Echoes of the interna65 Ágnes Ságvári, The Fate of the Properties of Jewish Communities in Hungary (1938– 1968), in: idem, Studies on the History of Hungarian Holocaust, trans. from the Hungarian by János Nagy, Budapest 2002, 81–141, here 106; Ştefan Lache/Gheorghe Ţuţui, La Roumanie et la Conférence de la Paix de Paris (1946), trans. from the Romanian by Georgeta Constantin, Bucharest 1987, 185 f. 66 For the full text, see Document No. 424, in: Jean Ancel (ed.), Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust, vol. 8, New York 1986, 487–506. 67 Glass, Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen, 255. 68 Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 123. 69 Cohen, Jewish Interests in the Peace Treaties, 108; Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 146–148. 70 Randolph L. Braham, Hungary, in: David S. Wyman/Charles H. Rosenzveig (eds.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Baltimore, Md., 1996, 200–224, here 208; Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, 257. 71 USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 25, World Jewish Congress, Minutes of Working Committee Meeting, 9 September 1946. 72 Cit. in Joseph B. Schechtman, Decline of the International Protection of Minority Rights, in: The Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951), no. 1, 1–11, here 2 fn. 3.

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tional civilizational hierarchies that buttressed Jewish claims to interference in sovereign Romanian affairs in 1878 and 1919 could not have been any clearer. The Western imposition then led to some behind-the-scenes political intrigue. Privately, the Romanian government pressured the Romanian Jewish delegation to advocate for the removal of the unwanted article as well as an Anglo-American addition, article 24, on heirless Jewish property. Schwefelberg and Benvenisti responded to such coercion with a request calculated to avoid inflaming tensions with the Communist government; the Romanian Jewish leaders promised their willingness to ask the Western powers to withdraw the articles on condition that the Romanian government obligate itself in a public statement to the conference to undertake a series of measures to restore Jewish citizenship rights, address indemnification claims, transfer heirless assets to a Romanian Jewish holding organization, and guarantee free emigration out of the country. The Romanian government rejected these demands as exceeding even those already contained in the treaty and the two sides reached an unbridgeable gap.73 Chief Rabbi Safran later recalled a particularly chilling warning issued to him by Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Gheorghe Tătărescu: “Do not forget that although we are now in Paris, we belong to Romania; do not forget that we shall leave Paris, return to Romania and meet there again.”74 The threat revealed more about the irritant that Romanian Jews had become to the government in Paris than any concrete action the regime would subsequently take, as these bold words were never followed by actual reprisals.75 If Jewish demands were exploited by the British for political gain and reinforced hierarchies between civilized and uncivilized states in the international system, they also unintentionally played into the hands of Hungarian revisionism. The Hungarians arrived in Paris expecting territorial adjustments to be made in favor of ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia and Romania, but instead found the humiliating borders of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon largely restored and their wartime territorial gains erased, as the Soviets favored Romania retaining Transylvania to offset its ceding of Bes-

73 Glass, Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen, 256; USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series C, Box 98, Folder 25, World Jewish Congress, Minutes of Working Committee Meeting, 4 October 1946; ibid., World Jewish Congress, Minutes of Working Committee Meeting, 9 October 1946. 74 Alexandre Safran/Jean Ancel (ed.), Resisting the Storm. Romania, 1940–1947. Memoirs, Jerusalem 1987, 242. 75 The back and forth between the Romanian delegation and various Jewish representatives is recounted in painstaking detail in Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the 1946 Peace Conference, 121–143.

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sarabia and Northern Bukovina.76 Now, Hungary’s overwhelming preoccupation became the hundreds of thousands of Magyars living in nearby territories.77 Facing a Czechoslovakian bid to extend the Potsdam precedent into the Hungarian peace treaty and unilaterally expel 200,000 Magyars, the Hungarians launched a quixotic campaign to create a “statue of minorities” that would operate on the basis of reciprocity among those states still containing ethnic minorities in East Central Europe.78 In publicly urging the adoption of a new system of minority rights, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs János Gyöngyösi drew legitimacy for his plan from the “claims advanced by the international representatives of Jewish organisations, the most authoritative in the matter, as a result of the cruel persecutions they have endured.”79 The response to this initiative by Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk pointed out the irony of the Hungarians drawing on Jewish claims, asking rhetorically about what had happened to Hungary’s large Jewish minority: “They were not all taken away by the Germans, but they disappeared very mysteriously, or perhaps not quite so mysteriously.”80 The Hungarian plan was essentially ignored, while the Czech attempt to find international sanction for unilateral transfer failed. Although supported by the Soviet Union, the Americans, British, and Australians forced a compromise; the Hungarian peace treaty included an article binding the parties to bilateral negotiations to resolve the minority dispute, reflecting what one author has called the “de-internationalization” of the minority problem in Europe.81 Moreover, the articles proscribing human rights were elsewhere joined by the explicit sanction of transfers of ethnic Italians, Croats, and Slovenians between Italy and Yugoslavia; apparently human rights and population transfer were neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive.82 76 Deborah S. Cornelius, Hungary in World War II. Caught in the Cauldron, New York 2011, 407–412. 77 Holly Case, Between States. The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II, Stanford, Calif., 2009, 203–205. 78 Mihály Fűlőp, The Hungarian Draft Treaty for the Protection of Minorities, in: Peter M. R. Stirk/David Willis (eds.): Shaping Postwar Europe. European Unity and Disunity, 1945–1957, New York 1991, 68–76. 79 United States Delegation, Verbatim Record of 17th Plenary Meeting, August 14, 1946, in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Paris Peace Conference: Documents, vol. 4, Washington, D. C., 1970, 213. 80 United States Delegation, Verbatim Record of 18th Plenary Meeting: August 15, 1946, in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Paris Peace Conference: Documents, vol. 4, Washington, D. C., 1970, 223. 81 Claude, National Minorities, 129–133. 82 Jennifer Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-States System, Oxford et al. 1998, 97–104. The Italian-Yugoslav clash over minorities and frontiers precipitated the unique creation of a transitory buffer zone, the free territory of Trieste, as a means to diffuse tensions. See Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugo-

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The Jewish Defeat at Paris in Historical Perspective When the conference ended in October 1946, the New York Times proclaimed it marked a radical departure from Versailles and the final death knell of minority rights in Europe. No editorials appeared to question this eulogy. The statesmen at Paris essentially reaffirmed the prewar boundaries and made no attempt to revise territorial frontiers to form homogenous states, preferring for states to settle their own problems.83 Although human rights and restitution were included in the treaties, Jewish representatives still viewed 1946 as a setback for the future of Jewish rights in Europe, particularly in light of the optimism that had reigned so widely in 1919. Serving as legal advisor to the Ethiopian delegation in Paris, Norman Bentwich wrote somberly to Nathan Feinberg, a Lithuanian lawyer present in Versailles, that the Jewish delegation had “not been able to achieve nearly as much as your Comité in 1919.”84 One delegate of the British Board of Deputies, a young Jacob Talmon, bemoaned that Jews’ inability to obtain even a “modicum of group rights” was illustrative of how the results of the conference could not “possibly be considered as an adequate compensation for the terrible tragedy which has befallen our brethren.”85 From New York, the Jewish historian Salo W. Baron noted with dismay the “pitiful role” played by the Jewish delegations in Paris.86 Finally, the AJC’s Simon Segal soberly declared that the conference had “exploded” the “myth of Jewish power” and that Jews in 1919 “were more influential than they were in 1946 at the Paris Peace Conference.”87 These observers would have been surprised to know that back in Bucharest, both Romanian Prime Minister Petru Groza and Foreign Minister Tătărescu stewed, frustrated that Romanian Jews had ended up with privileges that they felt were likely to cause them domestic political trouble.88

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slav Border. Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe, Albany, N. Y., 2001. John MacCormack, New Pattern Is Set for Minorities. Paris Treaties Mark a Departure from Wilson’s Policy, in: New York Times, 20 October 1946. Central Zionist Archives (Jerusalem), Nathan Feinberg Papers, A306/138, Norman Bentwich to Nathan Feinberg, 17 September 1946. USHMM, WJC New York Archives, Series B, Box 63, Folder 16, Jacob L. Fleiszer, The Jewish Case at the Paris Peace Conference, 20 October 1946. This brief sketch appears to contain the skeleton for the more substantive pieces cited in note 6. Gil Rubin, The Victory of Emancipation. Salo Baron on the Postwar “Jewish Question” (unpublished manuscript). I owe special thanks to Gil Rubin for sharing this work-in-progress with me. AJC Archives, AJC Subject Files, War and Peace File, Simon Segal, American Jewish Committee on Peace Problems, 22 January 1947. Glass, Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen, 257.

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Still, it is hard to argue that the provisions of the 1946 treaty made any real long-term difference in the lives of Jews in Romania and Hungary. Jean Ancel claims that the international pressure generated by the conference helped resolve the question of citizenship for returning Romanian deportees, but even if true, this would have been a rather short-lived gain.89 The raison d’être of Jewish activism at Paris assumed Romania and Hungary would be reconstructed along democratic lines; the Communist consolidation of power in those countries by 1948 rendered such inferences moot. Moreover, the very exercise of wrangling over the formulation of treaty clauses seemed a luxury for the cause of Jewish postwar reconstruction; there was something to Hannah Arendt’s quip that it was “absurd to demand better guarantees” in order to help resurrect European Jewry.90 While neither Hungary nor Romania would experience an immediate and major out-migration of its Jews after the creation of Israel, it would be largely under Israeli sovereignty – not international cooperation – that Jewish group life rooted in East-Central Europe would be best protected.91

89 Jean Ancel, She’erit Hapletah in Romania during the Transition Period to a Communist Regime, August 1944–December 1947, in: Israel Gutman/Avital Saf (eds.), She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948. Rehabilitation and Political Struggle. Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Jerusalem, October 1985, Jerusalem 1990, 143–167, here 153. 90 Hannah Arendt, The Minority Question (Copied from a letter to Erich Cohn-Bendit, summer 1940), in: Jerome Kohn/Ron Feldman (eds.), The Jewish Writings. Hannah Arendt, New York 2007, 125–133, here 129. 91 Israel traded money for Romanian Jews when conditions allowed. See Radu Ioanid, The Ransom of the Jews. The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel, Chicago, Ill., 2005.

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James Loeffler

“The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective

Zionist Internationalism – The Case of Jacob Robinson 2017 marks the one hundredth anniversary of what is surely one of the more obscure slogans in the annals of Zionism: “The Famous Trinity of 1917.”1 For the three decades after World War I, this simple formula “represented the totality of Jewish thought”: “equal rights everywhere, national rights in countries of compact Jewish settlement, and the building up of a National Home in Palestine.”2 This Jewish Trinity emerged in the many wartime proclamations issued by local Zionist organizations across Europe, Palestine, South Africa, and North America in anticipation of the Paris Peace Conference. It was formally codified in the World Zionist Movement’s 1918 Copenhagen Manifesto.3 From the 1920s well into the 1940s, European and American Zionist leaders across the entire political spectrum continued to insist on equal civil rights everywhere, national autonomy in Eastern Europe, and territorial nationhood in Palestine. Not only were these three rights claims equally necessary, they were also understood as complementary and co-constitutive, especially the latter two. “Palestine and Diaspora nationalism are but two aspects of the fabric of Jewish existence,” wrote one veteran Polish Zionist leader in 1945.4

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This paper was first presented at the conference, “Did Something Happen to Zionism along the Way? Continuity and Change in Jewish Nationalism,” Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 29 until 31 December 2013. I am grateful to the following individuals for stimulating comments and questions: Israel Bartal, Rotem Giladi, Jaclyn Granick, Abigail Green, Markus Kirchhoff, David Luban, Dirk Moses, Kenneth Moss, David Myers, Noam Pianko, Gil Rubin, and Eliyahu Stern. I also thank Daniel Greenberg and Chana Simon Greenberg for generously sharing their recollections of Jacob Robinson and making available rare archival materials. Oscar Karbach, The Evolution of Jewish Political Thought, in: World Jewish Congress/ Institute of Jewish Affairs, The Institute Anniversary Volume (1941–1961), New York 1962, 23–48, here 27. Leon Chasanowitsch/Leo Motzkin (eds.), Die Judenfrage der Gegenwart. Dokumentensammlung, Stockholm 1919, 68. Joseph Tenenbaum, Peace for the Jews, New York 1945, 13. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 211–238.

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Today, by contrast, this once prevalent idea of diaspora autonomy and statist sovereignty as politically interdependent forms of Jewish nationhood has vanished from view. Contemporary Jewish popular culture fixates instead on a bifurcated image of sovereignty and autonomy as historical antipodes to one another, often juxtaposed in terms of Zionism and diaspora nationalism.5 One might adduce many explanations for this pattern. In simplest terms, the historical triumph of Israeli statism (mamlakhtiyut) after 1948 explicitly marginalized other competing Zionist visions. More recently, the parlous state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also led some intellectuals to valorize non-statist Zionism as an ethically purer form of Jewish nationalism. So too the thinness of contemporary American Jewish culture has inspired nostalgia in others for the thick language-driven Jewish secularism associated with many Eastern European Jewish diaspora nationalist projects.6 More striking, however, is how little the theoretical conceptions and inner workings of the “Famous Trinity” have been explored by historians. This despite the fact that in the last decade, a large cohort of historians has labored assiduously to retrieve the fuller dimensions and forgotten varieties of Jewish nationalism before 1948. Thanks to these efforts, Zionism’s roads not taken are by now well mapped. The atlas of non-Zionist nationalist alternatives such as Territorialism, Folkism, and Bundism is also well-nigh complete.7 The emerging new taxonomy of Jewish nationalist politics has radically diversified the images of what Zionism was and what Zionists wanted before 1948. Historians have shown how Zionism took the form of European modernism or Landespolitik just as easily as it translated itself into a program of emigration or state-building in Palestine. They have further revealed how in the name of Zionism, some twentieth-century Jews were willing to choose life in the diaspora over the historic Land of Israel. Even the assumption that the nation-state was the ultimate goal all along for Zionist leadership has now been subjected to a revisionist reading. It would seem, then,

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See, for instance, Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For more reflection on these dynamics, see James Loeffler, Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 105 (Summer 2015), no. 3, 367–398. The literature is voluminous on these topics. For partial surveys, see James Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism. Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America, in: Association for Jewish Studies Review 34 (2010), no. 2, 289–308; David Myers, Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy. New Currents in the History of Jewish Nationalism, in: Transversal 13 (2015), 44–51; and Simon Rabinovitch (ed.), Jews and Diaspora Nationalism. Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, Waltham, Mass., 2012, 233–238.

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that no assumption about the classic narrative of Zionism’s history has gone unchallenged.8 There remains one area, however, in which this is not the case. For all of its revisionism, this weighty mass of scholarship has done little to dismantle a core binary at the heart of the historical narrative. This is the enduring image of Zionism as an either-or choice between autonomous diaspora and territorial homeland. Still reading backwards from 1948, historians continue to assume that each nationalist faction on the Jewish political street exclusively oriented itself either toward Zion or diaspora. In replicating this binary, itself perhaps a product of a deeper, unconscious Jewish political geometry, they discount the possibility that some Zionists simultaneously pursued the twin goals of political consolidation in a territorial homeland in Palestine and the construction of national autonomy in the diaspora.9 Instead, they presuppose an underlying choice between “here” and “there.” This assumption has the effect of retrojecting a rigid dichotomy backwards into the entire structure of pre-1948 Jewish political thought. As a result, while historians readily accept that there were many Zionisms, they have yet to explore the interrelationship between the many teloi within Zionism.10 18 Here the recent work of Dimitri Shumsky, Gil Rubin, and Yosef Gorny stand out. See Dimitri Shumsky, Tzionut u-medinat ha-le’um. Ha’arakhah me-hadash [Zionism and the Nation-State. A Reappraisal], in: Zion 77 (2012), no. 2, 223–254, and idem, Brith Shalom’s Uniqueness Reconsidered. Hans Kohn and Autonomist Zionism, in: Jewish History 25 (2011), 339–353; Gil Rubin, From Federalism to Binationalism. Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism, in: Contemporary European History 23 (August 2015), no. 3, 393–414; and Yosef Gorny, From Binational Society to Jewish State. Federal Concepts in Zionist Political Thought, 1920–1990, and the Jewish People, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2006. On other contemporary Israeli historical writing on Diaspora and Zionism, see Arie Dubnov, Review Essay. Zionism on the Diasporic Front, in: Journal of Israeli History 30 (September 2011), no. 2, 211–224. 19 Dan Diner, Point and Plane. On the Geometry of Jewish Political Experience, in: Julia König/Sabine Seichter (eds.), Menschenrechte. Demokratie. Geschichte. Transdisziplinäre Herausforderungen an die Pädagogik, Weinheim 2014, 95–104. 10 For welcome exceptions, see Gil Rubin, The End of Minority Rights. Jacob Robinson and the “Jewish Question” in World War II, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 55–71; Kenneth Moss, Tsienizm in dem goles-natsyonalistishn gedank. Maks Vaynraykh in Palestine [Zionism in the Diaspora Nationalist Thought. Max Weinreich in Palestine], in: Afn shvel. gezelshaftlekh-literarisher zhurnal [On the Threshhold. A Social-Literary Journal] 356–357 (2012), 21–27; and Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia, Cambridge 2012. I leave aside, for the purposes of this essay, the question of what other contemporary intellectual and political forces drive this historiographical tendency to polarize sovereignty and autonomy in the history of Jewish nationalism. It suffices to make two observations. First, this newer literature still reproduces a binary of diaspora and Zion, which smacks of presentist political concerns. Second, this pattern follows a larger post-modern trend of the localization of Jewish history-writing, with a focus on situating Jewish nationalist thinkers and movements in discrete narrower contexts, both temporal and geographical.

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This article proposes to challenge that consensus via a reconsideration of the life and thought of the man credited with coining the phrase, “the Famous Trinity of 1917.” Jacob Robinson (1889–1977) is not unknown to historians today. With the boom in post-Cold War studies of Holocaust law and Nazi trials, his wide-ranging impact on twentieth-century international law and Jewish life has recently received scrutiny from a number of American and Israeli historians. They have documented how Robinson played an instrumental role in several episodes of Jewish international legal history, including the Nuremberg trial, the establishment of Yad Vashem, the negotiation of reparations between Germany and Israel, the International Refugee Convention, and the Eichmann trial.11 A second, smaller body of research spearheaded by European scholars has highlighted Robinson’s role in the Jewish and national minority politics of the interwar Lithuanian Republic. Approaching Robinson from a local Lithuanian angle, they have documented his pioneering work in during the brief period of Jewish national autonomy and his attempts to navigate through the complex political waters of post-1926 Lithuanian society under a liberal dictatorship. This research has recovered a crucial fact that has escaped much notice elsewhere: in the two decades between World War I and World War II, Robinson was the de facto leader of Lithuanian Zionism.12 Yet neither the refugee Jewish lawyer nor the Lithuanian Jewish politician quite captures Robinson’s breadth of activity or its meaning in the context of the history of Zionism. Early on in the interwar period, he emerged as a Zionist expert on the League of Nations, one of the movement’s resident legal

On the former, see Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism, 289–308 and Allan Arkush, From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism, in: Modern Judaism 29 (2009), no. 3, 326–350. For the latter, see Murray Jay Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, Oxford 2007, 18. 11 Michael Marrus, A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–1946, in: Cardozo Law Review 27 (2006), no. 4, 1651–1665, and idem, Three Jewish émigrés at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin, in: Ezra Mendelsohn/Stefani Hoffman/Richard I. Cohen (eds.), Against the Grain. Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, New York 2014, 240–254; and Boaz Cohen, Dr. Jacob Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the Elusive Jewish Voice in Nuremberg, in: David Bankier/Dan Michman (eds.), Holocaust and Justice. Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials, Jerusalem 2010, 81–100. 12 See the very important recent compendium of work by Lithuanian and German scholars Eglė Bendikaitė, Dirk Roland Haupt, Saulius Kaubrys, and Asta Petraitytė-Briedienė in Eglė Bendikaitė/Dirk Roland Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, Sankt Augustin 2015. This work, it should be noted, was published with substantial assistance from the German government’s Foreign Ministry. See also Eglė Bendikaitė, Sionistinis sajudis Lietuvoje, Vilnius 2006, and Sarunas Liekis, A State within a State? Jewish Autonomy in Lithuania, 1918–1925, Vilnius 2003.

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authorities on self-determination and minority rights in international law. At the European Congress of National Minorities in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Robinson pursued his own brand of Zionist legal diplomacy to build alliances with other national minorities (chief among them the Auslandsdeutsche) to bolster the prospects for international minority rights. In the 1930s and 1940s he rose to prominence in the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency, serving as one of the legal architects for the intensifying Jewish campaign for statehood. Meanwhile, at home, Robinson parlayed his legal diplomacy skills into a significant role as advisor to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and government advocate at the International Court of Justice. This unique position allowed him to pursue a rapprochement between Zionist aims and Lithuanian governmental policies in the interwar period, earning him the esteem of David Ben-Gurion, who in 1933 called Robinson “the most important man in Lithuania.”13 Fleeing to the United States during World War II, Robinson continued his work with the Jewish Agency and joined the leadership of the American Zionist Emergency Council. With the support of the World Jewish Congress, he also founded the Institute of Jewish Affairs, effectively the world’s first Jewish think tank. In the spring of 1945, he attended the founding United Nations Conference in San Francisco as the senior Zionist diplomat. There he led the effort to oppose the Arab League’s attempt to write the Trusteeship provisions of the United Nations Charter so as to block Jewish claims to Palestine. Finally, after 1948, Robinson spent a decade as legal advisor to the Israeli UN delegation and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Robinson’s remarkably diverse career has frustrated attempts to situate him in the historical landscape of modern Jewish politics. He has recently been variously characterized as a “politician without a political party,” a “second-generation” Gegenwartsarbeiter, and a Jewish liberal wavering between the naïve dream of conquering Palestine and the noble nightmare of Europe. Each of these efforts has its merits. Yet they unwittingly replicate the existing post-1948 assumptions about Zionism’s narrative arc towards statehood. Instead, it makes more sense to interpret him as the bearer of a lost Jewish political tradition of Zionist internationalism.14

13 Ben-Gurion Archives, Israel, David Ben-Gurion, Diaries, entry for 21 April 1933, cit. in Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen, At the Service of the Jewish Nation. Jacob Robinson and International Law, in: Osteuropa 8–10 (2008), Special Issue: Impulses for Europe. Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry, 157–170, here 164. 14 Eglė Bendikaitė, Politician without a Political Party. A Zionist Appraisal of Jacob Robinson’s Activities in the Public Life of Lithuania, in: idem/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 39–66; Rubin, The End of Minority Rights, 55 f.; Kaplan-Feuereisen, At the Service of the Jewish Nation, 168.

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The term “Zionist internationalism” is admittedly a neologism. It is not found as such in Robinson’s writings. Yet the phrase neatly describes both a discernible political sensibility and a larger specific interwar transnational Jewish project which he shared with many of his generation. Not unlike other aspiring European nationalists, these Zionists envisioned the new international institutions that arose on the ruins of the old European imperial order as the key to a smooth path to both harmonious global politics and national freedom. In their eyes, Woodrow Wilson’s conflicting promises of “autonomous development” for the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire and “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” had given rise to the need for a new approach to territory and nationhood. The messy world of sprawling diasporas and disputed borders could not be properly ordered exclusively by means of political fiat or military force. Law and politics must both accept the realities of transnational communities split between diasporic constituencies and co-national states. By virtue of their long experience with diaspora and their urgent need for a territorial homeland, Zionists were uniquely positioned to help realize this new order. For in contrast to the truly diasporist Jewish thinkers of the Bund, the Folkists, and the Territorialists, Zionist internationalists did not abandon the idea of statehood. They rather committed themselves equally to securing complementary claims to a land-based polity in Palestine and a viable politico-legal framework for Jewish collective existence in Eastern Europe. Their model, which they proposed to apply more broadly, wove together the two ideals of “minorities protection and national protection,” or “self-government and complete independence” to achieve “rights for humanity and justice for the nation.”15 The transnational network of Zionist internationalists that materialized in the 1920s and 1930s included a long, diverse roster of leading Zionist figures. There were prominent East European leaders such as Nahum Goldmann, Leo Motzkin, and Joseph Tenenbaum, the latter two of whom participated in the Paris Peace Conference. Others were parliamentarians like Yitzhak Grinbaum, Mordechai Nurok, Leon Reich, and Abraham Revutsky, active in the new postwar politics of independent Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia. Central and West European Zionist leaders included Hans Kohn, Maurice Perlzweig, Franz Bienenfeld, Oskar Karbach, Emil Margulies, and Ernst Frankenstein. So too the list contains many American Zionists such as Oscar Janowsky, Horace Kallen, Mordecai Kaplan, Julian Mack, Bernard Richards, and Stephen S. Wise. Most of all, it comprised a lengthy catalogue

15 Léon Reich, Les droits nationaux des Juifs en Europe orientale, Paris 1919, 4.

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of mostly Russian and Polish Jewish international lawyers such as Natan Feinberg, Julius Stone, Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, Raphael Lemkin, Shimshon Rosenbaum, Jacob Stoyanovsky, Zerach Wahrhaftig, and Norman Bentwich. Finally, to this register might be added other iconic figures, such as Alfred Zimmern, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt. By no means were all of these individuals unanimous in their understanding of Zionism’s goals vis-à-vis sovereignty and autonomy. But they shared two fundamental traits. First, they viewed Jews as a global nation deserving of some measure of political and, equally crucially, legal recognition beyond any one geopolitical context, present or future.16 Second, they believed deeply in the goal of fashioning new kinds of international political institutions with a discrete Jewish place within them. From World War I onwards, these Zionist internationalists populated the ranks of pro-League of Nations organizations in Palestine and Europe. They comprised the leaders of the European Congress of National Minorities and served active roles in the Institute of International Law, the International Congress of Students, and various League of Nations subsidiary groups. They coordinated all these efforts through new organizations of their own: the World Union of Jewish Students, the Comité des Délégations Juives, the Congress for the Rights of Jewish Minorities, and the World Jewish Congress. The latter organization, it could be added, arguably invented the modern international non-governmental organization (INGO) in the post-World War II arena of the United Nations. Recovering this forgotten tradition of Jewish politics through the biography of Jacob Robinson provides a window into the overlapping and complementary frameworks of local, national, and transnational activism inside interwar Zionism. It presents a clearer image of how the Zionist goals of building a co-national homeland or state in Palestine functioned alongside the construction of national minority kinship communities in Europe. So too it reintroduces Jews into the story of European internationalism and transnational civil society beyond their now-familiar roles as rights-deprived political objects or crisis-driven humanitarian actors.17 This means, for instance, treating the World Jewish Congress and the Joint Distribution Committee not merely as a rescue-and-relief organizations but as political actors.18 16 Maks Laserson, K mezhdunarodnoi postanovke evreiskogo voprosa [Towards the International Resolution of the Jewish Question], St. Petersburg 1917, 35 f. 17 Daniel Fuqua, Preface, in Daniel Fuqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, New York 2011, xii. See also Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia, Pa., 2013. 18 For a critique of Jewish political history as weighted too heavily towards the crisis explanatory paradigm, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale. The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, Berkeley, Calif., 2002, 8–10.

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Ascribing ideological politics to these philanthropic and humanitarian organizations is a key first step in a more complete history of Jewish internationalism writ large.19 On a larger level, however, the retrieval of Zionist internationalism permits a broader reconsideration of modern Jewish politics. For if the distinctive tripartite Jewish political theology of the “Famous Trinity” rested on three articles of faith whose relationship to one another remains obscure and even counter-intuitive to scholars today, then its recovery is all the more useful, if not imperative, for advancing the writing of contemporary Jewish political history. Beyond retracing the routes by-passed on the road to statehood lies the task of recovering the larger map of the world itself. It was not only autonomy or non-statist nationalism that Jewish politics discarded in the passage from past to present but also a whole way of envisioning the relationship between law, politics, and culture in the modern world.

The “First Principles” of Jewish Politics Politically speaking, Jacob Robinson was a child of 1905. Born in Saray, in the northwestern corner of the Russian Pale of Settlement in 1889, he came of age during the first Russian Revolution just as a torrent of nationalist political passions swept through imperial Russian society. Having passed from a traditional rabbinic education into the local secondary school (Gymnasium) in the city of Suwałki, he found himself in a diverse environment comprised of Jews, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians. During the 1905 elections to the Russian Duma, a conflict broke out. Local Poles demanded a boycott of the school on political grounds. Lithuanian students resisted. Jews like Robinson were forced to choose sides. The moment gave him his first taste of nationalist politics, leaving him acutely aware that Jews were the numerical minority who required allies to survive under any political scheme. It also bred a sympathy for the Lithuanian cause (and an antipathy

19 Important first attempts at a corrective can be found in recent work by Michael Barnett, The Star and Stripes. A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews, Princeton, N. J., 2016; Jaclyn Granick, Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914–1929 (unpublished PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva 2015); Nathaniel Kurz, The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights Politics, 1945–1975 (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 2014); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Jewish Threads in the Fabric of International History, in: Barbara Haider-Wilson/William D. Godsey/Wolfgang Mueller (eds.), International History in Theory and Practice, Vienna 2017, 477–500.

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to both Polish nationalism and Russian rule), which would color his later path into Lithuanian-Jewish political entente.20 Robinson went on to train in law at the University of Warsaw, receiving his L.L.D. in 1914. He spent his summers studying at the University in Leipzig where he joined the Zionist student faction. In Leipzig, he also had a series of fateful encounters with Vladimir Lenin and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Both experiences left him convinced that Marxist socialism, with its own internationalist vision, offered no hope for Jewish political aspirations. The Bolsheviks, despite their talk of self-determination, appeared little different than the Autocrats they wished to replace when it came to granting true freedom to national minorities. The Bund, on the other hand, he regarded as never more than “five minutes away from Bolshevism.” Given its leaders’ lack of belief in “democracy or democratic socialism” and its plain denial of Jewish world unity, he dismissed their program of national-cultural autonomy as irrelevant to Jewish politics.21 Robinson was drafted into the Russian Army in the summer of 1914. Captured during the German assault on Vilnius in September 1915, he spent the next three years in captivity in a series of German POW camps. He returned to his hometown at the beginning of 1919, a particularly propitious moment. During wartime negotiations, Zionists and Lithuanian nationalists had agreed on a common program of an independent Lithuanian state in which Jews would receive national autonomy rights beyond even what was envisioned for the postwar Minority Treaties. To be sure, this alliance was born of pragmatism; the Lithuanians wanted Jews to balance out the Polish and German populations in their new state, while the Jews hoped Lithuanians’ relative political weakness would make them more accommodating than Poland or Russia. Yet an alliance it was, and young Zionists like Robinson leapt at the chance to enact a national program there. Despite his legal training and his political instincts, Robinson’s initial path into postwar Zionism led to work as an educator promoting Hebraist cultural nationalism. Emboldened by the new Lithuanian Republic’s promise of cultural and educational autonomy for Jews, in 1919, he relocated his family to the small town of Vrbalis, where he founded and ran a Hebrew Gymnasium for three years affiliated with the Tarbut schools network. Robinson’s sole prior experience in pedagogy consisted of working as a private tutor. Never-

20 Greenberg Family Archive, Sudbury, Mass., Interview with Jacob Robinson by Daniel Greenberg, 15 November 1975 (Heb.). 21 Ibid.; American Jewish Archives (AJA), MS-361, Series C, Box C7, File 3, Folder Individuals Abroad, A–D, 1941–1948, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Vera Dean, 1941; AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C12, File 3, Folder World Jewish Congress, Jan[uary]–Jun[e] 1943, Jacob Robinson, Memorandum, 9 March 1943.

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theless, he threw himself into the work of building a new Hebrew-speaking generation to emancipate Jewish children from the “disease of multilingualism.” At first blush, this was an ironic position to take, for Robinson was a polyglot himself. He knew several European languages fluently, including French, Russian, German, co-founded a Yiddish newspaper in the early 1920s, and took the trouble to master Lithuanian, a rare move among his fellow Lithuanian Jewish intellectuals. Yet his Hebraism fit with his Zionist conviction that Jewish nationhood required a deep process of national renewal that began with linguistic “deassimilation” and culminated in a shared national consciousness that stretched across the entire Jewish world.22 This expansive vision was already on display in his first book, Yediat ’amenu. demografyah ve-natsiologyah (Knowledge of Our People. Demography and Nationology), written in Hebrew and published in Berlin in 1923. There, Robinson offered a wholesale sociological survey of the contemporary Jewish condition in the form of a textbook for Jewish schools. The book’s preface struck a positivist note, with an epigraph inspired by Auguste Comte about the power of knowledge.23 Its stated goal was to use the modern social scientific tools of statistics, sociology, and “nationology” (the anthropology of nationhood) to hold up a mirror to Jews such that they might see themselves objectively. Yet Robinson’s text clearly disclosed inter alia a distinctive Jewish political theory. In the first half, he offered an overview of world Jewry in terms of numbers, economic and social conditions, migration, education, and health. In the second half he turned to “nationology,” and discussed the biological, linguistic, and religious dimensions of the Jewish nation, antisemitism, the history of “Jewish self-rule,” and the past and present of the “Jewish national movement.” The Jewish people had always possessed “a distinctive national character,” claimed Robinson, drawing deeply on the writings of Simon Dubnow. In pre-modern times, the Jewish national spirit expressed itself through religion. “Jewish self-government” offered a unique political model for sustaining collective belonging. With the French Revolution and the birth of modern nationalism and secularization, Jewish nationhood assumed its political form as a “modern Jewish national movement” comprised of “two sides: a territorial-political one and a cultural-national one.”24

22 Jacob Robinson (Yankev Robinzon), Yediat ’amenu. Demografyah ve-natsiologyah. Sefer limud ve-iyun [Knowledge of Our People. Democraphy and Nationology. A Text and Study Book], Berlin 1923, 133. 23 “One must know in order to see, see in order to predict.” Ibid., 1. 24 Ibid., 143.

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In his treatment of Jewish nationalism, Robinson respectfully outlined a variety of political positions within the Jewish fold, including Zionism and Autonomism. He reserved the bulk of his discussion for the larger question of the shape of modern politics. Nationalism, he stressed, could not be understood except in relation to two other modern ideological tendencies: cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Cosmopolitans took the form of Marxists, Freemasons, and other would-be universalists who dismiss “the national as nothing more than prejudice and believe in the unity of the entire human race.” In doing so, he charged, they oversimplify society and fail to account for human diversity and creativity.25 On the other hand, nationalism was not free of its own extremists, who verged on chauvinism and jingoism. Their slogan he distilled to the English expression, “Right or wrong, my country.” As for the main culprits, he identified the Pan-Germanists and Pan-Slavists, who display “aggressive intentions towards the smaller nations within their midst or environs.”26 In between these two poles lay the path of internationalism: “Those who raise the flag of internationalism have chosen the ‘Golden Mean.’” Against both facile cosmopolitanism and “the extreme national idea,” he explained, internationalists “claim that nationalism is a special force that naturally shapes life and bequeaths moral values and cultural treasures to the world.” In the modern age, internationalists carried on the age-old pattern of balancing “individual, national, and universal.” This allowed them to continue in the tradition which had produced humanity’s greatest achievements: “The Jewish Torah, Indian Buddhism, Greek philosophy and art, Roman law, Arabic Islam, Roman Catholic theocracy, Italian humanism, German Reformation, the French Revolution – all of these created universal human values from within particular boundaries through the power of nationhood.” In the modern world, the Jewish national renaissance had finally begun. It was thus the task of the Jewish educator to awaken in Jewish youth “the slumbering forces” of national consciousness so that Jews might contribute anew to humanity.27 Robinson’s book appeared just at the moment when he shifted from educational work to active politics. In 1922 he was elected to the Lithuanian parliament as a Jewish MP for the General Zionist party. There, between 1923 and 1926, he led both the Jewish national faction and the national minorities bloc.28 The new Lithuanian government recognized Jewish auton-

25 26 27 28

Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133, 12. On Robinson’s parliamentary activities, see idem (Yankev Robinzon), Di fraktsye un di algemeyne un idishe minderhaytn-bavegung [The Jewish Faction and the General and

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omy through the creation of a separate, cabinet-level Ministry of Jewish Affairs. Robinson understood that this Lithuanian-Jewish entente rested on the principle of reciprocity. In this context, the transnational character of Jewish life was not a drawback but a net positive. In the first three years of Lithuania’s existence, Lithuanian Jewry and through them “world Jewry” (“dos aleveltlikhe yidntum”), wrote Robinson in 1926, had played a key role in Lithuania’s struggle for independence and recognition.” “Jewish freedom and Lithuanian freedom,” he insisted, were interlinked, bound together in a mutually beneficial contract, which he characterized using the Roman legal term, do ut des.29 But the parliamentary system also encouraged a political scramble between different factions within the Jewish world. From his entrée into formal Jewish politics in Lithuania, Robinson found himself facing direct challenges from non-Zionist political factions for control of the Jewish community. The greatest threat came from the Folkists, who also sensed fertile territory in Lithuania in the early 1920s. Zionism, according to Folkist leaders such as Yudl Mark and Tsemach Szabad, mortgaged the Jewish present in Eastern Europe to fantasies of a national life artificially planted in the Middle East. They attacked Zionism’s political vision from the ideological position of doikeyt (here-ness), stressing an exclusive focus on Jewish national autonomy in the diaspora. In reply, Robinson repeatedly took to the pages of Di idishe shtime (The Jewish Voice), the Yiddish-language newspaper he co-founded, to respond with a clear articulation of his vision of Zionist politics. In a seven-part article published in 1926 under one of his regular pseudonyms, he tore into their political positions. Robinson singled out doikeyt for critique as a theoretical absurdity. It made no sense to speak of Jewish rootedness in Lithuania in mystical, sacred terms when before the war Jews had emigrated at a rate of some 25,000 a year. Furthermore, it was the height of arrogance to stop Jewish nationhood at the borders of the Lithuanian or Polish state, ignoring the global character of the Jewish people.30 The Folkist critique clearly touched a nerve in Robinson. For it forced him to clarify the Zionist position on Diaspora autonomy versus in-gathering in the Land of Israel. He did so in another 1926 essay, written in his own name under the title Zionism and Landespolitik. From the Helsingfors conference of 1902 onwards, in which Gegenwartsarbeit had been enunciated Jewish Minorities Movement], in: idem (ed.), Barikht fun der idisher seym-fraktsye fun II Litvishn seym (1923–1926) [Report of the Jewish Parliament Faction of the Second Lithuanian Parliament (1923–1926)], Kovno 1926, 77–83. 29 Idem, Araynfir [Introduction], in: idem, Barikht fun der idisher seym-fraktsye fun II Litvishn seym (1923–1926), 6–8. 30 E. B., Di folkistishe atake [The Folkist Attack], in: Di idishe shtime [The Jewish Voice] 221, 29 September 1926, 2.

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in their program, it was the Zionists who had turned minority rights into the “first principle of Jewish politics.” Others may have thought up the idea, but only Zionists actualized it by mainstreaming the idea into international politics, especially during World War I and thereafter. Thanks to Zionist agitation at the Paris Peace Conference and negotiations with Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians, they had attained real minority rights for Jews in Eastern Europe much more than any would-be Autonomists had ever achieved.31 Zionists, too, had created the “second (no-less important) principle of all active Jewish politics: the orientation towards world Jewry.” Only they could justifiably claim a true dedication to this principle of klal-yisroel solidaritet (all-Jewish solidarity). Far from being narrow parochialists, it was the Zionists who had the most expansive vision of internationalism. Moreover, the two principles seamlessly connected as two sides of the same coin: “Minority rights in the deep sense of the term means the right of spiritual belonging to all other parts of the nation in the whole world.”32 Just as national and international fit together into a harmonious world community, he went on to say, Jewish and Lithuanian politics also complemented one another: “Can one split oneself in two and say: ‘From here to there, Zionist, and from there onwards, citizen’? No. This is not necessary, because a fundamental unity exists here.” Zionist activism and Lithuanian civic work went hand in hand. “Our love for Jerusalem hardly weakens our joy in working for Lithuania,” he declared, and asked rhetorically: “Are we not better citizens because of the fact that we are better Jews and vice versa?” In answer to his own question, he replied with a Talmudic dictum: “Life is such, that ‘one thing depends on another’ [‘ha beha talya’]. Abstract logic cannot change that, for life’s own logic confirms this truth.”33

A Jewish Vision of Transnationalism In Robinson’s model, Zionism required not only a Landespolitik in Lithuania and a commitment to world Jewry and the Land of Israel, but also a place on the larger European interwar political stage. In the early 1920s, he maintained active ties to like-minded Zionists across Europe via the Comité des Délégations Juives based in Geneva and Paris. Less a movement than a network, the Comité connected Zionists engaged in autonomist projects in the 31 Jacob Robinson (Yankev Robinzon), Tsienizm un land-politik [Zionism and Landespolitik], in: Di idishe shtime 113, 18 May 1926, 13. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

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various independent states of East-Central Europe. Robinson worked closely with its leaders Leo Motzkin and Natan Feinberg in the 1920s to coordinate efforts to press for minority rights in various independent East-Central European states and at the League of Nations.34 He also pursued inter-parliamentary contacts with minority blocs in other Baltic states, the League of Nations Societies, and the international Inter-Parliamentary Union.35 These endeavors in turn led to an invitation from Baltic German nationalists in 1925 to join in the launching of the European Congress of National Minorities. It was there that Robinson began to develop an international public reputation as a leader of the minorities movement. At the opening conference of the Congress in Geneva in October 1925, Robinson delivered a rousing keynote address calling on Europe’s national minorities to unite in order to demand the right to national autonomy inside multi-ethnic states and transnational ties with their mother-nation. To justify this move, he cited the ancient Jewish tradition of the kehile as an example of a viable political arrangement that could inspire modern versions of autonomy. The Jewish political tradition offered a model for the larger path of historical development towards the decentralization of the “modern state.” The resolution approved called for “each national group to be permitted to conserve and develop its national individuality in corporations of public law.”36 Robinson repeated this theme over the next few years. In his 1928 speech to the same body, for instance, he called for the recognition of nationhood as something that transcended state borders. “A nation comprises all its fragments included in other States,” he asserted, “because all of these fragments are brothers.” Moreover, internationalism was now the operating principle for humanity. While there was no denying the state “is and will remain the sole basic unit of political organization,” he argued, its borders by no means represented the limits of human activities. Global capitalism, cultural life, ideas and politics, too, had all assumed “transnational [superétatique] forms,” so why not nations? “If we recognize international organizations for material things, it would prove a true poverty of spirit to refuse the same right to the same organizations from an intellectual point of view.”37

34 Idem, Di fraktsye un di algemeyne un idishe minderhaytn-bavegung, 77. 35 Ibid., 81 f. 36 Sitzungsbericht der ersten Konferenz der organisierten nationalen Gruppen in den Staaten Europas im Jahre 1925 zu Genf, Geneva 1926, 78; Greenberg Family Archive, Sudbury, Mass., Interview with Jacob Robinson by Daniel Greenberg, 15 November 1975 (Heb.); Funem kongres fun di natsionalen minderhayten in Zheneve. Di rede fun doktor Robinzon [From the National Minorities Congress in Geneva. Dr. Robinson’s Speech], in: Der moment [The Moment], 23 October 1925, 10.

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Robinson went on to acknowledge fears about minority irredentism. “They depict us as pan-Semites, pan-Germans, pan-Slavs,” he mocked, but our goals are not political but cultural. National minorities simply wished to cultivate ties with their “co-national State” or “spiritual metropole” while also remaining loyal to their “political fatherland” (“patrie politique”). He closed with a vision of spiritual communion freed from the constraints of geography, “We simply wish to live in the transnational nation as one lives in a city and we don’t particularly care in which street of this city we live.”38 Robinson’s words resonated with the host of European national minority leaders seeking ways to leverage the new internationalism of the day and the League of Nations into concrete legal advances without running afoul of their host countries. The speech was reprinted in the Congress journal, marking Robinson’s debut as something of a pan-European celebrity. True to his word, he continued throughout the late 1920s to promote these ideas, most famously through his 1928 German-language bibliographic compendium on minority rights and the attendant legal and political questions.39 At the same time, he joined in a late 1920s effort to expand the Comité des Délégations Juives from a loose activist network into a new kind of transnational Jewish political organization. That process began with the 1927 Zurich Congress on the Rights of Jewish Minorities, and culminated in the 1932 formation of the World Jewish Congress, which officially launched in 1936. Robinson’s disavowal of political goals resonated with many in his audience in the European minorities movement. Yet it hardly coincided with the realities of the time. From the start, he and his Comité colleagues Motzkin, Margulies, and Feinberg worried privately about German irredentism. In vain they hoped that expanded minority rights would neutralize the threat of an aggressive, expansionist German nationalism reappearing in the heart of Europe. At the same time, territorial expansion in Palestine remained no less central to their vision. When in 1923 Jewish Communists in Lithuania had questioned the community’s ties with the Jewish Agency, Robinson responded sharply: “The Land of Israel is bound up with Jewish life and with the broad masses. […] The Land of Israel is not somebody’s idle fantasy, but rather the question at the center of our very existence and future. […] The Land of Israel will solve our problems and light up the path of the Jews in exile.”40 37 Le discours de Jacob Robinson, représentant la minorité juive de Lithuanie, in: Cri des peuples 1, no. 19, 3 October 1928, 20 f. 38 Ibid., 21. 39 Jacob Robinson, Das Minoritätenproblem und seine Literatur. Kritische Einführung in die Quellen und die Literatur der europäischen Nationalitätenfrage der Nachkriegszeit, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Völkerrechtlichen Minderheitenschutzes, Berlin 1928. 40 Speech of Jacob Robinson at Jewish National Council meeting, 26 November 1923, cit. in

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Six years later, after a deadly spate of Arab anti-Jewish violence in Palestine shocked the Jewish world, Robinson led an emergency appeal in Lithuania. The Emergency Committee for the Land of Israel rallied all Lithuanian Jews to raise funds and bind themselves to their homeland.41 The Jewish settlement of its ancestral homeland, “the Land of all Jewish Generations,” as he called it in one petition to the League of Nations, was a moral and political imperative.42

Replanting the Sound Seeds of Autonomism? Robinson’s rich, complex biography neatly represents the complementary relationship between autonomist and statist goals in interwar Zionism. Equally crucially, his story also includes their parting. An early first blow came already in 1926, when a coup d’etat in Lithuania ended both democratic politics and the government’s experiment with Jewish national minority rights. The Jewish National Council was banned. The state-funded Jewish school system, Robinson’s pride and joy, was dismantled. Still, in spite of these developments, he did not abandon Lithuania.43 His confidence derived from his actual experience of post-1926 Lithuanian politics. Even with the dissolution of formal Jewish national bodies, the government worked secretly to address the Jewish community’s needs through an informal leadership structure led by Robinson and a small coterie of other Zionist leaders. Meanwhile, he was publicly tapped for a new prominent role as a legal diplomat for the Lithuanian state.44 He served as lawyer for the Lithua-

41 42

43

44

Leybl Shimoni, Di idishe natsionale farzamlung [The Jewish National Conference], in: Mendel Sudarsky/Uriah Katsenelenbogen (eds.), Lite, vol. 1, New York 1951, 251–272, here 266–268. Tsu ale yidn in lite! [To All Jews in Lithuania!], in: Di idishe shtime 211, 10 September 1929, 1. Idishe miutim in der gantser velt apelirn tsum felker-bund vegn erets-yisroel [Jewish Minorities in the Whole World Appeal to the League of Nations about the Land of Israel], in: ibid., 2; Tsu ale yidn in Lite! [To All Jews in Lithuania!], in: ibid., 1; Petition from Jacob Robinson to the Permanent Mandates Commission, 3 September 1929, in: League of Nations Archives (LNA), R2282, 6A/14036/224. I thank Natasha Wheatley for making this source available. Robinson delivered his balance sheet of Lithuanian Jewish politics after the coup in Robinzon, Araynfir, 5–9. “[F]rom a broader historical perspective, from the standpoint of spiritual and political education,” he insisted, “it is better to lose with honor, as proud, self-aware men and Jews” than to capitulate like “subservient [ma-yofusdik] ghettoslaves.” Ibid., 8. AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C7, File 3, Folder Individuals Abroad, A–D, 1941–1948; For more on Robinson’s late 1920s activities, see Dirk Roland Haupt, Jacob Robinson as Writer and Practitioner in International Law, in: Bendikaitė/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 126–129 and 146–154.

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nian Foreign Ministry in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague and on the Lithuanian-German Commission of Conciliation. This work brought him directly into international diplomatic and legal proceedings involving disputed border areas with mixed Lithuanian-German and Lithuanian-Polish populations. These assignments provided an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between autonomy, territory, and the growing possibilities for the international order. A larger blow came from the German elections of 1932 that brought Nazis into power in the parliament. His worst nightmare had come true, he later recalled: Pan-Germanism had successfully exploited the minorities movement for its imperial ambitions. Now a racist, antisemitic, pan-German party had seized control of German politics and openly preached the goal of territorial expansion. Worse still, he recognized, that the Auslandsdeutsche had discredited the entire minorities movement, leading world leaders to regard all minorities as “vicious Fifth Columnists” and a source of “calamity” in international governance.45 Though he engineered the famous 1933 Bernheim Petition to stop temporarily the Nazi legal persecution of Jews in Upper Silesia, he did not foresee much possibility of League action. He placed greater faith in the hope that public outrage might prevent the spread of Nazi race ideology to elsewhere in Europe.46 When World War II began, Robinson chaired the Lithuanian-based Committee to help Jewish Refugees from Poland. In 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, he fled across Europe and managed to secure passage on a ship to the United States. Safe in New York, he began to reassess the prospects for Jewish life in Europe through his work at the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the newly established research and planning unit of the World Jewish Congress. The move led to a decisive reevaluation of his political philosophy. On 25 June 1943, he sent a lengthy letter to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, leaders of the World Jewish Congress, announcing a change of heart. “I fear,” he wrote, that “a serious conflict is about to develop between the philosophy and the practical policy of Zionism on the one hand and the World Jewish Congress on the other.” Though he had devoted two decades of his life to minority rights, he gradually concluded between 1941 and 1943 that a “dual policy [of diaspora and Zion] is no longer possible.” Robinson wrote: “We must, at length, face the fact that we have been defeated by Hitler, the time for ‘both – and’ has passed. Today is the time for ‘either – or’ […]. It would be a delusion 45 Jacob Robinson, Minorities in a Free World, in: Free World 5 (1943), no. 5, 450–454, here 451. 46 Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933. Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008, 97.

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and a crime to reestablish Jews in Europe […]. Recent Jewish history is full of the wrecks of great ideas reduced to ridiculous size. What happened to territorialism? It became amateur geographical exploration. What happened to the Bund? An organization to fight Zionism, nothing more. Even Yiddishism is on the verge of degeneration, becoming something akin to a Yiddish Appreciation Club. At crucial moments, these movements did not find the right way. It is now the hour of decision for the World Jewish Congress – it must find its proper way.”47

Robinson had made his choice. The twin foci for interwar Zionism must yield to an exclusive focus on state-building in Palestine. In a series of detailed memos, he went on to explain his reasoning: the general material devastation; the uprooting of Jews from their traditional occupational niches in the European economy; the loss of Jewish allies among other national minorities; the physical reduction of Jewish demographic density; and the anticipated absence of democratic rule in postwar Eastern Europe. Most of all, he singled out the decline of minority rights in international law and future governance plans. The word “minorities,” he wrote later, had become a taboo term in the international political and legal lexicons. The very structure of post-Versailles international politics – premised on a world of legally recognized nations split territorially between states and kinship diasporas – had vanished from global political thought. The United Nations Charter, he wrote, “is based on the principle of the state as the basic unit of international society.” This left little room for transnational public bodies representing groups or cultures.48 As he concluded in another memo, “One of the most important lessons of the war so far is that territorial nations have not perished, while the scattered peoples are in considerable danger of so doing.”49 Robinson further elaborated on his thoughts on the decline of national autonomy in a long letter written to his colleague A. L. Easterman in January 1945. The British section of the World Jewish Congress had been approached with a proposal to publish an English translation of Simon Dubnow’s classic political tract, Letters on Old and New Judaism. Asked his opinion, Robinson conceded that there might be historical value in having such a document. But from a “practical-political viewpoint,” pure Dubnovian Autonomism was obsolete and irrelevant. Robinson noted that he had dis-

47 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C6, File 3, Folder American Jewish Congress, Wise, Stephen S., 1942–1948, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, 25 June 1943. See also the important analysis of this letter by Gil Rubin, The End of Minority Rights, 55–71. 48 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C16, F[ile] 2, Folder Vacation, 1946, Letter from Jacob Robinson to David Petegorsky, 2 October 1946. 49 Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Z5/644, File Misradei hanhalut ha-sokhnut ha-yehudit be-artzot ha-brit Nyu York [Offices of the Jewish Agency Directorship in the United States, New York], Memorandum 2 (1942–1943).

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cussed this problem as late as May 1940 with Dubnow himself. Then, he presented his critique: “With two thirds of extra-Soviet Jewry […] without a tradition of autonomy and with a constitutional regime which leaves no place for autonomous public law bodies for religious or national groups […] the importance of Dubnow’s ‘prescriptions’ to solve the Jewish problem has greatly vanished. The remaining Jewish communities in the surviving traditional centers of Jewish settlement […] [face] radically changed conditions of a new Jewish world […]. The sound seeds of ‘autonomism’ have been adopted in our program, but an over-emphasis on this theory now is not advisable.”50

Robinson’s letter raises the question: Which “sound seeds of ‘autonomism’” remained relevant in Zionism in 1945? He himself delivered inconsistent answers. In one wartime letter, he proposed limiting the sovereignty of new nation-state.51 His own larger ambivalence about the demise of minority rights in wartime Europe displayed itself in his famous 1943 book, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?52 This exhaustive study, co-written with four other experts, offered an extremely detailed scholarly analysis of the fate of minority rights and international law in East-Central Europe during the interwar period. In its very phrasing, the book’s title hints at the answer to its own question. Yet read closely, the text never actually offers an unqualified “yes” or “no.” The reason is that for all the self-evident flaws of the interwar minority treaties, Robinson still held them to be a useful model for how to advance political claims and legal defenses of Jews and other vulnerable national minorities. Indeed, during a course of 1943 lectures at Columbia University, Robinson called the minority rights “possibly the greatest innovation of modern times.” “While the international protection of minorities was not a first-class success,” he declared, “it was in the final analysis a successful experiment.”53 Robinson’s defense of minority rights was not limited to the offhand comment. After completing the Minorities volume, Robinson began work on a second volume, never completed, which he intended to defend “the future of minorities rights.” This study would prove

50 AJA, MS-361, C12, F[ile] 1, Folder World Jewish Congress, British Section, 1945, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Alex Easterman, 6 January 1945 on display rights ed into Zionism. 51 AJA, MS-361, C7, F[ile] 6, Folder Individuals, United States, A–K, 1941–1944, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Erich Kula, 15 March 1943. 52 Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?, New York 1943. 53 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C15, File 11, Folder Columbia Course Lectures, Draft Lectures 1943–1944, and Series C, Box C15, File 12, Folder Minorities in Europe, Columbia course, 1944 (manuscript). For similar comments, see also AJA MS-361 Series C, C14, F[ile] 21, Folder Meeting minutes, speech, correspondence, London, Oct[ober] 1945, Jacob Robinson, The Jewish International Political Agenda, Lecture delivered 10 Oct[ober] 1945.

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that minority rights “was not just a fancy solution for the last World War, but […] a prominent element in the attempt to re-shape the map of Europe.”54 A successful experiment did not necessarily mean one that could be repeated. Still, Robinson held out some hope that minority rights might remain a part of the postwar Jewish political program together with territorial statehood. Nor was he alone in this conviction. In 1941, Russian-born Poale Zion (Socialist Zionist) leader Abraham Revutsky asserted in a New York lecture, “I believe therefore that something along the lines of national autonomy must be included in the future Jewish demands. This national autonomy [in Eastern Europe] is an important bridge from civil rights in the [West] European countries to the Jewish center, the Jewish home in Palestine.”55 Three years later, he repeated this claim, suggesting that the Vaad leumi (Jewish National Council) in Mandatory Palestine offered a robust model for Jewish national autonomy in future Eastern Europe and even the United States.56 In 1942, Zerach Wahrhaftig, a religious Zionist leader soon to be among the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence declared apropos a postwar program: “The question of the Jewish people must be presented under two aspects: ‘Palestine’ and ‘Jewish national and cultural rights in the Diaspora.’”57 In 1943, American Labor Zionist Oscar Janowsky announced his prescription for “Jewish Rights in the Postwar World”: “In multi-national states, principally those of Eastern Europe, the Jews would constitute a minority nationality with political as well as cultural implications. And in Palestine, the Jews should be a territorial nation.”58 “Zionism is rooted also in the Diaspora,” wrote veteran Russian Zionist Max Laserson in 1944, and giving up on minority rights to focus exclusively on “the negation of galut with maximalist demands for Palestine” would be tantamount to “cutting away from Zionism of its most vital links with World Jewry.”59 That these voices largely fell silent after 1948 does not obviate their importance in showing just how much autonomism remained within certain strains of statist Zionism well into the 1940s.

54 AJA, MS-361, Series C, C12, F[ile] 1, Folder World Jewish Congress. British Section, 1945, Letter from Jacob Robinson to A. L. Easterman, 21 January 1942. 55 Abraham Revutsky, Jews in Post-War Settlement. 56 Idem, The Jewish Conferences in Atlantic City and Pittsburgh (Yid.), in: Morgn zhurnal [Morning Journal], 3 December 1944, 4. 57 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C2, File 11, Folder Meetings of research staff and department heads, 1942–1943. 58 Oscar Janowsky, Jewish Rights in the Postwar World, in: Survey Graphic 32 (1943), no. 9, 365. 59 Max Laserson, The Legal Rehabilitation of Europe’s Jews, in: The Reconstructionist 10, no. 4, 31 March 1944, 14.

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What of Robinson himself? As his post-1945 career attests, he made a remarkably swift transition to foreign policy work on behalf of the new Jewish nation-state. At the same time, he transposed his internationalist legal sensibilities into a new slate of projects involving international criminal law, transnational governance, and the United Nations.60

“The Dissident” During the second half of the war, Robinson had taken an active part in American policy planning discussions about international criminal justice, transnational political organization, and postwar plans for rebuilding Europe. 1945 saw him engaged in a flurry of overlapping activities emerging from those conversations. That spring he directed the Jewish Agency’s diplomatic strategy at the UN’s 1945 San Francisco Conference and then pivoted to work as a consultant to Justice Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg, helping to develop legal concepts and evidentiary documentation for the prosecution. Many of these activities continued into 1946, during which time he also continued to run the World Jewish Congress’s Institute of Jewish Affairs. Similarly, in 1947 he spent two months serving as the first legal consultant to the UN Commission on Human Rights, preparing legal documents for the commission members to use in drafting their own international bill of rights. The experience left him quite cynical about the prospects for human rights, since its emerging individualist focus undermined the very idea of minority identity.61 Immediately after this assignment, he departed for Israel to help the Jewish Agency as its legal counsel. In the years to come, he continued to pass back and forth between the World Jewish Congress orbit and the emerging Israeli state apparatus. In 1948, the year of statehood, Robinson formally joined the World Jewish Congress executive, declined Israeli citizenship, and yet wrote several key Foreign Ministry memos laying out the legal arguments for the partition of Palestine.62 He went on to play influential roles in drafting the 1951 Interna-

60 Examples of this activity can be seen in his various publications, including his 1958 Hague lectures on international law, Metamorphosis of the United Nations (The Hague, 1959), and his voluminous bibliography, International Law and Organization. General Sources of Information, Leiden 1967. 61 For discussion of this, see my forthcoming study, James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans. Human Rights and Jewish Politics in the Twentieth Century, chap. 5–6. 62 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C16, File 5, Folder Correspondence, Jan[uary]–June 1947.

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tional Refugee Convention as the Israeli UN representative and a number of related international legal projects.63 There were limits, however, to his embrace of Israeli Zionism. While he served as an employee of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Robinson never made aliyah himself. Throughout his post-1948 career in government service, he remained based in New York as an American citizen working for the Israeli government, splitting his time between Tel Aviv, Geneva, and New York. He also remained tainted by his diasporic past. On the occasion of his retirement in 1957, he was subjected to a nasty attack in the pages of Maariv. An anonymous writer questioned his eligibility for a pension, calling him “The Dissident”: “[W]e find it odd that a Jew who is an American citizen, and clings tightly to this citizenship, could have served all these years as our representative at the UN, and participated in many fateful decisions […] [T]hroughout the years Dr. Robinson has never concealed his extreme pro-American position, which has culminated at times in requests to do the bidding of the United States.”

In an ironic twist of fate, the writer turned Robinson’s famed multilingualism and diplomatic experience against him: “The situation with Dr. Robinson proves that not all is kosher in our foreign service, for at times people are chosen for posts in the foreign service on the basis of their specific expertise or language abilities, and not always according to the crucial measure of their primary loyalty to Israel and investment in the fate of this young state.”64

Rising to his defense was Abba Eban, then Israeli Ambassador to the UN, who published a spirited reply, in which he chronicled Robinson’s exemplary service in pursuit of statehood during 1947 and 1948.65 His other prominent allies included Natan Feinberg, by then founding dean of the Hebrew University Law School, and Shabtai Rosenne, Legal Advisor to the Foreign Ministry.66 Thus the incident did not impair Robinson’s role as an eminence grise in the field of Israeli international law experts. Yet it did reveal the ways in which the statist view associated with David Ben-Gurion’s premier63 For more on Robinson’s work between the UN and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, see Rotem Giladi, A “Historical Commitment”? Identity and Ideology in Israel’s Attitude to the Refugee Convention 1951–4, in: International History Review 37 (2015), no. 4, 745– 767, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2014.946949, and idem, Not Our Salvation. Israel, the Genocide Convention, and the World Court 1950–1951, in: Diplomacy & Statecraft 26 (2015), no. 3, 473–493, DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2015.1067525. 64 Ha-poresh, in: Maariv, 9 September 1957, 3. I thank Rotem Giladi for bringing this source to my attention. 65 Abba Eban, Lo ta’anah bi-re’ekha … [Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness …], in: Maariv [Evening], 15 October 1957, 3. 66 See Shabati Rosenne, In Memoriam: Jacob Robinson, in: Bendikaitė/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 69–86.

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ship in the 1950s called into question older kinds of international Jewish political relationships. With a focus on citizenship as a binary choice between diaspora and homeland, and a deep anxiety about the meaning of place, the 1957 attack reflected a clear narrowing of the criteria by which to define political Zionism.67 The shift was also reflected in a number of other institutional developments that also took place in the 1950s. The World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency were severed from Diaspora control and subsumed under Israeli state auspices, eliminating a key vehicle for legal relations between world Jewry and the Jewish population in the State of Israel.68 A series of important diplomatic agreements between American Jewish leader Jacob Blaustein and Ben-Gurion across the 1950s further codified the principle in policy terms – if not in specifically legal terms – of a clean split between the Israeli state and its diasporic Jewish kin. These negotiations centered on Israel disavowing any political or legal claim to American Jewry, while the latter pledged their loyalty to the American state. The surviving interwar organization – the World Jewish Congress – did continue to function at the United Nations and around the world as an independent international non-governmental Jewish organization, often in tension with the Israeli government, yet also at times closely aligned with its interest. A fuller study of this organization, still largely neglected by historians, might yield a more definitive answer as to which, if any, “sound seeds of autonomism” remained after 1948.69

Coda: Robinson in Jerusalem The contretemps of 1957 coincided with a final phase of Robinson’s career, once again marked by a remarkable diversity of activities that seemed calculated to integrate Israel firmly into the new international orbit of the West. In 1957, he became legal advisor to the Conference on Material Claims against Germany. The same year he joined in the creation of Yad Vashem’s research arm, and oversaw a major joint research program between the Israeli Holocaust institution and its peer organizations in London, Paris, and New York. All of these projects also represented ways to tie the Israeli state to its Jewish past and Diasporic present. But it was the Eichmann trial in 1961 that 67 Giladi, A “Historical Commitment”? 68 For consideration of these issues, see Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought. The Quest for Collective Identity, New York 1994. 69 See, however, the important work of Dan Lainer-Vos, Sinews of the Nation. Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States, Cambridge 2013.

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brought Robinson his final brush with diasporist politics – and his last attempt to extract a useful political legacy from Zionist internationalism. Given his prior experience at Nuremberg, Robinson naturally assumed a prominent role in the preparations for Israel’s own case against Eichmann. Serving as Special Assistant to Attorney-General Gideon Hausner, he effectively functioned as the legal architect of the trial.70 While Ben-Gurion focused more on the trial as a platform to showcase the achievements of Israeli statehood, Robinson saw the case as a chance to bind together the causes of international law and Jewish nationhood. For beyond achieving justice, he believed the case presented a perfect example of national and international merging together in pursuit of universal justice. By trying Eichmann for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, Robinson stressed, Israel accommodated the particular and the universal in the development of international criminal law. Not every observer agreed with that interpretation. The ensuing controversies drew Robinson into a series of public disputes that revealed just how much he saw nationalism as a positive, constitutive force for international law. Among the first to challenge Robinson’s viewpoint were American Jewish historian Oscar Handlin and former US Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor. Both questioned Israel’s motives and authority to pursue the trial. “To define a crime in terms of the religion or nationality of the victim, instead of the nature of the criminal act,” Taylor wrote in a 1961 New York Times Magazine article, “is wholly out of keeping with the needs of the times and the trend of modern law.” Going further, he accused the Israeli government of “an absolute nationalism which is irreconcilable with the very idea of international law.”71 Handlin, for his part, accused Israel of hypocritical vigilantism contrary to the “international moral code.”72 In both public responses and private correspondence, Robinson defended the trial.73 He professed amazement at Taylor’s skepticism about Israel’s jurisdiction and the benefits of the trial for international law. Israel’s 1950 genocide law is “the only national law which takes into account the findings of the Nuremberg judgment, in regard to criminal organizations,” he wrote, asking rhetorically, “Is this not an important contribution to the ‘real’ growth 70 Yad Vashem Archives, RG O.65, File 46, Correspondence between Jacob Robinson and Gideon Hausner, and File 75, Memoranda written by Jacob Robinson during the Eichmann Trial. 71 Telford Taylor, Large Questions in the Eichmann Case, in: New York Times Magazine, 22 January 1961, SM 11. 72 Oscar Handlin, Ethics and Eichmann, in: Commentary Magazine, 1 August 1960, 161 f., here 162. 73 Jacob Robinson, Placing Eichmann on Trial, in: New York Times, 6 June 1960, 28; idem, Jungle Law, in: Washington Post, 20 June 1960, A14.

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of international law?”74 Similarly, to Handlin he wrote that Israel was acting no differently than the Nuremberg trials in administering justice for all via a descrete forum – universal jurisdiction exercised in a national court.75 Robinson reserved his harshest public invective, however, for another critic of the trial, Hannah Arendt. As is well known, Arendt came to Jerusalem seeking an understanding of both the Holocaust and the Jewish state that had emerged in its aftermath. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial account of the proceedings, she not only offered a theory of the “banality of evil” that questioned the moral metrics applied to Eichmann, but also accused the Israeli government of manipulating justice for its own political ends. To Robinson this interpretation exhibited a poor command of the facts of history and the nature of international legal justice. In her arrogant ignorance, she smeared Zionism and made a mockery of law itself. Enraged, he voiced his rebuttal in an impassioned 1965 book, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, in which he dissected her arguments point by point in minute, nearly overwhelming detail. Robinson skewered her “bizarre” image of Eichmann as a conviction-less criminal.76 He exposed her myriad mis-readings of the historical record regarding the complicity of both local Jewish leaders and Zionist movement in the Nazi extermination program. In each case, he ascribed her mistakes to a willful philistinism and an astonishing lack of empathy for the victims. But it was in the realm of law that Robinson delivered his most acerbic attack. In his eyes, Arendt peddled a facile narrative of Zionist political parochialism trumping the quest for universal justice. She had implied, if not outright said, that Israel should have tried Eichman as hostis generis humani – an enemy of the human race – rather than as hostis Judaeorum – an enemy of the Jews. To Robinson, this was nonsense. So too her grandiose rhetoric about “the crime of crimes,” he asserted, misunderstood both the enduring meaning of nationalism in international law and the real way in which international criminal law developed over time. What Arendt had missed, Robinson explained, was that law advanced not through some abstract realm of philosophers positing principles but through the work of national governments partnering in the international arena. In the absence of an international criminal court, it fell to a national court (like Israel) to exercise its legitimate

74 Yad Vashem Archives, RG O.65 Jacob Robinson Papers, File 75, Jacob Robinson, Memorandum Comments on Taylor, Telford. Large Questions in the Eichmann Case, in: New York Times Magazine, 2 January 1961. 75 Handlin, Ethics and Eichmann, 162. 76 Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative, New York 1965, 59.

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jurisdiction and execute international law on behalf of the world community. International law, in other words, was a function of nationhood, not a replacement for it.77 To stress his model, Robinson urged a distinction between the terms “genocide” and “ethnocide.” The crime of genocide, he explained, referred technically only to the deliberate destruction of individual members of a group. Ethnocide, by contrast, meant “the crime against the Jewish people,” an attack on an entire group as such.78 As evidenced at Nuremberg, the “Jewish case was not singled out as a specific crime but was drowned in abstractions.”79 Despite popular perception, the International Military Tribunal had never made “the Jewish question […] central to its proceedings.” By contrast, he explained, “the Jerusalem court dealt not with crimes against citizens (or residents) of any one country, but with crimes against the Jewish people, whatever their country or citizenship.”80 This was not a reversion to tribalism, but a step forward for all justice. “In the Eichmann trial the accused appeared as responsible for the Crime against the Jewish People,” he explained, “not only against human rights of individual Jews, but also against the collective right of a people to existence and continuity.”81 Paradoxically, by focusing on a group’s destruction, the Israelis had done more for international law (and universal jurisdiction) than the Nuremberg trial. They had shifted the balance of focus from the perpetrators of atrocity to the legal status of the victims. The Israeli Eichmann trial had prosecuted both specific “crimes against the Jewish people” and “crimes against the world order.”82 Hence via the Eichmann trial, international law and Jewish politics had received their joint vindication. Robinson’s idiosyncratic preference for “ethnocide” as a better candidate for defining the ultimate crime reflected the coming together of the Zionist and the internationalist sides of his political imagination in a theory of international law. Jewish politics would bring justice to the Jews and advance the rule of law for all humanity in one fell stroke. In this respect, Robinson’s Zionist legal internationalism might be seen as a form of “minimalist universalism,” in Michael Walzer’s helpful phrase. Eschewing a universalist view of law and politics as transcending human difference by effacing it, Robinson posited a pluralist model in which common ethics arose from the balanced needs of concrete smaller nations.83 77 Ebd., 83 and 100. 78 Jacob Robinson, The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust. Some Legal Reflections, in: Israeli Law Review 7 (1972), no. 1, 13. 79 Ibid. 80 Idem, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, 63. 81 Idem, The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust, 13. 82 Idem, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, 71.

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In spite of his enthusiasms, Robinson found few takers in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial for his legal coinage. “Ethnocide” failed to take root, even as genocide grew dramatically as a concept in international law and politics over the subsequent decades. Likewise, while the State of Israel drew credit – and approbation – for its role in administering justice in the Eichmann trial, it served only to reinforce an image of the sovereign state as the sole, logical preserve of Jewish nationhood for purposes of international law. As for autonomy and minority rights, those ideas remained alive only in the Zionist political imagination as a solution not to the Jewish Question, but to the Palestinian one.84 Almost wistfully, Robinson wrote in the Israeli Yearbook of Human Rights in 1971 that perhaps the time for minority rights had not yet come. “Were minority rights ‘an experiment that failed?’,” he asked rhetorically, before answering his own question: “Perhaps one may use the Talmudic expression, Lo ikhshar dara, which, freely translated, means that a precious gift was given to a generation which proved to be insufficiently mature to weave it into its social fabric.”85 Where he wished to see this idea manifest itself, he did not specify. Thanks to Robinson’s legal diplomatic efforts, Zionism succeeded in 1948 in defining a Jewish nation in public international law. Yet by inscribing that nation exclusively in a territorial state, Israel eliminated the possibility of Jewish collective national legal status outside the category of Israeli citizenship.86 The ideological erasure of Jewish nationhood beyond the state was one reason that Robinson’s own personal status could serve as such a flashpoint for political controversy. Here it should be noted that the New York Times article announcing Israel’s decision to seek Robinson’s assistance took pains to describe him as “an American” and a “United States attorney.”87 The only way to make Zionism fulfill its broadest promise of a political revolution for world Jewry would have been to preserve a political-legal 83 Michael Walzer, Nation and Universe, Oxford 1990, 533. 84 Myers, Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy, 50 f. Though see, also, Gidon Gottlieb, Israel and the Palestinians, Foreign Affairs 68 (Fall 1989), no. 4, 109–126 and World Jewish Congress, Proceedings of the Sixth Plenary Assembly, Jerusalem, February 3–10, 1975, Geneva 1981, 273 f. 85 Robinson, International Protection of Minorities. A Global View, in: Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1 (1971), 61–102, here 71. 86 Although international law had taken notice of the “specific phenomenon ‘Jew’,” wrote Bulgarian Jewish international lawyer and World Jewish Congress member J. J. LadorLederer in 1981, “it has found no way of defining it or individualizing its provisions on Jewry as a collectivity.” Idem, Jewry’s Nationals, in: Israel Law Review 16 (1981), no. 75, 75–102, here 76. 87 American Invited on Eichmann Case. Israel Asks Ex-Nuremberg Attorney to Help Prepare Trial of Nazi Leader, in: New York Times, 13 August 1960, 3.

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relationship to a diasporic Jewish minority outside the borders of the State of Israel.88 The greatest irony, of course, is that such a legal relationship between Israel and a Jewish national minority outside its borders eventually did emerge. Furthermore, that link remains as another one of Zionism’s greatest legacies, which continues to develop year by year: the global diaspora not of Jews, but of Israelis.

88 For an important attempt to play out the implications of this line of political reasoning, see Julie Cooper, “A Diasporic Critique of Diasporism: The Question of Jewish Political Agency”, in: Political Theory 43 (2015), no. 1, 80–110.

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The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern – Re-Reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article

From “Westphalia” to “Westfailure”? International relations studies make considerable use of the term “Westphalia,” a convenient abbreviation for “the Westphalian state system” which, in turn, owes its etymology to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The term serves as a kind of trope to designate the realities of the predominant modern system of political entities, its achievements as well as shortcomings, its historical and present state, and future development. A whole universe unfolds here: from the peace that brought to an end the Thirty Year’s War in Europe, to the evolution of structures fundamentally shaping the modern state system as such, on a global scale, right up to the very present. Given its presence in fields of intellectual debate and academic research such as international relations, political science, and international law, one may ask whether reflecting on the prevalence of the Westphalian state system would not seem a useful analytical perspective within the realm of Jewish Studies, especially those dealing with modern Jewish history in the sphere of statist and international politics. In turn, the relevance of particular Jewish cases in that field of analysis of international politics and international law should also be pointed out. All this the more so, as it is a Jewish author, namely Galician-born, Austrian-American Jewish international lawyer Leo Gross (1903–1990), who is widely acknowledged as having been most influential in bringing attention to that international order. Leo Gross’ article The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, published in the January 1948 issue of The American Journal of International Law,1 is deemed to have been the very origin of the parlance of “Westphalia” in academic discourse.2

1 2

Leo Gross, The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, in: The American Journal of International Law 42 (1948), no. 1, 20–41. “The origins of the concept are most commonly attributed to a seminal article published by Leo Gross,” writes Rainer Grote, Art. “Westphalian System,” in: Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, ed. under the direction of Rüdiger Wolfrum, 10 vols., Oxford 2012, here vol. 10, 870–874, here 870 (this encyclopedia is accessible online through a number of channels). JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 239–263.

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As generally agreed today, the main principle of this whole system of political order is the sovereignty of states.3 Perceived as the right of political self-determination, a state’s overall sovereignty encompasses sovereignty in its internal as well as external affairs. Internal sovereignty is understood as the monopoly on the (legitimate) use of force. Externally, sovereignty means that it is not subjected to any higher authority. On the international level, there is thus no monopoly on the use of force. Due to the absence of any authority above the state, relations between states are anarchic in nature. Nevertheless, apart from these tendencies of anarchy resulting from external sovereignty, the “Westphalian system” requires the community of states to acknowledge some other principles: As a basic norm, each state consists of a stable territory, marked by recognized boundaries (territorial principle). Another norm is the acceptance of legal equality between states (legality principle). A given state may and must claim these principles for itself in order to constitute an acknowledged subject; and for reasons of reciprocity, each member of the system concedes this to any other. Thus, as a further standard, only consent, voluntariness, is regarded as a valid ground of international legal obligation. Then, quite consistently with the basic principle of double sovereignty, there is the norm of non-intervention, the rejection of interference in the internal affairs of another state. Deviations especially from this last principle may occur, but as exceptions they nevertheless prove the rule. Following significant disturbances or alterations, like wars or the emergence of new states, the system repeatedly adjusts – or seeks to adjust – itself anew. Dominant as the label “Westphalia” is in international relations theory, it has given rise to substantial criticism. Certainly, the label as such is, to a degree, a misnomer. A number of historical studies have sought to show that the so-called Westphalian order did not suddenly arise just because of the treaties negotiated and concluded in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648. In this regard, the Peace of Westphalia is not a singular but a processual event. Within a longer span, preceding as well as following this event, the Peace of Westphalia marks a recognizable step away from the medieval idea of a Christian commonwealth governed by universal institutions – the Emperor and the Pope. Of central importance here is that secular “fundamental shift […] from a hierarchical order based on the recognition of authorities above the States to a horizontal system characterized by the coexistence of a multi-

3

There are numerous instructive overviews on the principles of the “Westphalian system” available. As a basis for the following summary, see Ulrich Menzel, Paradoxien der neuen Weltordnung. Politische Essays, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, 152–157, and 163–167; see also Grote, Art. “Westphalian System.”

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plicity of territorially defined autonomous entities.”4 The Peace of Westphalia enhanced these secular tendencies recognizable since the Early Modern Period and the Renaissance, and significantly accelerated by the Reformation.5 It is also correct to note – and of importance for periodization of modern Jewish history – that the international order identified by the label “Westphalian system” “did not receive its fullest articulation until the late 18th and 19th centuries.”6 Another sort of critique tends to reject the whole notion of such a system on the premise that it “promotes a highly static view.”7 But this would mean to mistake analytical description for ontological prescription. As a term or discourse trope, “Westphalia” should not be branded as itself normative in character. Nonetheless, in international relations studies, labels like “Westphalian paradigm,” “Westphalian regime,” “Westphalian sovereignty” abound. The term “Westphalia,” actually just the name of a geographical region in Germany, evolved into a code-word, which, by semantic chance, may also be regarded as a distinctly Western idea: Historically, it first developed in Western Europe, it affected all European continental and later the colonial empires, and was always aimed at and at hand when new sovereign political entities emerged, worldwide.8 In international relations discourse, “Westphalia” today is used by a whole range of divergent voices: those who primarily intend to describe what exists, those who wish to enforce that equilibrium or warn not to abandon it, and those who condemn that order and aspire to overcome it. One of the most radical voices of critique has been that of the British scholar Susan Strange. In her last published paper in 1999, she accused the Westphalian system of a number of failures, briefly of “failing Capitalism, the Planet and global (and national) civil society,”9 so that she consequently (and famously) rechristened it as the “Westfailure system.”

4 5

6 7 8

9

Ibid., 870. Bardo Fassbender, Art. “Westphalia, Peace of (1648),” in: Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, here vol. 10, 865–869, esp. 868; Grote, Art. “Westphalian System,” 872–874. Ibid., 873. Ibid., 874. Comp. the modern classic by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., London 2006. Among the basic characteristics Anderson ascribes to the nation is that of sovereignty: The modern nation “is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. […] [Nations] dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.” Ibid., 7. Susan Strange, The Westfailure System, in: Review of International Studies 25 (1999), no. 3, 345–354, here 345 (abstract).

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Given the prominence of parlance about Westphalia in the English-speaking world, one can usefully inquire about the details of its “foundational” article, The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, and the biography of its author Leo Gross. Taking into view the total of his scholarship, Gross has been characterized as “at once master of the theory and of the practice of international law.”10 In the sense of one possible application, a reading of the seminal article by Gross as a contribution to the theme of “Jewish questions” or Jewish core concerns in international politics is also worthwhile.

Leo Gross Whereas Leo Gross is not a widely known figure today,11 he is rightly considered to be “one of the leading American law scholars of the immediate post-war period.”12 Mainly dealing with issues of contemporary international law, he became professor at Tufts University in 1944, where he taught at the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy outside Boston, Massachusetts, until 1980. His earlier career seems typical of talented, young, intellectually minded Jews born in imperial Austrian Galicia, who experienced the collapse of the old Habsburg Monarchy in World War I and the emergence of the Polish and (short-lived) Ukrainian states in their childhood or youth – and took up university studies in Vienna. Such “collective” biography applies, for instance, to the international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, born in 1897 in Żółkiew in Eastern Galicia (nowadays Zhovkva, Ukraine), or to eminent historian Salo W. Baron, born in 1895 in Galician Tarnów. Whereas later on in his career Gross worked as an assistant of Lauterpacht in London, he apparently never met Baron or took note of his work. Yet comparing Baron’s and Gross’ approaches in sections of their respective writings might prove fruitful, and the present article will do so below. Apart from his birth in 1903 in the small town of Krosno, little is known about Gross’ early years. He and his family moved to Vienna during or at the end of World War I where they lived in the seventh Gemeindebezirk (dis-

10 Stephen M. Schwebel, Preface, in: Leo Gross, Essays on International Law and Organization, 2 vols., New York/The Hague 1984, here vol. 1, xi f., here xii. 11 Gross is not mentioned at all in the highly influential study by Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960, Cambridge 2002. 12 Grote, Art. “Westphalian System,” 870.

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trict).13 His father Jakob, a merchant, seems to have run some successful business; in the years before and up to 1938, he owned a villa in the immediate vicinity of Vienna, in Kaltenleutgeben, which he was forced to give up and sell below market value following the Pogromnacht that year. In general, his family seems to have lived a modern secular as well as consciously Jewish life, conducting, for instance, Passover Seder or celebrating Hanukkah, and wishing each other the best for the Jewish as well as gentile New Year.14 Leo Gross had begun his studies in 1923. Among his teachers at Vienna University was Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), the highly eminent legal theorist, especially known for his magnum opus Reine Rechtslehre (1934; engl. Pure Theory of Law). Originating from Prague and born Jewish, Kelsen was twice-converted (he had first converted to Roman Catholicism and then to the Protestant faith). Most crucial for Gross’ intellectual career was his decision to become a dedicated member of the “Vienna School” of the theory of law, headed by Kelsen. Gross received a first doctorate in law in 1926, and also completed his studies of Staatswissenschaften in the same year by handing in his dissertation on Pazifismus und Imperialismus which earned him a second doctorate (rer. pol.). Exactly upon delivery of his revised dissertation to Kelsen on 15 July 1927, Gross remembered much later, both witnessed the deadly clashes between Vienna police and workers enraged over the previous-day acquittal of three right-wing nationalists accused of firing at members of the Social Democratic Schutzbund: “Kelsen was visibly shaken. This was the beginning of the reactionary attack on the democratic constitution which reached its peak with the establishment of a corporate state in 1934.”15 A lifelong warm and friendly relationship developed between the mentor Kelsen and his pupil Gross, and their two families. Leo Gross married Gerda (née Fried), a niece of Kelsen, and both became close friends of Hans and Grete Kelsen. Over and beyond their professional and scholarly interests, another shared bond between the two men was that they were both forced to flee twice from the National Socialists. Decades later, in 1968, on the occasion

13 Jörg Kammerhofer, Leo Gross, in: Robert Walter/Clemens Jabloner/Klaus Zeleny (eds.), Der Kreis um Hans Kelsen. Die Anfangsjahre der Reinen Rechtslehre, Vienna 2008, 115–133; on Gross’ biography, see ibid., 115–118. 14 A large collection of Gross’ correspondence, mainly from the later 1930s onwards – including his family, colleagues and institutions – is hosted by the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945 der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt a. M., Nachlass Leo Gross (henceforth DEF, Leo Gross/file[s]). Information on his family here according to numerous letters in DEF, Leo Gross/Anna Gross; Salo Gross; Willy Gross; here particularly letters by Leo and Salo Gross, 1948–1950. 15 Leo Gross, Hans Kelsen. October 11, 1881 – April 15, 1973, in: The American Journal of International Law 67 (1973), no. 3, 491–501, here 493.

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of Leo Gross’ 65th birthday, Kelsen (then 87) contributed an essay to the Festschrift for his friend edited by Karl W. Deutsch and Stanley Hoffmann.16 Gross expressed his thanks in a letter to Kelsen who then lived in Berkeley, California: “It’s exactly 45 years since I attended my first lecture by you. I have never regretted that I dedicated all these years to the study of international law. […] I can say without any exaggeration that without your support and encouragement, I would never have found my current position or sphere of activity.”17

As a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1929 to 1931, he had continued his studies in London and then in the United States at Columbia and Harvard and received a law degree from the latter university. Back in Europe, his earlier Vienna dissertation was published in 1931 as Pazifismus und Imperialismus. Eine kritische Untersuchung ihrer theoretischen Begründungen. “Imperialism” here is understood in particular as the primacy of self-interest as asserted by the sovereign state over any legal order under international law, and Gross obviously disapproves of political theories justifying such primacy. He also criticizes “organizational pacifism” because, in his view, it strove merely to create more organization while avoiding any discussion on the justification of pacifism – due to fears of being accused of utopianism.18 By contrast, referring – throughout – to Kant, he espouses his own position as that of idealistic pacifism: “If we wish to have a methodologically pure and properly constructed theory of pacifism, we must fall back on and refer to Kant.”19 Although “eternal peace,” as Kant himself already surmised, was scarcely realistic, its pursuance was something Gross regarded as a commandment of moral-practical reason. In his conclusion he then referred to Kelsen’s pure theory, alluding to it as a proof of the rectitude of this viewpoint.20 In a contemporary review published in 1932 in Die Friedens-Warte, to which Gross himself contributed later on,21 Hans Klinghoffer underlined this as being a defect of this study. Klinghoffer (1905–1990) was also of Jewish descent, he too hailed from Galicia and had also studied politics and become a doctoral student of Kelsen in Vienna; he and Gross later on shared the experience of flight into exile, and both remained in close con16 Karl W. Deutsch/Stanley Hoffmann (eds.), The Relevance of International Law. Essays in Honor of Leo Gross, Cambridge, Mass., 1968. 17 DEF, Leo Gross/Hans Kelsen, Leo Gross to Hans Kelsen, 15 December 1968 (Germ.). 18 Leo Gross, Pazifismus und Imperialismus. Eine kritische Untersuchung ihrer theoretischen Begründungen, Leipzig/Vienna 1931, 93–97. 19 Ibid., 208 (Germ.). 20 Ibid., 430–453. 21 See his review article Die Ideen Prof. Moors über Pazifismus und Anarchismus, in: Die Friedens-Warte 33 (1933), no. 3, 87–90. On the journal, still published today, see (3 December 2016).

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tact and mutual attachment until old age.22 In his review of Gross’ first book, Klinghoffer invokes Kelsen himself, stating that the “purity” of his theory of law was incompatible with a justification of pacifism. If elsewhere Kelsen may on occasion have said something in support of pacifism, then Klinghoffer also quotes him as having termed such statements a subjective evaluation “over and beyond anything scientific.”23 Nevertheless, even two decades later, Gross in his often-quoted article States as Organs of International Law and the Problem of Autointerpretation still points to the pages of his dissertation in which he reads Kelsen’s theory of international law as a preference for “pacifism” over “imperialism.”24 From September 1932 on, Gross worked as an assistant of Kelsen in the Faculty of Law at Cologne University where he hoped to qualify as a professor. But already in April 1933, anti-Jewish Nazi legislation forced Kelsen and Gross to leave Germany. Kelsen went to Switzerland, Gross to London. Here, Gross became an assistant on the staff of a law annual edited by Hersch Lauterpacht, who had experienced Kelsen as one of his teachers during his studies of law in Vienna in the early 1920s and was now pursuing his career at the London School of Economics as an already outstanding international lawyer. Whereas Gross seems to have been impressed deeply by Lauterpacht’s 1933 influential work The Function of Law in the International Community, their personal-collegial relationship did not extend very far. When Gross in 1935 was offered a position at the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales y Económicos in Madrid, he turned the offer down.25 In the same year, he began working for the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) of the League of Nations, based in Paris, where he headed the International Relations section. This work, which he was able to continue for the next five years, without question contributed to his understanding of problems of international organization. 22 In 1938, Klinghoffer fled from Vienna to Paris, and from there on to Brazil in 1940. In 1953, he immigrated to Israel, taught as a professor in the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later also became a member of the Knesset. For a number of letters exchanged by Gross and Klinghoffer see DEF, Leo Gross/Hebrew University. On Klinghoffer’s biography see also Johannes Feichtinger, Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen. Österreichische Hochschullehrer in der Emigration 1933–1945, Frankfurt a. M./ New York 2001, 295–297. 23 Hans Klinghoffer, Neue Handbücher der Friedensbewegung. Pazifismus und Imperialismus, in: Die Friedens-Warte 32 (1932), no. 5, 139–142, here 141, quote of Kelsen ibid. (Germ.). 24 Leo Gross, States as Organs of International Law and the Problem of Autointerpretation (1953), in: idem, Essays on International Law and Organization, vol. 1, 367–397, here 367. 25 Hans J. Morgenthau, at that time lecturer in Geneva, to whom the position in Madrid was offered next in early 1935, was happy to accept. See Oliver Jütersonke, Morgenthau, Law and Realism, New York 2010, 23.

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Still in August 1939, Leo Gross traveled to Britain to visit his brother Willy, who, academically known as Fabius Gross, had become a renowned Zoologist; having been forced to leave the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Biology in Berlin in 1933, he was now employed at Edinburgh University. Leo had left Paris still in peace for this journey, but returned in wartime. During the war years, his parents found accommodation in Budapest up to 1941 and later on in Switzerland. His brother Salo, who, before the war, had lived in Cernăuţi (Czernowitz), seems to have been spared the worst, and settled with his wife and daughter in Polish Bytom afterwards.26 From June 1940 on, the situation of Leo and Gerda Gross, who had married in 1938, became a struggle for survival. As the Wehrmacht advanced, they fled Paris, heading first for Vichy in the unoccupied zone in France’s south. Due to the far-reaching German demands regarding foreigners and Jews, which the Vichy regime in many aspects was only too willing to fulfill, Gross feared that “at almost any time the Gestapo might put their finger on him.”27 Their potential life-saver came in the form of an invitation for Gross to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. The personal management of their case was placed in the adept hands of Alvin Johnson (1874–1971), director of the New School, acting on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had set up a limited program for rescuing a number of those endangered scholars from Europe who promised to become a welcome addition to the field of American political science. But for a number of months, they were not spared the dismaying situation so many refugees experienced, lacking necessary papers that were only granted dependent on yet other papers. In September, Johnson wrote to Gross, still in Vichy, about the difficulties involved, explaining “that it would not be proper for me to take up the question of a visa with the State Department at this time. […] The decision is first of all in the hands of the Consul, and presumably he will grant the visa.”28 But the consulate refused to do so as long as the State Department, which recently had further restricted immigration, did not instruct them accordingly.29 Some weeks later, Johnson sent the message that he now had appealed to the State Department to arrange for a non-quota visa.30 But it still took several more months of uncertainty until Leo and

26 DEF, Leo Gross/Anna Gross; Salo Gross; Willy/Fabius Gross. 27 Cit. in Feichtinger, Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen, 314. 28 DEF, Leo Gross/New School of Social Research, Alvin Johnson to Leo Gross, 4 September 1940. 29 For further details on these restrictions and the Grosses’ odyssey, see Feichtinger, Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen, esp. 312–314. 30 DEF, Leo Gross/New School of Social Research, Alvin Johnson to Leo Gross, 24 October 1940.

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Gerda Gross were finally able to leave Europe via Lisbon, reaching the United States in March 1941. Having become the parents of twins right after their arrival in New York, the new life in America for the Grosses proved complicated. The New School tried to help, but was unable to offer much of a salary for his appointment as visiting professor. They could also only offer this post for a maximum of two years. Moreover, the Grosses’ first permit to stay in the country was valid only until August 1941. In view of the procedure of entry at Ellis Island, in possession only of French TIV identity papers (titres d’identité et de voyage), Leo Gross applied for a regular passport – at this point understandably not for an Austrian, but a Polish one – which he was granted by the Polish Consul General in New York City, but was valid only until March 1942.31 In the summer of 1941, Gross moved on from New York to Medford, Massachusetts, to work for the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. There, under an arrangement between the New School and the Rockefeller Foundation, he began to teach. His academic status initially as lecturer and his broader future prospects there seemed to him at best unpromising.32 A source of support for the Grosses at this time was their contact with the Kelsens, who had emigrated to the United States in 1940. Since Kelsen had a – unappreciative33 – post at Harvard University in Cambridge and Gross at Tufts in Medford but a short distance away, they were virtually neighbors, until Kelsen relocated in 1942 across the country to the University of California, Berkeley. In view of his family’s situation Leo Gross cordially accorded the Kelsens the role of “auntie” and “uncle,” and he also asked Hans Kelsen for letters of recommendation.34 In December 1942, Leo and Gerda Gross were granted permanent residence in the United States, and a month later he was informed that the Rockefeller Foundation had extended the stipend for him for another two years. Nevertheless, until his regular appointment as Professor of International Law and Organization at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, on a parttime basis for the academic year 1944/45 and as a full appointment thereafter, Gross continued his active search for other employment opportunities, not least in an international organization. He wrote that he would perhaps go to Paris or Geneva, “once there are international institutions once more.”35 He had great interest in the future United Nations, applied to UNRRA and

31 Ibid., Draft of a letter, 18 July 1941. 32 He sent letters of interest to numerous institutions. See e. g. his correspondence in DEF, Leo Gross/Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 33 Gross, Hans Kelsen, 494 f. 34 There are numerous letters of these years in DEF, Leo Gross/Hans Kelsen. 35 Ibid., Leo Gross to Hans Kelsen, 22 June 1943 (Germ.).

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became in 1944/45 a consultant to its General Counsel. Still in 1945/46, Gross sought to become consultant for the future UNESCO, whose predecessor institution was considered to be the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations based in Paris, for which Gross had worked earlier. Yet that led in the event to nothing.36 Particularly during his first year after arriving in America, Gross was also actively engaged in assisting with the rescue of others.37 By 1945, for Leo Gross himself the situation had much improved, which prompted him to write to Johnson in gratitude: “By appointing me as visiting professor in the New School, you have enabled me to leave France. You have thus saved my life. By giving your assistance and counsel during the past few years, you have enabled me to find roots in the academic community of the United States. You have thus enabled me to start life afresh.”38

In 1949, Gross became citizen of the United States. When his mother Anna managed to visit him a year later, she saw him for the first time in eleven years. Still, he was directly concerned with Jewish fate in world politics, especially through his family: In summer 1950, he greeted the news that his brother Salo and his wife had just left their home in Bytom and had followed their daughter to Israel, less for Zionist enthusiasm as out of pessimism towards their perspectives in Eastern Europe under communist rule. Leo wrote to Salo that he felt “pity for those who wished themselves back to Poland. They will encounter surprises if they return there.” He drew his information on Israel from reading the Times, he explained, concluding: “It is not easy for this small country, but it will and must get better.”39 As regards his own religious-cultural integration in their new surroundings in Massachusetts, he at that time quipped a bit about the local reformed community.40

36 DEF, Leo Gross/Ministry of Education (Whitehall, London), Leo Gross to Sir Alfred Zimmern, 18 September 1946: “I should be extremely interested in being considered for a suitable position in the Secretariat of UNESCO.” 37 When recommending another scholar for support to the New School, Johnson described to him the harsh prevailing realities. Because of numerous limitations, he explained, “we were able to select fewer than one in ten of the names submitted.” DEF, Leo Gross/New School of Social Research, Alvin Johnson to Leo Gross, 14 July 1941. 38 Ibid., Leo Gross to Alvin Johnson, 9 March 1945. 39 DEF, Leo Gross/Salo Gross, Leo to Salo Gross, 28 September 1950 (Germ.). 40 In a letter of December 1950 to Salo Gross he wrote that his children were having a Hanukkah party at the local (Beth El) Temple, “which is reformed but nevertheless pleases them” and they were also attending the “so-called Sunday School where they learn a bit [ein bisserl] history and Hebrew.” Ibid., Leo to Salo Gross, 6 December 1950 (Germ.). It is not clear if Leo Gross was deeply critical of Reform Judaism or actually accepted it. However, in the 1960s he reserved seats for High Holidays in the local Beth El Temple, see DEF, Leo Gross/Beth El Temple Center.

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Academically, Leo Gross’ concern around 1945 was particularly with the lack of will among the Great Powers to effectively acknowledge a collective coercive authority for the United Nations and thus to fall prey to the weakness that had plagued the League of Nations. At the same time, in 1947/48, at the invitation of the Department for the Codification of International Law of the Secretariat of the United Nations, he prepared two studies, one of which was on the development of international law and its codification by international conferences.

The “Westphalia” Article For his 1948 article, primarily intending to analyze the constitution, and especially the shortcomings of the international system of his time, Gross nevertheless chose to prolong his perspective backwards by 300 years, and thereby substantiate his argument historically. Not so much dealing with the Peace of Westphalia as such, his article puts forward its lasting presence as an established fact: as “the framework of the state system and of international law resulting from the Peace of Westphalia” and the “continued influence of the Peace of Westphalia.”41 Quoting earlier European authorities who had claimed substantially the same,42 he sharpens and condenses those findings. Elsewhere he also qualifies the picture, maintaining that it “would seem hazardous” to regard the Settlement of Westphalia as more than a stage “in the gradual, though by no means uniform, process which antedates and continues beyond the year 1648.” (27) First of all, the tercentenary of the Peace of Westphalia for Gross serves as an iconic starting point: “The acceptance of the United Nations Charter by the overwhelming majority of the members of the family of nations,” he commences, “brings to mind the first great European or world charter, the Peace of Westphalia.” But already in the next sentence, he subverts his quite ceremonious opening. To that event, Gross writes, “is traditionally attributed the importance and dignity of being the first of several attempts to establish something resembling world unity on the basis of states exercising untrammeled sovereignty over certain territories and subordinated to no earthly authority.” (20) With this point of departure, the article stresses the quite ambivalent nature of that “world unity,” indicated, in particular, by the attri41 Gross, The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, 21 (henceforth all numbers given in brackets in the main text refer to the page numbers of this article). 42 See ibid., e. g. 28, where he writes, referring to Robert Redslob’s Histoire des grands principes du droit des gens (1923): “The Peace of Westphalia, for better or worse, […] represents the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world.”

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bution of sovereignty as “untrammeled,” a word Gross uses again in the text, and as “subordinated to no earthly authority,” a theme the article returns to several times. In its first section, the article provides a short history of major international gatherings following the Peace of Westphalia. Here, Gross names the Congresses of Vienna 1814–1815 and Aix-la-Chapelle 1818 as giving birth to the establishment of the “Concert of Europe.” He then proceeds with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the establishment of the League of Nations up to the United Nations Charter. Presented as a history of failures in terms of any “definite commitments” (20), all modern history of the state system appears rather to be a history of stagnation: “Thus the Peace of Westphalia may be said to continue its sway over political man’s mind as the ratio scripta that it was held to be of yore.”43 (21) In a second step, Gross describes the Westphalian settlement, its backgrounds and influence on key issues of modern international politics in a more detailed, apparently neutral and open manner. Here, he discusses religious toleration or religious equality, peaceful settlement, balance of power, and the development of general political ideas. Yet, midway through his article, he poses the question as to whether the development of such a new political system, based on law and power “operating between rather than above states,” marks a liberating progression or just a gateway to “the disorganization of the public law of Europe.” (29) To answer that question, he presents inter alia a survey of international law preceding and following 1648. He reviews the thoughts and positions of major figures from the Spanish School of Salamanca theologians Francisco de Vitoria and his successor Francisco Suárez, and Italian-born Oxford professor Alberico Gentili, moving on to Hugo Grotius as a contemporary of the Thirty Years’ War, and then on to the eighteenth century, to the outstanding Swiss international lawyer Emer de Vattel. Gross presents this history of international law as an increasing separation “from its roots in right reason and natural law” (40) towards what he calls “the era of uninhibited positivism.” (36) According to this description, major scholars of international law from the eighteenth century onward limited their role to nothing more than an approval of the facts already created in inter-state relations.44 As an answer to the question posed before pertaining to the results of the Peace of Westphalia, he thus concludes:

43 All emphasis in quotes according to original. 44 Vattel, Gross maintains, already “helped to establish […] the consensual character of international law and to reduce natural law from the function of supplying an objective basis for the validity, the binding force, of the law of nations to the function of supplying rules for filling gaps in positive international law.” Gross, The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, 36 f.

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“Instead of heralding the era of a genuine international community of nations subordinated to the rule of the law of nations, it led to the era of absolutist states, jealous of their territorial sovereignty to a point where the idea of an international community became an almost empty phrase […].” (38)

All this merges into Gross’ overall analysis of a “rugged individualism of states” which “ill accommodates to an international rule of law reinforced by necessary institutions.” To overcome these deficiencies, he cites different approaches, for instance by Kelsen, or a contemporary revival of natural law, and points in particular to the work of Lauterpacht. Common to all such schools which clearly would meet his quest for a secular “earthly authority” above the states, he identifies “that they strive to vindicate for international law a binding force, independent of the will of the states,” an international law that “is, and, if it is to be law, must be, a law of subordination, that is, a law above states.” (40) Critical of the formation of a super-state as a consequence of full-fledged international legislature, with recourse to Lauterpacht’s The Function of Law in the International Community (1933), Gross calls not only for an international court of justice, but one endowed with the authority of compulsory jurisdiction over disputes between states. Writing less than three years after the end of World War II, in conclusion Gross expresses his hope for a broader reexamination of the modern state system, which would reveal “means of harmonizing the will of major states to selfcontrol with the exigencies of an international society which by and large yearns for order under law.” (41) Mentioning neither the Holocaust nor World War II, it was evidently his self-understanding to present his concern as universalistic in approach and intention.

“Westphalia” as a Jewish Issue Intellectual and Institutional History Discussing “Westphalia” as a Jewish issue, one could do so in terms of the intellectual history of Jewish scholars and their work, or in terms of the political history of the Jews, particularly as regards practical, organized (“institutional”) efforts on political concerns of the Jews – from shtadlanut to Jewish diplomacy.45 The latter will be pursued for most of the remainder of this article. Nevertheless, it may be appropriate to point at least briefly to a few links between Gross and the approaches of other Jewish intellectuals.

45 See the article by Israel Bartal in this section of the Yearbook.

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As has become clear, the writings of Kelsen as well as Lauterpacht were of significant influence on Gross. The work of Gross himself seems to have exercised at least some modicum of influence on Hans Morgenthau (1904– 1980), and in the following generation on Richard A. Falk (b. 1930), although with quite differing emphases. Thus, it has been observed that for “many international relations scholars, particularly those of the realist school” – and Morgenthau certainly one of them – Gross’ “Westphalia” article may well have “provided the starting point for their State-centered analysis of the international system.”46 According to Hans Morgenthau, the 1648 Peace treaty “made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern state system.”47 Whereas the realist approach is used to describe and understand “Westphalian” international politics, it is not generally known for any proclivity to voice critical lament regarding the system as such. The latter appears to have marked the viewpoint developed by Richard A. Falk, one of Gross’ devoted students. Espousing in 1998 what he terms a “post-Westphalian perspective,” Falk notes the origin of this counter-image: “It was […] by way of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 […] that the modern system of states was formally established as the dominant world order framework.”48 In his view, the foes of an “emerging Global Village” included the United States and especially Israeli foreign policy. In 1968, both Falk and Morgenthau, along with Kelsen, were among the contributors to the Festschrift to honor Gross. Apart from his work at Tufts University and as a visiting professor at numerous other universities, Gross was also lecturing for the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department in the later 1950s and 1960s.49 His prime concern remained problems of international law and organization, and in this academic field he cultivated contacts with a number of colleagues, non-Jewish or Jewish, among the latter Elihu Lauterpacht (b. 1928), the son of Hersch Lauterpacht, who himself became an outstanding international lawyer.50 Quite interesting here is Gross’ relation to Jacob Robinson (1889– 46 Grote, Art. “Westphalian System,” 870. 47 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York 41967, 264, cit. in: Fassbender, Art. “Westphalia, Peace of (1648),” 868. 48 Richard A. Falk, Law in an Emerging Global Village. A Post-Westphalian Perspective, Ardsley, N. Y., 1998, 4. 49 For further details see the short biography, in: Deutsch/Hoffmann (eds.), The Relevance of International Law, 270 f. 50 In August 1941, after having made his way to the US, Gross hoped to see Hersch Lauterpacht, who stayed in the country in these months, but most likely they did not meet. Having received an offprint of Gross’ 1947 article on the “Lodge Reservations” (see below), Lauterpacht now addressed his thanks to “Professor Gross” and added just a few critical remarks. In 1954, Gross congratulated Lauterpacht on his appointment as a member of the International Court of Justice. Letters in DEF, Leo Gross/Hersch Lauterpacht; Trinity

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1977), who, after his flight to the United States in 1940, had become one of the most important researchers and spokesmen of Jewish demands in reaction to the Holocaust. Born in Russia, he had studied law in Warsaw, and, based in Lithuania, had become a leading judicial expert of minority rights and promoter of Jewish minority protection in the interwar era. As founder and leading member of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, Robinson devoted himself to defending the rights of Jews, prosecution of Nazi criminals, restitution and the support of the state of Israel.51 First in his function as counsel of the New York-based Delegation of Israel to the United Nations, Robinson also approached Gross. From 1950 up to the end of the 1960s, they mutually exchanged a number of publications they wrote on problems of international law and politics, and occasionally seem to have discussed these themes.52 Yet, their relation seems to have remained quite formal. In general, Gross kept himself somewhat detached from Jewish activists or institutions dealing with specifically Jewish concerns in international politics.53 At the same time, however, Gross’ acquaintance with Israeli diplomat and international lawyer Shabtai Rosenne (1917–2010) developed into a cordial relationship: Gross first met Rosenne in 1957 in his function as representative of the Delegation of Israel to the United Nations; in the mid-1960s, when Rosenne also had become Israeli ambassador, he addressed Gross as “dear Leo” and they exchanged on matters of international law and the state of Israel.54 In those years, Gross wrote three articles concerned with the accessibility of international waterways in the context of the Arab-Israel dispute: dealing with the passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal (1957), the passage through the Gulf of Aqaba (1959) and through the

51 52

53

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College (Cambridge). Gross’ correspondence with Elihu Lauterpacht developed into a quite cordial mutual appreciation: For instance, in 1969, Elihu Lauterpacht thanked “Dear Leo” especially for receiving copies of his lectures held at The Hague Academy. DEF, Leo Gross/Trinity College (Cambridge). On Robinson, see the article by James Loeffler in this section of the Yearbook. Letters in DEF, Leo Gross/Delegation of Israel to the United Nations; YIVO, New York. In a letter of 14 July 1958, for instance, Robinson wished to ask Gross whether he could find the time to read the typescript of his forthcoming course in The Hague Academy, on the metamorphosis of the United Nations: “Your legal (not legalistic) approach is congenial with my bias (if bias it is) and your comments would be of great value to me.” DEF, Leo Gross/Delegation of Israel to the United Nations. This also applies to his relation to international lawyer and Zionist Nathan Feinberg (1895–1988), who had immigrated to Palestine in 1924 and founded the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gross and Feinberg certainly knew of each other, but seem to just have politely acknowledged each other’s work and this only in their later career. DEF, Leo Gross/Hebrew University, exchange of two letters by Leo Gross and Nathan Feinberg, 1969. DEF, Leo Gross/Delegation of Israel to the United Nations, Shabtai Rosenne to Leo Gross, 11 December 1957, 13 April 1965, and 2 June 1967.

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Straits of Tiran (1969). Later on, he also dealt with the UN and the PLO (1976).55 However, Leo Gross apparently never intended to explicitly address Jewish issues in his work. His “Westphalia” article cannot but confirm this impression. To juxtapose it with the modern history of the “international situation” of the Jews, of course, means crossing boundaries between different disciplines: on one hand, history as a component of Jewish Studies, and on the other, international law, or, more precisely, questions of international relations and organization as dealt with by a political scientist and international lawyer. In the following, this is explored through the prism of Gross’ groundbreaking article itself. Three aspects in particular will be examined: emperor and empire, diplomacy of rights, and the question of enforcing human rights and international law.

Emperor and Empire In his article, Gross’ historical points of departure are the figures of Pope and Emperor, especially the latter. To the pre-Westphalian order he refers in terms of the Holy Roman Empire. This brings to mind imperial settings as major environment of pre-modern and modern Jewish experience. A general history of Jewries in this regard would investigate the larger context of great empires in which the majority of Jews, up to the twentieth century, lived. At the time of the Peace of Westphalia and even one or two centuries later, these were the Holy Roman Empire, but also the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire; and following the partitions of PolandLithuania, mainly the Russian and the Habsburg Empires became its modern successors. Such a reflection on the meaning of imperial conditions for the supranational existence of the Jews had been put forward prominently by Salo Baron, who originated like Gross from Galicia and had become a preeminent historian in the United States. As a result of his research on the Jewish condition through the ages, and arguably his own imperial roots, Baron wrote that the pattern of empire suited the Jews much more than the nationstate, stating: “[I]t has been an old historic experience that the Jews suffered more heavily in purely national states than in countries of multiple nationality.”56 Strikingly, in that same article, presenting an address he had delivered in May 1940, Baron was so convinced that the imperial mode was more suit55 See the reprints in Gross, Essays on International Law and Organization (2 vols). 56 Salo W. Baron, Reflections on the Future of the Jews of Europe, in: Contemporary Jewish Record 3 (1940), no. 4, 355–369, here 357 f.

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able for the Jews that he even looked somewhat favorably, albeit with caution and a disturbing portion of political naiveté, at the then looming prospect of an imperial Nazi-German domination of Europe: “Germany’s national spirit draws the country irresistibly into military adventures. Should it win and conquer large territories […], it would lose its national homogeneity and become a state of multiple nationality, which, incidentally, might cool its anti-Semitic zest.”57 Apart from such a temporary conjecture at that dark conjuncture, Baron formulated the more timeless truth, namely “that the Jewish question has always in a sense been an international question. Even from the inception of the Diaspora, down to the last century or two, the external fate of the Jewish communities has been essentially determined by huge multi-national empires, such as Persia or Rome, or by large civilizations, such as medieval Christendom or Islam.”

As against this traditional setting, problems arose especially by the advance of the emancipation era: “The very Emancipation, the attempted modern solution of the Jewish problem, was predicated upon the ultimate universal acceptance of the basic teachings of the American and French Revolutions. In its execution, however, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the great mistake was made that every nation, large and small, attempted a solution of its own. Much of the insufficiency, indeed failure, of the modern approaches to the Jewish question may be explained through this antinomy between its intrinsic internationality and the almost exclusively national methods applied in coping with it.”58

This insight appears as the apt corollary or result of applying the Westphalian paradigm, and its deficiencies, to modern Jewish history. Here, the contemporary writings of Baron and Gross would appear to complement each other. Whereas Baron is concerned with the outcome on the Jewish side, Gross struggles to determine the nature of the top of the system, leading him to the fundamental question of overall authority: “It would seem that the national will to self-control which after a prolonged struggle first threw off the external shackles of Pope and Emperor is the same which mutatis mutandis persists today in declining any far-reaching subordination to external international controls.” (40 f.)

57 Ibid., 357 f. Here Baron quotes his own writing, published three years earlier: idem, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols., New York 1937, here vol. 2, 428. In his 1940 article he even went directly on to assert: “One might visualize, in particular, that even if the German rulers should persist in making the proper German ethnographic areas judenrein, they would be much more tolerant of Jews in the areas of the subject or ‘protected’ peoples.” Ibid., 358. 58 Ibid., 369.

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At the time that “the old order based on the personal supremacy of the Empire” had been abandoned, it should have been, he proposes, substituted by “a new order based on the impersonal supremacy of international law […].” (39)

Diplomacy of Rights The one key aspect of the Peace of Westphalia, which Gross positively refers to, is the principle of religious equality, “which was placed as part of the peace under an international guarantee.” It “thereby established a precedent of far-reaching importance.” As an example, Gross describes the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna in a quite positive manner. This, by the way, is the one and only instance where Gross’ article refers to Jewish matters at all, albeit just in passing. Obviously, he knew about some conjunctions of the general history he depicts to Jewish history, but did not wish to pursue this aspect. In an effort to present the Congress of Vienna as a continuation of the Peace of Westphalia as regards the principle of religious equality, he writes: “The Constitution of the Germanic Confederation […], which forms part of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna […], stipulates in article XVI that the difference between the Christian religions should cause no difference in the enjoyment by their adherents of civil and political rights, and, furthermore, that the German Diet should consider the grant of civil rights to Jews […].” (22)

But if Gross intended to portray this stipulation as a promising example, his judgment was mistaken. At the Congress of Vienna, the “Jewish question” indeed was discussed for the first time behind the scenes and on the stage of such a gathering. This question of Jewish rights or emancipation came to the fore or was touched upon within the broader international politics of establishing and acknowledging new or enlarged territorial entities. In the case of the Confederation of German States (Deutscher Bund), there were numerous formal and informal conversations and deliberations on the status of the Jews, involving Jewish representatives, representatives of the German states, and the major powers. The main point here was that it had been under Napoleonic rule that Jewries in some German territories and major cities had, in effect, come to enjoy legal civil equality. In the end, these deliberations led to Article 16 in the Constitution of the Deutscher Bund, as referred to by Gross. But whereas that article may read as a friendly declaration, it not only postponed matters; the envisaged consultations by the German Bundestag never took place. And most ominously, the members of the Confederation had managed not necessarily to accept the status Jews had enjoyed in a given state or city, i. e. under Napoleonic rule. Rather, they had reserved the right to return to the status which had been allotted to Jews

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earlier, namely by the German authorities themselves. For a number of German Jewries, this meant the annulment of rights, extending up to banishment from cities where they had been allowed to settle for the first time. Although the representatives of the major powers expressly sought to secure for Jews the status they had come to enjoy at the time, the German states claimed and ultimately maintained that it was they who should deal with the status of the Jews as an internal matter of their own sovereignty. Thus, emancipation among the German states remained inconsistent and marked by setbacks for decades. Gross might indeed have found the actual true story behind this in Baron’s first major study, Die Judenfrage auf dem Wiener Kongress (Vienna/Berlin 1920), a work Gross apparently was unfamiliar with. However, neither Gross nor Baron made mention of another “Jewish” aspect of the Congress of Vienna that achieved a more promising result. This was disclosed in Max Kohler’s (1871–1934) study Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815), and Aix-La-Chapelle (1818): In regard to the Kingdom of the United Netherlands (the union of the former Dutch Republic and the former Austrian Netherlands, mainly Belgium), it was the aim of the Great Powers to merge Holland with Belgium under a king from the House of Orange. A constitution for the new Kingdom had been completed already in March 1814. In July of the same year, the four powers concluded a secret treaty with King William I, and, in 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, that treaty was ratified. Inter alia, it provided that the articles of the new constitution that guaranteed all inhabitants of any creed liberty, protection and equality, must remain unalterable in both parts of the union. The intention seems principally to have been that Protestant Holland should not be put in a position able to discriminate against Catholic Belgium. But while Holland ratified the grondwet (constitution), the Belgian Assembly of Notables rejected it, the ultra-Catholic party apparently not welcoming the loss of previous Catholic privileges. Nonetheless, King William I proclaimed the constitution in force for the whole of his Kingdom – precisely because the Treaty of Vienna, i. e. the will of the Great Powers, bound him to do so. En passant, that also meant the emancipation of the Jews in Belgium. Thus, it can be rightly maintained that the Congress in 1815 did indeed set “a landmark in the history of religious liberty in general.”59 A century later, this incident was cited by Georges Clemenceau, President of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, in his letter to Polish prime minister Ignacy Paderewski, urging Poland to accept the minorities treaty. As a fore59 Max Kohler, Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815), and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), in: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 26 (1918), 33–125; on religious equality in the United Netherlands, see ibid., 70–74, here 70.

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runner of the obligation of minority protection, Clemenceau mentioned, among other things, the example of the Netherlands at the time of the Vienna Conference. He noted that the “Kingdom of the United Netherlands in 1814 formally undertook precise obligations with regard to the Belgian provinces […] which formed an important restriction on the unlimited exercise of its sovereignty.”60 But why was it that, at the same time, members of the German Confederation were able to evade the will of the Great Powers of the day to include in its founding document a similar formulation on all religious faiths, Jews not excluded? The simple answer: because they indeed could. Thus, at the Congress of Vienna, the Great Powers managed to secure the equality of all faiths, including the Jews, in one body politic, yet failed to uphold equality of the Jews in another. Actually, the German Confederation at the Congress of Vienna had already set an example of a pattern which was demonstrated by other states later in evading stipulations imposed on them by the major powers concerning religious freedoms, citizenship or, after 1919, the preserving of cultural or religious autonomy of ethnic minorities in the form of minority treaties. In nineteenth century Jewish history, the cause célèbre in this regard was the Congress of Berlin of 1878 in its stipulations regarding Romania.61 However, the relevant article in the Treaty of Berlin speaks only of differences of religion that must not lead to exclusion of enjoying civil and political rights. This allowed successive Romanian governments to escape from the spirit of the Treaty under the pretext that the Jews in their county would constitute a separate nation, resulting in statelessness. But could this not have been avoided from the outset by clearer wording? During the final stages of the congress, the rapporteur of the editing commission explained that it had been especially difficult to find a fitting formulation for the Jews of Romania, “since their national status was undetermined.” To avoid any ambiguities, the Count de Launay, Italian ambassador to Berlin, had proposed to introduce the following sentence into the Treaty: “The Jews in Romania obtain Romanian citizenship including full rights”; and this would not apply solely to the smaller number of those Jews in Romania who indeed were nationals of other states.62 This would have sent an unmistakably clear message that the basic intention was the naturalization of the great majority of Jews living on Romanian soil. Bismarck rejected the rewording of the 60 Georges Clemenceau, Letter Addressed to M. Paderewski by the President of the Conference Transmitting to Him the Treaty to be Signed by Poland under Article 93 of the Treaty of Peace with Germany, as published in: The American Journal of International Law 13 (1919), no. 4, Supplement: Official Documents, 416–422, here 420. 61 See the article by Carsten Wilke in this section of the Yearbook. 62 Imanuel Geiss (ed.), Der Berliner Kongress 1878. Protokolle und Materialien, Boppard am Rhein 1978, 347.

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clause, arguing that the Congress had to refuse all attempts to start over anew. Gross, however, cites the more ceremonious statement that the French plenipotentiary William H. Waddington had advanced at the Congress of Berlin when it came to the conditions of formal acknowledgment of the new states in Southeastern Europe. In Waddington’s view, it was “important to take advantage of this solemn opportunity to cause the principles of religious liberty to be affirmed by the representatives of Europe.” Gross also cites the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin as a precedent concerning the minority treaties of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Here he quotes from the letter of Clemenceau to Paderewski, referred to above, but just the sentence alluding to a general spirit of the law: “It has for long been the established procedure of the public law of Europe that when a state is created, […] the joint and formal recognition by the Great Powers should be accompanied by the requirement that such state should, in the form of a binding international convention, undertake to comply with certain principles of government.”63

Gross extends this “long line of evolution” up to its “latest step” at that time in 1947/48, namely the United Nations Charter. (23) And in view of the expected, forthcoming declaration on human rights, he wrote: “If the efforts of the United Nations are crowned with success by the adoption of an international bill of the fundamental rights of man, they will have accomplished the task which originated in the religious schism of Europe and which had found its first, albeit an inadequate, solution on an international basis in the Peace of Westphalia.” (24)

It cannot be established whether all the shortcomings of the Congresses of Vienna, Berlin and Paris as regards rights and their enforcement, and especially the concerns of the Jews, had escaped Gross’ notice. Most likely this was not the case, at least in connection with the minority provisions of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, of which he was a contemporary. If he knew about these deficiencies and did not mention them, he may have done so because he simply did not want to appear as if he were advocating on behalf of some specifically Jewish matter here. He apparently sought to at least present the rights issue, extending from religious toleration and equality to universal human rights, as a positive ideal. Possibly underlying this was some element of irony in Gross’ attitude in respect to the genuine prospects of the United Nations “international bill of the fundamental rights of man.”64

63 Clemenceau, Letter Addressed to M. Paderewski, 417; here cit. from Gross, The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, 23. 64 Comp. the discussion of the article of Gross’ 1947 article on the charter of the United Nations and the Lodge Reservations, below.

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In order to link to Jewish history this “Westphalian” chapter of the rights of groups (and individuals), it can be stated that the rights issue had of course been at the heart of all Jewish diplomacy. In the history of universal emancipatory Jewish diplomacy since the nineteenth century, precisely the issue of rights had been the primary envisioned focus of hope. Its adherents in 1919 still quoted the stipulations of the Treaty of Berlin as a “great charter of Emancipation, especially of civil and religious equality.”65 The obvious failure of this charter can certainly be thought to have contributed in the meantime to the disillusionment of the emancipatory model, enhancing the Zionist approach as an alternative. Demanding a different “charta,” Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat (1896) spelled out precisely this vision of a Jewish state. At the same time, however, he was cautious to apply the “Westphalian” paradigm in full: Herzl stressed that “a State is formed, not by pieces of land, but rather by a number of men united under sovereign rule. The people is the subjective, land the objective foundation of a State, and the subjective basis is the more important of the two.”66 But, to be sure: To the extent the modern body politic of the Jews evolved into the pattern of a state, it also inevitably became a subject within that order, quite normally, with all its typical features. The 1948 statehood of Israel meant, first of all, to be part of the Westphalian system. As for the diplomacy of rights, the Concert of Europe never provided that authority of (effectively) securing civil and political rights, as at least the more enlightened members of the Concert wished to present. Seen from this perspective, the history of Jewish diplomacy in the nineteenth century definitely serves to broaden “Westphalia.” Gross is close to this insofar as he is prepared to consider the congress and concert system as “the beginning of a conscious effort to establish a community of states based on the will of all states or at least on the will of the Great Powers.” (39) But already at the outset of his article, he blames the Great Powers themselves for the downfall of the system: “Consultation and conference on problems of mutual interest was a frequent practice but no obligation of the Great Powers. It was precisely this flexibility, frequently regarded and praised as the chief virtue of the concert system, which ultimately brought about its ruin […].” (20)

That definitely happened in World War I, which, of course, also constituted a caesura in the political history of the Jews. We can further examine earlier

65 Lucien Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question. With Texts of Protocols, Treaty Stipulations and Other Public Acts and Official Documents, London 1919, 24. 66 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, Mineola, N. Y., 1988 (first publ. 1896), 137.

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phases and fractions of the Concert, exploring their impact on Jewish life: The age of more general liberty, as it spread in the wake of the Crimean War, was the most promising for a diplomacy of rights, whereas the narrowing of mutual exclusive alliances from the 1880s onwards hampered (if not prevented) such diasporic diplomacy.67 Then, the very outer tensions of the states involved in Great Power rivalry (“imperialism” to use the word of the time) may also have enticed these powers to inner-state anti-Jewish policies, the Dreyfus affair a prominent example here.

Enforcing Human Rights and International Law Gross’ depiction of the “Westphalian” history of rights, at first glance positive, is actually marked by a substantial portion of precariousness. In regard to human rights, he alludes to them in passing, but does not deal with them as an internal state problem. He thus does not reach such an intriguing level of analytical density as is achieved by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of the perplexities of the rights of man. This culminates in Arendt’s judgment that, when a state desires to discriminate, abuse and attack sections of its own population, no higher authority is in effect able to hinder it to do so.68 In the development of the Westphalian state, there was no access provided for the individual to a higher political body – or one on the level of international law – except the respective national state. In the classic understanding of international law itself, the individual did not belong to the trans-national system of law; his or her access was only mediated via the respective nationstate a person was deemed a national of. That might be called the “domestic” or inner core of the deficiencies of “Westphalia.” Gross is more concerned with the international, inter-state or external aspect of rights. Consequently, his emphasis is less on rights per se and rather on international law and organization. This is even more obvious in his 1947 article The Charter of the United Nations and the Lodge Reservations, which opens: “The prompt adoption of the Charter of the United Nations by the United States stands in bold relief against the failure to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations twenty-five years ago.” But this is pure irony, as Gross points to what he portrays as the persistency of the Lodge Reservations of 1919/20 – the misgivings of the spokesman of the Republican opposition regarding a number of League principles. Ultimately, 67 For a more detailed comparison of the emancipatory versus the Zionist type of Jewish diplomacy, see Markus Kirchhoff, Diasporische versus zionistische Diplomatie, 1878–1917, in: Aschkenas 17 (2007), 123–146. 68 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 2004 (first publ. 1951), 369–384.

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that contributed to the decision by Washington not to join the League (nor to ratify the Versailles treaty). Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had aimed to make the League “safe” for the United States, and Gross sets out to show that now also “the Roosevelt Administration […] had taken care to keep from the Charter [of the United Nations] all the important matters to which the majority of the Senate, in voting on the Covenant [of the League of Nations] with the Lodge Reservations on March 19, 1920, had taken exception.” (531)69

After comparing a number of Senator Lodge’s reservations with provisions of the UN Charter in detail, Gross concludes this article by centering on the problem of enforcement. International organizations in this regard may be either of the coercive, the non-coercive, or the intermediate type. The League, at least in the mind of President Wilson, had originally been “conceived as an international organization of the coercive variety,” whereas the “Lodge Reservations, if generally adopted, would have transformed the League into a non-coercive or an intermediate type of international organization” from the very outset. (551) But in the history of the League, that transpired anyway as the consequence of governmental preferences for unilateral action in various states. And especially again at the will of the Great Powers, now those constituting the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the United Nations appears as a “League without League principles.” (553) With the overriding commitment limited to mere consultation, the Great Powers “remain free to act inside and perhaps even outside the scope of the Principles and Purposes of the Charter.” (554) As one of the latter stages of the long history of the “Westphalian” pattern, this is a good characterization of the foundations of a world order with which, for better or worse, the world still has to cope.

Conclusion When Leo Gross set out to write his “Westphalia” article, he was able to draw on a number of earlier reflections on politics and law, as well as experiences of international organization. In the 1920s, he had been attracted to the subjects of his studies while experiencing post-imperial Central Europe 69 Leo Gross, The Charter of the United Nations and the Lodge Reservations, in: The American Journal of International Law 41 (1947), no. 3, 531–554 (here and henceforth all numbers given in brackets in the main text refer to the page numbers of this article). The UN Charter “was apparently also devised so as to make it safe for the United States to participate therein.” Ibid., 532.

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in Vienna. He had concluded his 1927/1931 dissertation, heavily influenced by Kelsen – and Kant – by stating that one could speak of a political theory reasonably only “where the state is understood as law, and where international law, as identical with the notion of law, is affirmed.”70 And, ultimately, he had put this into the formula: “The concept of the state as power opposes the concept of the state as law: Hegel versus Kant.”71 Just a few years later, the handing over of power to the Nazis must have felt like an exact proof of the antagonism between the rule of law and the rule of power he had spoken of.72 That he, indirectly triggered by this event, had come to work for the League of Nations had made him a close witness of the vulnerability and weakness of this international organization. Gross’ work has been described as a “singular combination of idealism and realism,” and “his taste for a more effective international law” as “heavily salted with a sense of the limitations imposed by the hard facts of international life.”73 It certainly does not comprise a body of what might be termed “Jewish writings.” Concerning his conspicuous silence about Jewish concerns, a comparison to the stances of Kelsen as well as Lauterpacht could be illuminating.74 Nevertheless, especially his article Peace of Westphalia, with its astonishing degree of familiarity with political and legal science, serves well, it could be argued, for analyzing the very foundations of the modern political condition of the Jews in particular. Generally, Gross’ conclusions cast a dim light on any possibility for a secular authority above the states which ultimately would secure equal rights, and act to prevent flagrant discrimination or open persecution of any population group. In this regard, the article by Gross may also be read as a framework for the forms of modern Jewish political responses to the evident shortcomings of that Westphalian order: on the one hand, attempts to cure that order, or to at least pragmatically remedy its symptoms, or, on the other, to accept it and its failures as a basic reality and seek corresponding workable answers within its compass. Translated from the German by Bill Templer

70 “[…] wo der Staat als Recht begriffen, und wo das Völkerrecht, mit dem Begriff des Rechtes identisch, bejaht wird.” Gross, Pazifismus und Imperialismus, 453. 71 “Die Auffassung des Staates als Macht steht gegen die Auffassung des Staates als Recht: Hegel gegen Kant.” Ibid. 72 “Gegensatz von Rechtsstaat und Machtstaat.” Ibid. 73 Schwebel, Preface, xi. 74 See the intriguing new research on the ways legal figures could be quite strategic about their Jewish political investments: James Loeffler/Moria Paz (eds.), The Law of Strangers. Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought (forthcoming); on Lauterpacht, see the article by James Loeffler, on Kelsen, see the article by Eliav Lieblich, both in the same volume.

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The Right to be Stateless: Dealing with Statelessness after World War II

Forced and Voluntary Statelessness The changes in the map of Europe in the wake of World War I brought about the rupture that Stefan Zweig describes in his autobiography Die Welt von gestern: “Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.”1

Even if this memory is nostalgic in its transfiguring of the past, it is infused by Zweig’s own experience of loss through emigration: before 1914, migratory movements remained without any greater consequences from the legal standpoints of citizenship and nationality. After World War I, the rage to regulate by means of passport controls, and the rapidly growing importance of documentary proof of identity were initially considered passing manifestations of a need for security caused by the Great War.2 They never passed, though. Instead, the interwar period saw the rise of a system termed “passport regime.”3 The passport now evolved with increasing intensity into what would be considered the system, per se, via which inclusion and exclusion 1

2

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Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. An Autobiography, trans. by Eden and Cedar Paul, Lincoln, Nebr./London 1964, 409 f. (first Engl. ed. New York 1943; first publ. Germ.: Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Stockholm 1942). Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship. The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept, New Haven, Conn./London 2007, esp. 144–155; Dieter Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit? Staatsbürgerschaft in Europa im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, Berlin 2016, esp. 253–263. The term “passport regime” was already used at the time, see Journal Officiel, R 2176, August 1926. On these “twin desires of porous borders and security” (emphasis by the author), see Mark B. Salter, Rights of Passage. The Passport in International Relations, Boulder, Col., 2003, 77. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 265–286.

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were defined.4 From that point on, individuals who lacked a clear and documentable affiliation to a state were unable to acquire a passport as travel document and prove of identity, and were thus considered stateless. The stateless individual stumbled into the status of someone in limbo (“inbetween”), constantly beset with the task of trying to acquire identity papers so as to legitimate his or her existence. In the best-case scenario, this was a temporary predicament – both from the view of the sovereign nation-state and the individual affected. Modern statelessness in Europe belongs to the history and post-history of the two world wars, the break-up of the empires, and the drawing of new boundaries and borders. The first great wave of statelessness in the twentieth century followed a decision by the Council of the People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union in October 1921 to revoke the Russian citizenship of all those who had fled as a result of the October Revolution. This first mass expatriation was at the same time a cause and basis for dealing with all further problems of statelessness.5 Consequently, in a direct response to this occurrence, efforts in the European states joined together in the League of Nations and led to the creation of the so-called Nansen passport in 1922, named after the High Commissioner for Refugees for the League of Nations, Fridtjof Nansen.6 This document confirmed that its bearer was not a citizen of any state, but meant to guarantee tolerance of his or her presence by the state in which the bearer presented the Nansen passport. As a passport, it served as an identification document for identity and nationality, but did not provide access to foreign countries. Although only a relatively small number of Jews were affected by this first occurrence of mass expatriation, in the first half of the twentieth century statelessness became a Jewish experience per se – an experience that stood at the beginning of persecution, exclusion, and finally, annihilation: National Socialism and World War II, in particular the mass expatriations of German Jews by National Socialist legislation as a 4

5

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Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Göttingen 2001; Fahrmeir, Citizenship; John Torpey, Passports and the Development of Immigration Controls in the North Atlantic World during the Long Nineteenth Century, in: Andreas Fahrmeir/Olivier Faron/Patrick Weil (eds.), Migration Control in the North Atlantic World. The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, New York/Oxford 2003, 73–91, here 78. Catherine Gousseff, L’exil russe. La fabrique du réfugié apatride (1920–1939), Paris 2008; Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border. Germany and the East, 1914– 1922, Ithaca, N. Y., et al. 2010. On Fridtjof Nansen, see i. a. Roland Huntford, Nansen. The Explorer as Hero, London 1997. On the Nansen passport, see Martin Stiller, Eine Völkerrechtsgeschichte der Staatenlosigkeit, dargestellt anhand ausgewählter Beispiele aus Europa, Russland und den USA, Vienna/New York 2011, 108 f.

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precursor and preliminary stage to annihilation, moved the community of nations after the war’s end in 1945 to grapple officially with the problem of statelessness. Thus, Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights already postulates the human right based on “nationality” and, therefore, on citizenship. The United Nations now sought to develop regulations that would prevent statelessness in the future. In 1954, this culminated in the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. According to this Convention, no state is permitted to expatriate its citizens if these persons then become stateless as a result.7 The present article shows how, from the experience of deprivation of rights by expatriation, a new humane doctrine emerged that accorded the individual not only the right to have a citizenship, but to refuse that same citizenship if so desired – and nonetheless remain protected by agreements in international law. It should be noted that, corresponding with international law, being a member of a state collective should not be an individual’s decision alone. Nor is statelessness, even if voluntarily accepted, regarded as a status worthy of protection. On the other hand – and this ambivalence will also come under focus here – the discussion on ways to overcome statelessness, as a status without any rights or protections, always included the perspective of those who sought, by means of an individual decision, to determine their own national belonging and nationality, even if this entailed becoming stateless. While those individuals demanded the right not just to have a citizenship – but also to be able to refuse that same citizenship – they simultaneously claimed to be protected from persecution and exclusion through recognition of their human rights. This article will illustrate how, in the face of the experience of mass statelessness, actors repeatedly appeared on the scene who endeavored to make heard the voices of those calling for the right of an individual to decide about his or her nationality. This was taking place concurrently with the emergence of a postwar doctrine of human rights whose breakthrough has largely been described for the 1970s,8 unfolding in the tangle of discussions on judicial 7

8

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” See (16 December 2016). For the UNHCR 1954 Convention, see (16 December 2016). For an overview of the state of inquiry at the beginning of the rediscovery of this research focus since the 1990s, see Kenneth Cmiel, The Recent History of Human Rights, in: The American Historical Review 109 (2004), no. 1, 117–135. For an example of the more recent diversity in historical approaches to the topic, see Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten. Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2014; idem/Samuel Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough. Human Rights in the 1970s,

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aspects, elements of international law and supra-state dimensions. In the analysis, the perspectives examined will involve the side of the state, i. e. the sovereign, as well as the personal motives of those who wish to become stateless, to render themselves stateless, or even to overcome allegiances to nation-states. Consequently, this article seeks to build a twofold perspective: both on those forced to be stateless as well as the “voluntarily stateless.” Specifically in the Jewish history of the twentieth century, marked not only by statelessness and persecution but also by the creation of the state of Israel, statelessness constituted more than just a status of victimhood. Of particular importance here is the “incubation period” in state-building between the war’s end and the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948: in this brief period, the traumatic experience of statelessness and its horrible consequences were also accompanied by the positive protective function of being categorized as “stateless.” One of the ambivalent insights in the history of modern statelessness is that it were precisely Jewish Displaced Persons after 1945 who were able to find their “home” in statelessness; and on that basis, they were able to nurture a kind of proto-statehood in the DP camps.

The Jewish Experience of Statelessness: National Socialism There were two principal causes for the Jewish experience of statelessness: the expatriation of an individual by action of the state, and “voluntary” statelessness by renunciation or masking of a given nationality for diverse motives, in the discourse of international law termed “de facto” statelessness. Already before National Socialist legislation, most national legal systems stipulated that the following factors in particular could lead to expatriation and exclusion from citizenship: permanent stay abroad, naturalization abroad and acquisition of another citizenship, acceptance of a public position in another state, or service in a foreign army. Those factors were bound up with decisions by the individual. However, in parallel with this, some countries expatriated their citizens as a punishment for various transgresPhiladelphia, Pa., 2014 (first publ. Germ.: Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren, Göttingen 2012). See also Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Moralpolitik. Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2010; Norbert Frei/ Annette Weinke (eds.), Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945, Göttingen 2013.

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sions – for example, desertion on the battlefield, but also such vaguely defined offenses as “disloyalty” to the state. Especially during World War I, European countries began to pass laws allowing them to denaturalize and expatriate their citizens.9 Such legislation marks a decisive turn in the history of the modern nation-state: the definitive end of any notion of the inviolability of an individual’s citizenship.10 Jews as a specific group were directly targeted by this for the first time in Nazi Germany; the most significant reason for European Jews to become stateless were the countless acts of expatriation imposed by National Socialist laws. Many of these legislative steps had consequences long after 1945, also influencing legal practice regarding statelessness in the Federal Republic of Germany. A new group of the stateless came into being with the beginning of the National Socialist regime. The reasons involved stripping supposed “enemies of the Reich” of their citizenship, the revocation of previous naturalizations, and finally the collective expatriation of all those Jews who had been deported or who had fled abroad. In a process of gradual legal and social exclusion, the National Socialists initially deprived Jews individually of their German citizenship, and from 1941 collectively. The first legislative step of the new regime was taken in July 1933 with the Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship (Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit).11 This law permitted the state to revoke the citizenship of all “disloyal” or emigrated Germans. Along with a Decree for Implementation of the Law (Durchführungsverordnung, 26 July 1933), it also stipulated that undesirable naturalizations could be revoked. Even native-born German Jews viewed this legislative step with great concern. Writing in his diary, the Hamburg lawyer Kurt Rosenberg noted: “Should a person emigrate? To where, where is there a possibility for the

19 On deprivation of citizenship during World War I, see Daniela L. Caglioti, Why and How Italy Invented an Enemy Aliens Problem in the First World War, in: War in History 21 (2014), no. 2, 142–169. See also Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen. 10 Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen. Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic, Philadelphia, Pa., 2012. On expatriations, see also Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal, Zwangsausbürgerung aus politischen Gründen. Ein Element europäischer Rechtsunkultur im 20. Jahrhundert?, in: Thomas Olechowski/Christian Neschwara/Alina Lengauer (eds.), Grundlagen der österreichischen Rechtskultur. Festschrift für Werner Ogris zum 75. Geburtstag, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2010, 433–458. 11 Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship (Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit), 14 July 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl) I, 480. A total of some 39,000 persons were stripped of their citizenship on this legal basis, including their family members; see Wolf Kaiser, Art. “Ausbürgerung,” in: Wolfgang Benz et al. (eds.), Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 1998, 381.

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wife and kids? You lose your citizenship. You’ll get a Nansen passport. Longing for peace and quiet within. Internal sense of unrest day after day.”12 As the Implementation Decree also made possible the revocation of naturalizations now deemed undesirable, it targeted the so-called Eastern Jews in particular.13 With their naturalization in Germany, these Jews had given up their Polish citizenship, since the Polish legislation on citizenship of 1920 prohibited dual nationality.14 If the naturalizations were now revoked, this rendered the German citizens of Polish origin henceforth stateless. In the spring of 1935, the National Socialist regime revoked the right to naturalization. In the end, however, the most effective instrument of mass expatriation were the so-called Nuremberg Laws passed later that same year. Along with the now operative regulations on individual expatriation, these laws introduced a historically quite new category – that of the “citizen of the Reich,” the Reichsbürger in full possession of all citizenship rights, in contrast to “national subjects” (Staatsangehörige) without any political rights.15 A Reichsbürger could only be a person “of German or kindred blood,” and Jews could only belong to the latter category; as Staatsangehörige, they were deprived of their right to political participation. The bundle of laws also included the notorious racist categorization in various gradations of “racially hybrid” Jews or racial hybrids, so-called Mischlinge, as well as a prohibition on “mixed marriages” between Jews and non-Jews. A next step in the jurisdictive insanity around citizenship matters was the draft law of 14 February 1938 on the Acquisition and Loss of German Nationality (Erwerb und Verlust der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit), according to which Jews and “Mischlinge” were no longer permitted to pass on their citizenship to their offspring.16 While this draft bill was not passed into law, it points up the élan among antisemitic legislators on citizenship such as Hans Globke. Those persons even sought to revoke what was actually deemed sacrosanct, namely the “family unity under nationality law.” Children from legally permitted “mixed marriages” would now no longer acquire Ger12 Leo Baeck Institute Archive, New York, AR 25279, Tagebuch Kurt Rosenberg, diary entry 20 August 1933, cit. in: Ina Lorenz/Jörg Berkemann, Die Hamburger Juden im NSStaat 1933 bis 1938/39, 7 vols., here vol. 3, Göttingen 2016, 27 (document no. 9). 13 § l of the Decree for Implementation of the Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship (Durchführungsverordnung), 26 July 1933, RGBl I, 538. 14 Article 11 of the law pertaining to Polish citizenship, 20 January 1920, publ. in: Georg Geilke, Das Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht von Polen, Frankfurt a. M. 1952, 52 f. 15 See Cornelia Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933–1945, Paderborn et al. 2002; and idem, Die Alchemie des Rassenbegriffs und die “Nürnberger Gesetze,” in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 4 (1995), 201–225. 16 See Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933–1945, 279.

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man citizenship independently from their parents’ nationality, and thus were stateless. The 11th Decree on Implementation the Reich Citizenship Law (11. Durchführungsverordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz) of 25 November 1941 exacerbated the situation dramatically. According to this law, all Jews who had taken up “residence” elsewhere – as the euphemistic legal discourse phrased it – were stripped of their German citizenship, no matter whether this “residence” abroad was due to forced emigration or flight as a refugee (for as long as the latter was feasible), or as a result of deportation. The cynical formulation read: “The regular stay abroad is considered operative if a Jew is residing abroad under conditions that indicate that he is not merely staying there temporarily.”17 In this connection, the General Government (Generalgouvernement) under German rule in occupied Poland was also deemed to be “foreign territory” for purposes of this law. Not only did the state confiscate the assets of those collectively expatriated in this manner; it also gave rise to a new multitude of stateless individuals, who now, being regarded as outside the law, could be sent to extermination camps and murdered there. Deprivation of citizenship thus stood at the very gateway to annihilation. If the internment camp before World War II had served primarily as a topos of threat, for those rendered stateless, stripped of their homeland and citizenship under the National Socialists it ultimately became “the only ‘country’ the world had to offer the stateless,” as Hannah Arendt once described it so impressively.18 In the early years of the Nazi regime, the expatriation of individuals ordered by the state principally targeted prominent personalities, including Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Carl Zuckmayer. The procedure of expatriation in the case of Albert Einstein illustrates in particular the interlacing of the urge for control by the state and individual understanding of one’s own nationality – and especially one’s own desire for self-determination. Einstein renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1896, but until 1901 he had not been naturalized in Switzerland; consequently, he was initially living as

17 Cit. in Dierk Müller, Die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit ausgebürgerter Emigranten. Zum Beschluß des Bundesverfassungsgerichts vom 14.2.1968, in: Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht/The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law 32 (1968), no. 4, 676–686, here 677. On the following Runderlaß des Reichsinnenministers, 3 December 1941, see Diemut Majer, “Fremdvölkische” im Dritten Reich. Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Rechtssetzung und Rechtspraxis in Verwaltung und Justiz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der eingegliederten Ostgebiete und des Generalgouvernements, Boppard am Rhein 1981, 475. 18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd rev. ed., New York 1958 (first publ. 1951), 284.

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a stateless person.19 However, in 1914, he again became a German. The reason for that was his acceptance into the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which presupposed Prussian (and thus German) citizenship. This re-naturalization was therefore not a decision by Einstein for the sake of regaining German citizenship per se, but rather went hand in hand with the awarding of a scientific honor. When the National Socialists gained power in January 1933, Einstein was in the US, and he then applied in April to relinquish his Prussian citizenship. The Nobel laureate’s request was submitted to the German Embassy in Brussels, reached the desk of the Reich Minister of the Interior in Berlin, and was subsequently dealt with by seven different offices. The Prussian Interior Minister intended to reject Einstein’s request – yet not in any way to preserve the latter’s German citizenship. Rather, what he wanted was the possibility to deprive Einstein of his German citizenship himself in accordance with the law of July 1933. For its part, the Foreign Office expressed reservations – in the case of a prominent citizen like Einstein, the diplomats foresaw a negative impact on Germany’s foreign relations and image abroad. While depriving Einstein of his citizenship threatened to give the request of the scientist unwanted publicity, a silent approval of his request would achieve the same aim and simultaneously prevent collateral damage. The tenacious struggle dragged on for almost another year, until on 29 March 1934 the Reich Interior Ministry revoked Einstein’s citizenship based on the July 1933 law. Six years later, he ultimately became a US citizen. Einstein’s case shows how the government authorities sought to assert their power to grant citizenship – unauthorized, individual decisions regarding one’s own nationality were not to be accepted.

After 1945: Jewish Displaced Persons and the Right to Statelessness One of the most important goals of the Allies immediately after the war’s end was the repatriation of Displaced Persons as quickly and comprehensively as possible. However, this task proved onerous, in significant measure due to the uncertain situation regarding citizenship of numerous Jewish and non-Jewish DPs. Although only a minority of 10 percent was demonstrably 19 On Einstein’s time as a stateless person, see Eckart Conze et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik, unter Mitarbeit von Annette Weinke und Andrea Wiegeshoff, Munich 2010, 82–84; and Miriam Rürup, Lives in Limbo. Statelessness after Two World Wars, in: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 49 (2011), 113–134, here 128–130.

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stateless,20 there was a large number of Jewish DPs who, due to the harrowing traumatic experiences of loss, did not seek to return to their home countries and tried to avoid repatriation. Thus, soon after the end of the war, efforts arose whose result was a shift in perspective: statelessness came to be viewed as an attribute worthy of protection. Representatives of Jewish DPs themselves, as well as the competent organizations pressed to exempt the group from repatriation to the very countries where they had been persecuted, and to house them in their own separate camps.21 What is often described in DP historiography as a “waiting room” turned out to be, in terms of citizenship law, “one of the birthplaces” (Atina Grossmann) and the “first chapter” (Dan Diner) of the state of Israel. This is reflected by the Harrison Report. In the summer of 1945, the US State Department established a special commission in reaction to the numerous complaints by Jews. Headed by Earl G. Harrison, a lawyer and US representative at the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICG), this commission visited the camps that same summer. Harrison’s final report in August 1945 gave direction to the future way in which Jewish DPs were dealt with. A clear shift in direction took place here: previously, Jewish refugees had been treated as a religious group, and had not been categorized or housed separately. Already in June 1945, Jews had been designated as “stateless” in the handbooks of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. However, during the early months after the war, the conceptual classifications were in any case variable and often subject to changes. Ultimately, such definitions always went hand in hand with changes in the maxims of behavior. The result of the Harrison Report was that Jewish DPs were now officially recognized as “United Nations nationals,” and accorded a “de facto” status as “non-repatriable refugees.” The recognition as a nation among other nations, which the Jews had not managed to achieve in the minorities regime of the interwar period, had thus become tangibly, and established itself under the direct impression of the postwar period, and particularly the situation in the DP camps.22 20 Before the establishment of the two German states in 1948, there were 280,000 DPs residing in Germany, of whom some 3 percent (ca. 10,000) were stateless. They were considered stateless foreigners under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). On the numbers and their aid by United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and finally the International Refugee Organization (IRO), see Laura J. Hilton, The Experiences and Impact of the Stateless in the Postwar Period, in: Rebecca L. Boehling et al. (eds.), Freilegungen. Spiegelungen der NS-Verfolgung und ihrer Konsequenzen, Göttingen 2015, 157–172. 21 Yfaat Weiss, Homeland as Shelter or as Refuge? Repatriation in the Jewish Context, in: Dan Diner (ed.), Historische Migrationsforschung, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 27 (1998), 195–219. 22 On the minority regime, see the contemporary analysis by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of

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However, initially it remained completely unclear where Jewish DPs should or could settle. This underlying sense of being homeless is certainly recalled as something disturbing, as by the survivor Jonas Mekas: “Am I a gypsy, a citizen of the world, an eternal DP?”23 Nonetheless, recognition as a national, even if stateless, collective had its advantage. Jews now were no longer automatically subject to the ongoing efforts of repatriation, and their statelessness had been given international recognition. In 1945, Hannah Arendt even went so far as to demand that the Jewish people be accorded the same rights and status within the United Nations as the 44 UN members.24 For the first time, statelessness proved to be a protection and thus an advantage, and no longer just a helpless “in-between” condition. This was because the shift to a “less endangered status,” as was offered by statelessness, meant at the same time that there could be no forced return to the home countries from which these refugees had been expelled.25

Protection of Stateless Individuals: The UN Convention of 1954 After World War II, the United Nations, as successor organization of the League of Nations, together with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) founded in 1946, had taken up the challenge of finding lasting solutions to the problem of “statelessness.” In 1948, they supported a study on the situation of the stateless, and established the Ad Hoc Committee on Statelessness and Related Problems.26 Two years later, this Committee put forward a Convention draft proposal and a protocol paper that dealt with the status of the stateless. After the passing of another year, the UN General Assembly meeting in Geneva finally passed the well-known Refugee Convention, still in force today. However, the Protocol on statelessness was not approved, but sent back for further revision. It was then passed on by the Secretary-General to individual governments with a request for reactions

23 24

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Totalitarianism, 269–289, and Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933. Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008. Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go, New York 1991, 328. Hannah Arendt, Die jüdischen Chancen. Geringe Aussichten – gespaltene Vertretung, in: Aufbau, 20 April 1945, publ. in: idem., Vor dem Antisemitismus ist man nur noch auf dem Monde sicher. Beiträge für die deutsch-jüdische Emigrantenzeitung “Aufbau” 1941– 1945, ed. by Marie Luise Knott, Munich/Zürich 2000, 181–184, here 181. See Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer. Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–1951, Göttingen 1985, 174. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, A Study of Statelessness, Lake Success, N. Y., 1949, (16 December 2016).

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and responses.27 It took three more years until finally, on 28 September 1954, at a Conference of Plenipotentiaries in New York attended by 27 countries (including the FRG), the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons was adopted and opened for signature.28 The principal aim of the Convention was to eliminate the legal vacuum in which the stateless found themselves, and to guarantee them fundamental social and economic rights and freedoms.29 It established rules and regulations for various aspects of their lives, such as marriage, property acquisition, inheritance law, travel, and equal treatment before the law together with “national subjects” and foreigners. Not taken into account were the genderspecific components of statelessness, namely the national status when it came to female spouses.30 This may be due to the fact that the primary concern was to eliminate disadvantages springing from the circumstances of the war and persecution. Similar to some two decades earlier in connection with the Nansen passport, it was stated that the signatory nations had no obligation to assist the stateless, or to admit them into the country, except in the case of asylum-seekers. The sole obligation was that they had to issue travel documents for stateless persons. These so-called Convention Travel Documents (CTD) were to have a validity of at least three months and a maximum of two years, and were to be issued by the local authorities, in most cases the local mayors.31

27 On the 1954 Convention, see Rürup, Lives in Limbo, 126–128. 28 See UNHCR, Nationality and Statelessness. A Handbook for Parliamentarians, Geneva 2005, 53, (16 December 2016). The FRG did not ratify the Convention until 1976, as one of its last state signatories; previously, this had been repeatedly postponed, noting that the FRG wished to wait until a sufficient number of other states had signed. The Federal Republic was not alone in this stance: 146 states had ratified the Refugee Convention of 1951 by 2005, but only 57 had by then ratified the 1954 Convention on Statelessness – 13 of the 15 EU states had signed the 1954 statute in 2003. 29 See Carol A. Batchelor, Statelessness and the Problem of Resolving Nationality Status, in: International Journal of Refugee Law 10 (1998), no. 1–2, 156–183; and idem, Stateless Persons. Some Gaps in International Protection, in: International Journal of Refugee Law 7 (1995), no. 2, 232–259. 30 See on this Miriam Rürup, Das Geschlecht der Staatenlosen. Staatenlosigkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit 1945, in: Journal of Modern European History 14 (2016), no. 3, 411–429. On the history of the committee, see Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity. Human Rights Mobilization in Global Politics, Philadelphia, Pa., 2009. 31 On policies of the FRG in regard to questions of citizenship, see Simon Green, Integration durch Staatsangehörigkeit? Die Ausländerpolitik der Bundesregierung 1955–1999, in: Heiner Timmermann (ed.), Nationalismus in Europa nach 1945, Berlin 2001, 399–424, here 405. On the idea of exploring the field of tension between international politics, questions of law, and implementation within specific countries on the other side, see also Thomas Risse/Stephen C. Ropp/Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), The Power of Human Rights. International Norms and Domestic Change, New York 1999; Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.),

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The Convention of 1954 applied to those stateless persons who as refugees did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention of Refugees, and who also had not obtained any other assistance from the UN. The most important result of the Convention was that, just within the short span of a decade, a new understanding was able to be established and codified in an agreement in international law: from that time on, expatriations were no longer permissible if they resulted in statelessness for those so expatriated. This constituted a massive interference in the sphere of nation-state sovereignty and its exclusive authority in matters of inclusion and exclusion regarding their national population. The experience of statelessness, largely affecting European Jews in the main, and thus particularistic, was to be solved globally and lead to a universally valid claim for citizenship. This notwithstanding, even after World War II there were cases of large-scale punishment by revocation of citizenship, for example in Poland, where German “collaborators” were penalized in this manner.32 And today, Austria is one of the few countries where persons are denaturalized if they do not renounce another citizenship within a specific time period and deadline.33 The beginning of discussions about ways to resolve the issues in dealing with statelessness and the formulation of the Convention on the “status” of stateless persons was marked by efforts to establish definitional delimitations, reminiscent in this respect of the earlier discussions connected with Allied repatriation policy. The aim was to find a category through which statelessness could be conceptually delimited and contained, thus rendering it politically practicable. Initially, the stateless were designated by various appellations: as “apatrides,” the “wretched,” as persons possessing an “abnormal status,” as the homeless, or as representatives of a “new class of international persons.”34 In the search for an acceptable definition, the principal concern was to regulate access to forms of assistance offered to the stateless, and to keep that within limits. In fact, since the emergence of modern statelessness, there has been an ongoing discussion about whether those persons should be supported and provided for as stateless who had “voluntaBringing Transnational Relations Back in. Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions, New York 1995. 32 See Krzysztof Stryjkowski, Nachkriegsfolgen der “Deutschen Volksliste” in Großpolen und das Schicksal der verbliebenen Deutschen, in: Mathias Beer/Dietrich Beyrau/Cornelia Rauh (eds.), Deutschsein als Grenzerfahrung. Minderheitenpolitik in Europa zwischen 1914 und 1950, Essen 2009, 261–278, here 274. 33 See Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship. Membership and Right in International Migration, Cheltenham 1994, 134 f. 34 For diverse examples, see files, press excerpts, correspondence and protocols stored in the Archives de la Société des Nations, Geneva (henceforth SDN), R 3589, C.558(b). M.200b.1927, Comité international de la Croix-Rouge (CICR), CR.123, and in SDN, R 3589, C.558(b).M.200b.1927, CICR CR.163.

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rily” renounced their citizenship, and who thus had not become stateless in every respect necessarily without any “fault of their own.”35 In juridical respects and in terms of international law, the UN distinguished in 1949 between “de jure” and “de facto” stateless persons. A clear line was to be demarcated between the first category, persons who by dint of a decision by the state, without any right to decide for themselves and thus as victims, had become stateless – and the “de facto” category of those who had “voluntarily,” so to speak, consciously chosen statelessness, or had at least hazarded the consequences of such a decision, for example due to their political convictions, which appeared incompatible with their country of origin.36 Whether these latter persons should likewise be able to enjoy the protection of instruments developed for “de jure” stateless was itself the object of protracted negotiations.37 One of the repeatedly raised arguments against such equal treatment was that then the stateless would legally be in a better position than, for example, foreigners living in Germany with a foreign citizenship. The discussions eventually led to the conclusion that those who were “de facto” stateless should not be protected by the Convention. Despite this careful and painstaking debate aimed at a highly delimited and precise definition of those who as stateless persons should fall under the protective canopy of the Convention, it continued to remain left up to the individual nation-states to decide whether they wished to regard a given individual as stateless in accordance with Article 1 of the Convention. Ultimately, what was at stake here was the power of definition: who had the last say? The nation-states very clearly claimed that power and authority for themselves. Thus, the international power relations in postwar situations were to a certain extent negotiated at the expense of those directly affected.

Answer to the Trauma of Expatriation? Repatriation in the FRG Integral to the big question after the end of Nazi rule as to how to deal with the legacy of “justice within injustice”38 was also the question: Should expat35 In this connection, see as exemplary SDN, C.558(b).M.200b.1927, discussions at the 3rd Conference on Communications and Transit 1927. 36 United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, A Study of Statelessness. 37 On this, see SDN, C.558(b).M.200b.1927, Statement by M. Politis, 1927 at the 3rd Conference on Communications and Transit. 38 See Michael Stolleis, Recht im Unrecht. Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt a. M. 1994; see also idem, The Law under the Swastika. Studies on Legal History in Nazi Germany, trans. by Thomas Dunlap, Chicago, Ill., 1998.

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riated Jews automatically – and thus ultimately forcibly – be restored to their previous status as citizens or not?39 The expatriated Jews raised a principal demand for the right to be repatriated. Nonetheless, they did not intend unconditionally to make use of that right. That was because in many cases it was quite a secondary matter to overcome and thus abrogate their stateless status, and for some the status of “non-nationals” had indeed become a vital component of their own new identity.40 Above all, everything seemed more palatable than to specifically accept German citizenship once again.41 Through the lens of Federal German citizenship law, certain central questions can be examined that played a major role in rendering the situation for the stateless so precarious in the wake of World War II. Initially, it remained unclear what law in general should be valid when it came to stateless refugees. As long as there were no binding national or international agreed regulations, stateless persons were at the mercy of the arbitrary will and whim of the respective country of their current domicile – even if that state was possibly, as in the case of the Jews expatriated, their country of origin. This applied, for example, in connection with questions of inheritance law and other aspects of earlier acquis, but also touched on changes in personal status, and was manifested in bureaucratic hassles that arose, such as obtaining death certificates for stateless relatives who were declared missing. After the end of the war, the National Socialist Reich Citizen Law of 1935 and its additional implementation decrees were revoked by the Military Government and the Allied Control Council Law No. 1 in September 1945. However, until the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, emigrants and deportees who had become stateless through National Socialist legislation remained so despite the Allied directives and ordinances, insofar as they themselves as stateless persons did not endeavor to have their expatriation revoked and nullified.42 Consequently, an expatriated Jew who was 39 Walter Schätzel, Die Staatsangehörigkeit der politischen Flüchtlinge, in: Archiv des Völkerrechts 5 (1955), no. 1–2, 63–79, here 67. See also Müller, Die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit ausgebürgerter Emigranten, 677. In addition, see David Fraser/Frank Caestecker, Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust, in: Law and History Review 31 (2013), no. 2, 391–422, here 415–420. 40 Fraser/Caestecker, Jews or Germans?, 419. 41 See Hannah Arendt, The Stateless People, in: Contemporary Jewish Record 8 (1945), no. 2, 137–153; and Miriam Rürup, Staatenlosigkeit als Entmenschlichung. Hannah Arendt: “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), in: Uffa Jensen et al. (eds.), Gewalt und Gesellschaft. Klassiker modernen Denkens neu gelesen, Göttingen 2011, 226–237. See also the Jewish expert on international law Hersch Lauterpacht, The Nationality of Denationalized Persons, in: The Jewish Yearbook of International Law 1 (1948), 164–185, here 174. 42 Control Council Law No. 1 – Repealing of Nazi Laws (Kontrollratsgesetz Nr. 1 betreffend die Aufhebung von NS-Recht), 20 September 1945, (16 December 2016).

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residing in occupied Germany, but did not unconditionally desire to stay there or regain German citizenship remained de facto stateless. This changed with the passing of the Federal German Basic Law (Grundgesetz): Article 116, paragraph II stipulated that every individual who had been stripped of German citizenship between 1933 and 1945 should be repatriated.43 Whoever was residing in Germany again did not need to make a specific separate application for this, but those living abroad did. Persons expatriated who were living in Germany but did not wish to become German citizens were even required to expressly declare that.44 Otherwise, the individual affected was deemed no longer expatriated and unexpectedly became, possibly against his or her will, a German national and citizen once more. The responsibility for the remaining so-called “hard-core” Jewish DPs was also transferred to the West German government after the establishment of the FRG. This directly concerned some 125,000 persons, including approximately 50,000 still living in DP camps. How to deal with them was regulated by the Law Pertaining to the Legal Status of Homeless Foreigners (Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung heimatloser Ausländer) passed in April 1951. The Basic Law thus granted the survivors who had been expatriated by the National Socialists their citizenship once again. Initially, this was thought of as a temporary measure, but then remained operative, to some extent in an unused form, down to the present, as a basis for automatically granting German citizenship to refugees of “ethnic German” origin, i. e. those with deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit.45 That was also one of the main reasons why in 1949 the Federal Republic decided to ground laws regarding citizenship on the Reich laws for citizenship of 1913. Because the law of descent and parental right that this legislation regulated, and the associated patrilineal transmission of citizenship also made it possible to symbolically “retain” the Germans in the East until a potential reunification of the two

43 As mentioned, part of this long lasting discussion was the question as to whether expatriated Jews automatically, and thus ultimately forcibly, should be restored to their previous status as citizens or not. On this, see Schätzel, Die Staatsangehörigkeit der politischen Flüchtlinge, 67; and Müller, Die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit ausgebürgerter Emigranten, 677. 44 On individual misgivings and reservations regarding the reacceptance of German citizenship, especially by Jewish émigrés, see Miriam Rürup, The Citizen and Its Other. Zionist and Israeli Responses to Statelessness, in: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 59 (2014), no. 1, 37–52; Fraser/Caestecker, Jews or Germans?, 419 f.; Jannis Panagiotidis, “The Oberkreisdirektor Decides Who Is a German.” Jewish Immigration, German Bureaucracy, and the Negotiation of National Belonging, 1953–1990, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), no. 3, 503–533. 45 Henry Ashby Turner jr., Deutsches Staatsbürgerrecht und der Mythos der ethnischen Nation, in: Manfred Hettling/Paul Nolte (eds.), Nation und Gesellschaft in Deutschland. Historische Essays, Munich 1996, 142–150, here 147.

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German states.46 This marked an implicit turn away from overcoming the injustices against the Jews perpetrated by National Socialism toward the explicit incorporation of the “Germans” in the East. Article 116 of the Basic Law regulated nationality via ius sanguinis; all former German citizens and their descendants had by dint of ius sanguinis a right to German citizenship. This naturally was valid for both Jews and nonJews.47 The first paragraph of Article 116 related in equal measure to refugees and expellees, and thus applied to both the “ethnic Germans” and the expatriated Jews. In that a law pertained to both groups jointly, it included the experiences of the immediate past as well as the crimes of National Socialism, and simultaneously made a statement oriented to a future unification of the entire German national population: Ultimately, Article 116 enshrined the right of return for all expelled Germans. In addition to the Basic Law, diverse laws and ordinances were passed in the 1950s also pertaining to Jewish remigrants. For example, a 1956 directive promised every Jew who returned to Germany immediate emergency aid of 6,000 DM.48 A discussion surrounding the 1953 Federal Law on Expellees and Refugees was of particular importance. That law stipulated who was to be defined as an “expellee,” and thus could also assert claims: “Someone who let himself be known as German in his home, insofar as his letting himself be known as a German was confirmed by certain characteristics such as descent, language, upbringing or culture.”49 At first glance, it appeared as if this law was addressing both “Germans” and “Jews” in equal measure. But a closer look at legal practice quickly reveals the differences. Problematic for many Jews, given their experiences of exclusion and persecution, was doubtlessly the “avowal” (Bekenntnis) of “membership in the German people” (deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit). The historical propinquity to the racially grounded “folk community” is blatantly manifest here.50

46 Randall Hansen/Patrick Weil, Introduction. Citizenship Immigration and Nationality. Towards a Convergence in Europe?, in: idem (eds.), Towards a European Nationality. Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality Law in the EU, New York 2001, 1–23, here 15. 47 Simon Green, Citizenship Policy in Germany. The Case of Ethnicity over Residence, in: Hansen/Weil (eds.), Towards a European Nationality, 24–52, here 25. 48 Meron Mendel, The Policy for the Past in West Germany and Israel. The Case of Jewish Remigration, in: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 49 (2004), no. 1, 121–136. 49 § 6 BVFG (Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge), (16 December 2016). See also Douglas B. Klusmeyer/Demetrios G. Papademetriou (eds.), Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation, New York 2009, 77. For a multi-facetted discussion of this concept, see i. a. Panagiotidis, “The Oberkreisdirektor Decides Who Is a German,” 510. See also Schätzel, Die Staatsangehörigkeit der politischen Flüchtlinge, 70. 50 Panagiotidis refers e. g. to this similarity to a definition of Volkszugehörigkeit in the Minis-

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As if this ethnic distinction were not enough, the avowed “commitment” had in addition to be proven down to the year 1944/45, and was thus directly formulated as part of the history of the expellees. There was some readjustment introduced later, and the period for Jewish applicants was backdated to 1933. Yet a problem continued to exist: How were Jews, who had lost their families, friends and neighbors in large numbers, to “prove” their avowed “commitment”?51 This was often irresolvable, for German “Eastern Jews” in particular, precisely because of their recognition as a national minority in the interwar period, Ostjuden were explicitly marked as Jews and not Germans – the minority protection system resulted here in unforeseen after-effects. The 1955 Act for the Regulation of Questions of Citizenship also dealt with the rights of expatriated Germans as well as “ethnic” Germans. According to this law, ethnic Germans had a fundamental right to naturalization. The Act also introduced the totally new category of “right of domicile” (Heimatrecht), which accorded all those who had been expatriated for political, religious, or racialist reasons a right of repatriation. A contemporary described the law as “a right that should have its place in a catalogue of human rights, although it cannot be found either in the UN Declaration of Human Rights or in the accord of the European Council.”52 Problematic was the fact that the time limit for expatriated persons to assert their claim was quite limited, only one year, the deadline being the end of 1956. Striking in the new law above all was its flexibility. Thus, after the new regulation of 1955, even those who had overcome their statelessness by gaining a new citizenship could assert a claim to repatriation – and could do so even if they had no intention of returning to Germany, let alone settling down there. The only limitation was in Article 2, which stipulated that the expatriation had to have occurred for political, religious, or racialist reasons.53 It can thus be noted that, in the end, the national and supra-national discussions in the decade following the war on how to deal with statelessness as part of the legacy of National Socialism resulted in legislation that was much more inclusive and more flexible than ever before. This occurred at a time, when these regulations had lost much of their relevance for stateless,

terialblatt des Reichs- und Preußischen Ministeriums des Innern 100 (1939), 783, where it is also stated that “Persons of foreign blood, especially Jews, are never such ‘Volkszugehörige,’ even if they have so far referred to themselves as such.” Idem, “The Oberkreisdirektor Decides Who Is a German,” 510. 51 Ibid., 512. 52 A. N. Makarov, Das Bundesgesetz zur Regelung von Staatsangehörigkeitsfragen vom 22. Februar 1955, in: Juristenzeitung 10 (1955), 659–662, here 659. 53 Ibid.; idem, Das Gesetz über die Staatsangehörigkeit von Ausgebürgerten, in: Deutsche Rechts-Zeitschrift 3 (1948), no. 8–9, 278–282, here 280.

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expatriated Jews – but still held importance for ethnic Germans. In order to assist the latter, the Federal Republic even accepted the risk of dual citizenship, an option absolutely to be avoided otherwise. The after-effects of Nazi injustice, particularly in the realm of citizenship matters, had a very long incubation period, as reflected in one particular case that eventually led to a far-reaching decision in 1968 by the Federal Constitutional Court. In 1962, two descendants of a native-born German living in the Netherlands initiated a court case when they applied for a certificate of inheritance in the Federal Republic. Their story went back all the way to the outbreak of the war in 1939, when a Jewish lawyer and German citizen called Dr. R., the father of the applicants, fled from Germany to Amsterdam, was deported from the Netherlands in 1942, and went missing.54 When Dr. R.’s children requested a certificate of inheritance years later, that would identify them as the rightful heirs of Dr. R., they were refused. The German authorities argued that their father had been stateless. His statelessness, however, had been brought about by the infamous 11th Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of 1941, which had generally declared all Jews “residing elsewhere” – and thus also in ghettos and extermination camps – to be stateless. The German authorities further insisted that, as Dr. R. had not regained his German citizenship after the war in accordance with Art. 116 of the Basic Law, Dutch law must apply as the law of his last place of known residence. His children submitted a constitutional complaint against this decision and its reasoning, which from the perspective of orphans who had lost their father during the war undoubtedly had a stinging, scornful ring to it. And there was yet another problem: The prohibition on retroactivity in Federal German law, which forbid the application of laws passed at a later point to an earlier case and its circumstances, prevented that all those expatriated could automatically be considered as non-expatriated. In fundamental terms, a distinction had to be made between at least two groups of persons expatriated: those who had not acquired a new citizenship and remained stateless, and persons who had in the meanwhile acquired a new citizenship. According to a Federal German regulation, the latter were required to submit “positive proof that they still felt they were Germans and either had returned to Germany or had submitted an application for repatriation.”55 However, the Constitutional Court judges showed sympathy for the plight of the descendants, and ruled the 11th Decree of 1941, which had collectively expatriated all Jews located outside of Germany, to be null and void.56 54 According to § 180 of the Federal German Restitution Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz), the day of death was declared to be 8 May 1945. 55 Müller, Die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit ausgebürgerter Emigranten, 680. 56 Decision of the 2nd Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court of 14 February 1968, BVerfG,

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In their justification of the ruling, they stated inter alia that “the 11th Implementation Decree was intended to plunge the Jews forced to emigrate into destitution and to destroy them physically and materially even beyond the boundaries of the National Socialist sphere of power”57 – thus following in the footsteps of the assessment by Hannah Arendt, according to which statelessness was only a precursor to annihilation, or already represented, per se, an act of extreme brutality. Yet, that judgment did not remain uncontroversial and unchallenged: A legal commentator supported his skepticism by arguing that the expatriated Jews who had not returned to Germany “no longer had any connections with Germany and with the German legal system. To force German citizenship on them was in violation of international law.”58 In addition, he advanced an argument stressing the subjectivity of the stateless, stating that, ultimately, one could not ignore the wishes and will of those expatriated: Many of them had “inwardly turned away from the German people and no longer saw any value in possessing German citizenship.”59 Thus, once again central here was the principle of individuals having the right to decide for themselves about their citizenship, and not having a nationality imposed upon. Truth to this principle consequently required a space of negotiation and colloquy between the state’s desire for control and the individual’s understanding of the law and the right of self-determination.

Prospects The debates and developments depicted here seek to sensitize people to the fact that statelessness cannot simply be written as a history of victimization, nor can it be described and analyzed solely from the perspective of the authorities. That is because simultaneous with the history of forced expatriations, a process of voluntary acceptance of a possible status of statelessness also arose. This acceptance appears to be almost correspondent to expatriation. Because in the main, it was authoritarian regimes that individuals wished to escape from by choosing to emigrate, even at the risk of being expatriated and left unable to acquire a new citizenship. Innumerable examples, including some quite prominent ones, such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, can be found in the early years of the National Socialist regime. 14.02.1968 (2 BvR 557/62), (16 December 2016). 57 Cit. in Müller, Die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit ausgebürgerter Emigranten, 680. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid.

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After World War II, Jewish DPs constituted the majority of those wishing to cast off their nation-state “classification,” inter alia in order to avoid forced and undesired repatriation. Against the backdrop of the knowledge gained about the consequences of expatriation by the National Socialists and the direct postwar experience regarding the best approach to dealing with the Jewish DPs, international agreements were reached in the first decade after the war’s end that at least were designed to prevent expulsion at the risk of statelessness. Thus, the recognition of “de facto” statelessness has retained substantial importance for refugees down to the present day. Renunciation of a demonstrable citizenship remains today a tried and tested means of eluding an undesired and non-voluntary extradition back to one’s country of origin. In this way, from the traumatic experience of being vulnerable, defenseless and unprotected as a result of the deprivation of citizenship, within the span of two decades there arose a desirable category of the formerly unprotected. The declaration of Universal Human Rights in December 1948 had sought to eliminate statelessness as a problem that had come about as a result of the two world wars, and was necessarily regarded as a humanitarian tragedy. Article 15 came to ensure that “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality, nor denied the right to change his nationality.”60 The intention was to proscribe and eliminate the antithesis of the “citizen.” Ultimately, this Declaration, along with the Conventions that followed, completed the nation-state project, since it rejected both forced statelessness (for example, as a result of expatriation) and voluntary statelessness (for example, by an individual’s renunciation of their citizenship). Springing from the experiences of statelessness, the end of empires and decolonization, an option opened up envisioning new models of belonging, but national sovereignty continued nonetheless to retain priority over universal human rights. Although after 1945 there was certainly a phase of the “openness of history,” when in the immediate postwar negotiations on how to deal with statelessness, ideas were repeatedly broached, such as the total abolishment of passports, cancellation of visa requirements, or complete abandonment of the principle of the nation-state as a core principle of social and political order. It becomes apparent, particularly from a look at how statelessness was dealt with in the context of the development of ideas of cosmopolitanism and the “world citizen,” that the constricting framework of the sovereign nation-state was by no means self-evident.61 60 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15, (16 December 2016). 61 See on this Miriam Rürup, Von der Offenheit der Geschichte. Der Umgang mit Staatenlosigkeit und die weltbürgerliche Idee, in: Bernhard Gißibl/Isabella Löhr (eds.), Bessere

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Hannah Arendt hesitantly concluded that statelessness could of course only be eliminated by means of a renewed “establishment of national rights,” as the case of the Jews and the state of Israel had demonstrated.62 Thus, the nation-state continued to be the proven institution guaranteeing through protection of national rights also the adherence to human rights, even if only of those who were citizens of a respective nation-state. After all, precisely the experience with Jewish statelessness had resulted in a system that had, in itself, once again produced statelessness and a lack of protection. In these reflections, one can discern aspects of Hannah Arendt’s own thinking, nurtured by her own nearly decade-long experience as a stateless person herself. Arendt argued vehemently for the need to bid adieu to the nation-state; as a concrete model, for example, she proposed a “Mediterranean confederation” for Europe. Yet, she was not thinking here of abolishing national allegiances and belonging; on the contrary, she stressed that, above all, a clear category of belonging to a people was a fundamental prerequisite for living together in this world as human beings.63 On various occasions she made clear that she did not see this conception of a people as “national” in the sense of a nation-state system and its development in Europe.64 Here, the aporias of human rights give rise to the aporias of the global community. Because in order to be able to defend and protect universals such as the Rights of Man, in Arendt’s coherent logic, there is a need for what is particularistic, for example protection by the state. Statelessness as a product of the decomposition of the nation-state thus appeared nonetheless to be a condition surmountable only within a political body defined by the state. Their experiences of legal lack of protection as a result of expatriation by the National Socialists were utilized by the persons affected to demand a system of protection that, in the best case, would prevent future statelessness – but, realistically, would at least endeavor to ensure that a lack of documents would never again go hand in hand with such a degree of vulnerability Welten. Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften, Frankfurt a. M. 2017, 71– 201. 62 Arendt herself inevitably had to recognize that this “curse” continued on. At the end of the chapter on “The ‘Nation of Minorities’ and the Stateless People,” which, to a large extent, looks at the situation facing the European Jews, there is a reference in The Origins of Totalitarianism to a new group of the stateless: the Palestinians. Idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd rev. ed., New York 1958, 290. See on this Rürup, The Citizen and Its Other. 63 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah. A Hidden Tradition, in: idem, The Jewish Writings, ed. by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, New York 2007, 275–297, here 297 (first publ. 1944). 64 Idem, Zionism Reconsidered, in: idem, The Jewish Writings, 343–374, here 371 (first publ.: Menorah Tradition 33 [1945], 162–196).

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and lack of protection and defense. For the contemporaries, to view statelessness as a status worth achieving beyond the experience of compulsion is therefore only conceivable from that point in time when a trustworthy system of protection under international law is established. By pushing through and establishing their classification as stateless “UN-nationals,” the Jewish DPs thus made a central contribution to the creation of a system of human rights that is, down to the present, intended to protect refugees from expulsion – and being extradited into a situation fraught with a lack of legal safeguards and security. Translated from the German by Bill Templer

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Negotiating after Negotiations: Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund “In all the thirty years of the negotiations, this lousy 440 million has been the most difficult one of all.”1

On 27 May 1965, Nahum Goldmann, the President of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, made a major statement. One day after his hard-won success – the passage by the West German Bundestag of supplementary legislation to the 1952 Restitution Agreement expanding eligibility for Holocaust survivors and increasing the payment fund by a fairly significant amount – Goldmann announced that his organization would make no further attempts to amend or expand the Federal Republic’s restitution laws.2 An extraordinary period in which Goldmann had played an historic role in negotiating compensation for Jewish individuals and cultural institutions seemed about to come to an end.3 Yet only four years later, Goldmann was back in Bonn appealing for a new agreement. The ensuing deliberations – slow, intricate, occasionally acrimonious, and lasting an entire decade – would also consume the final years of Nahum Goldmann’s life. These “negotiations after negotiations,” which took place during a key period of Cold War history, would reflect the strikingly changed relations between the Federal Republic and the Jewish world and its most prominent emissary. Although these second-act negotiations produced far less notable results than the first, they also had an unexpected afterlife.4 1 2

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Claims Conference Archives, New York (henceforth CCA), Conference Reports 1980, Nahum Goldmann, Transcribed Remarks, 7 July 1980, 42. [N. a.], Goldmann Satisfied with Bundestag Voting of $ 300,000,000 for Nazi Victims, in: Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 28, 1965, (16 March 2017). For details, see Kurt R. Grossmann, Die Ehrenschuld. Kurzgeschichte der Wiedergutmachung, Frankfurt a. M./Berlin 1967, 144; Christian Pross, Paying for the Past. The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror, Baltimore, Md., 1998, 64 f. Ernst Katzenstein, Jewish Claims Conference und die Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts, in: Hans Jochen Vogel (ed.), Die Freiheit des Anderen. Festschrift für Martin Hirsch, Baden-Baden 1981, 219–226. The principal sources for this essay are the Nahum Goldmann papers (NG) housed in the Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Jerusalem, the Willy Brandt (WBA) and Helmut JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 287–305.

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The Premier Jewish Diplomat: Nahum Goldmann On his 75th birthday in 1969, Nahum Goldmann was celebrated by his supporters as the world’s most influential Jewish spokesman.5 The Lithuanian shtetl-born and German-educated journalist, who had served in the Reich Foreign Ministry during World War I and edited and published the Encyclopaedia Judaica in the 1920s, had fled Germany in 1933 and settled in Geneva. There the 38-year-old exile developed his talents for diplomacy. An ardent Zionist, in 1935 he was chosen to represent the Jewish Agency at the League of Nations, and one year later he became a leading figure in the new World Jewish Congress, with its headquarters in Paris and liaison office in Geneva. Thereafter Goldmann made the acquaintance of European statesmen, worked actively in defense of Jewish minority rights, and led efforts to aid Jewish refugees; but, in his own words, he also failed to stave off the Nazi threat to European Jewry.6 In 1940 Goldmann and his family fled to New York, where he would remain for fourteen years and become an active figure in Zionist affairs. He was one of the major proponents of the 1942 Biltmore program calling for the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. In 1945 he helped to unify the major US Jewish refugee organizations and in 1951 he became chair of the Jewish Agency’s Executive Committee. Although he obtained US citizenship in 1945 (one of the seven passports he would hold), Goldmann, a staunch Central European, was also critical of American Jewry’s leadership and its politics.7

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Schmidt (HSA) papers, housed in the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bad Godesberg, and the prime minister and foreign ministry records in the Israel State Archive (ISA), Jerusalem. A major source of information is the newlyopened CCA which provide a full, sometimes daily and often poignant record of Goldmann’s forays between Bonn, New York, and Jerusalem. I should also like to express my gratitude to the Claims Conference archivist Andrew Forrell for his invaluable help in retrieving these documents from the storage facility, enabling me to be the first to review them since they were filed. There is, as yet, no full-length critical biography. See Nahum Goldmann, Mein Leben als deutscher Jude, 2nd rev. ed., Munich/Vienna 1980; also Raphael Patai, Nahum Goldmann. His Mission to the Gentiles, Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987, along with Anita Shapira’s review: idem, Patai’s “Nahum Goldmann,” in: The Jewish Quarterly Review 78 (1988), no. 3/4, 336–339; Jehuda Reinharz/Evyatar Friesel, Nahum Goldmann. Jewish and Zionist Statesman. An Overview, in: Mark A. Raider (ed.), Nahum Goldmann. Statesman without a State, Albany, N. Y./Tel Aviv 2009, 3–59. Monty N. Penkower, Dr. Nahum Goldmann and the Policy of International Jewish Organizations, in: Selwyn Ilan Troen/Benjamin Pinkus (eds.), Organizing Rescue. National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, London/Portland, Oreg., 1992, 141–153. Goldmann, Mein Leben als deutscher Jude, 342–355.

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After World War II, as President of the World Jewish Congress, Goldmann worked closely with the Zionist leadership in Palestine to secure American support for the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1949 he urged the Truman administration to pressure the new West Germany to provide restitution to Holocaust survivors and indemnification for Jewish material losses during the Nazi period. And in response to the positive signal by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, in October 1951 Goldmann convened a meeting in New York of representatives of the twenty-two major Jewish organizations from seven countries.8 At this gathering a new Jewish international organization was established – the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (or Claims Conference). Goldmann succeeded in creating an extraordinary body to negotiate on behalf of Holocaust victims throughout the world, a non-state organization whose leader was recognized by both the German and Israeli governments as a full participant in the subsequent negotiations.9 Goldmann’s pivotal role in the September 1952 Luxembourg Agreement has been thoroughly documented elsewhere.10 A patient and persistent negotiator, he worked closely with Adenauer to ease the difficult discussions and expedite their conclusion. The Bonn government finally agreed to transfer DM 3.45 billion in goods to Israel and also to compensate hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors and to establish a DM 450 million fund, administered by the Claims Conference, for the relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement of tens of thousands of Nazi victims throughout the world and for the reconstruction of Jewish institutions in Europe. It was an unprecedented arrangement, concluded not only between two fledgling states that had no diplomatic relations with each other, but also between a government and the representative of the Jewish People.11 18 Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, South Africa, and the United States. 19 Nana Sagi, Die Rolle der jüdische Organisationen in den USA und die Claims Conference, in: Ludolf Herbst/Constantin Goschler (eds.), Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Munich 1989, 99–118. 10 Idem, German Reparations. A History of the Negotiations. New York/Jerusalem 1986; Ronald Zweig, Reparations Made Me. Nahum Goldmann, German Reparations, and the Jewish World, in: Raider (ed.), Nahum Goldmann, 233–253; idem, German Reparations and the Jewish World. A History of the Claims Conference, Boulder, Col., 1987; Marilyn Henry, Confronting the Perpetrators. A History of the Claims Conference, London/Portland, Oreg., 2007; Christian Pross, Paying for the Past. The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror, Baltimore, Md., 1998, 64 f. 11 For the texts, see Ministry of Foreign Affairs, State of Israel, Documents Relating to the Agreement between the Government of Israel and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (signed on 10 September 1952 at Luxembourg), Jerusalem, 1953; Protocols Drawn Up by the Representatives of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. Signed at Luxembourg on 10 September 1952 by Dr. Nahum Goldmann for the Conference on Jew-

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After 1952 Goldmann became a prominent international Jewish figure. As a frequent visitor in the Federal Republic, he directed the conference’s lobbying efforts with the Bonn government and the Bundestag to implement the Luxembourg Agreement and succeeded in expanding its terms in 1956 and 1965.12 Another of Goldmann’s accomplishments occurred in the US in 1954 after the Eisenhower administration signaled its intention to diverge from its predecessor’s pro-Israel policies. Through the creation of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations Goldmann helped lay the groundwork for the unification of American Jewry to represent Jewish interests in international affairs and he became its first chair.13 In the nonJewish world, Nahum Goldmann was highly valued for his old-world charm, tact, and flexibility, only occasionally tinged with bouts of brashness. Many foreign leaders considered Goldmann a convenient intermediary with Israel: a Jewish voice of reason and balance.14 Goldmann’s relations with Israel, the state he had helped to establish, were, at best, prickly. A vocal advocate of reconciliation with the Arabs, he was universally distrusted in Israeli official circles, particularly after the June 1967 war, when he made a number of quixotic proposals, including the country’s neutralization.15 Goldmann’s free-lance diplomacy, which included private talks with world leaders and also two abortive efforts to meet with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, vexed the Israeli government, as did his criticisms of its policies in the US and German press. Almost all Israelis viewed him with suspicion: the worldly elegantly-clad gadfly, amateur politician, and self-confident diplomat with his vast list of international contacts, the

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ish Material Claims against Germany and Chancellor Dr. Konrad Adenauer for the Federal Republic of Germany, Nuremberg [1952]. Karen Heilig, From the Luxembourg Agreement to Today. Representing a People, in: Berkeley Journal of International Law 20 (2002), no. 1, 176–196, here 180–185; Goldmann, Mein Leben als deutscher Jude, 426–454. Jack Wertheimer, Jewish Organizational Life in the United States since 1945, in: The American Jewish Year Book 95 (1995), 3–98, here 55–60. Despite the growth of several rivals since the 1980s, this group continues to exert considerable political power in US politics. [N. a.], Gestorben: Nahum Goldmann, in: Der Spiegel, 6 September 1982, 204; Dietrich Strothmann, Nahum Goldmanns Autobiographie „Ein unvergesslicher Jude“. Ein Leben im Dienste des Judentums und des Staates Israel, in: Die Zeit, 1 October 1982, (16 March 2017). NG CZA Z6/1151/I, Goldmann to Prime Minister’s Office, 18 August 1968; Herzog to Goldmann, 9 September 1968. One of Goldmann’s foremost critics, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, called his public diplomacy talents “slipshod.” See The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, CC001/189, Truman Institute Library, Abba Eban Archives, Eban to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, 22 December 1967. In a letter to Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin Eban denounced Goldmann’s “malignant” and “cancerous” international activities. See ibid., CC001/7, Eban to Rabin, 9 April 1968.

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“discordant Zionist” too steeped in the mentality and independent habits of the diaspora to faithfully follow Jerusalem’s direction.16 And although Goldmann had provided substantial help in bringing tens of thousands of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East to Israel in the 1950s and played a major role in the establishment of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, he also insisted on the importance of sustaining free and robust Jewish communities throughout the world, including the Soviet Union.17 Goldmann left the United States in the early 1960s and after a brief but unsuccessful plunge into Israeli politics18 returned to Europe. There, as leader of the Claims Conference, the World Jewish Congress, and the World Zionist Organization, he established residences in Geneva and in Paris. Yet despite Goldmann’s difficult relations with almost every Israeli leader and with the Israeli public, he remained devoted to its large population of Holocaust survivors, many of whom were in poor health, living in poverty, and receiving insufficient assistance from their government.

Goldmann’s New Partner: Willy Brandt A major political change occurred in the Federal Republic in 1969 with the end of twenty years of CDU/CSU governments and the ascension of a LeftCenter SPD-FDP coalition.19 Willy Brandt, West Germany’s first Social Democrat Chancellor, set out to transform his country’s international position. Over the next four-and-a-half years, the former exile from Nazi Germany, West Berlin mayor, and Foreign Minister reversed his predecessors’ Cold War stance, actively pursuing his Ostpolitik – reconciliation with 16 Shlomo Avineri, Statecraft without a State. A Jewish Contribution to Political History?, in: Gabriella Gelardini/Christian Strecker (eds.), Kontexte der Schrift, 2 vols., Stuttgart 2005, here vol. 1: Gabriella Gelardini (ed.), Text, Ethik, Judentum und Christentum, Gesellschaft. Ekkehard W. Stegemann zum 60. Geburtstag, 403–419, here 417–419. 17 Nahum Goldmann, The Future of Israel, in: Foreign Affairs 48 (1970), no. 3, 443–459; idem, Die Zeit arbeitet gegen Israel, in: Der Spiegel, 27 April 1970. See also Dina Porat, Nahum Goldmann and the Establishment of the Diaspora Museum, in: Raider (ed.), Nahum Goldmann, 255–272; Suzanne D. Rutland, Leadership of Accommodation or Protest? Nahum Goldmann and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry, in: ibid., 273–296; Meir Chazan, Goldmann’s Initiative to Meet with Nasser in 1970, in: ibid., 297–324. 18 Dr. Goldmann in Israel to Help Form a New Party, in: New York Times, 18 March 1961, 5; Goldmann Move Long Rumored among Zionists, in: New York Times, 7 May 1961, 38; Nahum naht, in: Der Spiegel, 21 June 1961, 47 f.; Goldmann, Mein Leben als deutscher Jude, 457. 19 Arnulf Baring, Machtwechsel. Die Ära Brandt-Scheel, together with Manfred Görtemaker, Stuttgart 21982.

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Bonn’s communist neighbors, including an acknowledgement of the existing borders as a consequence of Germany’s aggression and defeat in World War II – while also strengthening ties with its Western allies. In 1971 Brandt became the fourth German to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for instilling “hope for a new spring of peace for Europe’s frozen soil.”20 Brandt’s government was also determined to pursue a policy of evenhandedness (Ausgewogenheit) between the Arab states and Israel. To accomplish this, his government set out to restore diplomatic relations with the nine Arab countries, after these had been broken by those states in consequence of the establishment of German-Israeli diplomatic relations in 1965. It also announced that the FRG’s relations with Israel would no longer be governed by repentance but would now become as “normal” as with any other country. But this proposed normalization struck a discordant note among Jews, who insisted that the Bonn government could not ignore the slaughter of six million people nor renounce the financial and legal responsibilities it had undertaken to the survivors.21 In Brandt and his colleagues, Goldmann faced a new generation of German leaders neither tainted with the Nazi past nor burdened by guilt. Brandt, the handsome, charismatic, 56-year-old politician, had no personal ties to the Holocaust, no Jews in his immediate entourage, and, according to a former member of his inner circle, no “special feelings” for Israel.22 Moreover, West Germany’s sharp economic downturn in the late 1960s had brought budget-minded officials to the forefront of the powerful Finance Ministry. Brandt’s left-center government, which until 1972 held an only narrow parliamentary majority and included the pro business FDP, was highly reluctant to take on new financial obligations that would burden its Ostpolitik or to make any concessions involving Israel that would antagonize the Arabs.23

20 Speech by Mrs. Aase Lionæs, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in: Tore Frängsmyr/Irwin Abrams (eds.), Nobel Lectures. Peace, 1971–1980. Including Presentation and Acceptance Speeches and Laureates’ Biographies, Singapore 1997, 7–14, here 14, (22 July 2016). On Brandt, see Baring, Machtwechsel; Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt. 1913– 1992. Visionär und Realist, Stuttgart/Munich 2002. 21 Carole Fink, “Ostpolitik” and West German-Israeli Relations, in: idem/Bernd Schaefer (eds.), Ostpolitik, 1919–1974. European and Global Responses, Cambridge 2009, 182– 205. 22 Remarks by Manfred Lahnstein, a former ministerial director in Brandt’s cabinet at the conference “International Affairs and the Politics of Memory. German-Jewish-Israeli Relations after the Holocaust at the University of Haifa,” 12 January 2014 (no transcript available). 23 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 13 August 1970; Markus A. Weingardt, Deutsche Israel- und Nahostpolitik. Die Geschichte einer Gratwanderung seit 1949, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2002, 197–202.

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Also, there was little public support for concluding a new restitution agreement with the Claims Conference. By 1969, almost half the West German population had either been young children during the Nazi period or were born after 1945. A growing segment of Germans not only felt distant from the Holocaust but had also become highly critical of Israeli policies and increasingly resentful of the already large compensation payments to the Jews.24 Moreover, there was a lingering antisemitism in West Germany in conservative and far right circles as well as in new outbursts from the radical left.25 The tiny West German Jewish community of some 25,000, represented by the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, had no voice in public policy;26 and for Willy Brandt, with his impeccable anti-Nazi past, the interventions of American Jews – formerly a major concern in Bonn – had virtually no impact.27

Negotiating a “Post-1965” Agreement During the 1952 negotiations, a still impoverished West Germany had insisted on limiting the Luxembourg Agreement’s scope and duration, and the Claims Conference had acquiesced in the 1965 cut-off date for further applications. Also, both sides had agreed to exclude restitution to Holocaust victims living behind the Iron Curtain in countries with no diplomatic ties with the Federal Republic.28 As the FRG’s economic and political circumstances improved, its West European neighbors had presented claims to Bonn on behalf of their victims of Nazi persecution. Between 1959 and 1964, the Federal Republic concluded bilateral agreements with twelve countries, providing them with

24 CCA, Annual Meeting Files, Goldmann Remarks at Claims Conference Annual Meeting, Geneva, 6 July 1971. 25 Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge. Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany, Oxford/New York 1992; Timo Stein, Zwischen Antisemitismus und Israelkritik. Antizionismus in der deutschen Linken, Wiesbaden 2011. 26 Lynn Rapaport, The Cultural and Material Reconstruction of the Jewish Communities in the Federal Republic of Germany, in: Jewish Social Studies 49 (1987), no. 2, 137–154. 27 American Jewish Committee Archive, New York, Bertram Gold Executive Files, box 91, Jacob Blaustein [President of the American Jewish Committee] to Goldmann on conversation with German Ambassador Rolf Pauls, 30 June 1970; Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations. The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945, Detroit, Mich., 1999, 271 f. 28 Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Die Krise der Shilumim/Wiedergutmachungs-Verhandlungen im Sommer 1952, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 38 (1990), no. 1, 113–139; Klaus Huwe/Josie Mély, L’Allemagne fédérale et l’État d’Israël, in: Documents. Revue des Questions Allemandes 37 (1982), no. 3, 140–152.

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lump-sum payments of DM 4.000 per individual. And in 1965, pressed by the Claims Conference and by the State of Israel, the Bonn government added DM 1.2 billion to the indemnification fund set up by the Luxembourg Agreement to cover Jewish survivors who had escaped from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe up until that year.29 By 1969 a new crisis had developed. Four years after the 1965 cut-off date and Goldmann’s renunciatory statement, some additional 20,000 Jews had left the East. They had emigrated for a number of reasons, but primarily because they were fleeing the wave of official antisemitism after Israel’s victory over the Arabs in June 1967, the repression in Poland after March 1968, and the suppression that followed the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. At least two-thirds of these refugees were survivors of the Holocaust, approximately half settled in Israel, and the remainder went to Europe or the United States.30 Faced with this unexpected influx and with the high cost of resettlement, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees approached Bonn for assistance, and in December 1969 the West German Finance Ministry invited Goldmann to discuss a solution. The new government, intent on settling the matter quickly and without excessive cost, proposed to release part of the DM 1.2 billion restitution fund for the new arrivals. But Goldmann, raising moral and practical objections, refused to add their claims to the existing funds, and insisted that “new money” would have to be allocated.31 The difficulties were considerable. Ernst Katzenstein, the Director of the Claims Conference’s office in Bonn, warned Goldmann that the new Bonn government was “far more reserved” than its CDU/CSU predecessors toward the indemnification of Nazi victims. Brandt, breaking with past traditions, had in his first policy address been noticeably silent on the Federal Republic’s responsibility toward Israel and the Jewish people, and the new Chan-

29 Susanna Schrafstetter, The Diplomacy of “Wiedergutmachung.” Memory, the Cold War, and the Western European Victims of Nazism, 1956–1964, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (Winter 2003), no. 3, 459–479; Helmut Rumpf, Die Regelung der deutschen Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Archiv des Völkerrechts 23 (1985), no. 1/ 2, 74–101. 30 On the influx from the Eastern bloc, see CCA, Post-1965 Records, S. J. Roth (Institute of Jewish Affairs, London) to Ernst Katzenstein (Director of the Claims Conference office in Bonn), 1 May 1969; ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 27 May 1969; ibid., Daniel Lack (Legal Adviser, American Joint Distribution Committee, Geneva) to Katzenstein, 21 May and 12 June 1969; ibid., E. Jahn (Staff Member, UN High Commissioner for Refugees) to Lack, 9 June 1969. 31 Ibid., Katzenstein to Saul Kagan, Bonn, 15, 16, and 17 December 1969; ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 31 December 1969; ibid., Kagan to Katzenstein, New York, 29 March 1970.

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cellor had shown himself more difficult to gain access to than previous West German leaders.32 Goldmann’s resolve to create an entirely new fund came with a price: initiating new talks with highly problematic new partners. In his report on 1 June 1970 to the Claims Conference’s Board of Directors, Goldmann acknowledged the new faces in Bonn and also admitted that the German people were “sick and tired” of making restitution and indemnification payments – now costing them nearly eight times more than the 1952 estimate of DM 6 billion. Although he too was weary of plying the route to Bonn, he would nonetheless persevere on behalf of the post-1965 arrivals.33 There were other complications, including the approximately 200,000 outstanding indemnification claims that had frayed nerves and consumed hours of study and deliberation between the Claims Conference and Bonn. Also, the Israeli government had raised demands for increased payments on behalf of medically incapacitated Holocaust survivors. But the greatest obstacle before Goldmann were the potential rival demands against the Federal Republic by the East European governments involved in Brandt’s Ostpolitik (especially Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia) for human and property damages in World War II, which threatened to delay the negotiations indefinitely.34 Willy Brandt, absorbed in the negotiations for the Moscow and Warsaw treaties and the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, was scarcely involved in the post-1965 project. And Goldmann, during their encounters in September 1970 and February 1971, decided not to press the busy Chancellor.35 But as opposition mounted in Bonn to any new financial commitments – coming especially from the new “budget-conscious” Finance Minister Karl Schiller, from the reserved Foreign Minister Walter Scheel (who was concerned, above all, with not antagonizing the Arabs), and also from Brandt’s own Chief of Staff Horst Ehmke (who invoked a “negative” German public opinion to bolster his reservations against any new agreement): Goldmann 32 Ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 1 April 1970; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 3 April 1970. 33 Ibid., Katzenstein Report, 1 June 1970. For details about the difficulties of dealing with German officials, see NG CZA Z6/2405, Goldmann to Pinchas Sapir (Israeli Minister of Finance), 28 June, 23 August, 2nd and 27 December 1971. 34 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 31 July, 13 and 14 August 1970; ISA 130 4573/6, Ben Horin to Finance and Foreign Ministries, 12 March and 6 April 1971. See also Aufzeichnungen des Ministerialdirigenten Lebsanft, 12 July 1971, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (hereafter AAPD) 1971, ed. on behalf of Auswärtiges Amt by Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 3 vols., here vol. 2, Munich 2002, 1120–1127. 35 NG CZA Z6/2392, Goldmann to Brandt, Paris, 27 October 1970; CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 18 September 1970 and 5 February 1971.

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decided to make a direct appeal to the Chancellor against the “deplorable situation” in Bonn.36 During their meeting on 6 December 1971 – on the very eve of Brandt’s departure for Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize – Goldmann used “tough talk” with the Chancellor, complaining about the unavailability of key officials and suggesting the creation of a special committee to clear up all the pending indemnification claims and move ahead with the post-1965 project.37 The Claims Conference followed this up with an official message in February 1972 outlining its proposals for adjudicating the outstanding indemnification cases, setting up a special fund for the post-1965 migrants, and calling for “urgent action.”38 However, Brandt in 1972 was still focused on other issues: obtaining Bundestag ratification of the Eastern treaties in May, opening talks with East Germany in August, and preparing for the November elections in which, despite the political backlash over the Munich Olympics, his government triumphed.39 And although Brandt had attained a comfortable parliamentary majority, he now faced challenges from his party’s young left-wing dissidents and appeared to close observers increasingly weak and indecisive.40 Goldmann, returning to Bonn in February 1973, met again with Brandt and also with the new Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt, who was particularly unenthusiastic over a post-1965 agreement. Another complication arose. Brandt, his Secretary of State Egon Bahr, and Schmidt all insisted that Goldmann direct his efforts for increased compensation toward the newlyrecognized East Germany. This was both an astute and a draining condition – compelling the Jewish emissary, despite his well-founded reservations, to approach the GDR, divert his energies, and serve Bonn’s interests by creating a model for Poland and Yugoslavia to direct their restitution claims also to East Berlin. It forced the Claims Conference into very long, difficult, and largely fruitless efforts spanning more than two decades until the GDR finally expired.41 In the meantime, the Claims Conference’s Bonn office 36 NG, CZA Z6/2412, Goldmann to Brandt, Paris, 21 October 1971; for the background, see CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 25 and 26 February, 24 March, 25 May, 19 and 23 November 1971; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 11 and 12 March, 14 May, and 20 August 1971; ibid., Kagan to Goldmann, 30 November 1971. 37 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 8 and 15 December 1971. 38 Ibid., Goldmann to Brandt, 15 February 1972. 39 On 2 March 1972, the Chancellor told a visiting American Jewish delegation that although his government was “in close contact” with Goldmann and Katzenstein, because of its Ostpolitik negotiations it would have to “set limits” on any new indemnity claims. AdsD, WBA, A9/27, Memorandum, Bonn, 3 March 1972. 40 ISA 130 5331/7, Ben Horin to Foreign Ministry, Bonn, 9 April 1973. 41 CCA, Post-65 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 7 February 1973, Katzenstein to Lack, 9 February 1973, and Katzenstein to Goldmann, 9 March 1973; ISA 130 5332/7, Meroz to Foreign Ministry, 7 February 1973.

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redoubled its lobbying efforts; and the Israeli government urged its emissaries to maintain pressure on West German officials and politicians.42 Willy Brandt’s long-awaited visit to Israel in June 1973 – the first by a sitting German leader – momentarily raised hopes among Claims Conference and Israeli officials.43 On the eve of this journey, Goldmann urged Brandt to establish a parliamentary group to deal with his long-delayed restitution proposal.44 The Chancellor, however, refused to take any action; and, bowing to his hosts’ sensitivity, he also excluded Goldmann from his entourage.45 When the hitherto secret talks between Goldmann and Brandt suddenly became public, a 30 May article in the mass circulation Stern assured West Germans that their Chancellor was not intending to increase the Federal Republic’s financial burdens.46 Not unexpectedly, during his minutely-scripted five-day visit to Israel, the West German Chancellor made no financial commitments. Although an amiable guest, Brandt repeatedly stressed the priority of the present and future over the dark German-Jewish past;47 and intent on reinforcing Bonn’s efforts to court the Arabs, he repeatedly denied, in public and in private, a “special relationship” with Israel.48 Goldmann, unimpressed with the Chancellor’s courteous greeting to him from Jerusalem, had become deeply pessi-

42 Ibid., Meroz to Foreign Ministry, Bonn, 7 February 1973; ISA 130 6808/4, Ben Horin to Finance Minister Ministry, Bonn, 6 April, 21 and 22 May 1973; ibid., Sapir to Ben Horin, 10 April 1973; ibid., Meroz to Foreign Ministry, 11 April 1973; ibid., Ya’acovi [Jacoby] to Foreign Ministry, 18 May 1973. On Ambassador Ben Horin’s difficult meeting with Schmidt on 6 April 1973, see CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 10 April 1973; see also CCA (1979), Ferencz, Report to the July 1979 Claims Conference Meeting on Efforts to obtain Compensation from the German Democratic Republic. 43 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Ortar to Katzenstein, Jerusalem, 13 April 1973. 44 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 29 March 1973. 45 Ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, Bonn, 18 May 1973. Brandt did include the Zentralrat president Werner Nachmann and his wife in his delegation. On West German press commentary, see Keine neuen Forderungen Israels, in: Bremer Nachrichten, 5 June 1973; Der Staatsbesuch des deutschen Bundeskanzlers in Israel, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 June 1973. 46 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 4 and 6 June 1973. See also Höflich zur Kenntnis nehmen. Warum Bundeskanzler Brandt beim Staatsbesuch in Israel neue Wiedergutmachungsforderungen ablehnen will, in: Der Stern, 30 May 1973. 47 Brandt doubtless had in mind the current negotiations between the FRG and Yugoslavia, in which his government, also insisting on “the future instead of the past,” would succeed in substituting Tito’s demand for reparations with DM 1 billion in development aid. For details, see Milan Kosanović, Brandt and Tito. Between “Ostpolitik” and Nonalignment, in: Fink/Schaefer (eds.), Ostpolitik, 1919–1974, 232–243. 48 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, Bonn, 7 and 8 June 1973; ibid., Ortar to Katzenstein, Jerusalem, 11 June 1973.

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mistic over reaching a new settlement.49 Brandt, on his part, termed this visit “the most difficult journey of all.”50 Goldmann, returning to Bonn on 30 August, once more complained to the chancellor that the situation was “unsatisfactory and deplorable” on all levels. There were no longer any parliamentary experts to deal with the remaining indemnification questions; there were no Foreign Ministry officials dedicated to restitution issues; the federal states lacked qualified personnel to adjudicate the remaining pre-1965 cases; and Brandt’s government – despite its Bundestag majority – had assumed a “detached” attitude toward Holocaust survivors. Goldmann lamented that “the grand beginning by Adenauer that had been continued by Erhard and Kiesinger” had reached a “dead end” through a process of “unconscious sabotage […].” He further insisted that “a unique and generous program would end on a discordant note.” Threatening to unleash a public campaign, Goldmann set a timetable: the May 1974 meeting of the World Jewish Congress at The Hague, which he invited the Chancellor to address upon the successful conclusion of the negotiations. Brandt, although acknowledging several impediments – the claims of the Eastern communist governments, and the Foreign Ministry’s concerns about antagonizing the Arabs – denied any intention of dropping the talks and encouraged Goldmann to present concrete proposals.51 Rising to Brandt’s challenge, Goldmann returned to Bonn in October 1973 and held a new round of meetings with Scheel and Schmidt, and also with Herbert Wehner, chair of the SPD parliamentary faction.52 On 18 October he presented a figure of DM 1 billion to Brandt, who ostensibly raised no objections, but indicated a three- to five-year payment period.53 After his departure, Goldman began formulating concrete plans for the administration of the fund to some 50,000 claimants.54

49 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Goldmann to Schmidt, 10 June 1973; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 19 June 1973. 50 Carole Fink, “The Most Difficult Journey of All.” Willy Brandt’s Trip to Israel in June 1973, in: The International History Review 37 (2015), no. 3, 503–518. 51 ISA 130 6803/4, Ya’acovi to Finance Ministry, Bonn, 30 August 1973; CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 15 September 1973. 52 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 11 October 1973; ISA 130 3603/4, Ya’acovi to Foreign Ministry and Finance Ministry, Bonn, 15 September, and 19 October 1973; ibid., Ben Horin to Foreign Ministry, 15 and 17 October 1973. 53 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 19 October 1973. 54 The estimates were 48,000 in Israel, 3,000 in other countries. See ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 5 November 1973. New complications arose, however, when Goldmann’s partners – the Israeli government and the Claims Conference in New York – raised procedural issues. ISA 130 5331/15, Report, Israeli Ministry of Finance, 13 October 1973. CCA, Post-1965 Records, Ya’acovi to Katzenstein, Bonn, 8 November 1973; ibid., Ferencz to Katzenstein, 12 November 1973.

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However, because of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, the negotiations were suddenly placed on ice. In November, attempting to organize a European response to the Arab oil boycott, Brandt decided against submitting a new restitution proposal to the cabinet;55 and in February, because of the economic crisis, Schmidt insisted on a postponement and a reduction in the total figure.56 When Goldmann returned to Bonn in March 1974, he was unable to obtain interviews with either Brandt or Schmidt.57 There would be no public announcement at the World Jewish Congress; indeed, its May 1974 meeting at The Hague had to be cancelled because of “security reasons.”58 Goldmann’s almost five-year-old initiative was collapsing. The waning days of Brandt’s chancellorship were scarred by the scandal over the Stasi spy Günter Guillaume’s presence in his entourage. Schmidt drew back from meeting with Goldmann, hinting vaguely at private consultations with the Chancellor, whom he was also plotting to unseat.59 In a heartfelt appeal to the Finance Minister, Goldmann referred to his long and fruitful collaboration with the Bonn government, minimized the cost of a post-1965 settlement, and pleaded for a prompt and generous solution before the World Jewish Congress Executive Committee’s meeting in June.60 Schmidt responded on 2 May, promising to take the matter in hand and complete the work by the month’s end. But the Finance Minister’s offer was hedged with two stiff restrictions: another public renunciation by the Claims Conference and the government of Israel of any further indemnification claims, and also – due to the drastic downturn in the German economy, an offer of only half of Goldmann’s figure – DM 500 million – of which 10 percent would be allocated to non-Jewish persecutees.61 Goldmann, after consultations in Israel, rejected both proposals and offered to return to Bonn for further negotiations.62

55 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 13 December 1973, and 6 February 1974. 56 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 6 February 1974. See also ISA 130 4576/6, Ya’acovi to Foreign Ministry and Finance Ministry, Bonn, 6 February 1974. 57 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 8, 11, 15, and 19 March 1974. 58 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 27 March 1974. 59 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 28 March 1974. 60 Ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt, 28 March 1974. See also AdsD, 1HSA, A006968, Memorandum, Bonn, 2 May 1974. 61 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Goldmann to Schmidt, 2 and 4 May 1974; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, Bonn, 3 May 1974; ISA 130 6817/12, Ya’acovi to Foreign Ministry, Bonn, 2 May 1974. 62 AdsD, 1HSA, A006908, Goldmann to Schmidt, Jerusalem, 20 May; ibid., Schmidt to Goldmann, 28 June 1974.

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The Final Stage On 6 May 1974, Willy Brandt resigned the West German chancellorship and, not unexpectedly, was succeeded by Helmut Schmidt. Despite their difficult transactions, Goldmann warmly congratulated the new West German leader.63 However, it was obvious that the Claims Conference’s position had further deteriorated because the new Finance Minister, Hans Appel, opposed any payments whatsoever.64 In June, after Schmidt cancelled their appointment at the last minute, Goldmann had to accept still another delay.65 Schmidt was determined to conclude the post-1965 issue. At his hourlong meeting with Goldmann on 8 October, the Chancellor, accompanied by the newly-appointed West German Ambassador to Israel Per Fischer, offered to create an endowment of DM 600 million, of which 10 percent would be allocated to non-Jewish emigrés from the Eastern bloc. It would be payable in five or six annual installments and be administered by the Claims Conference, which would have to issue a formal statement renouncing any further demands from the Federal Republic. Underlining his country’s dire financial situation, Schmidt stressed the extraordinary nature of this arrangement: Had Goldmann’s project come forward only at that moment, it would certainly have been rejected.66 Brandt, who had remained on as SPD party chairman, urged a speedy acceptance, as did Goldmann’s handful of loyal allies in Bonn.67 But while the Claims Conference leader proceeded to iron out the details,68 there were new obstacles: protests from the Israeli government, procedural objections from the Claims Conference in New York, and the demands of the Zentralrat’s leader Werner Nachmann to play a larger role in the new arrangement.69 Moreover, after Schmidt’s DM 600 million propo-

63 Ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt, Jerusalem, 20 May 1974. 64 Ibid., Appel to Schmidt, 10 June, 12, and 25 September 1974. Katzenstein quoted Goldmann’s description of Appel: “a tough boy without [a] sense of humor,” who stressed that “he had been three years old when the Nazis had come to power.” CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 7 June 1974. 65 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 14 June 1974; ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt and to Appel, 21 June 1974; ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 27 August 1974. 66 Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 10 October 1974; ibid., Goldmann to Executive Directors of Member Organizations, Board of Directors of the Claims Conference, 22 October 1974. See also Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Schmidt mit dem Präsidenten des Jüdischen Weltkongresses, Goldmann, 8 October 1974, in: AAPD 1974, Munich 2005, vol. 2, 1267– 1272. 67 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 10 October 1974. 68 Ibid., Memorandum of Understanding (draft), 4 December 1974. 69 Ibid., Vermerk über ein Gespräch von BM a. D. Prof. Dr. Alex Möller mit Dr. Nahum Goldmann und Staatssekretär Agmon vom israelischen Finanzministerium, 13 November

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sal – made without consulting either the Foreign or the Finance Ministry – had been leaked in the West German press, the two ministries voiced their opposition, as did several East European and Arab governments as well.70 There was another weak point in Schmidt’s proposal, which was revealed in the Bundestag session on 11 December 1974: To avoid a drawn-out public and parliamentary debate, the Chancellor had insisted on a joint-resolution by all three major West German parties, thus handing a veto to the CDU/ CSU opposition.71 It also precipitated a wave of negative press coverage.72 Despite Goldmann’s appeals, a new generation of CDU/CSU politicians – now in the opposition camp – were adamant against further payments to Jewish victims.73 The party of Konrad Adenauer suddenly raised strong procedural, financial, political, and diplomatic objections, championed the

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1974; ibid., Katzenstein to Pine, 26 November 1974; ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 13 and 26 November (two letters), 3, 5, 6, 9, and 19 December 1974; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 4, 5, and 19 December 1974. Also AdsD, 1HSA, A006968, Nachmann to Schmidt, 10 July and 28 October 1974; ibid., Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland to Schmidt, 26 November 1974; Schmidt to Nachmann, 26 November and 13 December 1974; ibid., Leister to Schmidt, 7 October 1974; ibid., Per Fischer to Schmidt, 12 December 1974; also ibid., Nachmann and Ginsburg to Goldmann, 12 December 1974. Aufzeichnung des Vortragenden Legationsrats I. Klasse Rumpf, 12 December 1974, in: AAPD 1974, vol. 2, 1617–1620; CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 13 January 1975, appending articles in the Frankfurter Rundschau and Tagesspiegel, 12 January 1975. AdsD, 1HSA, A007005, Vermerk über das Gespräch des BK mit Vorsitzenden der 3 Fraktionen, 16 January 1975; also CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 26 February 1975. Wollen Juden 600 Millionen?, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 January 1975; Neue Gespräche über die Wiedergutmachung, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 January 1975; Fraktionen prüfen Regelung der Rest-Wiedergutmachung, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18 January 1975; 600 oder mehr, in: Der Spiegel, 3 March 1975; Streit um die Wiedergutmachung, in: Westfälische Rundschau, 19 April 1975; on the negative foreign effects, see Araber fordern. Bonn darf NS-Opfern nichts mehr zahlen, in: Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 13 February 1975; Die PLO droht der Bundesrepublik, in: Die Welt, 15 February 1975; Polen verärgert und enttäuscht über Bonn, in: Kölnische Rundschau, 17 February 1975; “Ich weiß nicht, wie man Helmut helfen kann,” in: Der Spiegel, 24 February 1975; Goldmann verhandelt in Bonn über die Wiedergutmachung, in: Die Welt, 18 March 1975; Bonn wich vor massivem Druck wegen Wiedergutmachung zurück, in: Die Welt, 26 March 1975. On the damaging impact, see CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Goldmann, 26 March 1975. See also Constantin Goschler, Die Bundesrepublik und die Entschädigung von Ausländern seit 1966, in: Hans Günter Hockerts/Claudia Moisel/ Tobias Winstel (Hgg.), Grenzen der Wiedergutmachung. Die Entschädigung für NS-Verfolgte in West- und Osteuropa 1945–2000, Göttingen 2006, 94–146, here 111 f., fnn. 73– 77. Ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 8 and 27 January 1975; ibid., Goldmann to Carstens, 25 January 1975; ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 19, 26 March, and 7 April 1975; ibid., Katzenstein to Goldmann, 4, 7, 8, and 15 April 1975.

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claims of German expellees, and raised alarms over the negative consequences abroad.74 Rather than risk public criticism, Goldmann acquiesced in Schmidt’s decision to postpone further political negotiations.75 Thereupon Katzenstein correctly predicted a very long delay, accompanied by “gloom, failure and frustration”;76 and indeed there was no progress for several years. The talks between Goldmann and the German government were halted by the elections in the FRG in October 1976 and in Israel in May 1977, by continuing CDU/CSU opposition, and also by a dispute between the government of Israel and the Claims Conference over the distribution of monies and the goals to which they would be allocated. Nonetheless, Goldmann continued to lobby for a settlement, and in 1978 received a valuable endorsement from Marion Dönhoff, co-publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a close friend of the Chancellor.77 It was only on 14 December 1979 that Goldmann’s project finally came to fruition.78 Over the objections of the Foreign and Finance Ministries, Schmidt persuaded the three major parties in the Bundestag to adopt a “final indemnification gesture” (Abschlussgeste der Wiedergutmachung), committing the reduced figure of DM 440 million for the post-1965 emigrants to be paid over five years. The newly-named Hardship Fund would be administered by the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, which would receive DM 40 million to assist Jewish communities in Germany. The Claims Conference would distribute the remaining funds according to the eligibility guidelines established by the Federal Cabinet, and individual payments were not to exceed DM 5.000.79 In January 1980, Goldmann hastened to Bonn to iron out the details with Schmidt and returned in June and July.80

74 On Goldmann’s Bonn meetings from 4 to 6 June, see ibid., Katzenstein to Kagan, 6 June 1975. 75 AdsD, 1HSA, A007110, Goldmann to Schmidt, Paris, 10 June and 18 July 1975. 76 CCA, Post-1965 Records, Katzenstein to Kagan, 11 June 1975. 77 AdsD, 1HSA, A006814, Dönhoff to Schmidt, 1 May 1978; also ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt, 3 May 1978. 78 Gespräch des Bundesministers Genscher mit dem israelischen Wirtschaftsminister Patt, 19 November 1979, in: AAPD 1979, Munich 2010, vol. 2, 1718–1724, here 1724; CCA Stiftung Wiedergutmachung, Katzenstein to Weismann, 5 December 1979. 79 Aufzeichnung des Ministerialdirigenten Verbeek, 14 January 1980, in: AAPD 1980, Munich 2011, vol. 1, 72–78. Anticipating Arab protests, the Bonn government emphasized that none of the funds would be paid to Israel. 80 AdsD, 1HSA, A008878, von Staden to Schmidt, Tel Aviv, 17 December 1979; ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt, 19 December 1979 and 16 January 1980; ibid., Goldmann, Note, 7 January 1980; ibid., Talks between Goldmann and Schmidt, 15 January 1980; ibid., Gablenz, Note, 17 January 1980; AdsD, 1HSA, A008911, Vermerk, 19 June 1980; AdsD, 1HSA, A008961, Gespräch BK/Goldmann, 10 July 1981.

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On 8 July 1980 Schmidt, fulfilling Goldmann’s invitation to Willy Brandt, became the first German leader to address a board meeting of the World Jewish Congress. At this gathering in Amsterdam, which was honoring Goldmann’s 85th birthday, Schmidt praised the Claims Conference president and called him the “leader of Diaspora Jewry.”81 However, one day earlier Goldmann in his report to the directors of the Claims Conference, was both disgruntled and philosophical at his most recent accomplishment. “In all the thirty years in the negotiations, this lousy 440 million has been the most difficult one.” He detailed the numerous problems that had arisen in the final half decade of talks, including the poor relations between Schmidt and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He paid tribute to Werner Nachmann, head of the Zentralrat, who had provided indispensable last-minute help in wrapping up the Bonn negotiations. And he also complained of the difficulties in working with the Israeli government. Acknowledging that he had achieved no “triumph,” Goldman was nonetheless proud that “the last act didn’t fail” and that there had been a “dignified conclusion” to his work.82 Two years later, on 29 August 1982, Goldmann died at age of 87 in a West German hospital in Bavaria, and was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a place reserved for Zionist leaders. In an ironic twist of history, just as the Hardship Fund was scheduled to expire, there was a marked expansion of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel, Europe, and the US.83 When the Claims Conference demanded the fund’s extension beyond the five-year cut-off date, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl – once a fierce opponent – readily agreed. The Hardship Fund (albeit with a checkered beginning)84 exists to this day.85 81 Schmidt Calls His Policies Reliable, in: The American Israelite, 24 July 1980, 4. For Schmidt’s text (delivered in English), see AdsD, 1HSA, A010098, 8 July 1980. 82 CCA, Conference Reports 1980, Transcript of 7 July 1980, Recorded Remarks, 42; ibid., 80-CC-06, Summary of Discussion at Annual Meeting of the Corporation, 7 July 1980 contains a brief summary Goldmann’s remarks. See also CCA, Hardship Fund, Goldmann Memorandum to Board of Directors, 27 October 1980; CCA 82-CCHF-05, Report to the Corporation, Geneva, 8 July 1981. 83 The numbers rose from 206 (1986) to 2072 (1987), 2166 (1988) and 12,172 (1989). Barbara Dietz/Uwe Lebok/Pavel Polian, The Jewish Emigration from the Former Soviet Union to Germany, in: International Migration 40, (2002), no. 2, 29–48, here 35. 84 On 19 May 1988, the New York Times reported that some thirty million DM were missing from the Hardship Fund, allegedly transferred to the private accounts of Werner Nachmann, who had died in January, and became the subject of a Zentralrat law suit against its former president’s estate. 85 Henry, Confronting the Perpetrators, 18; Heilig, From the Luxembourg Agreement to Today, 185 f. Moreover, in 1992 the Claims Conference concluded a new agreement with post-unification Germany establishing the Article-2 Fund, providing € 270 monthly pensions to former residents of the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe not included in ear-

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Conclusion Nahum Goldmann’s role in the creation of the Hardship Fund – the “negotiations after negotiations” – exemplified his unique status in the Federal Republic as spokesman for Holocaust victims worldwide. No other figure has played this role. But an important change had occurred on the West German side in 1969. Goldmann’s effort to reopen the restitution issue was impeded when his earlier CDU/CSU partners were replaced by an SPD/FPD coalition, which was not only pursuing an ambitious Ost- and Nahostpolitik and coping with budget shortfalls and public unrest, but was also less committed than their predecessors to atone for the Nazi past. Behind this new government was a German public disinclined to make further sacrifices to Jewish Holocaust survivors. Moreover, in the new international atmosphere of the 1970s in which human rights non-government organizations had suddenly gained international prominence, Goldmann’s pleas for Jewish compensation fell on a less attentive and sympathetic audience. To be sure, Goldmann was also responsible for the repeated postponements and for the modest outcome. His negotiating style – ranging from affable to threatening – tended to irritate his new West German partners. Goldmann often missed or misread signals from Bonn and he was also unskilled in coordinating strategy with New York and Jerusalem. Moving constantly between various capitals and distracted by his other political and personal commitments, as the years dragged on, Goldmann became hampered by his advanced age and failing health. Moreover, the delays and unimpressive results sapped Goldmann’s authority and stature in the Jewish world. Tuviah Friedman, one of his severest critics, termed Goldmann an “ineffectual Hofjude” who, living in personal luxury, had for a decade tolerated Bonn’s policy of procrastination (Verschleppungspolitik) toward Holocaust victims.86 Despite the meager prospects of achieving a substantial settlement, Goldmann nonetheless persisted in his solo mission. Aided by the indefatigable Ernst Katzenstein, who for twenty-five years ran the Claims Conference office in Bonn, and assisted by a few loyal West German friends, Goldmann remained infused with courage and with a dogged commitment to help those lier indemnification programs. Gideon Taylor/Greg Schneider/Saul Kagan, The Claims Conference and the Historic Jewish Efforts for Holocaust-Related Compensation and Restitution, in: Carla Ferstman/Mariana Goetz/Alan Stephens (eds.), Reparations for Victims of Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. Systems in Place and Systems in the Making, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2009, 103–114, here 105. 86 AdsD, 1HSA, A007420, Tuviah Friedman [Chair of the World Federation of Victims of the Nazi Regime], to Schmidt, Haifa, 24 July 1980; Sagi, German Reparations, 195 f.

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in need: even at the cost of dealing with far younger, unsympathetic, and impatient partners in the entirely new West German atmosphere of the 1970s. Goldmann’s last diplomatic act was to champion the “double victims” – of Nazism and of Communism – and he ultimately obtained a renewed acknowledgment from Bonn of its responsibility toward the Jewish people.87

87 AdsD, 1HSA A008878, Goldmann, Note, 7 January 1980; ibid., Goldmann to Schmidt, 19 December 1979 and 16 January 1980.

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Schwerpunkt Bruchlinien – Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen seit 1959

Herausgegeben von Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue

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Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue

Einführung Am 22. September 1952 berichtete das amerikanische Magazin Time in einem Artikel über die Paraphierung des Luxemburger Abkommens zur Regelung der Reparationszahlungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland an Israel von einem Missgeschick während der Zeremonie, das auch dann als emblematisch gelten könnte, wenn es erfunden wäre: »German Secretary for Foreign Affairs Walter Hallstein smilingly handed Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett a golden fountain pen. Sharett bent over the reparations documents, and in the silence the scratch of the pen was heard through the room. But the pen made no mark: its ink had run dry. Stiffly, Sharett signed with his own pen.«1

Glaubt man dem Time-Bericht, zeigte die Zeremonie selbst auf fast tragikomische Weise dem Abkommen, das mit der Unterschrift des israelischen Außenministers den unterschiedlich begründeten Vorbehalten beider Seiten zum Trotz besiegelt werden sollte, seine Grenzen auf. Der Akt der Unterzeichnung konnte zwar vollzogen werden, doch nur als jeweils isolierte Geste der Unterzeichner. Die Übergabe der Füllfeder vom bundesrepublikanischen Repräsentanten an den Vertreter des israelischen Staates scheiterte, weil die Tinte die Mitwirkung verweigerte. Die Steifheit, die der Time-Artikel bei dem auf sein eigenes Schreibgerät zurückverwiesenen israelischen Außenminister ausmacht, kontrastiert mit dem vorhergehenden Lächeln des bundesdeutschen Staatssekretärs. Das Lächeln sollte einen durch die Übergabe der Feder symbolisierten Dialog einleiten; die durch das Missgeschick verursachte Steifheit überführte es der Scheinhaftigkeit. Im Lächeln drückte sich das Ansinnen der jungen Bundesrepublik aus, durch die Paraphierung des Reparationsabkommens einer Institutionalisierung und Normalisierung des Verhältnisses zwischen beiden Staaten vorzuarbeiten, die dreizehn Jahre später mit der Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen besiegelt zu werden schien.2 Das Versagen der Füllfeder verwies gleichsam objektiv auf die Widersprüchlichkeit dieses Ansinnens. In der darauf antwortenden Steifheit des Außenministers brachte sich die historische Wirklichkeit gegenüber ihrer zeremoniellen Inszenierung in Erinnerung.

1 2

Time, 22. September 1952, 32. Zu den verschiedenen Akteuren der Unterzeichnungszeremonie des Luxemburger Abkommens vgl. detailliert Dan Diner, Rituelle Distanz. Israels deutsche Frage, München 2015. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 309–313.

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Obwohl das Luxemburger Abkommen, in dem sich zuallererst die durch den Zivilisationsbruch des Holocaust gesetzte, historisch irreversible Distanz im Verhältnis zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Israel objektivierte, einen bedeutenden Einschnitt in der Geschichte zwischenstaatlicher Beziehungen beider Länder bildete, blieben diese Beziehungen die folgenden Jahrzehnte hindurch umgekehrt von jener Dissonanz geprägt, die in der vom Time-Magazin protokollierten Szene ihren Ausdruck fand. Der 12. Mai 1965, der Tag, an dem die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen beiden Staaten offiziell in Kraft traten,3 steht kalendarisch für einen Prozess, dessen Initiierung, Institutionalisierung und innere Widersprüchlichkeit sich im bloßen Datum nicht angemessen spiegeln lassen. Seinen Gehalt gewinnt das Datum vielmehr erst im Verbund mit anderen Daten: mit dem Dezember 1959 etwa, als Otto Hahn, Präsident der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), mit dem Physiker Wolfgang Gentner, der das Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg leitete, und mit Feodor Lynen, dem Direktor des Max-Planck-Instituts für Zellchemie in München, auf Einladung des Weizmann-Instituts (WI) in Rehovot nach Israel fuhr, um die Möglichkeiten einer wissenschaftlichen Kooperation beider Einrichtungen zu sondieren; oder mit dem Jahr 1964, als die Unterzeichnung des bis heute gültigen Minerva-Vertrags zwischen der MPG und dem WI diese Zusammenarbeit verstetigte.4 Hinzu treten weitere Daten und Orte: Der 14. März 1960, als Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer beim Gespräch mit dem israelischen Ministerpräsidenten David Ben-Gurion im Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in New York eine Spende der Bundesregierung in Höhe von 3 Millionen DM an das Weizmann-Institut ankündigte;5 das Jahr 1965, als der 1938 von Österreich nach Palästina emigrierte Historiker Walter Grab, der in den Sechzigerjahren vorübergehend in die Bundesrepublik gekommen war, um in Hamburg bei Fritz Fischer zu promovieren, von dort aus nach Israel zurückkehrte und an der Universität Tel Aviv Neuere europäische Geschichte zu lehren begann;6 der Oktober 1971, als Grab in Tel Aviv 3

4

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6

Dokumente hierzu finden sich bei Michael Wolffsohn, Deutsch-israelische Beziehungen. Umfragen und Interpretationen 1952–1986, München 1986. Vgl. außerdem Yeshayahu A. Jelinek (Hg.), Zwischen Moral und Realpolitik. Deutsch-israelische Beziehungen 1945– 1965. Eine Dokumentensammlung, Gerlingen 1997; ders., Deutschland und Israel 1945– 1965. Ein neurotisches Verhältnis, München 2004. Robert Gerwin, Wissenschaftler machten den Anfang. Eindrucksvolle Kooperationsprogramme, in: Tribüne 34 (1995) 133, 159–170; Dietmar K. Nickel, Wolfgang Gentner und die Begründung der deutsch-israelischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen, in: Wolfgang Gentner, Festschrift zum 100. Geburtstag, hg. von Dieter Hoffmann und Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr, Heidelberg 2006, 147–170. Yehudit Auerbach, Ben-Gurion and Reparations from Germany, in: David Ben-Gurion. Politics and Leadership in Israel, hg. von Ronald W. Zweig, London 1991, 274–292; Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953, Cambridge 2005, 138 f. Walter Grab, Meine vier Leben. Gedächtniskünstler – Emigrant – Jakobinerfoscher – Demokrat, Köln 1999.

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das erste Institut für deutsche Geschichte in Israel ins Leben rief;7 der Dezember 1976, als in ebendiesem Institut unter der Schirmherrschaft von Grab ein Symposium über »Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918« veranstaltet wurde, von dem wichtige Impulse für die deutsch-israelische Kooperation in der Geschichtswissenschaft, nicht zuletzt zur Historiografie der Arbeiterbewegung, ausgingen;8 und schließlich die Jahre 1977/78, als an der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem die Abteilung für deutsche Sprache und Literatur gegründet wurde.9 Das fünfzigjährige Jubiläum zur Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik im Jahr 2015 nahm das SimonDubnow-Institut zum Anlass, um im Sommersemester in einem Forschungskolloquium der Geschichte deutsch-israelischer Wissenschaftskooperation seit 1959 nachzugehen – jenem Jahr, in dem infolge des Treffens zwischen der MPG und dem WI die Minerva-Stiftung zur Förderung des akademischen Austauschs beider Staaten als eine Tochtergesellschaft der MPG gegründet wurde.10 Die für den Jahrbuch-Schwerpunkt ausgewählten Beiträge dieser Vortragsreihe machen nicht nur die in den Anfängen besonders bedeutsame naturwissenschaftliche Kooperation, sondern auch die bislang weitaus seltener beleuchteten Zusammenarbeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft zum Thema. Mit den Anfängen des deutsch-israelischen Austauschs in der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Bedeutung Walter Grabs für dessen Institutionalisierung befassen sich Irene Aue-Ben-David und Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan in ihrem Beitrag über frühe deutsch-israelische Konferenzen zur Neueren Geschichte. Dabei arbeiten sie das Spannungsverhältnis heraus, das zwischen

17 Iris Nachum, Es muss nicht immer Wiedergutmachung sein. Walter Grab und das Minerva Institut für deutsche Geschichte an der Universität Tel Aviv, in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 40 (2012): José Brunner/dies. (Hgg.), »Die Deutschen« als die Anderen. Deutschland in der Imagination seiner Nachbarn, 237–277, (16. Dezember 2016). Zum wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund Robert Jütte, Die Emigration der deutschsprachigen »Wissenschaft des Judentums«. Die Auswanderung jüdischer Historiker nach Palästina, Stuttgart 1991, bes. 193–204. 18 Vgl. Mario Keßler, Jakobinismus, Demokratie und Arbeiterbewegung. Der Historiker Walter Grab, in: Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 1 (2002), H. 1, 55–68. Außerdem Dan Diner, Israel und Deutschland. Über Nähe und Distanz ihrer Wissenschaftskulturen, in: Impulse geben – Wissen stiften. 40 Jahre VolkswagenStiftung, hg. von Michael Globig, Göttingen 2002, 491–506. 19 Christian Kohlross/Hanni Mittelmann (Hgg.), Auf den Spuren der Schrift. Israelische Perspektiven einer internationalen Germanistik, Berlin/Boston, Mass., 2011. 10 Michael Sela/Dietmar Nickel, Die Entstehung der deutsch-israelischen wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit, in: Shmuel Bahagon (Hg.), Recht und Wahrheit bringen Frieden. Festschrift aus Israel für Niels Hansen, Gerlingen 1994, 241–247.

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dem Gegenstand der wissenschaftlichen Disziplin und deren zeitgeschichtlicher Funktion für die deutsch-israelische Kooperation gerade auf diesem Gebiet bestand. Den historisch weiter zurückliegenden, jedoch ebenfalls unmittelbar mit der politischen Konstellation ihrer Ursprungszeit verbundenen Anfängen der Zusammenarbeit auf dem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaften widmen sich Ute Deichmann und Ari Barell. Dabei zeigen sie die Grenzen auf, an die die Fortschritte der deutsch-israelischen Zusammenarbeit jenseits des akademischen Sektors in der politischen Öffentlichkeit stießen. Die Autoren rufen in Erinnerung, dass die Interessen, die dieser Zusammenarbeit in beiden Staaten zugrunde lagen, weiterhin notwendig zueinander im Widerspruch standen. Einen bedeutenden Einzelaspekt der Kooperation zwischen Israel und Deutschland in den Naturwissenschaften arbeiten Sharon Livne und Amos Morris-Reich in ihrer Studie zu frühen Begegnungen bundesdeutscher und israelischer Genetiker heraus. Ihre Darstellung des Besuchs der Delegation der MPG am Weizmann-Institut 1959 verdeutlicht die Differenzen zwischen den institutionellen Zwecken jenes Austauschs, den Intentionen der Akteure und den daraus folgenden politischen Konsequenzen. Der Verbindung zwischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte und politischer Geschichte gehen die letzten beiden Beiträge nach. Jenny Hestermann stellt dar, wie die ein Jahrzehnt vor Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik beginnenden halboffiziellen Versuche akademischer Kooperation als eine Diplomatie vor der Diplomatie wirkten, obgleich deren Akteure sich ihrer objektiven historischen Bedeutung als Initiatoren einer politischen Zusammenarbeit nur teilweise und meist erst retrospektiv bewusst wurden. In einem close reading von Erfahrungsberichten bundesdeutscher Wissenschaftler über ihre Aufenthalte in Israel zeigt sie, in welchem Maß deren Wahrnehmung ihrer Arbeit von den zeitgeschichtlichen Bedingungen imprägniert war. Roni Stauber schließlich vollzieht in seinem Artikel den Zwiespalt zwischen realpolitischen Zwecken und erinnerungspolitischen Verbindlichkeiten nach, in dem die israelische Diplomatie sich in ihrem Verhältnis zur Bundesrepublik von Beginn an befand, und skizziert den geschichtlichen Wandel dieses Zwiespalts. Das fünfzigjährige Jubiläum der diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen beiden Staaten erweist sich im Durchgang der Beiträge als ein Datum, das für einen sehr viel früher initiierten und bis heute unabgeschlossenen Prozess steht. Die Dissonanz, die das Time-Magazin im Kratzen der leeren Feder während der Zeremonie des Luxemburger Abkommens wahrnahm, klang in diesem Prozess stets ebenso nach, wie die in ihm gegenwärtigen politischen, institutionellen und persönlichen Zwecke beständig im Konflikt miteinander standen. Bis heute sind die etablierten Routinen des wissenschafts- und kul-

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turpolitischen Austauschs zwischen beiden Staaten von der Zäsur, die ihm vorherging, und den damit verbundenen Dissonanzen geprägt. Dies zeigt sich in Eklats wie dem angesichts des Vortrags Helmut Gollwitzers, der 1978 auf dem Martin-Buber-Kongress in Beer Sheva zustimmend Bubers Warnung zitiert hatte, die Juden dürften durch ihr Verhalten gegenüber den Palästinensern nicht in eine »Herrenvolk-Position« hineingeraten,11 oder in den Protesten, die 2001 Daniel Barenboims Plan auslöste, anlässlich des Israel-Festivals mit der Berliner Staatskapelle den ersten Akt von Wagners Walküre aufzuführen.12 Die Beiträge des Schwerpunkts erzählen die Geschichte deutsch-israelischer Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Geschichte dieser Dissonanzen.

11 Claudia Lepp, Helmut Gollwitzer als Dialogpartner der sozialen Bewegungen, in: Siegfried Hermle/Claudia Lepp/Harry Oelke (Hgg.), Umbrüche. Der deutsche Protestantismus und die sozialen Bewegungen in den 1960er und 70er Jahren, Göttingen 2007, 226–247, hier 239 f. 12 Na’ama Sheffi, Der Ring der Mythen. Die Wagner-Kontroverse in Israel, Göttingen 2002, 15 f.

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Irene Aue-Ben-David and Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan

Observant Ventures: Early German-Israeli Conferences on German History A remarkable intensification and diversification of contacts between West German and Israeli scholars in the humanities can be observed from the second half of the 1970s on. There were, of course, exceptional cases prior to this period, in which individual scholars established contacts with selected counterparts, but it was only from the 1970s that such encounters received institutional recognition as exchanges and joint collaborations began to materialize. Such encounters were embedded in a chain of transmission which began much earlier, a tradition of methodical diffusion and knowledge dissemination into Israeli academia, transmitted by and large in the German language.1 This was most evident in cases in which the Israeli side was represented by a scholar born and raised in the German-speaking sphere, “molded by the medium of the German language and the convention of knowledge related to it.”2 That is to say, the German language was not merely a shared means of communication, or even a remnant of a formerly universal, cosmopolitan academic tongue; it carried a certain epistemic heritage. Parallel and closely related to the intensification of personal contacts during the 1970s was the belated institutionalization of German history in research and teaching in Israeli universities, beginning with Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The former took the lead when in 1971 the Institute for German History was inaugurated, preceded by the intensive organizational efforts of its founder, the late historian Walter Grab (1919–2000). In 1980, a chair of German history in the name of Richard Koebner (1885–1958), the founder of the Israeli guild of historians, was established at the Hebrew University, following years of engagement by representatives of the Freunde der Hebräischen Universität (Friends of The

1

2

For more on this manifold process of knowledge dissemination, anchored in the traditional gateway of Central and East European Jewry into modernity, see Dan Diner/Moshe Zimmermann, Israel’s German Academic Legacy. An Introduction, in: idem (eds.), Disseminating German Tradition. The Thyssen Lectures, Leipzig 2009, 7–14; Yfaat Weiss, Back to the Ivory Tower. The German Language at the Hebrew University, in: Arndt Engelhardt/Susanne Zepp (eds.), Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung. Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenskultur, Leipzig 2015, 247–263; Dan Diner, Language and Restitution. The German-Israeli Encounter in Luxembourg, 1952, in: Engelhardt/Zepp (eds.), Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung, 281–295. Diner/Zimmermann, Israel’s German Academic Legacy, 8. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 315–339.

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Hebrew University) in the Federal Republic of Germany, and facilitated to a large extent by contributions from German private funding. Negotiations preceding these establishments reflect two very distinct modes of operation, derived from dissimilar traditions, each obeying unique sets of obligations and constraints. For Israeli academic institutions, and above all this applies to the universities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the cultivation of initial contacts was seen as a gateway for forging strategic partnerships with German institutions, both academic and financial in nature. In order to reconstruct effectively the meanings of events which were binational in character, we shall shortly examine the preconditions facilitating such intellectual encounters on the German side. One of the major paradigmatic shifts which occurred within West German historiography following World War II was driven in significant measure by the rise of the social sciences and the embracing of the discipline by leading historians, a trend which began gaining popularity in the early 1960s and continued on into the 1970s.3 Young German historians who completed their professional training at this time participated in an inevitable change of generations within the academic establishment, during which new historical approaches and methods were introduced, practiced and refined. Contacts with senior exiled German historians were renewed; and early signs of a cautious willingness to selectively lift the barriers formerly preventing external voices from entering the corridors of German historiography can also be seen. These historians sought to re-evaluate the course of modern German history in its entirety, while questioning the validity of traditional interpretations and historiographical methods.4 In doing so, they permitted external voices to be heard.

3

4

On shifting trends in postwar German historiography, see Georg G. Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine Kritik der traditionellen Geschichtsauffassung von Herder bis zur Gegenwart, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 21997, 245–268; idem, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. Ein kritischer Überblick im internationalen Zusammenhang, 2nd rev. ed., Göttingen 1996; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus, 2nd rev. ed., Düsseldorf 1972. On the emergence and development of German social history, see Jürgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte. Begriff – Entwicklung – Probleme, 2nd extended ed., Göttingen 1986; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Geschichte als Historische Sozialwissenschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1973; Gerhard A. Ritter, Die neuere Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in: Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Sozialgeschichte im internationalen Überblick. Ergebnisse und Tendenzen der Forschung, Darmstadt 1989, 19–88; Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, Munich 1989; Ernst Schulin, Rückblicke auf die Entwicklung der Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Eberhard Jäckel/Ernst Weymar (eds.), Die Funktion der Geschichte in unserer Zeit, Stuttgart 1975, 11–25. Shulamit Volkov, Historia, historionim ve medinat ha-le’om ha-Germanit [History, Historians and the German Nation State], in: Yoseph Mali (ed.), Zmanim ḥadashim. Mechkarim ba’historiographia ha-modernit [New Times. Studies in Modern Historiography], Ra’anana 2008, 241–258, here 245 and 248.

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This article examines early academic encounters of German and Israeli scholars during two of the first bilateral conferences and workshops devoted to German and German-Jewish history, held in 1976 within the framework of bi-national initiatives by the Hebrew University as well as Tel Aviv University and their respective German counterparts.5 These events were chosen for examination principally because of their pioneering attributes: the conference held in Göttingen in late September in cooperation with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, titled “Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen” (The crisis of liberalism between the World Wars), was the first intellectual event to gather Israeli scholars (not only historians) from the Hebrew University alongside German scholars, mainly from the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for History. The second event examined in detail is the symposium “Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918” (Jews and Jewish aspects in the German workers’ movement) held in December 1976 at Tel Aviv University, hosted by the Institute for German History.6 Our findings and evaluations rely mostly on documentation stored in Israeli university archives, the Archives of the Max Planck Society in Berlin and oral history interviews. An investigation of these case studies allows us to explore several diverse elements which were active in shaping the initial foundation of GermanIsraeli research cooperation in the humanities.

New Home, Desired Guests: The 1976 Symposium at Tel Aviv University During the formative years described above, starting from the early 1960s, Shlomo Na’aman (1912–1993) and Walter Grab, alongside other colleagues, 5

6

The following is an incomplete list in a growing sequence of academic events which took place during the 1970s and early 1980s: “Deutschland und der Nahe Osten (1835–1939)” (Tel Aviv 1975), “Judentum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung” (Wolfenbüttel 1975), “Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918” (Tel Aviv 1976), “Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen” (Göttingen 1976), “Begegnung von Deutschen und Juden in der Geistesgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts” (Jerusalem 1978), “Frieden und Friedenssicherung in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart” (Mannheim 1979), “Juden in der deutschen Literatur” (Jerusalem 1982), “Aufklärung und Haskala aus jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht” (Jerusalem 1983). A year before, the Institute hosted a symposium on Germany and the Ottoman Empire and German policy in the Middle East during the interwar period. However, this was an international event in character, not a bi-national one, with no German scholar among the speakers. Hence, according to our considerations, the former is regarded as the first of its kind to take place in Tel Aviv.

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began cultivating collegial ties with German counterparts as their academic writings appeared in German professional journals and their books were brought out by German publishers. A decade later, these ties proved useful when Grab was pursuing a well-orchestrated effort to win recognition as an internationally oriented academic establishment for the recently founded Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. The symposium held in late December 1976 – the first to bring together Israeli and German scholars to discuss German history from the focal point of German-Jewish history – was a significant milestone in the process. From the Israeli perspective, this watershed conference was considered in retrospect not only as means to further establish the Institute, but also as a stage in which Israeli scholars were introduced to the emergent trend of renewed scholarly interest in the German workers’ movement, as part of the social history of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century German society. The Institute was already in existence by the time the symposium was conceptualized, although future budgets to ensure continuity of its activities were yet to be secured, since the initial five-year funding period provided by the Volkswagen Foundation was due to expire. Primary financial support was awarded by the foundation in October 1970,7 as a result of the tireless efforts Grab had devoted to the task during an early sabbatical year, following the directive of the head of the Department of General History, Zvi Yavetz, and TAU Rector André de Vries. They had instructed Grab to exhaust all possibilities for forging strategic partnerships with German academic and funding institutions, chiefly with the aim of establishing an independent institute.8 The Institute was inaugurated in October 1971 as the first of its kind in the state, marking the young university in Tel Aviv as the frontrunner in establishing the study of German history within Israeli academia, preceding the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by almost a decade.9 The chief goals of the Institute, as presented by Grab during the inauguration ceremony – most of which remain pertinent until today –, were: promoting the research projects of the Institute’s research fellows; hosting guest professors from Germany and integrating them into the teaching curriculum; supporting doctoral students’ research trips to Germany; establishing a library 7 8 9

Walter Grab, Meine vier Leben. Gedächtniskünstler – Emigrant – Jakobinerfoscher – Demokrat, Cologne 1999, 225. The Archives of Tel Aviv University (ATU), Box 78.59, File no. 7, Walter Grab to Dr. H. Flitner, representative of the Volkswagen Foundation, 17 December 1969. For a detailed account on the establishment of the Institute, see Iris Nachum, Es muss nicht immer Wiedergutmachung sein. Walter Grab und das Minerva Institut für deutsche Geschichte an der Universität Tel Aviv, in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 40 (2012), 237–277, (12 November 2016).

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and an annual journal, the Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte (Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History).10 During Grab’s tenure as director from 1971 to 1985, the Institute was dedicated above all to the following topics: early German democratic traditions; the history of German workers’ movement and trade unions; German policy in the Middle East; and German-Jewish relations. This accorded with the cluster of key topics to which the Institute had committed itself, as described in detail in the general proposal prepared by Grab at the request of the foundation.11 Listed there under the sub-chapter outlining the proposed research objectives, the first paragraph states that attention is to be given to questions of social and political structures within the sphere of German culture, with a primary emphasis on democratic currents and the problems of the German workers’ movement.12 Thus, the topic chosen for the symposium, “Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918,” suggested by Na’aman, was not only determined by the latter’s personal prerogatives, but rather also was in keeping with a guiding directive and central to the academic objectives of the Institute. During the early 1970s, as formal academic relations in the humanities between Israel and West Germany were yet to develop, the establishment of collaborative research projects depended above all upon personal initiative and collegial ties on both sides. As a result, the majority of early collaborative acts, such as the 1976 TAU symposium, was conceived in close conjunction with the specific interests of the scholars involved, and at times reflected the unavoidable gravitational forces that personal and generational biographies exerted upon their academic work. It is therefore necessary for us here to examine the organizers’ approach towards the German Federal Republic in view of their migratory backgrounds, as well as their personal engagement in forming the groundwork of what would later become a prolific bilateral exchange. Walter Grab was born in Vienna in 1919, shortly before the fall of the monarchy.13 In 1938, following the German annexation of Austria, he was

10 Reden und Ansprachen zur Eröffnung des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte an der Universität Tel Aviv, 20 October 1971, Tel Aviv 1972, 13–29, here 10–12. 11 A precise description of the demands is provided in ATU, Box 78.59, File no. 7, Dr. H. Flitner to Walter Grab, 17 February 1970. 12 Ibid., Antrag auf Bereitstellung der Mittel zur Errichtung eines Instituts für deutsche Geschichte. Also included in the document is a list of the designated members of the future institute (Charles Bloch, Shlomo Na’aman, Yehuda Wallach, Michael Harsgor and Chaim Shamir), along with a selection of their publications and fields of interest. 13 Grab describes his life history in detail in his autobiography Meine vier Leben. See also idem, Jessas, der Herr Grab is zruckkumma!, in: Ich stamme aus Wien. Lebenserinnerungen vertriebener Juden, Wiener Journal (Dezember 2000–Januar 2001), iv–vii.

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forced to abandon law school and leave the cosmopolitan metropolis. Nevertheless, Vienna was and remained for him a symbolic icon of identity, marking his sustained affinity to German culture and language. He settled with his parents in Palestine, a place he considered first and foremost as a refuge from Nazi persecution. The very foundations of his new home were cast from the German language and literary legacy, fenced in by social-democratic values which he never abandoned. Due perhaps to his upbringing in a multinational context, the German he possessed preserved its universal qualities, and remained as such a cultural emblem, as opposed to a nationalistic and ethnically infused political entity.14 Thus, in the early nineties he could still claim: “Geistig habe ich in der deutschen Kultur Heimatrecht, das kann mir keiner nehmen.” (Intellectually, I have the right of domicile in German culture. No one can take that away from me.)15 Shortly after his arrival in Palestine, Grab enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and began studying history and English literature. Due to the family’s dire economic situation, he was once again forced to quit his studies and join his father in the family business. It was only in 1958, aged 39, that he decided to enroll at the recently founded Tel Aviv University, where he completed his bachelor in history and philosophy. Shortly after, Walter Grab travelled to Hamburg to write his doctoral dissertation on the German Jacobins under the supervision of Fritz Fischer. He returned to Israel in 1965, and immediately was invited to join the academic staff of the History Department at Tel Aviv University, led by Yavetz. In the broader envelope of change, Israel and West Germany established formal diplomatic relations in mid-May that same year. From the very beginning of his academic career, he had no difficulty in traveling to Germany or establishing collegial ties inside German academia. Grab’s interests in late eighteenth and nineteenth century German history, prior to the establishment of imperial Germany, were firmly consolidated, resting partly on pragmatic reasoning, as this historical period was unrepresented by the then existing teaching staff of the Department of History at TAU.16 He assumed that innovative doctoral research which would grant him international recognition could only be conducted where accessibility to unattended archival materials could be provided, i. e. in Germany. He thus 14 On this issue see idem, Nicht aus Zionismus, sondern aus Österreich, in: Hajo Funke, Die andere Erinnerung. Gespräche mit jüdischen Wissenschaftlern im Exil, unter Mitarbeit von Hans-Hinrich Harbort, Frankfurt a. M. 1989, 115–148. On Grab’s commitment to his monarchical infused mother tongue as a cultural emblem, as well as his means of negotiating the prolonged tension between a Palestinian exile and a Jewish “Heimat,” see the obituary in Dan Diner, Weder Heimat noch Exil. Walter Grab zum Gedenken, in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 30 (2002), 361–368. 15 National Library of Israel, ARC 4° 1958 1/18, Walter Grab to Karl-Ludwig Ay, 16 November 1993. 16 Grab, Meine vier Leben, 152.

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was elated when in 1962 the Friedrich Ebert Foundation granted him a scholarship to conduct his research in Germany.17 From then on, not only did German academic institutions, publishers, scholars and readers provide a desired sounding board for his historical conceptualizations, they also became his sole references: he was writing in German, with Germans, for Germans. Compared to his colleague Grab, historian Shlomo Na’aman had far greater ambivalent attitudes toward West Germany and German society. Born in 1912 in Essen as Hans Salomon Goldreich, as a child he attended a Jewish primary school and later joined a Zionist youth movement. He immigrated to Palestine in June 1932, immediately after completing his university-entrance diploma (Abitur) in a secondary school (Realgymnasium) in Essen, and shortly before the transfer of power to the National Socialists in Germany. For many years, he worked as an educator in the kibbutz movement educational system, and it was only in 1954, at the age of forty-two, that he enrolled for academic studies in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1962 he completed his dissertation written under the supervision of the renowned historian Jacob Talmon,18 titled Ferdinand Lassalle. A Study in Non-Parliamentary Democracy, and was awarded his PhD.19 Na’aman’s personal as well as intellectual engagement with Germans was neither immediate nor obvious. His first journey back to Germany as an adult was not until 1960, when he joined his father during a visit to his native Essen. In his memoirs, Na’aman recalls that his initial impressions of West Germany did 17 Ibid., 154. Formal collaboration between the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, as the official representative of Germany’s Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB), and the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, began only in 1975. However, the support of Israeli scholars preceded formal relations, and Grab’s political orientation as well as his interest in neglected democratic currents in modern German history, are likely to have played a central part in the decision to grant him the scholarship. A few weeks before the decision was made, Grab hosted in his apartment the head of the foundation, Günter Grunwald, accompanied by the SPD bursar Alfred Nau and Willi Eichler. He recalls: “Wir unterhielten uns drei Stunden lang über israelische und deutsche Politik und über den Methodenwandel in der Geschichtswissenschaft.” (We spoke for three hours about Israeli and German politics and the methodological shift in historical research.) Ibid. 18 Jacob Talmon (1916–1980) was one of the most prominent historians to teach modern history in the Hebrew University and is today principally remembered for his renowned trilogy comprised of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), Political Messianism. The Romantic Phase (1960), and The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (1980). See Arie Dubnov, Priest or Jester? Jacob L. Talmon (1916–1980) on History and Intellectual Engagement, in: History of European Ideas 34 (2008), no. 2: Jacob Talmon and Totalitarianism Today. Legacy and Revision, 133–145. 19 Gerhard A. Ritter, Shlomo Na’aman als Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, in: Hans-Peter Harstick/Arno Herzig/Hans Pelger (eds.), Arbeiterbewegung und Geschichte. Festschrift für Shlomo Na’aman zum 70. Geburtstag, Trier 1983, 9–19, here 9.

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not meet his expectations, since he perceived West Germany to be a successor of the Weimar Republic, dominated by an overarching capitalist mentality. This impression was later reconfirmed by his colleague from Braunschweig, Georg Eckert (1912–1974),20 who introduced him to the intransigent struggle within West German society between conservatives and socialists, as it reverberated with the historical quarrels over the German “special path” (Sonderweg). It was for the sake of supporting the renewed organized socialist struggle that in 1961 Eckert established the periodical Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, originally based in Braunschweig before its transfer to Bonn as part of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.21 Eckert’s declared objective – to introduce young scholars to the history of the German workers’ movement, with the aim of overcoming the rupture in studying the course of its history – appealed to Na’aman, who became one of the journal’s permanent contributors during its first decade in existence.22 Somewhat different from Grab, Na’aman’s engagements within German academia were devoted first and foremost to students and researchers belonging to a younger German generation. Another significant factor in his gradual approach to dealing with West Germany and German topics were, as he commented, his cordial ties with German colleagues in the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, an institute which became Na’aman’s favorite locus for research stimuli in the early 1960s, due principally to the rich collections in the German section of the IISH.23 For almost three decades, Na’aman’s relation to Germany and German culture was characterized by complete personal detachment; German was never spoken in his family home, and book shelves were not adorned with volumes by German classicists.24 Na’aman’s daily life in the kibbutz and his long-lasting kinship with the kibbutz move20 On Eckert and the creation of the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, see Heike Christina Mätzing, Georg Eckert und die Anfänge des Archivs für Sozialgeschichte, in: Meik Woyke (ed.), 50 Jahre Archiv für Sozialgeschichte. Bedeutung, Wirkung, Zukunft, Bonn 2011, 23–44. This has been condensed by the author into a short biography, Georg Eckert – eine biographische Skizze, published online in March 2016 at the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI), (12 November 2016). 21 In 1990, Na’aman composed a lengthy autobiographical manuscript, comprised of twelve chapters titled Hitpatchut ve temurot (Evolution and Transformation). It was distributed to a few family members but was never published. The essay was kindly transferred by the family to the authors of this work: Na’aman, Hitpatchut ve temurot, here chap. 10, 131. 22 Among other renowned authors such as Jacques Droz, Edmund Silberner, Walter Grab, Miklós Molnar, and Jiří Kořalka. See Jürgen Kocka, 50 Jahre Archiv für Sozialgeschichte. Bedeutung, Wirkung, Zukunft, in: Woyke (ed.), 50 Jahre Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 8–23, here 14. 23 Na’aman, Hitpatchut ve temurot, chap. 8, 100, and chap. 10, 133. 24 Conversation with son and daughter Nadav and Michal Na’aman, Tel Aviv, 23 December 2015.

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ment, along with its demanding commitment to the task of nation-building, had their share in shaping his complex affinities to the German-speaking world. Interestingly, he noted that what had separated him from Germany initially was not his awareness of the Holocaust but rather his personal memories of the Weimar Republic and the rupture of its headlong metamorphosis into the National Socialist regime. This was a gap later bridged in his thinking by a positive evaluation of German social-democratic politics of his own day, represented above all by the figure of Willy Brandt.25

The Symposium: Logic, Aims and Outcomes In October 1975, Walter Grab, head of the still fledgling Institute for German History, approached German historians from across the Federal Republic of Germany, inviting them to participate in the planned 1976 symposium “Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848– 1918”. He did so in the name of Na’aman, who had by then already attracted considerable attention as a specialist in the early history of German social democracy and the workers’ movement. His emergent reputation reached a degree of notable renown after publishing his comprehensive biography of Ferdinand Lassalle in 1970, encouraged by Georg Eckert.26 Shortly after the Institute at TAU was founded, Eckert became Director of the German Friends’ Association of the Institute, and had he not passed away in 1974, it is highly likely that he would have participated in the symposium. Originally invited were Otto Büsch (Berlin), Reinhard Rürup (Berlin), Julius Schoeps (Duisburg), Werner Jochmann (Hamburg), Helga Grebing (Göttingen), Kurt Nemitz (Bremen), George Haupt (Paris), Susanne Miller (Bonn), and Hermann Weber (Mannheim). Israeli academia was represented by Jacob Toury, Shulamit Volkov, Charles Bloch, Jehuda Eloni, Elkana Margalit, Peretz Merhav and Na’aman himself.27 Participants from both sides 25 Na’aman, Hitpatchut ve temurot, chap. 8, 101. 26 Shlomo Na’aman, Lassalle, Hanover 1970. On 16 November 1970, a favorable review of the book appeared in the German news weekly Der Spiegel, concluding: “Tatsächlich besteht der Reiz von Na’amans Lassalle-Biographie darin, daß sie die ideologischen Elemente der deutschen Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts in neuen, überraschenden ‘Verkettungen’ zeigt.” (“The real attraction of Na’aman’s Lassalle biography lies in the fact that it presents the ideological elements of German 19th-century history in new, surprising ‘concatenations.’”). Der Spiegel 47 (1970), 212–218, here 218. 27 In his autobiography, Walter Grab recalls the fact that among the participants were descendants of three leading figures in German social-democratic politics of the early twenti-

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were requested to lecture on a topic that would fit within a carefully calibrated scheme designed to meet the symposium’s aim in addressing the central question: To what extent were Jews involved in the German workers’ movement, and for which reasons, and what specific effect did their Jewish backgrounds exercise upon the formative ideas of the German working class? Na’aman and Grab assigned an distinct task to each of the invitees, outlined in detail within the initial approach.28 Of those who in the event did not deliver a talk or were unable to attend altogether, Julius Schoeps (who chaired a panel but did not present a paper) was to dedicate his talk to Aaron Bernstein, a liberal popular educator (Volksaufklärer), and his influence on the German workers’ movement; Helga Grebing, author of Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (1966), was asked to speak about the German social-democratic movement and the “Jewish question.” Georg Haupt was encouraged to address the role played by East European Jewry in the workers’ movements; and Hermann Weber’s prospective presentation would have breached the format of periodization, since he intended to speak about Jewish activists inside the KPD leadership during its formative years from 1918 to 1921.29 As was clear from the papers’ titles, the symposium was presented and perhaps also conceptualized in a positivistic manner, as if it was primarily meant to step into an apparent gap in the current state of research by illuminating both Jewish individuals and their distinctive modes of operation over a long-term historical process, covering the formative centuries of the German working class and its struggle for political power. However, if we turn to Na’aman’s synopsis, closing the collection of essays published in 1977 following the symposium, a different conceptual framework seems to emerge, revolving chiefly around the double theme of emancipation and antisemitism. This was a leitmotif recurrent within the papers, providing them with a sense of cohesion which Na’aman noted and commented on in his concluding remarks.30 As he highlights the links between the different essays, the picture that emerges seems to be largely a negative account of eth century – Haase, Bloch and Moses – whose presence granted the symposium a certain uniqueness. Idem, Meine vier Leben, 283 f. 28 See, e. g., Walter Grab’s letter to Otto Büsch, conveying a message from Na’aman, according to which Büsch’s contribution is expected to address social transfigurations in the German Empire and their effect on the political orientation of the Jews in the workers’ movement. ATU, Box 840.148, File no. 25, Walter Grab to Otto Büsch (Historische Kommission), 16 November 1975. 29 ATU, Box 840.148, File no. 25. A draft version of the symposium guidelines originally planned for April 1976. 30 Shlomo Na’aman, Zusammenfassung, in: Walter Grab (ed.), Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918. Internationales Symposium, Dezember 1976, [Tel Aviv] 1977, 247–253.

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social-democratic politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It emphasizes on the misgivings the leadership had in properly addressing questions of national minorities both in theory and in practice, and its failure to recognize and confront antisemitism as a social disease, let alone to acknowledge its political function in the German Reich. Na’aman refers to a historically revised notion of the “Jewish question” that had surfaced in the discussions not just in reference to antisemitism but rather as a question concerning a national minority fervently aspiring for emancipation. And in that regard, he maintained, a methodological postulate seemed to clarify itself: namely the need to address Jewish aspects in a wider context, such as their correlation with the broader socialist strands and their attitudes towards religion and nationality.31 Moreover, what Na’aman appeared to find most striking in his overall impression of the symposium was an apparent theoretical deficit in Marxist theory as a whole, and particularly in the social-democratic conception of antisemitism. It was manifested primarily from the 1890s onwards as the “Jewish question” came to be treated with a certain “scientificity,” although its form and profile constantly changed. Na’aman noted that this was the product of a certain neglect of theory by the leadership, leading to a situation where “quietism took hold in the sphere of theory” (“sich ein Quietismus auf dem Gebiet der Theorie breitmachte”).32 These were the principal aspects foregrounded in Na’aman’s overall impression of the symposium. But what did he intend to achieve by organizing a bi-national event in the first place? Na’aman’s opening lecture on Moses Hess may provide us with a hint. In its introduction, he demarcates the concept of emancipation as a common denominator of nineteenth-century Jewish, socialist and liberal movements, understood as “directed selfactivity” (“gezielte Selbsttätigkeit”), in the form advocated by heralds of the French Revolution as an antithesis to the act of emancipation as a solution imposed from above, regarded by Na’aman as a“messianism”33 echoing ideas of Jacob Talmon. It was indeed through negotiating a consciously restricted concept of emancipation that Na’aman could view nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectual and social history and the early history of the workers’ movement as inseparable. This seems to have been the principal precept he wished to convey to the bi-national debate. He argued, it was 31 Ibid., 252. 32 Ibid., 253. Na’aman elaborated on the developmental engagement of Marxist thought with antisemitism and the “Jewish question” in his monograph Marxismus und Zionismus, published after his death. See idem, Der Marxismus der ersten Generation und das Problem des Antisemitismus, in: idem, Marxismus und Zionismus, Gerlingen 1997, 55–76. 33 Shlomo Na’aman, Moses Hess. Zwischen Messianismus und Emanzipation, in: Walter Grab (ed.), Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918, 15–46, here 15.

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no coincidence that German Jews, who apprehended the revolutionizing living conditions of the nineteenth century in a manner more incisive than that of the German artisans, played such a significant role in the German workers’ movement, and above all in creating the intellectual ferment of socialist and communist ideas during the Vormärz period, as well as in the Workers’ Educational Societies (Arbeiterbildungvereine).34 The binding together of German-Jewish history with the history of the workers’ movement, to which the title of the symposium alludes, had been a recurring topic in Na’aman’s work since the end of the 1960s.35 In this regard, Jacob Toury’s talk, in which he sketched a scheme depicting the dynamic of convergence between the history of the German Jewry and that of the workers’ movement, served Na’aman’s conceptions well, even if these were critiqued during the discussion that followed immediately after.36 This attempt at merging histories was in fact part of a threefold construct comprised out of general German history, the history of the workers’ movement and German-Jewish history. Since the beginning of the 1960s, Na’aman had been a strong advocate of freeing the history of the workers’ movement from its historiographical mode of isola-

34 Ritter, Shlomo Na’aman als Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 11. 35 In 1968, Na’aman published a monograph on Lassalle, defined as a study in social history, in which he discusses the difficult relations between Jewish life and Judaism, social ideology and political visions of a German national democracy as reflected in Lassalle’s persona, thoughts and public action: idem, Ferdinand Lassalle. Deutscher und Jude. Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie, [Hanover] 1968. In later years, as reflected in his talk, he continued to work on the nature and impact of various Jewish dimensions on the figure of Moses Hess, while developing a binary opposition between “political Messianism” – a term introduced by his former mentor Jacob L. Talmon – and “emancipation” as a conceptual framework for historical interpretation. See Shlomo Na’aman, Moses Hess in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Zu seinem 100. Todestag am 6. April 1975, in: Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte 5 (1976), 247–297; idem, Moses Hess. Zwischen Messianismus und Emanzipation, in: Grab (ed.), Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918, 15–44; idem, Emanzipation und Messianismus. Leben und Werk des Moses Hess, Frankfurt a. M./New York 1982; idem, Die Selbstdeutung von “Rom und Jerusalem” durch Moses Hess. Seine Artikelserie in der “Niederrheinischen Volks-Zeitung,” in: Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte 11 (1982), 173–201. 36 Jacob Toury, Die Dynamik der Beziehungen zwischen Juden und Arbeiterbewegung im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Grab (ed.), Juden und jüdische Aspekte in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918, 47–62. Reinhard Rürup considered the presented linkages too general, and argued that the events of 1848 were rather marginal for German Jewry; no mutual paths had existed, and a convergence of interests had occurred no earlier than 1878, with the passage of Bismarck’s Socialists Laws (Sozialistengesetze) and the public emergence on the scene of the antisemitic movement. Yehuda Eloni found fault with Toury’s alleged indifference concerning the infrastructure of the workers’ movement. Franz Nauen, however, spoke in favor, and so did Na’aman, who added his agreement by concluding that the linkage between Jews and the Workers’ Educational Associations is quite evident.

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tion by embedding it in a wider field of general German history.37 The additional premise regarding the intertwined paths of German-Jewish social history and the history of the awakening German working class points up the logic underlying a triple historical construct: if social and intellectual German-Jewish histories are integral components of the history of the workers’ movement, a history which in turn, supposedly, can only be properly evaluated when included within the general course of German history, then German-Jewish history should be properly regarded as integral to broader general German history, and examined as such. We may argue that such logic could not be utilized as a general mode of historical perception unless justified with respect to a delimited historical period or a specifically defined discursive context. However, this does not diminish the degree of novelty which Na’aman sought to inject into the existing state of research. The rise of the social sciences in Germany since the early 1960s, and their embrace by prominent scholars in leading historical trends, strengthened by the academic establishment, had certainly contributed to the re-emergence of a particular interest in the history of the German workers’ movement. This had been reinforced by the further development of academic groupings such as the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte, founded in Heidelberg by Werner Conze in 1957, and the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, founded in 1961 in Braunschweig. Numerous monographs were published and dozens of articles dealing with the topic appeared in journals dedicated to social history and to the German workers’ movement in particular. These included the International Review for Social History, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, and Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft. None of them, however, dealt directly either with Jewish individuals or Jewish aspects of the history of the German working class, in any of its developing stages. A survey of selected works published during the 1960s provides a complementary dimension, since they reflect the varied strands predominant in research. Prominent West German historians such as Gerhard A. Ritter, Helga Grebing, Werner Conze and Wolfgang Schieder, offered broad perspectives on central processes in the history of the German workers’ movement throughout the nineteenth century, while avoiding any emphasis on the specific contributions of German Jews.38 German-Jewish activists such as Moses Hess, Julius Moses and

37 Shlomo Na’aman, Von der Problematik der Sozialdemokratie als demokratischer Partei. Zur Jubiläumsfeier des Jahres 1963, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 5 (1965), 503–525, here 524 f. 38 See Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich. Die Sozialdemokratische Partei und die freien Gewerkschaften 1890–1900, 2nd rev. ed., Berlin 1963;

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Joseph Bloch scarcely appear in these accounts, if at all. Ritter, for instance, in his early 1957 monograph on the German workers’ movements in the German Empire, chose not to address Jewish matters in particular, nor did he discuss key approaches within the workers’ trade unions and the Social Democratic Party towards antisemitism, although this very decade he chose to focus on was central in the crystallization of the socialist leadership’s stance regarding the “Jewish question.”39 In Helga Grebing’s Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Ein Überblick (1966), Moses Hess, whose Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (1837) is the first formulated socialist program to appear in Germany, and who was one of the first members of the directorate of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, is mentioned only once.40 In the exemplary cases of Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder, such an absence was perhaps grounded in methodological considerations, as both adhered closely to the methods of social history, which (due to the strong influence of the Annales school) favored large-scale constructs and longterm processes of social change over evaluations of the contributions of individuals to such processes, aspects of belonging and nuances in the transmission of tradition and political knowledge. Less was to be expected of historical works produced at the time in the German Democratic Republic, such as the dogmatic Grundriß der Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, prepared by a committee headed by Walter Ulbricht and approved by the Central Committee of the SED in 1963, which served as an exposé for the eight volumes of Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, published three years later by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus in East Berlin.41 Within the prevailing East German narrative of the German workers’ movement, questions concerning antisemitism as social phenomena, aspects of ethnic identities and national minorities remained out of bounds. This strand was anchored in the Marxist-Leninist theory that downplayed the problem of antisemitism by examining it as a social trope which exceeded its sole function in a class struggle.42

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Helga Grebing, Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Ein Überblick, Munich 1966; Werner Conze/Dieter Groh, Die Arbeiterbewegung in der nationalen Bewegung. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor, während und nach der Reichsgründung, Stuttgart 1966; Wolfgang Schieder, Anfänge der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Die Auslandsvereine im Jahrzehnt nach der Julirevolution von 1830, Stuttgart 1963. On this aspect, see Shulamit Volkov, Ba-ma’agal ha-mekhushaf. Yehudim, antishemim ve-Germanim aḥerim [The Magic Circle. Jews, Antisemites, and Other Germans], Tel Aviv 2002, 122–129. Na’aman first highlighted Hess’s contributions to the formation of the German workers’ movement in: idem, Moses Hess in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Hermann Weber, Die DDR 1945–1990, 4th rev. ed., Munich 2006, 62 f. Reinhard Rürup, who lectured in the symposium on the topic of German Socialism and the “Jewish question” before 1914, was one of the first to publish a critical examination

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From the German perspective, Na’aman’s attempt to draw the historians’ attention to looming Jewish aspects in the framework of revising the history of the German workers’ movement was very timely. As part of a long, profoundly deep process of re-evaluating – in both content and form – the history of fundamental social paths and apparent normative, cultural and political clashes in nineteenth-century German society, the formation of the German working class as a social stratum, its impact on the political sphere towards the turn of the century, along with its structural implications on German society as a whole, occupied many historians in both East and West Germany at the time. Academic literature was proliferating, comprised of a multitude of monographs, biographies, articles, documentaries, and revised editions of archival compilations. Na’aman took an active part in this process and could therefore recognize the window of opportunity to add in the Jewish perspective to the canon. On the personal level, the symposium as he conceptualized it, together with Grab, was a realization of his aspiration to ensure that the Jewish angle should remain within the confines of the canon; or, as formulated above, to sew Jewish attributes into the historical patchwork of the German working class. It is not unlikely that the German invitees, including those who ultimately were unable to participate, such as Helga Grebing, Otto Büsch, and Georg Haupt, were thought of as missionary heralds. They would, it was opined, later foster this endeavor within their own works, or deliver the message to their counterparts in the host institutions and their surrounding environment.

From Jerusalem to Göttingen The conference titled “Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen” was carried out in Göttingen from 29 August to 3 September 1976. It was one of the first major academic conferences in the field, bringing together a wide range of scholars, drawn mainly from the University of Göttingen in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In contrast to Tel Aviv University, where the Institute for German History had already been working since 1971, the Göttingen conference took place against the background of the disputed establishment of German history and German

of the Marxist-Leninist position vis-à-vis the “Jewish question.” In a monograph published in 1975, he also pointed to loopholes in the state of research of his time, above all East German institutionalized research. See idem, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Göttingen 1975.

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language and literature in the curricula of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While the Faculty of Humanities of the Hebrew University was still in the throes of the altercation over whether or not to introduce and to foster German topics within the regular approved curricula, the university’s management under its president Abraham Harman (1968–1983) was working intensively to promote research collaboration with Germany. One of the aims of this collaboration was to pave the way for new funding resources, due to the difficult economic situation of the Hebrew University following the rebuilding and expansion of the campus on Mount Scopus, which had been damaged during the Six-Day War in June 1967. It was only in 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War, that the majority in the council of the Faculty of Humanities decided to establish a chair for German history and a division for German language and literature. A funding proposal for the establishment of a division for German language and literature was submitted to the Volkswagen Foundation in November 1975, and approved in December 1976. Two years later, a proposal was submitted to the Minerva Foundation, requesting funds for the establishment of a chair for German history.43 Both proposals were still pending when the German-Israeli symposium “Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen” ocurred. Perhaps a bit odd but not surprising, the chosen venue of this symposium was the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, which already alludes to the origins of the conference planning. The event was organized within the framework of a new partnership between the universities of Göttingen and Jerusalem, founded building upon early contacts between the eminent Hebrew University chemist and nuclear scientist Ernst David Bergmann (1903–1975),44 physiologist and neurologist Otto Creutzfeld (1927– 1992), and biophysical chemist and Nobel Prize winner Manfred Eigen (b. 1927), both Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. Returning from a visit to Göttingen in 1973, Bergmann

43 On the history of the establishment of German history and German philology at the Hebrew University, see Irene Aue-Ben-David, Deutsche Geschichte und Germanistik in Jerusalem. Zu den Anfängen der deutsch-israelischen Zusammenarbeit in den Geisteswissenschaften, forthcoming in: Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Culture History 11 (2017), no. 1, special issue: The Humanities between Germany and Israel, ed. by Irene Aue-Ben-David, Michael Brenner and Kärin Nickelsen. 44 Bergmann, born in Germany, left the country in 1933 and reached Mandate Palestine via the United Kingdom. In Palestine, he worked at the Weitzman Institute, was a scientific counselor to the defense ministry, worked for the IDF and became the first chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. See William B. Jensen/Henry Fenichel/ Milton Orchin, Scientist in the Service of Israel. The Life and Times of Ernst David Bergmann (1903–1975), Jerusalem 2011.

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reported to the president and rector of the Hebrew University that a number of scientists there would be interested in establishing a formal partnership between the two universities.45 Bergmann regarded Göttingen as being one of the most important research centers in Germany, if not in Europe. This was a remarkable assessment, considering Bergmann’s personal alienation from Germany in the wake of the Holocaust,46 and the history of Göttingen University, which had forfeited its world renown in the sciences following the expulsion of several famous Jewish scholars in 1933, particularly in the fields of physics and mathematics.47 The Hebrew University’s administration took Bergmann’s assessment very seriously and began negotiations with Göttingen University’s rector, the historian Rudolf von Thadden (1932–2015), an expert on French modern history and Prussian history.48 Only forty-two years of age, von Thadden was the youngest rector in Germany during this period and his career had developed in the midst of a generational shift in German academia.49 Von Thadden supported the wish of the Hebrew University to forge a partnership between the two universities and accepted an invitation to visit Jerusalem to discuss its details. During his stay there in September 1974, he clarified that he wished to establish research contacts extending beyond the natural sciences, in the fields of the humanities, law and social sciences. He had come prepared and presented a list of names for various academic fields, listing the social historian Helga Grebing (b. 1930), himself, and Rudolf 45 Archive of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (AHU), File 1956, Göttingen University, A. D. Bergmann to Avraham Harmann, 17 December 1973. 46 According to Ute Deichmann, he had been to Germany only twice after 1945 and refused to communicate with scholars from Germany in German. See idem, Collaborations between Israel and Germany in Chemistry and the Other Sciences. A Sign of Normalization?, in: Israel Journal of Chemistry 55 (2015), no. 11–12, 1181–1218, here 1185. 47 Hans-Joachim Dahms, Die Universität Göttingen 1918–1989. Vom “Goldenen Zeitalter” der Zwanziger Jahre bis zur “Verwaltung des Mangels” in der Gegenwart, in: Ernst Böhme (ed.), Göttingen. Geschichte einer Universitätsstadt, 3 vols., Göttingen 1987– 2002, here vol. 3: Rudolf von Thadden/Günther J. Trittel (eds.), Von der preußischen Mittelstadt zur südniedersächsischen Großstadt 1866–1989, Göttingen 1999, 395–456. On the University of Göttingen during National Socialism, see Heinrich Becker/Hans-Joachim Dahms/Cornelia Wegeler (eds.), Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, 2nd, rev. ed., Munich 1998. 48 Natan Goldblum described the meeting as “touching,” as von Thadden spoke about his family’s history and engagement in the resistance. See AHU, File 1956, Göttingen University, Natan Goldblum (Authority of Research and Development, Hebrew University), Report on a visit to Göttingen, 10 July 1974 (Heb.); Michael Rabin (Rector) to Rudolf von Thadden, 30 July 1974. The rector reported on the state of negotiations to the University’s Standing Committee on 13 December 1976. Ibid. 49 He had received his chair in the Department of History at Göttingen University in the eventful year of the student movement and revolt in 1968, and 1974/75 also served as Rector of the University.

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Vierhaus (1922–2011), the Director of the Max Planck Institute for History, as contacts in the field of history.50 The partnership between the two universities was officially inaugurated in 1975. That year in Göttingen the so-called Jerusalem Committee was founded – an interdisciplinary group with members from the university, the Max Planck Institutes and the Academy of Sciences – that fostered contacts with Jerusalem during the coming years.51 Unsurprisingly, the historian Rudolf Vierhaus is listed among the members. Vierhaus, who devoted much of his research to the history of the Enlightenment, was deeply involved in the internationalization of German history in numerous areas, including the establishment of the German Historical Institute in London in 1976 and also later in Washington, D. C. (1987), and the founding of the Mission Historique Française en Allemagne in Göttingen. Motivated by his wartime experiences – Vierhaus was seriously injured as a Wehrmacht soldier in 1944, had been a prisoner of war and only regained his health in 1949, enabling him to take up his studies of history, German literature and philosophy at Münster University – he strived to build bridges between nations with which Germany had been in conflict.52 Activities planned within the framework of the partnership included joint symposia and exchanges of graduate students, scientists and scholars for short or extended periods.53 As an opening event for the partnership in 1975, an initial symposium on the topic “Information Theory in the Natural Sciences” took place in Jerusalem. Moreover, Gerhard Gottschalk (b. 1935), von Thadden’s successor 1975/76 as Rector in Göttingen, informed Michael Rabin (b. 1931), Hebrew University Rector, that a second conference was planned for 1976 in Göttingen on “a modern historical problem […].”54 The 50 AHU, File 1956, Göttingen University, Natan Goldblum, Report on the cooperation between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institutes, May 1975 (Heb.). 51 The founding members of the Jerusalem Committee consisted of the following professors: Werner Creutzfeld (internal medicine, Rector of Göttingen University), Erhard Scheibe (philosophy and mathematics), Manfred Schröder (physics), Rudolf von Thadden (history), Walther Zimmerli (Old Testament). From the Max Planck Institutes (MPI) were present: Otto Creutzfeldt (neurobiology, Director at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry), Manfred Eigen (physical chemistry and molecular biology, Director of the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry), Rudolf Vierhaus (history, Director of the MPI for History). See Archives of the Max Planck Society (AMPG), Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216, Gerhard Gottschalk to Michael Rabin, 25 June 1975. 52 Hartmut Lehmann, Nachruf auf Rudolf Vierhaus. 29. Oktober 1922 – 13. November 2011, in: Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (2013), 184–188. 53 See AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216, Entwurf einer Ordnung zur Pflege der Austauschbeziehungen zur Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem. 54 AHU, File 1956, Göttingen University, Gerhard Gottschalk to Michael Rabin, 25 June 1975.

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organization was in the hands of Rudolf von Thadden, Rudolf Vierhaus, and the Dean of the Hebrew University’s Humanities Faculty and Bible expert, Shemaryahu Talmon (1920–2010), who was a driving force in establishing contacts with German scholars in the humanities.55 The correspondence conveying the preparations of the Göttingen symposium reveals some of the difficulties of such an endeavor. Beyond the primary engagement and declared enthusiasm on both sides, the proper path towards a joint scholarly event still required negotiations. In a letter written in June 1975, Talmon stated: “As we agreed tentatively during your visit to Jerusalem, the topic, ‘The Weimar Period’, seems indeed to be acceptable. However […] I consider it desirable that we approach this topic in a comprehensive manner. If we confine the subject to political history exclusively, the contribution of the Israeli scholars will be somewhat restricted, since German history proper is not, as yet, well developed in our research and teaching program.”56

Both sides ultimately agreed that the theme of the conference would be the crisis of liberalism, which was chosen in response to Talmon’s request for a broader approach to the period. In the preface to the conference proceedings, published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen in 1978 in German, von Thadden stated: “What is known as the crisis of liberalism since the end of the nineteenth century and which occurred in almost all European states – not least in its consequences – affected hardly any other people as much as it affected the Germans and the Jews. The failure of the liberal democracy at the start of the 30s in Central Europe led indirectly to Germany’s road to ruin, and destroyed the existence of the Jewish citizens in its dominion of rule. The survivors and descendants have cause to reflect together on the reasons for this failure.”57

55 Talmon was born in Poland but was raised and educated in Breslau. A survivor of internment in Buchenwald, he migrated to Palestine in 1939. He was one of the first scholars of the Hebrew University who was ready to establish academic contacts with German counterparts and became one of the founders of the Heidelberg Hochschule für jüdische Studien, where he was Rector from 1982 to 1984. 56 AHU, File 1956, Göttingen University, Shemaryahu Talmon to Rudolf von Thadden, 8 June 1975. 57 Translation by the authors. The original text in German is as follows: “Das, was als Krise des Liberalismus seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in fast allen europäischen Staaten in Erscheinung getreten ist, hat – nicht zuletzt in seinen Folgen – wenige Völker so stark betroffen wie das deutsche und das jüdische. Das Scheitern der liberalen Demokratie Anfang der 30er Jahre in Mitteleuropa hat mittelbar dazu geführt, daß Deutschland ins Verderben gestürzt und die Existenz der jüdischen Bürger in seinem Herrschaftsbereich vernichtet wurde. Die Nachlebenden haben Anlaß, über die Gründe des Scheiterns gemeinsam nachzudenken.” Rudolf von Thadden (ed.), Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, Göttingen 1978, 7.

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On the one hand, von Thadden stemmed from a prominent Pommeranian aristocratic family which had been engaged in the resistance and had suffered as a result. His renowned father Reinold, a leading figure in the Lutheran church before and after World War II, had been active in church opposition to Nazism, his aunt Elisabeth von Thadden, a member of the underground Solf Circle, was executed by the Nazis in 1944. And belonging to the younger generation (b. 1932) on the other hand, Rudolf von Thadden felt no direct guilt and therefore sensed no need to offer an apology. Both basic elements in his biography doubtless made it easier for the Israeli side to cooperate. The list of participants indicates that the event was not conceived as a regular conference, but was a gathering of eminent scholars to discuss possibilities for future cooperation. German participants included von Thadden; Rudolf Vierhaus, Director of the Max Planck Institute for History; Werner Jochmann (1921–1994), Head of the Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus in Hamburg; the educational specialist Hellmut Becker (1913–2013), Head of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development; and Göttingen literature scholar Albrecht Schöne (b. 1925), a central figure as consultant from 1975 to 1983 in the process of creating the division for German Language and Literature at the Hebrew University.58 The Hebrew University was represented by scholars from different generations, and for some of them this was their first visit to Germany since the end of World War II. The group was headed by prominent personalities within the field of the German-Jewish intellectual heritage, such as Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) and Ernst Simon (1899–1988). Scholem and Simon served to some extent as mediators by dint of their acknowledged rootedness in the German tradition. Scholem also was very active in promoting research on German topics within Israeli academia.59 The delegation likewise included the historians Yehoshua Arieli (1916–2002),60 Shemaryahu Talmon, and the 58 The support of the establishment of a division for German Language in Jerusalem was one of the explicit aims of the Jerusalem Committee. See AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216, Gerhard Gottschalk to Michael Rabin, 25 June 1975. On Schöne’s activities, see his own description: idem, “Ein kleines Göttinger Wäldchen wächst in Israel.” Über die Gründung der Abteilung für Deutsche Sprache und Literatur an der Hebräischen Universität, in: Reinhard G. Kratz (ed.), Centrum Orbis Orientalis (Coro). Zentrum für semitistische und verwandte Studien. Gründungsfeier am 16. Dezember 2005, Göttingen 2005, 33–38. 59 On Scholem’s complex relationship with Germany, along with his nostalgia in the face of disappointment with regard to the course of the Zionist project in Israel, see Noam Zadoff, From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back. Gershom Scholem between Israel and Germany, Jerusalem 2014 (Heb.); see also idem, “Zion’s Self-Engulfing Light.” On Gershom Scholem’s Disillusionment with Zionism, in: Modern Judaism 31 (2011), no. 3, 272–284. 60 Born in Carlsbad in Sudetenland in 1916, he moved to Palestine in 1931, was later a sol-

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philosopher Natan Rotenstreich (1914–1993), who formerly had refused to cooperate with Germany. Rotenstreich served as Rector of the Hebrew University from 1965 to 1969, was Vice President of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities and had cooperated with German colleagues, especially with Vierhaus and the Lessing Akademie in Wolfenbüttel. Among his other joint publications, he later authored the volume Aufklärung und Haskala in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht together with the prominent philosophy historian Karlfried Gründer (1928–2011).61 Speakers came from the fields of history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology and religious studies, some of whom were active in efforts to improve Christian-Jewish relations, such as the Frankfurt-born comparative religion specialist Raphael Yehuda Werblowsky (1924–2015) and Shemaryahu Talmon. The files of Rudolf Vierhaus contain some drafts on the structure of the conference. The original idea was to have two keynotes at the end of the conference presented by an Israeli and a German participant: Gershom Scholem and the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009).62 In the final program, only Scholem gave an opening keynote, and the conference ended with a roundtable discussion in which the jurist Gerhard Leibholz (1901–1982),63 Hellmut Becker, and Natan Rotenstreich participated. A lively debate developed at the conference on Scholem’s argument that assimilation was a form of self-deception.64 Conference participants such as Leibholz and the émigré

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dier in the British Army Pioneer Corps, captured and confined as a POW by the Germans from 1941–1945, where he managed to conceal that he was Jewish and spoke German natively. See, Walter Nugent/Avihu Zakai, In Memoriam. Yehoshua Arieli, in: Perspectives (November 2002), (12 November 2016). Karlfried Gründer/Natan Rotenstreich (eds.), Aufklärung und Haskala in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht, Heidelberg 1990. AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216. Leibholz, a Christian from a Jewish family, immigrated with his family to Great Britain and re-emigrated to Germany in 1947, where he held the chair for Political Sciences until 1969 and became a member of the Federal Constitutional Court. Werner Heun, Leben und Werk verfolgter Juristen. Gerhard Leibholz (1901–1982), in: Eva Schumann (ed.), Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren. Rechtswissenschaft und Justiz im “Dritten Reich” und in der Nachkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008, 301–326. Gershom Scholem, Zur Psychologie der Juden in Deutschland 1900–1930, in: Thadden (ed.), Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, 256–277, 271: “Uns allen war die Grundüberzeugung gemeinsam, daß die überwiegende Majorität unserer jüdischen Umgebung in einem Vakuum und – schwieriger noch und für uns aufregender – in einer Selbsttäuschung lebte, in der sie ihre Wünsche für Realität hielt und ihre Augen bewußt an einem Trugbild der deutsch-jüdischen Harmonie weidete, dem nichts entsprach.” (“We also shared the fundamental conviction that the overwhelming majority of those in our Jewish surroundings were living in a vacuum, and – more difficult for us and more unsettling – in a form of self-deception, in which they mistook their wishes for reality and consciously feasted their eyes on an illusion of German-Jewish harmony, that corresponded to nothing.”)

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sociologist Reinhard Bendix (1916–1991)65 vehemently rejected this view and criticized Scholem for questioning their identity. Unfortunately, these discussions have not been documented in the conference proceedings.66 In his introduction, von Thadden only mentioned that the “difficulties of this beginning interdisciplinary attempt” have been obvious, but also stressed that the “necessity of the continuation of the work” was clear.67 The conference proceedings, edited by Rudolf von Thadden, were published in German. All participants spoke or at least understood German well. A translation of the proceedings into Hebrew or English was not considered at the time. Reflecting on the influence of this German-Israeli research cooperation on Israeli discourse, it is questionable to what extent these particular papers influenced the new generation of Israeli students in German history.68 But it is clear that the conference had outcomes and impact on a range of different levels. The meeting served to foster initial encounters and discussions between Israeli and German scholars, and strengthened the collaboration which can be observed, for example, between Rotenstreich, Gründer, and Vierhaus in research on Haskala and the Enlightenment. Moreover, long-lasting relations were established, as well as personal links and friendships, as in the case of Arieli and Vierhaus. Most significantly the institutional relations were reinforced, which brings us to another “result” of the conference.

After the Conference: A Chair for German History at the Hebrew University In 1978, the Minerva Foundation, established by the Max Planck Society to facilitate research by German and Israeli scientists, funded the establishment of a chair for German history at the Hebrew University, which developed into the Richard Koebner Research Center for German History.69 In granting 65 Bendix was born in Berlin, immigrated from Germany in 1938 to the US, and completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago. In 1947, he joined the Department of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for the rest of his career. As Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program, he stayed from 1968 to 1970 in Göttingen and became a close friend of von Thadden. 66 See Rudolf von Thadden’s letter to the conference participants from 14 December 1976, in which he announced that the editors would address the topics of the discussion in the introduction AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216. 67 Thadden (ed.), Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, 9. 68 In later years the Koebner Center published the conference proceedings in Hebrew. 69 The funding came from the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) and was transferred via Minerva, since the BMFT did not want to be conspicuous

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its approval, the Minerva Foundation decided to create an academic board of German and Israeli scholars to accompany the establishment of the chair and its activities. For the German participants on the academic board, the foundation followed the recommendation of the Göttingen Jerusalem Committee and nominated Vierhaus and von Thadden. The third German board member was the sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius (1928–2014). The Göttingen-Jerusalem activities received attention, right from the start, from leading figures in the area of scientific policy and politics within the Federal Republic. In 1975, Gerhard Gottschalk sent a copy of the letter informing his Jerusalem colleagues about the establishment of the Göttingen-Jerusalem Committee to the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG), and to the presidents of the Max Planck Society, German Academic Exchange Service, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Minerva Committee.70 The partnership between Göttingen and Jerusalem went far beyond contacts between two universities. The aforementioned correspondence shows that as early as 1975, Göttingen had far-reaching plans for Jerusalem. This highlights the importance of the individual commitment on both sides, but also the existence of an extensive institutional network prepared to take up the cooperation. In his response to the Minerva Foundation, Vierhaus wrote, accepting their invitation to join the academic board: “The establishment of this Chair […] is doubtless an important event, both politically and in terms of the politics of science. We can only hope that it will also bring ‘reward and results’ in terms of scholarship […].”71

Concluding Remarks In conclusion, we would like briefly to focus on the Israeli side of these encounters and try to sharpen the distinctions between the different points of in this connection. German-Israeli relations did not seem to be “relaxed” enough yet and it was feared that governmental funding might easily be interpreted within the Israeli public as “propaganda” aimed to foster a positive image of Germany. See Archive of the Minerva Foundation in Munich, Abt. V 5746940708, Kaye to St., 5 May 1977, Einrichtung eines Lehrstuhls für deutsche Geschichte an der Hebräischen Universität (HU) Jerusalem. 70 AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 216, Gerhard Gottschalk to Michael Rabin, 25 June 1975. 71 In Germ. original: “Die Einrichtung dieses Lehrstuhls […] ist zweifellos wissenschaftspolitisch und politisch ein Ereignis. Es ist nur zu hoffen, dass sie auch wissenschaftlich sich ‚auszahlt‘.” AMPG, Papers of Rudolf Vierhaus III, ZA 182, File 225, Rudolf Vierhaus to Dieter Ranft (Managing Director of the Minerva Foundation), 2 June 1978.

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departure and different sets of consequences as they crystallized in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the 1960s and 1970s. In both cases examined, personal contacts appear to have played a central role in facilitating bi-national research collaboration. However, while the activities of scholars from Tel Aviv University in search of academic ties in Germany had already been initiated during the early 1960s and appear not to have evoked particularly strong feelings of dissatisfaction or opposition among TAU staff, scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem felt it necessary to postpone attempts for cautious cooperation until the administration had first deemed such endeavors acceptable and later desirable. As long as the German topics were kept in a limbo of curricular exclusion, an institutionally approved and efficiently coordinated infrastructure of knowledge transfer could not be attained. Ethical considerations and pressing in-house objections led to prolonged (and documented) hesitation, and resulted in enduring and careful negotiations. The stakes in Jerusalem were indeed higher: The Hebrew University was not only perceived as the leading national institution of higher learning, it had acquired an aura of being one of the most prominent institutions of the Jewish people, an international renown linked to a manifest set of demands and expectations. Thus, when explaining her disapproval of the intent to establish a division for German language and literature within the Faculty of the Humanities, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh (1930–1998), Professor of Islamic civilization, originally from Wiesbaden, stated explicitly that “the university is a public institute bearing a symbolic meaning for Israel and the diaspora […].”72 University policy towards anything German in nature drew public attention well before the debate over the institutionalization of the German topics took place. The situation in Tel Aviv was different. As the still comparatively young university in the vibrant city, professors at TAU had the liberty to strive for international recognition for their fledgling Institute by arranging strategic partnerships without being subjected either to institutional encumbrances, pointed critique or external criticism. The 1976-symposium held in Tel Aviv should therefore be considered principally as the product of a process where personal ambitions of faculty members resulted in significant milestones along the long road of institution building – in this case, the Institute for German History, launched but a few years before. An additional institutional property contributed to the apparent distinctions between the two universities when considering their general approach towards topics connected with German history and culture. While the German tradition in scholarship had achieved a secure place in the Hebrew Uni-

72 AHU, Faculty council meeting protocol, 10 July 1974.

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versity from its very foundation in 1925 in Mandatory Palestine – frequently referred to as a German university due to the many German, Czech and Austrian Jews on its staff –, Tel Aviv University was predominantly an AngloSaxon-oriented institution of higher learning. The broaching of German research topics did not conjure up allusions to a contested pre-existing tradition, as was the case with the Hebrew University. Thus, university administration could offer a more-or-less robust atmosphere to the professors involved, open to the prospect of developing and maintaining the field of German history in the Department of General History. This was achieved by means of strengthening the paths of knowledge exchange through cooperation with German counterparts, as has been exemplified above. While both events discussed here mark the initial phases in creating a space of professional academic discussion between German and Israeli scholars in the humanities, these beginnings were separated in space and tenor from one another in the context of Israeli academe. Acquiring links for academic exchange also entailed opening doors for German funding, as German academic institutions and government offices expressed readiness to support the institutionalization of research on topics in German studies in Israel. This was acknowledged by the administration of both universities, which sought to concretize these potential resources bearing strategic significance for future development of their respective institutes. In this respect and others, the two universities competed with one another. Tel Aviv realized the advantage of being light-footed and quick to implement a policy aimed at achieving envisaged partnerships. By contrast, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem moved at a slower yet steady pace, entrusted with a timehonored legacy of great prestige and a respected scholarly tradition. These elements played their part in the dynamics that arose between representatives of the Hebrew University and their German counterparts in Göttingen and elsewhere. In terms of appearance and public image, it is doubtless significant that not a single scholar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem attended the symposium held in Tel Aviv in December 1976.

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Internationality as Moral Challenge and Practical Success: The Origin and Early Development of the Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences Opposing Nazi Germany’s attempts to undermine the internationality of science by basing it on racial criteria, sociologist Robert Merton proposed several institutional imperatives as the ethos of modern science in 1942. Among them were: universalism – the validity of a scientific finding is independent of nationality, race or creed; and communalism – theories and empirical results have to be freely exchanged.1 The exclusion of people in Nazi Germany on the basis of what was considered race was without precedence. However, this ethos of the internationality of science was violated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in other political contexts, though for very different reasons. In the aftermath of World War I, the Western Allies imposed a long-lasting boycott against Germans and Austrians and their scientific institutions in order to force German intellectuals to publicly declare that Germany bears exclusive responsibility for the outbreak of war and that they repent. They achieved, however, the opposite – many German intellectuals drifted to the right and became more nationalistic. After World War II, there was no official boycott against German scientists, but for many years they were often excluded from international conferences, and many scientists refused to visit Germany. The memory of the Holocaust and the war prevented scientists from establishing normal relationships with their German colleagues. This article portrays the beginnings and early development of the scientific collaboration between Israel and Germany. It was initiated, most surprisingly, during a time in which Israel had imposed a complete cultural boycott against Germany, and not, as has often been stated, by the Max Planck Society (MPG), or its president, in 1959, but by two Israeli scientists and a German one. They succeeded in gaining political support, and in 1964 their efforts resulted in the first Minerva agreement, which ultimately led to the largescale collaboration between the Weizmann Institute of Science (WI), a number of German universities and the MPG. The article traces the development 1

Robert K. Merton, The Normative Structure of Science (1942), in: idem, The Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, Ill./London 1973, 267–278. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 341–369.

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of the early collaboration in physics, biology, and chemistry, analyzes its benefits and moral costs, and shows how it evolved from being mainly (but not exclusively) materially and politically motivated with personal histories playing a major role to a pragmatic, scientific collaboration of a high standard. Merton’s norms of science must be regarded as ideals with blatant violations, as demonstrated by the National Socialist regime and by the Allies after World War I, resulting, at times, in detrimental effects on science on all sides. The ideal of the internationality of science was also suspended, for moral reasons, by Israeli and Jewish scientists after the Holocaust by their refusal, for some time, to collaborate with German scientists as a group. The analysis of the beginnings and development of the Israeli-German science collaboration makes it clear that Merton’s norms must be seen within their historical context. This article elucidates the difficult balance between the adherence to Merton’s ideal of scientific internationalism on the one hand, and moral concerns on the other. It details the prerequisites for the establishment of successful collaboration under difficult personal and political circumstances.

Historical and Political Background In this article, the term Germany refers exclusively to the Federal Republic of Germany (former West Germany). There were some political contacts between Israel and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until 1949/50. However, the GDR’s self-understanding as “the better Germany,” not responsible for the war and the atrocities of the National Socialists, permitted its political leadership to absolve itself from any responsibility for the past. The GDR’s official policies were shaped by strong anti-Israeli campaigns. Moreover, the political constellation of the Cold War and the GDR’s integration into the foreign policy strategy of the Soviet Union contributed to its anti-Israel stance.2 Adverse political conditions and sentiments in both countries were extremely unfavorable to any kind of collaboration between Israel and West-Ger-

2

Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Das Verhältnis der DDR zu Israel, 28 March 2008, (16 March 2017). See Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, Mass., 1997.

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many.3 Israel had close diplomatic and cultural ties to the United States and France, while it maintained none with Germany for many years after World War II. They were either prohibited by the state or discouraged, as was explained by Hanan Bar-On: “That, since the Holocaust, relations of Israel’s Jewish population with Germany cannot be but problematic is to state the obvious, yet the depth of the abyss that prevailed in the forties, fifties and early sixties is already in 1997 not easy to imagine. Neither diplomatic nor cultural ties existed between the two countries. All Israeli passports were marked ‘valid for all countries with the exclusion of Germany’. Visits by Israeli nationals to Germany, with the exception of officials, were unheard of and German tourists or visitors did not come to Israel; this despite the Reparations Agreement between the two states that was concluded in Luxembourg in 1952.”4

This Reparations Agreement (Heskem ha-shilumim)5 was reached by David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer despite strong opposition in both Israel and Germany, as well as in the Arab States.6 During the 1950s, the Israeli and German governments developed close relations in the areas of the military and secret service, involving German shipments of weapons to Israel (brought about by Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres and German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauß) and information exchange between the Mossad and one of the German secret services, the BND. But these details did not become public knowledge until much later.

The Initiators of the Collaboration and Their Motives Inaccurate accounts of the MPG under Otto Hahn initiating contacts with Israel in 1959 are widespread, and can be found, for example, on the official webpage of the Minerva Foundation:

3

4

5

6

Details of the political and historical background can be found in Ute Deichmann, The Beginnings of Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences. Motives, Scientific Benefits, Hidden Agendas, Jerusalem 2016. Weizmann Institute Archive (WIA), Hanan Bar-On, The Role of the Weizmann Institute of Science in the Process of the Normalization of Israel–German Relations, 1997, (16 March 2017). For the problematic connotations of the term “reparation” (Wiedergutmachung), see Axel Frohn, Introduction. The Origins of Shilumim, in: idem (ed.), Holocaust and Shilumim. The Policy of “Wiedergutmachung” in the Early 1950s, Washington, D. C., 1991, 1–6, 2. For the Reparations Agreement see Dan Diner, Rituelle Distanz. Israels deutsche Frage, Munich 2015. Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Deutschland und Israel 1945–1965. Ein neurotisches Verhältnis, Munich 2004, 161–250.

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“In 1959, a delegation of the Max Planck Society, headed by its president Otto Hahn, visited the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The background was that after a long time of silence scientific contacts between researchers of these institutions were coming to life.”7

It can be assumed that the “long time of silence” between these institutions (which had never actually worked together before) refers to the lack of contact between scientists from the MPG and their former Jewish colleagues, who had been expelled in and after 1933. Similarly, the webpage of the MPG about the Minerva-Weizmann Program places the beginnings of the collaboration in the year 1959: It speaks about the “first scientific contacts between Germany and Israel, which Gerhard Schmidt and Amos de-Shalit (both from the WI) and Otto Hahn, (then president of the Max Planck Society) initiated in 1959.”8 While this statement at least mentions Gerhard Schmidt and Amos de-Shalit, it omits the name of Wolfgang Gentner, who, unlike Otto Hahn, was the crucial German scientist in launching the collaboration. An Israeli scientist, the Berlin-born chemist Gerhard Schmidt (1919– 1971), was the first to seek contacts with Germany. He was the son of Erich Schmidt, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Munich. His father became a member of the NSDAP in 1933 and divorced his Jewish wife, Gerhard’s mother. In 1935, at the age of 16, Gerhard Schmidt emigrated with his mother to Switzerland and a year later to England. His father’s financial support afforded him an excellent education. He studied chemistry at Cambridge University and then conducted graduate research from 1943 to 1947 on X-ray crystallography at Oxford under Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a future Nobel Laureate. In 1948, Schmidt moved to Israel and joined the WI, where he became full professor and head of the scientific section of X-ray crystallography in 1956. That year, Schmidt visited his father in Munich for the first time, despite feelings of resentment against him over divorcing his mother. This personal visit opened up new contacts in Germany with chemists in Munich and Heidelberg, as well as with physicist Wolfgang Gentner, who was, as his father convinced him, beyond political reproach. Gentner played a decisive role in establishing collaboration with the WI. In that, he was prompted by Schmidt, whose motives were scientific, and further stemmed from his desire to boost and enhance infrastructure and research at the WI. He expected the exchange with German colleagues and the chemical industry to 7 8

History of the Minerva Foundation, (16 March 2017). Minerva-Weizmann Program, (16 March 2017).

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elevate chemistry at his institute, and in Israel in general, opening up new lines of research and industrial applications. This was significant because Israel’s industry at that time was not yet well developed, being largely based on agriculture. From 1960 to 1964, Schmidt served as chairman of the board of the Yeda Research and Development Corporation, the WI’s technology transfer company and worldwide first academic institution of that kind. This post partly overlapped with his time acting as chairman of the scientific committee and administrative director of the WI from 1959 to 1961.9 In these positions he made many international contacts, particularly in German science and industry. The importance to Schmidt of translational research also reveals itself in the fact that, likewise in the early 1960s, he founded the Center for Industrial Research in Israel. Wolfgang Gentner (1906–1980) was an experimental nuclear physicist. A post-doctoral fellow at the Marie Curie Radium Institute in Paris from 1932 to 1935, he maintained strong relationships with scientists at that institute. As a staff scientist from 1936 to 1945 in the Department of Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, he participated in the German nuclear project. In 1940, he was ordered, together with physicist Walther Bothe, to put into practice Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s cyclotron in occupied Paris and use it for the German nuclear research program. Despite representing the occupying power, Gentner was able to continue his friendly relationship with his colleague Joliot-Curie, who was in charge of the cyclotron. Gentner, not a member of the NSDAP or its affiliates, succeeded twice in getting Joliot released from arrest. His humane and gallant conduct during the war earned him the respect of his French co-workers.10 In contrast to most of his German colleagues after the war, Gentner was ready to acknowledge German scientists’ partial responsibility for Nazi actions against Jewish colleagues.11 Trusted by the French occupying forces in West Germany, he was charged with the administration of the non-university research institutes in the French-occupied zone. In 1945, he became professor at the University of Freiburg, and in 1956, was appointed director of the synchrocyclotron at CERN in Geneva. In 1958, he became director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. From 1957 to 1958, during Gentner’s time in Geneva, the Israeli physicist Amos de-Shalit (1926–1969) was also conducting research at CERN. He

19 Ginsburg, Gerhard M. J. Schmidt 1919–1971, in: Israel Journal of Chemistry 10 (1972), no. 2, 59–65, here 63. 10 Dieter Hoffmann/Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr, Wolfgang Gentner. Ein Physiker als Naturalist, in: idem (eds.), Wolfgang Gentner. Festschrift zum 100. Geburtstag, Berlin/Heidelberg/ New York 2006, 1–60. 11 Ibid., 27.

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belonged to the first generation of Israeli physicists studying at the Hebrew University with renowned theoretical physicist Giulio Racah, who had emigrated to Mandatory Palestine after his dismissal from his professorship at the University of Pisa in 1938 due to the new anti-Semitic laws in Italy. In 1963, de-Shalit became scientific director, and in 1965 director of the WI. Gerhard Schmidt urged de-Shalit to visit Gentner in his office at CERN in 1957. For very different reasons, they raised for the first time the possibility of cooperation between Israeli and German scientists. Their encounter was the starting point as was acknowledged by the later WI president Chaim Harari: “The exchange between Prof. Wolfgang Gentner […] and Prof. Amos de-Shalit, […] [in the fifties] was to lay the foundations of scientific collaboration between the two countries.”12 Gentner was interested in the scientific aspect. The Allies’ control council laws had imposed severe restrictions on militarily relevant research in nuclear physics and war-related technologies. The laws also subjected any other research in applied physics, in particular atomic physics, to Allied permission. Gentner’s principal motive for becoming a main organizer of the scientific collaboration with Israel was his hope that it would open up new possibilities for young German researchers. In addition, he was interested in overcoming the international isolation imposed on German science, complaining about the “boredom in the science enterprise of today in Germany [Langeweile im heutigen Wissenschaftsbetrieb Deutschlands].”13 According to Josef Cohn, there was a “most acute shortage of theoretical physicists in Germany”; he envisaged that visiting Israeli physicists might contribute to the advancement of this scientific field in Germany.14 De-Shalit’s motives for his endeavor to establish scientific relations with Germany were less clear-cut. As will be shown, he had a strong scientific interest in the work of Hans Jensen at the University of Heidelberg. By then already a leading figure at the WI and strongly internationally oriented, deShalit was interested in Israeli science building strong international ties, including with Europe, as he explained during one of the meetings with his German colleagues, referring to the WI’s high energy project: “Professor de-Shalit explained that Israel had tried many a time to be accepted into CERN without avail as the contention had been that Israel was not a part of Europe. However Israel was greatly interested to be involved in the scientific, cultural, eco-

12 WIA, Letter by the president of the WI, Chaim Harari, prepared by Leora Frucht, 1993. 13 Dietmar Nickel, Wolfgang Gentner und die Begründung der deutsch-israelischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen, in: Hoffmann/Schmidt-Rohr (eds.), Wolfgang Gentner, 147–170, here 149. 14 WIA, 12/75 separate documents, 1.75 Bet, 16/2001/1, Josef Cohn to Meyer Weisgal, 13 February 1958.

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nomic and other activities in Europe and attempts to achieve this goal continue. Thus, apart from the scientific merits of this project [the high energy project], its implementation would also serve as a means to achieve this aim.”15

Moreover, the material aspect was very important at the time. But de-Shalit’s friendly and very supportive attitude towards the young German visitors showed that he also wanted to help this generation of scientists. He made it clear that science, by its very nature, should participate in the humanistic aim of re-establishing relations in order to provide for a better future: “The history of the relations between Israel and Germany is marked by the very unfortunate happenings in the not-too-distant past. These things are not forgotten, cannot be forgotten and, to my mind, should not be forgotten. However, our Torah teaches us that we should not hold children responsible for the deeds of their parents, a whole community responsible for the deeds of individuals, no matter how large their number is. Loyal to this old principle, I believe we should try to re-establish relations, and scientific cooperation probably forms the best first step. I hope that by understanding each other we can make sure that the happenings of the past will never repeat themselves again, and warn other nations, who may be blindly reaching such horrible situations, to stop before it is too late.”16

However, it was obvious and important to him that the collaboration with Germany would include only those German scientists who were either antiNazis or belonged to the younger generation. Thus, the three scientists who initiated the scientific collaboration pursued concrete objectives. When it was about to be institutionalized a few years later, other objectives were added. Generally, on the German side, the goal was to overcome international isolation and the constraints imposed on research by the Allies, and to promote complementary research in areas that were not sufficiently developed.17 On the Israeli side, the short-term goal was to enhance research infrastructure, gain financial support, and establish contact with chemical research at universities and in industry, while, the long-term goal was to have Israeli science internationally integrated into the framework of European science.

15 WIA, 1974–1(81), Minutes of the Joint Committee of the Israeli-German Scientific Cooperation (henceforth MJC), 28 October 1964. 16 WIA, 11/76–88, De-Shalit, address at the MPG meeting on 2 July 1962 in Munich in honor of the WI “written from memory on July 9, 1962.” 17 The discussions during the second meeting of the Joint Committee of the Israeli-German Scientific Cooperation is very clear on this subject. See WIA, 1974–1(78), MJC, 16 October 1963.

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The Involvement of Politics, German Industry, and the MPG The three initiators knew that they needed political backing from Adenauer and Ben-Gurion in order to succeed. The WI scientists were also aware of the fact that their idea would face the strongest criticism from members and the executive board of their institute. In this phase of the collaboration, the tremendous support of Josef Cohn, the European representative of the WI, should be emphasized. While Ben-Gurion was contacted directly by then-president of the WI, Abba Eban, it required the diplomatic skills of Josef Cohn and the intervention of an old friend of Konrad Adenauer’s, who had helped him after Adenauer was dismissed from office in 1933, to arrange a meeting with the German chancellor. Ben-Gurion agreed to the establishment of contacts with German industry and academia “with the proviso of no publicity whatsoever.”18 Adenauer likewise endorsed the cooperation. At a meeting with Cohn in 1959 Adenauer promised financial support for the scientific cooperation, and he opened the door to Israeli contacts with German industrial and political figures. It should be emphasized that the collaboration was not initiated by politicians, but nevertheless suited political interests. Agreements with Israel, such as the support for the Israeli-German science collaboration, helped Germany repair its political credibility in the West.19 This support also served geopolitical considerations by strengthening the fight against the allies of the Soviet Union. Moreover, supplying money and (secretly) weapons was easier than offering diplomatic relations or promoting Ben-Gurion’s idea that Israel be accepted as member of NATO and the common market, because this would have aroused strong reactions from the Arab countries.20 Through Adenauer’s mediation, Cohn and Israeli scientists met with representatives of industry, science, politics, and commerce from Germany, who had been invited by Hermann Abs of the Deutsche Bank. A committee, chaired by Abs, was set up to discuss the steps to be taken in greater detail. Its German representatives included, among others, Gentner, Professor Boris Rajewsky, Dr Ernst Telschow of the MPG and Winnacker (probably Karl Winnacker) from Hoechst.21 However, Cohn and the WI scientists did not

18 WIA, 1975–11(162), Gerhard Schmidt to Meyer Weisgal, 1 October 1959. 19 See Günther Gillessen, Konrad Adenauer and Israel, Oxford/London 1986, 18. 20 See Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Adenauer – Ben-Gurion – Sharett – Goldmann und die Entwicklung der deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen, in: Hanns Jürgen Küsters (ed.), Adenauer, Israel und das Judentum, Bonn 2004, 15–26, here 18–24. 21 WIA, 1982–2(40), Meeting of the Executive Council of the WI, 5 November 1959.

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succeed in attracting any substantial support from German industry,22 despite Adenauer’s intervention and the German scientists’ confirmation that the planned projects would serve German interests. In a next step, and with political backing, Gentner arranged a meeting between Cohn and Otto Hahn, President of the MPG. Hahn accepted a hastily arranged invitation to visit the WI in December 1959. He was to retire from his position as President of the MPG in 1960, and his designated successor, Adolf Butenandt, who had been close to the Nazis, would have been “a much tougher man to deal with.”23 Initially, the planned visit met with opposition from the WI executive board, but was later agreed to, despite fears that accepting funding from German institutions formerly involved in the Holocaust would lead to considerable problems for the Institute in the Jewish world and beyond, and that staff, many of whom Holocaust survivors, would react emotionally to the visit of a German delegation.24 The visit was approved in November 1959, and the delegation of the MPG arrived for a ten-day stay in Israel. Otto Hahn was a renowned chemist, best known for his discovery, together with Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. As a Jewess, Meitner was forced to flee Berlin in 1938; while in exile, she provided, together with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, the physical explanation for Hahn’s and Strassmann’s experiment, which demonstrated fission chemically.25 Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Chemistry Prize alone, a grave error of the Nobel Committee, since Meitner was an equal partner in the work, as acknowledged only some fifty years later.26 Hahn was opposed to National Socialism and continued his collaboration with Meitner even after her forced emigration, though he also remained friendly with his former student Ernst Telschow, an outspoken National Socialist and antiSemite, who became General Secretary of the MPG’s predecessor Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Hahn’s postwar attitude was shaped by his new position as head of the MPG and his wish to create a better relationship between Germany and the rest of the world. As a respected non-Nazi scientist he epitomized the “good German.” Unlike a few other German scientists, among them Gentner, he did not distinguish himself by sensitivity to the feelings of Jewish colleagues

22 Dietmar K. Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot. Die Anfänge der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Zürich 1989, 34. 23 WIA, 1989-15(1), Gerhard Schmidt to Meyer Weisgal, 10 December 1959. 24 Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 24. 25 Ruth Sime, Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics, Berkeley, Calif., 1996. 26 Elisabeth Crawford/Ruth Sime/Mark Walker, A Nobel Tale of Postwar Injustice, in: Physics Today 50 (1997), no. 9, 26–32, here 26.

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who had been expelled from Germany.27 In his correspondence with these colleagues, for example biochemist Otto Meyerhof, he expressed a nationalistic attitude which he did not have before, and a wish to suppress the past, for which he was strongly criticized.28 In Israel, however, there were no former colleagues to criticize Hahn. His endeavor to present Germany in a favorable light and improve its international standing was instrumental in including the MPG in the collaboration with the WI. Hahn himself, however, did not participate in the collaboration. Feodor Lynen was a renowned German chemist and biochemist who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Bloch (who as a student in 1934 had fled Germany). Lynen’s political integrity was well-known among émigré scientists, with whom he kept good relations. In the face of the low standard of dynamic biochemistry and molecular biology in Germany at the time (a direct and indirect result of the expulsion of Jewish scientists), Lynen hoped that young German scientists would benefit from a more open style of leadership and new approaches in biomedical research in Israel. Lynen strongly fostered the German-Israeli science collaboration.29 He supported the establishment of a new department for molecular biology at the WI with German funding, spearheading the beginning of cooperation in this field,30 and in 1963, he participated in the inauguration of this department. Biophysicist, and later the fourth Israeli president, Ephraim Katzir visited Lynen at the MPI in Munich in 1961, and Lynen continued to support the collaborative work in various ways for many years.31 This visit of Wolfgang Gentner, Otto Hahn, and Feodor Lynen thus completed the first phase of the collaboration, in which the initiators were looking for potential partner institutions for the WI, which would administer the support by the German government. However, with the new MPG administration now in place, President Butenandt and his personal advisor Telschow were opposed to the signing of an agreement on collaboration. They were concerned that the involvement of German government funds might violate the Society’s independence, pointing to statutory problems.32 Interestingly, 27 Ute Deichmann, The Expulsion of Jewish Chemists and Biochemists from Academia in Nazi Germany, in: Perspectives on Science 7 (1999), no. 1, 1–86; idem, Flüchten, Mitmachen, Vergessen. Chemiker und Biochemiker in der NS-Zeit, Weinheim et al. 2001, chap. 8: Auswirkungen des Nationalsozialismus auf die Chemie und Biochemie in Deutschland nach 1945. 28 Ibid.; Sime, Lise Meitner, 340–346. 29 Heike Will, Feodor Lynen. “Sei naiv und mach’ ein Experiment.” Biographie des Münchner Biochemikers und Nobelpreisträgers, Weinheim 2011. 30 Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 32. 31 Will, Feodor Lynen. 32 Nickel, Wolfgang Gentner und die Begründung der deutsch-israelischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen, 159.

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Telschow, as General Secretary of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during the Nazi era, did not share these concerns. Due to these problems, initial government funds were transferred directly to the WI (in support of the establishment of the Life Sciences Institute and a new proton accelerator). In 1963, the Volkswagen Foundation provided 2 million DM for joint research projects. A year later, the collaboration was given a legal foundation. Annual funding was provided by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research via the limited-liability Minerva GmbH (now the Minerva Foundation, a subsidiary of the MPG) on the basis of the Minerva agreements, the first of which was signed in 1964. Since then, the Ministry for Education and Research has given 3.65 million Euro to the Foundation.33

The Institutionalization of the Collaboration Minerva Grants and Fellowships A major part of the collaboration consisted of visits of young German scientists to the WI, and some years later, also Israeli scientists to German institutions. It was complemented by the Scholars Exchange Program that was funded, until 1973, by the Volkswagen Foundation. The cooperation was directed and managed by the Joint Committee of the Israeli-German Scientific Cooperation (or the Gentner Committee) that comprised senior German and WI scientists and was headed by Wolfgang Gentner. Apart from Gentner, it initially included Germans Hans FriedrichFreksa, Hans Jensen, and physiologist Hans Hermann Weber, and Israelis de-Shalit, physicist Shneior Lifson, and biologist Michael Feldman, who all belonged to the WI. In addition, the meetings were usually attended by Josef Cohn and a representative of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. The committee was the top organ to shape the scientific cooperation. Within the Scholar Exchange Program it approved of research projects proposed by the WI and scholarships for visiting scholars in both countries. The Joint Committee started to work even before the Minerva agreement was signed in 1964. The first few meetings were held at the WI in Israel. After the third meeting, at the request of Gentner, they began to convene in Israel and Germany alternately – usually twice a year. The first one in Ger-

33 History of the Minerva Foundation, (16 March 2017). Some documents suggest different figures, see below.

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many was held at Heidelberg in May 1965, and in fact, embodies a growing normalization in the relations. As mentioned earlier, it was very clear from the outset that the German side was interested in supporting collaborative and complementary research in areas that were not well developed in Germany,34 such as microbiology.35 The importance of personal contacts and exchange of views between scientists from both sides was also stressed.36 At the Joint Committee’s meetings, the German side was pressing hard for collaborative projects. At the second meeting, German members had already drawn up a list of German scientists who might be interested in participating in the WI’s first nineteen funded research projects.37 The funding policy for these projects as well as the Scholar Exchange Program, formulated during the discussions of the Committee, was motivated by the desire to promote collaborative research and research in areas where German science was deficient. It was evident that the Germans were not interested in just funding Israeli research programs. According to Jensen, the aspect of scientific cooperation should be the governing factor and the research program should, therefore, not be judged on scientific merits alone. Gentner agreed with him and stressed the importance of the scientific cooperation which, in his mind, should be the guiding factor in any decision.38 Two criteria were formulated for supporting the WI’s research projects and the Scholar Exchange Program: scientific merit as well as depth and extent of collaboration, or potential for future collaboration.39 At the beginning of the 1970s, Minerva supported around twenty research projects conducted by over 55 WI scientists every year, with an annual budget of 4 million DM, plus 500,000 DM for equipment. This was in addition to the Scholar Exchange Program funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and handled by the Joint Committee as well.40

34 This point comes out very clear in the second meeting of the Joint Committee. See WIA, 1974–1(78), MJC, 16 October 1963. 35 WIA, 1974–1(78), MJC, 16 October 1963 (draft version), 3: To “establish personal contacts with scientists to exchange ideas and compliment research work in such areas not covered in Germany, as for instance, microbiology.” 36 Ibid., 6: Jensen stressed the “immense advantage to be gained by oral exchange of views between scientists working on projects of mutual interest.” 37 Ibid., app. A. 38 Max Planck Institute Archive (henceforth MPIA), II. Abteilung, Rep. 89, File 110(3) (henceforth II, 89, 110[3]), MJC, 16 November 1965. 39 For example, MPIA, II, 89, 110(3), MJC, 16 November 1965; MPIA, II, 89, 110(4), MJC, 21 April 1966. 40 MPIA, II, 89, 110(3), MJC, 16 November 1965; MPIA, II, 89, 103(1), MJC, 7 November 1966 and 6 May 1968; WIA, 1974–1(88), MJC, 11 May 1967.

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The Scholar Exchange Program The German funding of the early collaboration with the WI came from two sources. The first was the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, which transferred the money to the Minerva Foundation. The second source was the private Volkswagen Foundation, which financed the Scholar Exchange Program.41 Although at the beginning of this program, there were predominantly visitors from Germany, at the end of its first decade (1963–1973), the number of Israeli and German visiting scholars was almost equal, with sixty fellows visiting from Israel, and 58 from Germany.42 This trend corresponded to the general increase in the number of WI scientists who visited European countries for longer periods (of over a month) in the late 1960s. During 1968 these numbers even doubled in comparison with the previous year. Thanks to the institutionalized GermanIsraeli collaboration, by the end of the 1960s Germany was the main European destination visited by WI scientists for longer periods. In 1968, for example, 18 percent of the Institute’s scientists who travelled abroad for more than a month stayed in Germany, compared to 7 percent in other European countries.43 The duration of stay, though, was in favor of the German scientists who spent almost double the amount of time in Israel than their Israeli colleagues spent in Germany.44 Accordingly, 60 percent of the budget of 2,5 million DM allocated by the Volkswagen Foundation to the exchange program was spent on German scholars visiting Israel, and 40 percent on Israeli scholars visiting Germany.45 Despite the growing similarity in the patterns of mutual visits, the German side still pressed for Israeli fellows with longer stays in Germany.46 From the statistics presented above, it seems that Amos de-Shalit’s policy to promote collaboration with Europe began to bear fruit. The activity of the WI in Europe, and especially in Germany, strongly increased, despite the fact that most of the longer visits by WI scientists were to the United States.47 The following pages detail some of the early key scientific collaborations, mainly funded by the Minerva Foundation. During the first years only proj41 In 1973, after ten years of funding the scholars exchange program, the responsibility for the program was transferred from the Volkswagen Foundation to the Minerva Institute. The German Ministry for Education and Research took responsibility for the funding. 42 MPIA, II, 89, 144, MJC, 1 April 1973. 43 MPIA, II, 89, 103(2), MJC, 21 November 1968. 44 639 months in Israel compared to 389 months spent by Israeli scholars in Germany. MPIA, II, 89, 144, MJC, 1 April 1973. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Fifty percent of the visits in 1968. MPIA, II, 89, 103(2), MJC, 21 November 1968.

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ects in physics and biology were funded by Minerva.48 About 57 percent of the budget was allocated to projects in physics and about 43 percent to those in biology.49 In 1968, research programs in chemistry were added to the list of supported fields, thanks to the fruitful cooperation between Gerhard Schmidt and Heinz Staab.

Early Collaborations in Physics, Biology, and Chemistry Nuclear Physics Nuclear physics was the first area of collaboration between WI scientists and Germany, due, in part, to Amos de-Shalit’s scientific connections with Gentner and Jensen. The Minerva Foundation funded collaborative research in the fields of research at the WI Department of Nuclear Physics: experimental nuclear physics, experimental high energy physics, theoretical studies in nuclear physics, and theoretical high energy physics.50 Theoretical physicist Hans Jensen (1907–1973) from the University of Heidelberg visited Israel as early as September 1957 to participate in the International Conference on Nuclear Structure at the WI. A brilliant young scientist, he had joined the Nazi party in 1937 at the age of thirty, while pursuing his habilitation. He was, however, “denazified” with the help of Werner Heisenberg, who testified that Jensen had joined the party only because he wanted to avoid difficulties in academia; Heisenberg, not a member of the Nazi party, helped many of his colleagues who were members.51 Thus, in 1946, Jensen became a full professor (at the Technical University in Hannover, and in 1949, at the University of Heidelberg). In 1963, Jensen shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics with American physicist Maria GoeppertMayer, who proposed the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus at the same time as Jensen (the other half went to Eugene Wigner). Jensen’s work was very important to WI scientists. According to Harry Lipkin, Jensen’s “pioneering research in nuclear physics and discovery of the nuclear shell model constituted the basis for much of our own work.”52 Jörg Hüfner elaborated on the complementary research at Rehovot and Heidelberg: 48 49 50 51

WIA, 1974–1(81), MJC, 28 October 1964. MPIA, II, 89, 103(1), MJC, 7 November 1966, Minerva Projects, app. I and II. MPIA, II, 89, 106, Summary of Co-Operative Research Programs 1961–1969. Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949, Cambridge, 1989, 192–204. 52 Harry Lipkin, First Steps. The German-Israeli Dialogue, Weizmann Institute of Science 10 (1987/88), no. 3, 50.

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“[Jensen] had developed his shell model of the atomic nucleus […] already in 1949; the model describes the structure of the nucleus in terms of independently moving nucleons. As younger scientists, de-Shalit and Igal Talmi at the WI ‘grew up’ with this model and developed it further. Racah at the Hebrew University strongly contributed to the mathematical development of the model; Jensen could not do this. The shell model is a simplification of a many-body problem for which there are no exact mathematical solutions. The WI was clearly more mathematically oriented. The scientists there knew mathematics, but Jensen, who was an outstanding physicist, was not very strong in mathematics.”53

Amos de-Shalit’s and Yigal Talmi’s textbook Nuclear Shell Theory (1963) was based, in part, on Giulio Racah’s algebra. Hans Weidenmüller added that the theoretical nuclear physicists at the WI further developed, in an important way, a model that had been developed by Jensen in Heidelberg. As a result, the theory group at the WI became internationally important, and there was a strong interest in Heidelberg in their results. The first German long-term fellow was a physicist, Lorenz Krüger, who came to the Department of Nuclear Physics as early as 1961. Between 1961 and 1970, seventeen long-term and many short-term visitors joined the Department, and more than thirty joint papers were published. A 1969 report of the Department of Nuclear Physics that was submitted to the Gentner Committee came to the result that the Department’s work “broadened the scope of activity here or in the respective German institutions” and “led to fundamental insights in general.”54 During that time, the principal German institutes with which the Department had associations of various degrees included the MPI for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, the Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Physical Institute of the University of Heidelberg, and the Institute of Theoretical Nuclear Physics of the University of Bonn.55 German scientists, who as postdoctoral fellows went for long-term visits to the Department, recalled the importance of these visits emphasizing, in particular, the invigorating new scientific approaches and the different research environment at the WI, which they characterized as offering a more open and lively style of scientific discussion.56 Moreover, young researchers were frequently exposed to top scientists from leading institutions around the world, which was rare in postwar Germany. 53 Interview with Jörg Hüfner by Ute Deichmann, Jerusalem, 19 April 2013. 54 The following contributions were mentioned: Uses of Group Theory; Investigation into the Interaction of Λ [Delta] Particles and Protons; Uses and Development of the Quark Model; Studies of the General Structure of the S-Matrix for Finite Many Channel Scattering; Study of the Re-Orientation Effect in Cd114; Fine Structure Studies of γ [Gamma] Rays in Muonic Atoms. MPIA, II, 89, 106, Summary of Co-Operative Research Programs 1961–1969. 55 Ibid. 56 Deichmann, The Beginnings of Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences.

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Biology Immunology The first long-standing project of collaboration began in 1962 in the field of immunobiology, initiated by Michael Sela of the WI and Otto Westphal in Freiburg. The immunologist Michael Sela was head of the newly established Department of Immunochemistry at the WI from 1963 to 1975; in 1970, he became vice president, and in 1975 president of the institute until 1985. Sela is also known for his involvement in the development of Copaxon, a blockbuster medicine for treating multiple sclerosis. Sela was born in Poland in 1924 and moved with his family, via Romania, to Mandatory Palestine in 1941. Many members of his family perished in the camps in Poland.57 Otto Westphal, born in 1913 in Berlin, had not only been a member of the NSDAP, but also of the SS. For this reason, he was expelled from German academia in 1945. He found employment at the Swiss pharmaceutical institute Wander AG near Basel. Due to his scientific success mainly in immunology, the institute was taken over by the MPG as MPI for Immunobiology with Westphal as its founding director in 1962; it was then moved to Freiburg. The groups in Rehovot and Freiburg exchanged knowledge and each group was working on a mutual project. The first joint publication appeared in 1966 in Immunochemistry.58 In 1966, the scope of collaboration increased when Michael Feldman, head of the Cell Biology Section at the WI Department of Immunology, started to work together with Herbert Fischer at the Freiburg MPI. The immunologist Fritz Melchers, who spent some time at Sela’s group in 1970, became the director of the Basel Institute for Immunology shortly after his return. Though he stayed friends with Sela, he did not continue collaboration with the WI because of the different approaches at these two institutions: “My scientific interests became more and more cellular, among them my work on Bcells and stem cells. At Sela’s part of the WI, there was nobody who was interested in this. The immunology of Sela and his coworkers as well as that of the Institute at Freiburg, the focus of which was research into endotoxins, were strongly determined by the question of what is an antigen. Even years later, they would not understand how important the cellular part is. Apart from the lack of interest, I think that the reasons have to be financial ones. Cellular immunology, which requires a large amount of instruments, is much more expensive.”59 57 Interview with Michael Sela by Ute Deichmann, Rehovot, 18 March 2009. 58 MPIA, II, 89, 106, Summary of Co-Operative Research Programs 1961–1969. The publication included the description of the first completely synthetic antigen to antibodies with specificities to polypeptides and sugars, and it discussed the role of sugars in antigenicity. 59 Interview with Georg Friedrich (Fritz) Melchers by Ute Deichmann, Berlin, 5 July 2013.

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Michael Sela often visited Freiburg and other places in Germany. In 1967, he became a foreign member of Westphal’s MPI for Immunobiology. In the late 1960s, there were several joint publications, as well as frequent visits between other members of the groups. This German-Israeli collaboration in immunology highlights early political problems during a time, when a substantial number of German scientists were former members of Nazi organizations, and shows the very different ways Israeli scientists dealt with this fact. According to Michael Sela,60 Otto Westphal came to Israel on his own initiative. Westphal wrote to Professor Olitzki, a bacteriologist at the Hebrew University, who invited him to Israel, where he then contacted Sela. The latter recalls: “During his first visit, I had a very long meeting with Westphal, where he spoke sincerely about his Nazi past. We started to cooperate, and later Westphal became a personal friend of mine. But I never involved him in any of the official German-Israeli discussions; this was kept separate from my collaboration with Westphal. He became a friend of Israel and was very supportive of our work.”61

Westphal remained a controversial figure at the WI. Israel Pecht, who was involved in collaborative projects with Germany early on, remembers: “To me, it remains incomprehensible that the relations of Michael Sela and Michael Feldman to Otto Westphal were so close. Perhaps the fact that Westphal, in contrast to Butenandt and Kuhn, did not hide his Nazi past, played a role in it. He also belonged to a different age group and had not held a high position in the Nazi era. This might have facilitated the contact with him.”62

Otto Westphal obviously did not feel that his Nazi past was a severe problem for many colleagues at the WI. He stated in an interview that he did not have any difficulties in Israel because of this past.63 Sela became a member, and later the chairman, of EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization founded in 1964. Sela considered the collaboration with Germany to be a means of helping to bring about a better future. He held that “we should never forget about the past, but […] we also have to plan the future. I myself, and my successor, Haim Harari, received the Harnack Medal of the Max Planck Gesellschaft for our contributions in strengthening German-Israeli scientific collaboration. Many members of my family perished in the camps in Poland. My contact with Germans had nothing to do with forgetting. I am not sorry for these contacts and I am not sorry for the contact with Otto Westphal.”64 60 61 62 63

Interview with Sela. Ibid. Interviews with Israel Pecht by Ute Deichmann, Rehovot, 5 January and 2 March 2009. Interview with Otto Westphal by Ute Deichmann, Montreux, 18 August 1996. At that time I did not yet know about his close collaboration with the WI. 64 Interview with Sela.

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When asked about his motivation for his great support for German science and scientists, Sela stated: “I tried bona fide to help German science.”65 Fritz Melchers’ comment shows the importance of this help for young German scientists: “I can tell you what helped me. We knew that we Germans had a problem, internationally; we felt the aloofness towards Germans everywhere. To help meant to assist the young generation to become accepted again internationally. Here Michael Sela said, this has to be changed and it is to his great merit that he did it systematically.”66

The Institute for Molecular Biology in Braunschweig In 1967, the German scientists asked the WI to establish scientific contacts with the newly established Institute for Molecular Biology in Braunschweig. Molecular biology was one of the new disciplines that after World War II started only with a delay67 due to, among other things, German scientists’ limited access to the international community. In the mid-1960s there was only one university institute devoted to molecular biology, the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne, founded by Max Delbrück. The new institute in Braunschweig was launched with the support of several university professors and directors of MPIs, among them Friedrich Cramer and Manfred Eigen, and was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The establishment of contacts with an internationally renowned institution such as the WI was considered a desirable goal from the outset. Shneior Lifson had already been selected as a foreign scientific member of the new institute. However, its collaboration with the WI did not develop successfully because, among other things, the prominent German scientists did not move their working groups to Braunschweig.68 Despite this fact, these aspirations and efforts to cooperate indicate the role assigned by the Germans to the WI as a constructive actor for their reintegration into the international scientific arena.69

65 Interview with Sela. 66 Interview with Melchers. 67 Ute Deichmann, Emigration, Isolation and the Slow Start of Molecular Biology in Germany, in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002), no. 3, 449–471. 68 Simone Wenkel, Die Molekularbiologie in Deutschland von 1945 bis 1975. Ein internationaler Vergleich (PhD thesis, University of Cologne 2013), (16 March 2017), 66 f. 69 WIA, 1974–1(89), MJC, 6 November 1967.

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Chemistry Solid-state Crystallography Another pillar of the early collaboration, and the main area of joint projects in chemistry, was X-ray crystallography. Partner institutions for the WI in that field were the University of Heidelberg and the MPI for Coal Research in Mülheim (Ruhr). Crystallography at the WI was based on what Gerhard Schmidt had studied at Cambridge and Oxford, both international centers in X-ray crystallography. Schmidt’s major contribution to science was his synthesis of crystallography and chemistry; that is, he was not only concerned with the structure analysis of molecules, but started the study of chemical reactions within crystals. Researchers at the department came from many countries and disciplines; many of them were survivors of concentration camps. The crystallography “bore the hallmarks by what Schmidt had learned in England, but was tempered by computer methods introduced by Fred Hirshfeld.”70 Starting in 1963, Gerhard Schmidt gave several lectures at the MPI in Mülheim. In exchange, C. H. Krauch from said MPI – the son of Carl Krauch, a board member of IG Farben during World War II – visited the WI several times. As a result, a joint program in structure analysis and solidstate chemistry was initiated. Carl Krüger from the MPI in Mülheim joined the X-ray crystallography group of the WI for 14 months to learn crystallography; he was the first to introduce crystallography to organic chemistry in Germany and later set up a structure analysis group at the MPI. The collaboration in chemistry was not funded by Minerva in the beginning, which was then still focused on research projects in physics and biology.71 In late 1966, following a short-term collaboration between Schmidt and Staab, it was decided to fund chemistry projects as well, as Gentner explained at the seventh meeting of the Joint Committee in November 1966: “It had become clear that the present projects in chemistry were closely connected with work on parallel lines in Germany and it would seem to be extremely desirable […] to include the projects in chemistry in the list of projects under the Minerva contract.”72

At this meeting, Staab and Schmidt, too, joined the Gentner Committee as full members. The WI financed these chemical projects until the Minerva funding began – a decision which demonstrates the growing importance of 70 Interview with Leslie Leiserowitz by Ute Deichmann, Rehovot, 31 March 2013. 71 WIA, 1974–1(81), MJC, 28 October 1964. This collaboration was funded though by Volkswagen Foundation and by the WI and – maybe – the Thyssen Foundation. See MPIA, II, 89, 110(3), MJC, 16 November 1965. 72 MPIA, II, 89, 103(1), MJC, 7 November 1966.

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chemistry in those years for the Israeli institute, as will be discussed shortly.73 In 1968, Minerva designated 45 percent of the budget to fund projects in physics, 39 percent in biology and 16 percent were allocated to new research projects in chemistry. The addition of chemistry to Minerva’s funded projects correlated with internal changes in the structure of chemical research at the WI. In 1966, the WI decided to establish a Department of Chemistry that included the departments of X-ray Crystallography, Photochemistry and Organic Chemistry under the directorship of Gerhard Schmidt.74 Schmidt told the Joint Committee that these steps, accompanied by a master research plan in Chemistry developed by the institute,75 would enhance collaboration between the various groups in chemistry working at the WI, and enable them to deal with problems of a more fundamental nature. This new strategic master plan supported the collaborative projects with the German scientific institutions. When de-Shalit confirmed the WI’s commitment to funding these programs should German sources not be found, he stressed that “the Institute was aware of its needs in chemistry and of the desirability to enhance the gratifying aspects of the collaborative work with professor Staab’s group […].”76 At the invitation of Heinz A. Staab, the head of the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Heidelberg, the crystallography group of the WI assisted with the setting-up and running-in of a structure analysis group in Heidelberg in 1966, and with the training of X-ray crystallographers. Leslie Leiserowitz, who had just finished his PhD, was in charge of setting up the laboratory under the supervision of Gerhard Schmidt. At that time, determining the structure of complex molecules was an extremely slow process, and Leiserowitz had begun to create computer programs to speed up this work.77 During his stay at Staab’s department, he was able to confirm

73 Ibid. 74 These changes and others were implemented following recommendations of an internal survey committee headed by Jerome Wiesner of MIT. See WIA, 1974–1(88), MJC, 11 May 1967. 75 This new research master plan included research efforts along the following lines: Molecular Structure in the Ground State and Electronically Excited States; Molecular Packing Arrangements of Organic Compounds in Their Crystalline Phases; Solid State Reactions and Their Dependence upon Crystal Lattice Geometry; Utilization of Electronically Excited States for Chemical Reactions. MPIA, II, 89,103(1), MJC, 7 November 1966. 76 Ibid. 77 Interview with Leiserowitz. Leiserowitz had learned to program with the help of Fred Hirshfeld, a former Yeshiva scholar from Brooklyn who became a physicist, and whose first program was called WEIZAC (Weizmann Automatic Computer), a variant of John von Neumann’s MANIAC. Based on Herbert Hauptman’s mathematical methods for the determination of structures by diffraction methods, Leiserowitz had prepared programs for diffractometers before he came to Heidelberg.

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the validity of his programs, which had a highly stimulating effect on crystallography. After Leiserowitz had left Heidelberg, the new laboratory was run by Hermann Irngartinger, who had received training in Rehovot in 1966. He was supported by visits of Leiserowitz and Schmidt, and after two years, the Heidelberg group became a renowned center for the X-ray structure analysis of organic molecules. At the request of Staab and Schmidt, Siemens AG installed a computer for the X-ray diffractometer and high-resolution mass spectrometer in Heidelberg; the subsequent work was, in part, based on experiences with the IBM computer in Rehovot. The collaborative work between Staab’s and Schmidt’s groups included joint supervision of PhD theses and visits of postdoctoral fellows and other researchers to both labs. Thus, the help that Schmidt and Leiserowitz provided to the department of Organic Chemistry in Heidelberg was of great importance. The WI later received in return a single-crystal diffractometer from Siemens. Staab’s interest in the collaboration with Schmidt should not be taken for granted. At the time, there were a few good crystallographers in Germany, for example in Munich. However, the close connection between crystallography and organic chemistry was unique at the WI, and Schmidt, a leading researcher in his field, was willing to share his knowledge. In addition, prospects of potential funding as a result of the collaboration with the WI might have also played a role in Staab’s wish to team up with Schmidt. According to Staab, the two had envisioned a ten-year collaborative program that would extend beyond X-ray crystallography into solid state chemistry, photochemistry, radiation chemistry and more.78

Collaboration with German Industry In November 1959, shortly before the visit of Hahn and the MPG delegation to Israel, the scientific committee of the WI formally approved of the scientific cooperation with Germany, explicitly excluding, however, any research project “supported by German industry.”79 Several years later, Gerhard Schmidt, who had a keen interest in applied science, managed to establish research connections with German industry nevertheless. In 1966, for example, he achieved a three-year research agreement with the Bosch Company in the field of organic semiconductors with catalytic properties.

78 MPIA, II, 89, 103(1), MJC, 7 November 1966. 79 WIA, 1989–15(1), Meeting of the Scientific Committee, 23 November 1959.

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The collaboration of Volker Schurig and Emanuel Gil-Av is an example of pioneering work in organic chemistry in Israel that resulted in the development of major industrial applications in Germany. Schurig, after his PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Tübingen, spent two years at the WI from 1968 onwards at the invitation of Emanuel Gil-Av, supported by a fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation.80 Emanuel Gil-Av’s group at the WI played a pioneering role in the 1960s in the development of the direct separation of enantiomers by gas chromatography. At the WI, Schurig was introduced to a research field that launched his academic career.81 Some years later, this research gained tremendous practical importance, as Schurig recalls: “After the catastrophe with Thalidomide (Contergan), legislative authorities worldwide recognized the importance of optical asymmetry for the development of chiral drugs, i. e., drugs consisting of only one single pure enantiomer rather than the racemate.82 Here the analytical methods which we developed were of the greatest importance. At the turn of the millennium the sales of the analytics of chiral compounds added up to US $ 150 million. Prof. Gil-Av and Dr. Feibush were the pioneers in this area of research, a fact that though it was recognized at the WI, was not used commercially.”83

Biophysics Another pillar on which the early Israeli-German science cooperation rested was biophysics, with a major involvement of Manfred Eigen, head of the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. Eigen was born in 1927 among the younger scientists, and therefore was without political reproach. A student of Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer, he conducted research in the field of biophysical chemistry, and in 1967, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions, effected by disturbing the equilibrium with very short pulses of energy. Many WI scientists, such as Aharon Katzir, Michael Sela, and Shneior Lifson, visited Eigen’s MPI. The Minerva Foundation sponsored, among other things, research on intra- and inter-molecular forces: Frequent visits of Shneior Lifson resulted in research on statistical mechanics of polypeptide stabilities and intramolecular forces. 80 Volker Schurig to Ute Deichmann, April 2013, with an unpublished Erfahrungsbericht at the WI of Science, 1969–1971. 81 Volker Schurig, From Metal Organic Chemistry to Chromatography and Stereochemistry, in: Haleem J. Issaq (ed.) A Century of Separation Science, New York/Basel 2001, 327– 347. 82 An enantiomer is one of two possible structures (stereoisomers) of a molecule which are mirror images of one another; a racemate is a mixture of both types of structures. 83 Schurig to Deichmann.

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Physical chemist Israel Pecht spent his postdoctoral years (1967–1969) at Eigen’s MPI; he was the first Israeli postdoctoral fellow in Germany. When making preparations to arrange for a postdoctorate in the United States – as was common for Israeli students at the time – he attended a lecture of Eigen at the WI. The latter’s research fascinated Pecht so much that when Eigen accepted him, Pecht agreed to go to Göttingen for two years. Pecht remembers that “the decision to go to Germany was not easy at the time. […] Almost our entire environment in Israel, including many friends and colleagues, were critical. […] I made my decision because of Eigen. But unconsciously it was a political statement, too – I was and am of the opinion that above all, scientific – not political – criteria should determine decisions in science. […] I am convinced that my generation had to begin the contacts with postwar Germany, not only because of scientific motivation, but just as much because of the basic human need for dialogues, which finally became also political ones.”84

According to Pecht, Eigen’s laboratory differed from others in Germany in that it had a “non-hierarchical, very open, casual, and lively atmosphere. It was strongly internationally oriented. […] Eigen took care that there was a constant flow through Göttingen of leading international personalities of molecular biology, biophysics, and biophysical chemistry. […] This fact as well as Eigen’s deep insights guaranteed that we were informed about the newest developments.”85

Eigen’s MPI, as Pecht underlines, was a stronghold for the development of new methods for tackling fundamental questions: “Indeed, Eigen received the Nobel Prize for research, in which he studied elementary steps of chemical and biological processes using ultra-fast, new methods. In the early 1970s, I brought these methods and the apparatus to Rehovot.”86 Pecht was accepted to the WI by Michael Sela after having met him at a 1969 conference of EMBO, organized by Eigen. At Sela’s Department of Chemical Immunology, Pecht initiated a program in the study of fast kinetics in immunological problems, in particular molecular recognition.

Benefits and Moral Costs The collaborations contributed to the re-internationalization of German science at a time when international relations with Germans were severely 84 Interview with Pecht (emphasis by the author). 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.

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strained because of the recent past. The main beneficiaries of this development were young German scientists visiting the WI, many of whom experienced international collaboration and a very different research environment for the first time. Israel, that is, the WI, benefited strongly as well. The material benefit in times of economic hardship was tremendous. German financial support for the WI in the first years of collaboration reached about 10 to 15 percent of the Institute’s yearly budget. Scientific director Shneior Lifson acknowledged the fact that the supported projects contributed to a considerable extent to the enhancement of the WI’s scientific scope. According to him, some of the best research at the WI in the mid-1960s was conducted in the projects under the auspices of the Joint Committee. German funding and scientific collaboration, it seems, had an important effect on WI’s scientific development. The fact that, at the time, the institute was the only Israeli institution to receive such support from Germany no doubt gave it an advantage over other Israeli scientific institutions. Apart from the financial aspect, the collaboration enabled the institute to receive exclusive access to leading scientists in Germany and to connections with German industry. The integration of Israeli science into Europe as an aim of the cooperation with Germany was an early vision of Amos de-Shalit: “[T]he attraction of scientists to the United States from various countries in Europe was the main stumbling block for cooperation and collaboration within Europe itself. I believe that the present situation provides a unique chance to enhance the collaboration within Europe, and I include Israel in Europe for that purpose, to create something which will be everlasting as the mutual benefits of all of us.”87

Years later, this vision seems to have come true; funding from the European community, such as from the European Research Council, became extremely important. Despite the benefits brought about by the collaboration, there was a price to be paid. Israeli scientists had to pay a moral price by collaborating not only with non- or anti-Nazi German scientists, administrators, and politicians, or those of younger generations, as was the intention of de-Shalit, Lipkin, and others, but also, unavoidably, with institutions and individuals that had belonged to the power structure of the Nazis. The predecessor of the MPG, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and its scientists had actively committed Nazi racial crimes. The collaboration between the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Otmar von Verschuer, and Josef Mengele, who sent blood samples and organs of con87 WIA, 1974–1(88), Amos de-Shalit to Josef Cohn, 27 August 1967.

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centration camp inmates for examination to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, is a well-known example. The President of the MPG from 1960 to 1972, Adolf Butenandt, and its vice-president in 1960, Richard Kuhn, excellent scientists and Nobel laureates in chemistry, supported Nazi policy. Butenandt joined the Nazi party in 1936 and was known for anti-Semitic attitudes towards Jewish colleagues;88 one of his young co-workers participated in the collaborative project of von Verschuer with Mengele in Auschwitz mentioned above.89 Some of the top administrators of the MPG and the West-German State had been deeply involved in the Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies. Examples are: Ernst Telschow, secretary general of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and NSDAP member from 1933 onwards, created networks between 1937 and 1945 that linked the Society with major figures in politics and industry, for example Minister of Agriculture Herbert Backe, who was responsible for the death by starvation of millions of Soviet citizens in the Ukraine.90 After 1945, Telschow continued to be the general director of the MPG during Hahn’s presidency from 1948 until 1960 despite protests from former refugee scientists, and in 1960, became personal advisor to the new MPG President Adolf Butenandt. Hans Globke, head of Adenauer’s Federal Chancellery, was one of the official commentators on the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, and charged with the law’s implementation. Hermann Josef Abs, a leading figure in German finance and economy during the Nazi era, represented German industry in the negotiations with the WI. He was involved in the “Aryanization” of Jewish banks and companies in Germany and other countries. Israeli scientists, who participated in the organization of the collaboration with Germany, had to be pragmatic, similarly to Ben-Gurion, who accepted financial restitution from Germany in the face of severe criticism from people in Israel who did not want to accept money from the country that was responsible for the Holocaust. Moreover, they seem to have accepted the myths created by German scientists about the alleged heroic opposition of many leading scientists against Nazi policy and about the Kaiser Wilhelm

88 Wolfgang Schieder, Spitzenforschung und Politik. Adolf Butenandt in der Weimarer Republik und im “Dritten Reich,” in: idem/Achim Trunk (eds.), Adolf Butenandt und die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Wissenschaft, Industrie und Politik im “Dritten Reich,” Göttingen 2004, 23–77. 89 It was fortunate for the MPG’s standing that Mengele was not captured; he might have revealed details about his erstwhile documented collaboration with a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. 90 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York 2010.

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Society being a victim of Nazi policy, and not the “partners in power of a totalitarian regime to its very end” that they turned out to have been.91 While not all the details were known then, many of them were. The 1950s and 1960s were too early a period of time to be able to avoid dealing with former National Socialists. In Germany, the fact that the MPG and German scientists were accepted as partners by a high-ranking Israeli institution early after World War II contributed to their international rehabilitation and immunity when confronted with critical questions. The acceptance by Israel, of all countries, strongly contrasted with the serious criticism which the MPG and its president (1948–1960), Otto Hahn, received from refugee scientists in the United States and England. What they condemned was, among other things, the fact that the MPG did not take responsibility for the actions of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during the Nazi era, in particular, the dismissal of its Jewish members. In the long run, however, the critical questions could not be avoided. The belated exposure, by scientists and historians, of the moral failure of many German scientists and their institutions during the Nazi era and their silence thereafter nurtured the already widespread skeptical attitude among young people in West Germany, not only towards scientists, but also towards science itself. Their criticism interfered, in some cases, with basic research and applications, in particular in genetics, biotechnology, and medical reproductive technology. Anti-science sentiments, and, according to many scientists, an overemphasis on moral concerns in Germany, became a burden on scientific progress.

Ethical Aspects of Internationalism The initiation of scientific collaboration between Israel and Germany violated Israel’s cultural boycott against Germany after World War II, though it served the interests of leading statesmen and parts of the elites of both countries. The fact that despite strong opposition in Israel the collaboration finally became successful was made possible mainly by two individuals, Gentner and de-Shalit, and on the administrative side, Josef Cohn. WI physicist Uzy Smilansky recalls: 91 Reinhard Rürup, Kontinuität und Neuanfang. Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus und die Vergangenheitspolitik der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, in: Jürgen Matthäus/Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds.), Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord. Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart, Darmstadt 2006, 257–274, here 268. Rürup was co-chairman of the Presidential Committee for the Investigation of the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the Period of National Socialism.

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“At the time [the collaboration] was very difficult. It could have gone wrong if not for Gentner and de-Shalit. They handpicked the right people; and Amos went from door to door in order to ask whether there was any objection in the lab to accommodating a young German visitor.”92

Gentner used to personally interview every German candidate for a scholarship at the WI,93 and the German members of the Joint Committee used to meet the visiting German fellows in the laboratories and socially during their visits to Israel.94 One reason for the continued success of the collaboration lies in its development from a mainly politically and materialistically motivated one – though there was also genuine scientific interest, especially in physics – into a true collaboration, where each side contributed more or less equally to research of high scientific standing.

The Inclusion of Other Institutions in the Collaboration From 1968, scientists from other Israeli universities requested German funding; there was also an interest by graduate students in conducting research in Germany.95 The WI was not particularly interested in having these institutions and the humanities included as beneficiaries of German government and private funding.96 The institute stressed that it should have a special status regarding the cooperation with Germany, at least in the case of governmental funding, as Shalhevet Freier, the WI’s deputy director-general, made clear on behalf of the institute’s top management: “The Institute stuck out its neck initially in establishing open relations with German science. It feels, therefore, that its special status ought to be preserved.”97 In the following months, the WI tried to halt, or at least to reduce the scope of German scientific collaboration with other institutions in Israel – with little success. Not only did Israeli institutions and scientists attempt to receive funding from Germany, but scientists and funding agencies in Germany had a keen interest in collaborating with other Israeli universities.98 92 93 94 95

Interview with Uzy Smilansky by Ute Deichmann, Rehovot, 2013. WIA, 1974–1(89), MJC, 6 November 1967. MPIA, II, 89, 103(2), MJC, 21 November 1968. WIA, 1974–1(90), Cohn to de-Shalit, 8 January 1968; Gentner to de-Shalit, 11 March 1968. An example is Tel Aviv University which asked the Volkswagen Foundation to support the constructing of the building for the Faculty of Economic and Social Research with 2,5–3 million DM; the application was turned down. 96 WIA, 1974–1(90), Freier to de-Shalit, 4 April 1968; WIA, 1978–6(147), Freier to Weisgal et al., 26 May 1969. 97 WIA, 1974–1(90), Freier to de-Shalit, 4 April 1968. 98 WIA, 1974–1(90), Gentner to de-Shalit, 11 March 1968; WIA, 1978–6(147), Freier to Weisgal et al., 26 May 1969.

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The death of Amos de-Shalit in September 1969, one of the main architects of the WI’s science collaboration with Germany, marked the beginning of a new phase in the scientific cooperation between Israel and Germany; the WI’s monopoly over the collaboration with Germany ended.

The Scientific Collaboration, Politics, and Society The collaboration was an expression of needs and interests and of a readiness by some Israelis to establish scientific relations with a young generation of German scientists. It did not, as such, lead to an improvement in relations at the political level, or to the establishment of diplomatic relations of the two countries. Political and military relations had begun before the scientific relations and they remained confined to particular purposes, such as the reparations agreement. Regarding the societies of Israel and Germany, the scientific relations may have contributed to a better understanding by individuals of the culture and politics of the country of the respective partners, but this did not automatically extend to other segments of society, which have other interests and are guided by different principles. The cooperation between Germany and Israel in the humanities began much later than that of the WI/German one, because in the 1960s there were no Israeli initiatives for collaboration in the humanities or sciences outside the WI. Some German scholars, on the other hand, were looking – in vain – for collaboration. The WI did not conduct research in the humanities. With its network of cooperating and funding institutions in Germany it could have facilitated the collaboration between Germany and other Israeli universities in the sciences and in the humanities, but it opposed this idea, fearing that resources might be diverted to other Israeli institutions. It should be emphasized again that the very early beginnings of cooperation between Germany and the WI, even before the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, was possible only because highly motivated individual scientists ran against the tide and succeeded in gaining political and financial support. Such initiatives did not take place at other Israeli universities in the sciences and humanities. Clearly the material need was less pressing in the humanities. Furthermore, the German language and previous association of some of the humanities with the Nazi ideology further reduced the motivation to work with Germany. However, the humanities, too, are international enterprises, and in the 1980s and 1990s fruitful exchange began to develop, for example, in Near-Eastern archaeology, Biblical Studies (Alttestamentliche Studien), and Islamic Studies, where excellent scholars participated in both countries.

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Another example of different segments of society developing in different directions is the current BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel, in which many individuals and institutions of American universities participate. This is despite the fact that the United States is Israel’s strongest partner in the sciences, the military and in politics. This is not the place to analyze the BDS movements’ motives and possible consequences, such as potentially driving Israel’s largely liberal academia to the right, or causing liberal young academics to leave the country. Suffice it to say that this movement is another example of the violation of the ethos of scholarly and scientific internationalism for allegedly moral reasons mentioned in the beginning. The international scientific and scholarly collaboration is a value in its own right, not because it might catalyze a better understanding between peoples or nations. Einstein, an opponent of the boycott by the Western Allies against Germany in the 1920s, spoke of the “internationality of mankind’s most beautiful treasures.”99 The initiators of scientific relations between Israel and Germany, however different their motives may have been, acted according to this ethos. Yet, the example of this collaboration also illuminates the problem of finding the right balance between this ethos of scientific internationalism and other moral principles. Although the initiators tried to exclude Nazi perpetrators at the beginning, and made it clear that working with Germans had nothing to do with forgetting past crimes against humanity, the moral problem remained as the collaboration was based in part on myths regarding the National Socialist past of members of the German scientific establishment. It should, however, also be mentioned that it served to open the eyes of many young German scientists to this past, because most members of the German scientific establishment attempted to forget or deny it. The collaboration proved successful over such a long period of time because it was voluntary, scientifically sound, and because both sides, each in its own way, at least tried to address the past and take responsibility.

99 Albert Einstein, On the Contribution of Intellectuals to International Reconciliation, in: Deutscher Gesellig-Wissenschaftlicher Verein von New York (ed.), Thoughts on Reconciliation Invited and Compiled by the Social and Scientific Society of New York in Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Its Foundation, 1870–1920, New York 1920, 10 f.

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Early Contacts in Genetics, 1949–1965: A Historical-Sociological Perspective While in scientists’ virtually own self-understanding, the pursuit of scientific goals is their highest and only real guiding ideal, a closer observation of the actions of scientists often reveals a plethora of activities that are connected with various aspects of social life. Such a viewpoint shows science and politics to be closely entwined, in different registers and in a myriad of ways. The particular case of the relations between Israeli and German scientists after 1945 demonstrates the major trajectory in the nexus of science and politics in the second half of the twentieth century, as science was becoming a major platform for political ends. Sometimes politicians made use of scientists in order to advance political goals, and on other occasions scientists initiated and drove political processes, impinging on the roles usually ascribed to political leaders. If, in retrospect, the use of science to build bridges between nations and peoples characterizes this trajectory, then the first decades of the process after the end of World War II, as the patterns of this course emerged in a dynamic process of negotiation, are arguably the most interesting to observe. In the German-Israeli context, this negotiation took place against the background of the systematic annihilation of European Jewry in the immediate past, which had only ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender. This article is the third of three that address the wider context of Jews, Germans, and biologically-oriented science after World War II and the Holocaust. The first article studied the discussion of Jewish biology in Germany, showing three trajectories within the structure of an intellectual taboo on antisemitic statements in biologically-committed discourses. The second article, shifting its focus to Israeli geneticists, addressed the fantasy of the post-Holocaust geneticist, that is, a belief in the future promise of genetics, which could not be separated from the knowledge of the role of genetics in the worldview and policies of Nazi Germany.1 The central aim of this third article is to

1

Amos Morris-Reich, Taboo and Classification. Post-1945 German Racial Writing on Jews, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (2013), 195–215, and idem, The “First Letters” of Jacob Wahrman, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (3 December 2016). With one exception, the correspondence analyzed in the latter article is different from that addressed in the present article. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 371–398.

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demonstrate, employing a particular sociological framework, that the entwinements between science and politics in the first decades after 1945 were already varied, multileveled, multidirectional, and sometimes contradictory.

The Gentner Delegation The newly established State of Israel decided on a policy of boycotting any formal relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (hereafter Germany). Israeli citizens were formally prohibited from entering Germany, and Israeli institutions, including scientific institutions, avoided relations with public or private German institutions. This formal policy did not change following the 1952 Luxembourg Reparations Agreement between Israel and Germany. Israeli academic institutions continued to boycott relations with German scientific institutions until the end of 1959, when a German delegation from the Max Planck Society (the renamed, reestablished state-funded network of research institutions, previously called the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) visited the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. The beginning of scientific relations was political; political relations began through cooperation in science.2 The delegation was headed by Wolfgang Gentner, and it included his wife Alice, Otto Hahn and his son Hanno (a historian of science), and Feodor Lynen. Wolfgang Gentner (1906–1980) was a nuclear physicist who had worked during the war in the physics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, and who took part in the German nuclear research project. Gentner, who was not a member of the National Socialist Party, became a professor at the University of Heidelberg after the war and, starting in 1956, headed the Synchrocyclotron project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.3 Otto Hahn (1879–1968) was famous for his contribution to nuclear fission, for

2

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For a methodological discussion of the uses that science and politics make of each other, exemplified in an earlier period, see Mitchell G. Ash, Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen für einander, in: Rüdiger vom Bruch/Brigitte Kaderas (eds.), Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik, Stuttgart 2002, 32–51; Mitchell G. Ash, Wissenschaftswandlungen und politische Umbrüche im 20. Jahrhundert – was hatten sie miteinander zu tun?, in: Rüdiger vom Bruch (ed.), Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft, Stuttgart 2006, 19–37. For the Luxembourg Reparations Agreement, see Dan Diner, Rituelle Distanz. Israels deutsche Frage, Munich 2015. Dieter Hoffmann/Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr, Wolfgang Gentner. Ein Physiker als Naturalist, in: idem (eds.), Wolfgang Gentner. Festschrift zum 100. Geburtstag, Berlin/Heidelberg 2006, 1–60.

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which he was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics.4 After the war, Hahn was appointed director of the Max Planck Society. Hahn was anxious to reestablish good scientific relations between the German scientific establishment and the international scientific community, particularly in light of the banning of German scientists from the international community which had followed World War I. The wider context for the visit to Israel and the development of bilateral activities concerned the international scientific community and, within that, the increasing importance of the American scientific community. The third leading member of the delegation, Feodor Lynen (1911–1979), taught chemistry at the University of Munich in the 1940s and was later appointed director of the Max Planck Institute of Cellular Chemistry in Munich. Later, in 1964, he won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, with Konrad Bloch. The delegation’s scientific goals were entwined with scientific-political and extra-scientific national goals. These issues were formulated with various degrees of openness and explicitness and involved political considerations (at the party, national, and international levels), economic matters, and financial concerns. The visit was the successful culmination of months of work – mainly by Gerhard Schmidt (1919–1971), an organic chemist and the chairman of the Weizmann Institute’s Scientific Committee and its administrative director from 1959 to 1961, and Amos de-Shalit (1926–1969), a physicist and the founder and head of the Institute’s department of nuclear physics – to establish formal scientific relations between the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Society and thereby also between the states of Israel and Germany. In addition to the Weizmann Institute, the German delegation also visited the Technion in Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and toured parts of the country. Members of the Weizmann Institute lectured before the delegation, and members of the delegation also presented their research to Israeli scientists. The success of the visit was only slightly marred by the protests of several Hebrew University students against Gentner’s and Lynen’s lectures at the university and by the expression of astonishment, by Knesset member Mordechai Nurock, at the renewal of relations with Germans so soon after the Holocaust.5 As a direct result of the visit, the Weizmann Institute received

4 5

Hahn was awarded the prize alone, although he had collaborated with Lise Meitner, who had escaped Berlin in 1938 for fear of being persecuted as a Jew. The students’ protest was conveyed through the Israeli branch of the international Beitar Youth Movement. Hebrew University Archive (HUA), File 614, Y. Lieberman (local Beitar Commissioner) to Binyamin Mazar (President of Hebrew University), 11 December 1959. Nurock, born in Latvia in 1884, was a Zionist activist before and throughout the war, in which he lost his wife and two children. After the war he immigrated to Israel and served as a member of the Knesset until his death in 1962. HUA, File 614, M[ember of

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the equivalent of three million USD from Germany, and by 1966 money transfers from Germany had totaled 25 million German marks.6 The Gentner delegation initiated binational scientific relations between Germany and Israel, which led eventually to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the states less than six years later, in 1965. These political events did not follow a linear course, however. While the Israeli political leadership at first rejected the idea of diplomatic relations with Germany outright, by 1955 the direction had changed and the Israeli government sought formal diplomatic relations. At that point its attempts to test the waters were rejected by the German political leadership for economic reasons, due to Germany’s close relations with the Arab world. To compensate for the delay in diplomatic relations, the German government then encouraged other types of relations, mainly military and scientific, and was willing to provide large sums of money for this purpose. The idea of scientific relations, therefore, involved science in itself as well as science as a platform for and expression of other things, involving past and present moral, economic, and political considerations, including questions concerning actual or desired recognition or standing in the international community. The delegation’s visit and its outcome also involved several asymmetries concerning assumed roles as perpetrators and victims during the Nazi period as well as political, demographic, scientific, and economic size and power. The delegation’s visit also involved complex relations between individual and institutional capacities. Gentner, for instance, came as a German physicist, but his motives for initiating the visit were more personal than a simple desire to collaborate with Israeli scientists per se. Although his own biography as an individual was untainted, he felt a sense of responsibility for his country’s politics towards Jews in the Nazi period. The encounter between Gentner and de-Shalit took place, very fittingly, at CERN, which was established in 1954 as a joint scientific project of twelve European states on the Swiss-French border, with the explicit intention that science should facilitate relations among peoples and nations. Hahn, meanwhile, although he took pleasure in visiting the Christian sites of the Holy Land during the delegation’s visit, was there in a capacity and out of motivations that were more institutional than personal, heading the delegation not only as a German scientist (there was little if any direct connection to his own scientific work) but as the President of the Max Planck Society. On the Israeli side, similarly, de-Shalit understood the importance of the visit less in terms of direct collaboration within his field of scientific

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the] K[nesset] Mordechai Nurock to Minister of Education and Culture Zalman Shazar, 25 December 1959. HUA, File 614, Bentwitz to Eilat, 1 May 1967.

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activity and more as in regard to possible relations between the states (not only because of the possibility of German financial support for the Weizmann Institute). De-Shalit, who had completed his PhD studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (under the supervision of Paul Scherrer and Wolfgang Pauli) and then moved to the United States, founded the physics department at the Weizmann Institute upon his return to Israel in 1954. From the outset, the visit of the delegation and the scientific relations that ensued between the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Society involved multifaceted relations between individuals, with various motivations, capacities, kinds and degrees of investment, and goals, some of them only partially expressed. This article explores one particular thread in this spectrum of relationships from the individual to the institutional.7 For reasons explained below, this article explores the case and networks of one individual scientist, the German-born Israeli geneticist Jacob Wahrman, basing its analysis on a particular sociological formulation of the relationship between individual and institution, detailed below. This makes it possible to examine some of the differences between formal scientific relations, primarily those between the Max Planck Society and the Weizmann Institute, and contacts between individual scientists in that same time frame. This look at exchanges between German and Israeli scientists will shed light on a spectrum of activities particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. The analytic framework used here draws on the work of Luc Boltanski concerning the understanding of institutions and individuals and the relations between the two.8 As Boltanski puts it, individuals such as Jacob Wahrman exist in flesh and blood. Institutions such as a genetics department or a university, meanwhile, “hang together” in Boltanski’s terms: they produce social effects that are irreducible to the individual human beings who comprise them at a given moment in time, but they do not exist in the same way that individuals do. What Boltanski brings home is the contradiction at the heart of historical and sociological analysis: the contradiction between society as something that transcends the individuals that comprise it (“hangs together”), although it has no ontological existence apart from the individuals that comprise it. For our analysis of early contacts in genetics, and the role of Wahrman in particular, it is crucial to understand that Wahrman as an individual is not independent, but his acts and statements are structured and shaped by those same social institutions that, as we will see, he is apparently 7

8

Ute Deichmann, Collaborations between Israel and Germany in Chemistry and the Other Sciences. A Sign of Normalization?, in: Israel Journal of Chemistry 55 (2015), no. 11/12, 1181–1218. Luc Boltanski, On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation, Cambridge 2011.

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infringing. Boltanski’s framework offers an understanding of the relations between individuals and institutions in terms of a spectrum: at it’s one end are institutions, but it must be recognized that no institution can speak or act without an individual human being at the end of its speech act or enunciation in one way or another. At the other end of this same spectrum are individuals, who express different degrees of institutionalization in their various daily activities, which can be demonstrated in the actions and communications of one single scientist.

Jacob Wahrman For several reasons, the case of Jacob Wahrman offers extraordinary possibilities for exploring the theme of early contacts between Israelis and Germans in the field of genetics. First, and most important, Wahrman communicated and collaborated with German and Austrian scientists at a very early stage, beginning in the late 1940s, a decade before the 1959 visit of Wolfgang Gentner’s delegation to the Weizmann Institute. Secondly, Wahrman left a uniquely rich historical record of his scientific communication with these German and Austrian counterparts, allowing it to reconstruct crucial aspects of his professional history and network. But what makes this case even more interesting is Wahrman’s field of activity. When Max Weinreich characterized Nazism in 1946 as a combination of Genghis Khan and Eugen Fischer, he was using Fischer, a prominent living German geneticist, as the representative of all that was notorious about the role of science in Hitler’s murderous barbarism.9 Genetics was already at that time understood to be deeply contaminated, arguably more than any other scientific field, by its links to the Nazi worldview, racial legislation, and horrific medical experiments. Given the political and cultural background of a boycott of German institutions, genetics would have seemed to be an especially unlikely field for early collaboration. Wahrman’s record is thus a particularly fruitful site for the exploration of relations between the individual and the institutionalized registers of scientific activity. Jacob Wahrman was born in Frankfurt in 1924.10 His father, Shmuel Wahrman, had emigrated there from the Galicia area of Poland and started working as a clerk in Y. Kaufmann’s publishing house. In 1921, Shmuel 19 Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, New York 1946, 240. 10 See the obituary by Carmelit Richler, in: Cytogenetic and Genome Research 112 (2006), 181–183, (10 January 2017).

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Wahrman started a bookstore in Frankfurt with his uncle, Moshe Aaron Wahrman. In December 1933, after the Nazis’ rise to power, the family immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. Perhaps on the advice of the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who had visited the Frankfurt store in 1933 and encouraged Shmuel Wahrman and his good friend Nathan Bamberger to start a secondhand bookstore in Jerusalem, the two then opened the Bamberger and Wahrman bookstore. The store became an attraction and meeting place for Jerusalem’s secular and religious intellectuals, operating until Wahrman’s death in 1961.11 Jacob Wahrman grew up around books and showed a passionate interest in the country’s landscapes and natural treasures from a young age. As a Hebrew University biology student, he took part in Jewish hiking clubs. In particular, he organized student tours to the Negev Mountains in 1945 and 1946, which produced reports that contributed significantly to the understanding of the region’s ecology. In 1955, he received his PhD (under the supervision of Elisheva Goldschmidt) for his study of the genetics of Mantidae (mantises). Wahrman’s areas of interest included entomology, herpetology, mammalogy, and cytogenetics, as well as historical studies of Israel.12 He became a professor in 1966 and continued his scientific work until his retirement in 1993. After his retirement, Wahrman continued studying the history of Israel and developing his collection of historical maps, which was purchased by the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem after his death in 2005. Meticulous and perfectionistic, Jacob Wahrman published few of his studies, keeping much of his correspondence in voluminous alphabetized folders. These folders, covering the period from the late 1940s until shortly before Wahrman’s death, make it possible to trace his contacts and gain insight into the attitudes of the young scientist. The focus here will be on his correspondence with German or German-speaking scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. Letters exchanged with non-German or non-German-speaking scientists during this period, as well as correspondence from subsequent periods, are used for comparative purposes, to provide further perspectives on Wahrman’s thoughts and attitudes.13 But before turning to Wahrman’s letters

11 Ernst Fischer, Verleger, Buchhändler und Antiquare aus Deutschland und Österreich in der Emigration nach 1933, Elbingen 2011, 21 and 335 f. 12 Jacob Wahrman, Caroline Emily Gray Hill. The Orientalist Painter from Mount Scopus, in: Cathedra. For the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv 112 (2004), 91–112 (Heb.). 13 Wahrman always wrote in English or Hebrew, while German researchers usually addressed him in German. In a letter from 1970, Wahrman writes in Hebrew: “I understand German but can hardly speak the language.” National Library of Israel Archive (NLIA), Jacob Wahrman Archive (JWA), Wahrman to Dr. Perez Zadik, 29 November 1970.

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and contacts, a brief note on some of the changes that characterize the postWorld War II period in science is necessary.

Academic Collaboration In order to understand the changing scientific landscape in which Wahrman matured as a scientist, the gradual postwar transition from “little science” to “big science” has to be acknowledged: science relying on the work of the individual researcher evolved into broader-based research tying together several disciplines and researchers in cross-institutional and international projects.14 Scientific collaboration had become prevalent as early as the nineteenth century, when Germany and Britain began catching up with French science, which had enjoyed almost exclusive dominance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thanks to massive state support.15 Throughout the nineteenth century, Germany and Britain narrowed the gap in the development of their professional scientific communities, and after the reform in German universities in the 1830s, the German natural sciences – particularly the experimental sciences – began to prosper, with a growing reliance on collaborative research.16 This kind of collaboration contributed to an increasing German dominance in disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Chemical studies, in particular, received massive state support; by the end of the century, about two-thirds of the world’s chemical research was being carried out in Germany, and more than 4,000 chemists were employed in German industry.17 After World War II, the scientists who were old enough to still remember World War I would have retained a lively 14 Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science and Beyond, New York 1986; Donald Beaver/Richard Rosen, Studies in Scientific Collaboration, part 1: The Professional Origins of Scientific Co-Authorship, in: Scientometrics 1 (1978), no. 1, 63–84, here 73. Today, it may even be said that the emphasis on collaboration has been replaced by one on teamwork, and that it is the latter which makes the crucial difference between “big” and “little” science. Donald Beaver, Reflection on Scientific Collaboration (and Its Study). Past, Present, and Future, in: Scientometrics 52 (2001), no. 3, 365–377. 15 Hans-Liudger Dienel, Bilateral Scientific and Technical Collaboration between Hostile Countries in Europe. France and Germany, 1860–1950, in: Innovation 12 (1999), no. 4, 517–524. 16 Beaver/Rosen, Studies in Scientific Collaboration, part 1: The Professional Origins of Scientific Co-Authorship, 74–76. In addition to the experimental sciences, Germany also experienced accelerated development in the disciplines of comparative philosophy and history. 17 Donald Beaver/Richard Rosen, Studies in Scientific Collaboration, part 3: Professionalization and the Natural History of Modern Scientific Co-Authorship, in: Scientometrics 1 (1979), no. 3, 231–245, here 239.

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consciousness of how, during that war, the Allies suspended all scientific collaboration with German and Austrian scientists and, after the war, boycotted them and prevented them from taking part in conferences, associations, and publications. International scientific associations previously dominated by Germans were reestablished by the Allies.18 The use of science as a platform for political ends after World War II was directly influenced by the different strategy that had been employed following World War I. The scientific boycott, which had been intended to stay in effect until 1931, was ended in 1926 following the 1925 Locarno Treaty and Germany’s admission into the League of Nations. In the post-boycott era and until World War II, German science experienced an impressive resurgence, particularly in the areas of chemistry, biology, and biochemistry.19 Having learned a lesson from how the boycott after World War I exacerbated German nationalism, the Allies did not declare an official boycott of German science after World War II. Nevertheless, the sciences in postwar Germany still suffered from relatively slow development compared to what was happening in the United States and other countries. This was an effect of the massive brain drain resulting both from the forced emigration or killing of Jewish and other scientists after the Nazis’ rise to power and the massive recruitment of leading German scientists by the United States and the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the war, as well as of the economic difficulties of the universities in war-ravaged Germany. In seeking to avoid the isolation that had plagued it after World War I, the German academia conceived of scientific relations with Israel not only as an end in themselves but as a gate to reentry into the international scientific community. Another factor which contributed to the postwar German scientific gap was the aforementioned transition from little to big science, led by the United States. German universities were late in realizing the need for interdisciplinary research, which was key for big science. Nor did the way they rebuilt after the war contribute to their international competiveness.20 The American model of big science was grounded in the assumption that postwar Europe would find it difficult to conduct research programs on the American scale, but that it could benefit from transatlantic collaboration and thereby also promote American scientific development. With reference to Germany, however, American science policy was ambiguous. On the one hand, it encour-

18 Roswitha Reinbothe, Deutsch als internationale Wissenschaftssprache und der Boykott nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Frankfurt a. M. 2006. 19 Ute Deichmann, Emigration, Isolation and the Slow Start of Molecular Biology in Germany, in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002), 449–471. 20 Marie Luise Zarnitz, Molekulare und physikalische Biologie, Göttingen 1968, 17–36.

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aged collaboration as part of the postwar national security strategy.21 The ambition of the Western powers was to stabilize and reinforce West Germany – in science as in other areas – as a buffer against East Germany and the Soviet bloc. But the roles of science and scientists in Nazi Germany cast a long shadow over postwar scientific exchanges and collaboration with Germans. This wider context is necessary for understanding Wahrman’s German interlocutors.22 Against this historical background, the ethos of science as universal, rational, and in essence politically indifferent made it the best platform for the political negotiation between Israeli Jews and Germans. Speaking in Bonn in 1990, at an event marking thirty years of scientific relations between the countries, Haim Harari, then the President of the Weizmann Institute, summed it up well: “It was no coincidence that 20 years ago it was the area of science – rather than any other area of human pursuits – that was selected to bring about a rapprochement between the two nations that have contributed so much to human culture. After the dark past, it was impossible to start anew in a different area.”23

Indeed, the Gentner delegation is often taken as having marked the beginning of scientific relations between Germany and Israel, leading to the establishment of diplomatic ties. In exploring early contacts in the field of genetics, the following is not intended to replace the existing history but rather to contribute to and critically modify it, to make it more complex and less idealized.

Early Contacts From the record of his communications, one can see that Jacob Wahrman exchanged live and dead specimens, papers, offprints, and professional knowledge with colleagues from as many as twenty-five countries around the world, including countries in Western democracies, the Eastern Bloc, and countries in the developing world. In retrospect, however, the most important purpose for his collaboration in the areas of biology and zoology, 21 John J. Salomon, Science and International Relations. A European Perspective, in: Technology in Society 23 (2001), 291–315. 22 Ute Deichmann, The Expulsion of German-Jewish Chemists and Biochemists and Their Correspondence with German Colleagues after 1945. The Impossibility of Normalization? in: Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich, New York 2001, 243– 280. 23 Rolf Mehne, Thirty Years of Scientific Relations (Heb.), in: HaAtid. German Magazine in Hebrew 3 (1990), 25.

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and later genetics, was arguably the sharing of biological specimens. The reason for this, particularly in the changing landscape of modern science, was a growing dependency on a network of specimen collections which has driven Wahrman’s need, motivation, and justification for contact with numerous scientists abroad.24 With respect to Boltanski Wahrman’s motivation for the creation of a network of scientific connections, and for obtaining specimens of organisms, was individual, as both were necessary to help him take his first steps in the scientific field. Wahrman’s extensive network of specimen exchanges also included German and Austrian scientists, exemplified by sharing Opiliones (a kind of Arachnid) with C. Fr. Roewer from Bremen in 1952–55, Apodemus (field mice) and gerbils with Kurt Zimmermann from Berlin in 1957–58, Mantidae with Albrecht Faber from Tübingen in 1955, beetles with Hans Kulzer from Tutzing (Munich) in 1957–58, bat specimens with Kurt Bauer from Bonn in 1958–59,25 and Eumenes (bee and wasp) specimens with Paul Bluthgen from Naumburg (Saale) in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1958–61. With some of these, he exchanged laconic letters, while with others he maintained correspondences over a period of years that included updates on the situation of Jewish researchers who had arrived in Israel and resumed their scientific work there. There is no indication in Wahrman’s voluminous correspondence that in this capacity (that is, as an individual scientist working to promote his own scientific research and career), he treated scientists in Germany any differently from the many others elsewhere with whom he was communicating and exchanging specimens. Nor has it been possible to find any indication that he checked the biographies of the biologists and geneticists to whom he wrote or with whom he communicated for their political history or their activities and whereabouts during the Nazi period. One of Wahrman’s first letters to a German colleague is the one cited below, addressed in September 1950 to Professor Hans Bischoff of the Berlin Zoological Museum in East Berlin (the English here and elsewhere, including some small spelling errors at some points, is Wahrman’s own): “For some years now I am collecting and observing Hymenoptera of this country, especially Apidae. Lack of literature proved to be one of the main difficulties of identifica-

24 Niki Vermeulen/John N. Parker/Bart Penders, Understanding Life Together. A Brief History of Collaboration in Biology, in: Endeavour 37 (2013), no. 3, 162–171, here 165. 25 Kurt Bauer was born in 1926 in Austria. He was wounded during his military service and spent six months in an American military hospital, after which he was discharged from the POW camp. He studied zoology and spent the years 1958–1961 researching in Bonn. Friederike Spitzenberger, Kurt Bauer zum 60. Geburtstag, in: Annual Naturhistorisches Museum Wien 88/89 (1986), 1–13.

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tion. Moreover a part of the library of this Department was left on Mt. Scopus – the premises of the Hebrew University – and is therefore, as you will realize, unavailable to us, for the time being. In order to obtain the important publication of the late Mr. Alfken I wrote some time ago to his daughter. In her reply she was kind enough to inform me that these papers are now in the hands of the Museum in Berlin and she suggested to contact you in this matter. I should be very much obligated to you for reprints of Alfken’s papers in general and especially those regarding the bees of Europe, Mediterranean countries and NorthAfrica. Any other reprints by the late prof. Hedicke and other specialists will be appreciated very much.”26

Although nothing was actually exchanged in the course of this correspondence, it does represent a minimal and preliminary form of collaboration. At the time of writing, the young Wahrman had only just begun his research. It was one year after the establishment of the two separate German republics; Berlin was divided and still lay in ruins. The State of Israel was only two years old, and the Mount Scopus Campus of the Hebrew University was in Jordanian hands, with no regular access for Israelis, forcing the various departments to find temporary locations in the Israeli section of the thendivided Jerusalem.27 This situation denied Wahrman access to the theoretical materials he required in genetics. He therefore began trying to obtain the important writings of German entomologist Johann Dietrich Alfken (1862–1945), which had been transferred to the Natural History Museum in Berlin and its counterpart in Erfurt in 1945.28 Alfken’s daughter, who shared this information in a postcard she addressed to Wahrman in German in April 1950, directed him to Bischoff. Wahrman thereupon wrote to Bischoff and requested his help in obtaining Alfken’s materials, those of the late entomologist Hans Hedicke (1891–1949), or of other experts. Hedicke had served as a lecturer at the Prussian Academy of Science from 1923 until 1945 and was the representative for the evolving field of environmental protection in Berlin from 1936 on. There is no indication that Wahrman knew about or for that matter had any interest in Hedicke’s past. From his activities in 1958, which will soon be discussed, when he worked to keep the international congress of genetics from being held in Berlin in 1963 as planned, it is clear that Wahrman was aware of the Nazi past of geneticists in Germany, and concerned enough to voice his objections loudly. But what Wahrman was doing in practice, in these communications with individual German and Austrian colleagues, was to widen his professional network for his immediate scientific purposes. 26 NLIA, JWA, Wahrman to Bischoff, 10 September 1950. 27 The new Givat Ram Campus was not inaugurated until 1958. 28 Alfken had specialized in Hymenoptera, and particularly Apoidea. NLIA, JWA, Wahrman to Bischoff, 10 September 1950.

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Bischoff was not slow to reply. In German, he apologized for not being in possession of all of Alfken’s publications. No printed copies remained of his earlier publications, and a certain number of the later ones were also lost. As for Hedicke’s publications, these had fallen “victim to a bombing raid.” Publications on various Middle Eastern bee species that Wahrman wanted to collect in Israel were unavailable in Germany, due to Allied attacks on Berlin at the end of World War II, and now unavailable in Israel as well, as the old campus had been taken over by the Jordanians in 1948. Bischoff suggested that Wahrman visit the museum and review its particularly rich selection of Apiden. In his reply, Wahrman did not point out that as an Israeli citizen, he was prohibited from entering Germany. Instead, he replied that he was more interested in biological problems than in identifying organisms and politely added that “as you know some groups of Bees have no specialists for time being, so I will not hesitate to make use of your offer when it will prove necessary.”29 Past historical events (World War II bombings) and present political ones (the Hebrew University campus being in Jordanian hands) thus both come up in the communication. They come up not as an end in themselves, but rather as a side note to the scientific issue directly under discussion (offprints of scientific publications). Here, as well as in other correspondence, Wahrman carefully circumvents the political matter by returning the conversation to the specific scientific subject under discussion. Although the communication yields no actual exchange of materials, Wahrman leaves the possibility of future cooperation open. Indeed, his correspondence with Bischoff is resumed in late 1952 and early 1953, when Wahrman asks for further assistance in locating a certain insect collection and Bischoff responds that once again, the information is not available: Professor Brühl has been dead for several years and his journal is not in the museum.30 Wahrman thanks him for his reply and, as far as can be determined, this ends their correspondence.31 It is worth noting, again, that the purpose of Wahrman’s writing to Bischoff is for individual scientific objective. Thus Wahrman, an Israeli scientist, was communicating with Bischoff, a German scientist. Can one speak of “German-Israeli scientific collaboration” here? This question can be answered from two perspectives, which to some extent clash with each other. But first, it is worth stressing that others at the Hebrew University were aware that individual conduct bore institu-

29 The English, again, is Wahrman’s. NLIA, JWA, Wahrman to Bischoff, 26 November 1950. 30 NLIA, JWA, Wahrman to Bischoff, 8 October 1952; Bischoff to Wahrman, 6 January 1953. 31 Ibid., Wahrman to Bischoff, 1 March 1953.

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tional weight. In 1955, for instance, M. Avnimelech of the Hebrew University’s geology department found it necessary to write Binyamin Mazar, the university’s president from 1953 to 1961, about letters from Germany: “I am asking for your instruction: should I respond to these proposals affirmatively or negatively?”32 Mazar responded by referring Avnimelech to Kurt David Worman of the National Library and asked that his department follow the library’s example.33 Unlike Avnimelech, Wahrman seemed to believe that the individual and institutional could be separated from each other. Bischoff, in East Germany, was aware of young Wahrman’s work on Mantidae in Israel and tried to assist him, it appears, as best he could, with articles and information on other scientists who might help him. He also invited him to come for a consultation at the museum in Germany. Although Wahrman could have obtained materials and information there that were not available to him elsewhere, he declined the invitation, but it is not possible to determine whether this was because of the Israeli boycott, his personal ambivalence about Germany, or out of narrower scientific considerations. On the level of individual scientific collaboration, there was no joint research work between them nor even, in this particular event, any exchange of materials. It may be that this form of exchange does not cross the minimal threshold to make it worthy of the name of scientific collaboration. But it is useful to shift the perspective and analyze this question from a different angle. Although Wahrman was an Israeli scientist, communicating with the German scientist Bischoff, they were doing this as two individual scientists rather than as representatives of their respective institutions (let alone as representatives of institutions understanding themselves as touching on state affairs). One can thus speak of a scientific collaboration between an Israeli scientist and a German one, but not of German-Israeli scientific collaboration, which would have to include collaboration between scientific institutions acting as German and Israeli institutions. In line with Boltanski’s conceptual framework, however, emphasizing the complex, dynamic, and two-

32 HUA, File 612, Avnimelech to Mazar, 2 February 1955 (Heb.). 33 Ibid., Secretary [anonymous] to Avnimelech, 24 February 1955. In late 1960, the Permanent Committee’s minutes include the following guideline: “No research proposal will be submitted to Germany without the Permanent Committee’s approval.” In other words, the university as an institution wanted to determine the appropriateness of any joint individual activities. Similarly, in 1959 the Permanent Committee held a discussion on scholarships and decided against student exchanges with the Berlin University. As the Technion had already proposed several candidates for scholarships offered by the Hamburg Municipality to the State of Israel, no Hebrew University candidates were to be proposed, and it was emphasized that no public announcement regarding postdoctoral scholarships in Germany was to be made. Ibid., Permanent Committee, 21 January 1959 (Heb.).

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way flow between individuals and institutions, the line between the two is not stable, fixed, or at times even clear. Wahrman, after all, was enrolled as a PhD student in the Hebrew University, used the Hebrew University letterhead and his institutional affiliation, thus involving a certain minimal degree of institutionalization in his correspondence. At the other end of the spectrum, even when the Weizmann Institute struck the deal with the Max Planck Society in 1959, it was against fierce internal opposition within the Weizmann Institute and certainly did not mean that all faculty members went along with the decision in principle or in practice. In the German scientific community, the agreement met with resistance that may have been less vociferous but was no less strong.

Correspondences and Collaborations But let us return to Wahrman’s communication, comparing his correspondence with Germans to that with others from less sensitive historical backgrounds. To begin with, his letters to German scientists appear no different from the others in terms of writing style or manner of address, and they led to exchanges of articles, specimens, and knowledge. During the 1950s, he met German scientists in neutral third countries such as Turkey and Cyprus, where he collected specimens. One can also observe that after meeting scientists, including the Germans, he tended to keep in touch with them. A case in point is Curt Kosswig (1903–1982). In July 1951, Wahrman travelled to Istanbul for a symposium organized by Kosswig and collected specimens and research materials during his stay. Kosswig’s rather extraordinary biography included joining the SS in 1933 but then leaving Germany in 1937 for exile in Turkey in protest against the Nazi regime’s actions, particularly the 1935 dismissal of the head of Muenster University’s Department of Zoology, Professor Leopold von Ubisch, who was “half-Jewish.” Until 1955, Kosswig worked at the Department of Zoology of Istanbul University, which was built around his research skills – subsequently earning him the title “Father of Turkish Zoology.”34 In 1955, he returned to Germany from his exile and resumed his work at Hamburg University. 34 On German scientists in Turkey during the Nazi era, see Dinçer Gülen/Nuriddin Meriç/ Orhan Küçüker, Deutsche Wissenschaftler in der Türkei nach 1933. Ord. Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Curt Kosswig und seine herausragende Bedeutung für die zoologische Forschung und Lehre, in: Mitteilungen aus dem Hamburgischen Zoologischen Museum und Institut 101 (2004), 19–27, see (12 December 2016); Christopher Kubaseck/Guenter Seufert (eds.), Deutsche Wissenschaftler im türkischen Exil. Die Wissenschaftsmigration in die Türkei 1933–

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Wahrman’s correspondence with Kosswig began before his visit to Turkey, in 1949 at the latest, as may be inferred from the fact that the first letter still extant is dated 1 January 195035 in which Wahrman thanks Kosswig for having him sent his articles on genetics. In this brief letter, Wahrman also mentions five researchers from Turkey, Britain, Russia, and Sweden.36 All of them were older than himself and belonged to Kosswig’s generation; they were all familiar with one another and exchanged information and specimens through Kosswig. Wahrman, who had yet to complete his master’s thesis, joined this “invisible college”37 and benefited from its knowledge and contacts that would prove very helpful in his academic career. Specifically, he received specimen deliveries from Kosswig, shared his research ideas with him, and asked him to continue sending him study material. This correspondence with Kosswig demonstrates some of the complexities in the attempt to classify Wahrman’s scientific networks along national lines (which includes “racial,” religious, or political background), political affiliation, or institutional lines. Wahrman’s attempt to evade the political inflections of his scientific collaborations can also be seen in another one, this time with a British scientist. Wahrman was in touch with the entomologist Malcolm Burr, from whom he hoped to obtain comparative data that he needed for his work. However, the communication with Burr was intermittent, and as Wahrman wrote to Kosswig in March 1950, he had a suspicion why: “A long time passed since I heard from Dr. Burr. I am afraid that a letter from him was lost as he insisted on writing always Filistin on the envelopes (although I informed him that this may cause transfer of the letter to the Arab sector of Jerusalem). On meeting him please remind him in this matter.”38

35

36

37

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1945, Würzburg 2008; Ute Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, 25, 49, and 73; Diane B. Paul/Raphael Falk, Scientific Responsibility and Political Context. The Case of Genetics under the Swastika, in: Jane Maienschein/Michael Ruse (eds.), Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, Cambridge 1999, 257–275. Wahrman joined the Palmach – the elite underground Jewish fighting force in Palestine – in 1943. A year later, he began his biology studies at the Hebrew University. Starting at the end of 1947, he served in the Haganah – the main Zionist militia organization – and later in the Israeli Defense Force. He resumed his studies in the middle of 1949. Rhasis Erazi, (birth and death dates unknown) published his PhD in 1940 in Turkey; Frank Archibald Turk (1911–1986) and Malcolm Burr (1878–1954) were from England; Boris Uvarov (1889–1970) was British and Russian; and Hans Lohmander (1886–1951) was from Sweden. The term was first used with the establishment of the Royal Society in 1660. Many of its members – mainly mathematicians – did not belong to any official institute, but met on a regular basis to share common scientific interests. See Price, Little Science, Big Science and Beyond; Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges. Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities, Chicago, Ill., 1972. NLIA, JWA, Wahrman to Kosswig, 14 March 1950.

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Wahrman feared that because Burr insisted on addressing his letters to “Filistin” (a transcription of the Arabic word for Palestine) rather than “Israel,” Burr’s specimens and explanations would not reach Wahrman but be sent to Jordanian East Jerusalem instead and thus get lost. In his laconic fashion, Wahrman does not discuss in the letter whether Burr’s insistence on addressing letters to “Filistin” stemmed from Burr’s ignorance about the State of Israel and Wahrman’s location in the Israeli rather than the Jordanian part of Jerusalem, from simple absentmindedness, or from a potential anti-Zionist or antisemitic bias. Whatever the reason, Wahrman ignores the possible political aspects of Burr’s mailing error, never losing sight of his immediate scientific goal of receiving the materials. When his objectives were individual rather than institutional, even when there were signs of possible political infringement on his scientific collaborations, he attempted to solve the issues in a pragmatic fashion.39 Before travelling to Istanbul for the symposium organized by Kosswig mentioned above, Wahrman asked Kosswig about the possibility of visiting the Zoological Institute in Istanbul, which then was realized in July 1951. Wahrman, who lectured on zoology in Israel at the symposium organized by Kosswig, was very excited by his stay and moved by Kosswig’s hospitality. Apparently Wahrman, along with other participants of the symposium, was hosted in Kosswig’s home, probably due to the inappropriate conditions at the guesthouse reserved for them.40 During that time, Wahrman met many researchers, one of whom he mentioned only by his first name, Atif. In Bol39 The correspondence with Burr was renewed in December 1950. The objective political boundaries of Wahrman’s pragmatic strategy can be gauged from his 1951 correspondence with Carl Friedrich Roewer (1881–1963). Wahrman was interested in the latter’s chapter Solifuga, Palpigrada, which appeared in a book published in 1934 (in: H. G. Bronn, Klassen und Ordnungen des Tierreichs, vol. 5: Arthropoda, section IV: Arachnoidea und kleinere ihnen nahegestellte Arthropodengruppen, Leipzig 1934, 1–723). Roewer, a prolific zoologist who defined about a third of the spider species known today, was the director of the Übersee-Museum in Bremen starting in 1933. The problem Wahrman had to overcome was the inability to transfer money from Israel to Germany due to the boycott. As Israel was actively preparing the ground for negotiating the Reparations Agreement, it did not allow Israeli Pounds to be converted to German Marks. Wahrman sought to solve this pragmatically, asking a British colleague, Frank A. Turk (1911–1986), to serve as an intermediary. Between February and September of 1951, the two exchanged letters, discussing money transfers from Israel to Germany via the United Kingdom. But the scheme failed because the British bank they were using required confirmation to the effect that “the Israeli licence quoted is a non-Scheduled Territory licence permitting payment to West Germany” (NLIA, JWA, Midland Bank Limited to Turk, 18 June 1951.) Roewer suggested that Wahrman pay for books located in East Germany with US Dollars (Ibid., Turk to Wahrman, 30 June 1951). It is not known whether Wahrman eventually received the books. The correspondence ended in September, 1951 (NLIA, JWA). 40 NLIA, JWA, M. Başoğlu to Wahrman, 9 July 1951; and Kosswig to Wahrman, 7 June 1951.

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tanski’s analytical terms, however, given Wahrman’s citizenship and institutional affiliation and the fact that he spoke about zoology in Israel, his talk involved a greater degree of institutionalization than a genetic subject per se would have done. Wahrman’s participation in the symposium was not the end of the collaboration between him and Kosswig. Nine years later, in 1960, Kosswig came to Israel. By now, however, he was no longer living and working in Turkey but had become the director of the Zoological Institute and Museum in Hamburg. Wahrman hosted Kosswig and his partner when the Hebrew University still opposed formal relations with German institutions. In a letter of gratitude, Kosswig later wrote to Wahrman (in German) that after returning to Hamburg he had visited Helsinki: “You can imagine that I have been recalling the beautiful and warm days in Palestine not without some longing.”41 In their correspondence, Kosswig introduced Wahrman to Professor Wolf Herre (1909–1997) of the Zoological Institute and Museum in Kiel, thinking that Wahrman could benefit from Herre’s work on hybrids. Indeed, Herre wrote to Wahrman and in June 1950 (the letter is dated 1960 but from context it is clear it should say 1950), invited him to Kiel to present his cytological research to him.42 Although Wahrman responded both to Kosswig and to Herre that he might stop over in Kiel in conjunction with a mammalogy conference being held in Brno, Czechoslovakia that August, in the end he did not visit Herre’s laboratory.43 When Kosswig established the contact between Wahrman and Herre, he did not disclose to Wahrman that Herre had been a member of the SA (storm troopers) and the National Socialist Teachers Union during the Nazi period and served on the Russian front (nor is there any indication that Wahrman inquired).44 Upon his release from Soviet captivity in 1945, Herre was admitted to Kiel University.45 Although Wahrman never visited Herre in Kiel, the two did share detailed information about research and cytological experimental methods.46 While there is no 41 Ibid., Kosswig to Wahrman, 6 May 1960. It is worth noting that, like Burr, although in this case with no postal consequences, Kosswig also refers to Palestine rather than Israel. 42 Ibid., Herre to Wahrman, 3 June 1960 [1950]. 43 Ibid., Wahrman to Herre, 15 July 1950. 44 Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945?, Frankfurt a. M. 2003, 247. 45 In two posthumous memorials, details about Herre’s Nazi past were omitted. It was only mentioned that he had served on the Russian front, became a prisoner of war, and was released within a short period. M. Röhrs/F. Pirchner, In Memoriam Wolf Herre, in: Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics, 115 (1998), no. 4, 323–325; Diether Sperlich et al., In Memoriam Prof. Dr. h. c. Wolf Herre (1909–1997), in: Zeitschrift für Zoologische Systematik und Evolutionsforschung 36 (1998), 153–156. 46 NLIA, JWA, Herre to Wahrman, 3 June 1960 [1950], and Wahrman to Herre, 15 July 1950.

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indication that Wahrman knew about Herre’s Nazi past, it seems safe to assume that it would not have surprised him. As is now widely established, the great majority of geneticists, physical anthropologists, and physicians had supported the Nazi party and its core beliefs, and Wahrman’s 1958 objection to the 1963 genetics congress taking place in Germany indicates that he was clearly aware of this context.47 Kosswig’s expansion of Wahrman’s scientific network to include Herre most certainly qualifies as a form of scientific collaboration. As Herre and Kosswig were at this time both directors of institutes, their collaboration involved a greater degree of institutionalization than if they had just been lone, individual scientists. But as far as one can tell from the existing written record, the collaboration was still intended to advance scientific ends in the more specific sense, not involving any direct mention of institutional, let alone national, considerations. It is notable that in comparison with his correspondence with Kosswig, Wahrman’s correspondence with Herre is brief and matter-of-fact; it is also mediated by Kosswig. Wahrman did not initiate this contact or attempt to cultivate it, but it nevertheless raises many questions in light of Wahrman’s public stance in 1958.

Individual and Institutional Networks In 1958, at the end of the International Congress of Genetics in Montreal, it was decided that the following congress would be held in 1963 in Germany. By that time, Wahrman was the head of the Genetics Society of Israel. In 1959/60, in this capacity, Wahrman was intensely active in attempts to cancel the decision and to move the congress somewhere other than Germany.48 Wahrman was supported in these efforts by his doctoral supervisor Elisheva Goldschmidt and the prominent non-Jewish American geneticist Leslie C. Dunn. Like Wahrman, Goldschmidt (1912–1972) was born in Frankfurt and forced to emigrate before completing her medical studies there. In 1942 she received a PhD in zoology from the Hebrew University and became one of the pioneers of genetics in Israel. Leslie C. Dunn (1893–1974) was an American geneticist from Columbia University who had been very active prior to the war in helping refugee scientists immigrate to and find employment in the United States. During and after the war, he was also a leading activist in 47 For the wider context, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors. Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York 1986; Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler. 48 NLIA, JWA, Report of the Genetics Society of Israel on Its Activities between October 1959 and April 1965, 15 April 1965.

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the struggle against racism, particularly of the biologically-based kind, in both scientific and social circles. Dunn thus clearly believed in the public roles of scientists and viewed scientific collaboration as a form of bridge-building. He had formed contacts with Russian scientists to support them in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution. In the late 1920s, he visited Europe and took part in the 1927 International Congress of Genetics in Berlin. Later, during the McCarthy era, he was branded a communist sympathizer, if not worse, despite his consistent opposition to both right- and left-wing political violence.49 Dunn’s close cooperation with Wahrman and Goldschmidt against the proposed Berlin congress played a significant part in the eventual decision by the International Union of Biological Sciences to move the congress to Scheveningen, the Netherlands. Although Dunn viewed scientific collaboration as a political instrument, and the congress would be taking place eighteen years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, in this particular case he objected because of the enormity of the crimes carried out by German geneticists and the rehabilitation of German genetics that the congress would imply. The use of science as a form of bridge-building had, for Dunn, certain boundaries. Wahrman’s forms of activity also appear contradictory. As an individual scientist, Wahrman collaborated with German scientists, including some who had been in the SS or the SA and had served on the Eastern front, but in his institutional capacity, he adamantly opposed the rehabilitation of German genetics that would have been entailed by Germany being allowed to host the international congress. In other words, although Wahrman had begun collaborating with German geneticists prior to the Gentner delegation’s visit to Israel, which is often understood as marking the beginning of German-Israeli scientific collaboration, he was now, after scientific collaboration had formally commenced, working, in his official capacity as the head of the Genetics Society of Israel, against having the congress take place in Germany. Wahrman was out of sync with Israel’s national and institutional course of events. From another perspective, however, one can contrast Wahrman’s activities as an individual scientist with those carried out in his institutional scientific capacities. Here one can see that he was generally consistent: on the institutional level, not only was he not neutral or indifferent but he was in fact

49 Theodisius Dobzhansky, Leslie Clarence Dunn (1893–1974), in: A Biographical Memoir, Washington, D. C., 1978, 78–104, here 85–87; Melinda Gormley, Scientific Discrimination and the Activist Scientist. L. C. Dunn and the Professionalization of Genetics and Human Genetics in the United States, in: Journal of the History of Biology 42 (2009), no. 1, 33–72; William DeJong-Lambert, The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research. An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair, Dordrecht/New York 2012.

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uncompromisingly opposed to relations with Germany, even after the Gentner delegation’s visit. On the non-institutional, or individual, level, however, he initiated and cultivated a network of scientific connections with German scientists, including ones with Nazi pasts.50 This is particularly interesting given Wahrman’s later positions and statements. More than a decade later, in 1972, the idea was raised again that Germany should host the International Congress of Genetics, this time for 1978. Based on the fierce opposition in 1958, which had forced the change of venue for 1963 and most probably caused embarrassment, if not humiliation, for German genetics instead of the hoped-for rehabilitation, Professor J. W. Boyes, secretary of the International Genetics Federation, wrote to Amram Ashri (b. 1929) and cautiously asked him: “It has been suggested quite unofficially that we might consider West Germany as the possible location of the 1978 International Genetics Congress. You may recall that when this was suggested some years ago there was considerable reaction. Accordingly, before taking any action whatever, I would like to know very much what the reaction of your members of the Society might be.”51

Ashri wrote to the members of the Genetics Society of Israel and asked them to read Boyes’s letter carefully. He also reminded them that the 1963 congress had been moved to Holland due to Israeli opposition. “On the other hand,” he added, “many years have passed and there is a new generation of geneticists there [in Germany]. Please let me know how you and your colleagues at the Society view this problem.”52 Uzi Ritte passed the question on to Wahrman in August 1972, inquiring as to his personal opinion and how the Society should respond. Ritte deliberately separated the private from the institutional sphere and asked how Wahrman stood with regard to each.53 Wahrman responded the very next day. He replied: “I do not think we can support the suggestion to hold the international congress in Germany. I propose that the Genetics Society [of Israel] avoid taking an official stand, and

50 In a liminal case, in which Wahrman received letters following the 1967 war from Herbert Lüers, a geneticist and rector of the Free University of Berlin, scientific and political considerations, as well as individual, institutional, and national ones, mix in very strange ways. Wahrman passed the letters on to the President of the Hebrew University; see Morris-Reich, The “First Letters” of Jacob Wahrman. 51 NLIA, JWA, Boyes to Ashri, 9 August 1972. 52 Ibid., handwritten over the letter Boyes to Ashri, 9 August 1972. In a handwritten note attached to the letter, Ashri addresses Wahrman directly and asks for his personal response and that of other members, as he would like to obtain a “representative impression” (Heb.). 53 Ibid., Ritte to Wahrman, 23 August 1972 (Heb.). Uzi Ritte (1937–2012) wrote his master’s thesis under Wahrman’s supervision. He specialized in the effect of environmental conditions on the genetic structure of various populations.

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even inform the international organization to that effect. I believe the time has come to leave the German question to each individual’s conscience.”54

Considered the moral authority in this case by virtue of his activity to prevent the holding of the congress in Berlin in 1963, Wahrman continued to insist on the separation between the institutional and the personal. This time, however, he was willing to adjust to the changed reality and be more flexible in the former sphere.55 Although Wahrman believed that outright support for holding the congress in Germany would be tantamount to forgetting, normalization, or rapprochement, to which he was opposed, he now believed that outright institutional opposition was no longer justified. It appears that for Wahrman, the institutional and personal had become closer, but they were still not indistinguishable. His justification for the change in opinion, however, is odd. Wahrman himself had already collaborated with the older generation of individuals. But now he used the emergence of a younger generation to justify a change in the Israeli stance concerning the German genetic community as a whole. This apparent contradiction is sharpened by the fact that in Wahrman’s estate, one can find evidence that he had sought out information and material on the Nazi past of German geneticists. In other words, he had an explicit interest in the subject. It is possible, however, that this interest only developed gradually, or that it was actually triggered by the fact that at the 1961 International Conference on Human Population Genetics in Israel, in which some forty experts from different countries took part, the only German participant was the West German Hans Nachtsheim (1890–1979). Prior to inviting Nachtsheim, the conference organizer, Goldschmidt, had inquired into Nachtsheim’s Nazi past. Her inquiries must have set her mind at ease, as, at the time, Nachtsheim was considered the only prominent German geneticist whose record during the Nazi period was clean. Only subsequently was it established that he had been directly involved in the euthanasia program and taken part in experiments on humans and corpses, but had covered his tracks after the war.56 Even as late as the 1980s, Wahrman created a file on geneti-

54 Ibid., Wahrman to Ritte, 24 August 1972 (Heb.). 55 The 1978 congress was finally held in the Soviet Union. 56 Ute Deichmann, Hans Nachtsheim, a Human Geneticist under National Socialism, and the Question of Freedom of Science, in: Michael Fortun/Everett Mendelsohn (eds.), The Practices of Human Genetics, Dordrecht 1999, 143–153.

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cist Hans Bauer (1904–1988) focusing on his Nazi past.57 This file includes a letter of confession and explanation addressed by Bauer to the GermanAmerican geneticist Franz Schrader (1891–1962) of Columbia University, as well as further correspondence by Schrader in this matter. On the file, Wahrman wrote that he had shown the letter to Gropp and to Sperling (it appears probable, but not certain, that this is Karl Sperling, a German human geneticist born in 1941) in 1986. Alfred Gropp died in 1983, though, and it is thus not clear whether the letter was shown to Alfred’s son, Cornelius, or was shown only to Sperling that year. Given his objection to the 1963 congress, beginning in 1958, and his interest in the background of German geneticists, it is fair to assume that even before the incident concerning Nachtsheim, Wahrman was interested in the past of scientists he communicated with. There are two possibilities. Either he did not examine the background of German geneticists and did not care about their personal biographies, or else he had checked their backgrounds but the results of his inquiries were no reason for him to avoid contact or even collaboration with them. In this apparent complex structure of possible contradictions, what is interesting here concerns the variable of individual versus institutional capacities and considerations. A positive correlation emerges between inquiries into the personal background of German geneticists as individuals and a growing institutional flexibility with regard to international (and Israeli) recognition and implied rehabilitation of German genetics as a whole.

Science and Political Bridge-Building Thus far this analysis has used one case, that of Wahrman, in order to look at the individual and institutional modalities involved in communication and collaboration between Israeli and German geneticists. The official or semiofficial version of the inception of scientific relations between West Germany and Israel is that they began with the meeting between Gentner and de-Shalit in 1956 and with the 1959 visit of the Gentner and Hahn delegation to Israel and the signing of the agreement between the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Society. What one sees here, however, is that Wahrman 57 Bauer was a member of the SS in 1933–35, and a member of the Nazi-affiliated Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science throughout the war. After the war he found it difficult to resume his scientific work due to his suspected Nazi loyalties, but eventually, in 1948, he was admitted to the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen.

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began building his network earlier than either of these events, that his network was individual rather than institutional, and that it was not intended to serve as a platform for bilateral national relations. On the contrary, in his institutional function, Wahrman worked to abort the international congress that would have rehabilitated German genetics and later affirmed its reentry into the international scientific community. These various instances of scientific relations thus involved not only differing degrees of individual motivation versus institutionalization but also touched, directly and indirectly, on the political sphere, even at the national level in Israel and Germany. But if in one sphere, the German-Israeli one, Wahrman used his institutional capacity to act against the use of science as a political instrument, in a different sphere he did the opposite. Wahrman was from an early age a political person, with leanings to the left side on the Israeli political map, and the conflict between Jews and Arabs has been of considerable significance for him. Perhaps this is why, when offered the opportunity to combine regional with scientific politics, Wahrman felt inspired and able to bring about true change: to facilitate collaboration between Jewish and Arab geneticists in the Middle East. In 1963, the year that the congress originally planned for Berlin actually took place in the Netherlands, an idea arose that the Genetics Society of Israel should join a regional association which would also include geneticists from Turkey and Greece. The Genetics Society of Israel, under Wahrman’s leadership, decided that if a formal proposal was made, it would respond favorably.58 A politically even more daring initiative, because closer to the ArabIsraeli conflict, was initiated by German-American geneticist Alexander Hollaender (1898–1986). Hollaender immigrated to the United States in 1921, where he specialized in biological radiation and genetic mutations, worked among other things at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and was deeply involved in scientific education and international cooperation.59 In 1964, German-American and German-born Israeli geneticists came up with the idea of holding a joint meeting of geneticists from various Middle Eastern countries on chromosome structure, chemistry, and physiology. Hollaender and Wahrman thought Turkey would be a suitably neutral location for such a meeting. To promote the initiative, Wahrman contacted Kosswig’s former student Atif Şengün, whom he had met in Istanbul in 1951. Now, thirteen years after that first meeting, the two collaborated on organizing the

58 NLIA, JWA, Minutes of the Fourth General Assembly of the Genetics Society of Israel, 4 April 1963 (Heb.). 59 For example, he held an annual symposium in South America to share information and help develop local scientific knowledge. See Richard B. Setlow, Alexander Hollaender (1989–1986). Biographical Memoir, Washington, D. C., 2011, 1–11.

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Middle Eastern scientific meeting planned for the summer of 1965 in Istanbul.60 Since there was considerable interest and willingness to support the initiative in Istanbul, the three began thinking of scientists they could invite.61 Şengün had his doubts as to whether the meeting could take place. But he immediately qualified his doubts, giving an example of a meeting that had already taken place in Turkey, with Jewish and Arab scientists participating: “I hope that we shall be able to bring the scientists from Israel as well as from Arab countries together. Two years ago the representatives of Israel and of Lebanon had attended the international course on chromosome study organized by our Faculty.”62

Surprisingly enough, it turned out that the main difficulty in organizing the meeting was not political. The organizers were unable to find Arab researchers with expertise in the subjects selected for the conference. Şengün asked Wahrman for help locating such scientists, and Wahrman responded by suggesting that the range of subjects be expanded to make it easier to find suitable Arab participants.63 Subsequently, Şengün wrote to Wahrman: “Unfortunately I could still not decide the topic of the meeting proposed by Dr. Hollaender. On the other hand I am sure the list of the scientists of Arab Countries will be rather small in any case.”64 In June 1965 Wahrman replied: “Unfortunately it took me a long time to consider the matter. I came to the conclusion that the success of the meeting depends upon the cooperation of the geneticists from Egypt. Naturally I can do little about this.”65 Apparently, although some progress had been made in identifying suitable Arab participants, Egyptian geneticists obstructed the initiative, whether by refusing to help finding relevant geneticists or by refusing to take an active part in the conference themselves. This doomed the whole project. Şengün was willing to proceed with organizing the meeting only if names were provided. He became tired of looking for Arab geneticists himself, but added that “I have no objection if any of them will be invited. On the contrary I would be glad to meet them.”66 The last time the initiative is mentioned in Wahrman’s letters is in June 1966, when he informs his Turkish colleague: “I have just heard from Dr. Hollaender that he renewed his efforts to organize a Mediterranean Chromosome Conference, perhaps in Greece. But I do not know the details

NLIA, JWA, Şengün to Wahrman, 12 November 1964. Ibid., Şengün to Wahrman, 9 October 1964. Ibid., Şengün to Hollaender, 10 October 1964. Ibid., Şengün to Wahrman, 12 November 1964; and Wahrman to Şengün, 15 February 1965. 64 Ibid., Şengün to Wahrman, 2 March 1965. 65 Ibid., Wahrman to Şengün, 4 June 1965. 66 Ibid., Şengün to Wahrman, 23 July 1965. 60 61 62 63

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yet.”67 This attempt apparently failed as well, probably also due to the growing tensions in Israeli-Arab relations, which culminated in the June 1967 war. Wahrman’s vision of scientific collaboration with Arab geneticists as a form of bridge-building proved futile. There are numerous elements that offer themselves for analysis in the comparison between the post-Holocaust German-Israeli context and that of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here, note Wahrman’s different, almost contradictory modes of conduct in the two contexts. In the German-Israeli context, he built individual collaborative scientific networks, in the narrower understanding of scientific collaboration, but opposed such collaboration being used as a political platform; in the ArabIsraeli context, he attempted to make use of science as a form of political bridge-building, but there is no evidence that points to any attempt by him to collaborate with Arab scientists as individuals.

Concluding Comments In analyzing early contacts between Israeli and German scientists in the field of genetics, this article has employed Luc Boltanski’s sociological conceptualization of institutions and individuals, according to which there is a spectrum that reaches from institutions that exist only in the abstract, at one end, all the way to living individuals, on the other. These two ends of the spectrum are in certain respects ideal types, in Boltanski’s concept, because individuals’ actions exemplify differing degrees of institutionalization and institutions always and necessarily involve individuals. This conceptualization has been employed in order to demonstrate that early contacts between Jewish Israeli scientists and non-Jewish German scientists involved various degrees of institutionalization. If Boltanski’s conceptualization effectively deconstructs binary differentiations between private and public or individual and institutional capacities, showing that they are instead matters of degree, the findings shown here undermine and complicate the existing, semi-official narrative about scientific and political connections between Germany and Israel after the Holocaust. What the existing narrative implies is a top-to-bottom perspective, in which scientists and political leaders employed each other and, through a now-celebrated event, the visit of the Gentner delegation to the Weizmann Institute in 1959, set off the scientific relationship between the states. But once these degrees of institutionalization have been recognized, the unam67 Ibid., JWA, Wahrman to Şengün, 30 June 1966.

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biguous divisions between scientists as individuals and scientists who operate in their institutional capacities cannot be upheld. And given this demonstration that a network of relations had already begun a decade earlier, the semi-official narrative that implies that the Gentner delegation initiated scientific relations must be modified. Wahrman’s network and the history of Gentner’s delegation can be placed on a spectrum from the individual to the institutional. Both involve different degrees and modalities of institutionalization. Early contacts in genetics were, on the whole, closer to the individual than to the institutional end. Furthermore, the closer these contacts tended toward institutional concerns, the more explicitly the recent past that was in the background surfaced, and the greater opposition and sensitivity they met. Gentner’s delegation was closer to the institutional end of the spectrum. Here the events were placed squarely in the context of the recent past and institutional (scientific and extra-scientific) rather than individual concerns, and justifications were at the center. While we focused our analysis on degrees of institutionalization in Jacob Wahrman’s professional network of communication, this article cannot end without addressing the question of what effect his contacts with German and Austrian scientists had on the development of his science. As has been shown here, Wahrman wrote to German scientists whose scientific assistance was necessary for the successful completion of his dissertation. In the constitutive stage of his development as a geneticist, then, he had to rely on the knowledge and assistance of German colleagues. This also reveals a certain kind of scientific loop: Wahrman needed the knowledge and expertise of German colleagues because, first, the hegemony of German botanists and biologists in these regions of the Middle East, and, secondly, the issue of what kind of question was worthy of a PhD in Hebrew University’s Anatomy (later Genetics) Department were rooted in specifically pre-Nazi German academic traditions. Wahrman later developed in additional directions, and as his interest in cytogenetic questions and methods, in particular, increased, his network more and more shifted towards the English-speaking world in general and especially the United States. Once he no longer needed the assistance of the German geneticists, he only remained in touch with a couple of them: Gropp (a victim of Nazism) and Kosswig (exiled during the Nazi era). As his interest in his Palestinophile collection grew, however, he had expanded contact with German colleagues who shared that interest. Wahrman’s pattern of activity differed from that epitomized by Gentner and de-Shalit. The semi-official narrative about science and politics in the relations between Germany and Israel after the Holocaust, with the mutual use for the sake of building bridges between nations, epitomizes the post-

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World War II coalescing of politics and science into a single cultural arc. From this perspective, Wahrman’s case is rather unique. Unlike de-Shalit and Gentner, Wahrman denied, in practice, that science and politics had to be positively coordinated. On the contrary, the boundaries that Wahrman set himself were unrelated to individual biography during the Nazi period, which he ignored, setting a boundary instead between the scientific network among individuals and the institutionalized, political register, which others seemed to think had to be conjoined. Wahrman thus contacted individuals and used their knowledge while simultaneously opposing institutional cooperation, national recognition, or the use of science for rapprochement. Walter Benjamin famously called for reading history against the grain. This perspective emphasizes the contradiction between Wahrman and the de-Shalit and Gentner encounter (and the course the historical relations between Germany and Israel had taken). This reading of Wahrman emphasizes alternative moral, psychological, and political possibilities concerning relations between science and politics after World War II and between Jews and Germans after the Holocaust.

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Vor der Diplomatie: Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Brückenbauer? Im Dezember 1959 brach eine Delegation deutscher Physiker zu einem ersten Besuch am Weizmann-Institut in Rehovot nach Israel auf. Das naturwissenschaftliche Forschungszentrum war 1934 unter dem Namen DanielSieff-Institut errichtet worden. Der spätere Staatspräsident Chaim Weizmann, selbst ein renommierter Chemiker, hatte es gemeinsam mit einem Team von Fachkollegen gegründet – er hatte früh erkannt, dass Intelligenz im trockenen Palästina »der einzige Rohstoff [ist], über den wir verfügen«.1 Laut Dietmar Nickel, der ab 1966 der Generalverwaltung der Max-PlanckGesellschaft (MPG) angehörte und ab 1973 in deren Auslandsreferat für die Minerva-Stiftung verantwortlich war, lockerte sich auf der Reise die zunächst verkrampfte Atmosphäre bald: »Hierzu trug die spontane Einladung der Witwe Weizmanns, Frau Vera Weizman [sic], ebenso bei wie die liebenswürdige und warmherzige Art [Otto] Hahns, als Vertreter der besten Traditionen.«2 Der Besuch im Winter 1959 sollte dem persönlichen Kontakt, aber vor allem einem Überblick über die Arbeitsmöglichkeiten für potenzielle deutsche Besucher dienen. Gelockt worden war die deutsche Delegation damit, dass »im November und Dezember das Klima dort besonders schön ist, so dass die Anstrengung nicht zu groß sein dürfte«, wie Wolfgang Gentner an Otto Hahn in einem Brief zur Vorbereitung geschrieben hatte.3 Otto Hahn war dank seiner Biografie als entschiedener NS-Gegner die Symbolfigur des anständig gebliebenen Deutschen und von daher wie wenig Andere geeignet, an der Gestaltung der deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen mitzuwirken. Neben den beiden nahmen auch Feodor Lynen und Hahns Sohn Hanno an der Reise teil.4 Gentner schrieb, er würde sich freuen, »wenn alles bald zu einem positi1

2

3 4

Zit. nach Dietmar K. Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot. Die Anfänge der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Israel, hg. vom europäischen Komitee des Weizman Institute of Science, Zürich 1989, 10. Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 7. Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft wurde 1948 als gemeinnützige Forschungsorganisation in der Rechtsform eines eingetragenen Vereins mit einem Jahresetat von 7 Millionen DM gegründet, (30. Januar 2017). Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Gentner an Otto Hahn, 14. September 1959. Hanno Hahn erinnerte sich in seinen Reisenotizen: »Mittwoch, 2.12.: Ausschlafen. EinJBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 399–417.

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ven Ergebnis käme.«5 »Alles« bezog sich sowohl auf die Institutionalisierung der finanziellen Unterstützung aus Deutschland wie auf eine künftige Zusammenarbeit in der Forschung. Die achttägige Reise gilt heute als Auftakt zur Kooperation zwischen deutschen und israelischen Forschern. Neben dem Weizmann-Institut besuchte die kleine Gruppe auch das Technion Haifa und den See Genezareth.6 Hahn resümierte in einem Brief an Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer nach seiner Rückkehr, er habe »einen ausgezeichneten Eindruck von den wissenschaftlichen Leistungen des Weizmann-Institutes erhalten und [sei] tief beeindruckt von der freundlichen Aufnahme«.7 Ausgehend von vereinzelten persönlichen Initiativen und Kontakten wurde eine offizielle Kooperation zwischen israelischen und westdeutschen Institutionen gegen Ende der 1950er Jahre auf dem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaften eingeleitet. Üblicherweise nehmen die Naturwissenschaften in einschlägigen Darstellungen, etwa in den Publikationen anlässlich der Feierlichkeiten 2015 zum 50-jährigen Jubiläum der Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Israel, die Rolle eines »Eisbrechers« ein. Denn in dem historisch weniger belasteten Feld der Wissenschaften konnten erste bilaterale Verbindungen geknüpft werden, auch da die deutschen Juden in der Naturwissenschaft vor 1933 eine führende Rolle innehatten und sich die Beteiligten auf deutscher und israelischer Seite in den 1950er Jahren häufig bereits kannten. Später führten die wissenschaftlichen Kontakte auch zu einer Annäherung im politischen Bereich. Diese Lesart der Naturwissenschaften als »neutraler« Wegbereiter wird indes durch jüngere Studien infrage gestellt. Sie bezweifeln, dass die Vertreter der Naturwissenschaften tatsächlich unabhängig von außenpolitischen Überlegungen agierten und welche Motive und Absichten hinter den frühen naturwissenschaftlichen Beziehungen standen.8 In diesem Beitrag soll

5 6 7 8

druck des Weizmann-Institutes bei einem Parkbummel: Paradiesesgarten! (erinnert an Palm Springs […]). Wie wir später sahen, war dieser Eindruck typisch und untypisch zugleich für das Land und den jungen Staat: nicht überall Paradies und modernster Lebensluxus, sondern karge Sand- oder Felsgebiete, verfallene Araberorte, kriegszerstörte Bergnester, aber aufgrund des wahrlich eindrucksvollen und imponierenden Aufbauwillens und des sogenannten ›Kibbutzgeistes‹, besonders der jüngeren Leute, eben doch an den modernen Zentren […], neuen Orten und wissenschaftlichen Pionierstellen [wie Technion Haifa oder Hebrew University Jlem.] auch jener großartige, großzügige und zugleich rationelle Geist und ähnliche Bilder wie beim Weizmann-Inst. im 1. Blick.« Archiv der MPG, III 14 6058, Reisenotizen Israel von Hanno Hahn, Bl. 2 (Hervorhebungen im Original unterstrichen). Ebd., Bl. 4. Vgl. Archiv der MPG, III 14 6560, Reiseprogramm. Archiv der MPG, II M/2, Brief Otto Hahn an Bundeskanzler Adenauer, 8. Februar 1960. Zu den Motiven vgl. bes. Ute Deichmann, The Beginnings of Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences. Motives, Scientific Benefits, Hidden Agendas, Jerusalem 2016.

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danach gefragt werden, ob sich erstens die verbreitete Ansicht aufrechterhalten lässt, dass die Naturwissenschaften bei der Annäherung zwischen der bundesdeutschen und der israelischen Gesellschaft nach dem Holocaust tatsächlich das Eis brachen, und zweitens, wie sich die ersten Aufenthalte junger deutscher Forscher in Israel gestalteten. Zum einen war die Richtung wissenschaftlicher Kooperation in den ersten Jahren einseitig, da Besuche israelischer Forscher in Deutschland von deren eigener Regierung politisch nicht gewünscht waren. Daher hielten sich zunächst nur junge deutsche Forscher in Rehovot auf, Aufenthalte israelischer Forscher an den Max-PlanckInstituten in Göttingen, Berlin oder anderen Städten waren dagegen noch nicht absehbar. Zudem waren, wie anhand der Quellen aus der Max-PlanckGesellschaft und dem Weizmann-Institut zu zeigen sein wird, nur wenige deutsche Wissenschaftler bereit, den Schritt in das unbekannte Land im Orient zu wagen und ihre Ängste davor zu überwinden, wie sie wohl aufgenommen würden. Am Weizmann-Institut wiederum gab es gegen die Kontakte mit Deutschen erheblichen Widerstand, mit dem die Initiatoren in dieser Form nicht gerechnet hatten.9

Gemeinsame Interessen und ihre Grenzen Die frühesten Kontakte zu deutschen Wissenschaftlern durch Mitarbeiter des Weizmann-Instituts entstanden, als der aus Deutschland stammende Israeli Gerhard Schmidt 1956 Kontakt zu Wolfgang Gentner aufnahm. Schmidt war 1934 aus Berlin emigriert und arbeitete als Chemiker am Weizmann-Institut. Die beiden unternahmen von 1956 bis 1958 ausgedehnte Spaziergänge durch den Kaiserstuhl bei Freiburg und besprachen Ideen zur Konkretisierung einer Zusammenarbeit.10 Den ersten Vorschlag diesbezüglich hatte Amos de-Shalit 1957 gemacht, der laut Gentner eines Tages einfach in dessen Zimmer gekommen war und diese Möglichkeit vorgeschlagen hatte.11 De-Shalit war Kernphysiker am Weizmann-Institut und forschte in den Jahren 1957/1958 als Ford Foundation Fellow an der Europäischen Organisation für Kernforschung (CERN). Die Ausformulierung der israelischen Vorstellungen zur Kooperation übernahm nach diesen Initiativen der Präsident der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Josef Cohn. Cohn war in Heidelberg als Chemiker promoviert wor19 Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 23. 10 Ebd., 19. 11 Ansprache Wolfgang Gentner vom 28. November 1978 in Bonn, zit. nach Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 18.

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den, hatte sich früh der zionistischen Bewegung angeschlossen und war 1933 ebenfalls nach Palästina emigriert.12 Er beabsichtigte, ein europäisches Netzwerk von Freunden des Weizmann-Instituts aufzubauen, nach dem Vorbild des bereits existierenden amerikanischen Freundeskreises. Für dieses Ziel der »Operation Germany« wurde er zum »erfolgreichen Akquisiteur« und »zum Schrecken mancher Amtsinhaber in deutschen Ministerien, die sich seinem Charme nicht entziehen konnten.«13 Um die Finanzierung für eine wissenschaftliche Kooperation mit der Bundesrepublik zu ermöglichen, sprach er direkt bei Konrad Adenauer vor. Dabei berief er sich auf den gemeinsamen Freund Dannie Heinemann, in dessen Schuld Adenauer stand, weil Heinemann ihm nach der Absetzung als Kölner Bürgermeister im Jahr 1933 finanziell geholfen hatte. Die Bundesrepublik verband mit der Kooperation zwei Ziele: Zum einen sollte die Reputation der deutschen Wissenschaft durch fachlichen Austausch mit renommierten ausländischen Forschern gesteigert werden. Durch Emigration, Vertreibung und Ermordung während des nationalsozialistischen Regimes hatte Deutschland an Humankapital eingebüßt. Zudem sollte die Forschungsförderung in Israel und die Kooperation mit israelischen Forschern auch die Wiederaufnahme in die internationale Staatengemeinschaft ermöglichen. In der Jubiläumsschrift zum 40-jährigen Bestehen der Minerva-Stiftung des Bundesministeriums für Forschung und Bildung heißt es: »So war die Wissenschaft als grenzüberschreitendes Medium an der Annäherung zwischen Deutschen und Israelis, die 1965 mit der Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen ihren politischen Höhepunkt fand, maßgeblich beteiligt.«14 Die gemeinsamen Projekte hätten Grundlagenforschung von »gemeinsame[m] Interesse« umfasst.15 Das »gemeinsame Interesse« bedeutete in den späten 1950er Jahren vor allem physikalische Grundlagenforschung und Kernenergie, die für Israel wie für die Bundesrepublik in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges von großer Bedeutung waren. Das politisch-strategische Interesse an der Grundlagenforschung war neben dem Gedanken einer »Wiedergutmachung« das zweite wichtige Motiv für die insgesamt hohen bundesdeutschen Aufwendungen für die deutsch-israelische Zusammenarbeit. Dabei stützten sich die ersten 12 Zu den Biografien der Protagonisten vgl. Deichmann, The Beginnings of Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences. Zur Rolle Cohns bei der Initiierung der Kontakte vgl. Michael Schüring, Minervas verstoßene Kinder. Vertriebene Wissenschaftler und die Vergangenheitspolitik der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Göttingen 2006, 352. 13 Nickel, Es begann in Rehovot, 20. 14 Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Hg.), Deutschland–Israel. Zusammenarbeit in Wissenschaft und Technologie, Bildung und Forschung, Redaktion Petra Mann, Bonn 2004, 8. 15 Ebd., 31.

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Kontakte und Kooperationen auf das »Engagement und die einsichtsvolle Diplomatie von Persönlichkeiten wie Otto Hahn, Feodor Lynen und Wolfgang Gentner«.16 Deren Engagement korrespondierte mit den bundesdeutschen außenpolitischen Interessen und konnte diesen zur Umsetzung verhelfen. In seinem Rückblick 1979 über die Anfänge lobte Gentner Otto Hahn, dem es »in kurzer Zeit« gelungen sei, »aufgrund seiner Vergangenheit, seines wissenschaftlichen Ruhmes und seines persönlichen Charmes […] die zerbrochene Kollegialität mit den deutschen Emigranten wiederherzustellen.«17 Die gemeinsame Forschungstradition erleichterte die wissenschaftliche Zusammenarbeit, denn das Weizmann-Institut ging »in hohem Maße auf die Vorgaben deutscher Wissenschaftstradition und Forschungsorganisation zurück, wie sie sich in Israel ganz generell in der Etablierung eigenständiger und dem Modell der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft nachgebildeter Einrichtungen für Grundlagenforschung niederschlagen.«18 Diese Nähe war für die israelischen Forscher auch problematisch, denn obwohl sie sich der deutschen Forschungstradition vertraut und oft auch zugehörig fühlten, verlangte gerade diese historische Nähe nach dem Holocaust »eine ganz besondere Distanz gegenüber den mit Deutschland verbundenen deutschsprachigen Kulturelementen und Traditionsinhalten«.19 Daher wandte sich die israelische Wissenschaft nach dem Krieg stärker der angelsächsischen Welt zu, was zu einem Synkretismus zwischen deutscher und angelsächsischer Tradition führte. Der Besuch unter der Führung Otto Hahns stand überdies im Kontext einer sich verstärkenden deutsch-israelischen militärischen und wirtschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit. Seit Konrad Adenauer im Suez-Krieg 1956 die Güterlieferungen aus dem Luxemburger Abkommen nicht, wie erwartet, ausgesetzt, sondern Partei für Israel ergriffen hatte, war ein positiver Stimmungswandel gegenüber Deutschland in der israelischen Gesellschaft eingetreten. Ben Gurion ersuchte erstmals 1957, noch ohne Erfolg, die Bundesregierung um diplomatische Beziehungen. Im selben Jahr schlossen die beiden Verteidigungsminister Franz Josef Strauß und Shimon Peres ein geheimes Waffenabkommen. Bei seinem aufsehenerregenden ersten persönlichen Treffen mit David Ben Gurion im Hotel Waldorf Astoria in New York im März 1960 schlug Konrad Adenauer vor, den Wissenschaftsaustausch mit 3 Millionen DM zu

16 Schüring, Minervas verstoßene Kinder, 360. 17 Archiv der MPG, II 1 G 117, Zwanzig Jahre Zusammenarbeit mit dem Weizmann Institut, 7. Dezember 1979, Wolfgang Gentner. 18 Dan Diner, Israel und Deutschland. Über Nähe und Distanz ihrer Wissenschaftskulturen, in: Impulse geben – Wissen stiften. 40 Jahre VolkswagenStiftung, hg. von Michael Globig, Göttingen 2002, 491–506, hier 491. 19 Ebd., 493.

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fördern, womit die Idee der Minerva-Stiftung geboren war. Damit verbunden war der Plan, Forschungsaufträge von deutscher Seite an das WeizmannInstitut zu vergeben, an denen dann deutsche Wissenschaftler mitarbeiten könnten.20 Bereits 1959 hatte der Bundeskanzler »ein lebhaftes und aktives Interesse an diesem Vorschlag zum Ausdruck gebracht«, wie Josef Cohn an Otto Hahn schrieb.21 Gentner hatte Cohn verschiedene Namen von Personen genannt, die sich für den Wissenschaftsaustausch interessieren würden, darunter Siegfried Balke, Bundesminister für Atomkernenergie und Wasserwirtschaft, und Konrad Adenauer selbst.22 Balke habe bestätigt, dass er den wissenschaftlichen Kontakt mit dem Weizmann-Institut moralisch und finanziell unterstützen würde. Allerdings könnten die staatlichen Institutionen ohne diplomatische Beziehungen mit Israel nichts unternehmen. Daher schlug er vor, dass sich »hier zum Beispiel die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft einschalten« könne.23 So schrieb Gentner an Amos de-Shalit, das Bundesministerium habe vorgeschlagen, die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft solle sich eigenständig um Kooperationen mit Israel bemühen. Das Ministerium selbst könne nicht tätig werden, solange keine diplomatischen Beziehungen bestünden.24 Ein Vorschlag lautete, »die Beziehungen damit [zu] beginnen, dass z. B. dem Weizman[sic]-Institut vom Atomministerium über die MaxPlanck-Gesellschaft ein Forschungsauftrag […] gegeben würde.«25 Dies könne zu einem »gegenseitigen Austausch von Wissen führen, an dem wohl beide Seiten interessiert sind.«26 So wurde die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft als Zwischenstelle eingerichtet und damit verhindert, dass die Ministerien direkt Gelder nach Israel überweisen mussten. Es sollte aber trotzdem nicht der Eindruck entstehen, »als handele es sich um Zuschüsse aus dem Vermögen der MPG, da die MPG satzungsgemäß […] auf die Förderung ihrer eigenen Institute«27 festgelegt war. Auch das Präsidium der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zeigte sich besorgt, dass der Eindruck einer unilateralen finanziellen Unterstützung israelischer Forschung ohne zählbare Vorteile für die deut20 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Gentner an Otto Hahn, 14. September 1959. 21 Ebd., Brief Josef Cohn an den Präsidenten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Otto Hahn, Zürich, 29. Juni 1959. In demselben Brief erwähnt Cohn auch, dass er mit Herrn Gentner »in einer engeren Beziehung« stehe. 22 Ebd., Brief Gentner an Otto Hahn, 14. September 1959. 23 Ebd. 24 »Ich habe ihm [Dr. Ballreich] mitgeteilt, daß es von Seiten des Ministeriums als beste Lösung angesehen würde, wenn die Gelder nach Israel über die MINERVA überwiesen werden könnten, da ja noch keine diplomatischen Beziehungen zu Israel bestehen und daher alle offiziellen Wege versperrt sind.« Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 201, Brief Edmund Marsch an Adolf Butenandt, 22. Mai 1963. 25 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Gentner an Amos de-Shalit. 26 Ebd. 27 Ebd., Vermerk der Generalverwaltung, Göttingen, 11. Februar 1960.

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sche Wissenschaft entstehen könne – was eine satzungswidrige Verwendung ihrer Gelder gewesen wäre. Mit Konrad Adenauers Einverständnis wurde dann 1963 mit öffentlichen Geldern die Minerva-Stiftung gegründet. Adenauers persönliches Engagement wurde bei seiner Reise nach Israel im Mai 1966 vom Weizmann-Institut mit der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde gewürdigt.28 Im ersten Jahr spendete die Volkswagenstiftung 2 Millionen DM, ab 1964 förderte das Bundesministerium für wissenschaftliche Forschung mit 3,5 Millionen DM jährlich die Minerva-Stiftung. Sie war damit eine Tochter der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, die über einen eigenen Fonds verfügte, um freier und unbürokratischer über Stipendien und Forschungszuschüsse entscheiden zu können. Mit der Förderung des Wissenschaftsaustauschs zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Israel suchte sich die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft auch von ihrer Vergangenheit respektive von ihrem Vorgänger abzusetzen: Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, die von 1911 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs existierte, hatte sich des Ausschlusses und der Vertreibung ihrer jüdischen Mitglieder schuldig gemacht.29 Die Erwartungen und Probleme, die zwischen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft und ihren »ehemaligen Mitarbeitern«, den jüdischen Israelis bestanden, betrafen vor allem drei Punkte: »die symbolische und materielle ›Wiedergutmachung‹, die wissenschaftlichen oder wissenschaftspolitischen Interessen und schließlich die politische Haltung bzw. Vergangenheit der Akteure in Deutschland und die damit verbundene Auseinandersetzung um Schuld und Verantwortung.«30 Die Säulen der angestrebten Kooperation sollten persönlicher Kontakt und Austausch von Wissenschaftlern, unter anderem in Form von gemeinsamen Forschungsgruppen, sein. Ein Motiv auf bundesdeutscher Seite lag darin, jene herausragende Forschung, die mit den jüdischen Wissenschaftlern in den 1930er Jahren aus Deutschland vertrieben worden war, wieder in die eigene Wissenschaftstradition zurückzuführen und die wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse, die in Israel seit über zwanzig Jahren am Institut in Rehovot gewonnen worden waren, auch für den deutschen Markt nutzbar zu machen.

28 Zum privaten Besuch des Altkanzlers in Israel: Jenny Hestermann, Inszenierte Versöhnung. Reisediplomatie und die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen von 1957 bis 1984, Frankfurt a. M. 2016. 29 Schüring, Minervas verstoßene Kinder, 11 und 14. 30 Ebd., 20 f.

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Die ersten Stipendiaten am Weizmann-Institut Jene Doktoranden und Postdoktoranden, die für würdig befunden wurden, die Bundesrepublik wissenschaftlich in Israel zu vertreten, waren handverlesen. Die jungen Wissenschaftler wurden in ihrer Funktion als erste Repräsentanten gleichsam als Diplomaten vor der Diplomatie verstanden und, einmal vor Ort, begriffen sie sich selbst als solche. Wolfgang Gentner erbat am 12. April 1962 von Edmund Marsch aus dem Präsidialbüro der Max-PlanckGesellschaft, er möge laufend über mögliche Kandidaten informiert werden. Ausdrücklich verwies er auf die Sensibilität des Wissenschaftleraustauschs. »Im Zusammenhang mit dem mündlichen Bericht, den mir Herr Dr. Krüger gegeben hat, möchte ich sehr ernsthaft darauf hinweisen, dass auf die Auswahl der richtigen Leute für einen längeren Aufenthalt am WI sehr großen Wert gelegt wird. Wer sich entschließt, dorthin zu gehen, muß bereit sein, Vorwürfe, die nicht nur die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit sondern auch die Gegenwart betreffen, entgegenzunehmen und in wirklich taktvoller Weise zu diskutieren. […] Die beiden [Physiker] haben es nicht immer leicht gehabt, und es ist nur der sehr sorgfältigen Auswahl zu verdanken, dass das erste Experiment gut angelaufen ist. Wer nicht den notwendigen Takt und Verständnis sowie die Bereitschaft mitbringt, auch ungerechte Vorwürfe entgegenzunehmen, sollte lieber zurückgehalten werden. […] Ich darf noch hinzufügen, dass aus allen Berichten, die ich habe, am Weizmann-Institut wie auch an den Universitäten verschiedene Parteien im heftigen Kampf sind, ob man überhaupt in den nächsten Jahren mit deutschen wissenschaftlichen Stellen Verbindungen aufnehmen sollte. Erst nach längeren Diskussionen ist es der Partei, die für einen Kontakt kämpfte, gelungen, das Einverständnis für den Besuch der deutschen Wissenschaftler für einen längeren Aufenthalt am Institut zu erhalten. Es würde nur einer kleinen unbedachten Bemerkung bedürfen, um die ganze Aktion in Frage zu stellen.«31

Es gab offenbar offizielle Appelle an die Wissenschaftlerkollegen, im »Ausland« taktvoll und zurückhaltend zu sein, einen »guten Eindruck« zu machen.32 Der Leiter des Max-Planck-Instituts für Zellchemie, Feodor Lynen, schlug seinem Mitarbeiter Ekkehard Lorch persönlich vor, für neun Monate an das Weizmann-Institut zu gehen.33 Lorch lehnte ab, weil er eine »Stelle in einem wirtschaftlichen Unternehmen antrete«.34 Drei jüngere Chemiker, Walter Lorenz, Lorenz Krüger und Cornelius Noack, fanden sich schließlich bereit, auf Einladung von de-Shalit für einen längeren Forschungsaufenthalt an das Weizmann-Institut zu gehen. In der Sitzung des Präsidiums der Max31 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 200, 1–2, Brief Gentner an Dr. Marsch, MPG, Präsidialbüro, 12. April 1962. 32 Schüring, Minervas verstoßene Kinder, 332. 33 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 200, 1–2, Brief Marsch an Rycus im Weizmann-Institut, 2. Februar 1961. 34 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Lorch an die Generalverwaltung, 8. März 1961.

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Planck-Gesellschaft hieß es zu diesem Vorhaben: »Verhandlungen und Vergütung und Dauer des Aufenthalts schweben noch.«35 Denn anfangs gab es noch kein Austauschprogramm, sondern jeder Einzelfall wurde in einem Briefwechsel zwischen den beiden Verwaltungen über die Eignung, den Willen und die mögliche Höhe des Stipendiums (durchschnittlich 1 200 DM) für die Kandidaten aus Deutschland, verhandelt. Die Berichte der Stipendiaten über ihren Aufenthalt wurden dem Präsidenten direkt vorgelegt, wie zum Beispiel der Bericht von Mark Schleyer aus dem Jahr 1963,36 den Edmund Marsch lobend kommentierte. Er freue sich sehr über diesen »äußerst positiven Bericht von Herrn Dr. Schleyer, und daß er es anscheinend so gut versteht, als Deutscher in Israel nicht unangenehm aufzufallen.«37 Schleyer verlängerte seinen Aufenthalt am Weizmann-Institut sogar; dies war jedoch wohl eher der Tatsache geschuldet, dass er in Heidelberg im Anschluss an seinen Israel-Aufenthalt keine Stelle mehr hatte. In diversen Briefen forderte er eine Erhöhung seines Stipendiums sowie Reisekosten für seine Frau – diese Forderungen konnte er offensichtlich deshalb stellen, weil es kaum Konkurrenz für einen Forschungsaufenthalt am Weizmann-Institut gab. Seine Bitte wurde allerdings vom Bayerischen Staatskanzler Edmund Marsch aus der Generalverwaltung abgelehnt: Im Vergleich mit den Amerikanern, die »mitunter auch Wochenendbesuche von ihren Frauen aus Amerika am Weizmann-Institut« erhielten, sei »bei uns […] das Geld für die Forschung aber eben immer noch sehr knapp«.38 Marsch schrieb an das Büro des Premierministers, sowohl die Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung als auch der Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) hätten Interesse, israelische Wissenschaftler als Gastwissenschaftler zu fördern: »Wir würden uns freuen, wenn israelische Wissenschaftler von diesen Möglichkeiten in zunehmendem Maße Gebrauch machten.«39 Die Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung unterstützte im Oktober 1961 das WeizmannInstitut mit einer Spende in Höhe von 500 000 DM. Diese Förderung war zwar nur für Stipendien gedacht, doch Josef Cohn bat Gentner, dennoch zu prüfen, ob »im Hinblick auf die allgemeine schwierige finanzielle Situation 35 Ebd. Noack war der erste Stipendiat, der über einen längeren Zeitraum, von 1961 bis 1963, am WI weilte. 36 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Edmund Marsch an Mark Schleyer, 10. Januar 1963: »Ich habe mich sehr darüber gefreut, dass Sie an dem Institut eine so herzliche Aufnahme gefunden haben und auch so schnell Kontakt mit den Mitarbeitern schließen konnten. Wie Ihnen damals Herr Professor Gentner sagte, ist gerade das oft das Schwierigste und diese Hürde haben Sie gut genommen. […] Auch dem Herrn Präsidenten hat Ihr Bericht vorgelegen.« 37 Ebd. 38 Archiv der MPG, II M 2, Brief Edmund Marsch an Mark Schleyer am WI, 26. November 1963. 39 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Dr. Marsch an Yakov Saphir, 3. Juli 1968.

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des Instituts […] die zu erwartenden Zuwendungen der Stiftung auch zum Teil als Beitrag zu dem normalen Budget verwendet werden können. Ein Betrag von 500 000–800 000 DM [käme] in Frage«.40 Im Jahr 1965 bezuschusste die Bundesregierung mit 6 Millionen DM den Erwerb eines Teilchenbeschleunigers, offenkundig auch als Teil der Wiedergutmachungszahlungen.41 Die Kontakte und Verhandlungen wurden dadurch erleichtert, dass fast allen Akteuren Deutsch als Muttersprache gemeinsam war. Der erste Rektor der Universität in Tel Aviv war der aus Deutschland stammende Biologe Professor Alfred Klopstock, wie die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung am 1. November 1960 in einem Beitrag über die Gründung der neuen Hochschule berichtete.42 Er hatte die Universität Heidelberg im Jahr 1933 verlassen müssen und war gemeinsam mit seiner Frau in das Mandatsgebiet Palästina emigriert.43 Die Wissenschaftler vom Weizmann-Institut adressierten ihre deutschen Kollegen in deutscher Sprache, so zum Beispiel Dr. Karger, der nach Göttingen reiste, um »die Rechnungsführung und Revision« an einem der Max-Planck-Institute kennenzulernen.44 Auch innerhalb des Weizmann-Instituts tauschten sich die Wissenschaftler in deutscher Sprache aus, einige von ihnen, darunter Frieda Goldschmidt, lernten nie Hebräisch und trafen sich regelmäßig zum »Kaffeeklatsch«.45 Auf seiner ersten Reise nach Israel im Dezember 1959 hatte sich Otto Hahn von der Ausstattung des Weizmann-Instituts beeindruckt gezeigt. Diese sei weitaus besser als die Ausstattung in Forschungsinstituten und Laboren in Deutschland, schrieb er an die Generalverwaltung. Über die Lebensbedingungen jedoch klagten die jungen deutschen Gastwissenschaftler: Das Bad müsse er, schrieb Lorenz Krüger, mit einem anderen Bewohner gemeinsam nutzen. Er bemängelte außerdem die fehlende Kochgelegenheit und den fehlenden Kühlschrank, trotz der spätherbstlichen Jahreszeit sei »nach unseren Begriffen noch Hochsommer hier« und die Kantine des Weizmann-Instituts habe »eher mäßige Qualität«.46 Zwei Tage darauf schrieb Krüger an Gentner, er wolle einen Überblick über die Kosten geben,

40 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 202, Brief Josef Cohn an Gentner, 23. Juli 1965. 41 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7. April 1965. 42 Ebd., 1. November 1960. 43 Reinhard Rürup, Schicksale und Karrieren. Gedenkbuch für die von den Nationalsozialisten aus der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft vertriebenen Forscherinnen und Forscher, unter Mitwirkung von Michael Schüring, Göttingen 2008, 244. 44 Archiv der MPG, I M/2, Brief Pfuhl an Karger, 12. Juli 1960. 45 Joe Jaffe, Early Days in the Weizmann Institute, Wimborne Minster 1996, 21. Frieda Goldschmidt war Professorin für Organische Chemie an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin gewesen. Vgl. Meyer Weisgal, … so far. An Autobiography, New York 1971, 156. 46 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 200, 1–2, Brief Lorenz Krüger, 5. November 1961.

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die erschreckend hoch seien. Lebensmittel seien teuer, nur ein eigenes Haushaltsbudget (das er nicht habe) könne diese Kosten teilweise auffangen. Klagen darüber, dass die gewährten Auslandsbeihilfen in Israel kaum zum Leben reichten, finden sich in allen Berichten und Briefen von Stipendiaten. Beeindruckt zeigte sich Krüger dagegen von seinem Besuch in einem Kibbutz, dessen »kommunistische[,] aber von allen freiwillig übernommene Eigentumsordnung« er »sehr eindrucksvoll« fand. »Nach außen« seien alle Bewohner freundlich, besonders die Jüngeren zeigten sich interessiert.47 Über die Lebensbedingungen berichtet ein anderer Stipendiat: »Es gab ein Gästehaus mit ca. zehn Einzelzimmern, diese sind mit gemeinsamem Badezimmer zu kleinen Wohnungen zusammengefasst. Kochmöglichkeit oder Kühlschrank fehlt, die Lage ist schön und ruhig.«48 Zur Verpflegung in der hauseigenen Cafeteria bemerkte er: »Die Preise sind mäßig, die Qualität des Essens ist es bisweilen auch.«49 Ein Post-Doc-Fellowship sei mit einem insgesamt viel niedrigeren Lebensstandard als in Deutschland verbunden. Erforderlich wären etwa 30 Prozent höhere Gehälter – das wäre wohl jedoch nicht fair gegenüber den israelischen Kollegen, die deutlich weniger verdienten. Den Arbeitsalltag lobte dagegen auch er als ausgezeichnet: »[Der] Umgangston ist zwanglos und informell. Titel werden nie, Nachnamen fast nie verwandt. […] Das hohe Niveau des ständigen Mitarbeiterstabes sowie die große Zahl der ausländischen Besucher, besonders aus den USA, lässt nicht das geringste Gefühl von Abgelegenheit oder Provinzialismus aufkommen, wie man es wegen der geographischen Lage oder der Kleinheit des Landes vielleicht vermuten würde.«50

Auffällig ist, dass die Anwesenheit von Wissenschaftlern aus den Vereinigten Staaten hier als Emblem gelungener internationaler Vernetzung dargestellt wird, während Israel zwar »abgelegen« erscheint, jedoch weniger provinziell als befürchtet. Hierin zeigt sich auch, dass die jungen Forscher keine hohen Erwartungen an ihren Aufenthalt mitbrachten und nur vage Vorstellungen vom Leben in Israel hatten. Seinen persönlichen Eindruck bat der Autor jedoch mit Vorbehalt aufzunehmen: »Einzelne, ausgesuchte, deutsche Besucher [werden] zwar mit Mißtrauen angesehen, bei näherem Zusehen jedoch willkommen geheißen, besonders wenn sie so jung sind, daß eine persönliche Beteiligung an den Ereignissen zwischen 1933 und 1945 nicht in Frage kommt.« Es gebe große Hilfsbereitschaft gegenüber den Deutschen; sei man einmal akzeptiert, seien die Kollegen sehr herzlich, diese Aufnahme sei jedoch »nicht selbstverständlich« und erfordere »für den 47 Ebd., Brief Krüger an Gentner, 7. November 1961. 48 Ebd., Bericht über einen viermonatigen Aufenthalt am Weizmann-Institut, November 1961–Februar 1962 (Autor unbekannt). 49 Ebd. 50 Ebd.

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israelischen Partner oft einen ausdrücklichen Entschluß und ein Stück Zivilcourage«, befindet er abschließend.51 Auch der Verfasser des zitierten Berichts scheint sich als »Brückenbauer« verstanden zu haben, denn ohne seinen Aufenthalt und ein »weiteres Vertrautwerden mit Deutschen«, werde sich, so seine Vermutung, nur »sehr schwer ein junger Israeli finden […], der bereit wäre, für längere Zeit in Deutschland zu arbeiten.«52 Er spricht sich dafür aus, dass stets nur einzelne Deutsche zur gleichen Zeit im Weizmann-Institut arbeiten sollten: »Eine Konzentration von mehreren in demselben Department würde sich wahrscheinlich sehr unglücklich auswirken, zur Isolation der deutschen Gruppe führen und aller Voraussicht nach die interne Opposition gegen israelisch-deutsche Beziehungen stärken. Ein deutscher Besucher wird sich am besten einleben, wenn er Zurückhaltung und, vor allem in politischen Gesprächen, Takt übt, keine nationalen Empfindlichkeiten mitbringt und ihnen auch dann nicht verfällt, wenn ihm ein verzerrtes Bild seines Volkes vorgehalten wird.«53

Der Autor lässt offen, auf welche Art das Bild der deutschen Gesellschaft seiner Ansicht nach verzerrt werde. Wichtig scheint ihm jedoch das eigene Selbstverständnis und das seiner Kollegen als taktvolle Diplomaten, die sich nicht auf Auseinandersetzungen einlassen, sondern ihre ruhige Standhaftigkeit auch angesichts vermeintlicher Zumutungen der Gastgeber unter Beweis stellen. Seine Ansicht, dass keine zu große Zahl deutscher Wissenschaftler gleichzeitig willkommen sei, teilte Amos de-Shalit, der bei einer der offiziellen Zusammenkünfte mit den deutschen Professoren im Weizmann-Institut 1963 sagte, sowohl theoretische Physiker als auch Experimentalphysiker seien willkommen: »However, the smooth absorption into the scientific community would best be served if they would not arrive at the same time.«54 Mark Schleyer berichtet an die Generalverwaltung im Dezember 1962: »Es hat uns sehr beeindruckt, daß es möglich ist, an einem bedeutenden und nicht gerade kleinen Forschungsinstitut die persönlichen Kontakte auf eine annähernd gleiche Stufe zu stellen wie die wissenschaftlichen. In meinem Fall ist dabei noch besonders zu berücksichtigen, daß ich aus Deutschland stamme. […] ich bin daher, das muß ich zugeben, mit gewissen Bedenken, Hemmungen, schlechtem Gewissen, oder wie man es nennen mag, hierher gefahren.«55

51 52 53 54

Ebd. Ebd. Ebd. Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 201, Minutes of Meeting at the Weizmann Institute, 16. Oktober 1963. 55 Ebd., Bericht Mark Schleyers an die MPG, Dezember 1962.

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Schleyers gewisse »Bedenken und Hemmungen« und sein schlechtes Gewissen, das er direkt mit seiner deutschen Herkunft verknüpfte, bedurfte – insbesondere wenige Monate nach der Verurteilung und Hinrichtung Eichmanns in Jerusalem – offenbar keiner weiteren Erläuterung. Schleyer schien auch eine direkte Konfrontation mit den israelischen Kollegen zu fürchten. Unmittelbar nach seiner Ankunft sollte er Professor Ephraim Katchalski zu Hause besuchen,56 »die Frage, ob ich zu diesem Besuch meine Frau mitnehmen kann, fand man wohl etwas komisch, da dies doch selbstverständlich sei.« Dass bei seinem Besuch auch Katchalskis Frau, seine Tochter und ein weiterer Professor anwesend waren, kam ihm als »kleiner deutscher wissenschaftlicher Assistent […] etwas ungewöhnlich vor.«57 Doch die Ereignisse wurden aus seiner Sicht noch skurriler: »Am nächsten Vormittag erschien bei uns eine Dame im Badeanzug. Sie hätte erfahren, dass wir eventuell Interesse am Baden hätten. Es war die Gattin von Prof. Berger.«58 Kontakte zu knüpfen sei leicht in Rehovot, Katchalski gebe sich Mühe, ihn mit »interessanten Leuten« zusammenzubringen: »Auch finden immer wieder mal Empfänge oder Parties statt, sei es nach dem kostenlosen Konzert eines russischen Pianisten hier im Institut, nach der Eröffnung des Studienjahres, oder bei sonstigen Gelegenheiten. Obwohl hierzu jeder Institutsangehörige hingehen kann, werden wir vom akademischen Sekretariat immer noch gesondert eingeladen. Angesichts solcher Empfänge, wo man sich von Kuchen bis zu wunderbaren kalten Platten, vom Kaffee bis zum Kognak je nach Geschmack reichlich bedienen kann, findet man interessante Gelegenheiten zu allen möglichen Diskussionen.«59

Mit der legeren, herzlichen Aufnahme sogar im erweiterten Familienkreis des Instituts kontrastiert Schleyer seine zu Beginn seines Aufenthalts geäußerten Befürchtungen, dass der Kontakt möglicherweise gehemmt sein werde. Neben dem Befremden über den lockeren Umgangston, der sich vollkommen unterschied von jenem hierarchischen in der damaligen deutschen Wissenschaftskultur, klingt auch Erleichterung über die – so nicht erwarteten – entspannten Begegnungen durch. Trotz dieser positiven persönlichen Eindrücke machten ihm allerdings die Arbeitsbedingungen zu schaffen: »Mein Eindruck ist: Bedrückend eng […], die Gänge sind eng, die Labors sehr voll. In der Biophysik und Biochemie arbeiten etwa insgesamt [sic] 40 Leute.«60 Die Informalität bereitete ihm

56 Ephraim Katchalski hatte seinen Namen in Ephraim Katzir hebraisiert. Er war 1973–1978 der vierte Staatspräsident Israels. 57 Ebd., Bericht Mark Schleyers an die MPG, Dezember 1962. 58 Ebd. 59 Ebd. (Hervorhebung im Original unterstrichen). 60 Ebd.

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hingegen Freude. Schleyer hebt die Gegensätze zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur hervor: »Alle Institute einschließlich der großen Bibliothek sind werk- und feiertags Tag und Nacht geöffnet. Titel und Familiennamen werden in der Anrede kaum verwendet. […] Wenn man den Chef […] sprechen will, meldet man sich nicht langfristig vorher telefonisch an, sondern schaut in sein Zimmer, das meist offen steht. […] Man kann von ›Familienbetrieb‹ sprechen, das Arbeitsklima ist ausgezeichnet. Als konservativer Deutscher könnte man zunächst glauben, dass dadurch Disziplin- oder Respektlosigkeit gefördert würde – das ist aber durchaus nicht der Fall, der Respekt vor dem ›Familienoberhaupt‹ ist da, auch wenn er sich nicht gerade im andachtsvollen Erstarren beim Anblick desselben äußert.«61

Die Bemerkung zur »andachtsvollen Erstarrung« ironisiert die starre deutsche Hierarchie, wobei durchaus Bewunderung für das legere Wissenschaftsleben in Israel zum Ausdruck kommt. Der Stipendiat Jörg Hüfner fasste seine neuen Erkenntnisse über das ferne Land im Jahr 1964 so zusammen: »Um die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Dimensionen Israels auf mir bekannte Groessenordnungen zurueckzufuehren, habe ich es manchmal mit West-Berlin verglichen. Auch in Israel leben ungefaehr 2,2 Millionen Menschen und es ist wie Berlin eine Insel. Wasser und feindliche Nachbarn umgeben es.«62

Ihrem Befremden zum Trotz schienen die Stipendiaten, wenn sie sich erst einmal eingelebt hatten, auch um Verständnis für das bedrohte kleine Land werben zu wollen – ein weiterer Aspekt der selbst auferlegten Rolle als vermittelnde Diplomaten. Cornelius Noack berichtete an die Generalverwaltung, dass »diese Leute« – er meint die deutschen Juden – »zwar auch alle von Deutschland als ganzem nichts mehr wissen [wollen], […] aber an Kontakten mit einzelnen, von denen sie Einwandfreies wissen, doch noch sehr interessiert [sind]. Man hat da oft den Eindruck, dass für viele innerlich Deutschland immer noch die geistige Heimat ist.«63 Daher sind auch fast alle Briefe in deutscher Sprache verfasst. Gentner schreibt im Februar 1960 an den Geschäftsführer Amos Manor, der ihn um einen Vortrag zum Thema Atomenergie gebeten hatte: »Entschuldigen Sie, wenn ich diesen Brief in deutsch schreibe, aber ich denke, dass Sie ihn lesen können oder sicher jemanden finden, der Ihnen bei der Übersetzung behilflich ist.«64 Die deutsche Sprache war ein, wenn nicht das wichtigste Bindeglied und stiftete bei aller Fremdheit der israeli61 Ebd. 62 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 201, Jörg Hüfner, Bericht an die Studienstiftung über den Aufenthalt in Israel, Rehovot 23. Juli 1964. 63 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 200, 1–2, Bericht Noack an die Generalverwaltung. 64 Ebd., Brief Gentner an Amos Manor, 4. Februar 1960.

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schen Wissenschaftskultur für die deutschen Stipendiaten dank der gemeinsamen »geistigen Heimat« eine Verbindung. Gegenbesuche von israelischen Forschern in der Bundesrepublik blieben dagegen lange aus. Es mangelte nicht nur an der Bereitschaft der israelischen Doktoranden und Postdoktoranden, auch politisch wurde ein solcher Austausch abgelehnt. Ein Studium in Deutschland sei »grundsätzlich unerwünscht«, ältere Fachleute sollten nur dann gehen, »wenn ihr Fach für den Staat Israel lebenswichtig ist und wenn sie es nirgends sonst befriedigend lernen können«.65 Der Briefwechsel zwischen de-Shalit und Cohn drückt diesen Konflikt beispielhaft aus. Während de-Shalit sagte, man könne niemandem vorwerfen, sich nicht durch einen Besuch in Deutschland »prostituieren« zu wollen, fand Cohn diese Ausdrucksweise geschmacklos und hielt seinem Kollegen entgegen, es sei verwerflich, Geld von Deutschen anzunehmen, ohne persönlich mit ihnen etwas zu tun haben zu wollen.66

Historische Kontexte: Eichmann-Prozess, Kulturdebatte, Ägypten-Krise Erschwert wurde das Knüpfen erster Kontakte durch die außenpolitische Konstellation ab 1961 im Zuge des Eichmann-Prozesses. In einer Zeit, in der Prozess- und Augenzeugenberichte im Radio liefen und die Schrecken der Schoah ins Gedächtnis riefen, war es auch wegen der aufgebrachten öffentlichen Stimmung in Israel schwer, junge Deutsche in das israelische Arbeitsleben zu integrieren.67 »Die Atmosphäre zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre war diesen zögernden Anfängen nicht gerade förderlich«, schrieb Israel Pecht, einer der ersten israelischen Postdoc-Stipendiaten in Deutschland.68 Laut Gentner sei jedoch dieser Zeitpunkt besonders geeignet gewesen, eine Kooperation mit Israel einzugehen. Es sei »der richtige Augenblick, sich an die öffentliche Hand zu wenden«, schrieb er an Gerhard Schmidt.69 Er führte zwar die Gründe dafür nicht aus, aber es ist zu vermuten, dass es auch um 65 Ebd., Brief Cornelius Noack an Gentner, 23. Januar 1961. 66 Briefwechsel de-Shalit–Cohn, April 1969, zit. nach Schüring, Minervas verstoßene Kinder, 357. 67 Über den Eichmann-Prozess und die Stimmung in Israel vgl. einführend Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, New York 2004, sowie Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s. Ideology and Memory, London 2007. 68 Israel Pecht, Deutsch-israelische Zusammenarbeit in der Wissenschaft. Brückenschlag durch Forschung und ihre Förderung, in: Impulse geben – Wissen stiften, 481–490, hier 482. Der gebürtige Wiener Pecht war als Chemiker von 1967 bis 1969 Fellow in Göttingen. 69 Archiv der MPG, I 1M/2, Brief Gentner an Schmidt.

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eine Antwort auf die Vielzahl antisemitischer Schändungen in der Bundesrepublik 1959/1960 ging, die große internationale Aufmerksamkeit erregt hatten. Die Bundesregierung, besonders Adenauer, hatte ein hohes Interesse, sich als israelfreundlich zu bekennen und auf diese Weise Sympathien zu sammeln.70 Im Jahr 1961 wurde gleichzeitig die sogenannte Kulturdebatte in der Knesset geführt und ein Gesetz verabschiedet, das den kulturellen Austausch mit Deutschland deutlich beschränken sollte.71 Das israelische Außenministerium riet israelischen Wissenschaftlern von der Teilnahme an Konferenzen und der Annahme von Einladungen deutscher Institute ab.72 Zwar bestand in Israel kein direkter Zusammenhang zwischen diesem Gesetz und dem Eichmann-Prozess, aber die deutschen Wissenschaftler nahmen beide Ereignisse wie auch die israelischen Debatten als einheitlichen Prozess fortwährender Feindseligkeit ihnen und ihrem Land gegenüber wahr. Cornelius Noack berichtete, die emotionale Debatte habe sie am Institut bedrückt: »Es sieht danach doch beinahe so aus, als sei der Boden für eine Verständigung doch noch nicht ganz bereit. Nun ist die – ja immer auch von innen- und parteipolitischen Erwägungen bestimmte – Entscheidung eines Parlaments etwas anderes als die Meinung der Bevölkerung, und hier haben wir die unterschiedlichsten Ansichten gehört. Im ganzen spürt man aber doch den Unterton durch, dass der Kontakt mit Deutschland nicht erwünscht ist, was wir […] so nicht erwartet hatten. […] Gegenüber der Ungeheuerlichkeit dessen, was geschehen ist und der Größe der Schwierigkeiten, die noch vorhanden sind und auch in Zukunft sein werden, kommt man sich als einzelner manchmal recht hilflos vor und dennoch ist es wohl gerade solche Kleinarbeit wie unser Hiersein jetzt, die letztlich etwas wird bessern können.«73

Er bezeichnet seinen Aufenthalt in Israel (»unser Hiersein«) als den Weg zu besseren Beziehungen zwischen Deutschen und Israelis allgemein. Zwar

70 Dies war auch der Hintergrund von Adenauers erstem Treffen mit Ben Gurion in New York auf neutralem Boden am 14. März 1960. Vgl. dazu Yeshayahu A. Jelinek/Rainer A. Blasius, Ben Gurion und Adenauer im Waldorf Astoria. Gesprächsaufzeichnungen vom israelisch-deutschen Gipfeltreffen in New York am 14. März 1960, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997), H. 2, 309–344. 71 Vgl. auch Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11. Januar 1962: »Israel schränkt Kulturbeziehungen zu Deutschland ein.« Der Antrag der konservativ-nationalistischen Partei Herut auf völligen Abbruch wurde abgelehnt, doch deutsche Künstler dürfen nicht in Israel auftreten. Israelische Studenten werden nicht zum Studium in Deutschland ermutigt, und »eine weitere Fortbildung an deutschen Instituten wird nur erlaubt, wenn diese im Interesse des Staates liegt. […] Die Errichtung von Zweigstellen deutscher Institute, Gesellschaften und Organisationen in Israel ist nicht gestattet.« Lediglich »ausgewiesene AntiNazis« seien laut Außenminister Abba Eban in Israel willkommen. 72 Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Deutschland und Israel 1945–1965. Ein neurotisches Verhältnis, München 2004, 385. 73 Archiv der MPG, III 68 A 200, 1–2, Bericht Noack an Gentner, 23. Januar 1960.

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ohne ein ausgeprägtes politisches Sendungsbewusstsein, verstanden sich die deutschen Fellows doch selbst als Brückenbauer und Diplomaten. An anderer Stelle bemerkte Noack, die Tatsache der Anwesenheit deutscher Forscher im Land sei ja wohl wichtiger als die reine physikalische Forschung.74 Im Jahr 1964 tangierte eine weitere politische Krise den Aufenthalt der deutschen Wissenschaftler in Israel. Es wurde öffentlich, dass deutsche Raketenwissenschaftler in Ägypten an der Forschung zu Waffensystemen mitarbeiteten. In den Worten Golda Meirs halfen sie dabei einem »Feind, der an der Vernichtung Israels« arbeite. »Die Söhne jener Nation [gemeint ist Deutschland] beabsichtigen mit ihren Taten die Vernichtung des Staates Israel«, betonte Meir in einer Rede vor der Knesset im März 1963 und löste damit eine emotionale Debatte unter den israelischen Abgeordneten aus. Die Kampagne gegen die Raketenwissenschaftler war allerdings nicht nur gegen Deutschland gerichtet, sondern diente auch innenpolitisch einem Angriff auf Ben Gurion und seine Deutschland und den Deutschen zugewandte Politik.75 Die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Israel schließlich im Frühjahr 1965 war ebenfalls dem Thema der Waffenlieferungen geschuldet: Als die Frankfurter Rundschau Ende 1964 an die Öffentlichkeit brachte, dass die damaligen Verteidigungsminister Franz Josef Strauß und Shimon Peres im Jahr 1957 in einer Nacht-und-NebelAktion in Rott am Inn geheime Waffengeschäfte beschlossen hatten, sorgte dies für Proteste aus den arabischen Ländern. Um diese vor allem geopolitisch wertvollen Beziehungen nicht aufs Spiel zu setzen, suchte die bundesdeutsche Regierung die mit Israel vereinbarten Waffenlieferungen in Geld umzuwandeln. Weil die israelische Regierung sich dagegen zunächst aus berechtigter Sorge sperrte, kein anderes Land würde Waffen an Israel verkaufen, entschloss sich Bundeskanzler Ludwig Erhard schließlich, gleichsam als Entschädigung die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen anzubieten. Die Annäherung beider Staaten erfolgte so vor allem mit Blick auf militärische Kontakte und Sicherheitsinteressen. Nach der Gründung der Minerva-Stiftung im Jahr 1963 und der Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen im Mai 1965 intensivierte sich der Austausch zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik. Die israelischen Wissenschaftler nutzten die guten Beziehungen auch für politische Zwecke; so baten sie um Hilfe bei der »Befreiung« russischer jüdischer Wissenschaftler.76 Auf den mittlerweile zahlreichen Reisen herrschte »herzliche Stimmung«.77 Ab 1970 beteiligte sich auch

74 75 76 77

Ebd., Briefwechsel Noack mit Gentner über einen neuen Zuschnitt des Themas. Jelinek, Deutschland und Israel 1945–1965, 418. Archiv der MPG, II 1 G/116. Ebd.

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die Volkswagenstiftung mit Stipendien am Wissenschaftleraustausch. Mit ihren Geldern hatte sie bereits 1968 einen Forschungslehrstuhl am Weizmann-Institut eingerichtet. Sie war so effektiv und wirksam in dem »langsamen und schmerzvollen Prozess einer Wiederherstellung menschlicher Kontakte«, wie es Israel Pecht formulierte.78 Dass sich die keineswegs neutrale Volkswagenstiftung vor dem Hintergrund der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit der Firma Volkswagen und dem in Israel verbreiteten Boykott ihrer Produkte in auffälliger Weise engagierte, bietet eine interessante Pointe ihrer Förderpolitik. Die Bedingung für die Gelder war jedoch, dass mindestens zwei deutsche Wissenschaftler an den Forschungsprojekten zu beteiligen waren. Eine Dauerförderung, wie sie die Minerva-Stiftung übernommen hatte, war der Volkswagenstiftung satzungsgemäß verboten.79 Im Jahr 1968 schrieb der Generalsekretär der MPG Ernst Telschow an Edmund Marsch: »Ich könnte Ihnen über die Entwicklung noch manches Interessante erzählen, was nicht in den Akten steht.«80 Auch noch 1972 klagten die Gastwissenschaftler, dass die Stipendien zu gering für den Lebensunterhalt seien.81 Die deutschen Gäste wurden zwar herzlich aufgenommen, doch »immer waren auch Untertöne herauszuhören«, besonders als in den 1970er Jahren deren Zahl stieg.82

Zusammenfassung und Ausblick In den frühen 1960er Jahren waren die ersten deutschen Stipendiaten und Wissenschaftler, die Israel besuchten, unvermeidlich von den außenpolitischen und innergesellschaftlichen Debatten beider Länder beeinflusst. Ihr Selbstverständnis als »Pioniere« der deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen entsprach dabei in Teilen durchaus der Realität. Auffällig ist aber die Rolle als selbst ernannte Diplomaten, die in den Berichten der jungen Nachwuchswissenschaftler in einem leicht überhöhten Verständnis ihrer eigenen Bedeutung zum Ausdruck kommt. Darin spiegelt sich allerdings auch die Angst vor einer Ablehnung ihrer israelischen Kollegen aufgrund einer angenommenen 78 Pecht, Deutsch-israelische Zusammenarbeit in der Wissenschaft, 485 f. 79 Archiv der MPG, II 1 G/122, Brief aus der Verwaltung der Volkswagenstiftung an Gentner, 16. März 1972. Die entscheidenden Gremien der Stiftung legten allerdings zugunsten des deutsch-israelischen Austausches ihre Förderbedingungen in Einzelfällen doch etwas großzügig aus und förderten das Stipendiatenprogramm statt der offiziellen fünf Jahre über einen Zeitraum von acht Jahren. 80 Archiv der MPG, II 1G/116, Brief Telschow an Marsch, 9. Juli 1968. 81 Ebd., Bericht Edmund Marsch an das Präsidium am 28. Juli 1972. 82 Pecht, Deutsch-israelische Zusammenarbeit in der Wissenschaft, 484.

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Kollektivschuld des deutschen Volkes. Es zeigte sich jedoch, dass die Israelis sehr genau zwischen den Generationen unterschieden und die jüngeren Forscher ohne große Bedenken aufgenommen wurden. An den Berichten der Stipendiaten lässt sich auch ablesen, wie sich deren eigene Erwartungen im Laufe ihres Aufenthalts wandelten, Vorurteile abgebaut wurden und die Erleichterung über den freundlichen Empfang in den Vordergrund trat. Die Wissenschaftskultur nahmen sie als amerikanisch »leger« und entspannt wahr, obgleich Israel ihnen aus der Ferne zunächst provinziell erschienen war. Der lockere Umgangston, der so ganz anders war als jener hierarchische in der deutschen Wissenschaftskultur, sorgte für Befremden, aber auch für Erleichterung. Eine wichtige Rolle bei der Annäherung und dem gegenseitigen Verständnis schien die deutsche Sprache gespielt zu haben, die auch die Muttersprache vieler israelischer Wissenschaftler der älteren Generation war. Die These von den Naturwissenschaften als »Eisbrecher« trifft insgesamt nur bedingt zu. Die frühen Kontakte zwischen Wissenschaftlern waren ein elitäres Projekt, betrieben von den Leitern der jeweiligen deutschen und israelischen Institute, gegen Widerstand aus der Mitarbeiterschaft des Weizmann-Instituts. Die Zusammenarbeit erfolgte unter möglichster Abschirmung gegenüber der israelischen Öffentlichkeit, um Kritik zu entgehen, sowie unter Schwierigkeiten, Forscherpersonal auf beiden Seiten für den Austausch zu gewinnen. In einem anderen Sinne hatten die Kontakte in den Naturwissenschaften aber eine Vorreiterfunktion: Die spätere Zusammenarbeit in den Geisteswissenschaften baute auf bestehende Formen wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation und Kooperation auf. Mit der Minerva- und der Volkswagenstiftung bestanden bereits etablierte Strukturen. Der Start war ähnlich wie im Jahrzehnt zuvor ein einseitiger, indem zunächst nur deutsche Gastwissenschaftler nach Israel gingen. In allen Bereichen gab es am Anfang personell, länger auch noch monetär eine klare Richtung. Ausschließlich deutsches Geld floss in die Stiftungen, die Lehrstühle und Austauschprogramme in Israel aufbauten. Erst ab 1986 wurde mit der German-Israeli Foundation (GIF) eine Stiftung gegründet, an der sich beide Staaten zu je 50 Prozent beteiligen. Das heute gängige Narrativ von der wissenschaftlichen Kooperation als Erfolgsgeschichte mag im Rückblick unbestritten sein. Aus Sicht der beteiligten Protagonisten in den frühen 1960er Jahren erschien die Möglichkeit einer freundschaftlichen wie einer strategischen Annäherung jedoch gleichermaßen fragil.

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Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik: Die israelische Diplomatie und das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Nationalsozialismus Im April 1959 erhielt Felix Elieser Shinnar, Leiter der Israelischen Handelsmission in Köln, ein Schreiben des deutschen Oberstaatsanwalts und Leiters der Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, Erwin Schüle. Darin bat Schüle ihn als höchsten Repräsentanten des jüdischen Staates in Deutschland, Kontakt zu den israelischen Justizbehörden herzustellen. Schüle wollte in Israel lebende Holocaustüberlebende ausfindig machen, die in den Jahren 1942/43 in der Region Zamość im Distrikt Lublin Zeugen der Deportationen in die Vernichtungslager und der dort verübten Morde geworden waren.1 Die Israelische Handelsmission hatte 1953 gemäß dem Wiedergutmachungsabkommen, das im September 1952 in Luxemburg zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland unterzeichnet worden war, in Köln ihre Tätigkeit aufgenommen.2 Formal fungierte die Handelsmission als Wirtschaftsgesandtschaft mit begrenzten konsularischen Funktionen. Ihre Hauptaufgabe bestand im Ankauf von Wirtschaftsgütern im Gegenwert der Beträge, zu deren Zahlung sich die Bundesrepublik gegenüber Israel verpflichtet hatte. Um welche Produkte es sich dabei handelte, war zuvor zwischen beiden Staaten ausgehandelt worden. Shinnar hatte die Verhandlungen über die deutschen Zahlungen von Anfang an begleitet, zunächst als Berater der israelischen Regierung. Zusammen mit Giora (Georg) Josephthal leitete er dann die israelische Delegation bei den Gesprächen mit der Bundesrepu-

1

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Israelisches Staatsarchiv (nachfolgend ISA), 5724/8-‫ג‬, Chaim Cohen (Rechtsberater der Regierung) an den Leiter der Ermittlungsabteilung beim Landesstab der israelischen Polizei, 12. Mai 1959. Die hier und nachfolgend genannten deutschen Titel von Archivalien aus dem ISA sind, soweit nicht anders verzeichnet, Übersetzungen aus dem Hebräischen. Zu Zamość in der Zeit des Holocausts siehe und (beide 27. Oktober 2016). Das Abkommen sah vor, dass Deutschland im Verlauf der nächsten zwölf bis vierzehn Jahre insgesamt 3 Mrd. Mark (zum damaligen Zeitpunkt ca. 715 Mio. US-Dollar) in Form von Waren und unterschiedlichen Produktionsmitteln an Israel zahlt und außerdem 450 Mio. Mark (ca. 110 Mio. US-Dollar) über die israelische Regierung an die Jewish Claims Conference überweist. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 419–444.

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blik im niederländischen Wassenaar, die schließlich zum Luxemburger Abkommen führten.3 Angesichts nicht vorhandener diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik bis 19654 sowie vor dem Hintergrund der schnell wachsenden wirtschaftlichen und militärischen Bedeutung der Bundesrepublik in Westeuropa und innerhalb der Nato erfüllte Shinnar schon bald nach seinem Eintreffen in Köln faktisch diplomatische und hoheitliche Funktionen. Er agierte dabei im Einverständnis mit den israelischen Außenministern Moshe Sharett und später Golda Meir, obgleich er nicht zum Mitarbeiterstab des Außenministeriums zählte, sondern dem Finanzministerium unterstand. Seine Direktiven erhielt er von den jeweiligen Finanzministern, vom Außenministerium und von den drei Premierministern David BenGurion, Moshe Sharett und Levi Eshkol, die während seiner Mission amtierten und denen er regelmäßig Bericht erstattete. Shinnar war allgemein beliebt und geachtet, sowohl bei den Spitzen der westdeutschen Wirtschaft als auch bei Regierungsvertretern, insbesondere bei Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer. Seit Sommer 1953 fungierte er als persönlich ernannter Gesandter und seit Anfang 1958 als Botschaftsrat. Shinnar erfüllte de facto, wenn auch nicht offiziell, die Aufgaben eines akkreditierten Botschafters und wurde als solcher auch von den Deutschen wahrgenommen. Zwar stand er keiner Botschaft, sondern nur einer konsularischen Wirtschaftsgesandtschaft vor, doch während der zwölf Jahre, die Shinnar in der Bundesrepublik verbrachte, deckte seine Tätigkeit Bereiche ab, die unter den Bedingungen uneingeschränkter diplomatischer Beziehungen zu den Aufgaben eines Botschafters gehört hätten, weshalb sein Anteil an der Förderung der Beziehungen zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik nicht hoch genug bewertet werden kann.5 3

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Dokumente zum Abkommen zwischen der Regierung Israels und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Drucksache der Regierung, Jerusalem 1953, 95. Zu einer detaillierten Darstellung des Aufbaus der Gesandtschaft und ihren Aufgaben siehe Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Implementing the Luxembourg Agreement. The Purchasing Mission and the Israeli Economy, in: The Journal of Israeli History 18 (1997), H. 2/3, 191–209. Zu den Umständen und Gründen, die dafür sorgten, dass keine diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Staaten angebahnt wurden, siehe Roni Stauber, The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Debate over the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations with Germany, in: Yad Vashem Studies 37 (2009), H. 2, 153–195; ders., Israel’s Quest for Diplomatic Relations. The German-Israeli Controversy, 1955–1956, in: José Brunner (Hg.), Deutsche(s) in Palästina und Israel. Alltag, Kultur, Politik, Göttingen 2013, 215–228. Die Einschätzung zur Sonderstellung Shinnars in der Bundesrepublik stützt sich auf mehrere Hundert Berichte von Mitarbeitern des israelischen und des bundesdeutschen Außenministeriums sowie auf Protokolle gemeinsamer Erörterungen beider Ministerien, die sich hauptsächlich in den Akten des Außenministeriums im Israelischen Staatsarchiv und im Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts in Berlin befinden.

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Schüles Brief an Shinnar wurde wenige Monate nach Tätigkeitsbeginn der Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen abgeschickt. Damit ist er einer der ersten Vorstöße zur offiziellen Zusammenarbeit Israels und der Bundesrepublik beim Auffinden und der Anklage von NS-Verbrechern in Westdeutschland – ein Unternehmen, das in den darauffolgenden Jahren erheblich ausgebaut werden sollte. Shinnar spielte bereits Ende 1957 eine wichtige Rolle bei der Weitergabe von Informationen an Israel über den Aufenthaltsort Adolf Eichmanns in Buenos Aires. Allerdings handelte es sich dabei um eine Privatinitiative Fritz Bauers, des jüdischen Generalstaatsanwalts von Hessen, die vor den deutschen Strafverfolgungsbehörden geheim gehalten worden war. Infolge des offiziellen Kontakts, der sich 1959 zwischen dem Büro des Rechtsberaters der israelischen Regierung, den israelischen Polizeibehörden sowie der Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem einerseits und der in Ludwigsburg ansässigen Zentralen Stelle andererseits ergab, wurde die Handelsmission in Köln zu einem wichtigen Akteur bei der Weitergabe von Informationen zwischen den beiden Staaten über Deutsche, die verdächtigt wurden, an der Planung und Durchführung der Ermordung von Juden während des Holocaust beteiligt gewesen zu sein. Während der Vorbereitung des Eichmann-Prozesses wurden die Gesandtschaft in Köln und ihr Leiter Shinnar zu einer wichtigen Instanz für die Kommunikation zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Israel sowohl in politisch-staatlichen als auch ermittlungstechnisch-juristischen Fragen, die mit der Anklage gegen Eichmann zusammenhingen.6 Die Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg wurde mit den Jahren zu der Institution in Westdeutschland, die am stärksten mit der Aufklärung von durch Deutsche verübten Verbrechen identifiziert wurde. Die von den Justizministerien der Bundesländer finanzierte Koordinierungsstelle spiegelt eine veränderte Herangehensweise bei der Ermittlung und Bestrafung der Verantwortlichen von während der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft verübten 6

Im juristischen Sinne betraf dies vor allem die Vernehmung von Zeugen durch Gerichte in Deutschland und die Übermittlung wichtiger Dokumente, etwa des sogenannten GersteinBerichts über die Ermordung von Juden im Vernichtungslager Belzec, den Kurt Gerstein, ranghoher Offizier im Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS, kurz vor seinem Tod bzw. Selbstmord in französischer Militärhaft im Frühjahr 1945 zu Papier gebracht hatte. Siehe hierzu z. B. ISA, 584/8-‫חצ‬, Savir an Shinnar, 17. Januar 1961. Auf politischem Terrain ging es z. B. um die Bitte der Adenauer-Regierung, der israelische Staat möge das Honorar für Eichmanns deutschen Verteidiger Robert Servatius übernehmen. Die Delegation des deutschen Außenministeriums hielt sich für die Dauer des gesamten Prozesses in Israel auf, um potenzielle Schäden für das Ansehen der BRD abzuwenden, wie sie etwa durch die mögliche Aufdeckung der Verstrickung von Mitgliedern der deutschen Regierung oder ranghoher Staatsbeamter zu entstehen drohten. Siehe z. B. ISA, 584/1-‫חצ‬, Shinnar an Levavi, 15. März 1961; Eckart Conze u. a., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik, unter Mitarbeit von Annette Weinke und Andrea Wiegeshoff, München 2010, 602–604.

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Verbrechen wider. Diese Veränderung setzte in der Bundesrepublik – rund ein Jahrzehnt nach Staatsgründung – allerdings nur schleppend ein. Viele der Täter lebten vollkommen unbeeinträchtigt im Land und hatten Anstellungen im öffentlichen Dienst oder der Privatwirtschaft gefunden. Der Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozess im Jahr 1958 war wohl die erste Gerichtsverhandlung seit den Nürnberger Kriegsverbrecherprozessen, die der deutschen und internationalen Öffentlichkeit die von Deutschen während des Krieges hauptsächlich im Osten verübten Massenmorde wie auch die unbehelligte Existenz der Verantwortlichen vor Augen führte.7 Ab Frühjahr 1953, nach dem vom Bundestag ratifizierten Wiedergutmachungsabkommen, war die israelische konsularische Handelsmission in Köln für ein ganzes Spektrum von Themen zuständig. Parallel dazu wurde die Zusammenarbeit zwischen israelischen und deutschen Diplomaten erheblich intensiviert. Auch bauten beide Staaten sukzessive militärische und nachrichtendienstliche Kontakte auf. Das Verhältnis erfuhr nach dem Sinai-Feldzug, vor allem aber mit Ben-Gurions Versuch, die Bundesrepublik zu einem Verbündeten und Waffenlieferanten Israels zu machen, einen starken Aufschwung. In der Bundesrepublik wurde Israel zunehmend als strategischer Partner des Westens betrachtet.8 Vor dem Hintergrund intensivierter Kontakte stellt sich die Frage, wie die Repräsentanten Israels in der »Phase der Ruhe und Integration«9 der Bundesrepublik zwischen 1953 und 1958 mit deren Unwillen, sich ihrer noch jungen Vergangenheit zu stellen, und dem Ausweichen vor einer ernsthaften Diskussion über die Mitverantwortung der deutschen Bevölkerung für die nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen umgingen. Interessant sind insbesondere die israelischen Reaktionen auf das damalige »schändliche Versäumnis« bei der Strafverfolgung in Westdeutschland.10 Diesen Themen soll im Folgenden vor allem auf Grundlage der Korrespondenz zwischen den israelischen Gesandten in Köln und an anderen Orten, insbesondere in Europa, mit der Spitze des israelischen Außenministeriums nachgegangen werden. 17 Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965. Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law, Cambridge/New York 2006, 13–20; Annette Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt gegen sich selbst. Die Geschichte der Zentralen Stelle Ludwigsburg 1958–2008, Darmstadt 2008, 10–28; Patrick Tobin, Crossroads at Ulm. Postwar West Germany and the 1985 Ulm »Einsatzkommando« Trial (unveröffentlichte Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C., 2013). 18 Roni Stauber, The Impact of the Sinai Campaign on Relations between Israel and West Germany, in: Modern Judaism 33 (2013), H. 3, 235–259. 19 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, 296. 10 Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past. The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, übers. aus dem Dt. von Joel Golb, New York 2002, 66 (dt.: Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit, München 1996).

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Die Bundesrepublik und ihr Verhältnis zur NS-Vergangenheit Das Ausblenden der nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen und die Tatsache, dass viele der dafür verantwortlichen Deutschen zum damaligen Zeitpunkt unbehelligt in der Bundesrepublik lebten, ist als Teil eines umfassenden Schweigens der christdemokratischen Regierung unter Kanzler Adenauer zu verstehen, das innerhalb der bundesrepublikanischen Gesellschaft breite Akzeptanz erfuhr und von Saul Friedländer als »gewolltes Verstummenlassen« bezeichnet worden ist. Nach seinen Worten »genügten einige öffentliche Reuebekenntnisse und die Zahlungsinitiative, um zu einem im Wesentlichen ritualisierten Ersatz für das Erinnern zu werden«.11 Die von Adenauer offiziell propagierte Politik verpflichtete sich zwar zur Strafverfolgung bei schweren Verbrechen, dies wurde jedoch angesichts des Strebens nach Integration aller Teile der Bevölkerung in die neu zu errichtende westliche Demokratie weithin als Nebensächlichkeit begriffen. Die Unterstützung des Nationalsozialismus oder die Mitgliedschaft in der NSDAP wurden als »politischer Irrtum« aufgefasst, als eine Art kultureller Umnachtung, die viele betroffen hatte; jedoch nicht als bleibender ethischmoralischer Makel, der eine Integration in die demokratische Gesellschaft oder gar eine Anstellung im öffentlichen Dienst, im Regierungs- und Verwaltungsapparat ausgeschlossen hätte.12 Auch die Prozesse, die nach dem Krieg gegen Hunderte von Deutschen wegen der Verübung von Kriegsverbrechen und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit geführt wurden, stießen in der bundesdeutschen Öffentlichkeit überwiegend auf Gleichgültigkeit oder gar Ablehnung, obwohl viele Bürger prinzipiell für eine Bestrafung hoher NS-Funktionäre waren. Solche Prozesse fanden zwar zwischen 1945 und 1949 auf deutschem Boden statt, jedoch vor Gerichten der Siegermächte. In der breiten Öffentlichkeit der jungen Bundesrepublik wurden die Strafverfahren entsprechend als »Siegerprozesse« aufgefasst, in denen die besiegten Deutschen abgeurteilt und die von den Alliierten selbst verübten Kriegsverbrechen übergangen wurden. Mitunter wurde behauptet, die von den Alliierten begangenen Kriegsverbrechen wögen nicht weniger schwer als die von den Deutschen im Osten verübten Taten. Immer wieder wurden die Bombardierung deutscher Städte und das brutale Verhalten vor allem der sowjetischen Armee gegenüber deutschen Zivilisten und Kriegsgefangenen angeprangert; ein konventionelles Vorgehen gegen die kommunistischen

11 Saul Friedländer, Some German Struggles with Memory, in: Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.) Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, Bloomington, Ind., 1986, 27–42, hier 29. 12 Siehe Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, 29. Der Begriff des »politischen Irrtums« wurde von Eugen Kogon geprägt, siehe ders., Das Recht auf politischen Irrtum, in: Frankfurter Hefte 2 (1947), 641–655.

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Partisanen sei, so wurde argumentiert, unmöglich gewesen, da diese selbst internationales Kriegsrecht missachtet hätten. Überdies hätten viele Beschuldigte im Krieg lediglich Befehle ausgeführt.13 Der Versuch, die Schuld der breiten deutschen Öffentlichkeit an den Verbrechen des Naziregimes, insbesondere der Ermordung der Juden, zu erörtern – eine Frage, der Karl Jaspers in einer Vorlesungsreihe an der Universität Heidelberg schon 1946 nachging14 – weckte heftigen Widerstand sowohl innerhalb der medialen deutschen Öffentlichkeit als auch bei Politikern und Intellektuellen. Die Regierung adaptierte den sich ausbildenden Mythos von der deutschen Bevölkerung als Opfer und erhob ihn zu einem Fundament beim Aufbau der neuen westdeutschen Gesellschaft, zu einem wichtigen Faktor bei der Verteidigung des Ansehens des Landes – immerhin hatten Millionen Bürger des neuen Staates, die nunmehr praktisch über Nacht zu guten Demokraten geworden waren, jahrelang eng mit dem »Führer« und dessen neuer Ordnung sympathisiert. Dieser »Opferperspektive« zufolge waren die Deutschen Leidtragende des Naziregimes gewesen, um nach dem Krieg willkürlicher Bestrafung durch die Siegermächte und die vom Joch der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft befreiten Staaten ausgesetzt zu werden. Im Namen einer nach dieser Auffassung ethisch-moralisch unhaltbaren »Kollektivschuldthese« und lediglich zur Vergeltung seien kurz vor Ende des Krieges Deutschlands Städte bombardiert und zerstört worden, wofür der Fall Dresdens als exemplarisch galt. Außerdem seien Millionen von Deutschen aus ihren Siedlungsgebieten in Mittel- und Osteuropa vertrieben worden, in denen sie zuvor jahrhundertelang gelebt hatten.15 Verschiedene einflussreiche Gruppen innerhalb der jungen Demokratie, darunter Vertreter der Kirchen, namhafte Juristen und Bundestagsabgeord13 Einer im Jahr 1952 in Deutschland erhobenen Meinungsumfrage zufolge äußerte nur jeder zehnte Deutsche Zustimmung zu den Nürnberger Prozessen und ihren Folgeverfahren. Siehe Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial. War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory, Oxford/New York 2001, 145–153.; Frank M. Buscher, The U. S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946–1955, New York 1989, 9; John H. Herz, Bürde der Vergangenheit oder: Wie die Deutschen mit der Nazi-Hinterlassenschaft fertig wurden, in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 19 (1990), 13–32; Wolfgang Benz, Postwar Society and National Socialism. Remembrance, Amnesia, Rejection, in: ebd., 1–12. 14 Aus dieser Vorlesung ist Jaspers’ Schrift Die Schuldfrage hervorgegangen, 1946 erschienen im Verlag Lambert Schneider. 15 Edgar Wolfrum, Die Suche nach dem »Ende der Nachkriegszeit«. Krieg und NS-Diktatur in öffentlichen Geschichtsbildern der »alten« Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in: Christoph Cornelißen/Lutz Klinkhammer/Wolfgang Schwentker (Hgg.), Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945, Frankfurt a. M. 2003, 183–197, hier 190–195; David Bankier, Germania ba-schanim 1945–1947 [Deutschland in den Jahren 1945– 1947], in: Karl Jaspers, Sche’elat ha-aschmah [Die Schuldfrage], bearb. von David Bankier und Yaakov Golomb, aus dem Dt. von Yaakov Gotshalk, Jerusalem 2006, 7–29.

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nete, die die Unterstützung der Adenauer-Regierung genossen, übten bereits unmittelbar nach Gründung der Bundesrepublik und in der ersten Hälfte der Fünfzigerjahre Druck auf die Alliierten aus, insbesondere auf die Amerikaner, eine totale Amnestie zu verkünden oder zumindest bei langen Haftstrafen das Strafmaß herabzusetzen. Vor allem sollten diejenigen begnadigt werden, denen die – im Strafgesetzbuch nicht mehr vorgesehene – Todesstrafe drohte. Diese Ersuchen fanden umso mehr Gehör, je einflussreicher die Bundesrepublik innerhalb der westlichen Welt wurde, zumal vor dem Hintergrund der sich verschärfenden Blockkonfrontation und der Wiederbewaffnung. Das Strafmaß vieler zu langen Haftstrafen Verurteilter wurde immer wieder verkürzt, bis hin zur teilweise vollständigen Entlassung. Unter denjenigen, die so im Laufe der Fünfzigerjahre freikamen, waren auch Täter, die durch Gerichte der Alliierten zum Tode verurteilt und deren Strafen infolge des Drucks der Deutschen in Gefängnishaft umgewandelt worden waren. In der zweiten Hälfte der 1950er Jahre kamen auf diese Weise auch Befehlshaber der SS-Einsatzgruppen frei. Die letzten drei dieser Täter, ursprünglich zum Tode verurteilt, wurden 1958 aus der Haft entlassen, nur zwei Monate vor Beginn des Prozesses in Ulm, bei dem ganz ähnliche Taten verhandelt wurden.16 Die weitverzweigten politischen und öffentlichen Aktivitäten mit dem Ziel einer Amnestie setzten parallel zur Wiedereinstellung Zehntausender Bürger ein, die im Zuge der Entnazifizierungsverfahren aus Regierungsämtern oder dem öffentlichen Dienst entlassen worden waren. In einem beschleunigten Verfahren erhielten die Gekündigten ihre berufliche Stellung und alle Sozialansprüche zurück. Die Wiedereinstellung, durch die westlichen Alliierten selbst noch vor Gründung der Bundesrepublik ermöglicht, wurde im April 1951 durch den Bundestag beschlossen:17 Das Gesetz zur Regelung der Rechtsverhältnisse der unter Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes fallenden Personen, das auch eine Entschädigung für alle Betroffenen festlegte, die durch die Entnazifizierungsverfahren geschädigt worden waren, zielte vornehmlich auf Berufssoldaten, die in der Wehrmacht gedient hatten. Dazu zählten auch Angehörige der Waffen-SS. Vor allem galt das Gesetz für »Mitläufer« – ein dehnbarer Begriff, den die Alliierten erstmals im Zuge der Entnazifizierung verwendet hatten. Gemeint waren vor allem Parteimitglieder, die im Nachhinein behaupteten, ihr Beitritt zur NSDAP habe keine ideologischen, son-

16 Adalbert Rückerl, The Investigation of Nazi Crimes, 1945–1978. A Documentation, übers. von Derek Rutter, Heidelberg/Karlsruhe 1979, 43–51; Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958. Atrocity, Law, and History, Cambridge/New York 2009, 265–295. 17 Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, 56.

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dern rein opportunistische Gründe gehabt, etwa den Wunsch, eine Anstellung zu behalten oder im öffentlichen Dienst Karriere zu machen.18 Faktisch führte dies dazu, dass auch überzeugte NSDAP-Mitglieder und sogar Beamte in verschiedenen Unterorganisationen der SS und der Partei – wie der Gestapo und dem SD – erneut im öffentlichen Dienst unterkamen. Laut Angaben aus dem Jahr 1953 war rund ein Drittel aller Stellen in westdeutschen Behörden und Regierungsämtern mit Personal besetzt, das im Zuge der Entnazifizierung zuvor entlassen worden war.19 Diese Wiedereingliederungsprozesse stießen in Politik und Öffentlichkeit auf breite Zustimmung. Die Rehabilitierung ging vonstatten, während eine kritische öffentliche Diskussion über die tiefe Verwicklung der deutschen Bürokratie in ideologisch und rassistisch motivierte Verbrechen in der Zeit des »Dritten Reichs« nach Kräften vermieden wurde. Gleichzeitig verteidigte die westdeutsche Staatsführung rigoros Ehre und Ansehen der Wehrmacht, die ihrer Ansicht nach allein aus Treue zum Vaterland gehandelt hatte und an keinerlei Verbrechen beteiligt gewesen war; diese seien vielmehr allein von überzeugten Nationalsozialisten verübt worden.20 Das Streben nach einem Neuanfang, einer »Stunde Null«, ohne die offenen Rechnungen der Vergangenheit, wurde zum konstituierenden Ethos der Bundesrepublik. Es lässt sich die Einschätzung vertreten, dass dieses Ethos beträchtlichen Einfluss auf das mangelnde Interesse westdeutscher Strafverfolgungsorgane an entsprechenden Ermittlungen und Anklagen hatte. Die Anzahl eröffneter Ermittlungsfälle und die Zahl derjenigen Deutschen, die wegen in der NS-Zeit verübter Straftaten mit antisemitischem oder rassistischem Hintergrund vor Gericht gestellt wurden, gingen in der ersten Hälfte des Jahres 1955 dramatisch zurück. Außerdem behandelte ein beträchtlicher Teil der laufenden Verfahren Straftaten, die während der Dreißigerjahre in Deutschland etwa im Zusammenhang mit den Novemberpogromen begangen worden waren. Diese Taten blieben in ihrer Schwere weit hinter dem Morden im Osten zurück. Entsprechend häufig waren Freisprüche oder sehr milde Urteile. Die Handlungsverweigerung der Juristen, auch beeinflusst durch die NS-Vergangenheit hochrangiger Vertreter der Justiz selbst, darunter nicht wenige Richter, führte dazu, dass sich viele junge Bundesbürger der Charakteristika und des Ausmaßes der deutschen Vernichtungspolitik nicht oder nur unzureichend bewusst waren.21

18 19 20 21

Ebd., 41–66. Ebd., 54. Ebd., 48–54. Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice. The Auschwitz Trial, Cambridge, Mass., 2005, 16 f.; Herf, Divided Memory, 270–289; Irmtrud Wojak, Fritz Bauer. 1903–1968. Eine Biographie, München 2011, 285.

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Obgleich im Zusammenhang mit der Vorbereitung des Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozesses die Zahl der Ermittlungsverfahren in der zweiten Hälfte der Fünfzigerjahre wieder zunahm, wurden diese Ermittlungen zumeist nicht auf Initiative westdeutscher Staatsanwaltschaften aufgenommen. Sie kamen eher zufällig zustande, sei es aufgrund dreister Sorglosigkeit der Beschuldigten oder aber dank der Initiative Einzelner. Selbst der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess von Dezember 1963 bis August 1965, das vielleicht wichtigste unter den von der westdeutschen Justiz angestrengten Verfahren gegen NSVerbrecher, bei dem der hessische Generalstaatsanwalt Fritz Bauer eine maßgebliche Rolle spielte, kam nur durch eine Anzeige bei der Stuttgarter Staatsanwaltschaft zustande, deren Glaubwürdigkeit zunächst sogar in Zweifel gezogen worden war.22 Bauer entschied sich, die Informationen, die er zum Aufenthaltsort Adolf Eichmanns in Buenos Aires erhalten hatte, nicht an offizielle Stellen, darunter auch die zuständigen Staatsanwaltschaften, weiterzuleiten – aus Sorge, jemand dort werde eine Festnahme Eichmanns vereiteln. Allem Anschein nach befürchtete Bauer, die Informationen könnten bei der westdeutschen Botschaft in Buenos Aires ankommen, an deren Spitze mit Botschafter Werner Junker ein ehemaliger Parteigenosse stand, der im »Dritten Reich« als Sondergesandter des Außenministeriums auf dem Balkan fungiert hatte. In diesem Zeitraum hatten SS und Wehrmacht dort schlimmste Kriegsverbrechen an der Zivilbevölkerung verübt. Wie sich im Nachhinein herausstellte, weihte Bauer allein den damaligen Hessischen Ministerpräsidenten Georg August Zinn, wie er ein alter Sozialdemokrat, in seine Entscheidung ein, die verfügbaren Informationen an Israel weiterzuleiten.23

Erinnerung und Realpolitik in Israel Zwischen 1953 und 1958 wurden Hunderte von Schreiben und Telegrammen zwischen der Gesandtschaft in Köln und dem Außenministerium in Jerusalem ausgetauscht. In der umfangreichen Korrespondenz finden sich nur wenige Hinweise auf Kritik von Mitgliedern der israelischen Repräsentanz in Köln oder Beamten des israelischen Außenministeriums gegenüber ihren deutschen Kollegen bezüglich der Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit in der Bundesrepublik insgesamt und der Bestrafung von Naziverbrechern im 22 Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965, 25–45; Wojak, Fritz Bauer, 285. 23 Herf, Divided Memory, 270–289; Rückerl, The Investigation of Nazi Crimes, 1945–1978, 43–47; Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, New York 2011, 12; Conze, u. a., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, 603.

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Besonderen. Dagegen ist den detaillierten Berichten zu entnehmen, dass die Treffen zwischen den israelischen und deutschen Vertretern vor allem ökonomischen Themen gewidmet waren, etwa möglichen Anleihen aus der Bundesrepublik oder dem Versuch, mit den Entschädigungszahlungen in Verbindung stehende Anweisungen vorzuverlegen. Behandelt wurden außerdem die komplexen Beziehungen der Bundesrepublik zu den arabischen Staaten und die durch deren Drohungen mitverursachte Weigerung Bonns, diplomatische Beziehungen zu Israel aufzunehmen. Auch in den ausführlichen Berichten israelischer Diplomaten auf der ganzen Welt über Treffen mit deutschen Gesprächspartnern finden sich nur wenige Hinweise auf Kontroversen oder zumindest ausführliche Gespräche über den deutschen Umgang mit der eigenen Vergangenheit. Ein ähnliches Bild ergeben die überlieferten deutschen Briefe und Berichte. Die Affäre, die schließlich mit der Festnahme Eichmanns endete und dem Mossad viel Ruhm bescherte, wurde durch eine erste Kontaktaufnahme Bauers mit Shinnar 1957 initiiert, nachdem Bauer von einem in Argentinien lebenden Juden namens Lothar Hermann einen Hinweis erhalten hatte, demzufolge Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires leben solle. Diese Information passte zu anderen Hinweisen, über die Bauer verfügte: In Akten der österreichischen Polizei war davon die Rede, Eichmanns Frau sei zusammen mit den Kindern nach Südamerika gereist. Zwei Jahre später, im November 1959, wandte sich Bauer erneut an Shinnar und bat, einen direkten Kontakt zwischen ihm und dem Rechtsberater der israelischen Regierung, Chaim Cohen, herzustellen.24 Offenbar war es Bauer zu jenem Zeitpunkt gelungen, Hermanns Angaben durch eine weitere Quelle zu untermauern und nachzuweisen, dass Eichmann bereits 1950 unter dem falschen Namen Ricardo Klement nach Argentinien gelangt war. Auf Grundlage dieser Informationen ersuchte Bauer Cohen um ein persönliches Gespräch, in dessen Verlauf er diesen – und über ihn auch den israelischen Geheimdienst – überzeugte, endlich zu handeln.25 Parallel dazu stellten der Leiter der Zentralen Stelle, Erwin Schüle, und seine Mitarbeiter Anfragen zu weiteren in Deutschland wohnenden Verdächtigen. Erst diese Anfragen veranlassten Chaim Cohen und die israelischen Polizeiorgane, Zeugenaussagen zu den Taten der Naziverbrecher aufzunehmen und zusammenzustellen. Kurz nachdem er Ende 1956 zum Stab der

24 ISA, 5724/8-‫חצ‬, Shinnar an Cohen, 6. November 1959. 25 Die ganze Affäre ist in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur dezidiert beschrieben worden. Zu den jüngeren Beispielen zählen Hanna Yablonka, Medinat Israel neged Adolf Eichmann [Der Staat Israel gegen Adolf Eichmann], Tel Aviv 2001, 19 f. Über die von Österreich an Westdeutschland weitergeleiteten Informationen, die schließlich zu Bauer gelangten, siehe Wojak, Fritz Bauer, 289.

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Staatsanwaltschaft im Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozess gestoßen war, stellte Schüle außerdem informelle Kontakte zum Leiter des Archivs der Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem, Josef Karmish, und zu Tuviah Friedman, Leiter des nicht staatlichen Dokumentationsinstituts in Haifa, her. Unter anderem sollten Karmish und Friedman Schüle behilflich sein, Dokumente und Zeitzeugen in Israel ausfindig zu machen. Bis zu Schüles Anfrage beim israelischen Justizministerium im März 1959 hatte weder die israelische Justiz systematisch Erkenntnisse über Naziverbrecher gesammelt noch hatten die israelischen Behörden Deutschland in dieser Hinsicht zu Aktivitäten gedrängt. »Ich bin bereits mit dem Stab der Polizeikräfte zu der vorläufigen Übereinkunft gelangt, dass Zeugenvernehmungen, die durch das neue Zentrum in Ludwigsburg von Israel erbeten werden, durch Ermittler der Polizei erfolgen sollen, die in gegebenen Fällen sich der Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem und Friedmans Dokumentationsinstituts als Hilfsmittel bedienen könnten«,

schrieb Cohen an den stellvertretenden Generaldirektor des israelischen Außenministeriums, Maurice Fischer, als Antwort auf ein von diesem erstelltes Memorandum. Fischer hatte darin betont, es bestehe die Notwendigkeit, »eine zuständige Stelle in Israel zu schaffen, welche Anfragen aus dem Ausland und vor allem aus Westdeutschland koordiniert im Zusammenhang mit der Suche nach Zeugen und dem Auffinden von Beweismaterial gegen Naziverbrecher, die im Ausland vor Gericht gebracht werden sollen. Aufgabe einer solchen Stelle sollte sein, die Aktivitäten aller damit befassten Akteure zu dirigieren und zu koordinieren und als staatliches israelisches Zentrum für eine Behandlung dieser Belange zu fungieren. […] Hochrangige Juristen in Deutschland, die mit der Suche nach Naziverbrechern befasst sind, haben ein Interesse daran, nach Israel zu kommen und hier mit Verantwortlichen zusammenzutreffen, die sich im Auftrag Israels um diese Sache kümmern. Derzeit gibt es in Israel keine solchen Personen, an die wir sie verweisen könnten […].«26

Seit den ersten Wiedergutmachungsverhandlungen zwischen Israel und Deutschland im Jahr 1951 und die gesamten Fünfzigerjahre hindurch betrachteten die israelische Regierung und ihre Diplomaten das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zur NS-Zeit und zum Holocaust ganz offenbar unter dem Primat eigener realpolitischer Erwägungen und Ziele. Der israelische Premierminister David Ben-Gurion und sein Außenminister Moshe Sharett, von 1954 bis 1955 Premierminister, die in vielen Grundsatzfragen der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik extrem unterschiedlicher Ansicht waren, teilten in diesem besonderen Fall die Auffassung, die bundesdeutsche Verantwortung für die eigene Vergangenheit müsse sich vor allem in der Verteidi-

26 ISA, 5724/8-‫ג‬, Fischer an Cohen, 19. Dezember 1959; ebd., Cohen an Fischer, 21. Dezember 1959.

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gung von Existenz und Sicherheit Israels sowie in der Stärkung von dessen Wirtschaft ausdrücken. Bereits im Verlauf der Debatte über die Entschädigung aus Deutschland – von Ende 1951 bis Anfang 1952 – bezog sich BenGurion auf eine Lehre aus der Ohnmacht des jüdischen Volkes während des Holocaust, die in der Verpflichtung, den Staat Israel aufzubauen und zu stärken, sowie in einer dezidierten Realpolitik bestehe. Zentral sei die Notwendigkeit, Unterstützung für den jüdischen Staat im Kampf gegen seine aktuellen Feinde zu erlangen, Unterstützung auch und vor allem vonseiten derjenigen, die für die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden Verantwortung trugen. Ben-Gurion präsentierte seine Auffassung in schneidender Form bei einer Diskussion im Zentralkomitee der Regierungspartei Mapai im Dezember 1951. Dabei ging er im Besonderen auf die Vorbehalte der Mitglieder des Zentralkomitees Arieh Scheftel und Marc Dworzecki ein, die sich als Holocaustüberlebende gegen die Aufnahme von Entschädigungs- und Reparationsverhandlungen ausgesprochen hatten. Ben-Gurion sagte: »Morgen schon können sie uns in diesem Land abschlachten. Wir wollen nicht noch einmal in eine Lage geraten wie die, in der ihr wart. Wir wollen nicht, dass die arabischen Nazis kommen und uns abschlachten […], und damit dies weder Scheftels noch meinen Kindern widerfährt, sind Kanonen notwendig.«27

Gleichzeitig jedoch mahnte Ben-Gurion bei ebenjener Sitzung des Zentralkomitees zu größter Vorsicht, was die politische Inanspruchnahme des Holocaust im Verhältnis zwischen Israel und der internationalen Staatengemeinschaft betraf. So befürchtete er, das fortwährende Herausstellen der Katastrophe könne Ablehnung und Verachtung darüber wecken, ja sogar ein Gefühl der Empörung in der jüdischen Welt darüber, dass die Israelis die Erinnerung an den Holocaust nicht mit dem nötigen Respekt behandelten: »Was wir über das, was sie uns angetan haben, sagen müssen, werden wir sagen, wenn es notwendig ist. Ich weiß nicht, ob wir uns Tag und Nacht damit befassen werden, aber wenn sich die Gelegenheit ergibt, werden wir das Unsere sagen. Es ist besser, dies nicht über längere Zeit zu sagen, da es nur Verachtung weckt. Wenn ein neuer Jeremia erscheint, wird er das Seine dazu sagen. Wenn ihr eure Vorbehalte zu oft wiederholt, wird es der Welt zum Halse heraushängen – und in dieser Welt gibt es auch Juden.«28

Die Frage der Verhältnismäßigkeit einer Ableitung politischer Ansprüche aus der nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungspolitik, auf die Ben-Gurion bereits im Jahre 1951 verwies, kam im diplomatischen Diskurs zwischen Israel und 27 Ya’akov Sharett (Hg.), Pulmus ha-schilumim. Moshe Sharett be-ma’arachot ha-massa umatan al heskem ha-schilumim mi-Germania. Kovets protokolim u-mismachim, 1950– 1953 [Die Debatte über die Schilumim. Moshe Sharett in den Verhandlungsschlachten über das Wiedergutmachungsabkommen mit Deutschland. Sammlung von Protokollen und Dokumenten, 1950–1953], Tel Aviv 2007, 240. 28 Ebd.

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der Bundesrepublik im Laufe der Fünfzigerjahre immer wieder auf – insbesondere während diplomatischer Krisen. Denn auch wenn die Frage einer »moralischen Schuld« im israelisch-deutschen Kontext stets gegenwärtig war, so hüteten sich israelische Politiker wie Ben-Gurion und Sharett davor, diese besonders herauszustellen; stattdessen waren sie bestrebt, die Erinnerung an die Vergangenheit mit einer realpolitischen Kooperation zwischen beiden Staaten zu vereinbaren. Das israelische Dilemma zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik lässt sich durch viele Beispiele aus den Akten der Außenministerien beider Länder veranschaulichen. Im Folgenden sollen drei markante Fälle aus den Fünfziger- und frühen Sechzigerjahren erörtert werden. Generell lässt sich feststellen, dass das Argument einer aus dem Holocaust resultierenden moralischen Schuld der Bundesrepublik gegenüber Israel immer dann betont wurde, wenn die israelischen Diplomaten zu dem Schluss gelangten, die Haltung Bonns sei mit realpolitischen Argumenten nicht mehr zu ändern. Die erste Begebenheit ereignete sich in der ersten Hälfte des Jahres 1956 und stand im Zusammenhang mit der Entscheidung der bundesdeutschen Regierung, trotz der Ende 1955 zwischen beiden Staaten getroffenen Absprachen keine konsularische Vertretung in Israel zu etablieren. Die Vertretung hätte eine Vorstufe auf dem Weg zu vollumfänglichen diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen beiden Staaten bedeutet. Die Weigerung der Bundesrepublik, die getroffene Vereinbarung umzusetzen, war in gewisser Weise vorauseilender Gehorsam gegenüber arabischen Staaten. Offenbar wurde befürchtet, deren Reaktion könne darin bestehen, eine ostdeutsche konsularische Gesandtschaft zu begrüßen oder gar volle diplomatische Beziehungen mit der DDR herzustellen. Ein solcher Vorgang wiederum drohte weitere Staaten zu ermutigen, sich ähnlich zu verhalten, was zu Spannungen oder gar einem Abbruch der jeweiligen Beziehungen zur Bundesrepublik hätte führen können. Die deutsche Haltung in dieser Frage gegen Ende des Jahres 1955 war der Beginn eines Paradigmenwechsels in der israelischen Auffassung vom Verhältnis zum westdeutschen Staat und von der Trennlinie zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik. Bis zu jenem Zeitpunkt hatte in der israelischen Diplomatie das Gefühl vorgeherrscht, ein Zustandekommen diplomatischer Beziehungen hänge einzig und allein vom Willen Israels ab. In Ermangelung eines politischen oder sicherheitsstrategischen Druckmittels, das die Haltung der Bundesrepublik hätte ändern können, griff Moshe Sharett zum moralischen Argument einer aus dem Holocaust resultierenden Verpflichtung Deutschlands gegenüber Israel. Dabei bediente er sich einer raffinierten Taktik. Einerseits wollte er einen offenen Bruch mit der Bundesrepublik vermeiden und beschloss daher, dem Konflikt nicht öffentlich Ausdruck zu verleihen. Andererseits beabsichtigte er, Bonn klar die Schäden für die internationale Reputation der Bundesrepublik, ins-

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besondere für deren Beziehung zum jüdischen Volk, vor Augen zu führen, die das Eingehen auf einen – in israelischen Augen – arabischen Erpressungsversuch nach sich zöge. Anlässlich eines bevorstehenden Treffens von Shinnar mit dem bundesdeutschen Außenminister Heinrich von Brentano im Januar 1956 wies Sharett Shinnar an, er möge betonen, dass »auf Deutschland eine besondere und schwerwiegende moralische Verpflichtung lastet, Israel und das jüdische Volk zu entschädigen. Für Deutschland geht es langfristig betrachtet nicht nur um eine Abweichung von der Linie der Gerechtigkeit und der Einsicht, sondern die Rede ist hier von einem vollkommenen Richtungswechsel, den Deutschland vollziehen muss, sollte es tatsächlich und aufrichtig daran interessiert sein, die Untaten seines Regimes zu sühnen und eine neue Seite seiner Geschichte aufzuschlagen.«

In einem anderen Schreiben instruierte Sharett die israelischen Repräsentanten weltweit, gegenüber deutschen Diplomaten deutlich zu machen, dass »wir den klaren Eindruck gewonnen haben, sie seien an einer Fortentwicklung der Beziehungen nicht interessiert. Und dass, wo sie doch angesichts der entsetzlichen Vergangenheit nichts unversucht lassen müssten, uns entgegenzukommen.«29

Doch die Bundesrepublik gab dem israelischen Druck nicht nach. Sie zeigte sich zwar bereit, Israel wirtschaftlich und später auch militärisch zu entschädigen, dies jedoch unter der Bedingung, dass die politischen und ökonomischen Interessen der Bundesrepublik nicht beeinträchtigt würden. Die Gestalter der israelischen Außenpolitik mussten erfahren, dass ungeachtet des besonderen Verhältnisses zwischen den beiden Staaten die Möglichkeit, sich auf eine gemeinsame Erinnerung und moralische Verpflichtungen zu beziehen, begrenzt war. Diese Einsicht hielt sie künftig davon ab, ähnlich expliziten Gebrauch von diesem Instrument zu machen. Dessen ungeachtet gab es israelische Diplomaten, unter ihnen einige sehr erfahrene, die überzeugt davon waren, dass dieses Argument ohne Vorbehalt zum Einsatz gebracht werden sollte, einhergehend mit der Drohung, das deutsche Ansehen insbesondere unter den Juden der Vereinigten Staaten zu schädigen, sollten die israelischen Interessen ein solches Vorgehen erfordern. Dieser Standpunkt kam in einem zweiten Ereignis deutlich zum Ausdruck. Gideon Rafael, Botschafter Israels in Belgien und Luxemburg sowie Repräsentant seines Landes für den gemeinsamen europäischen Markt, schlug vor, antisemitische Schmierereien, zu denen es Ende 1959, Anfang 1960 in der Bundesrepublik gekommen war, zum Anlass zu nehmen, um die Bundesrepublik zur Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen mit Israel zu 29 ISA, 304-4-‫חצ‬, Sharett an Shinnar, 22. Februar 1956; ebd., Sharett an die Vertreter Israels in der Welt, 27. Mai 1956.

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drängen. Die Vorfälle hatten weltweit, vor allem in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, für Empörung gesorgt, da die Bundesrepublik sich offenbar einer ernsthaften Diskussion der eigenen Vergangenheit verweigerte. Insbesondere wurde ein Versagen des bundesdeutschen Erziehungswesens kritisiert.30 Die antisemitischen Vorfälle ereigneten sich wenige Monate vor dem geplanten Staatsgipfel in Paris, an dem die Vereinigten Staaten, Großbritannien und Frankreich gemeinsam mit der Sowjetunion teilnehmen sollten. Bei diesem Treffen sollte auf Verlangen der Sowjetunion, die die Westmächte bewegen wollte, die Stadt zu verlassen, der Status Berlins erörtert werden. Rafael schrieb an die israelische Außenministerin Golda Meir: »Die antijüdischen und neonazistischen Erscheinungen haben die internationale Stellung Deutschlands nachhaltig erschüttert. Alle Anzeichen belegen, dass die AdenauerRegierung äußerst sensibel ist, was die Situation anbelangt. Diese Sensibilität erscheint verständlich angesichts der deutschen Sorge, auf der Gipfelkonferenz könnten die Vereinigten Staaten und England sich auf Kosten Deutschlands zu einem Kompromiss mit der Sowjetunion bereitfinden. […] Andererseits würde eine Regelung der Beziehungen zu Israel auf eigene Initiative die Position Deutschlands in der westlichen öffentlichen Meinung stärken.«31

Kurz darauf, während des Gipfels in Paris, schlug Rafael vor, Israel solle inoffiziell aktiv werden, um die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit noch stärker auf das nachsichtige Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zur eigenen Vergangenheit zu lenken, auf das Fortbestehen »nazistischer Tendenzen« und vor allem auf die Integration ehemaliger Nationalsozialisten in hohe Staats- und Verwaltungsämter. Dieser Vorstoß resultierte jedoch nicht aus moralischer Kritik an der Bundesregierung, sondern aus dem politischen Kalkül, dass die Adenauer-Regierung »die in Deutschland bestehenden Vorbehalte überwindet und sich zugunsten einer Aufnahme von Beziehungen mit Israel entscheidet«.32 Die Art und Weise, in der die israelische Diplomatie versuchte, antisemitische Vorfälle und die Erinnerung an den Holocaust dafür zu verwenden, Druck auf Deutschland auszuüben, weckte jedoch den Widerstand BenGurions. Sie stand in völligem Widerspruch zu seiner bereits im zähen politischen Ringen um einen Abzug von der Sinaihalbinsel zu Beginn des Jahres 1957 verfolgten Politik freundschaftlicher Beziehungen zu Westdeutsch-

30 Zu der sogenannten »Hakenkreuzseuche« 1959/60 siehe ausführlich Roni Stauber, »Realpolitik« and the Burden of the Past. Israeli Diplomacy and the »Other Germany«, in: Israel Studies 8 (2003), H. 3, 100–122. 31 ISA, 301/19-‫חצ‬, Rafael an Meir, 26. November 1960. 32 Stauber, »Realpolitik« and the Burden of the Past; ISA, 301/19-‫חצ‬, Shinnar an Jerusalem, 19. und 24. Januar 1960.

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land, das zu einem Verbündeten Israels werden sollte.33 Ben-Gurion befürchtete, der nun ausgeübte Druck in Kombination mit den Anschuldigungen könnte die enger werdenden wirtschaftlichen und militärischen Kontakte zwischen beiden Staaten beeinträchtigen. In seinen Augen kam dem Umstand, dass ehemalige Nationalsozialisten reihenweise Aufnahme in den Staatsapparat gefunden hatten, keinerlei politische Bedeutung zu. Aus seiner Sicht gefährdeten die Deutschen – anders als die arabischen Staaten – die Sicherheit und Existenz des Staates Israel nicht. Seinem Tagebuch vertraute er an, Hans Globke, unter Adenauer Staatssekretär im Bundeskanzleramt, verhalte sich Israel gegenüber höchst positiv, obwohl er Miturheber des ersten Kommentars zu den Nürnberger Rassengesetzen gewesen sei.34 Jedoch lehnte auch Ben-Gurion eine vorsichtige strategische Inanspruchnahme der Erinnerung an den Holocaust zur Erreichung politischer Ziele nicht grundsätzlich ab. Diese Einstellung kam vor allem während der dritten Begebenheit zum Ausdruck: bei Ben-Gurions Treffen mit Adenauer im März 1960 in New York, nur zwei Monate bevor Eichmann aus Argentinien entführt und nach Israel gebracht wurde. Aus dem Protokoll der Zusammenkunft geht klar hervor, dass Ben-Gurion vermied, sich auf die Schuldfrage zu beziehen oder die Vergangenheit dezidiert anzusprechen, obwohl dies die erste Begegnung zwischen dem Regierungschef des jüdischen Staates und dem deutschen Bundeskanzler war. Stattdessen stellte Ben-Gurion in höchst subtiler Form ein Gleichgewicht her zwischen der moralischen Verpflichtung der Bundesrepublik gegenüber dem Staat Israel und dem auf Erfordernissen der Gegenwart basierenden Verhältnis zwischen beiden Staaten.35 Der Eichmann-Prozess sollte ein wichtiger Baustein auf diesem Weg sein, wie Ben-Gurion den Ministern seines Kabinetts bei der ersten Zusammenkunft nach der Entführung Eichmanns und dessen Überstellung nach Israel Ende Mai 1960 klarmachte. So sei der Prozess unter anderem dafür gedacht, das Gedenken an den Holocaust im Bewusstsein der Weltöffentlichkeit zu verankern – etwas, das bei den Nürnberger Prozessen unterblieben sei, wie 33 Siehe hierzu Stauber, The Impact of the Sinai Campaign on Relations between Israel and West Germany. 34 David Ben-Gurions Rede vor der Knesset, 29. Juni 1959, in: Divre ha-Keneset [Protokolle der Knesset], Bd. 27; Ben-Gurion Archiv, Sdeh Boker, Ben-Gurions Tagebuch, 15. Dezember 1960. Von 1953 bis 1963 war Globke Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes und galt als engster Vertrauter Konrad Adenauers. In den Dreißigerjahren hatte Globke als Verwaltungsjurist im Reichsinnenministerium an der Ausarbeitung der antidemokratischen und rassistischen Gesetzgebung mitgearbeitet. Besonders schwer wog, dass er 1936 gemeinsam mit seinem Vorgesetzten, Staatssekretär Wilhelm Stuckart, den ersten Kommentar zu den Nürnberger Gesetzen und deren Ausführungsverordnungen herausgegeben hatte. 35 Zaki Shalom, Document: David Ben-Gurion and Chancellor Adenauer at the Waldorf Astoria on 14 March 1960, in: Israel Studies 2 (1997), H. 1, 50–71.

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Ben-Gurion betonte. Mithilfe des Gerichtsverfahrens gegen Eichmann wollte Ben-Gurion die internationale, vor allem die europäische Verpflichtung zu einer Unterstützung des jüdischen Staates betonen, desjenigen Staates, der kollektiver nationaler Ausdruck des jüdischen Volkes sei und allein durch seine Existenz die Erinnerung des jüdischen Volkes trage. Gegenüber den Mitgliedern seiner Regierung äußerte er: »Das Bestreben von Nürnberg war eines gegen Deutschland, gegen die Naziführung, ein politisches Bestreben. Damals hat man nicht über die jüdische Angelegenheit zu Gericht gesessen, das war eine Nebensache. […] Die Welt möchte das vergessen […] diese ganze Sache muss neu aufgerollt werden«.36

Israelische Kritik am Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zu ihrer Vergangenheit Im offiziellen diplomatischen Austausch zwischen Israel und der Bundesrepublik kam das Thema des Holocaust mithin nur im israelischen Kontext zur Sprache, während die israelischen Diplomaten Zurückhaltung wahrten bei allen Fragen, die das Ausblenden der Vergangenheit betrafen, jener Linie der westdeutschen Staatsführung also, die Erschütterungen beim Aufbauprozess der Bundesrepublik verhindern sollte. In ihren Briefen nach Israel und auch in inoffiziellen Gesprächen mit ihren deutschen Kollegen, von denen anzunehmen ist, dass darüber nur teilweise in Jerusalem Bericht erstattet wurde, übten die Diplomaten und andere israelische Repräsentanten scharfe Kritik am Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zur eigenen Vergangenheit. Mitunter ließen sie sogar ihren Gefühlen freien Lauf angesichts der Realität, mit der sie konfrontiert wurden. Neben der Kritik finden sich aber auch viele Bezugnahmen auf die sich zusehends ausprägenden demokratischen Charakteristika des westdeutschen Staates, ebenso wie auf den allgemein schwindenden militaristischen Geist und das Erstarken pazifistischer Tendenzen in der westdeutschen Jugend. Zu den Fällen, in denen die israelischen Staatsvertreter eindrücklich Kritik, Empörung und Resignation artikulierten, gehört ein detaillierter Bericht über die westdeutsche Gesellschaft, 1954 von Chaim Yahil verfasst, stellvertretender Leiter der israelischen Handelsmission (Israel-Mission) in Köln und später, zu Beginn der Sechzigerjahre, Generaldirektor des israelischen Außenministeriums. Die Tätigkeit in Köln war nicht Yahils erster Aufenthalt in Deutschland nach dem Krieg. Im Dezember 1945 hatte er die DP-Lager 36 ISA, 12968/10, Sitzungsprotokoll der israelischen Regierung, 29. Mai 1960.

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in Deutschland besucht, an der Spitze sogenannter Hilfskompanien, die der Jischuw entsandt hatte, um die Überlebenden zu versorgen und möglichst ins Land Israel zu dirigieren. Kurz nach der Staatsgründung Israels hatte Yahil als erster israelischer Konsul in Deutschland amtiert, mit Sitz in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone. »Die parlamentarische Herrschaft ist wiederhergestellt und wirkt so stabil, als sei sie in diesem Land nie abgeschafft worden«, schrieb Yahil und brachte sogar Anerkennung für Intellektuelle und Politiker zum Ausdruck, die für die moralische Integrität der neuen bundesdeutschen Gesellschaft kämpften. Gleichzeitig jedoch betonte er den Unwillen weiter Teile der Bevölkerung, sich mit dem eigenen Verhalten während des Nationalsozialismus auseinanderzusetzen. Yahil brachte seine Wut und Frustration angesichts der Gleichgültigkeit, des Leugnens und der Apologetik der Deutschen in Bezug auf ihr Leben während der NS-Zeit und insbesondere in Bezug auf die Ermordung der Juden zum Ausdruck: »Man wundert sich, ob denn tatsächlich ein neuer Geist in diesem Volk Einzug gehalten hat. Doch nach einiger Zeit gerät dieser erste Eindruck ins Wanken. Denn man begreift, dass dieses Volk in seiner großen Mehrheit es ablehnt, sich seiner Vergangenheit zu stellen, und bemüht ist, zu vergessen und in Vergessenheit geraten zu lassen, sodass man bis ins Herz beleidigt von der Leichtigkeit ist, mit der die Deutschen versuchen, von ihren Verbrechen wieder zur Tagesordnung überzugehen, sich vor einem gerechten Urteil drücken und frömmeln, als seien sie Gerechte und hätten niemals sich vergangen.«37

Schon bald nach ihrer Ankunft in der Bundesrepublik Anfang 1953 brachte Yahils Gattin Leni, die als Helene Westphal in Potsdam zur Welt gekommen und aufgewachsen war, ihre seelischen Nöte und die weiterer israelischer Mitglieder der Kölner Mission im Umgang mit dem »neuen Deutschland« und seiner ambivalenten Realität zur Sprache. Einerseits fand Yahil junge Menschen vor, die Kritik an den herrschenden Umständen übten und nach einem neuen Weg suchten. Insbesondere erwähnte Yahil einen Kreis von Studenten der Universität Köln, die eine Vortragsreihe zur Bedeutung des Judentums für Deutschland organisiert hatten, und berichtet von dem großen Interesse und der Sympathie vieler für Israel. Andererseits bringt sie ihren Abscheu angesichts der Realitätsflucht, die ihr in Westdeutschland begegnete, zum Ausdruck. Yahil schreibt, auch diejenigen Mitarbeiter der Gesandtschaft, die zuvor gesagt hätten, es würde ihnen nichts ausmachen, eine Zeit lang unter den Deutschen zu leben, »spürten, kaum eingetroffen, jene Beklemmung in der Kehle, die nicht von einem lässt, bis man die Grenze zu einem der Nachbarländer überquert hat. […] Als Angehöriger

37 ISA, 2564/24-‫חצ‬, Was hat sich geändert? Anhaltspunkte zur Gestalt Westdeutschlands heute (Hervorhebung des Verfassers).

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der Mission hat man hier genau zwei Orte, an denen man sein möchte, an denen man sich mehr oder weniger richtig am Platze fühlt, auf der Arbeit und in der eigenen Wohnung – mehr nicht.«

Leni Yahil berichtet auch von einem Angehörigen der Gesandtschaft, der bei einem Treffen mit »ranghohen Regierungsbeamten« freimütig bekannt habe, dass »jeder von uns am liebsten bis ans Ende seiner Tage keinen Deutschen mehr sehen würde. Diejenigen, die dem Entschädigungsabkommen zugestimmt haben, taten dies zum Wohle des Staates Israel und seines Aufbaus.« Auch zu Beginn der Sechzigerjahre, in ihrem Briefwechsel mit Hannah Arendt, sprach Yahil, die schon bald eine der ersten und renommiertesten Holocaustforscherinnen Israels werden sollte, von ihrem beklemmenden Gefühl angesichts des »Stils in Deutschland«, und dies, obgleich ihre Mutter und ihre Schwestern inzwischen wieder dort lebten. Sie teilte Arendts scharfe Kritik an der deutschen Gesellschaft, die die Prinzipien der Demokratie nicht wirklich verinnerlicht habe.38 Ein weiteres Beispiel ist ein polemischer Bericht, vielleicht der kritischste überhaupt, der je an das israelische Außenministerium ging, über die bundesdeutsche Gesellschaft und deren Ignoranz gegenüber den früheren Verbrechen, vor allem aber über die Stellung, die ehemalige Nationalsozialisten in allen Regierungs- und Verwaltungsapparaten innehatten. Er stammte aus der Feder von Yochanan Meroz – in der zweiten Hälfte der Siebzigerjahre israelischer Botschafter in Bonn –, der ihn im Januar 1960 kurze Zeit nach seiner Ankunft in Köln als Repräsentant des Außenministeriums verfasst hatte. Unter anderem gelangte er zu der Feststellung, die Entwicklung in Deutschland sei von Grund auf negativ, und ohne fundamentale Veränderungen im deutschen Erziehungswesen gäbe es dort keinerlei Aussicht auf eine wirkliche Demokratisierung: »In Westdeutschland gibt es heute rund 25 Millionen Einwohner, die bewusstseinsbildend einer gezielten nationalsozialistischen und antisemitischen Erziehung ausgesetzt waren. Selbst wenn wir von der optimistischen Annahme ausgehen, dass 90 Prozent von ihnen lediglich willentlich oder unwillentlich Mitläufer gewesen sind, so finden sich hier dennoch zweieinhalb Millionen potenzielle oder faktische Nazis. […] [Viele von ihnen] sind durch den Entnazifizierungsprozess nicht erfasst worden (insbesondere in der Gerichtsbarkeit und innerhalb der Lehrerschaft). […] Ein Gerichtsurteil, das einen Naziverbrecher für unschuldig erklärt (oder ihn im besten Fall mit einer Strafe bedenkt, die so niedrig ausfällt, dass es ans Lächerliche und Groteske grenzt), oder fortwährende Apologetik drücken dem Herzen des Volkes sehr viel unmittelbarer ihren 38 Leni Yahil, Germania be-ejnei Israelim [Deutschland in den Augen von Israelis], in: Haaretz, 7. August 1953; Sarit Shavit/Dan Michman, Hannah Arendt and Leni Yahil. A Friendship that Failed the Test, in: Yad Vashem Studies 37 (2009), H. 2, 19–65. Für die deutsche Fassung des Aufsatzes siehe dies., Hannah Arendt und Leni Yahil. Eine Freundschaft, die nicht standhielt, in: Mittelweg 36 13 (2010), H. 3, 25–42.

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Stempel auf als alle Erklärungen und Verkündigungen der Regierung in Bonn. […] Und vergessen werden darf nicht, dass auch Bonn selbst sehr weit davon entfernt ist, sauber und makellos zu sein – Minister, Staatssekretäre usw. mit fragwürdiger Vergangenheit (will man es ganz vorsichtig ausdrücken) finden sich hier in nicht eben kleiner Zahl.«39

Seine an den Generaldirektor des Außenministeriums Yaakov Zur adressierte Fundamentalkritik an den Zuständen in der Bundesrepublik schloss Meroz mit der von vielen Kritikern in den Fünfzigerjahren verwendeten Formel: »Denn vor allem sind die Deutschen satt und es geht ihnen gut – also um Gottes Willen nicht die gesegnete Wirtschaftsbilanz stören, die Sattheit und Behaglichkeit.«40 Auslöser für die Niederschrift war die bereits erwähnte Welle antisemitischer Vorfälle. Aus dem Text und weiteren Briefen, die Meroz nach Jerusalem schickte, ging auch hervor, dass seine Ausführungen stark beeinflusst waren von seiner Empörung angesichts der nachsichtigen Haltung der Strafverfolgungsbehörden der Bundesrepublik gegenüber Kriegsverbrechern. In der Korrespondenz mit seinen Vorgesetzten in Jerusalem zog er eine deutliche Verbindung zwischen Adenauers Bereitschaft, höchste Staats- und Verwaltungsämter mit Personen zu besetzen, an deren NS-Vergangenheit vehemente öffentliche Kritik in Deutschland und international geübt wurde, und der Tatsache, dass viele Naziverbrecher unbehelligt in der Bundesrepublik lebten. Damit zielte Meroz vor allem auf Adenauers Flüchtlingsminister Theodor Oberländer41 und auf den schon erwähnten Hans Globke ab. Meroz, der Deutschland als Kind zusammen mit seinen Eltern nach der Machtübertragung auf die Nationalsozialisten verlassen hatte, gehörte zu den schärfsten Kritikern des israelischen Außenministeriums im Umgang mit dem Verhält39 ISA, 293/1-‫חצ‬, Meroz an den Generaldirektor des Außenministeriums, 15. Januar 1960. 40 Ebd. 41 Theodor Oberländer (1905–1998), Agrarwissenschaftler und Nationalsozialist, war in seiner Funktion als Direktor des Instituts für Osteuropäische Wirtschaft in Königsberg in die völkische »Ostforschung« involviert. Der Antisemitismus stellte dabei ein Grundelement seiner Weltanschauung dar und war in seinen ökonomischen Analysen allgegenwärtig. Ende der Fünfzigerjahre nahm die DDR-Propaganda Oberländer verstärkt ins Visier und beschuldigte die ukrainische Legion »Nachtigall«, in der Oberländer als Verbindungsoffizier fungiert hatte, an der Ermordung von Tausenden Polen und Juden in Lemberg im Sommer 1941 beteiligt gewesen zu sein. Im April 1960 gab Oberländer sein Regierungsamt auf, behielt jedoch sein Bundestagsmandat. Im Gegensatz zu einem ostdeutschen Gericht, das Oberländer in Abwesenheit zu lebenslanger Gefängnisstrafe verurteilte, kam die westdeutsche Staatsanwaltschaft zu dem Urteil, es gebe keine Belege für Oberländers Beteiligung an den Morden – eine Auffassung, die auch durch die historische Forschung gestützt wurde. Allerdings herrscht Einigkeit darüber, dass einzelne Soldaten der ukrainischen Einheit sehr wohl an den Morden beteiligt waren. Siehe hierzu z. B. Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944. Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens, München 21997, 54–60.

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nis der westdeutschen Gesellschaft zur eigenen Vergangenheit. Kurz nach seiner Ankunft in Köln sorgte in der westdeutschen Presse die Enttarnung des Psychiaters Werner Heyde für Schlagzeilen, der Vordenker des sogenannten Euthanasie-Programms (Aktion T4) gewesen und auch an dessen praktischer Umsetzung beteiligt war, jedoch jahrelang unbehelligt unter falscher Identität gelebt hatte. Die Affäre zog einen politischen Skandal und eine parlamentarische Untersuchung nach sich; auch im Ausland wurde sie mit großem Interesse verfolgt. Wie sich herausstellte, hatte Heyde mehr als ein Jahrzehnt unter dem falschen Namen Fritz Sawade in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein gelebt, einem Bundesland, in dem viele NS-Verbrecher Unterschlupf gefunden hatten. Dort war Heyde von höchsten Stellen in der Gesundheitsverwaltung geschützt worden – von Ärzten im Polizei- und Justizdienst, die von seiner Vergangenheit wussten, von Staatsanwälten und ranghohen Richtern, die ihm unter seinem falschen Namen sogar zu einer ärztlichen Approbation und damit zu einer Tätigkeit als Gerichtsgutachter vor allem bei Sozialgerichten verhalfen.42 Der Fall Heydes, dessen wahre Identität – wie in anderen Fällen auch – rein zufällig aufgedeckt wurde, symbolisierte in den Augen der Kritiker die schweigende Übereinkunft in der Bundesrepublik, Täter unbehelligt zu lassen. Meroz schrieb nach Jerusalem: »Im Fall Heyde werden wir Zeuge einer weitverzweigten offiziellen Verschwörung – einer Verschwörung aus Wissen und Schweigen, einer Verschwörung, die Heyde vor seiner Verhaftung gewarnt hat […]. Man wusste, dass dieser Mann als Kriegsverbrecher gesucht wird, und hat nichts unternommen; man wusste, dass er einer der Hauptverantwortlichen für das nazistische ›Euthanasieprogramm‹ war, und hat den Mund nicht aufgemacht. […] Meiner Ansicht nach ist das Verhalten von Flensburg keine Ausnahme. […] Es spiegelt getreulich den in Deutschland wehenden Geist wider. […] Solange die Oberländer und Globkes in der Hauptstadt der deutschen Demokratie eine leitende Funktion genießen, ist es nicht ›logisch‹ (und auch nicht ›anständig‹), Heyde und seinesgleichen ans Messer zu liefern.«43

Auch in persönlichen Gesprächen ließen Diplomaten zuweilen ihrer Kritik an den Vorgängen in Deutschland freien Lauf. So äußerte im Januar 1960 Gideon Rafael in einer Unterredung gegenüber Walter Hallstein, Staatssekretär im Auswärtigen Amt, der Kampf gegen den Nazismus sei nicht nur ein juristischer oder polizeilicher, sondern vornehmlich ein erzieherischer. Deutsch42 Werner Heyde sollte bereits im April 1947 in Haft als Zeuge beim Nürnberger Ärzteprozess aussagen, doch kurz zuvor gelang ihm die Flucht von einem amerikanischen Militärlastwagen. Nach seiner Enttarnung und Verhaftung erhob die Staatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt unter Leitung von Fritz Bauer Anklage. Nach einem gescheiterten Fluchtversuch nahm sich Heyde im Februar 1964, kurz vor Eröffnung seines Prozesses, in der Haft das Leben. Siehe u. a. Norbert Frei (Hg.), Karrieren im Zwielicht. Hitlers Eliten nach 1945, in Zusammenarbeit mit Tobias Freimüller u. a., Frankfurt a. M./New York 2001, 3–58. 43 ISA, 584/10-‫חצ‬, Meroz an das Außenministerium, Jerusalem o. D.

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land habe jedoch dabei versagt, da seine Regierung die eigene Bevölkerung ermutige, ihre Vergangenheit zu vergessen.44 Die Frage nach der Tätigkeit von ehemaligen NSDAP-Mitgliedern und Mitarbeitern des Reichsaußenministeriums im Auswärtigen Amt der Bundesrepublik war in den Fünfzigerjahren Ziel vieler Stellungnahmen und kritischer Berichterstattung zumeist in der europäischen Presse; immer wieder kam es zu Skandalen, wenn die problematische Vergangenheit eines westdeutschen Diplomaten aufgedeckt wurde. Vor dem Hintergrund des Strebens nach diplomatischen Beziehungen und einem Bündnis mit der Bundesrepublik wies der Generaldirektor des israelischen Außenministeriums mit Beginn des Jahres 1956 seine Diplomaten an, freundschaftliche Kontakte zu den deutschen Repräsentanten zu pflegen, ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass auch ehemalige Nationalsozialisten inzwischen im bundesdeutschen diplomatischen Dienst standen. Zugleich wurde aber auch bestimmt, dass die Israelis Kontakte zu deutschen Diplomaten, die »als Nazis bekannt seien«, meiden sollten.45 Die Umschreibung »als Nazis bekannt« war freilich eine vage Definition, die den israelischen Diplomaten viel Spielraum in der Entscheidung ließ. War hier wirklich jedermann gemeint, der Mitglied in der NSDAP gewesen war? Und wie sollte mit den anderen umgegangen werden, die keine Parteigenossen gewesen waren, gleichwohl aber dem nationalsozialistischen Staat gedient hatten? »Ich habe seit Anbeginn meiner diplomatischen Karriere nicht einen deutschen Diplomaten getroffen, der nicht versucht hätte, sich von den grausamen und barbarischen Verbrechen, die seine Landsleute begangen haben, reinzuwaschen und zu beweisen, dass er damit nichts zu tun gehabt habe«,

schrieb der israelische Botschafter in Italien Eliahu Sasson in einem Memorandum, das er dem israelischen Konsulat in Mailand vor dem Hintergrund der Ernennung eines neuen deutschen Konsuls in der Stadt übermittelte.46 Mit den Anweisungen von 1959 versuchte das israelische Außenministerium, die Fragen der Repräsentanten zu beantworten und legte fest, nur Personen »mit klarer und eindeutiger Nazivergangenheit« seien zu meiden – also nicht nominelle NSDAP-Mitglieder oder andere Amtsträger im »Dritten Reich«, sondern diejenigen, die eindeutig an der Umsetzung der Zielvorgaben im Sinne der nationalsozialistischen Ideologie beteiligt waren. Vor dem Hintergrund der erkennbaren Schwierigkeit für die israelischen Vertretungen rund um den Globus, zu entscheiden, wer denn nun ein »eindeutiger

44 ISA, 293/1-‫חצ‬, Rafael an Fischer, 11. Januar 1960. 45 ISA, 3009/24-‫חצ‬, Eitan an die Vertretungen Israels, 1. Februar 1956. 46 ISA, 3009/26-‫חצ‬, Sasson an Meier, 31. Mai 1959.

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Nazi« war, hieß es in den Direktiven noch, in jedem Fall müssten »dem Ministerium vollständige Angaben über die Nazivergangenheit eines deutschen Repräsentanten übermittelt werden, um diese zu verifizieren«.47 Die Korrespondenz zwischen dem Außenministerium in Jerusalem und den israelischen Diplomaten zeigt, dass Letztere in der zweiten Hälfte der Fünfzigerjahre sehr verschieden mit dem eröffneten Spielraum umgingen. Unter den Botschaftern fand sich keiner – und das entsprach der vom Außenministerium vorgegebenen Linie –, der offen Kritik an der Ernennung dieses oder jenen deutschen Botschafters geübt hätte, doch es gab manche, die den Kontakt zu einem bestimmten Botschafter vermieden und damit ihren Protest gegen die diesbezügliche Ignoranz des Auswärtigen Amtes in Bonn zum Ausdruck brachten. Andere zogen es vor, um der Interessen des Staates Israel willen nicht in der Vergangenheit ihrer deutschen Kollegen zu forschen. So beschloss etwa Eliahu Sasson, nachdem er 1960 zum Botschafter in der Schweiz ernannt worden war, den deutschen Botschafter trotz der Gerüchte um dessen nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit und der Vorbehalte aus den Reihen der jüdischen Gemeinde zu treffen. Der stellvertretende Leiter der Abteilung Europa, Yechiel Ilsar, fasste die Situation 1957 treffend zusammen: »[D]ie bestehenden Kontakte zwischen einem israelischen Diplomaten und einem deutschen sind von Ort zu Ort verschieden und ihr Charakter hängt von den jeweiligen Menschen selbst ab«.48 Ein Briefwechsel vom Dezember 1957 zwischen dem israelischen Konsulat in Montreal und dem Außenministerium in Jerusalem zur Vergangenheit des neuen deutschen Konsuls veranschaulicht gut den Spielraum der israelischen Repräsentanten. Auf Bitten des Generalkonsuls Michael Simon hatte man in Jerusalem mithilfe der israelischen Gesandtschaft in Köln die Vergangenheit des deutschen Konsuls überprüft, der kurz zuvor in Quebec eingetroffen war. Abschließend hieß es nach Montreal, man habe zwar herausgefunden, dass der Konsul Mitglied der NSDAP gewesen sei, »jedoch ein unbedeutender Mann aus dem Glied. Die Untersuchungskommission des Auswärtigen Amts in Bonn, welche die Vergangenheit seiner Mitarbeiter überprüft, hat ihn für unbelastet erklärt.«49 Zwar sah das Ministerium davon ab, Michael Simon zu raten oder ihn gar anzuweisen, wie er sich zu verhalten habe, doch zwischen den Zeilen wird ersichtlich, dass in diesem Fall Nachsicht geübt werden solle. Simon aber war anderer Ansicht und unterrichtete den israelischen Staat von Informationen, die er selbst über den neuen Amtsinhaber zusammengetragen hatte: 47 ISA, 3009/24-‫חצ‬, Chaim Yahil (Generaldirektor des israelischen Außenministeriums) an die Vertretungen Israels im Ausland, 28. Juli 1959. 48 ISA, 3009/26-‫חצ‬, Ilsar an die israelische Gesandtschaft in Bern, 20. Januar 1957. 49 Ebd., Ilsar an Simon, 16. Dezember 1957.

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»Er war ein Sklave im deutschen Reichsaußenministerium unter Ribbentrop und verfasste ein Memorandum zur Möglichkeit von kollektiven oder bilateralen Abkommen zwischen Deutschland und seinen Verbündeten […], um die Bürgerrechte der Juden außer Kraft zu setzen.«

Offenbar belastete die Angelegenheit Simon derart, dass er sich die Mühe machte, dieses Memorandum persönlich in die Hand zu bekommen. In seiner Mitteilung an das israelische Außenministerium bemerkte er lediglich, er habe örtliche Hilfe erhalten, enthielt sich jedoch näherer Angaben, von wem genau. Durchaus möglich erscheint, dass es sich dabei um deutsche Konsulatsmitarbeiter gehandelt hat. Nach Lektüre des Memorandums habe er beschlossen, »jeden persönlichen Kontakt mit dem Mann zu vermeiden, ohne jedoch die innerhalb des konsularischen Corps geltende Etikette zu verletzen«.50

Schlussbetrachtung In seiner Studie, die sich mit dem Verhältnis der Adenauer-Regierung zur NS-Vergangenheit im ersten Jahrzehnt des Bestehens der Bundesrepublik befasst, hat der Historiker Norbert Frei den Begriff »Vergangenheitspolitik« geprägt. Dieser bezieht sich auf den Versuch der westdeutschen Staatsführung in den Fünfzigerjahren, die Vergangenheit zu »bewältigen« und den Umgang mit der Geschichte auf die Erfordernisse der Gegenwart abzustimmen. Frei zielte mit der Wahl des Begriffs auf Vorgänge wie die Abschaffung beziehungsweise Aufhebung der Entnazifizierungsverfahren, die Politik der Integration und forcierten Wiedereingliederung ehemaliger Nationalsozialisten in den Staats- und Verwaltungsapparat der jungen Bundesrepublik, die Minderung oder Aufhebung der Strafen für die meisten in den Gefängnissen der Alliierten einsitzenden Kriegsverbrecher und die fehlende Bereitschaft, gegen in Deutschland lebende NS-Verbrecher zu ermitteln und sie vor Gericht zu stellen.51 Auch das Wiedergutmachungsabkommen und die Gesten des Entgegenkommens gegenüber Israel können, obschon sie gewiss politischen und militärischen Erwägungen im Zusammenhang des Kalten Kriegs folgten, als Teil jener »Vergangenheitspolitik« betrachtet werden, die von Adenauer strategisch geschickt und mit Nachdruck betrieben wurde: eine moralische Übernahme der Verantwortung für Taten, die vorgeblich nur von einigen wenigen Deutschen – und sogar gegen den Willen der deutschen Bevölkerung – be50 ISA, 3009/26-‫חצ‬, Simon an Ilsar, 30. Dezember 1957. 51 Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, VI.

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gangen worden waren. Entsprechend war Adenauer auf die Unterscheidung zwischen SS-Verbrechern und den Mitgliedern anderer Herrschaftsinstitutionen bedacht – ein Mythos, den der Historiker Gerald Reitlinger als »Alibi der Nation« bezeichnet hat.52 Die Bürger der Bundesrepublik machten sich, von wenigen Stimmen abgesehen, diesen für den Aufbau der westdeutschen Demokratie fundamentalen Mythos zu eigen. Die Integration all jener, die das vorherige Regime unterstützt hatten, erschien auch denen notwendig, die dem Nationalsozialismus kritisch gegenübergestanden oder unter ihm gelitten hatten.53 Vor dem Hintergrund der sich in den Fünfzigerjahren entwickelnden Beziehungen zwischen beiden Staaten entstand eine Art Junktim zwischen der »Vergangenheitspolitik« der christdemokratisch dominierten Bonner Regierung und der israelischen Regierung unter Führung der sozialdemokratisch orientierten Mapai. Aus Sicht der Deutschen waren die materiellen Entschädigungen ein gelegener Ersatz für eine wirkliche, kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Vergangenheit. Und aus Sicht der israelischen Führung und ihrer Diplomaten galten der Aufbau und die Stärkung des Staates Israel als zentrale Lehre aus dem Holocaust, als Antwort auf die Ohnmacht, die nach allgemeiner Überzeugung im Zentrum des Holocaustgedenkens stand. Entsprechend war die Unterstützung Israels durch deutsche Zahlungen, andere geldwerte Zuwendungen und Waffenlieferungen ohne finanzielle Gegenleistung – ein ungewöhnlicher Vorgang auf der Ebene internationaler Beziehungen – nach Auffassung der Israelis ein wichtiger moralischer Schritt der Übernahme von Verantwortung, sei es auch nur in indirekter Form, für die am jüdischen Volk verübten Verbrechen. Auch wenn Abgesandte des Staates Israel Verbitterung und Empörung empfanden angesichts des Unwillens der Deutschen, sich der eigenen Vergangenheit zu stellen, so teilten sie zugleich die Überzeugung, dass sie sich nicht in die Innenpolitik der Bundesrepublik und die Frage des Umgangs mit der deutschen Vergangenheit einmischen sollten, selbst wenn dies mit der Nichtbestrafung von Massenmördern einherging. Denn eine Konfrontation zu diesen Themen hätte ihrem Verständnis nach womöglich die eigentliche Aufgabe einer Konsolidierung Israels durchkreuzt. Bemerkenswert ist etwa, dass Felix Elieser Shinnar, der lange in der Bundesrepublik gearbeitet hatte, in seinen Memoiren auf jedwede Erörterung der schwerwiegenden Probleme, die mit dieser Frage verbunden waren, ebenso nachdrücklich verzichtete wie auf den Ausdruck seiner Gedanken und Gefühle zu diesem Thema. Das Buch, zu dem sowohl Ben-Gurion als auch Adenauer ein Vorwort verfassten, 52 Gerald Reitlinger, The SS. Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945, Melbourne/London/Toronto 1956. 53 Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, 303–312; Herf, Divided Memory, 267–300.

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ist ganz auf die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Erfolge Israels als Ergebnis seiner Beziehungen zur Bundesrepublik sowie auf die Gesetzgebung zum Thema persönlicher Entschädigungsleistungen als Resultat von beiderseitigen Verhandlungen ausgerichtet. Der hebräischsprachigen Ausgabe des Buches gab Shinnar den Titel Unter der Last von Pflicht und Gefühlen. In seinem Vorwort schreibt er über »die Auflehnung des Herzens und des Gefühls gegen die kalte Vernunft und ›Logik‹ der politischen Entität, die mit Gründung des Staates aus dem Jischuw entstanden ist.« Gegen Ende des Buches kommt er noch einmal auf das Thema zu sprechen, indem er in nur wenigen Sätzen seine Pflicht als Repräsentant des Staates erläutert, sich über persönliche Gefühle hinwegzusetzen: »Ich verstehe den Einzelnen, der seine Gefühle nicht unter Kontrolle hat und nicht zu einer solch realistischen Auffassung gelangen kann, und ich respektiere seine Empfindungen. Aber aus den besagten Gründen kann und darf ein Mensch aus politischer Warte derartige Gefühle nicht als verantwortliche Linie akzeptieren.«

Shinnar nahm mithin eine Unterscheidung vor zwischen persönlichen Gefühlen und Realpolitik, er verlieh dem moralischen Aspekt in Bezug auf das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zur eigenen Vergangenheit jedoch keinen Ausdruck. Insbesondere betraf dies den Verzicht des westdeutschen Staats im Verlauf der Fünfzigerjahre, NS-Verbrecher vor Gericht zu bringen und zu verurteilen. Derartige Aspekte mögen die Repräsentanten Israels wohl belastet haben, doch im offiziellen Diskurs zwischen den beiden Staaten fehlten sie weitgehend.54 Aus dem Hebräischen von Markus Lemke

54 Felix Elieser Shinnar, Be-ol kora u-regaschot bi-schelihut ha-medina. Yahasei YisraelGermania 1951–1966 [Unter der Last von Pflicht und Gefühlen. Israelisch-deutsche Beziehungen 1951–1966], Jerusalem 1967, 12 und 168.

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Gelehrtenporträt

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Lisa Moses Leff

Zosa Szajkowski: Archivdieb und Pionier der französisch-jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung Zosa Szajkowski, 1911 im russischen Polen geboren, gilt bis heute als einer der wegweisenden Historiker des französischen Judentums. Der Verfasser von mehr als 200 wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten begann seine Laufbahn zu einer Zeit, als die akademische Forschung zur französisch-jüdischen Geschichte noch in den Kinderschuhen steckte. Als Gesamtwerk sind Szajkowskis Studien bereits deshalb bemerkenswert, weil sie – häufig erst durch ihn entdeckte – Archivquellen verarbeiten, die wichtige Fragen der Politik-, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden Frankreichs erhellen. Viele prägen bis heute unser Denken über Schlüsselfragen der Modernisierung des Judentums in Frankreich, etwa über die Emanzipation und ihre Folgen, das gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Leben, über Gemeindeorganisation, Konflikte zwischen führenden Persönlichkeiten und den »einfachen Juden« sowie über die Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Frankreich. Szajkowski war zudem einer der Ersten, die in den 1930er Jahren das Leben jüdischer Einwanderer aus dem östlichen Europa in Frankreich untersuchten; seine jiddischsprachigen Schriften auf diesem Gebiet setzen bis heute Maßstäbe. Hinter seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit verbarg sich indes ein beschämendes Geheimnis: Szajkowski war auch ein Dieb. 1961 wurde er auf frischer Tat ertappt, als er jahrhundertealte, unersetzliche Dokumente aus dem Straßburger Stadtarchiv stahl. Später wurde er dafür in Abwesenheit schuldig gesprochen und zu einer Haft- und hohen Geldstrafe verurteilt. Da die französischen Behörden jedoch nicht auf seine Auslieferung bestanden, musste Szajkowski die Strafe nicht verbüßen. Die meisten seiner Kollegen in New York erfuhren nie davon.1 Allerdings setzte das Urteil seinen Diebstählen in Frankreich ein Ende. In seiner näheren Umgebung hingegen stahl er weiterhin Dokumente. 1978 wurde Szajkowski erneut erwischt, diesmal in der New York Public Library. Wenige Tage später nahm er sich, nur einen kurzen Fußweg vom Schauplatz seiner letzten Straftat entfernt, in einem Hotelzimmer das Leben.2 1

2

Archives de la Ville et de la Communauté Urbaine de Strasbourg (nachfolgend AVCUS), Dossier »Frydmann«; Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin, Strasbourg, 1709 W 75, Jugement contre Szajkowski (Frydmann). Interviews der Verfasserin mit ehemaligen Bibliothekaren der Judaika-Sammlung in der JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 447–473.

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Lisa Moses Leff

Szajkowskis Sammeltätigkeit ist – besonders wenn neben den Diebstählen auch die legalen Erwerbungen berücksichtigt werden – ebenso Teil seines Vermächtnisses wie seine wissenschaftliche Arbeit. Nachdem er die von ihm zusammengetragenen Dokumente als Quellen für seine Artikel und Bücher ausgewertet hatte, verkaufte er sie Stück für Stück über einen Zeitraum von mehreren Jahrzehnten direkt an Forschungsbibliotheken und Sammlungen, die auf Judaika spezialisiert waren. Soweit sich die Herkunft der Materialien zur französisch-jüdischen Geschichte in den Vereinigten Staaten und Israel überhaupt zurückverfolgen lässt, wurden die meisten Stücke offenbar in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren aus Szajkowskis Hand erworben.3 Diese Ankäufe waren in ihrem Umfang wie auch in ihren Auswirkungen bedeutend. Heute sind die Dokumente, die etliche tausend Juden aus dem Frankreich des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts betreffen, über Forschungsarchive im Ausland verstreut. Zu nennen sind dabei insbesondere die Brandeis University (Waltham, Mass.), die Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.), das Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati, Oh.), das Jerusalemer Zentralarchiv für die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, das Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York), das Leo Baeck Institute (New York), die Yeshiva University (New York) sowie das YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York). Die gestohlenen Archivalien wurden Bestandteile wichtiger, wissenschaftlich genutzter Quellensammlungen. Warum wurde dieser angesehene Historiker ein Archivdieb? Trotz einer Fülle von Gerüchten über Szajkowskis Straftaten wurde bisher kaum über bloße Spekulationen hinaus der Versuch unternommen, seine vielschichtigen Motive zu ergründen. Dabei offenbaren diese nicht nur einiges über ihn selbst, sondern auch über die äußerst bewegten Zeiten, in denen er lebte. Szajkowskis tiefe und dauerhafte Hingabe an das Sammeln war – ebenso wie sein Engagement für die Geschichtsschreibung – von weltanschaulichen Überzeugungen und seinen Ansichten darüber geprägt, wie die Juden am wirksamsten gegen die existenziellen Bedrohungen des 20. Jahrhunderts zu schützen seien. Bestimmend waren außerdem persönliche Existenzsorgen als Gelehrter zu einer Zeit, in der den zahlreichen Interessenten an einer wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn nur geringe Mittel vonseiten der Gemeinden und säkularer Wissenschaftsinstitutionen zur Verfügung standen.

3

New York Public Library (Claire Dienstag, Leonard Gold und Norman Gechlik), 30. Oktober 2008. Eine umfassende Darstellung von Szajkowskis Diebstählen und Verkäufen in Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief. The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust, Oxford/New York 2015.

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Der Lehrling der Tscherikowers Szajkowskis Karriere als Historiker folgte einem ungewöhnlichen Weg. Als Yehoshua Frydman 1911 in eine arme jüdische Familie im polnischen Zaręby Kościelne (jidd. Zaromb) geboren, wanderte er 1927 nach Paris aus. Eigenen Angaben zufolge erhielt er in Polen wie Frankreich nur wenig schulische Bildung. In seiner Heimatstadt besuchte er eine öffentliche Grundschule für jüdische Kinder und zog dann für eine Weile nach Warschau, wo er am rabbinischen Lehrerseminar studierte, bevor er nach Paris ging und seinen Bildungsweg zugunsten der Erwerbsarbeit abbrach. Er zeigte jedoch eine Neigung zum Schreiben und 1934 war er unter dem Pseudonym Zosa Szajkowski ein regelmäßiger Autor der Pariser jiddischsprachigen kommunistischen Tageszeitung Naye prese (Neue Presse) geworden. 1937, inmitten des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs, brach Szajkowski mit der kommunistischen Partei und beendete seine Mitarbeit an der Zeitung. Sein Interesse galt inzwischen ohnehin einer anderen Art des Schreibens: dem Verfassen wissenschaftlicher, auf Dokumenten basierender historiografischer Texte. Die erforderlichen Methoden erlernte er bei Elias Tscherikower, einem in Russland geborenen Juden, der damals in Paris lebte und mit Unterstützung seiner Frau Rebecca die Historische Sektion des Yidisher visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) leitete. Das 1925 gegründete YIVO war der Bewahrung und dem Studium jüdischer Kultur in ihrer Komplexität verpflichtet. Zu diesem Zweck hatten die Gründer ein Zentrum zur Förderung jiddischer Studien im damals polnisch besetzten Wilno sowie ein Netzwerk ehrenamtlicher zamlers (Sammler) geschaffen, die jüdische Artefakte aller Art zusammentrugen. Das zamler-Programm diente zwei im jiddischen Kulturnationalismus wurzelnden Zielen: Es sollte die jüdische Geschichte zu Zwecken des Gedenkens und der Forschung dokumentieren und das Interesse des jüdischen Volkes an seiner eigenen Vergangenheit wecken. Wilno beherbergte zwar den Hauptsitz des YIVO, aber nur eine seiner vier Sektionen: die für Sprachwissenschaft, Literatur und Folklore. Die Sektion Psychologie und Bildung war in New York, die für Wirtschaft und Statistik in Berlin angesiedelt, wie zunächst auch die von Tscherikower geleitete Historische Sektion, bis sie nach der Machtübertragung auf die Nationalsozialisten im Jahr 1933 nach Paris umzog. Das Ehepaar Tscherikower hatte eine Leidenschaft für historische Dokumentation, insbesondere für die der jüngeren Verfolgungsgeschichte der Juden. 1921 hatten beide in Berlin das Mizrakh yidisher historisher arkhiv (Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv) gegründet, eine gewaltige Sammlung, die die ukrainischen Pogrome von 1918 bis 1921 mit Materialien jedweder Art dokumentierte, auch durch die neuartige und noch umstrittene Form der Transkription von Augenzeugenberichten.

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Lisa Moses Leff

Nach ihrer Ankunft in Paris im Jahr 1933 riefen die Tscherikowers dort einen Kreis osteuropäisch-jüdischer Historiker ins Leben und beschritten neue Wege, indem sie die moderne französisch-jüdische Geschichte auf der Basis von Dokumenten erforschten. Trotz – oder gerade wegen – des hohen Grads ihrer Assimilation hatten französische Juden gerade erst begonnen, ihre Geschichte seit der Emanzipation wissenschaftlich zu untersuchen. Neben den umfangreichen wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten deutscher Juden nahmen sich diese Bemühungen noch bescheiden aus. Das Wirken der jiddischsprachigen Einwanderer war daher bahnbrechend. Tscherikowers Ergebnisse wurden schließlich 1942 in New York unter dem Titel Yidn in Frankraykh (Juden in Frankreich) publiziert. Szajkowski lernte die Tscherikowers wahrscheinlich um 1935 kennen. 1936 erwog er, für ein Jahr an das YIVO in Wilno zu gehen, um seine Erforschung der französisch-jüdischen Geschichte in einem stärker akademischen Umfeld fortzusetzen. Seine historiografische Arbeit hatte mit mehreren Artikelserien für die Naye prese begonnen, von denen er 1936 und 1937 zwei als Monografien veröffentlichte.4 Auch wenn er letztlich nie nach Wilno ging, verfolgte Szajkowski seine Geschichtsstudien in den späten 1930er Jahren mit Unterstützung des YIVO in durchaus ernsthafter Weise; er verfasste sieben der neunzehn Beiträge, die in der zweibändigen Textsammlung Yidn in Frankraykh erschienen, mehr als jeder andere Autor.5 Außerdem war Szajkowski ein eifriger zamler, der große Mengen von Dokumenten über das jüdische Leben im Paris der Zwischenkriegszeit zusammentrug.6

4

5

6

Shayko Frydman (Zosa Szajkowski), Etyudn tsu der geschikhte fun ayngevandertn yidishn yishev in Frankraykh, Paris 1936; ders., Di profesionale bavegung tsvishn di yidishe arbeter in Frankraykh biz 1914, Paris 1937. Ders., Di revolutsie fun 1848 un di inevaynikste kamfn in frantsayzishn yidntum, in: Elias Tscherikower (Hg.), Yidn in Frankraykh. Shttuyes un materialn, 2 Bde., hier Bd. 1, New York 1942, 205–235; Zosa Szajkowski, Frantsayzishe apklangen vegn yidn in Poiln-Rusland fun 15tn biz onhayb 19tn y. h., in: ebd., Bd. 1, 16–32; ders., Yidn un di nokh-napoleonishe restavratsie in Frankraykh (1814–1815), in: ebd., Bd. 1, 190–204; ders., 150 yor yidishe prese in Frankraykh, in: ebd., Bd. 1, 236–308; ders., Yidn un di Parizer komune fun 1871, in: ebd., Bd. 2, 93–154; ders., Di yidishe gezelshaftn in Pariz. Dos yidishe gezelshaftlekhe lebn in Pariz tsum yor 1939, in: ebd., Bd. 2, 205–247; ders., Dokumentn fun di arbe kehiles in 18tn y. h., in: ebd., Bd. 2, 304–316. Einen weiteren Artikel verfasste er unter dem Namen Tcher-Ski gemeinsam mit Tscherikower: A. Tcher-Ski, Di Drayfusafere, di arbeter-emigrantn un di frantsayzish-yidishe firers, in: ebd., Bd. 2, 155–192. Darunter befand sich wahrscheinlich auch eine bedeutende Sammlung von Dokumenten der Kultur-lige, der Kulturorganisation der jüdischen Kommunisten. Heute wird sie an der Columbia University aufbewahrt, siehe (16. März 2017). Für nähere, aus der Beschreibung auf der Website der Universität nicht hervorgehende Informationen über den Inhalt dieser Sammlung danke ich Nicholas Underwood.

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Für Szajkowski bot die jüdische Forschung, die er durch das Ehepaar Tscherikower kennenlernte, die praktikabelste Alternative zum linken politischen Parteienspektrum – dem sozialistischen Bund und mehr noch der kommunistischen Partei –, das die Juden in seinen Augen durch die Leugnung ihrer kulturellen Spezifik im Stich gelassen hatte. Aus Sicht der führenden YIVO-Mitglieder stellte diese Forschung eine diasporanationalistische Antwort auf die Herausforderungen dar, die Modernisierung, Urbanisierung, Migration und Verfolgung für das jüdische Volk bedeuteten. Szajkowski sah in ihrem Projekt die vielleicht letzte Chance, eine solide Grundlage für ein modernes jüdisches Leben zu schaffen. Und gewiss hoffte der aufstrebende Historiker außerdem, jüdische Studien könnten für jemanden wie ihn eine Einkommensquelle sein – für einen überaus intelligenten und tatkräftigen Mann, der jedoch kaum Bildungsabschlüsse oder Kapital vorweisen konnte.

Ein Soldat in zwei Armeen Als die Deutschen 1940 Frankreich eroberten, flohen die Tscherikowers nach New York, wo das YIVO eine Zweigstelle unterhielt. Im September, unmittelbar vor ihrer Abreise nach Lissabon, wo sie ein Schiff erreichen wollten, trafen sie Szajkowski in Marseille. Da sie ihre Archive auf die beschwerliche Reise nicht mitnehmen konnten, baten die Tscherikowers ihren Freund), diese an sich zu nehmen und die Arbeit des YIVO in Frankreich fortzuführen.7 Im Augenblick der Krise die Verantwortung für diese Archive zu übernehmen, stellte in der Karriere des Historikers, der bisher als Sammler von Judaika in Erscheinung getreten war, eine neue Stufe dar. Die sichere Verwahrung der ihm anvertrauten Materialien war für Szajkowski von größter Bedeutung. Anhand seiner Korrespondenz mit den Tscherikowers aus den Jahren 1940/41 lassen sich die – am Ende vergeblichen – Versuche der drei nachvollziehen, die Archive nach New York zu befördern.8 Diese Bemühungen gründeten auf einer gemeinsamen Auffassung der jüdischen Geschichte. Bereits vor dem Krieg, gewiss aber nach dem Fall Frankreichs waren sie einem Verständnis einer jüdischen nationalen Kultur gefolgt, das Staatsgrenzen nicht anerkannte. Materialien über die jüdische Geschichte von einem 7 8

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Archives, New York (nachfolgend YIVO Archives), RG 81, fol. 151138–151139, Szajkowski an die Tscherikowers, 2. September 1940. Siehe etwa YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 151232, Szajkowski an die Tscherikowers, 9. Juni 1941.

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Land ins andere zu befördern schien ihnen ebenso natürlich wie die Bewegung der Juden selbst, die auf der Suche nach einem sicheren Ort ebenfalls von einem Land ins nächste gingen. Die Geschichte der Juden sollte als die einer einzigen Volkskultur geschrieben werden – durch die Juden selbst, wo immer sie lebten. Nicht die Staaten, von denen die Juden regiert wurden, waren diesem Verständnis nach die Protagonisten der Geschichte, auch wenn oftmals sie die erforderlichen Dokumente für deren Rekonstruktion hervorbrachten. Rechtmäßigen Anspruch auf solche Archivalien hatten aus dieser Sicht die Juden, nicht die Staaten. Diese Perspektive auf die jüdische Geschichte kam in Szajkowskis Forschung zum Tragen, aber auch in der Sammeltätigkeit, der er nachging, während er ungeduldig auf ein Visum für die Vereinigten Staaten wartete. Nach dem Eintritt in die französische Fremdenlegion im September 1939 war er im Juni 1940 im Gefecht schwer verletzt worden und verbrachte die folgenden zehn Monate zur Genesung in Carpentras bei Avignon, einer der ältesten jüdischen Gemeinden in Frankreich. Aus seinen Forschungen in den Bibliotheken von Carpentras resultierte eine Studie über den ausgestorbenen jüdischen Dialekt der Region, des historischen Comtat Venaissin. Jenes JudäoProvenzalische, das er »Chuadit« nannte, schien ihm mit jüdischen Sprachen wie dem Jiddischen und dem Judäo-Spanischen (Ladino) vergleichbar.9 Szajkowski betätigte sich auch in diesem Zeitraum als Sammler. Er freundete sich mit Juden in der Region an und erwarb von ihnen schon bald Materialien von historischem Interesse, darunter Rara wie hebräische Grammatiken aus dem 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, Drucke aus dem späten 15. und zwei ausgesprochen seltene Pinkasim (Protokollbücher jüdischer Gemeinden) aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. Auch andere Objekte, etwa Ester-Rollen (Megillot), eine Thora-Krone und einen aus einer Synagoge stammenden Beschneidungsstuhl, erwarb er und schickte sie zusammen mit den Dokumenten an das YIVO in New York. Als persönliches Geschenk ließ er den Tscherikowers eine Thora-Rolle zukommen.10 Angesichts dessen, was wir über seine spätere Praxis als Sammler wissen, stellt sich natürlich die Frage, ob Szajkowski diese Materialien aus Carpentras auf rechtmäßigem Wege erwarb. Die einzige uns dazu vorliegende Quelle – seine Korrespondenz mit dem Ehepaar Tscherikower und anderen YIVO-Leitern in New York – ist insofern problematisch, als sie kaum Informationen über die Transaktionen enthält und eher auf den Nutzen der Mate-

19 Zosa Szajkowski, Dos Loshn fun di Yidn in di arbe kehiles fun Komtat-Venesen, New York 1948. 10 YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 151129–151130, Szajkowski an die Tscherikowers, 12. August 1940. Zu den Pinkasim siehe YIVO Archive, RG 81, fol. 151138–151139, Szajkowski an die Tscherikowers, 2. September 1940.

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rialien für Historiker eingeht. Allerdings schreibt Szajkowski darin, er habe die zahlreichen dem YIVO gespendeten Objekte von einem Fräulein Mossé erhalten, der unverheirateten erwachsenen Tochter des kurz zuvor verstorbenen Gemeindedieners der örtlichen Synagoge. Offenbar handelte es sich um Geschenke, doch was Mossé dazu bewogen haben könnte, sie einfach wegzugeben, bleibt unklar.11 Während über die Transaktionen und die Motive der Juden in Carpentras, die Szajkowski die Materialien gaben, nur spekuliert werden kann, sind dessen Beweggründe als Sammler weniger ungewiss. Stark geprägt von der Kultur des YIVO, sah er im Sammeln zweifelsfrei eine Möglichkeit, wertvolle Judaika dorthin zu bringen, wo man sie studieren würde. Szajkowski musterte seine Umgebung und kam zu dem Schluss, dass Carpentras zu diesem Zeitpunkt gewiss kein solcher Ort war. Wie er in einem 1944 in New York publizierten Artikel schilderte, befand sich das jüdische Leben in der Region im Aussterben.12 Die Sammlung des YIVO in New York erschien ihm als Aufbewahrungsort weitaus geeigneter. Szajkowskis Verhalten hatte noch einen weiteren Grund. Indem er den YIVO-Leitern in New York regelmäßig Berichte über seine Forschungsund Sammeltätigkeit sowie persönliche Geschenke schickte, verlieh er der Wartezeit in Frankreich Bedeutung. Der Kontakt zu Menschen, die er bewunderte, milderte zudem seine Einsamkeit. Hinzu kommt, dass Szajkowskis Sicherheit zu dieser Zeit gänzlich in den Händen der Institutsleiter lag, setzten sie doch alle Hebel in Bewegung, um ihm eines der wenigen 1941 in Marseille ausgestellten und entsprechend begehrten Visa zu verschaffen. Dieses persönliche Motiv widersprach keineswegs den ehrenwerten Zielen, die er mit seinen Freunden im YIVO teilte. Durch sein Engagement für das Vorhaben, die Grundlage für eine neue jüdische Kultur zu schaffen, versuchte er diese zu beeindrucken.13 Sobald er ein Visum erhalten hatte, reiste Szajkowski nach New York ab, wo er im September 1941 eintraf. Er wurde jedoch vom Gedanken an die Materialien verfolgt, die er in Europa zurückgelassen hatte, und schloss sich unmittelbar nach dem Kriegseintritt der Vereinigten Staaten der U. S. Army an. Mit der 82. Luftlandedivision, der er als Dolmetscher und Fallschirmjäger zugeteilt war, landete er am Vorabend des D-Days in der Normandie und half danach in Frankreich bei der Vernehmung gefangener feindlicher Soldaten. Auf Diensturlaub suchte Szajkowski dort nach den von ihm zurückgelassenen YIVO-Archivalien und konnte sie tatsächlich bergen. Daneben 11 YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 151113, Szajkowski an die Tscherikowers, 22. Juli 1940. 12 Zosa Szajkowski, The Decline and Fall of Provençal Jewry, in: Jewish Social Studies 6, (1944), H. 1, 31–54. 13 Siehe die Bemerkungen über das »Retten« von Dokumenten in ebd., 31.

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fand er wertvolle Dokumente über die französischen Juden während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, darunter die Publikationen und einen Teil des Archivs der Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), eines Dachverbands, der den deutschen Besatzungsbehörden unterstanden hatte und sämtliche Vorkriegsorganisationen der französischen Juden zusammenfassen sollte.14 Szajkowskis Sammeltätigkeit im befreiten Frankreich folgte der festen Überzeugung, dass die Judenverfolgung dokumentiert und erforscht werden musste, damit zukünftige Generationen wussten, was geschehen war, und Recht gesprochen werden konnte. Diese Selbstverpflichtung verband ihn mit anderen Personen im Umkreis des YIVO, etwa mit Emanuel Ringelblum und seinen Mitstreitern vom Untergrundarchiv Oneg Schabbatt, die unermüdlich das Leben im Warschauer Ghetto dokumentiert hatten, sowie mit den Gründern der jüdischen historischen Kommissionen, die ihre Arbeit im Augenblick der Befreiung aufnahmen.15 Für Szajkowski konnte der richtige Ort für die dauerhafte Aufbewahrung solcher Dokumente nur außerhalb Europas liegen. In Briefen an Rebecca Tscherikower, deren Mann 1943 plötzlich verstorben war, beschrieb er sein Sammeln während des Krieges als einen Akt der Rettung, als Versuch, die Überreste der jüdischen Vergangenheit aus den Trümmern einer Katastrophe zu bergen, deren Schauplatz nunmehr verlassen war. Da die Mehrheit der europäischen Juden umgekommen war, schien es ihm wichtig, sowohl die Spuren ihrer Geschichte als auch die Beweise für die NS-Verbrechen nach Amerika zu bringen, wo das jüdische Leben weiterhin blühte. Viele seiner Motive wurden von zahlreichen anderen jüdischen Gelehrten geteilt, die vor demselben Hintergrund tätig waren, und doch folgte Szajkowski noch ganz eigenen Beweggründen. Seine Betätigung als Sammler im befreiten Frankreich muss auch als Misstrauensvotum gegenüber der Welt der linken jiddischprachigen Juden in Paris gelesen werden, die er 1937 mit seinem Austritt aus der Kommunistischen Partei hinter sich gelassen hatte. Wie er im Lauf des Jahres 1945 immer wieder in Briefen an Rebecca Tscherikower berichtete, empfand er Widerwillen gegenüber allen jüdischen politischen Fraktionen in Frankreich. Ungeachtet all ihrer Leiden war er der Überzeugung, dass die endlosen – von ihm verächtlich als »Politik« bezeichneten – Streitereien unter Kommunisten, Sozialisten und Zionisten, die die eingewanderten Juden noch immer in Atem hielten, eine wirkliche Erneuerung jüdischen Lebens in Frankreich unmöglich machten. Mit14 YIVO Archives, RG 81, Korrespondenz Szajkowski-Tscherikower, Juni 1944 bis Dezember 1945. 15 Siehe dazu Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, New York 2012; Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bloomington, Ind., 2007.

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unter ging er so weit, den französischen Juden vorzuwerfen, sie seien nicht mehr jüdisch.16 Viele Einwanderer aus dem östlichen Europa waren dabei, ihr Jiddisch zu verlernen, ein Prozess, den die Extremsituation des Krieges beschleunigt hatte. Zudem hatte das Bekenntnis zu politischen Bewegungen, namentlich der Linken, ihr Denken von der Frage weggeführt, was für die Juden am besten sei. Aus all diesen Gründen bereitete es ihm keine Gewissensnöte, die Papiere der UGIF ins YIVO zu schaffen, auch wenn sie für den Wiederaufbau des jüdischen Gemeindelebens in Frankreich durchaus von Nutzen gewesen wären. Eine andere Art von Abscheu trieb Szajkowski bei seiner Sammeltätigkeit von Juli bis November 1945 in Berlin, wo er aufgrund seiner Französisch-, Englisch-, Russisch- und Deutschkenntnisse der Alliierten Kommandantur als Dolmetscher zugewiesen war. Hier wurde seine Jagd noch manischer; sie führte ihn an Orte, die er hätte meiden sollen, und ließ ihn die Dinge mitnehmen, die er nicht hätte mitnehmen dürfen. Seine weitreichenden Interessen galten unter anderem Dokumenten des »Dritten Reichs«, aber auch antisemitischen Büchern, Zeitungen und Pamphleten sowie den unterschiedlichsten Gegenständen, die Überlebende aus den Lagern und Ghettos gerettet hatten. Auch an jüdischen Büchern zeigte Szajkowski sich interessiert und es gelang ihm sogar, eine vollständige Sammlung der 1938 verbotenen Zeitung Jüdische Rundschau sowie mehrere Ausgaben einer jüdischen Untergrundzeitung aus dem Warschauer Ghetto zu finden. Doch jüdische Periodika waren eher zweitrangig für ihn. In Berlin, unter den Deutschen, gab es eine Fülle an Dokumenten der Täter, die er mit Genugtuung zusammentrug.17 Diese nationalsozialistischen Bücher und Dokumente an sich zu nehmen, verstieß gegen die Vorschriften. Mehrere Direktiven vom April und Mai 1945 untersagten den Truppen jedwede Aneignung von Gütern, die vormals den Nationalsozialisten gehört hatten oder von ihnen geraubt worden waren, Kunstwerke, Bücher, Archivalien und andere kulturelle Gegenstände eingeschlossen. Insbesondere antisemitische Bücher galten als illegal und konnten – mit Ausnahme dessen, was die Abgesandten der Library of Congress sammelten – konfisziert und vernichtet werden. Diese Direktiven dienten zwei Zielen: der Befreiung Deutschlands vom Einfluss der Nationalsozialisten und der Vorbereitung der Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher.18 16 YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 151851, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 12. Februar 1945. 17 YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 152076, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 4. August 1945; ebd., RG 81, fol. 152146, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 7. Oktober 1945. 18 Leslie Poste, The Development of U. S. Protection of Libraries and Archives in Europe during World War II (unveröffentlichte Diss., University of Chicago 1958), 22 und 64–67; Robert G. Waite, Returning Jewish Cultural Property. The Handling of Books Looted by the Nazis in the American Zone of Occupation, 1945 to 1952, in: Libraries & Culture 37 (2002), H. 3, 213–228, hier 215.

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Obgleich illegal, war die von Szajkowski 1945 in Berlin verfolgte Praxis relativ verbreitet. Überall sah er, wie amerikanisch-jüdische GIs sich illegal Güter beschafften, um jüdischen Displaced Persons zu helfen, während die sowjetischen Truppen als Ausgleich für ihre Kriegsleiden gewaltige Mengen Beutegut abtransportierten – von feinem Porzellan über Kunstwerke und Archive bis hin zu Eisenbahnschienen. In Deutschland im Sommer und Herbst 1945 fiel es Szajkowski nicht schwer, antisemitische Materialien zu finden. Vieles lag einfach in verlassenen Gebäuden herum, anderes konnte er sich durch Tauschgeschäfte oder kleinere Diebstähle beschaffen.19 Was immer Szajkowski bekommen konnte, schickte er an das YIVO. Laut seinem eigenen Bericht hatte er bis Ende August 1945 fünfzig Kisten aufgegeben, Ende September waren es bereits 250 und im Oktober verschickte er täglich fünf bis zehn. Als er am 9. November 1945 Berlin verließ, hatte er Hunderte Kisten an die Adresse des YIVO versandt. Auf jedes einzelne Frachtstück schrieb er »An Shayke [jiddisch für Yehoshua (Frydman)] für das YIVO«, damit der Zensor der Militärbasis »absolut sicher über seine Bestimmung« sein konnte und es passieren ließ: Dies war kein Beutegut, sondern Material für eine Bibliothek.20 Das fieberhafte Erbeuten von NS-Dokumenten befriedigte ein elementares Rachebedürfnis Szajkowskis. Bei einem seiner Streifzüge fand er beispielsweise einige leere Bögen von Adolf Hitlers offiziellem Briefpapier und schrieb darauf einen Brief auf Jiddisch an Tscherikower. Szajkowski, der jüdische GI als Eroberer, strich Namen und Titel durch (»Adolf Hitler, Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP«) und schrieb daneben: »Möge sein Name auf immer ausradiert werden.«21 Sehr wertvoll waren Dokumente mit Hitlers Unterschrift. Szajkowski berichtete, wie er einige von Hitler unterzeichnete Briefe gegen eine Fahrt im Jeep eintauschte, um weitere Papiere aus dem Propagandaministerium wegzuschaffen.22 Aber für ihn war dies nicht in erster Linie eine finanzielle Investition. Es verschaffte ihm ein gewisses Gefühl von Gerechtigkeit, zumal er zu diesem Zeitpunkt meinte, dass die Alliierten nichts unternahmen, um die Deutschen zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen. Die Nationalsozialisten hatten die Juden in einem solchen Maße beraubt – war es da nicht rechtens, wenn jüdische Wissenschaftler Zugang zu den materiellen Überresten ihrer bösartigen Pläne erhielten? 19 YIVO Archives, RG 81, fol. 152002, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 2. Juli 1945. 20 Ebd., fol. 152104, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 27. August 1945; ebd., fol. 152122, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 21. September 1945; ebd., fol. 152147, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 13. Oktober 1945. Die Zitate sind dem Brief vom 27. August 1945 entnommen. Die Übersetzungen stammen, soweit nicht anders angegeben, von Felix Kurz. 21 Ebd., fol. 152144, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 5. Oktober 1945. 22 Ebd., fol. 152095, Szajkowski an Rebecca Tscherikower, 19. August 1945.

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Aus diesem Grund wurde Szajkowski in Berlin erneut ein umtriebiger zamler für das YIVO, dessen Sammlungen er durch Material bereicherte, das ein Studium der Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus auf umfangreicher Quellenbasis ermöglichen sollte. Als »Berlin Collection« (RG 215) füllt es heute im YIVO-Archiv fast acht Regalmeter mit fragmentarischen Dokumenten aus mehreren NS-Ministerien, insbesondere dem Propagandaministerium.23 Der Lohn dafür blieb nicht aus. Für Szajkowski war es am wichtigsten, Eindruck auf den YIVO-Direktor Max Weinreich zu machen, der sich tatsächlich von den Erwerbungen begeistert zeigte. Weinreich würdigte Szajkowskis Leistung als Sammler sogar in seiner Studie von 1945 über die akademische Kollaboration in NS-Deutschland, die in der Hoffnung, zur juristischen Verfolgung der Nationalsozialisten beizutragen, Anfang 1946 aus dem Jiddischen ins Englische übersetzt und unter dem Titel Hitler’s Professors publiziert wurde. Nach Szajkowskis Rückkehr aus Europa ehrte Weinreich ihn zudem mit der Einladung, im Januar 1946 auf der Jahresversammlung des Instituts über seine Arbeit zu sprechen. Die Leser des YIVORundschreibens Yedies fun YIVO hatten von seinen Taten bereits aus zahlreichen Artikeln erfahren, die dort 1944 und 1945 über ihn erschienen waren. Diese Berichte zeichneten das Bild eines heldenhaften Retters von Judaika, der in einem entscheidenden Moment des Übergangs für das Institut und für das weltweite Judentum zum Aufbau des YIVO-Archivs beitrug und dadurch Wissenschaftlern bei der Dokumentation der an den Juden begangenen Verbrechen half, während die strafrechtliche Verfolgung der Nationalsozialisten allmählich Gestalt annahm.24 Auch jenseits der Welt des YIVO wurde Szajkowskis Arbeit als ein heroischer Rettungsakt gewürdigt. Die Besatzungsbehörden in Deutschland machten sich schon frühzeitig seine Ansichten zu eigen. 1946 entwickelten die Amerikaner ein Verfahren für den Umgang mit den Judaika, die die Nationalsozialisten in ganz Europa erbeutet hatten. Zunächst brachten sie alles in eine Zentralstelle bei Frankfurt am Main, das Offenbach Archival Depot. Eigentümer, die ohne größere Mühe ermittelt werden konnten, erhielten ihren Besitz zurück, mit der Verteilung des verbleibenden Beuteguts, klassifiziert als »erbenlos«, beauftragten die Amerikaner die Privatorganisation Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. Deren Leiter – Salo Baron, Professor an der Columbia University, und die Philosophin Hannah Arendt – 23 Fruma Mohrer/Marek Web (Hgg.), Guide to the YIVO Archives, Armonk, N. Y., u. a. 1998, 28 f. 24 Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, New York 1946, 2; o. A., Role of German Scholarship in Annihilation of Jews Analyzed, in: Yedies fun YIVO [YIVO-Nachrichten] 10 (September 1945), 1 f.; Program of the 20th Annual Conference of the YIVO, in: Yedies fun YIVO 12 (Dezember 1945), 6 f.

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verfolgten das Ziel, diese Judaika aus Europa fortzuschaffen und sie Bibliotheken in Amerika und Palästina/Israel zu übergeben. Wie Szajkowski waren sie der Auffassung, dass jüdische Bücher dorthin gehörten, wo Juden eine Zukunft hatten – nach Amerika und Israel, nicht nach Europa. Dieser Kontext mag erklären, wieso Szajkowski seine Beute dem YIVO übergab. Wenngleich seine Bergungsarbeiten häufig gegen geltende Vorschriften verstießen, fügten sie sich in den Rahmen der amerikanischen Leitlinien ein, wonach nicht Europa, sondern Amerika und Israel die geeigneten Orte für jüdische Kulturgüter waren.25

Ein unabhängiger Gelehrter im Amerika der Nachkriegszeit Auch nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg blieb Zosa Szajkowski ein Protagonist des Transfers französischer Judaika nach Amerika. Von seiner Rückkehr aus Europa 1946 bis zu seinem Tod im Jahr 1978 war der Historiker am New Yorker YIVO tätig. Er arbeitete dort als Forscher und Archivar und leitete eine Zeit lang das zamler-Programm in Frankreich und Belgien, das darin bestand, ehrenamtliche Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen zu gewinnen, die Materialien für die YIVO-Archive zusammentragen. Szajkowski war dabei auch ein hochproduktiver Wissenschaftler, der in fünf Sprachen – Englisch, Jiddisch, Hebräisch, Italienisch und Französisch – sowie auf der Grundlage eigener Archivrecherchen in Frankreich zahlreiche Artikel zur französischjüdischen Geschichte verfasste. Auf seinen dortigen Forschungsreisen erwarb Szajkowski Dokumente von Privatpersonen und Händlern und er stahl viele weitere aus öffentlichen Archiven und nicht staatlichen jüdischen Einrichtungen wie Synagogen (genauer: consistoires) oder der sehr umfangreichen Judaika-Bibliothek der Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Paris. Seine letzte Reise nach Frankreich im Jahr 1961 endete tragisch, als er beim Diebstahl von Dokumenten im Straßburger Stadtarchiv erwischt wurde. Dies war jedoch nur die Spitze des Eisbergs: Von 1950 bis zu seinem Suizid 1978 verkaufte Szajkowski viele Objekte zweifelhafter Herkunft – insgesamt mehrere Zehntausend – an amerikanische Forschungsbibliotheken, vor allem, aber nicht nur, an jüdische. Szajkowski, einst ein Retter, wurde ein Dieb und Händler von Schätzen aus französisch-jüdischen Archiven. 25 Dana Herman, Hashavat Avedah. A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (unveröffentlichte Diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2008); Elisabeth Gallas, »Das Leichenhaus der Bücher«. Kulturrestitution und jüdisches Geschichtsdenken nach 1945, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2013.

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Warum stahl Szajkowski? Dass das französisch-jüdische Leben an sein Ende gelangt sei, dachte er sicherlich nicht mehr. In den 1950er Jahren musste er schließlich zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass französische Juden nicht nur den Krieg überlebt hatten, sondern durch Neueinwanderer aus Osteuropa und wenig später aus Nordafrika zahlenmäßig verstärkt wurden. Auch bauten sie ihre Synagogen und Bibliotheken wieder auf. Und ebendiese Institutionen bestahl Szajkowski. Wenngleich seine Motive als Sammler in der Nachkriegszeit weit weniger klar sind als während des Krieges, steht außer Zweifel, dass seine Position als unabhängiger Wissenschaftler, der ein Auskommen außerhalb der Universitäten suchen musste, zumindest eine Rolle spielte. Zwar war Szajkowski als ein führender Experte für die moderne jüdische Geschichte anerkannt und publizierte in den wichtigsten englisch-, hebräisch- und jiddischsprachigen Zeitschriften auf diesem Gebiet, aufgrund seiner besonderen Lage genoss er jedoch weder die finanzielle Sicherheit noch den Status, den ihm seine wissenschaftliche Arbeit unter anderen Umständen verschafft hätte. Zweierlei stand ihm im Wege. Erstens hatte er keine Stelle an einer Universität und zweitens bewegte er sich ohne Bildungsabschlüsse als ein schlichter »Herr« auf einem Berufsfeld, das gewöhnlich nur dem »Professor« und dem »Doktor« Autorität zuerkennt. Doch obwohl solche Statusunterschiede ins Gewicht fielen, hatte Szajkowski auch ohne Titel als Wissenschaftler Karriere gemacht. Abgesehen von wenigen Stellen war jüdische Geschichte in den 1950er Jahren außerhalb Israels noch nicht an den Universitäten verankert, weshalb die Tatsache, dass Szajkowski kein Professor war, für sich genommen – anders als es heute der Fall wäre – keine ernsthafte Barriere für Anerkennung auf diesem Gebiet darstellte. Als er 1961 öffentlich als Dieb angeklagt wurde, war er ein außerordentlich viel publizierter, auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks angesehener Historiker, auch wenn er unabhängig arbeitete – ohne die finanzielle, administrative, soziale und moralische Unterstützung, die ihm eine akademische Anstellung gegeben hätte. Zeit für Forschung war eine weitere Ressource, an der es Szajkowski als unabhängigem Wissenschaftler mangelte. In den frühen 1950er Jahren nahm er eine dreijährige Auszeit vom YIVO, um sich ausschließlich Archivrecherchen in Frankreich widmen zu können. Auf der Grundlage seiner dortigen Funde war er in der folgenden Dekade imstande, durchschnittlich acht wissenschaftliche Artikel pro Jahr zu publizieren, die alle auf eigenen Forschungen beruhten und sich vor allem mit der Emanzipation und Modernisierung des französischen Judentums im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert befassten.26 26 Die Zeitschriften, in denen er am häufigsten publizierte, waren Hebrew Union College Annual, Historia Judaica, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, The Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research sowie Publications of the American

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Szajkowski interessierte sich in erster Linie für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Während in Frankreich dieses Gebiet durch die Annales-Schule Dominanz erlangt hatte, gewann es in Nordamerika in den 1950er Jahren erst allmählich an Bedeutung. Wie David Pinkey 1958 bemerkte, konnten mit Frankreich befasste nordamerikanische Historiker mangels Zugang zu den dortigen Archiven nur beschränkt etwas zu den Untergebieten Diplomatiegeschichte und Intellectual History (Ideengeschichte) beitragen, weshalb erfahrenere Historiker eher synthetische Arbeiten vorlegten, die auf den Archivrecherchen der mit der Annales-Schule verbundenen französischen Forscherteams aufbauten.27 Unter den jüdischen Historikern, die Szajkowski kannte, stach sein eigenes Werk hervor. Selbst für die Minderheit von Wissenschaftlern, die wie Salo Baron der Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Bedeutung beimaßen, war Szajkowskis Vorgehen ungewöhnlich, Forschungsreisen zu unternehmen und Dokumente aus Sammlungen in ganz Frankreich, insbesondere aus regionalen öffentlichen Archiven und Sammlungen von Synagogen, zu zitieren. Der Umfang und die Intensität der Archivrecherchen ist in der Tat der beeindruckendste Aspekt an Szajkowskis Werk. So zitiert er beispielsweise in einer seiner längsten Studien, Autonomy and Communal Jewish Debts during the French Revolution of 1789 (1959 im Selbstverlag erschienen), Dokumente aus öffentlichen Archiven in Arles, Altkirch (Elsass), Avignon, Bordeaux, Carpentras, Cavaillon, Colmar, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Metz, Montpellier, Paris und Straßburg.28 Als Synthese seiner Funde in diesen Archiven und Bibliotheken in ganz Frankreich stellte das Buch erstmals umfassend dar, wie sich die alten jüdischen Gemeindeeinrichtungen während und nach der Französischen Revolution aufgelöst hatten. Die Studie ist beinahe zweihundert Seiten lang. Doch mangelt es ihr, abgesehen von der kurzen Zusammenfassung am Schluss, an einer allgemeinen These, die die 22 Abschnitte zusammenhalten würde, in denen jeweils andere Gruppen von seltenen Quellen behandelt werden. Fünf besonders interessante Quellen wurden im Anhang abgedruckt. Dieser umfasst außerdem eine 17 Seiten

Jewish Historical Society. Szajkowski veröffentlichte auch viel auf Jiddisch, so in YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, YIVO Bleter, der argentinischen Zeitschrift Davke und in den eher populären Zeitschriften Yidishe kempfer und Kiyoum (Paris). Hinzu kamen gelegentliche Veröffentlichungen in hebräischer Sprache in Zion, Yad Vashem Studies und Horeb sowie einige kürzere Artikel auf Italienisch und Französisch. Seine besten englischsprachigen Artikel wurden später als Sammlung neu publiziert, siehe ders., Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, New York 1970. 27 David H. Pinkney, The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France, in: French Historical Studies 1 (1958), H. 1, 11–25. 28 Zosa Szajkowski, Autonomy and Communal Jewish Debts during the French Revolution of 1789, New York 1959.

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lange Bibliografie von Broschüren und gedruckten Quellen zu jüdischen Gemeindeschulden sowie eine Liste der kleinen Gemeinden, die vor der Revolution die Provinz Metz gebildet hatten. Die im Anhang abgedruckten Dokumente sowie die meisten Broschüren und Quellen in der Bibliografie zu Schulden wurden keiner Institution zugeordnet. Trotz ihrer Mängel war die Studie bahnbrechend, warfen ihre Quellen doch ein vollkommen neues Licht auf die Judenemanzipation in Frankreich. Über die Emanzipationsgesetze hinaus stützte sie sich auf Broschüren, die Presse, schriftlich dokumentierte Reden und zahlreiche Gemeindedokumente aus der Revolutionsperiode in ganz Frankreich, etwa Haushaltspläne, Kreditverträge, rechtliche Gesuche und Petitionen an die Regierung. Wie Szajkowski selbst anmerkte, waren solche Quellen kaum je genutzt worden. Die meisten Historiker der Judenemanzipation hatten sich auf die offiziellen Protokolle der Nationalversammlung beschränkt, während die wenigen, die ähnliche Quellen wie er verwendet hatten, lediglich lokalen Fragen nachgegangen waren. Wo fand Szajkowski diese wichtigen neuen Quellen, die aus den Gemeindeinstitutionen selbst stammten? Darüber können nur Mutmaßungen angestellt werden. Viele werden von ihm, locker nach Stadt gruppiert und nummeriert, einfach als »Dokumente« zitiert – beispielsweise in Fußnote 109: »Dokumente, Metz, Nr. 5, fol. 23–28«, und Fußnote 112: »Dokumente, Comtat, Nr. 3, fol. 6–21«. Es handelt sich somit um eine artifizielle Zusammenstellung von Materialien, die von diversen Einrichtungen an ganz unterschiedlichen Orten erstellt worden waren. Glaubt man den Fußnoten, dann befanden sie sich mittlerweile, 1959, in einem Archiv weit von ihrem Ursprung entfernt, nämlich in der Klau Library des Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, wo sie seitdem neu geordnet wurden, weswegen sie sich nicht mehr anhand der von Szajkowski angeführten Nummern finden lassen. Laut den Verzeichnissen, die Ende der 1970er Jahre bei der staatlich geförderten Neuordnung erstellt wurden, erwarb die Bibliothek sie von 1958 bis 1960 von Szajkowski – genau zu der Zeit, als er seine Studie abschloss.29 Die Frage, wo er sie fand, bleibt somit offen. Außer Zweifel steht allerdings, dass Szajkowski die »Dokumente« sehr fruchtbar nutzte. Auf ihrer Grundlage konnte er einen tieferen Einblick in 29 Laut Katalog erwarb die Klau Library die Sammlung »Sephardische Juden in Frankreich« 1960 von Szajkowski. »Zum Zeitpunkt des Ankaufs war diese Sammlung Teil der ›Französischen Sammlungen‹. Diese wurden später getrennt und gingen in den miteinander verbundenen Sammlungen Consistoire Central, Alsace-Lorraine und Kleine Französische Sammlungen auf.« Mit finanzieller Förderung durch die staatliche Stiftung National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) nahmen Jonathan Rodgers und Leo Lichtenberg von 1977 bis 1979 die Umgruppierung in diese insgesamt fünf Sammlungen vor und erstellten die entsprechenden Verzeichnisse.

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die Vorgänge der Emanzipation bieten. Trotz der unübersichtlichen Struktur, die eher einer Aktensammlung als einer gegliederten Argumentation ähnelt, gelangte seine Studie zu richtungsweisenden Ergebnissen beim Thema jüdische Gemeindeschulden. Szajkowski argumentiert, dass unter dem Ancien Régime die Gemeinden staatlich kontrollierte Körperschaften gewesen seien, deren Hauptzweck darin bestanden habe, Steuern einzutreiben und an die Behörden weiterzuleiten; als die dezidiert antikorporatistisch ausgerichtete Revolution diese Gemeinden auflöste, hätten die Juden erwartet, dass man sie – wie die Angehörigen aller anderen nunmehr liquidierten Körperschaften – für die Gemeindeschulden aus der vorrevolutionären Zeit nicht mehr haftbar machen würde. Dies war jedoch nicht der Fall. Nach der Auflösung der Gemeinden blieben Nachfolgeinstitutionen dafür zuständig, Gelder für die Abzahlung der Schulden zu erheben, und dienten somit als ein Instrument staatlicher Diskriminierung, selbst nachdem die Juden nominell gleiche Rechte erlangt hatten. Szajkowskis Studie hatte wichtige Implikationen für das Verständnis des Fortdauerns antijüdischer Tendenzen im modernen Frankreich und schränkte das positive Bild der Emanzipation ein, das für mehrere Generationen von Historikern maßgeblich gewesen war.30 Entstanden im Milieu jüdischer Kulturnationalisten, die in den späten 1930er Jahren eine romantische Vorstellung der »Ghettos« unter dem französischen Ancien Régime als wahrhaft autonomer Räume entwickelt hatten, stellte Szajkowskis Buch zugleich ein wichtiges Korrektiv gegenüber jenen Historikern dar, die in der Assimilation die Ursache für die Probleme von Juden im modernen Europa ausmachten. Nach Szajkowskis Auffassung bildete jedoch nicht die Argumentation einer Studie das Kriterium ihrer Qualität, sondern vielmehr ihre Quellen. Deren Präsentation besaß in seinen Artikeln folglich Vorrang vor der Entfaltung eines klaren Gedankengangs. In seinen Augen hatte die Geschichtsschreibung zu jüdischen Themen lange Zeit unter mangelnder Berücksichtigung der Quellen zugunsten großer Thesen gelitten, in denen er wenig mehr sah als »Bombast« und »Apologetik«; es schien ihm an der Zeit, dass jüdische Historiker über solche großen Thesen hinausgingen und die erforderliche empirische Arbeit leisteten, um herauszufinden, was tatsächlich geschehen war.31 Diese Einstellung ist neben seinem schwachen Englisch und seiner mangelnden akademischen Ausbildung sicherlich ein Grund dafür,

30 Szajkowskis Studie beeinflusste den damals mit ihm befreundeten Arthur Hertzberg, dessen Werk The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York 1968) gewöhnlich als das erste Buch angeführt wird, welches das durchgehend positive Narrativ über die Judenemanzipation infrage gestellt habe. 31 Siehe Zosa Szajkowski, Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees, New York 1953, 19.

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dass Szajkowskis Werk heute vielen Wissenschaftlern als antiquiert erscheint – als eine »bloße« Quellenpräsentation anstelle geschichtswissenschaftlich engagierter Argumentation.32 Szajkowski war in der Tat ebenso Bibliograf wie Historiker. Er veröffentlichte vier bedeutende Bibliografien über die Geschichte der Juden in Frankreich. The Emancipation of Jews during the French Revolution (1959) und Judaica-Napoleonica (1956), zusammen rund achtzig Seiten umfassend, befassen sich mit Perioden, die für Historiker der modernen jüdischen Geschichte von großem Interesse sind. Die umfangreichere Bibliografie Franco-Judaica (1962) bietet ausführliche Zusammenfassungen von Büchern, Broschüren, Dokumenten und Manuskripten über die Geschichte der Juden in Frankreich und der Schweiz von 1500 bis 1788, thematisch gegliedert und unter Angabe der Einrichtungen, die sie aufbewahren. Die vollständige Liste dieser Orte füllt in dem großformatigen Buch vier ganze Seiten und zeugt von Szajkowskis bemerkenswerter Fähigkeit, außerordentlich seltenes Material in staatlichen Archiven, privaten Institutionen und sogar den Sammlungen von Privatpersonen – darunter der Pariser Drucker Bernas, ein Herr A. Aron (New York), die Rabbiner N. Netter (Metz) und M. Ginsburger, der Buchhändler A. Rosenthal (Oxford) und der Historiker S. Posener – in Europa, Israel und den Vereinigten Staaten ausfindig zu machen. Szajkowskis viertes bibliografisches Werk über Juden in Frankreich, Analytical Franco-Jewish Gazetteer, 1939–1945 (1966), gewann den National Jewish Book Award und wird bis heute als seine bedeutendste wissenschaftliche Leistung gewürdigt. Bislang unbekannte Quellen zur Geschichte von Juden in Frankreich während des Zweiten Weltkriegs ordnete er darin nach commune und département an. Zusammengestellt zu einem Zeitpunkt, als eine historische Gesamtdarstellung des Holocaust in Frankreich noch ausstand, leistete Szajkowski damit Pionierarbeit. In seiner Einleitung beharrte er darauf, dass es für eine umfassende Geschichte der Periode, die ein Urteil über das Verhalten der Behörden wie auch jüdischer Amtsträger erlauben würde, noch zu früh sei; stattdessen stellte er Wissenschaftlern die Instrumente zur Verfügung, um mit der Forschung zu beginnen. Szajkowski war der Ansicht, dass Geschichte aufsteigend von den Quellen zu schreiben sei, und die Jagd nach diesen Quellen betrachtete er als ein lohnendes Unterfangen, das auf dem Gebiet der jüdischen Geschichte jedoch oft zu kurz komme,

32 Szajkowskis Werke sind häufig eher als Faktensammlung denn als Entfaltung von Argumenten charakterisiert worden, wobei aber nicht immer zur Kenntnis genommen wurde, dass er dies so beabsichtigte. Siehe z. B. Jonathan Sarna, Recalling Arthur Hertzberg. Public Intellectual, in: Jewish Week, 21. April 2006.

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weil Historiker eher daran interessiert seien, Thesen zu verfechten, die sie bereits vor ihrer Forschungsarbeit entwickelt hätten.33 Man könnte beinahe so weit gehen zu behaupten, dass Szajkowski in seinen Studien Schlussfolgerungen geradezu mied. So beendete er etwa seinen Artikel Population Problems of Marranos and Sephardim in France (1958) mit der Aufforderung an den Leser, seine Befunde »nur als Anmerkungen und nicht als abschließende Studie« zu betrachten. Diese Worte ließen sich auf den Großteil seines Werks beziehen.34 In diesem Fall deuteten seine Anmerkungen zu bislang ungenutzten Quellen in vollkommen neue Richtungen. Szajkowski behauptete in dem Artikel zum Beispiel, anhand der Namen im état civil (Tauf-, Heirats- und Sterberegister) in den Gemeindearchiven von Bordeaux und Bayonne könnten Historiker erkennen, wann und wie die conversos, die iberischen Neuchristen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, die Juden des 18. Jahrhunderts wurden. Gestützt auf lange Namenslisten, die er in den Fußnoten publizierte, konnte er tatsächlich plausibel argumentieren, dass »die ersten Generationen von Marranen, die aus Spanien und Portugal eintrafen, beinahe vollständig für die jüdischen Gemeinden verloren waren. Diejenigen, die jüdisch blieben, waren Marranen, die in einer späteren Periode ins Land kamen, und ihre Zahl war gering im Vergleich zu denen, die früher gekommen waren und Christen blieben.«35

In der Überzeugung, dass Schlussfolgerungen zu warten hatten, bis die Arbeit mit vielen unterschiedlichen Arten von Quellen abgeschlossen war, erlaubte sich Szajkowski selten die Befriedigung einer Konklusion. Wie er in seiner Studie über die Marranen einräumte, wäre es »eine Lebensaufgabe«, seine Behauptung durch Auswertung sämtlicher Namen in den Registern aus Bordeaux und Bayonne wirklich zu beweisen.36 Und selbst wenn man imstande wäre, diese Aufgabe zu erfüllen, könne sich eine »detaillierte 33 Zosa Szajkowski, The Emancipation of Jews during the French Revolution. A Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Printed Documents, 1789–1800, in: Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 3 (1957), H. 2 55–68 und 4 (1959), H. 1, 21–48; ders., Franco-Judaica. An Analytical Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, Decrees, Briefs and Other Printed Documents Pertaining to the Jews in France, 1500–1788, New York 1962; ders., Judaica-Napoleonica. A Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Printed Documents, 1801–1815, in: Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 2 (1956), H. 3, 107–152; ders., Analytical FrancoJewish Gazetteer, 1939–1945. With an Introduction to Some Problems in Writing the History of the Jews in France during World War II, New York 1966. 34 Ders., Population Problems with Marranos and Sephardim in France, from the 16th to the 20th Centuries, in: Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 27 (1958), 83–105. 35 Szajkowski, Population Problems with Marranos and Sephardim in France, from the 16th to the 20th Centuries, 105. 36 Ebd., 87.

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Monografie« der von ihm angestrebten Art nicht auf »verstreute Beispiele« aus ein oder zwei Quellen stützen, sondern sie müsse sich der Fragestellung durch einen Vergleich zahlreicher Arten von Belegen nähern. So wäre es beispielsweise einfach, zur Frage des Vermögens der jüdischen Einwanderer aus Spanien und Portugal »eine lange Liste von Marranen und sephardischen Juden anzuführen, die auf dem Gebiet der Seeversicherungen tätig waren«. Doch was würde das beweisen? Um mit Gewissheit sagen zu können, wie wohlhabend diese sephardischen Juden waren, müssten andere Quellen zeigen, welcher Prozentsatz von ihnen auf diesem Gebiet tätig war und welcher Anteil des jüdischen Kapitals in die entsprechenden Transaktionen floss.37 Szajkowski verstand Forschung als eine Herkulesaufgabe: Man musste von Stadt zu Stadt eilen, von einer Bibliothek in die nächste, und verschiedenste Dokumente exzerpieren, um spezifische Fragen zu beantworten. Szajkowskis Ansatz erforderte eine ebenso tief gehende wie breit angelegte Forschung. Die Jagd nach unterschiedlichen Quellen, die er miteinander vergleichen konnte, führte ihn an die entlegensten Orte; etliche Dokumente konnte er vermutlich nur mithilfe der vielfältigen Talente aufspüren, die er bereits als investigativer Journalist unter Beweis gestellt hatte. Beziehungen zu Archivaren zu pflegen war von größter Bedeutung, wussten diese doch am besten, welche Arten von Quellen überhaupt existierten und wo sie sich befanden. Nur durch detektivische Spürarbeit konnte er Dokumente ausfindig machen, deren Ablageort im Lauf der Jahre immer wieder gewechselt hatte oder die von vornherein nicht richtig archiviert worden waren. Die Suche erfolgte weitgehend in Frankreich, teilweise aber auch von New York aus durch schriftliche Anfragen an Archivare. Mit manchen von ihnen hatte er sich auf seinen Reisen angefreundet, so etwa mit Georges Weill, den er 1955 in den Archives départementales du Bas Rhin kennengelernt hatte. Weill – und vermutlich auch andere – freute es, einen so kompetenten Forscher getroffen zu haben, und so lieferte er auf Anfrage hilfreiche Informationen.38 Auch seine Quellenforschung über die Zeit des Holocaust in Frankreich betrieb Szajkowski teilweise auf schriftlichem Weg. 1955 schrieb er die Archive aller neunzig Départements in Frankreich an und bat um Kopien des 1941 durchgeführten Judenzensus; wie er erfuhr, waren die Dokumente auf Anweisung der Regierung kurz nach dem Krieg vernichtet worden. (Szajkowski blieb jedoch hartnäckig und fand schließlich im Institut de la statistique et des études économiques Belege, die 87 Départements abdeck37 Ders., Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, XXXVII f. 38 Ich danke Georges Weill dafür, dass er mir Fotokopien seiner Korrespondenz mit Szajkowski aus den Jahren 1956 bis 1958 zur Verfügung stellte und mir damit Einblick in eine dieser Beziehungen zu Archivaren gewährte.

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ten). Auf dieselbe Weise machte er viele der Quellen ausfindig, die in Analytical Franco-Jewish Gazetteer aufgelistet sind.39 In Frankreich betrieb Szajkowski eine unerbittliche Suche nach Quellen. Zwei Fußnoten aus Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees (1953) vermitteln einen Eindruck davon, wie viel Arbeit seine Forschungsagenda an einem gegebenen Ort nach sich zog: »Für den Niederrhein fanden wir die Hypothekenregister der Arrondissements von Straßburg, Saverne und Wissembourg; für Séléstat nutzten wir die Verzeichnisse der Registrierungsgebühren, aber auch sie gehören einer späteren Periode an. Für den Oberrhein fanden wir nur Verzeichnisse für Colmar und Belfort – alle aus einer späteren Periode. Wesentlich vollständiger sind die Hypothekenarchive in den Départements von Moselle, Meurthe und den Vogesen […]. In Meuse ist das Hypothekenarchiv verschollen. Laut dem Gesetz mussten Kopien der Hypothekenregister zur Sicherheit an eine bestimmte Stelle geschickt werden. Doch 1951 konnten wir sie nicht finden«.

1939 wurden einige Hypothekenregister nach Altkirch evakuiert und von dort ins ebenfalls elsässische Huningue, wo der Verfasser sie halb vermodert im Keller des Gerichtshofs vorfand. In diesem Zustand konnte unmöglich mit ihnen gearbeitet werden. Es waren überwiegend Abschriften von Registern aus Mulhouse.40 Welchen Ertrag hatte Szajkowskis Forschung? In diesem Falle nutzte er Hypothekenregister aus der napoleonischen Ära – die angesichts ihres Zustands vermutlich noch nie von Historikern verwendet worden waren –, um sich in neuer Weise der Frage zu nähern, wodurch die Flut von antijüdischen Pamphleten im Elsass des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts ausgelöst worden war. Diese Kampagne hat große historische Bedeutung, bewegte sie Napoleon doch zu seinem »schändlichen Dekret« (Décret infâme) von 1808, das unter anderem den jüdischen Geldverleih für zehn Jahre einschränkte. Mit dem Dekret selbst hatten sich Historiker zwar schon oft befasst, Szajkowski war jedoch der erste, der die ihm zugrunde liegende Krise von ihrem Ursprung her untersuchte. Indem er aufspürte, was von den Hypothekenregistern noch erhalten war, konnte er die nachrevolutionäre Kreditkrise in Elsass-Lothringen ansatzweise entschlüsseln. Letztendlich deutet seine Studie darauf hin, dass das System des Geldverleihs – und der Mangel an öffentlichen Landwirtschaftskrediten, der dieses System hervorbrachte – die soziale Grundlage des Antijudaismus in Ostfrankreich bildete. Bei einem anderen Historiker wäre dies (auch heute noch) ein Befund von außerordent-

39 Zosa Szajkowski, Glimpses on the History of Jews in Occupied France, in: Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance 2 (1958), 133–157, hier 151 f.; ders., Analytical Franco-Jewish Gazetteer, 1939–1945. 40 Ders., Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees, 76, Anm. 193 und Anm. 195.

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licher Bedeutung gewesen; im Falle Szajkowskis überwältigten die Details die allgemeine These, denn was ihn am meisten interessierte, waren die Quellen und die kleinen Fragen, die sich ständig vermehrten, nicht das Gesamtbild. Szajkowskis Erwartungen an eine historische Arbeit erforderten unablässig neues Material, um die Fragen zu beantworten, die er entwickelte, während er sich auf die Ebene einer Synthese zubewegte, sie aber nie erreichte. Er selbst führte nie eines der von ihm skizzierten imposanten Forschungsprojekte durch – es gab zu viele andere Quellen zu entdecken. Szajkowski verabscheute geradezu Arthur Hertzbergs The French Enlightenment and the Jews von 1968, das weitreichende Behauptungen über antijüdische Tendenzen der Französischen Revolution aufstellte, gegründet auf eine in den Augen der meisten Wissenschaftler beeindruckende Präsentation vielfältiger Quellen (die Hertzberg zu erheblichen Teilen durch Ratschläge von Szajkowski in den 1950er Jahren gefunden hatte, als die beiden noch befreundet waren). Nach Szajkowskis Überzeugung jedoch konnte man solche Schlüsse schlichtweg nicht ziehen, solange man auf der Jagd nach Belegen nicht jeden Stein umgedreht hatte.41 Das bedeutet allerdings nicht, dass Szajkowski von den Anliegen, die seine Arbeit in den 1930er Jahren angetrieben hatten, abgerückt wäre. Im Gegenteil, seine Studien zielten auf Fragen, die ihm so wichtig wie eh und je schienen: Fragen über jüdischen Reichtum, die Beziehung zwischen jüdischen Kreditgebern und christlichen Schuldnern, die Wurzeln des französischen Antisemitismus und den rechtlichen Status von Juden. So schrieb er in Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees: »In Frankreich, namentlich im Elsass, ist die Diskussion über das Dekret vom 17. März 1808 mitnichten ein Kuriosum der Vergangenheit […]. 1949 und 1950 besuchte der Autor der vorliegenden Studie viele Dörfer im Elsass und sah dort beinahe überall Wohlstand und sogar Reichtümer. Die Bauern besitzen ihr eigenes Land, Häuser, Traktoren, Autos etc. Der landwirtschaftliche Reichtum ist dort größer als in anderen Teilen Frankreichs. Er wurde durch die Entbehrungen und die harte Arbeit der Bauern über viele Generationen hinweg aufgebaut. Die meisten Angehörigen dieser Generationen bekamen keine Hilfe von der Regierung, keinen regulären Landwirtschaftskredit. Die Bauern verwirklichten ihren Traum, eine eigene Parzelle Land zu besitzen, ohne jede Unterstützung der Regierung, ja sogar gegen den Willen aller anderen. Es ist die Meinung des Verfassers, dass der Jude, der allseits verleumdet und angeschuldigt wurde, den Bauern im 18. Jahrhundert, während der Revolution und bis 1870 dabei half, ihren Wohlstand zu erreichen. Der Jude tat dies, weil auch er ein Auskommen brauchte. Doch gleichzeitig spielte er eine große und nützliche Rolle in der Wirtschaft des nordöstlichen Frankreich.«42

41 Ders., Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, XXIV f. 42 Ders., Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees, 106 und 191.

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Szajkowski zufolge wurzelte der elsässische Antijudaismus in der unzureichenden Rolle des Staates in der Wirtschaft. Ungeachtet seines Bruchs mit der Kommunistischen Partei hatte sich Szajkowskis weltanschauliche Perspektive seit seinen kommunistischen Jugendjahren kaum verschoben. Er hielt weiterhin an der marxistischen Überzeugung fest, dass die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse den Schlüssel zum Verständnis der Geschichte bieten. Aufgrund ihres Dogmatismus hatte er die Partei jedoch verlassen, und wenn er historische Darstellungen las, die von ihrer Ideologie bestimmt waren, empörte ihn dies. Nur gründliche Forschung konnte ihm zufolge die verborgene Dynamik ans Licht befördern, die zu den Problemen führte, mit denen Juden konfrontiert waren, und aus diesem Grund kritisierte er Historiker wie Raphael Mahler, denen er voreilige Schlüsse attestierte.43 Szajkowskis Hinwendung zu den Quellen als Schlüssel zur Geschichte verlieh Archiven und Bibliotheken als Institutionen absolute Zentralität. Das meiste, was er in seinen Artikeln aus den 1950er Jahren zitierte, hatte er in regionalen Archiven und Bibliotheken in ganz Frankreich gefunden. Für Studien wie Autonomy and Communal Jewish Debts during the French Revolution of 1789 oder Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees muss er eine strapaziöse Forschungsarbeit auf sich genommen haben. Zu bedenken ist dabei außerdem, dass er einen Ausstoß von acht Artikeln im Jahr sicherlich nur aufrechterhalten konnte, indem er an mehreren Studien gleichzeitig arbeitete. Angesichts der Originalität, Gründlichkeit und Breite seiner Forschung kann man über diese Produktivität nur staunen. Die umfangreichen Fußnoten in seinen Aufsätzen und Monografien untermauern diesen Eindruck, da sie – ähnlich wie Szajkowskis Bibliografien – lange Zitate aus Dokumenten in der französischen Originalsprache enthalten. Möglich war dies wohl nur, weil Szajkowski mit den Augen eines Bibliografen in die Archive und Bibliotheken ging – nicht von einer bestimmten historischen Frage getrieben, sondern auf der Suche nach schlechterdings allem, was für die moderne jüdische Geschichte von Belang sein konnte. Erst später sortierte er seine Fundstücke dann nach den Themen seiner Artikel. Auf einer dieser Forschungsreisen wurde Szajkowski am 13. April 1961 in flagranti ertappt, als er Dokumente aus dem Straßburger Stadtarchiv stahl. Bei dem Schriftstück, das er in diesem Augenblick aus einem Register herausriss, handelte es sich ironischerweise um ein 1784 vom Conseil Souverain d’Alsace verabschiedetes Gesetz, das Juden ohne festen Wohnsitz aus dem Elsass vertrieb, da man befürchtete, jüdische Vagabunden würden zwangsläufig Diebe werden. In Szajkowskis verlassenem Hotelzimmer in

43 Ders., Occupational Problems of Jewish Emancipation in France, 1789–1800, in: Historia Judaica 21 (1959), H. 2, 109–132, hier 132.

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der Nähe des Bahnhofs fanden Archivare später weitere Dokumente, die vermutlich aus anderen französischen Archiven stammten.44 Es gibt Belege dafür, dass der Vorfall vom Jahr 1961 nicht Szajkowskis erster Diebstahl in französischen Bibliotheken und Archiven war. Besonders kühn waren seine Entwendungen aus der Bibliothek der AIU, der größten Sammlung von Judaika in Europa. Wie eine Untersuchung dieses Falls zeigt, war Szajkowski imstande, selbst dann noch Dokumente fortzuschaffen, als sein Verhalten bei wachsamen Bibliothekaren bereits Misstrauen geweckt hatte. Ferner belegt sie, wie ausgesprochen schwierig es für französische Bibliotheken war, gestohlene Dokumente von den amerikanischen oder israelischen Sammlungen, an die Szajkowski seine Beute verkauft hatte, zurückzubekommen, selbst wenn sie ihre Eigentümerschaft plausibel belegen konnten. 1948 bemerkte der AIU-Bibliothekar Paul Klein (Moché Catane), dass zwei wertvolle Bücher verschwunden waren. Er verdächtigte zunächst Szajkowski, kam dann jedoch zu dem Schluss, dass er sich nicht sicher sein konnte, und zögerte, etwas zu unternehmen. Ein wichtiger Grund für dieses Zögern war, dass die gesamte Sammlung des AIU 1940 von den Nationalsozialisten geraubt und erst wenige Monate vor jenem Besuch Szajkowskis, bei dem er die Objekte höchstwahrscheinlich gestohlen hatte, von den Amerikanern aus Deutschland zurückgebracht worden war. Da die Kartenkataloge jedoch weiterhin fehlten – die Bibliothekare benötigten 14 Jahre, um sie zu rekonstruieren –, befand die AIU-Leitung, sie verfüge nicht über ausreichend Beweise, um den Fall der Polizei zu übergeben.45 Daneben dürfte ein zweiter, unausgesprochener Grund im Spiel gewesen sein: Welchen Eindruck hätte es erweckt, wenn eine jüdische Bibliothek zu einer Zeit, in der der Antisemitismus weiterhin stark war, einen jüdischen Historiker öffentlich des Diebstahls bezichtigt hätte? Die AIU wandte sich stattdessen an einen Vermittler: Saadia Cherniak, Vorsitzender der American Friends of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in New York, nahm eine unabhängige Untersuchung des Falls vor und traf sich mit Bibliothekaren der New York Public Library und des Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), um die Rückgabe des Diebesguts zu arrangieren, das sie von Szajkowski erworben hatten. Im Juni 1950 konnte die AIU auf diese Weise einige Dutzend Bücher vom JTS 44 AVCUS, Dossier »Frydmann«, 202 NW 39. 45 Alliance Israélite Universelle Archives (nachfolgend AIU Archives), fonds Lévy, AP1/76, Paul Klein an Noé Richter, 17. Oktober 1949; ebd., AM SG019a, handschriftliche Notiz von 1950 über die fehlende Akte zur Damaskus-Affäre. Zum Schicksal der AIU-Bibliothek im Zweiten Weltkrieg siehe Jean-Claude Kuperminc, La bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, in: Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 4 Bde, Paris 1989–1992, hier Bd. 4: Les bibliothèques au XXe siècle, 1914–1990, hg. von Martine Poulain, Paris 1992, 238.

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zurückkaufen. Weniger Erfolg hatte sie bei der New York Public Library, wo es sich als schwierig erwies, Kopien der Quittungen für Szajkowskis Ware zu finden.46 Diese Strategie verfehlte die angestrebte Wirkung weitgehend. Zwar erhielten die AIU-Bibliothekare einige Bücher zurück, doch sofern sie gehofft hatten, weitere Diebstähle zu verhindern, indem sie ihre New Yorker Kollegen vor Erwerbungen bei Szajkowski warnten, wurden sie bitter enttäuscht. Tatsächlich kauften amerikanische Bibliotheken ihm bis weit in die 1970er Jahre hinein Dokumente ab. Die Entscheidung der AIU, die Angelegenheit auf privatem Wege zu regeln, bedeutete außerdem, dass sie weiterhin einen Umgang mit dem Dieb finden musste. Während der 1950er Jahre gewährte sie Szajkowski weiter Zugang zur Bibliothek, behielt ihn aber stets strengstens im Auge. Als 1963 die Nachricht über seine Straßburger Verurteilung bekannt wurde, atmete man im AIU erleichtert auf: Der Dieb würde nie mehr in ihre Bibliothek zurückkehren.47 In den späten 1940er Jahren hatte sich Szajkowski vom heldenhaften Retter von Judaika in einen Archivdieb verwandelt. Eines seiner Motive war fraglos finanzieller Natur. Szajkowski führte in New York ein äußerst bescheidenes Leben: Das YIVO zahlte ihm ein sehr geringes Gehalt, das ihn zwar über der Armutsgrenze hielt, aber deutlich unter dem Durchschnittseinkommen der New Yorker Mittelschicht lag. Damit musste er von 1961 an eine dreiköpfige Familie ernähren.48 Ohne Promotion bewegte er sich abseits der Universitäten, die auf dem Fachgebiet der jüdischen Geschichte ohnehin kaum über Stellen verfügten. Da er selbst Sammler und Archivar war, wusste Szajkowski jedoch, dass sich der amerikanische Markt für Judaika im Aufschwung befand. Seine Direktverkäufe warfen bescheidene Gewinne ab, die einen willkommenen Zuverdienst darstellten. Zum Beispiel verkaufte er 1959 drei vermutlich aus AIU-Beständen stammende Dokumente für 15 Dollar an die American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati; seine Verkäufe an das JTS im Jahr 1950 bewegten sich, wie Cherniak von den dortigen Bibliothekaren erfuhr, in derselben Größenordnung.49 46 AIU Archives, AM SG019e, Saadia Cherniak an Eugène Weill, 24. Februar 1950; ebd., Saadia Cherniak an Eugène Weill, 19. Mai 1950; ebd., Saadia Cherniak an Eugène Weill, 29. Mai 1950; ebd., Saadia Cherniak an Eugène Weill, 9. Juni 1950; ebd., Saadia Cherniak an Eugène Weill, 4. Juli 1950. 47 Interview der Verfasserin mit Yvonne Lévyne, 6. November 2007. Lévyne begann 1954, in der Bibliothek zu arbeiten. Siehe auch AIU Archives, AM SG 019e, Korrespondenz zwischen Cherniak und Weill. 48 Dies geht aus Szajkowskis Einkommenssteuererklärungen für 1967 und 1968 hervor, aufbewahrt in YIVO Archives, RG 800. 49 American Jewish Archives, Marcus Papers, Correspondence, Zosa Szajkowski, Szajkowski an Marcus, 18. März 1959; ebd., Marcus an Szajkowski, 24. März 1969; ebd., Szajkowski an Marcus, 2. April 1959.

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Diese finanziellen Motive verbanden sich mit beruflichen. Die Art von Texten, die Szajkowski schrieb, erforderte viele Stunden Arbeit mit unterschiedlichsten Typen von Quellen, die sich in Institutionen weit von New York entfernt befanden. In dieser Ära vor dem Fotokopiergerät dürfte der Dokumentendiebstahl seine Arbeit erheblich erleichtert haben. Der Zeitpunkt der Verkäufe stützt diese Interpretation. Die in Autonomy and Communal Jewish Debts during the French Revolution of 1789 als »Documents« zitierte Sammlung erwarb das HUC etwa zur selben Zeit, als er das Werk veröffentlichte. Ebenso verkaufte er 1959 kurz nach Erscheinen seiner Studien über die Arbeit der AIU in den Vereinigten Staaten einige der darin verwendeten Materialien an Jacob Rader Marcus von den American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.50 Zudem tragen einige Dokumente Spuren von Szajkowskis Arbeit und sprechen dergestalt ebenfalls für die Theorie, dass zumindest manche der Diebstähle nicht nur aus Gewinninteresse erfolgten, sondern seine Forschung erleichtern sollten. Häufig schrieb Szajkowski Anmerkungen, Kalkulationen und Zahlen mit rotem und blauem Stift auf die Papiere, andere tragen sogar seinen jiddischen Namensstempel. Als er die Dokumente derart beschriftete, hatte er vermutlich nicht die Absicht, sie zu verkaufen. Zu einer Zeit, als es noch keine Fotokopierer – geschweige denn Digitalfotografie – gab, entwendete Szajkowski Dokumente, um seine Forschungsreisen im Ausland effizienter zu gestalten. Die Verkaufsphase folgte erst, als er die Materialien für seine Arbeit ausgewertet hatte. Dieses berufliche Motiv lässt sich vom finanziellen letztlich nicht trennen. Wie wir wissen, beklagte Szajkowski den Mangel an Ressourcen, die ihm für seine Arbeit zur Verfügung standen; in Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees bemerkte er zum Beispiel verbittert, dass »diese Arbeit die Kräfte eines Einzelnen weit übersteigt, insbesondere wenn sie ohne die finanzielle und moralische Unterstützung einer jüdischen Institution durchgeführt wird«.51 Szajkowski sah sich als ein Ein-Mann-Forschungsunternehmen, das erstmals die Fakten der jüdischen Geschichte bereitstellte. Doch anders als die großen Forschungsteams beispielsweise der Annales-Schule, denen er in den französischen Archiven persönlich begegnete und die gemeinsam daran arbeiteten, ausgehend von Archivmaterialien hochdetaillierte soziale und wirtschaftliche Studien zu erstellen, genoss Szajkowski kaum institutionelle Unterstützung. Dennoch setzte er sich als ein Forscher, der alles durch Daten aus den Archiven zu belegen ver-

50 Zosa Szajkowski, The Attitude of American Jews to East European Jewish Immigration (1881–1893), in: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 (1951), H. 3, 221–280; ders., Emigration to America or Reconstruction in Europe, in: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 42 (1952), H. 2, 157–188. 51 Ders., Agricultural Credit and Napoleon’s Anti-Jewish Decrees, 19.

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suchte, ehrgeizige Ziele. Der Verkauf gestohlener Dokumente diente der Finanzierung seiner Forschung.

Schluss Zosa Szajkowski hat die Geschichtsschreibung über das französische Judentum bis heute vermutlich stärker geprägt als jeder andere Wissenschaftler. Er verfasste zahllose Studien, die die Geschichte der Judenemanzipation, der Assimilation und des Antisemitismus in Frankreich aus jedem nur denkbaren Blickwinkel zu entschlüsseln suchten. Seine Fragestellungen ergaben sich aus den Quellen, die er wie ein investigativer Journalist aufspürte. Was er barg, erweiterte die Perspektive von Historikern des Judentums auf die Emanzipation und die von ihr bewirkten gesellschaftlichen, politischen und ökonomischen Veränderungen, namentlich in den Schichten unterhalb der Elite. Besonders seit den 1930er Jahren nahm Szajkowski Dokumente unter die Lupe, die Aufschluss über das Leben nicht etwa bedeutender Rabbiner oder wohlhabender Gemeindevorstände, sondern ärmerer und weniger bekannter Juden geben konnten. Szajkowski mag die Kommunistische Partei verlassen haben, aber er blieb stets entschieden antielitär. Anders als sein Mentor Tscherikower lehnte er daher die Vorstellung einer französisch-jüdischen Gemeinschaft, die dieselben Erfahrungen teilte, durchweg ab und betonte stattdessen ihre Vielfältigkeit und ihre inneren Konflikte. Am bemerkenswertesten an Szajkowskis Geschichtsstudien ist freilich die bibliografische Herangehensweise an ihre Themen. Weitaus wichtiger als die Untermauerung einer bestimmten These war es für ihn, Quellen zu erschließen, und aus diesem Grund werden seine Untersuchungen heute von Vertretern jüdischer Studien an den Universitäten zumeist ausgiebig verwendet, auch wenn sie zugleich als amateurhaft abgetan werden. Vielleicht bedeutsamer noch als seine wissenschaftlichen Studien sind die Folgen gewesen, die Szajkowskis Tätigkeit als Archivalienhändler hatte. Sie hat dazu geführt, dass die für Forscher wichtigsten französischen Judaika heute zwischen zwei Arten von Institutionen aufgeteilt sind. In Frankreich befinden sich viele Papiere weiterhin in den öffentlichen Archiven, die sie ursprünglich gesammelt haben und wo sie, gruppiert nach Herkunft, zusammen mit Dokumenten anderer französischer Institutionen aufbewahrt werden. In Amerika und Israel hingegen werden Dokumente über das französische Judentum nach einem ganz anderen Prinzip geordnet und gewöhnlich neben »deutschen« oder »italienischen« Materialien als »französische« klassifiziert. Kurzum, während ihre Sortierung in französischen staatlichen Einrichtungen die Organisation des französischen Staates widerspiegelt, drückt

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sie in amerikanischen und israelischen Sammlungen die Geschichte von Juden in der Diaspora aus – man könnte von einer »Rückkehr der exilierten Dokumente« sprechen. Der Zugang für Historiker, die sich mit der französisch-jüdischen Vergangenheit befassen, wird somit durch Institutionen strukturiert, die den Ort von Juden im modernen Frankreich ganz unterschiedlich verstehen. Die einen machen Juden zu einem integralen, wenngleich mitunter unsichtbaren Bestandteil der französischen Geschichte, während die anderen Frankreich zu einem Schauplatz unter vielen in der translozierten Geschichte von Juden machen. Dergestalt spiegelt sich in der Organisation der Archive eine Schlüsselfrage dieses geschichtswissenschaftlichen Feldes wider: Bildet die Geschichte des französischen Judentums einen Teil der französischen oder der jüdischen Geschichte? Für diese spezifische archivarische Konstellation ist in hohem Maße Zosa Szajkowski verantwortlich. Und insofern haben sich – obgleich vieles, was dieser ungewöhnliche Gelehrte tat, eindeutig strafbar war – die Folgen seines Handelns schlussendlich als produktiv erwiesen, schufen sie doch die materiellen wie geistigen Grundlagen für die Forschung über die französisch-jüdische Geschichte, wie wir sie heute betreiben. Aus dem amerikanischen Englisch von Felix Kurz

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Dubnowiana

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YIVO’s “Old Friend and Teacher”: Simon Dubnow and his Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute The figure of Simon Dubnow loomed large throughout the history of the Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (Yiddish Scientific Institute), known by its acronym YIVO. As the first center devoted to scholarship in Yiddish and about the history and culture of Yiddish-speaking Jewry, YIVO drew extensively on Dubnow’s work as a historian as well as his theories of diaspora nationalism. In addition, Dubnow enjoyed close personal relationships with several of YIVO’s founders, who considered him both a friend and mentor. The institute’s leaders often expressed their admiration of Dubnow, referring to him with a mixture of reverence and affection. The editors of the second volume of YIVO’s Historishe shriftn (Historical Writings), which was dedicated to Dubnow, called him an “old friend and teacher, who is so intimately connected with the Yiddish Scientific Institute.”1 At other times he was described as “one of the builders”2 and “one of the pillars of YIVO.”3 His stature was such that Jacob Lestschinsky, the head of YIVO’s Economic-Statistical Section, argued that the 1929 YIVO conference should be postponed once Dubnow declined to attend since it was bound to fail without his participation.4 Dubnow reciprocated such sentiments towards what he referred to as “our institute,”5 lauding “its significance […] in the intellectual revival of our people.”6 Given such mutual praise, as well as the close professional and personal ties between the historian and the institute, one might well expect Dubnow to 1 2

3

4 5

6

Elias Tcherikower (ed.), Historishe shriftn [Historical Writings], vol. 2, Vilna 1937, xiv. RG 1.1, Records of YIVO (Vilna): Administration, Folder 20, Executive Office, YIVO to Simon Dubnow, 22 September 1930. All archival citations refer to the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. RG 1.3, Records of YIVO (Vilna): Aspirantur, Folder 4056, Fayerlekhe zitsung mitn onteyl fun prof. dubnov [Festive Meeting with Prof. Dubnow’s Participation], 24 April 1940. RG 82, Tcherikower Archive (YIVO, Vilna), Folder 2141, Jacob Lestschinsky to Elias Tcherikower, 1 September 1929 and 7 October 1929. RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Zalman Reisen and Zelig Kalmanovitch, 8 December 1935. Originals of all documents in this folder are located in the Lithuanian Central State Archives, Fond 287. Ibid., Simon Dubnow, Di historishe badaytung funem idishn visnshaftlekhn institut [The Historical Significance of the Yiddish Scientific Institute], 1929. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 477–507.

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have been a consistently enthusiastic participant in YIVO’s activities. Indeed, in 1934 the linguist and journalist Zalman Reisen, one of its leaders, described him as “one of the co-founders of YIVO, who always takes an active part in its work.”7 The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. The story of Dubnow’s relations with YIVO reflects his ambivalence about balancing commitments to scholarship and to communal work, both in the service of the Jewish people. It also illuminates the constraints facing diaspora nationalists – Dubnow’s intellectual heirs – as they set out to build a modern culture in the Yiddish language in interwar Eastern Europe.

Laying the Foundation for Yiddish Scholarship The importance of Dubnow’s career in laying the foundation for YIVO’s work can hardly be exaggerated. Elias Tcherikower, the head of the institute’s Historical Section, wrote that before Dubnow’s efforts, Yiddish scholarship lacked a “general plan for building, a central idea and living spirit.”8 Both Dubnow and YIVO considered preserving the record of Jewish culture to be a crucial first step before scholars could pursue analytical research. In 1891 Dubnow published a famous essay in the Russian journal Voskhod (Dawn), lamenting East European Jews’ ignorance of their own past and calling on them to collect historic documents. His appeal led numerous readers to send him valuable books and papers, some of which eventually made their way to the YIVO Archives.9 This initiative inspired YIVO’s own efforts to gather both historical and contemporary material as the first stage of its work. Such collecting was largely carried out by zamlers (collectors), men and women who worked on behalf of the institute in Yiddish-speaking communities throughout the world.10 Through the zamlers’ work, the folk – the 17 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 18 Tcherikower (ed.), Historishe shriftn, vol. 2, xi. 19 See Simon M. Dubnow, Ob izuchenii istorii russkikh evreev i ob uchrezhdenii russkoevreiskago istoricheskago obshchestva [On the Study of the History of the Russian Jews and on the Establishment of a Russian-Jewish Historical Society], in: Voskhod [Dawn] 4 (April–September 1891), no. 9, 1–91. A Hebrew version was published the following year. See Simon Dubnow, Nahpesah ve-nahkorah [Let Us Search and Investigate], in: Pardes 1 (1891), 221–242. On this material in the YIVO Archives, see Marek Web, Dubnov and Jewish Archives. An Introduction to his Papers at the YIVO Institute, in: Kristi Groberg/Avraham Greenbaum (eds.), A Missionary for History. Essays in Honor of Simon Dubnov, Minneapolis, Minn., 1998, 87–92. 10 On YIVO’s collecting work and the zamlers, see Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation, New York 2014, 72–82.

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masses of ordinary Jews – became active participants in building Yiddish culture. Dubnow’s essay led not only to individual action but to the creation of an institutional base for Jewish scholarship. In 1892 the Hevrah Mefitse Haskalah (Society for the Spread of Enlightenment, also known by its Russian acronym OPE) founded a Historic-Ethnographic Commission, which in 1908 became the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society of St. Petersburg.11 From 1909 to 1918, the society sponsored Evreiskaia starina (The Jewish Past), a journal of Russian Jewish history that Dubnow edited. Thus, Dubnow also paved the way for disseminating the fruits of Jewish research though academic publications, another central goal of YIVO’s activity. That research was itself deeply influenced by Dubnow’s towering contributions to the field of Jewish historiography. In the prospectus for the Yiddish translation of his World History of the Jewish People, YIVO leaders described Dubnow’s work as “new in spirit, synthesis, and methodology.” Unlike earlier scholars, they wrote, Dubnow did not view the Jews as a “historical mummy” or a “religious tribe” but as a “living nation […] S. Dubnow entirely secularizes Jewish history [and] sets it on a social base.”12 In contrast to the traditional focus on religious texts and great rabbinic scholars, both Dubnow and YIVO adopted a “social-economic” approach.13 This methodology stressed the experiences of average Jews rather than elites and everyday social conditions rather than intellectual achievements. It highlighted the agency of ordinary men and women as the fundamental actors of history, which in turn reinforced one of Dubnow’s core principles: the ongoing vitality of the Jewish people in the face of antisemitism and assimilation. The populist thrust of these ideas reflects the centrality of the folk for both Dubnow and YIVO. Their collection initiatives made ordinary Jews crucial to the creation of Jewish scholarship, while their research made the folk itself the subject of this scholarship. Finally, both wished their findings to be read far beyond the academy.14 Thus, just as YIVO planned books and journals intended for a wide audience, it described Dubnow’s World History as 11 On the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, see Mark W. Kiel, A Twice Lost Legacy. Ideology, Culture, and the Pursuit of Jewish Folklore in Russia until Stalinization, 1930– 1931 (unpublished PhD thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York 1991), 393–446; and Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, Bloomington, Ind., 2009, 229–260. 12 RG 1.1, Folder 510, Velt-geshikhte fun yidishn folk in tsen bend [World History of the Jewish People in Ten Volumes], 1938, 6. 13 RG 82, Folder 2388, M[aks] Anin, Yidishe masn [Jewish Masses]; Simon Dubnow, Der itstiker tsushtand fun der yidisher historiografye [The Current State of Jewish Historiography], in: Yivo bleter [YIVO Pages] 8 (December 1935), no. 4, 290. 14 On YIVO’s attitude towards the folk, see Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 5–8, 55–57, and passim. On its popular work, see ibid., 90–99.

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“a work that together with a purely scholarly character is also accessible to the broad circle of readers and will become a popular book in the true sense of the word.”15 By publishing Dubnow’s research as well as sponsoring its own, YIVO sought to fulfill Dubnow’s mandate of creating scholarship both “about the people and for the people.”16 Even as Dubnow’s commitment to the folk and his view of Jewish history as an ongoing narrative shaped his academic work, they also led to a deep engagement in contemporary issues. In practice this dual focus was not easy to maintain. Dubnow was often torn between the pull of his writing desk and the call to serve in the public arena, even as he stressed the boundary between scholarship and political ideology. In this respect, too, he served as a model for YIVO, as the institute sought to balance scholarly neutrality and communal relevance while avoiding overtly partisan stances.17 As Tcherikower put it, Dubnow’s work “connects the past with the problems of today,” thus blazing a path for younger scholars who were raised on his writing and “who feel closely connected to the national and social problems of modern Jewish life.”18 Thus as a role model, he continued, Dubnow was much more than an academic; he was also an organizer, teacher, political activist, and theoretician, driven “not so much by the urge of a researcher as by the passionate search for a new ideology.”19 This ideology was diaspora nationalism, which viewed Jews as a nation lacking a state and which fought for their rights as a minority group within the countries of Eastern Europe. Dubnow’s role as this movement’s leading thinker informed both the secular definition of Jewish peoplehood and the theories of Jewish history that underlay his academic work. Moreover, his principle that “the general Jewish national idea is based on historical consciousness”20 made scholarship – in particular historical scholarship – a cornerstone of Jewish identity in the diaspora. In the years after World War I, Dubnow’s proposals for government support of national minorities’ educational and cultural institutions were enshrined – albeit in a much diluted form – in the Minorities Treaties signed

15 RG 1.1, Folder 510, Velt-geshikhte fun yidishn folk in tsen bend, 1938, 5 (emphasis here and below in the original). 16 Cit. in Benjamin Nathans, On Russian-Jewish Historiography, in: Thomas Sanders (ed.), Historiography of Imperial Russia. The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, Armonk, N. Y., 1999, 415. 17 On this tension in YIVO’s work, see Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 99–104. 18 Tcherikower (ed.), Historishe shriftn, vol. 2, xiv. 19 Ibid., xiii. 20 Cit. in Isaiah Trunk, Historians of Russian Jewry, in: Jacob Frumkin/Gregor Aronson/ Alexis Goldenweiser, Russian Jewry (1860–1917), New York 1966, 467.

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by Poland and other countries of the region. In the interwar period, these provisions enabled YIVO’s founders to envision building a national culture in the Yiddish language in the absence of a state. Thus, while Dubnow’s historical methodology inspired YIVO’s scholarship, his political theories allowed YIVO to be seen as much more than a modest research center. Supporters described it as a national institution for a people in diaspora, what Zalman Reisen called “the intellectual ingathering of the exiles for the international Yiddish nation.”21 The bonds linking Dubnow to YIVO encompassed not only his public career as a scholar and political theorist but a personal dimension as well. Dubnow’s acquaintance with many of YIVO’s future leaders predated the founding of the institute by more than a decade. As early as 1908, he heard fervent defenses of Yiddish in speeches by Nokhem Shtif, the linguist and literary scholar who would later formulate the first detailed plan for a Yiddish academic institute. The two also worked together in the Folkspartey (People’s Party), a political party based on Dubnow’s diaspora nationalist principles.22 At the time of the Russian Revolution, Dubnow was living in St. Petersburg alongside several of the institute’s future leaders. These included Shtif; Zelig Kalmanovitch, a linguist who would become one of YIVO’s main administrators and the editor of many of its publications; and Max Weinreich, a multifaceted scholar who would become YIVO’s most important figure. Together with many of his fellow Jewish intellectuals, Dubnow eventually fled war and hunger in Russia and settled in Berlin in September 1922. There he supported a project to document the recent waves of pogroms in Ukraine, a successor to Dubnow’s own call of 1891. This effort was headed by Elias Tcherikower, the future head of YIVO’s Historical Section, with the participation of Shtif and Lestschinsky. Dubnow also knew Shtif and Kalmanovitch as the Yiddish translators of his World History of the Jewish People, work which they began as early as 1909 and continued in the 1920s.23 Dubnow recalled quarreling with Shtif, whom he characterized as “hot-headed” and too enamored of his own Yiddish style.24 By contrast, Lestschinsky and Tcherikower became some of his most frequent guests in Berlin, part of what Dubnow described as his “com21 Barikht fun der konferents fun dem yivo [Report of the YIVO Conference], Vilna 1930, 12. 22 Simon Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn [The Book of My Life], 3 vols., Buenos Aires 1962–1963, here vol. 2, 89,188, 244, and 247. 23 Zelig Kalmanovitch’s Yiddish translations of the World History appeared in an abridged 4-volume edition in 1909 and a 10-volume edition in 1920. Shtif translated several volumes while living in Berlin from 1922 to 1926 which appeared beginning in 1923. 24 Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, vol. 3, 26.

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pany of close friends.”25 The three men visited each other often, spent Jewish holidays together, and took vacations with their wives and children where, as Tcherikower put it, “we lived like one family.”26 Interestingly, both Lestschinsky and Tcherikower addressed the older Dubnow by the patronymic “Shimen Markovitsh,” while Weinreich usually used the more deferential “Herr Professor Dubnow.”

Dubnow’s Role in YIVO’s Work Given his longstanding relationships with these younger colleagues, as well as his central role in shaping the very idea of a Yiddish scholarly institute, YIVO’s founders looked to Dubnow as a key supporter of their work from the very start. When Shtif completed his memorandum “Vegn a yidishn akademishn institut” (On a Yiddish Academic Institute), which called for the creation of a body devoted to Yiddish scholarship, he could only afford to send a few copies to individuals who he felt would be sympathetic to his plan and whose help he considered crucial. One of these, not surprisingly, was his Berlin neighbor Dubnow. Dubnow responded promptly after receiving the document in February 1925 (fig. 1). Yet if his support in principle could not be doubted, he was less than optimistic or forthcoming with practical aid. “You are not crazy, God forbid,” he wrote to Shtif, “or ‘crazy’ in the positive sense of a ‘man of the spirit.’” A Yiddish research institute is certainly necessary, Dubnow continued – adding that he preferred the term “research” to “academic” –, but after holding a meeting or conference in Berlin, what would follow? “I am afraid that we will have a meeting and pass a few nice resolutions but nothing further will come of it. First one must find a wealthy man who will give several tens of thousands of dollars for the institute – we are, after all, a people of paupers and live from charity – and in the second and third year pray to God that he (the donor, that is to say) does not go bankrupt, as is the way with Jews, and along with himself bankrupt the institute.”

Dubnow concluded, “I see no material basis for such an undertaking.” He ended his letter by suggesting that Shtif approach younger colleagues to do the practical work of founding the new body he envisioned. “Keep me a mile from such projects,” he wrote, noting that he was busy with his own publica-

25 Ibid., 117. 26 Ibid., vol. 3, passim; RG 82, Folder 2140, Elias Tcherikower to Jacob Lestschinsky, 9 September 1928.

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tions. “Later, when something concrete comes of the thought, you can still get me to do some work.”27 Dubnow gave a similarly cautious response a few months later to an invitation to head the fledgling institute’s Historical Section. He agreed to endorse its work but protested that his full writing schedule precluded an active role: “But dear brothers, don’t draw me into the organizational work […] [T]aking upon myself the supervision of your ‘Historical Section’ is completely impossible for me. I can only promise you that when the ‘Writings of the Institute’ will be published, I will gladly send an article along with other writers. I believe that you will find suitable people for the work among our friends from the younger generation.”28

Dubnow’s cool response might be attributed to skepticism that the ambitious plans of the institute’s founders could be realized. Yet after YIVO had been operating for nearly a decade, Dubnow still hesitated when asked to lend his name to a new initiative, the Aspirantur training program for students.29 This ongoing reluctance to play a fuller role at the institute might seem surprising. But we should recall that at the time of YIVO’s founding in 1925, the 65-year-old Dubnow was already an eminent scholar. Moreover, just at this point many of his major publication projects were coming to fruition. From 1925 to 1929, the first full edition of his Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (World History of the Jewish People) was published in Berlin. In addition, his Toldot ha-Hasidut (History of Hasidism) first appeared in 1929 to 1931 in Tel Aviv and his three-volume memoir Kniga zhizni (The Book of My Life) was published from 1934 to 1940 in Riga. Translations of his books were also appearing in various languages. Thus, for Dubnow YIVO’s founding and development coincided with an intense period of composing, editing, and translating his most important works. It is perhaps understandable that he did not wish to take time away from these tasks to shoulder administrative duties that he felt should fall to younger scholars. In fact, over the years the bulk of Dubnow’s contacts with YIVO involved his publications. As promised, Dubnow did become a frequent contributor to YIVO’s journals, while YIVO became the publisher of the Yiddish editions of many of his works. It published his Geshikhte fun khasidizm (History of Hasidism) in 1931 and 1933 in Kalmanovitch’s translation, just as the books appeared for the first time in Hebrew. In 1931 the Kultur-lige (Culture League) published the first volume of a Yiddish translation of the 27 RG 82, Folder 2369, Simon Dubnow to Nokhem Shtif, 18 February 1925. 28 RG 82, Folder 2382, Simon Dubnow to Nokhem Shtif, 28 August 1925; RG 82, Folder 2390, Letter of Organizational Committee, 29 October 1925. 29 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Executive Office, YIVO, 20 February 1934.

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Veltgeshikhte fun yidishn folk (World History of the Jewish People), but by 1933 Dubnow complained that it would not continue because of the economic crisis in Poland.30 In 1937 YIVO took over the project and completed the ten- volume set between 1938 and 1940.31 For his part, Dubnow expressed satisfaction at seeing his work in what he elsewhere termed “the YIVO language”32 after so many years of effort. As a token of support for the institute, he donated his honoraria for both publications back to YIVO.33 Dubnow also inspired new works of scholarship such as the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia), a compendium of world knowledge in Yiddish that was conceived in 1930 in honor of his 70th birthday.34 Also planned as a tribute on this occasion was the second volume of the Historical Section’s Shriftn (Writings), but it was delayed until his 75th birthday and only finally appeared in 1937.35 In addition to a broad range of historical articles, this collection contained studies of Dubnow’s genealogy and material from his personal archive. Dubnow praised the 700-page publication as “the Eiffel Tower of our scholarly literature.” He also remarked with a note of competitiveness that “our book has a great deal more true scholarship” than a similar Hebrew volume he had just received from Jerusalem.36 Although Dubnow declined to lead YIVO’s Historical Section, he did participate as a member and even hosted meetings in his Berlin apartment.37 Early on he proposed a four-volume collection of historical documents that could be used as a textbook in Yiddish schools as well as a tool for selfstudy.38 This project was in keeping with YIVO’s and Dubnow’s goal of pro30 RG 107, Collection of Letters, Simon Dubnow to Elias Tcherikower, 22 July 1933. 31 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934; RG 1.1, Folder 20, Dubnow to Executive Office, YIVO, 15 April 1937. Some volumes had been published previously. 32 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Max Weinreich, 16 July 1934. 33 RG 1.1, Folder 20, Executive Office, YIVO to Simon Dubnow, 5 October 1930; RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 34 On this project, see Barry Trachtenberg, Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the Holocaust, and the Changing Mission of Yiddish Scholarship, in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5 (November 2006), no. 3, 285–300; and idem, Jewish Universalism, the Yiddish Encyclopedia, and the Nazi Rise to Power, in: Gennady Estraikh/Mikhail Krutikov (eds.), Yiddish in Weimar Berlin. At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, London 2010, 195–214. 35 Sophie [Sophia] Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov. Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, Bloomington, Ind., 1991, 225. 36 RG 1.1, Folder 20, Simon Dubnow to YIVO, 3 June 1937. The Hebrew volume to which Dubnow referred is the Sefer Klausner (Tel Aviv 1937). 37 RG 82, Folder 2238, Minutes of meeting of the Historical Section, 10 November 1929; and RG 82, Folder 2239, Minutes of meeting of the Historical Section, 14 December [1929]. 38 RG 82, Folder 2238, A visnshaftlekhe historishe khrestomatye [A Scholarly Historical Chrestomathy].

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ducing work accessible to ordinary Jews, yet like many of the institute’s plans for popular publications, it was never realized.39 Dubnow also remained involved in the institute’s overall affairs. In 1928 Weinreich, Tcherikower, and Lestschinsky paid a visit to Dubnow’s home in Berlin to discuss YIVO’s activities and efforts to raise money for its new Vilna headquarters.40 When the Building Committee began fundraising, Dubnow agreed to take charge of soliciting donations in the German capital.41 As he suspected in 1925, the institute never did find the rich man who would underwrite its work. He noted a decade later that its woes continued even after it was well established. He lamented, “Our institute is now so famous throughout the world, but fame doesn’t lead to wealth – the poverty remains. Where can one find a Jewish Carnegie or a Rockefeller for our YIVO?”42 Despite its ongoing financial struggles, YIVO survived the economic collapse of the early 1930s and even expanded its work in the following years. One sign of its growth was the creation of its long planned educational division, the Aspirantur. As noted above, in 1934 Dubnow’s initial reaction to the plan for this project was cool. Before it could go forward, he argued, it needed to be more fully developed. Would the Aspirantur offer the equivalent of graduate classes or internships in the YIVO collections? “I could give a favorable answer to the proposal laid out in your letter dated 15 February if only the plan for the Aspirantur were clear to me. However, I do not find enough clarity in the communiqué of the Central Board. Preparing young scholars and researchers is certainly YIVO’s most important task, but how this task should be realized is the essential question. Will you create special seminars led by experts, or just give young people the opportunity to work in your archives and library?”

Writing that “I cannot give you advice from far away,” Dubnow nevertheless advised waiting to launch the initiative until there was a “concrete plan,” all the while reaffirming his support in principle.43 Six months later, Dubnow criticized the scope of the Aspirantur as too narrow, arguing that “we must clearly state: the end goal is a hoykhshul (col-

39 Several such works were realized in the late 1930s. Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 154–163. 40 Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, vol. 3, 86. 41 RG 1.1, Folder 7, Minutes of meeting of the Central Board, 6 November 1928; RG 82, Folder 2219, Di bashlosn fun der baratung [The Decisions Taken at the Meeting], 15–16 October 1928. 42 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Zalman Reisen and Zelig Kalmanovitch, 8 December 1935. 43 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Executive Office, YIVO, 20 February 1934; RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934.

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lege) for Yiddish scholarship at YIVO.”44 This was the term YIVO leaders used for the teaching program they envisioned that would serve as the equivalent of a Yiddish university, albeit on a modest scale. Dubnow proposed beginning with a series of classes on various historical periods and fields of study. He offered to come to Vilna for a month or two to lead one of the “special seminars under the direction of experts” that he had earlier proposed, a promise that Reisen described as “laying the cornerstone of the Aspirantur.”45 However, while Dubnow occasionally offered students advice and encouragement,46 he never did fulfill his pledge to make an extended visit to YIVO.

The Move to Riga and Visits to Vilna Nevertheless, in the mid- and late 1930s, Dubnow’s ties to YIVO grew closer. This change was sparked by Dubnow’s move from Berlin in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power. He settled in Kaiserwald (Latvian Mežaparks) on the outskirts of Riga, relatively close to YIVO’s Vilna headquarters. Yet he soon began speaking of a move to Vilna itself, a possibility he considered for the remainder of his life. His ambivalence about remaining in Latvia was likely due to a rightwing coup in 1934 that led to the curtailment of Jewish cultural, political, and economic activity, as well as a sense of isolation following the death of his wife Ida early that year.47 At the same time, the attraction of Vilna was largely due to the presence of the institute. He described the advantages of the city to the writer Daniel Charney: “Living is cheap there, there is a good environment although a tragic one, a YIVO. A little bit of press […] for the time being – the remnants of freedom of the press. Perhaps I will also be fated to settle in Vilna, but I will certainly visit there every year […].”48

44 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 45 RG 339, Papers of Jacob Lestschinsky, Folder 16, Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934 (for this letter, see also RG 87, Papers of Simon Dubnow, Folder 1040); RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 46 RG 87, Folder 1040, Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934; RG 1.1, Folder 20, Simon Dubnow to YIVO, 28 June 1937; RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, YIVO to Simon Dubnow, 17 July 1940. 47 On Latvian Jewry in this period, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars, Bloomington, Ind., 1987, 252 f. On the death of Ida Dubnow, see Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov, 213–126. 48 RG 87, Folder 1039, Simon Dubnow to Daniel Charney, Erev yom kiper 5695 [18 September 1934].

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Wishing to assess conditions in Poland and finally see YIVO firsthand, in August 1934 Dubnow paid his first visit to Vilna in nearly thirty years. As he wrote to Weinreich, he planned “to converse with you about our business and to get to know our institute.”49 In welcoming Dubnow to YIVO, Reisen expressed satisfaction that “the distinguished guest has the chance to see with his own eyes the institute and its work.”50 As with many other visitors in this period, Dubnow noted Vilna’s vibrant cultural life despite dire economic conditions, especially in the field of education. Dubnow summed up his impressions in a letter to Lestschinsky (fig. 2–3): “In general I am happy with my trip to Poland: I saw not only family and old friends but also observed a world that I left 28 years ago (when I moved from Vilna to Saint Petersburg). Of course, I saw more ‘society’ than common people. Enough troubles and worries, but also activity, readiness for struggle, often self-sacrifice (as in the school movement). In Vilna I visited almost all the schools of all types and saw how, amidst terrible poverty, they drag the little children out of the mud and transform them into civilized human beings.”51

His reaction to what he saw at YIVO, however, was mixed. He expressed both support for and reservations about the Aspirantur. He criticized YIVO’s World Convention planned for 1935 as “too grandiose” and poorly timed.52 Moreover, at a meeting of the Executive Office, he reported asking local activists why other Vilna cultural institutions, such as the An-sky Museum and the Strashun Library, did not merge with YIVO.53 Dubnow reported that they had blamed “the one-sided, partisan attitude of the YIVO board, where anti-Zionism and anti-Hebraism reign.” Dubnow stressed that “neutrality in social questions is after all the holiest principle of scholarship.” While he knew that YIVO did adhere to this principle, he argued, it needed to do more to show opponents that their charges were unfounded. Dubnow later wrote to Lestschinsky: “YIVO is also an island of culture in a sea of troubles, but in Vilna it does not have the good reputation that it has everywhere else: it is considered a partisan institution, and I raised the question of how to attract support from all directions so that the institute

49 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Max Weinreich, 16 July 1934. 50 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 51 RG 339, Folder 16, Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934. 52 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 53 On the An-sky Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society, known colloquially as the An-sky Museum, see Cecile E. Kuznitz, An-Sky’s Legacy. The Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture, in: Gabriella Safran/Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), The Worlds of S. An-sky. A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, Stanford, Calif., 2006, 320–345.

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would become an institution of the people in the diaspora like the ‘faithful house’ in the Land of Israel.”54

For their part the YIVO leaders in attendance explained that “fanatical or biased persons among the Vilna activists always sought to slander the institute” by spreading such groundless accusations, thus preventing YIVO from broadening its base of support.55 In fact, charges of partisanship had dodged the institute from its earliest days. Zionists and Orthodox Jews complained of its supposed Yiddishist, secularist outlook, even as members of leftwing political parties pressed it to embrace socialism. Such conflicts were more pronounced in the highly politicized environment of Warsaw than in Vilna. Moreover, they intensified in the mid-1930s, as the Depression and the rise of fascism led to growing polarization within Jewish society. In response, YIVO leaders only reaffirmed their commitment to Dubnow’s principle of objective scholarship.56 Living in Berlin until 1933 and a quiet Riga suburb thereafter, Dubnow was at a remove from the ideological conflicts engulfing East European Jewry. This perhaps explains his surprise at their intensity and the extent to which they impinged on YIVO’s work. Dubnow’s experiences during his visit led him to reconsider making his home in Vilna: “As for moving to Poland permanently, that is something I’ll have to ponder much more. This would alter my entire plan for the last phase of my life, which I want to devote to quiet introspection.”57 At the end of the year he was still undecided, writing to colleagues that he would delay a decision until the following spring or summer. He also considered Warsaw, where his daughter Sophia Dubnow-Erlich resided with her husband Henryk Erlich, a leader of the socialist diaspora nationalist Jewish Labor Bund, and two sons.58 In January 1935, he was still weighing his options: “And yet a center must be created in Vilna, primarily around YIVO. […] Vilna is, after all, the last chance to avoid boiling in the Warsaw cauldron. True, all around there is

54 RG 339, Folder 16, Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934. The phrase bayis ne’eman (faithful house) is used to refer to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, but here apparently refers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 55 RG 82, Folder 2220, Protocol 159, Meeting of the Executive Office, 23 August 1934. 56 On these tensions in YIVO’s work, see Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 99–109. On their escalation in the mid- and late 1930s, see ibid., 142 f. and 146– 149. 57 RG 339, Folder 16, Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934. 58 Simon Dubnow to Yehoshua Khana Ravnitzky, 5 December 1934, in: Simon Dubnow in Memoriam, Essays [on Dubnow by Various Authors] and Letters, ed. by Simon Rawidowicz, London/Jerusalem/Waltham, Mass., 1954, 321 f.; Simon Dubnow to Yosef Meisl, 26 November 1934, in: ibid., 371 f.

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bitter need, but one can still find a quiet corner. Life is cheap, there are enough friends, and more idealism than in other cities. […] I am still wavering between Otwock and Vilna, between my daughter’s family and the YIVO family.”59

Dubnow enjoyed taking walks among nature and sought a peaceful working environment. Thus it is not surprising that he mentioned the resort town of Otwock outside of Warsaw as a possible destination rather than the bustling capital itself. Similarly, in Vilna Dubnow eschewed the picturesque yet crowded and dilapidated Jewish quarter. Instead, he sought “a warm little corner in that Vilna that is far from Yatkever Street [in the Jewish quarter] and is surrounded by the most beautiful landscapes […].”60 He inquired whether he could find “good European apartments” in the wooded area of Zakret to the west of the city center.61 Yet in March 1935, he wrote that he had given up his plan to move to Poland.62 Discouraged by the rancor he had observed in Vilna and perhaps wary of being drawn too much into YIVO’s day-to-day activities, he chose to remain in the leafy Riga suburb of Kaiserwald where he could pursue his writing in relative tranquility.63 Dubnow’s impressions of the contentious atmosphere around YIVO were confirmed when he returned in August 1935 to participate in the institute’s World Convention. With the growing threat of fascism and the formation of the Popular Front earlier that year, leftwing delegates became ever more vocal in their calls for YIVO to become politically engaged and to embrace what the Bundist Jacob Patt called “the shkhine [divine light] of socialism.”64 Dubnow used his two speeches at the convention to reaffirm the core principles behind his – and the institute’s – work. At the festive opening session, “the full-packed room greeted S. Dubnow with great and prolonged ovations.” He began his address by noting the political, economic, and moral crisis unfolding in Europe. In such dire times, he asserted, “when social science is falsified for partisan dogmatics and partisan dictatorship […] our duty is to raise up the flag of honest pure scholarship […].” After all, he continued, one does not stop studying geology during an earthquake.65 Noting that the Hebrew University was also then celebrating its tenth anniversary, Dubnow described a “cultural dualism” that embraced work in both Hebrew 59 RG 87, Folder 1039, Simon Dubnow to Daniel Charney, 27 January 1935 (emphasis underlined in the original). 60 Ibid., Simon Dubnow to Daniel and Khaye [Charney], 3 January 1935. 61 Ibid., Simon Dubnow to Daniel Charney, 27 January 1935. 62 Ibid., Simon Dubnow to Daniel Charney, 12 March 1935. 63 Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov, 216. 64 Der alveltlekher tsuzamenfor fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut [The World Convention of the Yiddish Scientific Institute], Vilna 1936, 121. 65 Ibid., 14.

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and Yiddish, carried out in both “the Jerusalem of the Land of Israel” and “the Jerusalem of the diaspora.” Such a pluralistic dynamic, he continued, had characterized Jewish society since ancient times.66 In a separate talk Dubnow traced the development of Jewish historiography from its roots to the current “social and social-economic” approach that treated the Jewish people as a “living nation.”67 He compared recent Zionist scholarship, intended only for specialists, with YIVO’s publications “for every thinking person who is interested in contemporary and historical problems.”68 Yet while he reiterated the importance of work for a broad audience, he also stressed the boundary between communal engagement and political advocacy. He praised the research of some younger historians associated with YIVO such as Emanuel Ringelblum and Philip Friedman, but explicitly rejected the Marxist approach of historical materialism. The goal of scholarly inquiry, he again emphasized, must be to depict events “how they truly were […] not to create puppets for this or that ideology a priori. The ideology must be the a posteriori result of historical research […].”69 At the conference and elsewhere, YIVO leaders including Weinreich, Kalmanovitch, and Lestschinsky reiterated their support for Dubnow’s convictions. Yet such pronouncements did little to convince his critics, almost all of whom, not coincidentally, hailed from Warsaw. The Marxist historian Raphael Mahler insisted that all scholarship inevitably bore the imprint of class. And after Dubnow spoke of “cultural dualism,” the school activist Shloyme Mendelsohn stated that “today is such a time when dualism is our great enemy.”70 Meanwhile, as socialists opposed him from the left, his close colleagues and protégés Tcherikower and Kalmanovitch were questioning Dubnow’s continued faith in secularism and liberal democracy.71 While events at YIVO revealed the divisions within Jewish society, Dubnow also had a disturbing experience with local antisemitism. Following the convention, together with Daniel Charney, the artist Marc Chagall and his wife Bella, and others he visited a children’s home outside Vilna run by the public health organization TOZ. During a ferry ride they encountered a

66 Ibid., 15. Contrast these statements with a recent scholar’s conclusion that throughout his life Dubnow “continued to portray Diaspora nationalism and Zionism as a dichotomous choice.” Simon Rabinovitch, The Dawn of a New Diaspora. Simon Dubnov’s Autonomism, from St. Petersburg to Berlin, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 50 (2005), 267– 288, here 286. 67 Dubnow, Der itstiker tsushtand fun der yidisher historiografye, 290. 68 Ibid., 293. 69 Ibid., 293 f. 70 Der alveltlekher tsuzamenfor fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut, 91. 71 Joshua M. Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation. The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Cambridge, Mass., 2013, 201–218.

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group of students who harassed the Jewish passengers and forced them to disembark. This incident further disillusioned Dubnow about conditions in Poland.72 He wrote to the scholar Simon Rawidowicz, “This summer I was in Vilna, which is the opposite of a restful place; the noise of political parties and their quarrels, dreadful material poverty and spiritual sickness. In such an environment I could not establish my residence unless my daughter and her family forcefully demanded it of me.”

Instead, he concluded, he had “decided to remain in the quiet wooded area” of his home on the outskirts of Riga.73

The Years of World War II Dubnow’s plans for a tranquil old age were shattered with the outbreak of World War II. The historian in Riga and the institute in Vilna found their fates intertwined, yet both were temporarily shielded from the war’s full impact. Soviet troops entered Vilna on 19 September 1939 and turned the city over to Lithuanian authorities before withdrawing a month later. Both Latvia and Lithuania then remained independent until June 1940, creating a seeming oasis amidst the international crisis. With the outbreak of hostilities, friends admonished Dubnow to leave for America, but he felt that the officially neutral Baltic countries would provide a safe haven. Although he was able to secure an American visa, Dubnow refused offers to go to the United States as well as to Palestine.74 Just as he decided to remain in Riga, Dubnow expressed the hope that YIVO would not abandon Vilna. He reacted to a report that Weinreich planned to visit the United States: “That’s good, but he must not go in order to settle down there. We must fight as long as possible. We must not give up our last scholarly position in Eastern Europe,” Dubnow wrote to Kalmanovitch in January 1940. “YIVO must remain a fortress for free critical scholarship.” He urged the institute to work to legitimate itself under the new regime by adding legal experts with a good knowledge of Lithuanian to its management, to resist pressure from Orthodox leaders “to return Vilna to

72 Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov, 223. 73 Simon Dubnow to Simon Rawidowicz, 8 October 1935, in: Simon Dubnow in Memoriam, 446. 74 RG 1.1, Folder 641, Simon Dubnow to Zelig Kalmanovitch, 30 January 1940; RG 87, Folder 1040, Simon Dubnow to Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, published in: Yidisher kemfer [Jewish Fighter], (New York), 16 February 1940 (copy).

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the eighteenth century,” and to make use of the refugee intellectuals who had arrived from Poland.75 Among these refugees were his daughter Sophia Dubnow-Erlich and her sons Victor and Alexander Erlich, who had fled Warsaw at the outbreak of the war. Dubnow’s grandsons enrolled as students at YIVO while the family sought news of Henryk Erlich, who had been arrested by the Soviets. Dubnow spoke again at this time of moving to Lithuania: “I still think about settling in Vilna, although I understand that there are many quieter places for me in the world (apart from America I have been invited to go to the Land of Israel).”76 The presence of his family was certainly one attraction. The other, of course, was the presence of YIVO as he expressed “the hope that in Vilna I could be of help in restoring the institute.”77 According to his daughter, “Gradually Lithuania began to assume the character of the promised land in Dubnov’s imagination, a land where the fulfillment of his secret wishes awaited – a family circle, association with kindred spirits, permanent work at YIVO.”78 As he wrote shortly after the start of the war, “The only ray of light in the darkness is Lithuanian Vilna.”79 In early 1940 he even encouraged friends abroad to settle in the city.80 He wrote to Daniel Charney, “Why wouldn’t it be our fate to meet again in Lithuanian Vilna? Of course America is quieter, but we have no right to abandon the Old World as long as the danger is distant and we can perhaps avoid it entirely. I share with you the hope that we will all still return to the granny Jerusalem of Lithuania.”81

He noted in a letter to Tcherikower that his own plans were linked to the institute’s fate: “If it is not calm in Vilna and they drag YIVO to America, I’ll settle in Kaunas in June or July – a different temptation.”82 Yet he clearly leaned towards the former city, hoping optimistically for the continuation of YIVO’s work there. He explained his decision to decline an American visa by stating his intention of “moving to Vilna in order to help with the restoration of our Yiddish Scientific Institute, which has suffered badly from the

75 RG 1.1, Folder 641, Simon Dubnow to Zelig Kalmanovitch, 30 January 1940. His disparaging reference to Orthodox Jews was likely based on his experiences in Latvia, where the Orthodox political party Agudas Israel obtained a virtual monopoly on Jewish life following the 1934 coup. 76 Ibid. 77 Simon Dubnow to Elias Tcherikower, 18 December 1939, cit. in Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov, 238. 78 Ibid., 239. 79 Simon Dubnow to Aron Steinberg, cit. in ibid., 237. 80 RG 1.1, Folder 641, Simon Dubnow to Zelig Kalmanovitch, 30 January 1940. 81 RG 87, Folder 1039, Simon Dubnow to Daniel Charney, 12 February 1940. 82 RG 107, Simon Dubnow to Elias Tcherikower, 13 March 1940.

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war, especially from the destruction of Poland. I propose to do this in the coming spring, when Vilna will be a bit quieter.”83 Still Dubnow wavered. In April 1940 he visited both Lithuanian cities in order to visit his family and assess his options.84 At YIVO he attended the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the death of the classical Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. He also took part in a meeting of the Aspirantur where he offered students advice on their research topics. He told those assembled, “It gives me great joy, at a time when the world is being destroyed, to come to a corner where a world is being born. Scholarship creates light in a dark world.”85 In May Dubnow was still vacillating between Vilna and Kaunas.86 Yet the point was soon rendered moot as the Russian army invaded the Baltics in June 1940. Now both he and YIVO found themselves under Soviet rule.87 The following month he sent a carefully worded letter to Kalmanovitch, YIVO’s only remaining pre-war leader in Vilna now that Reisen had been arrested and Weinreich had reached New York. First of all, he asked that honoraria owed to him be paid to his daughter, adding that he hoped this request would be honored by “new colleagues” even “if changes took place in YIVO’s management.” He wrote of his desire to see the latest volume of his World History appear in print. “After all,” he noted, “my historical work is cited even in Soviet college history textbooks.” He continued: “I very much want to know what is happening at YIVO. As a member of the honorary presidium of the Curatorium, I can’t imagine that the new management would greatly change the work of our institute, which fulfills the requirements of the most modern scholarship. The research work and the Aspirantur must continue in Vilna, our old intellectual center with its youth greatly thirsting for knowledge. Convey the content of my letter to our colleagues and write me about everything of interest to us, the founders of YIVO.”88

Yet there seems to have been a break in communication after this point. In March 1941, Dubnow sent a letter to Weinreich complaining that he had 83 84 85 86

RG 87, Folder 1040, Simon Dubnow to Jewish National Workers’ Alliance. RG 107, Simon Dubnow to Elias Tcherikower, 13 March 1940. RG 1.3, Folder 4056, Fayerlekhe zitsung mitn onteyl fun prof. dubnov, 25 April 1940. Simon Dubnow to Yehoshua Khana Ravnitzky, 20 May 1940, in: Simon Dubnow in Memoriam, 330 f. 87 Sophia Dubnow-Erlich writes that his desire to move to Vilna was thwarted by a sealed border between the two new Soviet Republics. Yet it seems more likely that as a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks Dubnow thought it best to remain quietly in the Riga suburbs, or that in the end the aged historian simply found the prospect of a move too daunting. Idem, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov, 242. I thank David E. Fishman for his thoughts on this point. 88 RG 1.1, Lithuanian addendum, Folder 15, Simon Dubnow to Zelig Kalmanovitch, 17 July 1940.

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received no news in ten months (fig. 4). By that time Weinreich was carrying on YIVO’s scholarly work as head of its New York office. Dubnow now recognized that “the YIVO in America […] has changed from merely a branch to the central headquarters.” He asked about Sophia and her sons, about Weinreich’s own family, and about mutual friends such as the Tcherikowers. “We wonder why they don’t write to us here when letters often arrive from America, albeit with a delay. For us, cut off from family and friends in the war-torn lands, it would simply be a joy.”89 Weinreich replied promptly, assuring Dubnow that he had not been forgotten, that colleagues in New York often mentioned his name. He informed the elderly historian that his family was in Japan awaiting transit across the Pacific. He described the whereabouts of various acquaintances as well as his own life in the United States. And he wrote that Yiddish scholarship was continuing in America, that a new volume of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye created in Dubnow’s honor had just been published. Weinreich concluded, “All in all it is perhaps not so joyful here – where can one find joy these days – but there are possibilities for scholarly work, and there are also people with whom to work. We often think, if our grandfather Reb Shimen [Dubnow] were here with us, our mood would be much different. What do you think, could we convince him to get on his way? In the end it is difficult to get oneself up; then one moves of one’s own accord. And there’s no worry about a visa; after all there was one once already and we can certainly easily work it out.”90

But this was not to be. Dubnow never received Weinreich’s reply. By July 1941 the Nazis occupied both Lithuania and Latvia. By the end of the year, Dubnow had been murdered in the Riga Ghetto and the Nazis were making plans to liquidate the YIVO collections in Vilna.

Conclusion In myriad ways Dubnow’s career inspired YIVO’s leaders and supporters as they sought to develop Yiddish scholarship in interwar Eastern Europe. For his part, Dubnow spoke warmly of YIVO and of his desire to assist in its work. After he left Berlin in 1933, he often asserted his intention to spend time at the institute and perhaps to settle near its Vilna headquarters. Yet many of Dubnow’s promises went unfulfilled, and in the end he made only three brief visits to see YIVO’s activities firsthand. 89 RG 107, Simon Dubnow to Max Weinreich, 5 March 1941 (for this letter, see also RG 87, Folder 1038). 90 RG 107, Max Weinreich to Simon Dubnow, 6 April 1941.

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Throughout his life, Dubnow combined his scholarship with an ongoing engagement in social and political issues. He bequeathed this dual mission to YIVO, as both the individual and the institution always struggled to balance these competing demands. Yet it was this very tension that held Dubnow back from a more active role at the institute. Anxious to complete the writing projects to which he planned to devote the last stage of his life, Dubnow resisted the temptation of greater proximity to YIVO. It seems he feared being drawn increasingly away from his study and into its day-to-day work. Dubnow advocated building a modern, secular culture as a foundation of Jewish identity in the diaspora. In the interwar period, diaspora nationalists often viewed the array of Yiddish language institutions in Vilna, with YIVO at its apex, as the most complete fulfillment of Dubnow’s vision.91 Yet on his visits to the city the scholar came face to face with a difficult truth. By the mid-1930s, worsening political and economic conditions and the resultant polarization of Jewish life made such a vision increasingly difficult to sustain. Dismayed by what he saw at YIVO, despite his concern for the institute Dubnow was perhaps reluctant to confront on a daily basis the distance between current realities and his ideal of what diaspora nationalism could achieve. In the face of such rising tensions, Dubnow redoubled his insistence that academic work must not succumb to political pressures but remain apart from ideology. In this as in so much else, YIVO followed Dubnow’s lead, steadfastly defending this principle in the face of both internal and external criticism. In the end, the force of world events proved more than either could withstand. Until his death Dubnow maintained his commitment to Eastern Europe, even as YIVO relocated its center to New York and continued the work of Yiddish scholarship to which Simon Dubnow contributed so much.

91 On the image of Vilna and YIVO’s relationship to the city, see Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 135–139.

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Appendix Seven Letters of Simon Dubnow Concerning His Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute, Selected and Annotated by Cecile E. Kuznitz, and Transl. from the Yiddish by Vera Szabó Grünewald, 18 February 1925 (fig. 1) Dear Esteemed Colleague N. Shtif,1 Among piles of manuscripts and proofs I received today your “composition,” as you call your memorandum, and I read it immediately – what can I do if you have this effect on me? What can I say – you are not crazy, God forbid, or “crazy” in the positive sense of a “man of the spirit.” Such a research institute is necessary – this is what I would call it rather than an “academic institute” – but where, who and what? We can organize a meeting in Berlin, a convention – a bit more difficult but it certainly seems possible. But what then? I am afraid that we will have a meeting and pass a few nice resolutions but nothing further will come of it. First one must find a wealthy man who will give several tens of thousands of dollars for the institute – we are, after all, a people of paupers and live from charity – and in the second and third year pray to God that he (the donor, that is to say) does not go bankrupt, as is the way with Jews, and along with himself bankrupt the institute. I see no material basis for such an undertaking. But I can tell you now that I am absolutely the wrong one to consult. A liquidator cannot be an organizer, he might destroy things, discourage people. Keep me a mile from such projects. You should have a meeting with other younger colleagues who still have time for organizational tasks. Later, when something concrete comes of the thought, you can still get me to do some work. And here is the answer to your three questions. I have to end; it is very late, and there are piles of proofs and unsent manuscripts on my desk that must be sent tomorrow to the printing house; if not, there will be a hue and cry. Please forgive me. Best wishes and kind regards, S. Dubnow

1

Nokhem Shtif, a linguist and literary scholar, was the founder of YIVO as well as a Yiddish translator of Dubnow’s World History of the Jewish People.

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Fig. 1: Letter from Simon Dubnow to Nokhem Shtif, 18 February 1925. © Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (RG 82, Folder 2369).

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Prof. S. Dubnow Riga Riga, 20 February 1934 Meža prospect 68 Tel.: 36177. To the Executive Office of YIVO, Vilna Esteemed Friends, I could give a favorable answer to the proposal laid out in your letter dated 15 February if only the plan for the Aspirantur were clear to me. However, I do not find enough clarity in the communiqué of the Central Board. Preparing young scholars and researchers is certainly YIVO’s most important task, but how this task should be realized is the essential question. Will you create special seminars led by experts, or just give young people the opportunity to work in your archives and library? In such a small center as Vilna this question must be clarified before the new Aspirantur in honor of our celebrated Dr. Szabad2 is announced, because if, God forbid, the Aspirantur falls through, our reputation will suffer. I cannot give you advice from far away. I just want to see a clear plan, and then I will be ready and willing to give my name to this fine undertaking. Until things become concrete it might be better not to assign titles but write simply that S. Dubnow also promised his contribution. In any case, you have my promise in principle.3 Cordial regards and best wishes, S. Dubnow

2

3

Dr. Tsemakh Szabad was an important communal leader and benefactor of YIVO in Vilna as well as a highly respected medical doctor. The creation of the Aspirantur, which was named in his honor, was planned to coincide with Szabad’s 70th birthday. Emphasis underlined in the original.

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Riga, 26 September 1934 (fig. 2–3) My Dear Friends Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky]!4 Finally a letter from you, although still with a poste restante address. I had received your Rosh Hashanah card earlier and I am sending you back a pack of blessings for the New Year, above all that you stop being wanderers. Kashdan5 wrote me from Marienbad that you decided to settle down in Prague. You, however, have not mentioned anything about it, so you must still be hesitating. I can’t give you advice from far away. I don’t know your motives, but you must settle on some decision, because living like a nomad destroys the soul and makes you lose balance. You have heard a lot about me, as you write. In general I am happy with my trip to Poland: I saw not only family and old friends but also observed a world that I left 28 years ago (when I moved from Vilna to Saint Petersburg). Of course, I saw more “society” than common people. Enough troubles and worries, but also activity, readiness for struggle, often self-sacrifice (as in the school movement). In Vilna I visited almost all the schools of all types and saw how, amidst terrible poverty, they drag the little children out of the mud and transform them into civilized human beings. YIVO is also an island of culture in a sea of troubles, but in Vilna it does not have the good reputation that it has everywhere else: it is considered a partisan institution, and I raised the question of how to attract support from all directions so that the institute would become an institution of the people in the diaspora like the “faithful home”6 in the Land of Israel. I also suggested the creation of research seminars at the institute led by experts and I promised that I myself would come for a month or two every year and lead a historical seminar. My own plans are still unclear: for the winter I will definitely stay here in Kaiserwald, for now in my old apartment, just me and a maid; but maintaining a separate household is not worthwhile, and settling in the future Kazhdan guest house is also a risk. Will it really be established and kept up for a while? This winter I will probably stay in my apartment: I have to finish the second volume of my memoirs, and this can be done only in the quiet of Kaiserwald. As for moving to Poland permanently, that is something I’ll have to ponder much more. It would alter my entire plan for the last phase of my life, which I want to devote to quiet introspection.

4 5 6

The letter is to Jacob Lestschinsky, the head of YIVO’s Economic-Statistical Section, and his wife Leah. It is unclear who is meant here. The phrase bayis ne’eman (faithful house) is used to refer to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, but here apparently refers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Fig. 2–3: Simon Dubnow to Jacob and Leah [Lestschinsky], 26 September 1934. © Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (RG 339, Folder 16).

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True, not far from here things are not that quiet, either. The spirit of fascism is stronger by the day. The principle of “Latvia for the Latvians” is about to be realized. The education system is really a catastrophe: the new person overseeing Jewish school affairs at the Ministry of Education is a hard line Agudist.7 All the young teachers are being fired and replaced by yeshiva students with beard and peyes [sidelocks]. There is an outcry, and people come to me with their troubles. But it’s impossible to speak up here, because other than the Agudah oriented Haynt there is no other Jewish press. Our only hope to utter a free word is abroad, and it is our duty to do that. Well, let this be enough for today. Please answer this8 letter immediately just so I know you received it and it hasn’t gotten lost. And please, do write more clearly about your plans. I received from YIVO your book that was published at the time of the conference. It is a much needed work. There is trouble with my three-volume History: Steinberg9 stopped “and left off bearing.”10 Thus the work cannot be published in the German original, and the publishing houses are waiting for the translation in vain. Be well and cheerful both of you, but especially you, dear Leah, who sounded so sad in your postcard last summer. If it’s not too difficult, live with the hope that things will improve. Greetings to Taybele.11 Yours, with my full heart, S. Dubnow

27 January 1935 My Dear Friend, Daniel the Precious Man!12 I was deeply touched by your dear letter dated the 15th. You have a fine talent for memoir writing, and, although our writing methods differ, I am sure that your memoirs will also provide historical material regarding the characteristics of the period, just like mine. I say this before receiving your

17 18 19 10

The reference here is to the Orthodox political party Agudas Israel. Emphasis underlined in the original. The Russian and Yiddish writer Aron Steinberg translated several of Dubnow’s works. The phrase used here is a slightly altered quote from Genesis 29:32. It refers in the Bible to the matriarch Leah ceasing to bear children and here to Steinberg ceasing to work on Dubnow’s History. 11 This presumably refers to their daughter. 12 The letter is to Daniel Charney, the Yiddish poet and journalist. The Hebrew phrase ish khamudes (Precious Man) comes from the Book of Daniel (see Daniel 10:11) and is a common way of referring to the Biblical figure in rabbinic literature.

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book,13 which I hope will arrive shortly, because I remember the chapters you had published earlier. I cannot forget the images of the “conspiratorial” meetings that took place in the forest near a shtetl. That’s not belles lettres – that’s life itself! May you be healthy and at peace in Vilna so that you can write more. I think highly of your journalistic writing, too, in the BörneHeine genre, and it is quite regrettable that you don’t have a large newspaper in which to publish your pieces. Still, health is the most important thing; it upsets me that you lie in bed sick, probably on account of the cold winter. Now it is getting warmer, and you must recover your health. I am still affected by the death of our [Tsemakh] Szabad. It’s a pity that you did not have the opportunity to get to know well his fine, gentle character, his heart that was always filled with worry and concern for the troubles of the Jewish people and an urge to do something about it, to help, to organize. It is hard to imagine Vilna without Szabad. And yet a center must be created in Vilna,14 primarily around YIVO. I understand from your letter that you are close to settled, that you rented an apartment in the nicest area, near Zakret. But Rozenboym15 came to visit me recently and said that your [wife] Khayele wrote something about a change in your plans. Why? Vilna is, after all, the last chance to avoid boiling in the Warsaw cauldron. True, all around there is bitter need, but one can still find a quiet corner. Life is cheap, there are enough friends, and more idealism than in other cities. I look to you as my advance guard. I am still wavering between Otwock and Vilna, between my daughter’s family and the YIVO family. I am expecting from you accurate news about life in Vilna with all the details, and especially if I would be able to hide out there as I can here in Kaiserwald. I know that there is nothing of this sort over there, that you cannot live any farther out than Zakret, but are there any good European apartments there? I remember Pohulanka and Zakret from 28 years ago. Last summer, when I spent a week in Vilna, they didn’t even let me visit Zakret. Write me about how things are going with obtaining your formal right of residence in Poland. Are they making things difficult for you? Are you sure you will be able to extend your residence permit? It seems to me that Poland is more tolerant in this respect than other countries. You still have some remnants of freedom of the press, too, and we here envy “you” for that. But what will happen in the future? This cannot be predicted for many countries.

13 In the typed version of the letter that Charney donated to YIVO, he added in parentheses that the book referred to is Barg aroyf (Uphill), Warsaw: Literarishe bleter, 1935. 14 Emphasis underlined in the original. 15 It is unclear who is meant here.

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Here in my quiet and solitude I am now in the last phase of editing the second volume of my memoirs. In a few days I will send it to the printing press and then the process of proofreading will begin that will drag on for several months. I am not entirely alone, though. Friends come to visit me occasionally. In fact, some guests have just left: Levitas, Dr. Hertsfeld,16 and several ladies. Be well and cheerful, and give my regards to all our friends. Yours lovingly, S. Dubnow

30 January 1940 Mr. Z. Kalmanovitch17 YIVO, Vilna My Dear Friend, Thank you for your detailed letter dated the 15th of January regarding the situation of YIVO and other matters. Of course, America needs to be woken up, and not only North America. South America is even quieter, but it needs to respond. I heard that after coming to Vilna Weinreich planned to travel to America to organize a fundraising campaign. That’s good, but he must not go in order to settle down there. We must not give up our last scholarly position in Eastern Europe. We must fight until we have exhausted every possibility. I still think about settling in Vilna, although I understand that there are many quieter places for me in the world (apart from America I have been invited to go to the Land of Israel). I wrote to [Elias] Tcherikower18 that he, too, should come to Vilna as soon as the political situation becomes clearer. D[aniel] Charney wrote me that he was also dreaming of his old Vilna. We must safeguard YIVO by obtaining official papers as soon as possible and even broaden its charter. We must add to the management a couple of legal experts who know Lithuanian well. We have to utilize the newly arrived scholars for the Aspirantur and not let Rabbi Chayim Oyzer19 and his mob of rabbis with their yeshivas return Vilna to the 18th century. YIVO must remain a fortress of free critical scholarship.

16 It is unclear who is meant here. 17 The linguist Zelig Kalmanovitch was one of YIVO’s main administrators as well as the Yiddish translator of several of Dubnow’s works. 18 Elias Tcherikower was the head of the institute’s Historical Section. 19 The reference here is to Rabbi Chayim Oyzer Grodzienski, a prominent Orthodox leader and scholar who resided in Vilna.

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I hope to come to Vilna for a few days in April, take a look at the situation and then decide where to settle: in Vilna or Kaunas. You wrote me about last year’s financial report of the YIVO press. I would not raise this question at such a difficult time if not for my daughter [Sophia] Erlich and her family in Vilna. I have to support them and send them money from here, but this is very difficult from the administrative side. Therefore I ask you to tell the management that when the statement is ready, they should send it to me and pay my honoraria to my daughter in installments, a certain sum every month: both my honorarium for the World History and for the History of Hasidism in the editions of the last five or six years. My daughter’s address is: Stefańska 27 apt. 4 Be well, guard YIVO and write me. Yours, with cordial regards, S. Dubnow P.S.: What’s the news about Z. Reisen? Has anyone intervened in his case? As for [Henryk] Erlich, nothing has been achieved so far.20

Prof. S. Dubnow Riga Riga, 17 July 1940 Mr. Z. Kalmanovitch YIVO, Vilna My Dear Friend, I received your letter from [your] vacation a long time ago, and since I don’t know your personal address, I am writing to you via my daughter. In fact, the issue I am writing about concerns her. I would like to ask you, if possible, to pay my daughter the entire remaining balance of the honoraria that YIVO owes me according to the report of 1 January 1940 (1517 litas minus the amount she has received so far). If changes have taken place in YIVO’s management, please convey this to the new colleagues, too. I hope they will agree to pay my writer’s honoraria which they owe me for quite some time and which has been paid in installments. This is the source of income for my daughter’s large family in Vilna.

20 Both the linguist Zalman Reisen, one of YIVO’s founders, and the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich, the husband of Sophia Dubnow-Erlich, had been arrested by the Soviets shortly after the outbreak of World War II.

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I received volume six of my World History in your excellent translation. I hope that this important YIVO publication will be continued under any circumstance. After all, my historical work is cited even in Soviet college history textbooks. I very much want to know what is happening at YIVO. As a member of the honorary presidium of the Curatorium, I can’t imagine that the new management would greatly change the work of our institute, which fulfills the requirements of the most modern scholarship. The research work and the Aspirantur must continue in Vilna, our old intellectual center with its youth greatly thirsting for knowledge. Convey the content of my letter to our colleagues and write me about everything of interest to us, the founders of YIVO. With best regards, Yours, S. Dubnow

Riga, 5 March 1941 (fig. 4) My Dear Friend M. Weinreich,21 We got your American address from your sister and I am using it for two purposes: first, to get in touch with you and our displaced friends from whom I have not heard for almost 10 months now; and second, to ask you to locate my wandering family: Sonia22 and her children who left Moscow at the beginning of February and should have arrived in New York, via Vladivostok and Japan, sometime during the first half of March. Have your wife and son made it to you safely? And how are you yourself, and how are our friends from Paris? I don’t even know if they emigrated after the catastrophe. Where is [Elias] Tcherikower and his wife, and where are the others? Where is Dr. Steinberg from London, the younger one?23 We wonder why they don’t write to us here when letters often arrive from America, albeit with a delay. For us, cut off from family and friends in the war-torn lands, it would simply be a joy. Write me via your sister. She should give [the letter] to her neighbor Roznb[?] who visits me often. I am waiting, waiting. With cordial regards to you and your family, Yours, S. Dubnow

21 The scholar Max Weinreich was one of the leaders of YIVO. 22 Sophia Dubnow-Erlich and her family are meant here. 23 Aron Steinberg, mentioned above as a translator of Dubnow, was the younger brother of the political activist Isaac Nachman Steinberg.

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Fig. 4: Letter from Simon Dubnow to Max Weinreich, 5 March 1941. © Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (RG 107).

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Aus der Forschung

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Lutz Fiedler

Drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung – Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg und das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee Es war eine ganz und gar ungewöhnliche Verhaftung, als Angehörige des sowjetischen KGB in den frühen Morgenstunden des 14. Februar 1961 in die Moskauer Wohnung von Wassili Grossman eindrangen. In kaum mehr als einer Stunde konfiszierten sie alle auffindbaren Exemplare eines Buchmanuskripts, das der Schriftsteller erst wenige Monate zuvor der Literaturzeitschrift Znamya angeboten hatte. Selbst das Farbband der Schreibmaschine, mit der die vielen hundert Seiten verfasst waren, nahmen die Beamten an sich, um Grossman vollständig seines Lebenswerks zu berauben.1 Leben und Schicksal hatte er sein Opus magnum da bereits betitelt. Es war ein monumental angelegtes Epos über die Schlacht von Stalingrad, das den Schrecken des Zweiten Weltkriegs mit den politischen Verwerfungen eines ganzen Jahrhunderts verschmolz und dabei die Lebenserfahrungen seines Autors verarbeitete.2 Und es war ein häretisches Werk, das sowohl die stalinistischen Lager als auch den Holocaust als ultimativen Genozid an den europäischen Juden zum Thema machte.3 Grossmans Darstellung stand damit im deutlichen Kontrast zu den offiziellen Weltkriegsdarstellungen der Sowjetunion. Bereits Ende der 1950er Jahre hatte Boris Pasternak mit seinem preisgekrönten Roman Doktor Schiwago, einer nicht regimekonformen Geschichte von Oktoberrevolution und Bürgerkrieg, für Aufsehen und Auseinandersetzung gesorgt.4 Nun fürchtete die Sowjetmacht eine Umdeutung des »Großen Vaterländischen Kriegs«. Alles Bitten und Drängen von 1

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3

4

Simon Markish, A Russian Writer’s Jewish Fate, in: Commentary 81 (1986), H. 4, 39–47, hier 43; siehe Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, »Die Bürde der Klarsicht« (Nachwort), in: Wassili Grossman, Alles fließt, aus dem Russ. von Annelore Nitsche, mit einem Nachwort von Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Berlin 2010, 225–244, hier 225. Wassili Grossman, Leben und Schicksal. Roman, aus dem Russ. von Madeleine von Ballestrem, mit je einem Nachw. versehen von Jochen Hellbeck und Wladimir Woinowitsch, Berlin 2008. Siehe etwa Jürgen Zarusky, Shoah und Konzentrationslager in Vasilij Grossmans Roman »Leben und Schicksal«, in: Dachauer Hefte 22 (2006), 175–198; Ulrich M. Schmid, Historische Katastrophen und epische Tragik. Vasilij Grossmans narrative Bewältigung des Zweiten Weltkriegs, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 10 (2011), 315–328. John Garrard/Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, New York 1996, 257–259; Thun-Hohenstein, »Die Bürde der Klarsicht«, 232 f. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 511–531.

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Grossman blieb erfolglos. Zuletzt hatte er sogar an den sowjetischen Regierungschef Chruschtschow appelliert. »Ich bitte um Freiheit für mein Buch«, schrieb er verzweifelt.5 Die Publikation seines Romans jedoch sollte er nicht mehr erleben. Nur kurze Zeit nachdem Grossman im September 1964 starb, wollte Ilja Ehrenburg, einer der berühmtesten Autoren der Sowjetunion, mit der Veröffentlichung seiner aufsehenerregenden, von der Zensur beäugten Memoiren an das tragische Schicksal seines Freundes erinnern. Zwei ganze Kapitel widmete er seinem einstigen Wegbegleiter, in denen er von jener Zeit erzählte, die die beiden russischsprachigen Schriftsteller einst zusammengeführt hatte.6 Eine geteilte Geschichtserfahrung hatte sie als Juden miteinander verbunden. Beide waren sich zum ersten Mal begegnet, als sie inmitten des Zweiten Weltkriegs gemeinsam an der Veröffentlichung des sogenannten Schwarzbuchs gearbeitet hatten, um die Öffentlichkeit über die Vernichtung der sowjetischen Juden zu informieren und deren Ausmaße zu dokumentieren. Grossman und Ehrenburg hatten sich intensiv und engagiert in die Arbeit an diesem Buch gestürzt, doch griff die Unterbindung seiner Veröffentlichung im Jahr 1947 dem späteren Verbot von Leben und Schicksal schon vor.7 Gegen diesen Akt des Vergessens schrieb Ehrenburg nun in seinen Memoiren an. Ganze Passagen aus dem verfemten Manuskript des Schwarzbuchs gab er hier wieder, um das Buch, das Thema und die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Freund in Erinnerung zu halten.8 Dem Vergessen entreißen wollte Ehrenburg zugleich das 1942 als Repräsentationsorgan der sowjetischen Judenheiten ins Leben gerufene Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee, in dessen Auftrag er gemeinsam mit Grossman das Schwarzbuch zusammengestellt hatte und dessen Ende dramatisch war. Als »vielleicht die schwersten [Monate] meines Lebens« beschrieb Ehrenburg diese Zeit später, denn die Geschichte des Komitees war auch die Geschichte seiner eigenen Desillusionierung:9 Die Institution wurde 1948 verboten, viele ihrer Mitglieder sofort oder in den Folgejahren ermordet. Lange bevor sich die Geschichtsschreibung des Untergangs der sowjetischen Juden angenommen hatte, waren es die Memoiren von Ilja Ehrenburg, die ein Schlüsseldoku-

5 6 7

8 9

Wassili Grossman, Brief an den Ersten Sekretär des ZK der KPdSU Nikita Sergejewitsch Chruschtschow (1962), in: ders., Leben und Schicksal, 1054–1058, hier 1058. Ilja Ehrenburg, Die berühmten Ehrenburg-Memoiren. Menschen, Jahre, Leben. 3 Bde., hier Bd. 3: 1942–1965, München 1965, 168–182 (Fünftes Buch, Kap. 20 und 21). Ilja Altman, Das Schicksal des Schwarzbuchs, in: Wassili Grossman/Ilja Ehrenburg (Hgg.), Das Schwarzbuch. Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden, dt. Ausg. hg. von Arno Lustiger, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, 1063–1084. Ehrenburg, Die berühmten Ehrenburg-Memoiren, Bd. 3: 1942–1965, 172–182 (Fünftes Buch, Kap. 21). Ebd., 355–368, hier 355 (Sechstes Buch, Kap. 15).

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ment über den Holocaust in der Sowjetunion ebenso wie über dessen Nachgeschichte darstellten.10 Die Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees ist in den letzten Dekaden auch vermehrt Gegenstand der historischen Forschung geworden.11 Die Bedeutung des Komitees weist jedoch über dessen Wirken als Repräsentanz der sowjetischen Judenheiten im Schatten des Holocaust weit hinaus. Sein Verbot und die folgende Ermordung vieler seiner Angehörigen steht vielmehr auch für das Ende jenes »großen Bündnis[ses] von jüdischer Revolution und Kommunismus«, das Yuri Slezkine so meisterhaft in seinem Buch über das »jüdische Jahrhundert« beschrieben hat.12 Immerhin war die bolschewistische Revolution des Jahres 1917 auch mit dem Versprechen verbunden, den Antisemitismus des zaristischen Russlands zu beenden. Die soziale Utopie des Kommunismus bot den Juden einen Weg in die Moderne, mit dem sie die engen Grenzen der eigenen Herkunft in einer gleichsam herkunftslosen, kosmopolitischen Gesellschaft hinter sich lassen konnten. Es könne, so Slezkine, kein Zweifel daran bestehen, dass die Juden einen weit höheren Anteil an den Mitgliedern der Elite stellten als irgendeine andere ethnische Gruppe der UdSSR.13 Solange die Sowjetunion kosmopolitisch orientiert war, waren die Juden das sowjetischste unter den Sowjetvölkern. Erst als sich im Zeichen von Stalins Herrschaft die Sowjetunion zum Ende der 1930er Jahre zunehmend russifizierte, nahm jener Prozess seinen Anfang, der sich erst gegen die Reste der jiddischen Kultur des Landes, nach Krieg und Vernichtung aber zunehmend gegen die sowjetischen Juden schlechthin wandte. Während die Erfahrung einer massenhaften Ermordung allein der Herkunft wegen unter den sowjetischen Juden ein neues Kollektivempfinden beförderte, fand sich dieses aus der jüdischen Katastrophe erwachsene Bewusstsein innerhalb der sich zusehends ethnifizierenden Sowjetunion schon bald dem Verdacht eines nationalen Partikularismus ausgesetzt. Dies führte zum Untergang der einstigen, aus der Revolution resultier10 Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Time of Ilya Ehrenburg, New York 1996, 325 f. und 441, Anm. 42. 11 Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia. The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948, Boulder, Col., 1982; ders. (Hg.), War, Holocaust, and Stalinism. A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, Luxembourg 1995; Arno Lustiger, Rotbuch. Stalin und die Juden. Die tragische Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees und der sowjetischen Juden, Berlin 2000; Joshua Rubenstein/Vladimir P. Naumow (Hgg.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, New Haven, Conn., 2001; Frank Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten. Juden im Sowjetstaat 1941–1953, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2008. 12 Yuri Slezkine, Das jüdische Jahrhundert, aus dem Engl. von Michael Adrian, Göttingen 2006, 301. 13 Ebd., 236.

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enden Hoffnungen.14 Die »tragische Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees« (Arno Lustiger), die nach der staatlich orchestrierten Gründung nun in der Auflösung als Teil einer übergreifenden antijüdischen Verfolgungskampagne der späten Vierziger- und frühen Fünfzigerjahre kulminierte, steht paradigmatisch für diesen Prozess. Im schriftstellerischen Bemühen von Ilja Ehrenburg und Wassili Grossman, die eigene historische Erfahrung der sowjetischen Juden in das Geschichtsbild der Sowjetunion zu integrieren, hat dieses Geschehen zugleich ein die Zeit überdauerndes Monument gefunden. Zusammen bilden sie drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung.

Jüdische Fragen und kommunistische Antworten Ilja Ehrenburgs und Wassili Grossmans Texte dokumentierten wie keine anderen zeitgenössischen Werke jenes Drama der sowjetisch-jüdischen Geschichte, zu dessen Zeugen sie geworden waren. Die Wege, die die beiden Schriftsteller erst zum Kommunismus geführt hatten und dann auf Distanz zu dessen Vaterland brachten, hätten indes unterschiedlicher nicht sein können. Auch wenn der 1891 als Kind einer assimilierten russisch-jüdischen Familie in Kiew geborene Ehrenburg gemeinsam mit Nikolaj Bucharin zu den Bolschewisten der ersten Stunde gehörte, für seine kommunistische Untergrundarbeit 1907 von der zaristischen Geheimpolizei inhaftiert wurde und ein Jahr später ins Pariser Exil ausweichen musste:15 Ein linientreuer Kommunist ohne individuelle Biografie – wie er es selbst in seinem Roman Der Raffer ironisierte – wurde gerade nicht aus ihm.16 Die Begegnung mit Leo Trotzki im Wien des Jahres 1909 und Trotzkis Auffassungen von Kunst und Literatur hatten Ehrenburg gegenüber der kommunistischen Bewegung erstmals entfremdet. Ein Mitglied der Partei sollte er Zeit seines Lebens nie mehr werden.17 Stattdessen wurden ihm das Pariser Exil und dort das Café La Rotonde sowie die dortige kulturelle Boheme zur Heimat. Zwar war auch Ehrenburg im Eifer des Revolutionsjahrs 1917 aus dem französischen Exil über Petrograd nach Moskau zurückgekehrt. Die Revolution und die mit ihr 14 Ebd., 269–287. 15 Zu Ehrenburgs Biografie siehe Lilly Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt. Ilja Ehrenburg. Eine Biographie, aus dem Franz. von Eveline Passet, Berlin 1996 (zuerst Paris 1992); Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties. 16 »In Abwandlung eines bekannten Ausspruches stehen wir nicht an zu behaupten, dass gute Kommunisten keine Biographie haben.« Ilja Ehrenburg, Der Raffer. Roman, Berlin 1979, 150. 17 Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 28 f.

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verbundenen Gewaltexzesse hatten seine Zweifel aber eher bestärkt und ihn auf Distanz bleiben lassen, sodass er sich – mit einem Umweg über Berlin – im Jahr 1924 wieder in Paris niederließ. Die russische Sprache sollte die einzige kulturelle Bindung Ehrenburgs an das neue Sowjetreich bleiben, bevor er sich spät auch politisch zum Kommunismus bekannte.18 Anders verhielt es sich mit dem eine Generation später geborenen Wassili Grossman. 1905 im ukrainischen Berditschew zur Welt gekommen, entstammte auch er einer assimilierten jüdischen Familie russischer Kultur.19 Im Gegensatz zu seinem Vater, der im Bürgerkrieg den Menschewiki folgte, hatte sich Grossman schon in jungen Jahren den Bolschewiki angenähert.20 Er wuchs in Genf auf, ging dann aber zum Studium der Chemie nach Kiew. Erst spät, im Jahr 1932, wandte sich Grossman im Gefolge einer Tuberkuloseerkrankung von seinem Ingenieursberuf ab – und ganz seiner Leidenschaft des Schreibens zu. Seine beiden ersten Romanwerke Glückauf und Stepan Koltschugin standen noch ganz im Zeichen des sozialistischen Realismus, der vor allem von einer Idealisierung der Arbeiterklasse und ihres revolutionären Siegeszugs bestimmt war. Jüdische Fragen waren hier von nebensächlicher Bedeutung, ebenso wenig maß Grossman seiner eigenen jüdischen Herkunft besondere Relevanz bei.21 Allenfalls die jüdische Hinwendung zum Kommunismus stand in seiner später verfilmten Kurzgeschichte In der Stadt Berdichev und der 1937 veröffentlichen Erzählung Vesna (Frühling) im Zentrum. Thematischer Rahmen ist auch hier der russische Bürgerkrieg, die jüdischen Protagonisten vertrauten in den jede Herkunft neutralisierenden Charakter von Kommunismus und sowjetischer Nationalitätenpolitik.22 Damit verlieh Grossman zugleich seiner eigenen Überzeugung vom zukunftsweisenden Charakter der Revolution Ausdruck. Auch die schmerzliche Begegnung mit dem Großen Terror der späten 1930er Jahre sollte an diesem Fortschrittsglauben zunächst nicht prinzipiell rühren. Als im Jahr 1941 deutsche Truppen die sowjetische Westgrenze überschritten, hatte Grossman seinem Freund Semyon Lipkin vielmehr die trügerische Hoffnung anvertraut, dass dieser Krieg nun den »ganzen stalin’schen Dreck vom Antlitz Russlands abwaschen« könne.23 Dass schließlich auch Ehrenburg noch lange vor Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs zu einem bedingungslosen Anhänger des Sowjetkommunismus wurde, gründete nur zum Teil in seiner Sympathie für die Erfolge der Okto18 19 20 21 22 23

Ebd., 32–128. Zu Wassili Grossman allgemein siehe Garrard/Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev. Ebd., 40. Markish, A Russian Writer’s Jewish Fate, 40 f. Ulrich Schmid, Art. »Stalingrad«, in: EJGK, Bd. 5, Stuttgart 2014, 576–581, hier 576. Jürgen Zarusky, »Freiheitliche Erinnerung«. Vasilij Grossman und die europäische Erinnerung an Totalitarismus und Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte 10 (2006), H. 2, 81–110, hier 87.

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berrevolution und dem Umstand, dass er »von Anfang an ein Patriot der Sowjetunion war«.24 Schwerer wog die Erfahrung des Aufstiegs der antidemokratischen Bewegungen in West- und Ostmitteleuropa, der insbesondere die Juden bedrohte. Besonders prägend wurde für Ehrenburg deshalb sein Aufenthalt in Deutschland 1931, in einem Jahr, das bereits vom Aufstieg der Nationalsozialisten gezeichnet war.25 Im Spiegel dieser Entwicklungen verfestigte sich bei ihm der Eindruck, dass ein Mittelweg zwischen Kommunismus und Faschismus nicht mehr gangbar war. »Im Jahr 1931 begriff ich, dass das Los des Soldaten etwas anderes war als das Los des Träumers ist, und dass es an der Zeit sei, seinen Platz in den Reihen der Kämpfenden einzunehmen,« schrieb er später in seinen Memoiren über die bewusste Entscheidung, »dass ich mit zusammengebissenen Zähnen leben und eine der schwierigsten Künste erlernen muss: das Schweigen«.26 Ab 1932, als er eine Anstellung in der Regierungszeitung Izvestija annahm, stellte er sich zum Zweck des Antifaschismus ganz in den Dienst der sowjetischen Propaganda: Erst als Journalist in Paris, dann als Organisator des Internationalen Schriftstellerkongresses zur Verteidigung der Kultur und schließlich als Reporter im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg.27 Umso stärker musste es Ehrenburg deshalb erschüttert haben, als die Sowjetunion den deutschen Überfall auf Polen im September 1939 nicht nur hinnahm, sondern durch den deutschsowjetischen Neutralitätspakt sanktionierte. Neben der gemeinsamen Zerschlagung Polens zeitigte das Bündnis der Diktaturen seine Wirkung zudem auch im Inneren des Landes und mündete gar in eine Zensur Ehrenburgs. Zwischen 1939 und 1941 blieben seine Artikel für die Ivzestija ungedruckt. Diese Ausgrenzung brachte ihn an den Rand seiner Kräfte; in Paris erlitt er einen Nervenzusammenbruch. Zwei Jahre dauerte es, bis das Regime sich an Ehrenburgs publizistische Fähigkeiten erinnerte und ihm seine Türen von Neuem öffnete.28

Entgrenzte Gewalt: Über die Gründung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees Der Beginn des sogenannten Unternehmens Barbarossa, des deutschen Angriffs auf die Sowjetunion am 22. Juni 1941, veränderte die Landkarte 24 Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 68. 25 Ehrenburg, Die berühmten Ehrenburg-Memoiren, Bd. 2: 1923–1941, 252–258 (Drittes Buch, Kap. 29). 26 Ebd., 265 f. (Drittes Buch, Kap. 30); siehe Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 98. 27 Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 121–188; Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 106–183. 28 Ebd., 184–191.

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des Weltkriegs, aber auch die Verhältnisse im Innern der Sowjetunion. Die militärische Widerlegung von Stalins einstigem Irrglauben einer vorrangigen Gefahr durch die westlichen Mächte veranlasste den Diktator schließlich, den »Großen Vaterländischen Krieg« der sowjetischen Völker gegen Nazideutschland auszurufen. Zur Mobilisierung des ganzen Landes standen die sowjetischen Zeitungen nun auch wieder für Ilja Ehrenburg offen, der bald über die Sowjetunion hinaus zu einem der bekanntesten russischsprachigen Kriegsjournalisten wurde.29 Nur der junge Grossman, der vier lange Jahre für die Zeitung Krasnaja Swesda (Roter Stern) berichtete, erreichte ähnliche Bekanntheit wie Ehrenburg.30 Doch während Grossman als Chronist der Schrecken des Krieges und der Erfahrungen seiner Opfer in Erinnerung blieb, war es bei Ehrenburg vor allem die scharfe Sprache der Agitation, mit der er die von Wehrmachts- und SS-Verbänden begangenen Gräuel anklagte und so den Widerstand gegen den Feind mobilisierte. »Töte den Deutschen«, lautete die bekannteste Parole, mit der er gegen Nazideutschland in den Krieg zog.31 Der öffentlichen Positionierung als sowjetische Bürger stand ein erneuertes kollektives Auftreten der sowjetischen Juden gegenüber, das seit dem Beginn des Krieges eine Wende im jüdischen Selbstverständnis und der sowjetischen Politik gegenüber den Juden signalisierte. Als es am 24. August 1941 im Moskauer Zentralpark für Kultur und Erholung zu einer »Öffentlichen Versammlung der Vertreter des jüdischen Volkes« kam, war eine Vielzahl hochrangiger Vertreter des jiddischen Kulturlebens im Land zusammengekommen, um vor Tausenden Kundgebungsteilnehmern der gegen die Juden gerichteten Vernichtungsdrohung den Kampf anzusagen.32 Solomon Michoels – seinerzeit der wichtigste jiddischsprachige Schauspieler und Theaterdirektor – sowie die Schriftsteller Peretz Markish und David Bergelson gehörten zu den bekanntesten Sprechern. Auch Ilja Ehrenburg war zu der Versammlung gekommen. Seine von Radio Moskau live übertragene Rede begann mit folgenden bedeutungsvollen Worten: »Ich bin ein russischer Schriftsteller. Wie alle Russen verteidige ich jetzt mein Vaterland. Die Nazis riefen mir noch etwas anderes in Erinnerung: meine Mutter heißt Hanna. Ich bin Jude. Ich sage es voller Stolz. Stärker als alle haßt uns der Faschismus, und dies ziert uns.«33

Die Rede markierte eine Änderung des bisherigen Selbstverständnisses: Hier traten die sowjetischen Juden öffentlich als Juden auf und begriffen 29 Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 189–195. 30 Antony Beevor, Ein Schriftsteller im Krieg. Wassili Grossman und die Rote Armee, 1941–1945, aus dem Russ. und Engl. übers. von Helmut Ettinger, München 2007. 31 Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 192; Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 209–213. 32 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 118–122. 33 Zit. nach ebd., 120.

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sich zugleich als Teil eines transterritorialen jüdischen Volks, das einen ungewohnten, nun aber geduldeten Gegensatz zum sowjetischen Selbstverständnis repräsentierte. Diese Proklamation wurde aus taktischen Gründen – um Unterstützung durch die Juden Großbritanniens und Amerikas zu erwirken – vom Regime zugelassen. »Zum ersten Mal seit der Revolution wurde den sowjetischen Juden der Kontakt mit ihren Brüdern und Schwestern im Westen erlaubt«, beschrieb Arno Lustiger später diese »radikale Wende« in der Sowjetpolitik. Sie bildete auch den Ausgangspunkt für die Bildung des »Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees«.34 Dessen formale Gründung im Februar 1942 ging allerdings nicht allein auf eine jüdische Initiative zurück. Koordiniert wurde sie von dem im Juni 1941 gegründeten Sowjetischen Informationsbüro (Sowinform), das zeitgleich eine Vielzahl antifaschistischer Komitees von Nationalitäten und weiteren Gruppierungen zum Zweck der Kriegsmobilisierung ins Leben rief.35 Doch obwohl das Büro im September 1941 zuerst die aus Polen geflohenen Viktor Alter und Henryk Ehrlich mit der Gründung des Komitees beauftragte, fielen die beiden Angehörigen des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbunds mit ihrem kulturpolitischen Selbstverständnis schnell wieder in Ungnade.36 Nur wenige Wochen später gerieten sie in Haft, aus der sie nie wieder zurückkehren sollten. Noch Ende 1941 wurde die Gründung und Organisierung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees von Solomon Losowski übernommen, dem stellvertretenden Vorsitzenden des Sowinformbüros. Ihm schlossen sich schon bald zahlreiche Teilnehmer der Zusammenkunft vom August an, an der Spitze des Komitees stand fortan Solomon Michoels. Die Gründung des Komitees knüpfte damit zwar auch an die vorausgegangenen innerjüdischen Bemühungen seit Kriegsbeginn an, den sowjetischen Kampf gegen Judenvernichtung mit dem »Großen Vaterländischen Krieg« zu verbinden.37 Vorrangig war das staatliche Interesse an dieser Gründung aber an die Hoffnung geknüpft, mittels jüdischer Lobbyarbeit finanzielle und politische Unterstützung aus dem Westen zu erwirken. Auch deshalb agierte das Komitee niemals wirklich autonom. Von Anbeginn, schreibt Joshua Rubinstein in seiner Geschichte des Komitees, konnte »es niemals unabhängig operieren, sondern unterstand wie alle übrigen sowjetischen Institution der Aufsicht von Parteifunktionären. Es war nicht dazu gedacht, ohne Parteiaufsicht zu atmen.«38 34 Ebd., 122. 35 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 55; siehe ders., Art. »Jüdisches Antifaschistisches Komitee«, in: EJGK, Bd. 3, Stuttgart 2012, 268–273, hier 269. 36 Gertrud Pickhan, Das NKVD-Dossier über Henryk Ehrlich und Wiktor Alter, in: Berliner Jahrbuch für osteuropäische Geschichte 2 (1994), 155–186. 37 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 122–125. 38 Joshua Rubenstein, Introduction. Night of the Murdered Poets, in: ders./Naumow (Hgg.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, 1–64, hier 10.

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Ein gewisses Eigenleben entfaltete das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee dennoch. Schon kurz nach der formalen Gründung im April 1942 wurde die anfangs wöchentlich erscheinende Zeitschrift Eynigkeit ins Leben gerufen. Zwar unterlag auch das zuerst von Schachne Epstein herausgegebene Blatt der Aufsicht des NKWD und blieb damit politisch weithin kontrolliert. Nachdem mit der Auflösung von Der Emes (Die Wahrheit) im Jahr 1938 allein der Birobidzhaner Shtern als lokal begrenzte jiddischsprachige Zeitung innerhalb der Sowjetunion übriggeblieben war, bedeutete die Gründung der Eynigkeit nun jedoch das erneute Aufleben eines explizit jüdischen kollektiven Selbstverständnisses innerhalb des Sowjetimperiums.39 In seinem Wirkradius ging das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee weit über die Grenzen des Landes hinaus. Neben der Auslieferung der Eynigkeit ins Ausland hatte das Komitee in den ersten Jahren seiner Existenz in Palästina, Großbritannien und Amerika über 20 000 Artikel zur Lage der Juden und dem Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion veröffentlicht, daneben Broschüren und Buchmanuskripte.40 Folge dieses unermüdlichen Engagements waren die Gründung einer Vielzahl von Solidaritätskomitees sowie zahlreiche Kundgebungen in Großbritannien, Palästina, Nord- und Südamerika. Nichts jedoch dokumentierte deutlicher die Wirkung, die von der Tätigkeit des Komitees ausging, als die siebenmonatige Reise von Solomon Michoels und Itzik Fefer im Frühjahr 1943 durch Großbritannien, Kanada, Mexiko und die Vereinigten Staaten, wo sie für ihre Anliegen warben. Nach der Teilnahme an 46 Kundgebungen und zahlreichen Treffen, unter anderem mit dem Präsidenten des Jüdischen Weltkongress Stephen S. Wise und Albert Einstein, dem Vorsitzenden des Jüdischen Rats der Komitees zur Unterstützung der Sowjetunion, erreichte die Reise am 7. Juli 1943 schließlich ihren Höhepunkt. Über 50 000 Teilnehmer waren in New York zu einer Veranstaltung gekommen, um ihre Solidarität mit den sowjetischen Juden und dem Kampf der Sowjetunion zu bekunden.41

Entfremdungen inmitten des Krieges Als Fefer und Michoels im Spätherbst 1943 von ihrer Reise aus Amerika zurückkehrten, markierte diese zwar den Höhepunkt des publizistischen und monetären Erfolgs des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees ebenso wie 39 Shimon Redlich, Introduction, in: ders. (Hg.), War, Holocaust, and Stalinism, 3–162, hier 21–29. 40 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 142–148. 41 Ebd., 148–151; Rubenstein, Introduction, 14–19.

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der Kooperation und des Konsenses mit dem sowjetischen Regime. Doch schon vor ihrer Rückkehr begannen im Gefolge von Stalingrad Risse in jener Gemeinsamkeit sichtbar zu werden, die sich nach und nach zu einem Gegensatz zwischen jüdischer Erfahrung und sowjetischem Selbstverständnis entwickelten. Kurz nach seiner Gründung nahm die staatlich inszenierte Liquidierung des Komitees ihren Anfang. Die Schlacht von Stalingrad im Winter 1942/43 bedeutete nicht nur eine entscheidende militärische Wende des Krieges. Auch im Innern der Sowjetunion trieb sie den Wandel – etwa einen Prozess der Russifizierung – voran, den Stalin bereits am 3. Juli 1941 mit dem Wort vom »Großen Vaterländischen Krieg« eingeleitet hatte.42 Was mit der Deportation von Gruppen und Ethnien begann, die der Kollaboration verdächtigt wurden, wandte sich nun auch gegen die sowjetischen Juden – obwohl sich ein jüdisches Kollektivempfinden vor allem entlang der Konfrontation mit der unmittelbaren Vernichtung und im Schatten von Auschwitz ausbildete.43 Nirgends war diese Dramatik deutlicher zum Ausdruck gekommen als in den Worten des polnisch-jüdische Dichters Julian Tuwin: »Es gibt nämlich zwei Arten von Blut. […] Das Blut, das in unseren Adern fließt und jenes, das aus ihnen herausströmt«, beschrieb er bereits 1944 diese Entwicklung, die er als neue »Bruderschaft der Juden« bezeichnete.44 Vom russisch-national eingefärbten Internationalismus wurde diese jedoch zusehends als »partikularistisch« geächtet. Frank Grüner schreibt in seiner Arbeit über die Geschichte der sowjetischen Juden in den Jahren 1941 bis 1953: »Entscheidend für die Zuspitzung des Konflikts zwischen Regime und Juden war, dass das stalinistische Regime die Entwicklung innerhalb des sowjetischen Judentums als Ausdruck mangelnder Loyalität der Juden gegenüber dem Regime und in letzter Konsequenz als Verrat am Sowjetstaat interpretierte.«45

Die erste Etappe dieser dramatischen Entfremdung bildete die Entstehungsgeschichte des bereits erwähnten Schwarzbuchs, jenes Werks, das die Vernichtung der sowjetischen Juden dokumentieren sollte, dessen Erscheinen im Jahr 1947 aber von den sowjetischen Autoritäten verhindert wurde. Vier Jahre zuvor war die Idee zur Schaffung eines solchen Dokuments zu gleichen Teilen auf Anregungen Albert Einsteins, Scholem Aschs und Ben Zion Goldbergs vom American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists zurückgegangen, die sie Fefar und Michoels wärend deren AmerikaBesuchs vorgetragen hatten. Schon seit 1942 hatte auch Ilja Ehrenburg 42 Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall, München 1992, 308 f.; siehe Jörg Baberowski, Der Rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus, Frankfurt a. M. 32014, 225 f. 43 Slezkine, Das jüdische Jahrhundert, 269–287. 44 Zit. nach ebd., 279. 45 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 17.

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Materialien gesammelt, die den nationalsozialistischen Mord an den sowjetischen Juden und deren Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus dokumentierten. Im Frühjahr 1944 wurde ihm deshalb vom Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitee der Vorsitz der literarischen Kommission zur Erstellung des Schwarzbuchs übertragen.46 Seine Stellvertretung und spätere Nachfolge übernahm Wassili Grossman, der als Kriegsberichterstatter bereits zum Chronisten der Massenvernichtung geworden war. Ukraine ohne Juden hieß sein erster erschütternder Text aus dem Jahr 1943, in dem er auf den Seiten der Eynigkeit von den Erschießungskommandos berichtete, die dem jüdischen Leben in seinem Geburtsland ein Ende bereiteten und denen auch seine Mutter zum Opfer gefallen war.47 Ihrem Schicksal hatte er sich zudem in dem Beitrag Die Ermordung der Juden von Berditschew zugewandt, der wie sein Augenzeugenbericht über die Hölle von Treblinka zur Veröffentlichung im Schwarzbuch geplant war.48 Doch auch wenn Ehrenburg und Grossman eine ganze Reihe engagierter Schriftsteller, darunter Abraham Suzkever und Margarita Aliger, für die Mitarbeit an dem Projekt gewinnen konnten, das anfangs auch vonseiten der staatlichen Behörden gebilligt wurde: Kurz vor der Drucklegung im Herbst 1947 wurde die zu den Anfängen einer jüdischen »Churbnforschung« gehörende Publikation vom NKWD unterbunden.49 Shimon Redlichs umfassender Quellenedition zur Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees ist zu entnehmen, dass Streitfragen, die schließlich zum Erscheinungsverbot des Schwarzbuchs führten, bereits innerhalb der Redaktion für Auseinandersetzungen über die eigene Ausrichtung und den eigenen Handlungsspielraum sorgten.50 Zu Differenzen war es zuerst vor dem Hintergrund der Kollaboration auch sowjetischer Bürger bei der Ermordung ihrer jüdischen Nachbarn gekommen. Während Ehrenburg und Grossman auch solche Berichte unbedingt publizieren wollten, kontrastierte die darin beschriebene Realität mit dem sozialistischen Primat von der Einheit des Sowjetvolkes im Kampf gegen den Faschismus. Kaum weniger heftig war zudem die Diskus46 Ebd., 70–87; Lustiger, Rotbuch, 184–196; Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 189–226. 47 Wassili Grossman, Ukraine ohne Juden, aus dem Russ. übertragen und eingeleitet von Jürgen Zarusky, in: Johannes Hürter/Jürgen Zarusky (Hgg.), Besatzung, Kollaboration, Holocaust. Neue Studien zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, mit einer Reportage von Wassili Grossman, München 2008, 189–200. Der Text erschien zuerst in zwei Teilen in der Zeitschrift Eynigkeit vom 25. November und 2. Dezember 1943. 48 Wassili Grossman, Die Ermordung der Juden von Berditschew, in: ders./Ehrenburg (Hgg.), Das Schwarzbuch, 59–72; ders., Die Hölle von Treblinka, in: ebd., 821–854. 49 Laura Jockusch, »Khurbn Forshung«. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943– 1949, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 441–473. 50 Redlich (Hg.), War, Holocaust, and Stalinism.

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sion geführt worden, ob im Zeichen des beginnenden Kalten Kriegs wirklich an der Publikation eines separaten Schwarzbuchs in den Vereinigten Staaten festzuhalten sei. Dies wurde schließlich bejaht, was zu Ehrenburgs Rückzug aus dem Projekt führte.51 Nichts hatte aber mehr zum Konflikt mit Staat und Partei geführt als das Anliegen des Buches selbst – die Darstellung der Spezifik nationalsozialistischer Judenvernichtung und des damit verbundenen Schicksals von Opfern und Überlebenden.52 Das Sowjetregime war spätestens seit 1943 dazu übergegangen, alle Opfer innerhalb der Sowjetunion allein als »friedliebende Sowjetbürger« zu klassifizieren, und hatte damit Absicht und Praxis des Völkermords regelrecht umgangen, ja dessen Hervorhebung gleichsam als nationalistisch diskreditiert.53 Als die ersten Druckfahnen 1946 von den Zensurbehörden überprüft wurden, erbaten diese zahlreiche Korrekturen bezüglich der vermeintlichen Kollaboration wie auch der Opferzahlen.54 Einzelne Stellen, die die gegen die Juden als Juden gerichtete Vernichtungsabsicht der Nazis thematisierten, wurden ersatzlos gestrichen. »Durch das ganze Buch zieht sich die Idee, dass die Deutschen nur die Juden ausraubten und ermordeten«, monierte der Leiter der ZK-Abteilung für Agitation und Propaganda, Georgi Alexandrow, nach der Durchsicht des Manuskripts. »Der Leser erhält unbewusst den Eindruck, dass die Deutschen gegen die UdSSR mit dem alleinigen Zweck Krieg führten, die Juden zu vernichten.«55 Zwar erschien in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Palästina im Jahr 1947 dann eine gekürzte Ausgabe des Schwarzbuchs. Eine erste russischsprachige Fassung konnte allerdings erst 1980 und nur in zensierter Form publiziert werden. Es sollte noch einmal 14 Jahre dauern, bis erstmalig eine vollständige, unzensierte Kompilation aller Texte erscheinen konnte.56 Der Gegensatz zwischen dem neuen jüdischen Kollektivbewusstsein, das eine Reaktion auf die Vernichtung war, und der sich russifizierenden Sowjetunion reichte aber tiefer, als es im Publikationsverbot des Schwarzbuchs zum Ausdruck kam. Noch inmitten des Krieges hatte die Nachricht von kollektiver Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden unter den jüdischen Angehörigen der Roten Armee den Wunsch befördert, in separaten Verbänden gegen die Deutschen zu kämpfen. Das Aufleben einer traditionellen Judenfeindschaft in den Reihen auch der Armee tat ihr Übriges dazu.57 Für Sprengkraft hatte kurz darauf das sogenannte Krim-Memorandum gesorgt, in dem 51 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 77–79. 52 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 193–196. 53 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 416–451; Olaf Terpitz, Art. »Babi Jar«, in: EJGK, Bd. 1, Stuttgart 2011, 226–230, bes. 227 f. 54 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 194. 55 Ebd., 188. 56 Ebd., 192 f. 57 Slezkine, Das jüdische Jahrhundert, 282–287.

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Solomon Michoels, Itzik Fefer und Schachne Epstein im Herbst 1944 die Errichtung einer Jüdisch Autonomen Republik auf der Krim vorgeschlagen hatten.58 Zwar war das Memorandum des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees noch in Absprache mit der Sowjetführung angefertigt worden.59 Doch Stalins schon frühzeitig geäußerte Verschwörungstheorie, das Memorandum sei eine von Amerika aus gelenkte Konspiration gegen Sowjetrussland, entfaltete eine nachhaltige Wirkung. Zu keinem Zeitpunkt war der Zusammenstoß zwischen dem neuen Kollektivempfinden der sowjetischen Juden und dem Regime indes sichtbarer zum Ausdruck gekommen als im Zuge der Gründung des Staates Israel. Als im September 1948 Golda Meir als erste Botschafterin des Landes in der sowjetischen Hauptstadt eintraf, begleiteten sie Tausende sowjetische Juden auf ihrem Weg in die Moskauer Choralsynagoge. »Nächstes Jahr in Jerusalem!«, rief die begeisterte Menge Meir später anlässlich von Jom Kippur entgegen und warf damit auch Fragen eigener Zugehörigkeit auf.60 Je mehr aber die Sowjetregierung in ihrem Innern jedes kollektive Auftreten der Judenheiten zu bannen suchte, desto mehr begann sich diese Entwicklung schließlich gegen das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee als Repräsentanz der sowjetischen Juden zu wenden. Dies bildete schließlich auch den historischen Hintergrund, vor dem Ilja Ehrenburg im September 1948 seinen viel beachteten Artikel in der Prawda über jüdische Existenz und Zionismus veröffentlichte. Aus Anlass eines Briefes titelte Ehrenburgs schriftstellerischer Drahtseilakt, der als Antwort auf die fiktive Frage eines jugendlichen sowjetischen Juden nach der Legitimität des Zionismus formuliert war, deutlich die kollektive Erfahrung des Holocaust herausstellte und vor diesem Hintergrund auch die Existenz des jüdischen Staates verteidigte.61 Indem er die zionistische Idee eines jüdischen Staats als Lösung der »jüdischen Frage« aber prinzipiell zurückwies und stattdessen Antikapitalismus, Sozialismus und Antifaschismus als Antworten auf jüdische Existenzfragen formulierte, kehrte er jedoch nicht allein zum regimetreuen Vokabular der 1930er Jahre zurück. Es war zugleich der Versuch, die Bedingungen einer gesicherten Existenz der sowjetischen Juden auszuloten, deren Anerkennung als Kollektiv sich seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs zusehends von der Sowjetmacht infrage gestellt fand.62

58 Ausführlich hierzu siehe Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 307–316; Rubenstein, Introduction, 19–25. 59 Rubenstein, Introduction, 19–22; Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 87–98. 60 Siehe Slezkine, Das jüdische Jahrhundert, 287; Rubenstein, Introduction, 41. 61 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 202–206. 62 Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 257–260.

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Dem staatlichen Vorgehen gegen das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee war mit Ehrenburgs Intervention jedoch nicht beizukommen. Intern war das Urteil ohnehin schon lange gefällt und es kursierten Berichte des Sicherheitsministeriums an Schdanow, Molotow und Stalin, in denen das Komitee des »aktiven Nationalismus« und der amerikanischen Spionage gegen die Sowjetunion beschuldigt wurde. Auf der Sitzung des Politbüros der KPdSU am 20. November 1948 wurde schließlich das endgültige Urteil gefällt: Die Auflösung des Komitees, »eines Zentrums antisowjetischer Propaganda«, wurde beschlossen. »Vorerst soll niemand verhaftet werden«, lautete der letzte Punkt des Auflösungsbefehls.63 Zum Abschluss war die Geschichte des Komitees damit jedoch noch lange nicht gekommen. Seine dramatische Nachgeschichte hatte bereits mehrere Monate zuvor begonnen. Als Stalin im Januar 1948 den einstigen Vorsitzenden des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees Salomon Michoels ermorden ließ, wurde dies zum »Auftakt der Vernichtung der jiddischen Kultur und [der] systematischen Eliminierung der Juden aus den verschiedensten Bereichen des öffentlichen Lebens.«64

Verfolgung und Ermordung – die Liquidation des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees »Heute verstehe ich, dass der Beginn einiger Ereignisse, von denen ich jetzt erzählen werde, mit dem tragischen Tod von Salomon Michoels zusammenhängt«, begann Ilja Ehrenburg das Kapitel seiner Memoiren, das von der Zerschlagung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees und der darauf folgenden Kampagne gegen die sowjetischen Juden handelte.65 Im Januar 1948 hingegen war kaum absehbar, dass die Ermordung Michoels den Beginn einer Ereigniskette bildete, die sich über die Auflösung des Komitees bis zur »Nacht der ermordeten Dichter« und dem Ärzteprozess des Frühjahrs 1953 erstrecken sollte. Stalin ließ die Ermordung Michoels als Autounfall tarnen und ihn mit einem Staatsbegräbnis bestatten. Zwar wurden hier schon Befürchtungen bezüglich einer konzertierten Aktion geäußert, auch sprach der Dichter Peretz Markish in seinem Trauergedicht ganz offen von Mord. Mit der Umbenennung des Moskauer Staatlichen Jüdischen Theaters nach Michoels, vor allem aber durch die Bekanntgabe der Stalinpreisträger des Frühjahres 1948, zu denen neben zahlreichen anderen sowjetischen Juden diesmal auch Ilja Ehrenburg für seinen Roman Der Sturm gehörte, sollte 63 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 214. 64 Ebd. 65 Ehrenburg, Die berühmten Ehrenburg-Memoiren, Bd. 3: 1942–1965, 355 (Sechstes Buch, Kap. 15).

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jedoch dem Eindruck von einer anhebenden antisemitischen Kampagne zunächst entgegengewirkt werden.66 Eine dramatische Wandlung nahmen die Ereignisse erst um den Jahreswechsel 1948/49, als Massenverhaftungen mit der politischen Propaganda des Regimes Hand in Hand gingen.67 Nur kurze Zeit nach der Auflösung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees im November 1948 war das ganze Land schließlich von einer Verfolgungswelle überzogen worden: Innerhalb weniger Wochen wurde die gesamte Führungsriege des Komitees verhaftet, woraufhin sich schließlich – mit Ausnahme des Birobidzhaner Shtern – auch die jiddischsprachige Publizistik zur Aufgabe gezwungen sahen. Das Erscheinen von Eynigkeit wurde eingestellt und der jiddische Verlag Der Emes geschlossen.68 Eine nationale Kampagne, die den Verfolgungen und Vertreibungen anderer nichtrussischer Minderheiten innerhalb der Sowjetunion glich, war die »Vernichtung der jiddischen Kultureinrichtungen« indes nicht;69 vielmehr markierte sie den Umschlag von Nationalitätenpolitik in Antisemitismus und die Verschmelzung traditioneller Judenfeindschaft mit antimodernen Verschwörungstheorien.70 Begleitet wurde die Verhaftungswelle schließlich von einer Medienkampagne, die mit dem Artikel Über eine antipatriotische Gruppe von Theaterkritikern am 28. Januar 1949 begann. Bereits im Frühjahr 1946 hatte Andrej Schdanow die Stichworte dieser sogenannten »Kosmopolitenverfolgung« geliefert.71 Nun war auch in der Prawda neben der Anklage des Nationalismus zugleich von »wurzellosem Kosmopolitismus« und »Vagabunden ohne Pass« die Rede; die jüdische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion wurde mit nationaler Differenz ebenso wie mit Illoyalität, Universalität und einer vermeintlichen Westbindung im Kalten Krieg identifiziert.72 Repressionen, Massenentlassungen und weitere Verhaftungen waren die Folge. Symbolischen Ausdruck fand dies zudem in der Verfolgungspraxis des Regimes, die von einer scheinbaren »Enttarnung« der Zugehörigkeit auch jener sowjetischen Juden gekennzeichnet war, die ihre Namen schon lange russifiziert hatten.73 Spätestens im Februar 1949, als ihre Artikel nicht mehr publiziert wurden, ergriff auch Grossman und Ehrenburg die Angst vor einer Festnahme.74 »Mein Telefon war verstummt, 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Lustiger, Rotbuch, 222 f.; Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 271 f. Ders., Introduction, 40–46. Ebd.; Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 121–128. Lustiger, Rotbuch, 234–236. Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 437–451. Ebd., 438–443. Harriet Murav, Art. »Kosmopoliten«, in: EJGK, Bd. 3, Stuttgart/Weimar 2012, 424–427; Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 263; Lustiger, Rotbuch, 225–232. 73 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 228. 74 Für Grossman siehe Garrard/Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, Kap. 6: Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth, 195–228.

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nur die nächsten Freunde erkundigten sich nach meiner Gesundheit«, notierte Ehrenburg später über die um sich greifende Angst vor einer Verhaftung: »Die vorsichtigeren Bekannten gingen anders vor. Sie riefen aus einer Telefonzelle an, um festzustellen, ob ich mich noch melde.«75 In aller Verzweiflung verfasste Ehrenburg deshalb einen kurzen Brief an Stalin, in dem er Auskunft über sein Schreibverbot sowie über das Gerücht erbat, dass auch seine Festnahme bevorstehe. Dass sein Ringen um ein Ende der Ungewissheit schließlich von Erfolg und einer erneuten Einladung der Verlage gekrönt war, auch das gehörte zur stalinistischen Willkür jener Jahre.76 Ihren tragischen Höhepunkt erreichten die Darstellungen jüdischer Existenz zwischen nationaler Partikularität und kosmopolitischem Universalismus jedoch im Verfahren gegen die Führungsriege des Komitees.77 »Versuch des Sturzes, der Untergrabung oder der Schwächung der Sowjetmacht« lautete der zentrale Paragraf des sowjetischen Strafgesetzbuches, mit dem den Angeklagten der Prozess gemacht werden sollte.78 Während die Anklage zuerst das Streben nach Autonomie auf der Krim als feindliche Spionage und territoriale Abkopplung zugunsten der Vereinigten Staaten interpretierte, ist den von Joshua Rubenstein edierten Verhörprotokollen weiter zu entnehmen, dass zum Teil eine vermeintlich seit der Oktoberrevolution gegen das Regime gerichtete Biografie der Angeklagten konstruiert wurde.79 Zu einem Schauprozess, wie sie im Ostmitteleuropa der Nachkriegsjahre wiederholt vorkamen, sollte das von Folter und Gewalt begleitete Verfahren allerdings nicht werden. Vielmehr hatte das Regime alles darangesetzt, bereits die Verhaftung der führenden Mitglieder des Komitees geheimzuhalten.80 Auch Ilja Ehrenburg als populärer Vertreter des sowjetischen Regimes im Westen war immer wieder mit Fragen über deren Lage konfrontiert worden. Doch obgleich er den Bogen der Wahrheit überdehnte, als er 1950 in London die bohrenden Fragen nach dem Verbleib von Itsig Fefer und David Bergelson mit der Behauptung beantwortete, dass er wohl wissen würde, wenn ihnen etwas zugestoßen sei, hatte er tatsächlich keine Kenntnis vom Schicksal seiner einstigen Wegbegleiter und dem Urteil, dass gegen sie im Geheimen vollstreckt wurde.81 14 der 15 Angeklagten wurden zum Tode verurteilt und bis auf einen am 12. August 1952, in der »Nacht der ermordeten Dichter«, hingerichtet. Solomon Bregman verstarb kurz darauf in der Haft 75 Ehrenburg, Die berühmten Ehrenburg-Memoiren, Bd. 3: 1942–1965, 364 f. (Sechstes Buch, Kap. 15). 76 Ebd., 365. 77 Siehe hierzu die Protokolle bei Rubenstein/Naumow (Hgg.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. 78 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 252. 79 Ebd. 80 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 452. 81 Rubenstein, Introduction, 50; Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 285.

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und nur Lina Stern, Professorin für Biochemie und die einzige angeklagte Frau, kam nach siebenjähriger Haft wieder frei.82 Doch selbst diese Hinrichtungen bedeuteten nicht das Ende der Verfolgungen. Bereits einige Monate zuvor hatte Michael Rjumin, der damalige Leiter der Ermittlungen gegen das Antifaschistische Komitee, dem inhaftierten Arzt Jakow Etinger das falsche Geständnis abgezwungen, absichtlich schlechte Behandlungsmethoden gegen Regierungsmitglieder angewandt zu haben.83 Über ein Jahr später dienten derlei Behauptungen nun der Beweisführung zur Existenz einer sogenannten »Verschwörung der Kremlärzte«, denen erst der Tod von Andrej Schdanow zur Last gelegt und schließlich ein Mordkomplott gegen Stalin unterstellt wurde. Zwischen September und Dezember 1952 kam es zur Festnahme zahlreicher weiterer Ärzte jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Herkunft und am 13. Januar 1953 berichtete die Prawda über die »Verhaftung einer Gruppe von Ärzteschädlingen«.84 Von »Mörderärzten« und der »jüdisch-bourgeois-nationalistischen Gruppe des Joint« war dort die Rede, die es auf die »Ausrottung der führenden Kader der UdSSR« abgesehen hätten.85 Schnell hatte die staatliche Kampagne auch eine neue Welle des offenen Antisemitismus in der Bevölkerung beflügelt.86 Kontrovers ist in der Forschung immer noch, ob die »letzten Absichten« Stalins in diesen Monaten weiter gingen und schließlich auf »eine Deportation aller sowjetischen Juden« aus den europäischen Zentren »in den Fernen Osten« zielten.87 Unbestritten ist hingegen, dass das Regime mit einem offenen Brief in der Prawda die politische Loyalität zahlreicher jüdischer Intellektueller erzwingen wollte und ihnen mit ihrer Unterschrift die Rede von Mordkomplotten, jüdischem Nationalismus und einer zionistisch-amerikanischen Verschwörung in den Mund legte.88 Auch Wassili Grossman gehörte zu den Unterzeichnern des Briefs, nachdem man noch in seinem Landhaus fern von Moskau auf ihn Druck ausgeübt hatte. Bis ans Ende seiner Tage belastete die Unterschrift Grossmans Gewissen.89 Anders verhielt es sich mit Ilja Ehrenburg. Nachdem er inmitten der Welle der eskalierenden Judenfeindschaft mit der Verleihung des Stalin-Friedenspreises noch ein letztes Mal als »Feigenblatt« der stalinschen Politik instru-

82 Grüner, Art. »Jüdisches Antifaschistisches Komitee«, 273; Rubenstein, Introduction, 55–65. 83 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 248–250. 84 Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 289; Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 489–499. 85 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 281. 86 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 495–499. 87 Ebd., 499–507. 88 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 286–292. 89 Markish, A Russian Writer’s Jewish Fate, 46.

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mentalisiert wurde, hatte er noch einmal das ganze diplomatische Gewicht seiner Person in die Waagschale geworfen. In einem letzten Brief an Stalin machte er deutlich, dass die Vorgehensweise im Ausland gegen die Sowjetunion gewendet werden und die kritisierten Tendenzen eines jüdischen Partikularismus eher verstärken könnte. Eine Antwort auf diesen Brief erhielt er ebenso wenig, wie dessen Wirkung bekannt ist.90 Dagegen ist belegt, dass Michael Rjumin, der Initiator der antisemitischen Kampagne, bereits im Sommer 1952 eine Liste für weitere Festnahmen vorbereitet hatte. Diesmal standen auch die Namen von Grossman und Ehrenburg darauf.91 Vermutlich rettete ihnen nur der Tod Stalins am 5. März 1953 das Leben.

Gedächtniskonflikte: Jüdische Erfahrung und sowjetische Erinnerung Stalins Tod bedeutete nicht allein den Abbruch des Moskauer Ärzteprozesses. Verbunden mit der Geheimrede Nikita Chruschtschows auf dem XX. Parteitag der KPdSU im Februar 1956, leitete er zugleich eine kurzzeitige Phase der Liberalisierung ein. Ihren ikonischen Namen erhielt diese Ära schon unmittelbar nach dem Tod des Diktators. Tauwetter hieß der 1954 veröffentlichte Roman von Ilja Ehrenburg, dem von der Kritik zwar ein literarisch lediglich mediokrer Charakter beigemessen wurde, dessen Titel aber wie kein anderes Wort den sich wandelnden Geist der Zeit eingefangen hatte.92 Ebenso wie Ehrenburgs Romanhelden sich von den Ketten der vormaligen stalinistischen Reglementierung zu befreien begannen, waren die Jahre nach 1953 von ersten Haftentlassungen sowie der Rehabilitierung ganzer Personengruppen gekennzeichnet, die Stalins Herrschaft zum Opfer gefallen waren.93 Neben der Freilassung der Angeklagten im »Ärzteprozess« war auch die Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees von einem solchen Wandel betroffen. Zwar blieben die nachträgliche Aufhebung der Todesurteile und die Rehabilitierung der einstigen Mitglieder im November 1955 noch bis 1989 »streng geheim«.94 Im Anschluss an Chruschtschows Geheimrede berichteten aber bereits im März 1956 die amerikanisch-jid90 Lustiger, Rotbuch, 290–292. 91 Ebd., 248. 92 David Schick, Art. »Tauwetter«, in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig hg. von Dan Diner (nachfolgend EJGK), 7 Bde., hier Bd. 6, Stuttgart 2015, 43–48; Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 298–302. 93 Baberowski, Der Rote Terror, 257. 94 Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 452.

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dische Zeitung Forverts und kurz darauf die Warschauer jiddischsprachige Folksstimme von der Liquidierung des Komitees und gaben die Namen der Todesopfer bekannt.95 Wie eng die real- und erinnerungspolitischen Grenzen auch in der Zeit nach Stalins Tod gesteckt waren, war in der Ära Chruschtschow gerade im Bereich von Literatur und Kunst spürbar. Nach der Aufregung um Boris Pasternaks Doktor Schiwago im Herbst 1958 sorgte drei Jahre später Jewgeni Jewtuschenkos Gedicht Babi Jar für Furore, das am 19. September 1961 in der Zeitschrift Literaturnaya Gazeta erschienen war. »Über Babi Jar, da steht kein Denkmal«, hieß es gleich zu Anfang des langen Poems, mit dem der russische Schriftsteller das fehlende Gedenken an die Ermordung der Kiewer Juden, im Grunde aber die gesamte sowjetische Erinnerungspolitik beklagte, die mit dem Diktum der »Gleichheit aller Sowjetmenschen« die Erfahrung der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus überdeckte.96 Die Reaktionen auf Jewtuschenkos Tabubruch waren heftig. Von Heuchelei, Geschichtsverzerrung und dem Verrat am Gleichheitsprinzip des Internationalismus war die Rede und Chruschtschow selbst trat mit dem Vorwurf auf, hier würden allein Juden als Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands dargestellt.97 Als sich die Polemik gegen Jewtuschenko auch des gleichnamigem Gedichts von Ehrenburg bediente, sah dieser sich schließlich selbst veranlasst, Jewtuschenko beizustehen. Ehrenburg hatte in seinem 1944 verfassten Gedicht allein mit der Anrufung von vorsichtigen Begriffen wie dem »Stern« und dem »Ghetto« die jüdische Herkunft der Opfer von Babi Jar zum Thema gemacht. Knapp zwei Dekaden später und zur Unterstützung von Jewtuschenko wählte er nun eine weit direktere Sprache.98 »Es gibt keine ethnische Gruppe, die so viel gelitten hat wie die Juden«, erklärte er gegenüber einer italienischen Zeitung empört gegen den die Wirklichkeit verzerrenden Blick des sowjetischen Internationalismus.99 »Die Juden wurden von den Hitlerfaschisten schlicht deshalb umgebracht, weil sie Juden waren, sie wurden alle ausnahmslos umgebracht, Greise wie Neugeborene«, hieß es später in Ehrenburgs Memoiren über den präzedenzlosen Tod während des Holocaust.100 Jewtuschenko und Ehrenburg verkörperten aus zwei ganz unterschiedlichen Hintergründen heraus das Ringen um die Anerkennung des Holocaust und die Wahrung des Andenkens seiner jüdischen Opfer in den Zeiten der 195 Rubenstein, Introduction, 63. 196 Terpitz, Art. »Babi Jar«, 226 f. 197 Ebd., 229; Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 318–320; Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 323. 198 Marcou, Wir größten Akrobaten der Welt, 320. 199 Zit. nach ebd., 321. 100 Ebd.

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Sowjetherrschaft. Kaum weniger ist diese Erinnerung heutzutage jedoch mit Wassili Grossman und dessen literarischem Werk verbunden. Seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs war Grossman schließlich darum bemüht gewesen, in einem groß angelegten Roman über die Schlacht von Stalingrad seine Erfahrungen als Kriegsjournalist mit dem Schicksal der sowjetischen Juden zu verschränken. Noch 1952 – inmitten der staatlichen Kampagne gegen die sowjetischen Juden – war es ihm gelungen, in der Zeitschrift Novy Mir einen ersten Teil seines Romans zu veröffentlichen, der an nichts Geringerem als Tolstois Krieg und Frieden orientiert war.101 Doch schon die Titel und Text betreffenden Auflagen der Zensur, die ihn unter anderem zwangen, seinen jüdischen Protagonisten gegenüber einem russischen Offizier in den Hintergrund treten zu lassen, waren Vorzeichen des späteren Erscheinungsverbots. Erst 1980 konnte eine russische Ausgabe von Leben und Schicksal, die Semyon Lipkin mithilfe von Wladimir Woinowitsch, Andrei Sarachow und Elena Bonner über die Grenzen geschleust hatte, in Lausanne erscheinen.102 Der Historiker Jürgen Zarusky hat Leben und Schicksal als einen antitotalitaristischen Roman bezeichnet, dessen Gesamtschau von Nationalsozialismus und Stalinismus dem Ideal einer »freiheitlichen Erinnerung« verpflichtet sei. Grossmans Wort von der menschlichen Güte als ethischem Grundprinzip ebenso wie seine emphatische Berufung auf die Idee menschlicher Pluralität haben für eine solche Deutung die Grundlage geliefert.103 Nicht weniger unterstreicht Zarusky jedoch, dass Grossman den Massenmord an den europäischen Juden in das Zentrum seiner Darstellung gerückt hat.104 Erdrückend und erschütternd hatte Grossman dieses Schicksal an der Geschichte der jungen Ärztin Sofia Ossipowna Lewinton beschrieben, deren langer Weg der Deportation in den Gaskammern von Auschwitz endet. Und an diesem Ort, an den die Nazis die Juden aus ganz Europa verschleppt hatten, sah Grossman jene neue Form der Kollektivierung im Gefolge der Vernichtung entstehen, die auch auf die Überlebenden wirken sollte. »Das also bin ich«, denkt Lewinton im Roman kurz vor ihrem Tod, als sie in den sie umgebenden Juden den »nackte[n] Körper des Volkes« erkennt.105 Die Wirkung, die der Holocaust auch auf die Überlebenden hatte, kehrte Grossman wiederum an der Person seines literarischen Alter Egos, des Physikers Viktor Strum, hervor. »Vor dem Krieg hatte Strum nie daran gedacht, dass er Jude war, dass seine Mutter Jüdin war«, heißt es in einer kurzen biogra101 Ausführlich über die Analogie zu Tolstois Krieg und Frieden siehe Garrard/Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev, 239–244. 102 Siehe Zarusky, »Freiheitliche Erinnerung«, 91 f. 103 Grossman, Leben und Schicksal, 253–258 und 493–502. 104 Siehe hierzu Zarusky, Shoah und Konzentrationslager in Vasilij Grossmans Roman »Leben und Schicksal«. 105 Grossman, Leben und Schicksal, 666.

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fischen Rückschau im Roman.106 Durch die Erfahrung vom Tod seiner Mutter, die als Jüdin von den Nazis ermordet wurde, fand sich dieses Selbstempfinden nun unumstößlich revidiert. Jetzt, im Gefolge des Krieges, notiert auch Strum bei der Frage nach seiner Nationalität das Wort Jude in seinen sowjetischen Personalbogen.107 So steht Strum schließlich für Grossmans eigene Erfahrung wie für das Schicksal der sowjetischen Juden im Gefolge des Holocaust. Grossmans Darstellung in Leben und Schicksal war jedoch nicht allein an die sowjetischen Juden oder ein sowjetisches Publikum gerichtet. Als er im Herzen seines Romans eine Szene beschreibt, in der ein tatarischer Soldat dem Romanhelden Viktor Strum ausführliche Informationen über die Massenvernichtung mitteilt, ist zugleich von deren Bedeutung für die ganze Menschheit die Rede. Die Ausführungen des Soldaten, die detailliert den Augenzeugenbericht eines ranghohen Leutnants über die Massenerschießungen und die Existenz der Vernichtungslager wiedergeben, beendet der Soldat mit den an Strum gerichteten Worten: »Ich habe ihn eigens über die Juden ausgefragt, weil ich wusste, dass Sie das interessiert.« »Warum nur mich?«, fasst Grossman daraufhin den ersten Gedanken des von den Schreckensnachrichten erschütterten Strum in Worte. »Interessiert das andere Menschen etwa nicht?«108 Durch Grossmans Roman fällt lange nach dem Untergang des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees ein neues Licht auf dessen Bedeutung. Denn zwar steht seine Geschichte für den Untergang jenes Bündnisses von jüdischer Revolution und Kommunismus zu einem Zeitpunkt, als die Sowjetunion nicht mehr bereit war, die jüdische Erfahrung der Vernichtung mit dem eigenen Selbstverständnis zu konfrontieren. Mit der unermüdlichen Thematisierung der Präzedenzlosigkeit des Holocaust als gegenrationalem Projekt einer ultimativen Vernichtung kehrten das Komitee, Wassili Grossman und Ilja Ehrenburg damit aber auch die über die jüdische Erfahrung hinausweisende, allgemeinmenschliche Bedeutung jenes »Zivilisationsbruchs« (Dan Diner) hervor.109

106 Ebd., 110. 107 Ebd., 700 f.; siehe Slezkine, Das jüdische Jahrhundert. 108 Grossman, Leben und Schicksal, 443. Auf diesen Dialog ist bereits Jürgen Zarusky in seinen bemerkenswerten Artikeln zu Grossman eingegangen. Siehe ders., »Freiheitliche Erinnerung«, 97. 109 Der vorliegende Beitrag basiert auf Forschungsergebnissen, die im Rahmen des vom Europäischen Forschungsrat (ERC) geförderten Projektes »Judging Histories. Experience, Judgement, and Representation of World War II in an Age of Globalization« (PI Prof. Dan Diner; FP7/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement No. 340124) erarbeitet wurden. Für Ihre Kommentare und Hinweise möchte ich mich bei Nicolas Berg, Kobi Kabalek und Elisabeth Gallas bedanken.

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Literaturbericht

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Frühe Holocaustforschung in Amerika: Dokumentation, Zeugenschaft und Begriffsbildung Am 3. April 1949 luden die Herausgeber der Zeitschrift Jewish Social Studies zu einem in seiner Zusammensetzung wie Fragestellung einzigartigen Symposium an der New School for Social Research in New York ein.1 Um das zehnjährige Bestehen der Zeitschrift zu würdigen, die sich den verschiedenen Aspekten moderner jüdischer Existenz aus historischer Perspektive widmete, riefen sie eine Gruppe von Intellektuellen aus New York – im Wesentlichen Autorinnen und Autoren – zusammen, um die wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung des Holocaust zu diskutieren. Unter dem Titel »Problems of Research in the Study of the Jewish Catastrophe, 1939–1945« sollten die erkenntnistheoretischen und methodologischen Dimensionen des Gegenstands erörtert werden.2 Diese Themenwahl war nicht überraschend. Die Verantwortlichen der Jewish Social Studies hatten der Dokumentation nationalsozialistischer Politik und Verbrechen sowie ihrer Folgen für die Juden in Europa ab der ersten Ausgabe im Januar 1939 einen wichtigen Platz eingeräumt. Aus diesem Grund war die Zeitschrift zum Zeitpunkt des Jubiläums bereits als wichtigstes englischsprachiges Medium einer sozialwissenschaftlich fundierten jüdischen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der Erforschung des Holocaust etabliert – freilich nicht unter diesem Namen und lange bevor sich der Begriff allgemein durchsetzte.3 Das 1949 abgehaltene Symposium repräsentierte also im Kern die Gruppe derer, die sich in Amerika frühzeitig der Etablierung eines solchen Forschungsbereichs annahmen. Neben dem Initiator der Veranstaltung, Salo Wittmayer Baron, seinerzeit der 1 2

3

Teile der Forschung zu diesem Beitrag sind durch ein Global-Archives-Stipendium des Deutschen Literaturarchivs Marbach ermöglicht worden, wofür ich herzlich dankbar bin. Mit Ausnahme eines Beitrags sind die Vorträge publiziert in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 13–94. Hinweise zur Konzeption des Symposiums finden sich vereinzelt in Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif., Special Collections and University Archives Departement, Jewish Social Studies Records, 1931–1987, M0670. David Engel, Art. »Jewish Social Studies«, in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig hg. von Dan Diner (nachfolgend EJGK), Bd. 3, Stuttgart 2012, 192–195; zur Verwendung des Begriffs »Holocaust« siehe James E. Young, Beschreiben des Holocaust. Darstellung und Folgen der Interpretation, aus dem Amerikan. von Christa Schuenke, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, 139–149; Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, New York 2012, 223 f., Anm. 2. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 535–569.

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wichtigste Historiker der jüdischen Geschichte in Amerika sowie Kopf und Herausgeber der Jewish Social Studies, waren Hannah Arendt, Salomon Bloom, Philip Friedman, Samuel Gringauz, Joshua Starr und Herbert Wechsler als Vortragende, Koppel S. Pinson für Schlussbemerkungen und Abraham Duker, Mordecai Kossover, Paul M. Neurath, Zosa Szajkowski4 und Max Weinreich als Kommentatoren anwesend. Als Zeugen einer historischen Zäsur, deren Ausmaß alles bisher Dagewesene überstieg, und unter dem Eindruck, sich »der Geschichte gegenüber verantwortlich zu fühlen«, wie es Philip Friedman später ausdrückte,5 wollten sie mit ihrem Zusammentreffen den Ausgangspunkt einer systematischen wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit der zurückliegenden jüdischen Katastrophe schaffen.6 Die unterschiedlichen Facetten dieser ersten Auseinandersetzung stehen im Mittelpunkt der folgenden Überlegungen. Das Symposium gilt dabei als Referenzpunkt für die verschiedenen Motive, Ziele und Strategien, die sich im frühen Dokumentieren, Bezeugen und Beschreiben des Holocaust ausdrückten. Mittels einer Überblicksdarstellung der unterschiedlichen Textformen, die in den 1940er Jahren in Amerika in Konfrontation mit dem Gegenstand erprobt wurden, soll auf den kommenden Seiten das Forschungsfeld in the making konturiert werden. Fragen der strafrechtlichen Ahndung der Täter, der individuellen Zeugenschaft und der beginnenden historischen Begriffsreflexion stehen, so die hier zugrunde liegende These, im Mittelpunkt der frühen amerikanischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Holocaust. Die Teilnehmenden des Symposiums bildeten keine homogene Gruppe, sie waren unterschiedlicher Herkunft, hatten verschiedene Ausbildungswege durchlaufen und repräsentierten somit die Vielfalt von europäischen Wissenskulturen. Noch wichtiger für das Zusammentreffen in New York war jedoch, dass sich ihre Erfahrungsgeschichten im Nationalsozialismus fundamental voneinander unterschieden und so ihr Nachdenken darüber ganz verschiedene Anhaltspunkte hatte. Es trafen hier Lagerüberlebende wie Friedman und Gringauz, Geflüchtete wie Arendt und Weinreich sowie seit vielen Jahren in den Vereinigten Staaten Lebende wie Pinson, Wechsler und Baron aufeinander. Ihre Beiträge reichten von Sondierungen des Forschungsgeschehens über Analysen von Fallbeispielen und Einzelaspekten der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftspraxis bis hin zu konzeptionellen Überlegungen. Trotz des kurzen zeitlichen Abstands zum erlebten und bezeugten Grauen suchten sie eine wissenschaftlich »distanzierte« Konfrontation mit dem

4 5 6

Vgl. zu Zosa Szajkowski den Artikel von Lisa Moses Leff in diesem Jahrbuch. Philip Friedman/Jacob Robinson, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact, New York 1960, 103. Salo W. Baron, Opening Remarks, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 13–16.

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Gegenstand zu initiieren und schrittweise ein eigenständiges Forschungsfeld abzustecken. In seiner Ausrichtung stellte das Symposium damit das erste englischsprachige akademische Forum in den Vereinigten Staaten dar, das sich dem Holocaust als historischem Gegenstand widmete.7 Anders als in der Geschichte der Holocausthistoriografie herkömmlich beschrieben, kam es also keineswegs erst infolge des Prozesses gegen Adolf Eichmann 1961 zu einem Interesse an der Erforschung der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung. Schon während des Krieges und verstärkt unmittelbar danach sahen sich insbesondere die jüdischen Zeitzeugen geradezu gezwungen, das katastrophische Geschehen aufzuzeichnen und erste Narrative zu seiner historischen Deutung zu entwickeln. Es entstand ein heute weithin vergessenes Korpus von Schriften unterschiedlicher Genres, die dem Jahrzehnte später sich institutionalisierenden Forschungsfeld den Weg bereiteten. Erst in letzter Zeit wird das Potenzial dieser Pionierleistungen wiederentdeckt und in geradezu archäologischer Arbeit Stück für Stück ins Bewusstsein zurückgeholt. In dieser Neuvermessung der Gründungsgeschichte der Holocaustforschung spielen aber die in Amerika produzierten Publikationen bisher eine untergeordnete Rolle. Dies verwundert schon allein deswegen, weil sie ein so breites Spektrum von Themen, Zugängen, Schreibmodi und Dokumentationsformen abdecken, dass eine Neulektüre für das Verständnis der allgemeinen Produktionsumstände jener frühen Forschungsbeiträge besonders fruchtbar scheint. Die Vorträge und Kommentare der Tagung von 1949 ebenso wie das ausgebliebene Echo auf die Veranstaltung stehen paradigmatisch für Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen, die für die Holocaustforschung zwischen 1941 und 1961 in Amerika und auch andernorts kennzeichnend waren.

Rückkehr an den Anfang: Neue Perspektiven auf die Nachkriegszeit Die immense Forschungsleistung, die in den ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnten vorrangig von Gelehrten und politischen Akteuren jüdischer Herkunft in Europa, Amerika und im jungen Staat Israel vollbracht wurde, kommt erst langsam in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zur Geltung. Dass sie 7

Zu dem Zeitpunkt hatten bereits drei Konferenzen in Paris, Jerusalem und am YIVO New York (in jiddischer Sprache) stattgefunden, die von jüdischen Akteuren organisiert worden waren und sich der Erforschung der Katastrophe annahmen. Siehe Friedman/Robinson, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact, 152–155.

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überhaupt Aufmerksamkeit erfährt, hat mit dem wachsenden Interesse an der Geschichte der frühen Nachkriegszeit insgesamt zu tun, das eine Neubewertung des historischen Stellenwerts der Jahre nach 19458 und insbesondere kollektiver wie individueller Formen des Umgangs mit den nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen zur Folge hat. Seit den 2000er Jahren ist ein veritabler Forschungszweig der sogenannten Aftermath-Studies entstanden, der sich den rechtlichen, politischen, kulturellen, sozialen und erkenntnistheoretischen Resonanzräumen von Krieg und Holocaust nach 1945, besonders in der Zwischenzeit von Kriegsende bis 1949/50, zuwendet.9 Dieser Perspektivwechsel ist in besonderer Weise auch in den Jüdischen Studien zu beobachten. Nicht nur die historische Ausnahmesituation der Nachkriegsjahre – einer Zeit, in der es für einen kurzen Moment möglich schien, die Welt neu zu entwerfen und im Bewusstsein der Katastrophe des Holocaust neue Formen der politischen Ordnung und Friedenssicherung zu entwickeln – wird mit Blick auf die Situation von Überlebenden und jüdischen Akteuren und Organisationen weltweit untersucht.10 In diesem Zusammenhang ziehen auch die ersten jüdischen Initiativen der Dokumentation und Erinnerung des Holocaust Aufmerksamkeit auf sich, die bisher wenig Beachtung fanden, ja mitunter sogar geleugnet wurden. Unter dem Stichwort »Myth of Silence« stellen etwa Hasia Diner, David Cesarani und Eric Sundquist in verschiedenen Arbeiten die in Geschichtsschreibung und Lite-

18 Für einen thematischen Überblick siehe Mark Mazower, Reconstruction. The Historiographical Issues, in: Past & Present (2011), Supplement 6, 17–28, und das Sonderheft Critical Inquiry 40 (2014), H. 4: »Around 1948. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation«, hg. von Leela Gandhi und Deborah L. Nelson. Für die neue Rekonstruktion der ersten Nachkriegsjahre siehe beispielsweise Ian Buruma, 1945. Die Welt am Wendepunkt, München 2015. 19 Als Beispiel können die Veröffentlichungen zweier wichtiger Konferenzreihen dienen: Suzanne Bardgett u. a. (Hgg.), Landscapes after Battle, 2 Bde., London 2010–2011, und die von verschiedenen Herausgeberinnen und Herausgebern besorgte Publikationsreihe Lessons and Legacies, 11 Bde., Evanston, Ill., 1991–2014. Einen Überblick bieten Peter Reichel/Harald Schmid/Peter Steinbach (Hgg.), Der Nationalsozialismus. Die zweite Geschichte. Überwindung, Deutung, Erinnerung, München 2009. Zum Begriff der Zwischenzeit siehe Dan Diner, Zwischenzeit 1945 bis 1949. Über jüdische und andere Konstellationen, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament 65 (2015), H. 16/17, 16–20. 10 Einer der ersten, die die Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten der Zeit beschrieben, war Yehuda Bauer. Er bezeichnete die Nachkriegsjahre als »the great period of American Jewish Intervention in the Jewish world, aimed at reconstructing and rehabilitating the destroyed Jewish existence in the wake of the Holocaust«, siehe ders., Out of the Ashes. The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry, Oxford/New York 1989, XXII. Eine kurze Einführung in die neuere Forschung bietet Atina Grossmann, Who Guarantees Individual Rights? Jews and Human Rights Debates after World War II, in: Norbert Frei/ Annette Weinke (Hgg.), Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945, Göttingen 2013, 42–52.

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raturwissenschaft verbreitete Lesart infrage, der zufolge Reaktionen auf den Massenmord an den Juden in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit zunächst ausblieben und die Erforschung und Konfrontation mit den Ereignissen erst durch den 1961 in Jerusalem durchgeführten Prozess gegen Adolf Eichmann angestoßen wurden. Studien zur Entwicklung der Holocausthistoriografie (aber auch der Erinnerungskultur im Allgemeinen) basieren bis auf wenige Ausnahmen auf dieser Periodisierung. Die ersten anderthalb Nachkriegsjahrzehnte wurden gemeinhin als Zeit des Verschweigens und Verdrängens, der nur latenten Wahrnehmung der Katastrophe charakterisiert.11 Im Gegensatz dazu betonen Hasia Diner, Cesarani und andere, dass zumindest unter jüdischen Zeitgenossen eine Vielzahl von Aktivitäten zu verzeichnen gewesen sei, die der Aufarbeitung der Ereignisse und dem Gedächtnis der jüdischen Erfahrung während des Zweiten Weltkriegs dienen sollten.12 Vor dem Hintergrund dieser neuen Akzentsetzung hat sich auch ein Forschungsschwerpunkt ausgebildet, in dem Schreibstrategien, Narrative, Repräsentationsformen und Motive der ersten historischen Arbeiten zum Holocaust untersucht werden.13 Speziell mit Blick auf Amerika, aber auch hinsichtlich der amerikanischen Judenheiten wurde und wird indes bis heute 11 Einführend zur Periodisierung: Frank Bajohr/Andrea Löw, Tendenzen und Probleme der neueren Holocaust-Forschung. Eine Einführung, in: dies. (Hgg.), Der Holocaust. Ergebnisse und neue Fragen der Forschung, Frankfurt a. M. 2015, 9–30, und Jean-Marc Dreyfus/Daniel Langton, Introduction, in: dies, Writing the Holocaust, New York 2011, 1–6. Mit dem Begriff der Latenz arbeitet Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Nach 1945. Latenz als Ursprung der Gegenwart, Berlin 2012. 12 Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, New York 2009; David Cesarani/Eric J. Sundquist (Hgg.), After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence, London 2012. Für Frankreich siehe François Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence. Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire, Paris 2012. Eine übergreifende Darstellung bieten Regina Fritz/Éva Kovács/ Béla Rásky (Hgg.), Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte. Zur frühen Aufarbeitung des NS-Massenmordes an den Juden/Before the Holocaust Had Its Name. Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder of the Jews, Wien 2016. 13 Siehe v. a. Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, Mass./London 1981, bes. 125–146; James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, Bloomington, Ind., 1988 (dt.: Beschreiben des Holocaust); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, Md., 2001; Nicolas Berg, Ein Außenseiter in der Holocaustforschung. Joseph Wulf (1912–1974) im Historikerdiskurs der Bundesrepublik, in: Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 1 (2003), 311–346; David Bankier/Dan Michman (Hgg.), Holocaust Historiography in Context. Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, Jerusalem 2008; Jockusch, Collect and Record!; Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 11 (2012), Schwerpunkt: Frühe Holocaustforschung, hg. von Klaus Kempter, 301–386; ders., Joseph Wulf. Ein Historikerschicksal in Deutschland, 2., durchges. Aufl., Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2014; Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research. Birth and Evolution, London/New York 2013; jüngst: Mark L. Smith, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (unveröffentlichte Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, Calif., 2016).

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in der Forschung die vermeintliche Passivität gegenüber den europäischen Ereignissen während des Krieges und danach hervorgehoben.14 Einzig die beiden aus Europa stammenden und nach Amerika emigrierten jüdischen Wissenschaftler Raul Hilberg und Philip Friedman fanden in der jüngeren Vergangenheit als Nestoren der Holocaustgeschichtsschreibung Anerkennung.15 Zudem werden ausgesuchte jüdische Intellektuelle in der klassischen Exilforschung und Ideengeschichte gewürdigt, etwa Hannah Arendt oder Vertreter des Umfelds der Frankfurter Schule, die aus Europa nach Amerika flohen und dort in den 1940er Jahren Studien zur Geschichte und Wirkung von Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust vorlegten.16 Wenige aber haben wie 14 Einen Überblick zu der polarisierten und politisch aufgeladenen Debatte bietet Raphael Medoff, »The Holocaust, America, and American Jewry« Revisited, in: Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 6 (2012), H. 2, 127–135; ders., American Responses to the Holocaust. New Research, New Controversies, in: American Jewish History 100 (2016), H. 3, 379–409. Prominentestes Beispiel dieser Lesart ist Peter Novick, Nach dem Holocaust. Der Umgang mit dem Massenmord, aus dem Amerik. von Irmela Arnsperger und Boike Rehbein, Stuttgart 22001. 15 Roni Stauber, Laying the Foundations for Holocaust Research. The Impact of Philip Friedman, Jerusalem 2009; Natalia Aleksiun, Philip Friedman and the Emergence of Holocaust Scholarship. A Reappraisal, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 333–346; Laura Jockusch, Historiography in Transit. Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History in the Late 1940s, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 58 (2013), 75–94; Christopher Browning, Raul Hilberg, in: Yad Vashem Studies 35 (2007), H. 2, 7–20; René Schlott, Ein Exilant unter Exilanten. Raul Hilbergs frühe Jahre in den USA 1939–1961, in: Jahrbuch für Exilforschung 34 (2016), 93–107; ders./Walter Pehle (Hgg.), Raul Hilberg, Anatomie des Holocaust. Essays und Erinnerungen, Frankfurt a. M. 2016; Nicolas Berg, »Phantasie der Bürokratie«. Raul Hilbergs Pionierstudie zur Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, in: Jürgen Danyel u. a. (Hgg.), 50 Klassiker der Zeitgeschichte, Göttingen 2013, 71–75; Michael Wildt, Raul Hilberg and Saul Friedländer. Two Perspectives on the Holocaust, in: Christian Wiese/Paul Betts (Hgg.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination. Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, London 2010, 101–113. 16 Etwa Martin Jay, Dialektische Phantasie. Die Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule und des Instituts für Sozialforschung 1923–1950, Frankfurt a. M. 1976; Dan Diner (Hg.), Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz, Frankfurt a. M. 1988; Enzo Traverso, Auschwitz denken. Die Intellektuellen und die Shoah, aus dem Franz. von Helmut Dahmer, Hamburg 2000; Alfons Söllner, Fluchtpunkte. Studien zur politischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Baden-Baden 2006; Thomas Fries, Die transatlantischen Anfänge der Auseinandersetzung mit dem europäischen Judenmord. Franz Neumann, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, in: Georg Gerber/Robert Leucht/Karl Wagner (Hgg.), Transatlantische Verwerfungen – transatlantische Verdichtungen. Kulturtransfer in Literatur und Wissenschaft 1945–1989, Göttingen 2012, 45–69; Kim Wünschmann, The »Scientification« of the Concentration Camp. Early Theories of Terror and Their Reception by American Academia, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (2013), H. 1, 111–126; Eckart Goebel/Sigrid Weigel (Hgg.), »Escape to Life«. German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933, Berlin/Boston, Mass., 2012; siehe auch das seit 1983 erscheinende Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Exilforschung, hg. von Claus-Dieter Krohn.

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Gerd Korman (bereits in den 1970er Jahren), Lawrence Baron und eben Hasia Diner eine breitere Perspektive angelegt und in ihren Arbeiten gezeigt, dass diese Auseinandersetzung selbst in Amerika nicht die Ausnahme, sondern in zahlreichen jüdischen Zusammenhängen die Regel war.17 Statt eines Mangels an Initiativen war es offenbar vielmehr ein Rezeptionsdefizit, das über mehrere Jahrzehnte in der Forschung zur Nachkriegsgeschichte den Eindruck gefestigt hat, es habe hier – wie überall sonst auch – nach 1945 noch keine systematische Forschung zum Holocaust gegeben. Schon ein Blick in die 1960 von Philip Friedman und Jacob Robinson herausgegebene Bibliografie Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact, in der historische Arbeiten, Augenzeugenberichte und Dokumentsammlungen aufgeführt werden, die die jüdische Verfolgungs- und Vernichtungsgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus zum Gegenstand haben, offenbart eine andere Realität.18 Die Herausgeber belegen in diesem außerordentlichen und in seiner Tiefe bisher nicht ausgeschöpften Band eine mehrere Tausend Titel umfassende Publikationstätigkeit in den 1940er und 1950er Jahren; einige Hundert Einträge verweisen auf Autoren und Autorinnen sowie Institutionen in Amerika, die meisten unter ihnen mit jüdischem Hintergrund.

17 Gerd Korman, The Holocaust in American Historical Writing, in: Societas 2 (1972), 251–270; Lawrence Baron, The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), H. 1, 62–88; Hasia Diner, No Generation of Silence. American Jews and the Holocaust in the Post-War Years, in: Fritz/Kovács/Rásky. (Hgg.), Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte/Before the Holocaust Had Its Name, 135–147; dies., We Remember with Reverence and Love. Interessanterweise war es in Deutschland Martin Brozat, der in Reaktion auf die Ausstrahlung der Fernsehserie Holocaust 1979 darauf hinwies, dass eine rege Forschungstätigkeit unter jüdischen Organisationen und Akteuren in der Nachkriegszeit in Amerika stattgefunden hat, die keine Resonanz unter etablierten Historikern fand: ders., »Holocaust« und die Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979), H. 2, 285–298, bes. 289–293. Wie Sybille Steinbacher zu Recht betont, folgten in der Bundesrepublik »aus dieser Erkenntnis von Forschungsdefiziten […] jedoch keine Konsequenzen«. Auch Brozat verfolgte die jüdische Forschungstätigkeit nicht weiter und beließ sie in ihrem Schattendasein: Steinbacher, Martin Brozat und die Erforschung der nationalsozialistischen Judenpolitik, in: Norbert Frei (Hg.), Martin Broszat, der »Staat Hitlers« und die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, Göttingen 2007, 130–145, hier 142. 18 Die Bibliografie wurde als Kooperationsprojekt zwischen dem YIVO New York und der Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem Jerusalem erstellt, siehe Friedman/Robinson, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact.

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Annäherungen an die Katastrophe, den Churbn und »Hitlers Krieg gegen die Juden«: Sondierung eines Forschungsfeldes in Amerika Die ersten Versuche, die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden und die historische Tragweite dieses Geschehens zu beschreiben, sind in Amerika bereits vor Kriegsende entstanden. Im Rahmen der Aktivitäten verschiedener jüdischer Organisationen, die zumeist in New York ansässig waren und von diesem stetig wachsenden Zentrum jüdischen Lebens aus wirkten, dienten solche Schriften vorrangig der Dokumentation von Verbrechen. Mit der Befreiung von Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagern und schließlich der deutschen Kapitulation sowie dem damit einhergehenden Zugang zu neuen Dokumenten differenzierten sich die Herangehensweisen und Aufzeichnungsformen. Man kann zu dieser Zeit einer buchstäblichen Suchbewegung folgen: Beweggründe, Perspektiven und Forschungsfragen der Konfrontation mit den Ereignissen wurden formuliert, verschiedene methodische Zugänge erwogen und wieder verworfen. Begriffe, Konzepte und Theoriemodelle zur adäquaten Erfassung und Repräsentation des Geschehens standen noch nicht zur Verfügung und die Beteiligten versuchten vorsichtig, einen Rahmen für die zukünftige Forschung zu bestimmen.19 In dieser frühen, weder institutionalisierten noch in ihren Ausdrucksformen und Genres fest gefügten Forschungs- oder eher Schreiblandschaft Amerikas vor 1961 lassen sich grob drei Gruppen von Werken und Publikationsformaten identifizieren, die den Holocaust zum Thema haben. Die Grenzen verlaufen häufig fließend, konnten mit einer Publikation doch verschiedene Ziele verfolgt, verschiedene Zielgruppen angesprochen werden. Versucht man aber das vielstimmige Korpus zu charakterisieren, lassen sich Merkmale ausmachen, die es ermöglichen, Richtungen und Intentionen des Schreibens zu bündeln. Die Konvolute der chronologisch frühesten Textgruppe haben stark dokumentarischen Charakter und dienten in erster Linie der Beweisführung gegen die Täter. Die zweite und umfangreichste Gruppe von Publikationen widmet sich individueller wie kollektiver Gedächtnisarbeit. Diese Texte bergen aber, da sie vorrangig Erfahrungen von Opfern und Überlebenden zur Sprache bringen, häufig gleichzeitig das empirische Material, das eine Erforschung des Gegenstandes erst ermöglichte.20 Die dritte Gruppe umfasst schließlich jene Studien, die sich explizit der wissenschaftlichen Annäherung an den Gegenstand verschreiben. Die ersten synthetisierenden Auf19 Philip Friedman beschreibt diese Situation in verschiedenen Aufsätzen, z. B. ders., American Jewish Research and Literature on the Holocaust, in: Jewish Social Studies 13 (1951), H. 3, 235–250. 20 Ebd., 250.

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zeichnungen zum Geschehen in Europa beziehungsweise zum Nationalsozialismus wurden in unmittelbarer Reaktion auf die Ereignisse ab etwa 1941 verfasst. Ihren Höhepunkt hatten solche wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen allerdings Ende der 1940er und Anfang der 1950er Jahre. In dieser Periode zeigen sich vielfältige Interpretationsansätze und Zugangsweisen, über die die einzelnen Autoren versuchten, dem Ereignis sprachliche Gestalt und historischen Kontext zu geben.

Dokumentation und Rechtsprechung Das erste Korpus von Schriften entstand vor dem Hintergrund der von den Alliierten ab Oktober 1943 für die Nachkriegszeit geplanten strafrechtlichen Verfolgung der nationalsozialistischen Täter, die nicht nur neuer Rechtsauslegung,21 sondern auch einer systematischen Dokumentation des Geschehens bedurfte. Mitglieder führender politischer Organisationen wie des American Jewish Committee (AJC), des World Jewish Congress (WJC), der Anti Defamation League, aber auch von Forschungsinstituten wie dem YIVO beteiligten sich fieberhaft an der Erstellung von Dossiers, Berichten, Materialsammlungen und detaillierten Aufzeichnungen bestimmter Verbrechenskomplexe. Diese sollte vor allem der Beweisführung im Nürnberger Militärtribunal und den Nachfolgeprozessen dienen und besonders die jüdische Erfahrung sichtbar machen.22 Auf dem Symposium an der New School 1949 waren zwei Personen vertreten, deren Vorträge auf einer für Strafverfolgung und Entschädigung relevanten Rekonstruktion der Ereignisse basierten. Dies galt insbesondere für Joshua Starrs Beitrag Jewish Cultural Property under Nazi Control, der unmittelbar aus der Erfahrung jüdischer Restitutionsforderungen entstand. Vermutlich bezog sich auch Herbert Wechslers Vortrag zur »Katastrophe und den Nürnberger Prozessen« auf Material, das von jüdischen Organisa21 Stellvertretend für viele neue Forschungen in diesem Bereich siehe Mark Lewis, The Birth of New Justice. The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950, Oxford/New York 2014; Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment. Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, New Haven, Conn., 2001; etwas früher: Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg. Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1998. 22 Die Rolle des Holocaust in den Nürnberger Verfahren ist Gegenstand zahlreicher Aufsätze und Studien, deren Autorinnen und Autoren sich im Wesentlichen einig sind, dass die genozidalen Verbrechen zwar direkt thematisiert wurden, die jüdische Erfahrungsgeschichte als solche aber unterbelichtet blieb. Siehe dazu einführend Michael Marrus, The Holocaust at Nuremberg, in: Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), 5–41, sowie Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial. War Crime Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory, New York 2003.

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tionen zum Verfahren beigesteuert wurde, er ist allerdings nicht veröffentlicht worden und lässt sich auch aus den Dokumenten zur Konferenz nicht mehr rekonstruieren.23 Joshua Starr war der einzige in den Vereinigten Staaten geborene Teilnehmer des Symposiums. Während des Krieges war er – wie auch zahlreiche jüdische Emigranten, die zu dieser Zeit wichtige Texte zum Verständnis des Nationalsozialismus verfassten, etwa Franz Neumann und Herbert Marcuse24 – für das Office for Strategic Services des amerikanischen Kriegsministeriums tätig. Er gehörte außerdem zum Redaktionsteam der Jewish Social Studies und arbeitete unter der Leitung Salo W. Barons für die 1944 gegründete Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (Commission).25 Letztere gab den Anstoß für seine bis heute relevante Forschung über den nationalsozialistischen Kulturraub und dessen Folgen für jüdische Einrichtungen und Privatsammler in Europa. Als es sich die Commission zur Aufgabe machte, die Rückerstattung geraubter Kulturgüter jüdischer Provenienz vorzubereiten und eine entsprechende Forderung in den Nachkriegsverhandlungen zu verankern, wurde schnell deutlich, dass dafür zwingend detaillierte Kenntnisse des Geschehens notwendig waren. So entstand vor dem Hintergrund juristischer Erfordernisse eine historische Arbeit, in der Presse- und Täterdokumente sowie Zeugenberichte berücksichtigt wurden, um die Struktur, Protagonisten, Motive und Ergebnisse der NS-Raubzüge umfassend erklären zu können. Starrs Studie steht im Kontext dieser Arbeit der Commission, die nicht nur die historisch einmaligen juristischen Weichenstellungen für die Restitution von Kulturgütern vornahm, sondern eben Wegweisendes im Bereich der Rekonstruktion des nationalsozialistischen Kunst- und Kulturraubs hervorbrachte, indem sie ihn als genuinen Teil des Vernichtungsplans erkannte.26 Darüber hinaus gehörte dieser ausgesuchte Forschungszweig in den Zusammenhang der Arbeit des American Jewish Committe und hier besonders seines Institute for Peace and Postwar Studies, dessen Mitglieder in den 23 Zum Themenbereich hat Wechsler bereits am 30. Dezember 1946 auf dem Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association gesprochen, hier allerdings noch während des Nürnberger Verfahrens, siehe Herbert Wechler, The Issues of the Nuremberg Trial, in: Political Science Quarterly 62 (1947), H. 1, 11–26. 24 Franz Neumann/Herbert Marcuse/Otto Kirchheimer, Im Kampf gegen Nazideutschland. Die Berichte der Frankfurter Schule für den amerikanischen Geheimdienst 1943–1949, hg. von Raffaele Laudani, aus dem Engl. von Christine Pries, Frankfurt a. M. 2016. 25 Zur Geschichte der Commission und zu Starrs Engagement siehe Elisabeth Gallas, »Das Leichenhaus der Bücher«. Kulturrestitution und jüdisches Geschichtsdenken nach 1945, 2. durchgesehene Aufl., Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016, hier Kap. 2. 26 Zur Forschungsarbeit der Commission siehe dies., Documenting Cultural Destruction. The Research Project of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, 1944–1948, in: Fritz/Kovács/Rásky (Hgg.), Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte/ Before the Holocaust Had Its Name, 45–61.

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1940er Jahren Berichte und Dokumentationen zum Nationalsozialismus verfassten, um sich auf die juristischen Problemlagen der Nachkriegszeit vorzubereiten und diese mitgestalten zu können. Im November 1940 gegründet und von dem emigrierten belgischen Sozialwissenschaftler Max Gottschalk geleitet, hatte diese Einrichtung – mehr Komitee als Institut – die Aufgabe, die Situation der jüdischen Bevölkerung im Lichte der nationalsozialistischen Bedrohung und des deutschen »Weltkriegs gegen die Juden« zu erfassen.27 Darauf aufbauend sollten Migrations- und Ansiedlungsfragen beantwortet, Versorgungs- und Fürsorgestrategien entwickelt und die rechtliche Ahndung der Verbrechen an den europäischen Juden vorbereitet werden.28 Salo W. Baron hatte nicht nur gemeinsam mit anderen Angehörigen des Komitees seine Initiative zur Rettung der geraubten Kulturgüter begonnen, er hatte sich zuvor auch um dessen Publikations- und Forschungsaufgaben gekümmert. Die vielfältigen unter dem Dach des Institute for Peace and Postwar Studies realisierten Vorhaben waren durch zweierlei Aspekte motiviert: Zum einen betonte Baron 1941, dass die von den Nazis betriebene »Wissenschaft« derart öffentlichkeitswirksame Akzente in Bezug auf die Geschichte und Deutung jüdischer Existenz setze, dass eine Gegenoffensive dringend sei: »There is only one answer which the Jewish People can offer: the repudiation of quantity by quality, i. e. the circulation of a series of really sound and reliable volumes which by the sheer weight of evidence will outweigh the enormous output of Nazi literature.«29

Zum anderen sollten die rechtspolitischen Aspekte, die auf künftigen – zum Zeitpunkt des Arbeitsbeginns in weiter Ferne liegenden – Friedenskonferenzen in Europa verhandelt werden könnten und von Relevanz für die jüdische Existenz sein würden, mithilfe einer Serie von Publikationen vorbereitet werden, um Fehler der Nachkriegsverhandlungen von 1919 zu vermeiden.30 Insgesamt sah Baron die Hauptaufgabe des Komitees darin, historisch fun27 University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Raphael Cohen Papers (nachfolgend Cohen Papers), Box 50, Folder 3, Morris R. Cohen, Draft of Preliminary Report of the Committee on Peace Studies to the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee, 23. September 1940. Es liegt keine Geschichte des Instituts vor, eine Skizze seines inhaltlichen Programms fertigte einer seiner Gründer an, siehe Morris R. Cohen, Jewish Studies of Peace and Post-War Problems, in: Contemporary Jewish Record 4 (1941), H. 2, 110–125. 28 Siehe verschiedene Strategiepapiere des Instituts in: Cohen Papers, Box 50, Folder 2 und 3. 29 Cohen Papers, Box 50, Folder 2, Salo W. Baron, Memorandum on Publications, o. D. [zwischen dem 4. und 11. Juni 1941], 2. Einen Überblick über die von Baron angesprochene nationalsozialistische »Judenforschung« liefert Dirk Rupnow, Judenforschung im Dritten Reich. Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie, Baden-Baden 2011. 30 Cohen Papers, Box 50, Folder 2, Salo W. Baron, Memorandum on Publications.

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dierte Grundlagenarbeiten zur Gegenwartsanalyse der Situation der Juden anzustoßen, selbst wenn ihr Ertrag damals schwer einzuschätzen war. Ein Ausgangspunkt der Publikationstätigkeit des Institute for Peace and Post War Studies ist das – zwar vor dessen Gründung entstandene, jedoch vom AJC finanzierte – Buch International Aspects of German Racial Policies des Historikers Oscar Janowsky und des Juristen Melvin Fagen, das 1937 erschien.31 Der Band fußte auf der missglückten Initiative von Janowsky und Fagen, 1935 im Namen des AJC den Leiter der Hohen Flüchtlingskommission des Völkerbunds, James McDonald, dabei zu unterstützen, eine Petition zur Ächtung der deutschen Judenpolitik beim Völkerbund durchzusetzen. Nach zähem Ringen war es weder gelungen, die jüdischen Organisationen in Europa für die Sache zu gewinnen, noch den Völkerbund zu einer kritischen Adresse an das nationalsozialistische Deutschland zu bewegen.32 Janowsky und Fagen fügten schließlich die für McDonald und die Petition gesammelten Informationen zum Charakter des totalen Staats und seinen rechtlichen Konsequenzen für die Juden im deutschen Herrschaftsbereich in ihrem Buch zusammen und versahen es mit einem Anhang von Dokumenten. Es entstand in der Hoffnung, die politische Weltöffentlichkeit aufzurütteln und zum Eingreifen zu bewegen, wie der in alle genannten politischen Zusammenhänge involvierte Philosophieprofessor Morris Raphael Cohen, Gründungsherausgeber der Jewish Social Studies, betonte: »It is hoped that this book may help toward the restauration of international sanity.«33 In ähnlichem Duktus publizierte auch das spätere Institute for Peace an Postwar Studies seine Forschungsergebnisse. Zwei Publikationen sind exemplarisch hervorzuheben, zum einen der zwischen 1943 und 1944 zusammengestellte, über 350 Seiten umfassende Bericht Jewish Communities under Nazi Rule, der in erstaunlich akkurater Form Entrechtung und Verfolgung sowie die Entwicklung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in 17 durch Deutschland besetzten Ländern dokumentierte; zum anderen die 1945 publizierte Studie Jews in the Post War World von Max Gottschalk und Abraham Duker, in der die Autoren einen Vergleich zwischen den Folgen des Ersten und des Zweitens Weltkriegs vornahmen, um daran Aspekte einer gerechteren politischen Ordnung nach 1945 zu entwickeln. An beiden Texten zeigt sich eindeutig, dass es der wesentliche Impuls aller Publikationen des Komitees war, die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit über die Vorgänge in Europa zu 31 Oscar I. Janowsky/Melvin Fagen, International Aspects of German Racial Policies, New York 1937. 32 Zu der nur als tragisch zu bezeichnenden gescheiterten Initiative siehe Monty Noam Penkower, Honorable Failures against Nazi Germany. McDonald’s Letter of Resignation and the Petition in Its Support, in: Modern Judaism 30 (2010), H. 3, 247–298. 33 Morris Raphael Cohen/James N. Rosenberg, Introduction, in: Janowsky/Fagen, International Aspects of German Racial Policies, XX f., hier XXI.

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informieren und eine politische Strategiebildung zu Fragen des Wieder-inRecht-Setzens, der Versorgung und der Neuansiedlung der jüdischen Überlebenden nach 1945 in Gang zu setzen.34 Das so entstandene Material wurde vorrangig für die Lobbyarbeit des AJC in Bezug auf Hilfsmaßnahmen, Migrationspläne und die Palästinapolitik gegenüber der amerikanischen Regierung sowie für die Programme zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus genutzt.35 Dass hier quasi als Nebeneffekt frühe umfassende Dokumentationen der jüdischen Verfolgungsgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus entstanden, die auch von wissenschaftlichem Nutzen sein könnten, hatten die Autoren gar nicht intendiert. Eine aufklärerische Absicht gegenüber der amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit charakterisierte auch die unter dem Dach des AJC von Max Horkheimer und Samuel H. Flowerman ab 1949 herausgegebene Serie Studies in Prejudice. In deren Rahmen wurden wichtige, teils übersetzte Titel zu kollektivpsychologischen Formen der Vorurteilsbildung, zu Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus veröffentlicht mit dem Ziel, an einer offenen und liberalen Gesellschaft der Zukunft mitzuwirken.36 Die Serie ist Ausdruck einer eher temporären Annäherung zwischen den exilierten Denkern der Frankfurter Schule und den amerikanisch-jüdischen Organisationen, gehört aber zweifelsfrei in

34 The Jewish Communities of Nazi Occupied Europe, vorgelegt vom Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems, American Jewish Committee, New York 1982 [zuerst als Typoskript, New York 1944]; Max Gottschalk/Abraham G. Duker, Jews in the Post-War World, New York 1945. 35 James Loeffler, The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism. The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 »Declaration on Human Rights«, in: Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015), H. 2, 274–295. Allgemein zur Geschichte des AJC siehe Marianne R. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong. The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006, Waltham, Mass., 2007, Kap. 1. 36 Siehe die allen Bänden vorangestellte Einführung: Max Horkheimer/Samuel H. Flowerman, Foreword to Studies in Prejudice. Es erschienen fünf Bände – Bd. 1: Theodor W. Adorno u. a., The Authoritarian Personality, New York 1950 (dt.: Studien zum autoritären Charakter, aus dem Amerikan. von Milli Weinbrenner, Frankfurt a. M. 1973); Bd. 2: Bruno Bettelheim/Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice. A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans, New York 1950; Bd. 3: Nathan W. Ackerman/Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder. A Psychoanalytical Interpretation, New York 1950; Bd. 4: Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal For Destruction. A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, New York 1949 (dt.: Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus, übers. und bearb. von Felix J. Weil, Frankfurt a. M. 1959); Bd. 5: Leo Löwenthal/ Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit. A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, New York 1949 (dt.: Falsche Propheten. Studien zur faschistischen Agitation, übers. von Susanne Hoppmann-Löwenthal, in: Leo Löwenthal, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, Frankfurt a. M. 1982). Zum inhaltlichen und konzeptionellen Zuschnitt der Serie siehe Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung, München 51997, 454–478.

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das Bild einer von rechtspolitischen Akteuren und Institutionen der Zeit geförderten Aufarbeitung der Verbrechen. Dieses Moment war auch Anstoß der Arbeit einer weiteren prominenten, unter dem Dach des World Jewish Congress entstandenen Institution in New York. Das 1941 von dem aus Litauen geflohenen Juristen Jacob Robinson gegründete Institute of Jewish Affairs legte bald nicht nur erfolgreiche Konzepte zur Strafverfolgung der NS-Täter vor, sondern fügte der Beweisführung gegen die Hauptangeklagten der Nürnberger Kriegsverbrecherprozesse umfassendes Material zur Verfolgungs- und Vernichtungsgeschichte der Juden hinzu.37 Seine Mitglieder hatten ebenfalls schon während des Krieges damit begonnen, einzelne Aspekte der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft zu beschreiben, darunter Ghettoisierung, Zwangsarbeit und das Aushungern der europäischen Juden. Zudem entstanden hier zwischen 1943 und 1945 frühe Abhandlungen über die nationalsozialistischen Verfolgungsmaßnahmen, die alle bisher gekannten Formen antisemitischer Gewalt überstiegen, sowie Analysen der Gleichschaltungs-, Kolonisierungs-, Vertreibungs- und Ausrottungspolitik des deutschen Staatsapparats.38 Nach Kriegsende intensivierten Robinson und seine Mitstreiter die Zusammenstellung von Belastungsmaterial gegen die Kriegsverbrecher. Mithilfe der Kanäle des World Jewish Congress, der Büros in ganz Europa unterhielt, wurden Täterdokumente gesammelt, Interviews und Berichte der Überlebenden ausgewertet, Aufzeichnungen, Flugblätter und Dokumentationen von Widerstandsgruppen zusammengetragen und so die kleinteilige Rekonstruktion von Tathergängen ermöglicht. Jenseits dieser Dokumentationsinitiative, auf deren Ergebnisse die amerikanische Anklage in Nürnberg unter der Leitung von Robert H. Jackson nachweislich zurückgriff,39 entstand eine Reihe von Studien zu Einordnung, 37 Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen, Art. »Institute of Jewish Affairs«, in: EJGK, Bd. 3, Stuttgart 2012, 130–136; Zohar Segev, The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust. Between Activism and Restraint, Berlin/Boston, Mass., 2014, 184–201. 38 Institute of Jewish Affairs (Hg.), Jews in Nazi Europe. February 1933 to November 1941. A Study prepared by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, submitted to the Inter-American Jewish Conference, November 23–25, 1941, Baltimore, Md., o. O. u. J. [New York 1941]; Jewish Affairs 1 (1942), H. 11–13: The Jewish Religion in Axis Europe. Fortress against Barbarism; Boris Shub, Hitler’s Ten-Year War on the Jews, New York 1943; ders./Zorah Wahrhaftig, Starvation over Europe (Made in Germany). A Documented Record, New York 1943; Joseph B. Schechtman, Jews in German-Occupied Soviet Territory, New York o. J. [1944]; Gerhard Jacoby, Racial State. The German Nationalities Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, New York 1944. 39 Laura Jockusch, Ein Anwalt der Opfer? Der Jüdische Weltkongress und das Problem einer jüdischen Interessenvertretung bei den Nürnberger Prozessen, in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 22 (2013), 13–34; Michael R. Marrus, A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–1946, in: Cardozo Law Review 27 (2006), H. 4, 1651–1665.

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Kontur und Folgen des Genozids an den europäischen Juden, die über den rechtspolitischen Zweck hinausgingen.40 Hier sind besonders die Arbeiten des russischstämmigen Historikers Anatole Goldstein zu nennen, dessen Werdegang weitgehend unbekannt ist, der aber durch seine Publikationen in der »Lest-we-forget«-Serie des Instituts hervortrat, in deren Mittelpunkt die Verbrechen des Holocaust standen. Mit kürzeren Titeln wie Crimes against Humanity. Some Jewish Aspects und From Madagascar to Auschwitz von 1948 – beide wiederum stark inspiriert von der juristischen Debatte um Strafverfolgung und Neujustierung der Instrumente des internationalen Völkerrechts in Reaktion auf die eingetretene Katastrophe41 – sowie ausführlicheren Darstellungen wie Their Mournful Road. The Story of the »Final Solution« (1948), Operation Murder (1949) oder From Discrimination to Annihilation (1952) versuchte Goldstein das Geschehen einerseits in einen historischen Kontext zu setzen, andererseits dessen einzigartige Charakterzüge hervorzuheben.42 In gewisser Weise kann man Goldsteins Schriften als Resonanzen auf den Urtext dieser in Amerika entstandenen, eben vorrangig an politischen und Rechtsfragen orientierten Texte sehen: das 1944 veröffentlichte Buch Axis Rule in Occupied Europe von Raphael Lemkin.43 Das einflussreiche Buch, mit dem Lemkin die Massenverbrechen der Nazis gegen die Juden als Kollektiv auf den Begriff des Genozids brachte, diesen als Straftatbestand des internationalen Völkerrechts einführen und damit seine juristische Ahndung ermöglichen wollte, enthält neben strukturellen Darstellungen zu den Elementen eines Völkermords detaillierte Rekonstruktionen der nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungspolitik – von den ersten Absichtserklärungen bis hin zur Tatumsetzung.

40 Zahlreiche Publikationen des Instituts dieser Zeit widmeten sich auch der Flüchtlingskrise und den jüdischen Displaced Persons in Europa, siehe etwa Arieh Tartakower/Kurt R. Grossmann, The Jewish Refugee, New York 1944; Zorah Warhaftig, Relief and Rehabilitation. Implications of the UNRRA Program for Jewish Needs, New York 1944; ders., Uprooted. Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons after Liberation, New York 1946; Gerhard Jacoby, The Story of the Jewish »DP«, New York 1948. 41 Anatole Goldstein, Crimes against Humanity. Some Jewish Aspects, in: The Jewish Yearbook of International Law 1 (1948), 206–225. Der einzige erschienene Band des Jahrbuchs enthält herausragende Texte jüdischer Juristen und Intellektueller, die den Zivilisationsbruch und seine Folgen auf rechtlicher Ebene diskutieren, darunter Nathan Feinberg und Jacob Robinson. Siehe auch Anatole Goldstein, From Madagascar to Auschwitz, in: Congress Weekly 15 (1948), H. 19, 5–7. Darin nimmt Goldstein expliziten Bezug auf die Nürnberger Nachfolgeprozesse. 42 Ders., Their Mournful Road. The Story of the »Final Solution«, New York 1948; ders., Operation Murder, hg. von Maximilian Hurwitz, New York 1949; ders., From Discrimination to Annihilation, New York 1952. 43 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Washington, D. C., 1944.

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Lemkins Schriften wie auch die zahlreichen in den Zusammenhängen der jüdischen Organisationen entstandenen Texte zeichnet ein dualer Charakter aus: Zumeist als konzeptionelle oder rechtspraktische Beiträge und Beweismittel zur juristischen Umgangsweise mit dem Nationalsozialismus formuliert, entstanden hier – ändert man die Blickrichtung – auch wichtige erste Dokumentationen auf der Ebene der Ereignisgeschichte des Holocaust. Sie können uns heute nicht nur für eine Neuvermessung ihrer Historiografie, sondern auch inhaltlich interessieren. Umgekehrt bildete der Nürnberger Prozess selbst einen, wenn nicht den Motor für die frühe historische Aufarbeitung der Zusammenhänge, denn das für die Anklageerhebung und Prozessführung akquirierte Material sollte den wichtigsten Quellenbestand zur Erforschung des Nationalsozialismus wie des Holocaust bilden. Der deutschjüdische Jurist Robert M. W. Kempner, der Jackson in der Anklage unterstützte, bezeichnete den Prozesskomplex Nürnberg entsprechend als »die größte politologische und historische Forschungsstätte, die jemals existiert hat.«44

Zeugenschaft und Erinnerung Ein zweiter Bereich von Publikationen im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt diente der Erinnerungsarbeit. Zahlreiche Flüchtlinge, Überlebende und Augenzeugen verarbeiteten ihre Verfolgungserfahrungen in Europa im Schreiben und im aufgezeichneten Gespräch. Ihre Zeugenschaft nahm dabei sehr unterschiedliche Formen an: Neben historisch-chronistische Darstellungen traten literarische und autobiografische Schriften, die individuelle und kollektive Erfahrungen unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft repräsentierten.45 Die Erinnerung an die ungezählten und anonym gebliebenen Ermordeten war ein wesentliches Motiv dieser Texte, von denen manche den Charakter eines »Ersatz-Grabsteins« (»substitute gravestone«) für die Toten ohne Gräber annahmen.46 44 Robert M. W. Kempner, Ankläger einer Epoche. Lebenserinnerungen, in Zusammenarbeit mit Jörg Friedrich, Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Wien 1983, 223, zit. nach Jan Eike Dunkhase, Art. »Nürnberg«, in: EJGK, Bd. 4, Stuttgart 2013, 384–390, hier 388. 45 Die theoretische wie historische Literatur zum Thema Zeugnis, Zeugen und Zeugenschaft des Holocaust füllt mittlerweile Regalmeter; zur Einführung siehe Ulrich Baer (Hg.), »Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen«. Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah, Frankfurt a. M. 2000; Norbert Frei/Martin Sabrow (Hgg.), Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, Göttingen 2012; Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Testimony and Time. Holocaust Survivors Remember, Jerusalem 2015; Anna Pollmann, Art. »Zeugenschaft«, in: EJGK, Bd. 6, Stuttgart 2015, 547–552. 46 Jack Kugelmass/Jonathan Boyarin (Hgg.), From a Ruined Garden. The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, New York 1983, 12.

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Eine der wichtigsten Artikulationsformen stellen die sogenannten jiskerbikher (Jizkor-/Erinnerungsbücher) dar. Zumeist von den landsmanshaftn, den organisierten Verbänden der Überlebenden eines bestimmten Ortes, einer Stadt, einer Region, auch eines bestimmten Ghettos oder Konzentrationslagers publiziert, versammeln diese Bücher Dokumente, Belletristik und andere Erinnerungstexte an die zerstörten Heimatstädte und Landschaften, Augenzeugenberichte zu deutschen Maßnahmen gegen die Juden, Listen mit Namen von Ermordeten, Fotografien und weitere Überbleibsel der zerstörten Welt.47 Von Philip Friedman bereits 1951 wiederum als »literarische Grabsteine« bezeichnet, bestand die Aufgabe der Erinnerungsbücher explizit darin, den Toten und den vernichteten Orten ein materielles Gedächtnis zu geben.48 In den 1940er und 1950er Jahren entstand eine große Menge von Jizkorbüchern in Amerika, die vor allem dem Angedenken zerstörter polnischer und litauischer Städte und Orte gewidmet waren. Zumeist dokumentieren sie zunächst deren jüdische Tradition und Geschichte vor dem Nationalsozialismus, um anschließend, häufig in Mikrostudien, die Holocausterfahrung in der spezifischen Region zu rekapitulieren.49 Ihre Besonderheit bestand auch darin, dass es sich um Werke großer Autorengruppen handelte, die eine kollektive Zeugenschaft und Zeugnispflicht zum Ausdruck brachten. Wie Boyarin und Kugelmass in ihrer ersten Anthologie ausgewählter Texte aus Jizkorbüchern betonen, entstanden jene in einer beispiellosen soziale Milieus und Sprachen, Länder und Kontinente umspannenden gemeinschaftlichen Tätigkeit des Dokumentierens und Erinnerns – als Testamente der zerstörten Welt richteten sie sich an kommende Generationen.50 Ein durch seine komplexe Produktions- und Veröffentlichungsgeschichte aus der Menge der in Amerika entstandenen Erinnerungsbücher herausstechendes Projekt war das sogenannte Black Book. Es stellt kein Jizkorbuch im strengen Sinn dar, ähnelte jener Gattung aber in Struktur und Umsetzung. Das von dem Physiker Albert Einstein, dem Schriftsteller Shalom Asch und dem Journalisten Ben-Zion Goldberg initiierte Projekt, das zusammen mit dem in der Sowjetunion aktiven Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitee reali-

47 Einführend Rosemary Horowitz, A History of Yizker Books, in: dies. (Hg.), Memorial Books of Eastern European Jewry. Essays on the History and Meanings of Yizker Volumes, Jefferson, N. C., 2011, 7–27. 48 Philip Friedman, »Landsmanshaftn« Literature in the United States during the Past Ten Years, in: ebd., 43–53, hier 44 (zuerst jidd. 1951). Siehe für zahlreiche englische Übersetzungen hebräischer und jiddischer Jizkorbücher (5. März 2017). 49 Siehe Friedman, »Landsmanshaftn« Literature in the United States during the Past Ten Years. 50 Kugelmass/Boyarin (Hgg.), From a Ruined Garden, 5 f.

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siert werden sollte, zielte auf die Veröffentlichung von Dokumenten und Berichten zur nazistischen Vernichtungspraxis in Europa und dabei insbesondere auf die Wiedergabe jüdischer Augenzeugenberichte.51 Die in Amerika umgesetzte Fassung, die 1946 unter dem Titel The Black Book. The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People von dem Herausgeberkonsortium The Jewish Black Book Committee in New York veröffentlicht wurde,52 entsprach letztlich nur rudimentär dem Vorhaben, das gleichzeitig in der Sowjetunion lanciert wurde.53 Die englischsprachige Version sollte, so wird es in der Vorrede formuliert, die Form einer Anklageschrift (»Indictment«) annehmen. Diese explizite Referenz auf die Sphäre des Rechts machte es zugleich zu einem Buch, das in den Bereich der Initiierung von juristischen Maßnahmen gegen die Täter gehört, da es mit dem Ziel veröffentlicht wurde, Einfluss auf den internationalen politischen Umgang mit den Verbrechen zu nehmen.54 Im Namen der Opfer sollte das deutsche Volk der Vernichtung der europäischen Juden angeklagt werden. Die sechs thematischen Kapitel (Verschwörung, Gesetze, Strategien der Dezimierung, Vernichtung, Widerstand, Recht/Gerechtigkeit), die einen kumulativen Verlauf der antijüdischen Politik des nationalsozialistischen Regimes nahelegten, dokumentierten die Tatbestände. Zahlreiche Originalquellen wurden hier erstmals in englischer Übersetzung öffentlich gemacht. Die von Einstein verfasste Einleitung, in der er die

51 Einen Vorläufer hatte es bereits 1943 gegeben. Im Namen der American Federation for Polish Jews hatte der polnisch-jüdische Journalist und Publizist Jacob Apenszlak eine Sammlung unter dem Titel The Black Book of Polish Jewry herausgegeben, das mittels einer Vielzahl von Berichten zu lokalen Verbrechen der Deutschen in Polen, die vom polnischen Untergrund geliefert und über die polnische Exilregierung nach Amerika gelangt waren, die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit mit den Ereignissen konfrontieren sollte. Siehe ders., The Black Book of Polish Jewry. An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry under the Nazi Occupation, New York 1943. Zum Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitee siehe auch den Beitrag von Lutz Fiedler in diesem Jahrbuch. 52 Hinter diesem Konsortium standen das prosowjetische American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists sowie der WJC und der Va’ad Leumi. 53 The Jewish Black Book Committee (Hg.), The Black Book. The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People, o. O. [New York] 1946. Zur Geschichte der verschiedenen Versionen, der sowjetischen Zensur und Unterbindung der russischsprachigen Veröffentlichung siehe Harvey Asher, The Black Book and the Holocaust, in: Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999), H. 3, 401–416. 54 Dieses Faktum provozierte Hannah Arendt zu einer sehr scharfen Kritik an dem Band, dessen Engführung einer historischen Rekonstruktion der Ereignisse mit politischen Maßnahmen, die aus ihnen zu folgen hätten, als kurzsichtig und den Verbrechen nicht angemessen geißelt. Siehe dies., The Image of Hell (Review of The Black Book. The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People; and Hitler’s Professors, by Max Weinreich), in: Commentary 2 (1946), H. 3, 291–295 (dt.: Das Bild der Hölle, in: dies., Essays und Kommentare, hg. von Eike Geisel und Klaus Bittermann, 2 Bde., hier Bd. 1: Nach Auschwitz, Berlin 1989, 49–62).

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Spezifik des Judenmords innerhalb der nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung und politischen Praxis hervorhob, für eine Öffnung Palästinas plädierte und die Deutschen als Kollektiv für die Verbrechen verantwortlich machte, wurde nach einem eindringlichen Veto der sowjetischen Partner des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees, die darin eine Inkompatibilität mit den politischen Maximen der UdSSR ausmachten, nicht abgedruckt.55 Gleichzeitig fanden die aus der Sowjetunion stammenden Berichte von jüdischen Augenzeugen, die von Ilja Ehrenburg und dem Komitee gesammelt worden waren und durch den sowjetischen Botschafter Andrei Gromyko an die Herausgeber in New York übergeben wurden, hier weniger Raum als ursprünglich vereinbart. Anders als von den kommunistischen Partnern erhofft, konzentrierte man sich nicht allein auf den sowjetischen Fall, sondern wollte ein gesamteuropäisches Panorama abbilden. Die Frontstellungen des heraufziehenden Kalten Kriegs überlagerten bereits 1946 dieses in seiner Prominenz einzigartige gemeinsame Publikationsunternehmen zwischen Amerika und der Sowjetunion. Noch näher an die Form eines Jizkorbuchs rückte die vom Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitee ab 1944 eigentlich als sowjetisch-amerikanische Veröffentlichung vorbereitete, dann mehrfach an der sowjetischen Zensur gescheiterte und erst ab den 1980er Jahren in zahlreichen Sprachen publizierte Fassung des Black Books. Indem es Stimmen jüdischer Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungsfeldzugs in der Sowjetunion versammelt, setzt es ihnen ein Denkmal. Auf Deutsch erschien das Buch 1994 unter dem Titel Das Schwarzbuch. Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden.56 Der neben Ehrenburg für die Konzeption und die Auswahl der Dokumente verantwortliche Wassili Grossman formulierte in seinem Vorwort einen eindeutigen Erinnerungsappell: »Möge das Andenken an die Leiden und den qualvollen Tod von Millionen ermordeter Kinder, Frauen und alter Menschen auf ewig bewahrt bleiben. Möge die heilige Erinnerung an die zu Tode Gequälten eine gestrenge Hüterin des Guten sein, möge die Asche der Verbrannten die Herzen der Lebenden rühren und sie gemahnen, daß alle Menschen und Völker Brüder sind.«57

55 Siehe Asher, The Black Book and the Holocaust, 403. Albert Einsteins Einleitung wurde schließlich publiziert in der kritischen Gesamtausgabe der Black-Book-Konvolute, siehe ders., Zum Schwarzbuch, in: Wassili Grossman/Ilja Ehrenburg (Hgg.), Das Schwarzbuch. Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden, dt. Ausgabe hg. von Arno Lustiger, übers. von Ruth und Heinz Deutschland, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994, 1013 f. 56 Grossman/Ehrenburg (Hgg.), Das Schwarzbuch. 57 Wassili Grossman, Vorwort, in: ebd., 18–38, hier 38. Die Einordnung dieser Fassung des Black Books in die Reihe der Jizkorbücher zeigt auch die Aufnahme in die bereits genannte Onlinesammlung (5. März 2017).

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Einem ähnlichen Impuls wie dem zur Entstehung der Jizkorbücher folgend, publizierten verschiedene Organisationen und Einzelpersonen nach 1945 Anthologien mit Zeugnissen von Überlebenden und Geflüchteten. Ein wesentlicher Motor der Sammlung von Dokumenten und Aufzeichnung von Gesprächen war das 1940 von Vilnius nach New York transferierte YIVO Institute. Da die Welt des alten YIVO durch die Nationalsozialisten vollständig vernichtet worden war, machten sich die Verantwortlichen in der Neuen Welt die Bewahrung und Erinnerung der zerstörten jüdischen Existenz im östlichen Europa zur Aufgabe. Die Vergegenwärtigung und Dokumentation der Verbrechen des Holocaust war dabei von immenser Bedeutung. Nach Kriegsende wurden dank der Initiative des YIVO in über 500 Orten Europas Beweismaterial gesammelt und Augenzeugenberichte aufgezeichnet, zudem übernahm das Institut zahlreiche Dokumente aus den Beständen der amerikanischen Regierung und der Armee. Es konstituierte in dieser Zeit eines der wichtigsten und größten Holocaustarchive weltweit und vermittelte das katastrophische Geschehen durch Publikationen und Ausstellungen an die amerikanisch-jüdische Öffentlichkeit.58 Darüber hinaus befassten sich verschiedene Akteure mit der Aufzeichnung und Bekanntmachung des Schicksals der Überlebenden, so etwa der Autor, Rabbiner und spätere Mitherausgeber des Menorah Journal, Leo W. Schwarz, der in der U. S. Army diente und zwischen 1946 und 1947 die Operationen des Joint in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone leitete. Er publizierte 1949 unter dem Titel The Root and the Bough. The Epic of an Enduring People Zeugnisse von Displaced Persons und Überlebenden.59 Schwarz’ Darstellung war getragen von Motiven wie Widerstand, Kampfeswillen und Weiterleben, er setzte auf Elemente, die eine Kontinuität jüdischer Geschichte herstellten. Entgegen einer verbreiteten Vorstellung von passiven und wehrlosen Opfern präsentierte Schwarz aktiv Handelnde, denen er eine Aura des Heroischen verlieh – eine Zuschreibung, die in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren insbesondere in der zionistischen Geschichtsdeutung häufig anzutreffen war.60 Im selben Jahr erschien auch die Anthologie We Survived. The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and the Hunted in Nazi Germany, die der aus Deutsch-

58 Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 93–96. 59 Leo W. Schwarz, The Root and the Bough. The Epic of an Enduring People, New York o. J. [1949]; zu Schwarz siehe Alan A. Steinbach, Leo W. Schwarz. In Memoriam (1906– 1967), in: Jewish Book Annual 26 (1968/69), 68–74. 60 Zu dieser Bedeutung und Schwarz’ Motiven siehe Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 187 f. Ein heroisches Narrativ in Bezug auf jüdische Überlebende und Widerstandskämpfer wurde von Juden in der frühen Nachkriegszeit weltweit konstruiert und angenommen, entfaltet sich aber besonders in Israel. Für Amerika siehe Lynn Rapaport, The Holocaust in American Jewish Life, in: Dana Evan Kaplan (Hg.), The Cambridge Companion on American Judaism, Cambridge/New York 2005, 187–208, hier bes. 191 f.

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land nach Amerika geflohene Eric H. Boehm während seiner Zeit als Soldat und Übersetzer bei der Amerikanischen Luftwaffe aufgezeichnet hatte. Boehm hatte an der Ergreifung des Oberbefehlshabers der Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Keitel, mitgewirkt und nach der deutschen Kapitulation zahlreiche Augenzeugen hinsichtlich ihrer Erfahrungen während des Zweiten Weltkriegs befragt. Sein Band versammelte neben deutsch-jüdischen Überlebenden, unter ihnen so berühmte wie der Rabbiner Leo Baeck, auch nichtjüdische Verfolgte, zumeist kommunistische oder christliche Widerstandskämpfer, die in Gestapohaft oder in Verstecken den Krieg überstanden hatten.61 Boehms Sammlung, die er den »ungezählten Toten« gewidmet hatte, wurde als Einblick in die Tiefenschichten des totalitären Staatsapparats und die persönlichen Berichte als »wertvolle historische Dokumente« zur Verfolgungsgeschichte von Oppositionellen und jüdischen Opfern des Nationalsozialismus gewertet.62 Die heute berühmteste Sammlung von Augenzeugenberichten dieser Zeit erstellte der jüdische Psychologe David Boder, der nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg aus Kurland über Mexiko nach Amerika gekommen war und hier am Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago im Fachbereich Psychologie lehrte und forschte.63 Er reiste im Juli 1946 nach Europa und führte in Frankreich, der Schweiz, Deutschland und Italien – vorrangig in DP-Lagern – Interviews mit Überlebenden durch, die er mit einem Drahttonrekorder aufzeichnete. So entstand das erste Holocaust-Tonarchiv, dessen Gewährsleute in neun Sprachen von ihren Erfahrungen berichteten und dessen Medium, der magnetisierte Stahldraht, die Aufzeichnung und Konservierung der emotionalen Regungen und traumatischen Residuen im Sprechakt der Befragten ermöglichte. Eine erste Auswahl von acht Gesprächen wurde in transkribierter Form 1949 unter dem Titel I Did Not Interview the Dead veröffentlicht, zwischen 1950 und 1957 erschienen weitere siebzig Interviews im Selbstverlag.64 Anders als in den Tausenden Befragungen, die die zum Kriegsende 61 Eric H. Boehm, We Survived. The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and the Hunted of Nazi Germany, New Haven, Conn., 1949. 62 Ralph Haswell Lutz, Review: We Survived by Eric H. Boehm, in: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 269 (1950), 191 f., hier 191. 63 Zu Biografie und Werk siehe Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices. The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, New York 2010. 64 David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, Urbana, Ill., 1949 (dt.: Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt, hg. von Julia Faisst, Alan Rosen und Werner Sollors, Heidelberg 2011); ders., Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People Recorded Verbatim in Displaced Persons Camps. With a Psychological and Anthropological Analysis, 16 Bde., Chicago, Ill., 1950–1957. Alle 130 Interviews, die Boder in Europa durchführte, sowie zahlreiche Hintergrundinformationen zu seiner Arbeit sind nachzuhören bzw. zu finden auf der Website Voices of the Holocaust, die das Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago 2009 bereitgestellt hat, siehe (5. März 2017).

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in Europa gegründeten Jüdischen Historischen Kommissionen mit Überlebenden durchführten, um Dokumentationsmaterial nicht zuletzt für eine strafrechtliche Verfolgung der Täter bereitzustellen,65 ging es Boder mit seinen Gesprächen vorrangig um die Rekonstruktion und Wirkung der Erlebnisse des einzelnen Individuums. Er wählte für sein Projekt eine in Bezug auf die geografische Herkunft und das Selbstverständnis möglichst diverse Gruppe von Überlebenden aus, darunter auch einige nichtjüdische Displaced Persons. Als Psychologe suchte er vor allem zu verstehen, was mit der Persönlichkeit der Menschen geschah, die solch monströsen Formen von Verfolgung und Gewalt ausgesetzt wurden. Zudem wollte Boder ihre Stimmen möglichst authentisch verewigen und schließlich die amerikanische Öffentlichkeit über die Gräuel der Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager aufklären. Seine Arbeit wurde zwar anerkannt, stieß aber weder in seiner Zunft noch in der weiteren Öffentlichkeit auf breite Resonanz. Zeit seines Lebens arbeitete er an der psychologischen Analyse und vollständigen Bereitstellung der 130 Interviews, doch die Bedeutung seiner Zeugnisse wurde erst lange nach seinem Tod erkannt.66 Neben den Publikationsformaten, die einer nach bestimmten Maßgaben konstituierten Gruppe von Überlebenden einen kollektiven Artikulationsraum für Erfahrung und Erinnerung schufen und diesen gleichzeitig für die Nachwelt bewahrten, hielten zahlreiche nach Amerika Gerettete ihre Erfahrungen von Flucht, Exil, Verfolgung und Internierung in Memoiren und fiktionalen Texten fest. Viele dieser Schriften wurden zunächst in Jiddisch verfasst, später ins Englische übersetzt und fanden in der ersten Nachkriegszeit durchaus eine größere Leserschaft. Trotzdem sind sie zumeist nicht Teil des heutigen Kanons der Holocaustliteratur geworden.67 Allen Texten, deren wesentlicher Impuls die Erinnerungsarbeit war, kommt in der beginnenden Holocaustforschung auch eine wichtige Rolle bezüglich

65 Zur Geschichte und Motivation der Jüdischen Historischen Kommissionen siehe Jockusch, Collect and Record! 66 Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices, 120–148; siehe auch Simone Gigliottis umfassende und instruktive Besprechung von Rosens Buch: dies., The Voice as a Human Document. Listening to Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Europe (Review of Alan Rosen, »The Wonder of Their Voices«. The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder), in: Yad Vashem Studies 40 (2012), H. 2, 217–235. 67 Einen Überblick über wichtige literarische und autobiografische Texte in Amerika bietet etwa Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 96–109. David Cesarani schreibt in einem Beitrag über das Missverhältnis von Produktion und heutiger Rezeption der frühen Memoiren, ders., Challenging the »Myth of Silence«. Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry, in: ders./Sundquist (Hgg.), After the Holocaust, 15–38, bes. 23 f. Eine allgemeine Einführung in frühe Memoiren von Überlebenden weltweit liefert Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust. Identity, Testimony, Representation, Oxford/New York 2006, 100–112.

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des frühen Nachdenkens über Ausdrucksformen, Medien und Mittel der Darstellung des Erlebten zu. Man erprobte Sprache und Sprechweisen, suchte geeignete Formate der Publikation und Vermittlung des Ereignisses, das – wie Hannah Arendt es in ihrer Besprechung des Black Book 1946 ausdrückte – in der Menschheitsgeschichte kein Pendant habe, das »zu berichten schwieriger wäre«.68 Nachdenken über die Herausforderungen des Aufzeichnens, auch das Gespür für einen Rest von Unbezeugbarem, war vielen der Texte bereits eingeschrieben.69 Aus der Perspektive der zeitgleich arbeitenden Forschenden waren sie auch insofern von immenser Bedeutung, als solche Berichte durchaus als empirische Basis für deren Studien dienten. Philip Friedman in seiner dreifachen Rolle als Zeuge, Überlebender und Historiker des Holocaust betonte wiederholt die Signifikanz der Augenzeugen für die Forschung, so etwa 1948 in einem Aufsatz: »Apart from official sources (archives) there are – and these are the very most important – living sources, quivering reality with traces of the ›historical process‹ on their bodys and in their hearts.«70 Auch auf dem New Yorker Symposium sprach Friedman über die verschiedenen Funktionen der am Gedächtnis, ja auch dem Auf- und Durcharbeiten des erlebten Traumas orientierten Texte, und fasste sie neben stärker wissenschaftlichen und historisierenden Formaten unter dem Stichwort der »Churbn-Literatur« – Literatur der Zerstörung. Er betonte die Zentralität der Anthologien von Zeugnissen der Überlebenden für die anhebende Forschung, wies aber gleichzeitig auf das Problem hin, dass sich zu viele Laien – durchaus mit nachvollziehbaren Motiven – der Aufarbeitung des Geschehens widmeten, dessen Realität aber eher verzerrten, statt zum Verständnis beizutragen.71 Die doppelt empfundene Verpflichtung zur Zeugenschaft und zur historischen Aufarbeitung wurde nicht nur von Gelehrten wie Philip Friedman selbst wahrgenommen, sondern auch von »Amateurhistorikern«, die keine Vorbildung in historischem Arbeiten und Quellenkritik besaßen, sich aber durch das Überleben dazu veranlasst sahen, ja es sich zur existenziellen Aufgabe machten, ihre Erfahrungen aufzuzeichnen und in einen historischen Kontext zu setzen. Auf dasselbe Problemfeld verwies neben Friedman auch 68 Arendt, Das Bild der Hölle, 51. 69 Siehe Aurélia Kalisky, Die Erzeugung der Wahrheit zwischen Kunst und Zeugenschaft. Über ein in Auschwitz geschriebenes literarisches Manifest, in: Sibylle Schmidt/Sybille Krämer (Hgg.), Zeugen in der Kunst, Paderborn 2016, 85–105; allgemein zur erkenntnistheoretischen und moralisch-rechtlichen Dimension von Zeugenschaft siehe Sibylle Schmidt, Ethik und Episteme der Zeugenschaft, Paderborn 2015. 70 Philip Friedman, Die forshung fun unzer khurbn (1948), zit. nach Mark L. Smith, No Silence in Yiddish. Popular and Scholarly Writing about the Holocaust in the Early Postwar Years, in: Cesarani (Hg.), After the Holocaust, 55–66, hier 63. 71 Philip Friedman, Research and Literature on the Recent Jewish Tragedy, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 17–26.

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Samuel Gringauz, der ebenfalls zum Symposium in New York geladen war. Gringauz stammte aus Ostpreußen, hatte die Internierung im Ghetto Kovno und im Konzentrationslager Dachau überlebt und sich nach Kriegsende drei Jahre im DP-Camp Landsberg in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone aufgehalten, bevor er 1948 nach Amerika emigrieren konnte. Auch er widmete sich der Frage nach den Bedingungen einer systematischen Erforschung der Katastrophe. Den Herausforderungen ihrer Sprecherposition als Überlebende waren sich beide bewusst. Sie thematisierten ausführlich die aufkommenden Fragen von möglicher Subjektivität, Emotionalität und zu großer zeitlicher Nähe für die Bewertung der Ereignisse. Als Pendant zu den offenen Formen des Schreibens, wie sie in dieser frühen Zeit charakteristisch waren, entwickelten Gringauz und Friedman Kriterien für eine streng wissenschaftliche Erfassung des Gegenstands. Im Mittelpunkt von Gringauz’ Überlegungen standen methodische Fragen zur adäquaten Beschreibung der sozialen Realität des nationalsozialistischen Ghettos.72 Beide beriefen sich auf bereits etablierte Formen jüdischer Bearbeitung von kollektiven Verfolgungserfahrungen und plädierten für die Orientierung an der sozialwissenschaftlich und alltagsgeschichtlich basierten Historiografietradition des YIVO und Simon Dubnows.73 Zudem zielten sie auf eine Vernetzung und Kooperation von Forschenden in Israel, Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, um dadurch die Qualität von Methoden und Ergebnissen zu sichern.74 Gringauz brachte diese Punkte auf dem Symposium zur Diskussion: »The question thus arises whether participants of such a world-shaking epoch can at all be its historians and whether the time has already come when valid historic judgment, free of partisanship, vindictiveness and ulterior motives, is possible. In our opinion survivors of the great catastrophe can make an important contribution to the exploration of the problem. In their minds the inadequate historical document acquires the immediacy and wealth of full reality, provided, of course, that the survivors are social scientists and not self-glorifying graphomaniacs. We are further of the opinion that the most satisfactory basis for sound research in these problems is to be found in the co-operation of scientists who have had personal experience with scientists who have not, as exemplified in the present conference. We believe, finally, that although the time for final judgment may not yet have arrived, the establishment of methodical directives for research are immediate urgent tasks.«75

72 Samuel Gringauz, Some Methodological Problems in the Study of the Ghetto, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 65–72. 73 Laura Jockusch, »Become Historians Yourselves! Record, Take it Down, and Collect!« Jewish Historiography in Times of Persecution, in: Iggud. Selected Essays in Jewish Studies 2 (2005), 77–95; dies., Chroniclers of Catastrophe. History Writing as a Jewish Response to Persecution before and after the Holocaust, in: Bankier/Michman (Hgg.), Holocaust Historiography in Context, 135–166; dies., Historiography in Transit. 74 Friedman, Research and Literature on the Recent Jewish Tragedy, 26. 75 Gringauz, Some Methodological Problems in the Study of the Ghetto, 66.

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In diesem Sinne suchten Friedman und Gringauz, die dabei stellvertretend für eine größere Gruppe der zumeist aus dem östlichen Europa stammenden surviver-historians stehen, das Fundament für eine wissenschaftliche Erforschung des Holocaust in Amerika zu legen.76

Begriffsbildung und Historisierung Genau dieses Fundament war es, das Salo W. Baron und die Organisatoren des Symposiums 1949 im Blick hatten. Baron selbst betonte in seiner Einführung: »We have felt that the time has come to subject the harrowing experiences of the great Catastrophe to rigorous scientific scrutiny.« Obgleich ihm die historische Distanz zum Geschehen für das Erfassen von dessen Dimensionen noch zu kurz, die emotionale Belastung noch zu hoch schien, hielt er die Etablierung eines Forschungsfeldes für zwingend erforderlich. Eindeutig unterstrich er die Notwendigkeit, neue Terminologien und Methoden historischer Darstellung zu finden.77 An dem neuen Forschungsfeld wurde zum damaligen Zeitpunkt in Amerika bereits von verschiedenen Seiten gearbeitet und die Jewish Social Studies spielten hierbei eine herausgehobene Rolle. Dies lag vor allem am Autorenkreis der Zeitschrift, der aus zahlreichen Geflüchteten, Emigrierten und Überlebenden bestand, die nun ihre Erfahrungen und Beobachtungen in Berichte, Studien und Analysen übersetzten, wesentliche, auch im Ausland erscheinenden Publikationen zum Thema der jüdischen Verfolgung besprachen oder zentrale Dokumente sammelten und zugänglich machten. Das hier Vorgelegte fügte sich in die wachsende Zahl von Texten ein, deren Autorinnen und Autoren Dimension und Bedeutung des Holocaust wissenschaftlich erfassen wollten und dafür neue historische Zugänge suchten. Ihre Arbeiten bilden die dritte Gruppe von Schriften der frühen Nachkriegszeit zum Thema und repräsentieren aus heutiger Perspektive am eindeutigsten eine frühe Holocaustgeschichtsschreibung. Nur schlaglichtartig werden im Folgenden die vielen Titel und Themen dieser beginnenden Historiografie beleuchtet, um einen vorläufigen Eindruck von der Publikationslandschaft zu geben. Einige schon genannte Titel und Schreibende gehören in diesen Bereich, und hier insbesondere diejenige Forschung, die in der Vorbereitung und im Gefolge der Nürnberger Prozesse entstanden ist. So sind die vom Institute of Jewish Affairs in Auftrag gegebenen Monografien und Dokumentsammlungen genauso unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihres historiografischen Werts zu 76 Smith, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust. 77 Baron, Opening Remarks, 14.

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lesen, wie sie dokumentarische Beweismittel für die Verbrechen darstellten. Neben den erwähnten Titeln von Anatole Goldstein, der weite Teile seines empirischen Materials aus den Nürnberger Prozessdokumenten bezog,78 sind hier die bereits vor Kriegsende entstandenen Dokumentationen von Gerhard Jacoby (Racial State. The German Nationalities Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia) und Jacob Lestschinsky (Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival) sowie Boris Shubs und Zorah Warhaftigs Starvation over Europe (Made in Germany) und Arieh Tartakowers Extermination of Polish Jewry zu nennen.79 Ein weiterer Band, der explizit auf dem Nürnberger Dokumentationsmaterial aufbaute, es in seinen Bezügen auf den Holocaust einordnete und mit einem historisch-juristischen Kommentar rahmte, war der 1947 von dem jüdischen Staatsanwalt Seymour Krieger für die American Jewish Conference publizierte Titel Nazi Germany’s War against the Jews.80 In der zeitgenössischen Kritik als »vollkommenste Quellensammlung des Krieges der Nazis gegen die Juden« und als »Kulturgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus« gewürdigt, steht Kriegers Buch als prägnantes Beispiel für die durch Nürnberg angeregte Forschung.81 Der noch rechtzeitig vor Kriegsausbruch aus Polen nach New York geflohene Forschungsdirektor des YIVO, Max Weinreich, der das Symposium 1949 als Moderator mitgestaltete, hatte 1946 ein Buch veröffentlicht, das in bis heute einzigartiger Weise antrat, die Verknüpfung der akademischen Eliten in Deutschland mit dem Nationalsozialismus, mehr noch, mit der Vernichtungspolitik nachzuweisen. Hitler’s Professors knüpft an die von Baron schon während des Krieges problematisierte Tatsache der notorischen nationalsozialistischen »Judenforschung« an und zeigt, inwiefern einzelne Prota-

78 Nehemiah Robinson (1898–1964), Direktor des Institute of Jewish Affairs von 1948 bis 1964, erklärte die Lest We Forget-Serie in seinem Vorwort zum ersten, von Goldstein besorgten Band zum Ausdruck einer Weiterentwicklung der Institutstätigkeiten in Bezug auf die Nürnberger Prozesse. Nun sollten die dort ermittelten deutschen Verbrechen einer wissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung unterzogen und in der Serie unter verschiedenen thematischen Schwerpunkten für die öffentliche Aufklärung aufbereitet werden. Siehe Nehemiah Robinson, Preface, in: Goldstein, Operation Murder, 5. 79 Shub/Warhaftig, Starvation over Europe; Arieh Tartakower (Hg.), Extermination of Polish Jewry. Reports Based on Official Documents, Received by the World Jewish Congress and by the Representation of Polish Jewry, July – August, 1943, New York o. J. [1943]; Jacoby, Racial State; Jacob Lestschinsky, Crisis, Catastrophe and Survival. A Jewish Balance Sheet, 1914–1948, New York 1948. 80 Seymour Krieger (Hg.), Nazi Germany’s War against the Jews, New York 1947. Krieger gehörte zum Stab des amerikanischen Chefanklägers Robert H. Jackson. 81 Kurt Helmer, Der Krieg der Nazis gegen die Juden. »Nazi Germany’s War against the Jews«, by Seymour Krieger, in: Aufbau 13 (1947), H. 18, 7. Zu diesem Kontext zählen auch Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial. The Evidence at Nuremberg, Dallas 1954; Josef Guttmann, The Fate of European Jewry in the Light of the Nuremberg Documents, in: YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 2/3 (1947/48), 313–327.

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gonisten der deutschen Geistes-, Sozial- und Rechtswissenschaften Schlüsselfunktionen für die ideologische Untermauerung und damit Ausbreitung des nationalsozialistischen Terrors übernahmen. Weinreich untersuchte im Detail, wie vor allem die Vernichtung der osteuropäischen Judenheiten und ihrer Lebenswelten von den wissenschaftlichen Institutionen mit vorbereitet und durch legalistische, rassistische, koloniale, antisemitische Erklärungsmuster weltanschaulich unterfüttert wurde: »What we are trying to prove is that German scholars from the beginning to the end of the Hitler era worked hand in glove with the murderers of the Jewish people and that the official indoctrination literature […] which openly proclaimed: ,The Jew must be annihilated wherever we meet him!‘ repeated to the letter the ,facts‘ and ,reasons‘ contained in the scholarly literature.«82

In diesen thematischen Zusammenhang gehören auch Arbeiten wie die des polnisch-jüdischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialhistorikers Bernard Weinryb. Er widmete sich früh den nationalsozialistischen Forschungsarbeiten zur »Judenfrage« und jüdischen Geschichte sowie den Strategien der »Nazifizierung« von Wissenschaft und Forschung in Deutschland.83 Ein weiterer produktiver und heute weitgehend vergessener früher Autor der Geschichte von Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust war Josef Tenenbaum. Der ebenfalls aus Polen stammende Mediziner hatte sich frühzeitig der jüdischen Politik verschrieben und für den europäischen Nationalitätenkongress, später für mehrere amerikanisch-jüdische Organisationen wie den World Jewish Congress gearbeitet und als Präsident der American Federation of Polish Jews gewirkt. Unmittelbar nach dem Krieg unternahm er zwei Reisen nach Polen, die für seine Studie Underground. The Story of a People von 1952 grundlegend waren. In ihr erzählt er die Geschichte der polnischen Juden unter Naziherrschaft, insbesondere ihre klandestinen Aktivitäten im Untergrund des Warschauer Ghettos.84 Weiterhin widmete sich Tenenbaum Einzelaspekten der Vernichtungspolitik, etwa verschiedenen Täterprofilen oder den Aktivitäten der Einsatzgruppen.85 Den ideologischen und in ihrer Gewalt gegen

82 Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, New York 1946, 9. 83 Bernard D. Weinryb, Jewish History Nazified, in: Contemporary Jewish Record 4 (1941), H. 2, 148–167; ders., Nazification of Science and Research in Nazi Germany, in: Journal of Central European Affairs 3 (1944), H. 4, 373–400. 84 Joseph Tenenbaum, Underground. The Story of a People, New York 1952. Grundlegend für das Werk war sein Reisebericht, siehe ders., In Search of a Lost People. The Old and the New Poland, New York 1948. 85 Ders., Auschwitz in Retrospect. The Self-Portrait of Rudolf Hoess, Commander of Auschwitz, in: Jewish Social Studies 15 (1953), H. 3/4, 203–236; ders., The Einsatzgruppen, in: Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955), H. 1, 43–64.

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Juden kulminierenden Prinzipien des Nationalsozialismus ging er in seinem Überblickswerk Race and Reich. The Story of an Epoch von 1956 nach.86 In den Untersuchungszusammenhang von rechtspolitischen Strukturprinzipien des nationalsozialistischen Staats, seiner Eliten und seiner ideologischen Grundlagen gehören auch die heute weit bekannteren, schon während des Krieges erarbeiteten Studien der aus Deutschland geflohenen Intellektuellen Ernst Fraenkel (The Dual State) und Franz Neumann (Behemoth), die sich aber anders als Tenenbaum nicht explizit mit Judenverfolgung und Holocaust beschäftigen.87 Dies tat in der Tradition Neumanns wiederum dessen berühmter Schüler Raul Hilberg. Seine mittlerweile unangefochten als bahnbrechend für die frühe Holocaustforschung geltende Studie The Destruction of the European Jews, die 1955 abgeschlossen wurde, aber wegen der ablehnenden Haltung verschiedener angesprochener Universitätsverlage erst 1961 erscheinen konnte, bietet die kleinteiligste und umfassendste Rekonstruktion der Verfolgungs- und Vernichtungsvorgänge aus Täterperspektive.88 Letztere stand im Gegensatz zu den Arbeiten von Philip Friedman. Dieser hatte sich 1925 bei Salo W. Baron – noch vor dessen Emigration in die Vereinigten Staaten – an der Universität Wien promoviert und eine Laufbahn als Lehrer und Historiker der jüdischen Geschichte in Polen begonnen, die durch den Nationalsozialismus jäh abgeschnitten wurde. Unmittelbar nach der Befreiung Lembergs (Lwiws) durch die Rote Armee, die auch seine eigene Befreiung bedeutete, begann Friedman über die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden in Polen zu schreiben und die Ereignisse aus jüdischer Perspektive zu schildern. Nachdem er als treibende Kraft im Aufbau der Jüdischen Historischen Kommissionen in Polen und der Amerikanischen Besatzungszone wirksam geworden war und bereits zahlreiche Berichte, Kurzstudien und Aufsätze auf Polnisch, Jiddisch und Deutsch vorgelegt

86 Ders., Race and Reich. The Story of an Epoch, New York 1956. 87 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State. A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, übers. aus dem Deutschen von E. A. Shils, in Zusammenarbeit mit Edith Lowenstein und Klaus Knorr, New York 1941 (dt.: Der Doppelstaat. Recht und Justiz im »Dritten Reich«, Frankfurt a. M. 1974); Franz Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, London 1942 (dt.: Behemoth. Struktur und Praxis des Nationalsozialismus 1933–1944, übers. von Hedda Wagner und Gert Schäfer, Köln/Frankfurt a. M. 1977). 88 Raul Hilberg, Prologue to Annihilation. A Study of the Identification, Impoverishment, and Isolation of the Jewish Victims of Nazi Policy (unveröffentlichte Diss., Columbia University, New York, 1955); die Schrift wurde von dem kleinen Verlag Quadrangle Books veröffentlicht, siehe ders., The Destruction of the European Jews, Chicago, Ill., 1961 (dt.: Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden. Die Gesamtgeschichte des Holocaust, hg. von Ulf Wolter, übers. von Christian Seeger, Berlin 1982).

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hatte,89 widmete er mit seiner Ankunft in New York sein kurzes Leben ganz der Erforschung des Holocaust. Als Dozent der Columbia University sowie des Jewish Teachers College legte er, auch mit der Unterstützung von Baron, Einzelstudien vor, deren vielfältige Themen von der Erforschung einzelner Lager, Ghettos und jüdischer Ortschaften über den jüdischen Widerstand im Warschauer Ghetto und jüdische Aktivitäten im Angesicht der Katastrophe bis hin zu Hilfsleistungen der nichtjüdischen Bevölkerung reichten. Er untersuchte dabei auch kontroverse Fragen wie die Rolle der Judenräte oder Formen der Kollaboration mit den Deutschen und adressierte die Verfolgungsgeschichte der Sinti und Roma.90 Verknüpft mit diesen historischen Rekonstruktionen, die sich durch einen integrierenden Zugriff aus Täterquellen und Opferberichten auszeichnen, um Hergang wie Essenz des ultimativen Genozids ausbuchstabieren zu können, dachte Friedman viel über methodologische Fragen nach und arbeitete mittels verschiedener bibliografischer Projekte an der systematischen Erschließung des entstehenden Forschungsfelds.91 Die angemessene methodische Annäherung an das Thema beschäftigte zu diesem Zeitpunkt auch die 1941 nach Amerika geflohene politische Theoretikerin Hannah Arendt. Im Netzwerk Salo W. Barons hatte sie ein erstes 89 Zu finden in Friedman/Robinson, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact. Ein wichtiges frühes Werk war die Studie Friedman, This Was Oswiecim. The Story of a Murder Camp, übers. aus dem Jidd. von Joseph Leftwich, London 1946. 90 Philip Friedman publizierte auf Jiddisch, Hebräisch, Deutsch, Polnisch, Französisch und Englisch. Im Folgenden eine Auswahl seiner englischsprachigen, nach seiner Ankunft in New York erschienenen Titel: Nazi Extermination of the Gypsies, in: Jewish Frontier 18 (1951), H. 1, 11–14; The Jews of Greece during the Second World War, in: Abraham G. Duker, The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume. Studies in History and Philology, hg. von The Conference on Jewish Relations, New York 1953, 241–248; The Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi Era, in: Jewish Social Studies 16 (1954), H. 1, 61–88; Martyrs and Fighters. The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto, New York 1954; Was There an »Other Germany« during the Nazi Period?, in: YIVO Annual of Social Science 10 (1955), 82–127; The Jewish Badge and the Yellow Star in the Nazi Era, in: Historia Judaica 17 (1955), H. 1, 41–70; Their Brothers’ Keepers, New York 1957; The Fate of the Jewish Book during the Nazi Era, in: Jewish Book Annual 15 (1957/58), 3–13. 91 Friedmans wichtigste englischsprachige Titel hierzu sind: The European Jewish Research on the Recent Jewish Catastrophe in 1939–1945, in: Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 18 (1948/49), 179–211; American Jewish Research and Literature on the Jewish Catastrophe of the Years 1939–1945, in: Jewish Social Studies 13 (1951), H. 3, 235–250; Preliminary and Methodological Problems of the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period, in: Yad Vashem Studies 2 (1958), 95–131; Problems of Research on the Jewish Catastrophe, in: Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959), 25–39. In diesen Bereich gehören auch die beiden im Zuge des Symposiums gelieferten Beiträge: ders., Research and Literatur on the Recent Jewish Tragedy; ders./Koppel S. Pinson, Some Books on the Jewish Catastrophe, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 83–94. Viele dieser Beiträge finden sich in der postum veröffentlichten Anthologie Roads to Extinction, die seine Frau Ada June Friedman 1980 in Philadelphia herausgegeben hat.

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intellektuelles wie politisches Umfeld in den Vereinigten Staaten sowie ihre erste dortige Anstellung gefunden. In ihrem Symposiumsbeitrag Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps befragte Arendt etwa die Tauglichkeit des gesamten Instrumentariums historischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Arbeitens in Bezug auf Verständnis und Darstellung des Universums der Vernichtungslager. Die von Menschen geschaffene Wirklichkeit der »Tötungsfabriken« lasse sich durch herkömmliche Begrifflichkeiten nicht beschreiben, sperre sich gegen traditionelle Formen des Denkens und Erklärens und konterkariere in ihrer »absoluten Sinnlosigkeit« bisher gültige Maßgaben gesunden Menschenverstands und Welterkennens, so Arendt.92 Sie selbst legte mit ihrem Grundlagenwerk zum Totalitarismus 1951 ein Buch vor, in dem sie historische Kontexte ausleuchtete, die zur Entstehung des Nationalsozialismus beitrugen und dessen »neue Staatsform« bestimmten.93 Unter dem universalisierenden Begriff des Totalitarismus als modernes System der politischen Herrschaft führt sie hier aus, was sie an anderer Stelle als »Traditionsbruch« bezeichnet hatte: wie die Nazis eine Welt des Tötens und der totalen Beherrschung geschaffen hatten, die ihren konsequenten Ausdruck in den Vernichtungslagern fand, deren »Massenfabrikation von Leichen« die totale Entmenschlichung vorausging und die sich letztlich allen gekannten Kriterien von Sinnstiftung entzogen.94 Arendt war es, die zu dieser Zeit am deutlichsten betonte, dass es neuer Formen der Erzählung, ja des Begreifens im Sinne von Annähern und Erfassens des Ereignisses bedürfe, um ihm adäquat zu begegnen und es in seiner Wirkung zu verstehen.95 Von verschiedenen Seiten versuchten Autorinnen und Autoren im Amerika der 1940er Jahre die Herausforderung anzunehmen, Zugänge und Fragen zu 92 Hannah Arendt, Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 49–64, hier 49, 53 und 64. Ein von ihr angestrebtes Projekt zu den nationalsozialistischen Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagern, das sie unter dem Dach der Conference on Jewish Relations durchführen wollte, fand keine Förderung und ist deshalb nicht realisiert worden. Siehe The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., The Hannah Arendt Papers, Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, Miscellany: Outlines and Research Memoranda, 1946, Hannah Arendt, Memo: Research Project on Concentration Camps, [o. D.], (5. März 2017). 93 Dies., The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1951 (dt.: Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1955), hier zit. aus der 13. Auflage, München 2009, 16. 94 Erläutert im Kapitel »Konzentrationslager« der Elemente und Ursprünge, siehe ebd., 907–943, das Zitat 921. 95 Neben dem genannten Aufsatz siehe auch dies., Konzentrationsläger, in: Die Wandlung 3 (1948), H. 4, 309–330; dies., Understanding and Politics, in: Partisan Review 20 (1953), H. 4, 377–392; dies., Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände im politischen Denken der Gegenwart. Vier Essays, aus dem Engl. übertragen von Charlotte Beradt, Frankfurt a. M. 1957.

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finden, um sich mit der Wirklichkeit des Nationalsozialismus zu konfrontieren und seine negative Bedeutung in der menschlichen Zivilisationsgeschichte hervorzuheben. Doch es dauerte noch mehrere Jahrzehnte, bis sich die Holocaustforschung als eigene Disziplin der Zeitgeschichte an den Universitäten etablierte und in systematischer Form betrieben werden konnte.

Was blieb und was bleibt In der hier abgesteckten Forschungslandschaft Amerikas treten drei Merkmale besonders hervor: Die vielstimmige und nicht systematisierte Literatur gehört unterschiedlichen Genres an; das Aufzeichnen der Ereignisse war kein Randphänomen, sondern führte zum Entstehen eines regelrechten Bestands von Schriften; dessen Autorinnen und Autoren waren in der Regel jüdischer Herkunft. Abraham Duker, ein aus Polen stammender, bereits 1923 nach Amerika emigrierter Historiker und Redakteur der Jewish Social Studies, diagnostizierte in seinem Kommentar auf dem Symposium 1949 eine allgemein anzutreffende Apathie gegenüber den nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen und verstand hierin die spezifische Aufgabe für die jüdische Öffentlichkeit: »In a world which has been tolerating mass genocide and in a civilization which permits mass murderers to go unpunished and still shows indifference to utilizing antisemitism as an instrument of politics, it is indeed the task of the Jewish community to see to it that the nightmarish reality of the catastrophe be investigated, interpreted and brought to the attention of the decent elements of society, of which the academic world should form the logical vanguard. This is the responsibility of the public relations organizations as well of the Jewish scholars and thinkers.«96

Duker unterstrich die Rolle des Symposiums für die Initiation einer umfassenden Erforschung des Holocaust: »Let us hope that this conference will mark the beginnings of American research, publication and popularization of the facts of the catastrophe.«97 Diese Hoffnung sollte sich nicht erfüllen, denn die vielen – auch und in besonderer Form aus dem Umkreis von Philip Friedman, dem YIVO und den Jewish Social Studies hervorgegangenen – Arbeiten zur Geschichte, Bedeutung und Erinnerung des Holocaust fanden weder zu ihrer Zeit Nachhall, noch wurden sie später rezipiert. Bis auf wenige Ausnahmen finden sich Besprechungen der Schriften eher in der jüdischen als in der allgemeinen amerikanischen Presse. Dieser Umstand deutet darauf hin, dass die Auseinandersetzung vor allem in der jüdischen 96 Abraham Duker, Comments, in: Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), H. 1, 79–82, hier 79. 97 Ebd., 82.

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Öffentlichkeit verblieb. Auch Friedmans Versuche der Etablierung eines Fachbereichs zum Thema an der Columbia University scheiterten, er integrierte zwar die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus und des Holocaust in seine übergreifenden Kurse zur jüdischen Geschichte, konnte aber keine eigenständigen Seminare zum Gegenstand anbieten. Sein Status an der Universität blieb prekär, er erhielt stets nur Lehraufträge und häufig nicht die Förderung, die er sich für seine Forschung wünschte.98 Wie Friedman ging es den meisten Protagonisten auf diesem Gebiet: Entweder sahen sie sich zu einem wissenschaftlichen Schattendasein gezwungen oder sie verlegten sich von selbst auf andere Forschungs- oder Tätigkeitsbereiche. Dazu mögen verschiedene Gründe beigetragen haben. Laut einem der frühen kritischen Beobachter dieser ausgebliebenen Auseinandersetzung, Gerd Korman, war von Relevanz, dass man in Amerika die Bearbeitung des Holocaust eher in der Verantwortung der europäischen Betroffenen sah oder als »jüdisches« respektive »deutsches« Thema jenseits eines allgemeinen Interesses abtat.99 Diese Form der äußeren Abwehrreaktion fiel auch insofern auf fruchtbaren Boden, als sich die Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem in Jerusalem zunehmend zum Zentrum jüdischer Holocaustforschung herausbildete und – durchaus in Ablehnung vergleichbarer Initiativen andernorts – mit dem Anspruch auftrat, die zentrale Einrichtung des Bereichs zu werden. Dieser Umstand trug dazu bei, die Aufmerksamkeit von der amerikanischen Szene wegzulenken, sodass sich auch die innerjüdische Diskussion mehr und mehr nach Israel orientierte.100 Einflussreicher war selbstredend, dass der Kalte Krieg die Gefahren der Gegenwart und drohende Kampfhandlungen ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit der amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit gerückt hatte, was wenig Raum für die kritische Konfrontation mit der jüngsten Vergangenheit ließ. Zum Ende der 1940er Jahre erhitzten nicht mehr Deutschland und seine Verbrechen die Gemüter, sondern die Sowjetunion, ihre Verbündeten und ihre realen oder vermeintlichen Unterstützer im eigenen Land.101 Furore machten deshalb weniger die ersten Rekonstruktionen und Interpretationen des Nationalsozialismus und der Vernichtungsgeschichte, sondern – wenn überhaupt – eher die theoretischen Konzepte, die universell angelegt waren und den vergleichenden Blick auf verschiedene Verbrechenskomplexe des 20. Jahrhunderts richteten, etwa im 198 Siehe YIVO Archives and Library Collections, Center for Jewish History New York, Papers of Philip Friedman, 1914–1993, RG 1258, Series II, Folder 477: Columbia University, und Folder 478: Courses Friedman. 199 Korman, The Holocaust in American Historical Writing, 269; so argumentiert auch Schlott, Ein Exilant unter Exilanten, 100. 100 Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s. Ideology and Memory, London 2007. 101 Baron, The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960, 63.

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Begriff des Totalitarismus oder dem des Genozids.102 Die Unterscheidungskriterien, die jüdische Intellektuelle wie Arendt und Lemkin entwickelten, um einer ungebrochenen Einordnung der Judenvernichtung in die gleichförmige Logik moderner Massenverbrechen entgegenzuwirken, fanden allerdings in der Diskussion kaum Niederschlag.103 Dass es sich bei der frühen Holocaustforschung in Amerika also um eine weitgehend innerjüdische Angelegenheit handelte, erklärt wohl auch, warum sich das nach dem Eichmann-Prozess so rasant entwickelte Interesse an der historischen Aufarbeitung sowie an den Zeugen der Verbrechen nicht auf die Ergebnisse dieser »wissenschaftlichen Außenseiter« bezog, die nahezu vollständig dem Vergessen anheimfielen. Weder las man ihre Schriften während ihrer Entstehungszeit, noch erinnerte man sich ihrer später.104 Doch lohnt sich ein Blick zurück nicht nur vor dem Hintergrund historischer Gerechtigkeit gegenüber den Wegbereitern einer solchen Aufarbeitung. Die frühe Holocaustforschung zeichnet sich durch eine Fülle von Zugriffen und inhaltlichen Zielsetzungen aus, die wesentliche Elemente weit späterer Diskussionen im Fach präfigurierten und deren Rekapitulation konstruktive Eingriffe in seine gegenwärtige Entwicklung ermöglicht. Die in Saul Friedländers Meistererzählung Das Dritte Reich und die Juden perfektionierte integrierende Perspektive durch die Verknüpfung von Täterquellen mit den Stimmen der Opfer wurde etwa von den survivor-historians, insbesondere von Philip Friedman, eingeführt und als notwendiger Zugang einer angemessenen Darstellung des Geschehens postuliert.105 Fragen solcher Dar102 Anson Rabinbach, Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg. Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid, Göttingen 2009. 103 Beispiel und eindrucksvolles Dokument der zeitgenössischen Debatte, in der Arendt ihre Positionen gegen den Mainstream stark zu machen versuchte, ist ihr Kommentar auf einer berühmt gewordenen Konferenz zur Totalen Herrschaft, die 1953 von der American Academy of Arts and Sciences veranstaltet wurde. Die Remarks sind in ihrem Nachlass zu finden: The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., The Hannah Arendt Papers, Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, Essays and Lectures: Remarks, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [o. D.] 1953. Zur Tagung siehe Carl J. Friedrich (Hg.), Totalitarianism. Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1953, Cambridge, Mass., 1954. Jüngst hebt etwa Philippe Sands den biografischen Erfahrungshintergrund von Lemkins Konzept des Genozids hervor: ders., East West Street. On the Origins of »Genocide« and »Crimes against Humanity«, London 2016. 104 Zum Problem der Wahrnehmung der »wissenschaftlichen Außenseiter« in der deutschen und allgemeinen Holocaustforschung siehe Ulrich Herbert, Holocaust-Forschung in Deutschland. Geschichte und Perspektiven einer schwierigen Disziplin, in: Bajohr/Löw (Hgg.), Der Holocaust, 31–79, hier 42, und Berg, Ein Außenseiter in der Holocaustforschung. 105 Diese Vorarbeit wird von Friedländer selbst allerdings nicht thematisiert, auch wenn er das Werk von Friedman stellenweise rezipiert und zitiert: ders., Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, Bd. 1: Die Jahre der Verfolgung. 1933–1939, München 1998, und Bd. 2: Die Jahre der Vernichtung. 1939–1945, München 2006.

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stellung – heute unter dem titelgebenden Schlagwort »Limits of Representation« einer zum Sinnbild der Debatte gewordenen Konferenz an der University of California von 1990 geführt – adressierten die Zeitzeugen in einer ganz eigenen Dringlichkeit.106 Entweder setzten sie sich intensiv mit dem eigenen Sprechort auseinander und machten die Suche nach adäquaten Begriffen der Beschreibung des Erlebten selbst zum Thema oder sie setzten Maßstäbe in der Verhandlung der Grenzen von Sprache und Denken in Konfrontation mit dem Holocaust, wie etwa Hannah Arendt oder Theodor W. Adorno. Lokal- und Mikrogeschichte, wie sie heute zur detailgetreuen Rekonstruktion einzelner Verbrechenssegmente und -abläufe sehr häufig betrieben wird, lässt sich aus Quellen wie den Jizkorbüchern, aber auch aus Studien der frühen Forscherinnen und Forscher erweitern und ergänzen. Formen der oral history sowie, daraus folgend, der Erfahrungs- und Alltagsgeschichtsschreibung und der »Geschichte von unten« wurden in diesem Zusammenhang bereits weit vor ihrer Durchsetzung in der allgemeinen Historiografie erprobt. Auch die Integration von Quellen wie Tagebüchern, Fotografien, Folklore und Objekten in die historische Forschung ist kein Phänomen des in den 1970er Jahren beginnenden sozial- und später kulturgeschichtlichen material turn, sondern wurde in zahlreichen Texten dieser ersten Phase vorgeführt. Viele noch unausgewertete Erfahrungsberichte der Überlebenden, die in unmittelbarer zeitlicher Nähe zum Geschehen aufgezeichnet wurden, harren bis heute der Bearbeitung und erhalten in einer Zeit, in der die letzten Zeugen versterben, immer mehr Bedeutung. Setzt man sich mit den Tendenzen der gegenwärtigen Forschung auseinander, die Ulrich Herbert in einem instruktiven Text zum Stand der Holocausthistoriografie zusammengefasst hat, findet man überraschende Symmetrien mit den frühen Arbeiten.107 Wie die heutigen Studien waren die anfänglichen häufig regional ausgerichtet und befassten sich intensiv mit den Räumen, »in denen der Massenmord tatsächlich stattgefunden hat«.108 Darüber hinaus suchten die Autorinnen und Autoren in den 1940er Jahren aus der Perspektive der Opfer zu sprechen, diese aber auch mit Täterquellen zu kontrastieren; sie verknüpften verschiedene Verbrechenskomplexe, etwa unterschiedliche Tötungsformen, in ihrer Darstellung und adressierten die Verfolgungserfahrung nichtjüdischer Opfergruppen. Sehr häufig fokussier106 Ders. (Hg.), Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the »Final Solution«, Cambridge, Mass. 1992. Die Debatte wurde 2011 aufgegriffen und weitergeführt auf einem Symposium in Jena: Norbert Frei/Wulf Kantsteiner (Hgg.), Den Holocaust erzählen. Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität, Göttingen 2013. 107 Diese aktuellen Tendenzen erklärt Herbert: ders., Holocaust-Forschung in Deutschland, 61–63. 108 Ebd., 61.

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ten sie Themen, die mit Ausraubung, Enteignung und Ausplünderung zu tun hatten, also den wirtschaftlichen Aspekten der NS-Verfolgung. Darüber hinaus scheuten sie sich nicht, die – vorsichtige – Frage nach dem Verhalten der deutschen Bevölkerung zu stellen. All dies sind Elemente, die Herbert als besondere Qualitäten der gegenwärtigen Forschung identifiziert. Seine überzeugende Schlussfolgerung, dass sich die Forschenden heute im Wesentlichen der Perzeptionsforschung, also der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust, zuwenden und damit in gewisser Weise auch die Konfrontation mit dem eigentlichen Ereignis umgehen, könnte durch die Beschäftigung mit der ersten Generation eine neue Wendung nehmen. Hier nämlich lässt sich die Frage nach der aktiven Rolle von Überlebenden im Umgang mit den Verbrechen, nach ihren Netzwerken, Artikulationsformen, ausbleibenden Resonanzen und damit auch den allgemeinen erinnerungskulturellen Implikationen ihres Handelns direkt konfrontieren mit den materiellen Realitäten des Geschehens selbst. Nicht selten können die Akteure der Nachkriegszeit für beide Betrachtungsebenen herangezogen werden. In Konstellationen, in denen die Konturen des Holocaust als historisches Ereignis durch den wachsenden zeitlichen Abstand und die hohe konzeptuelle und begriffliche Verdichtung zu verschwimmen drohen, kann das Wiederlesen der frühen Texte, die unter dem unmittelbaren Eindruck des Ereignisses geschrieben sind, Anstoß zu neuem Nachdenken und Erkenntnisgewinn zugleich sein.

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Abstracts Irene Aue-Ben-David/Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan Observant Ventures: Early German-Israeli Conferences on German History The vibrant, steadily expanding body of German-Israeli research collaborations in the Humanities carries along traces of a long history of consolidation. During the early 1970s, an intensification of personal contacts established between members of the two academic communities was followed by a belated institutionalization of the research and teaching of German history, language and literature in Israeli universities. Early German-Israeli cooperation in the field of German history resulted in joint academic events, which are perceived, in retrospect, as significant milestones in a complex process of intellectual nearing. This paper examines the preconditions which facilitated two such early academic encounters: a conference in the University of Göttingen taking place in September 1976, and a symposium hosted three months later by the young Institute for German History at Tel-Aviv University, the first of its kind in an Israeli academy. Both cases attest to the personal, institutional and cultural dynamics which dominated the early stages of this bilateral exchange from the moment it set forth. Israel Bartal From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881 While the role of the communal shtadlan – an intercessor for Jewish affairs – became, alongside other positions of the pre-modern European community, a thing of the past, the need for the vital services provided by the holders of this position remained. In the absence of the kahal, or the Councils whose authorities were curtailed and eventually completely revoked, informal shtadlanut continued to operate voluntarily and were even able to expand their influence beyond traditional areas of engagement. The article examines the incarnations of shtadlanut at three points of time in which Jewish intercession was applied on a transnational scale in response to grave crises: 1756, 1840, and 1881. In doing so, it can be shown that in the case of Western European Jewish figures and/or modern organizations assisting their persecuted brethren, new methods were employed, demonstrating the Western character of Jewish politics, and a new discourse appeared. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 571–581.

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David Biale Experience vs. Tradition: Reflections on the Origins of the Buber-Scholem Controversy In the 1960s, Gershom Scholem wrote several famous critiques of Martin Buber. Although the Buber-Scholem debate has evolved into an object of intense research, this article tries to refocus the attention to the complex personal dimension of this relationship. It thereby offers new insights into the origins of Scholem’s frontal assault on Buber, which caused long-term damage to Buber’s reputation. It will be shown how Scholem’s rejection of Buber began during World War I, initially as a critique of Buber’s position on the war, but then on his approach to Judaism generally. Although Scholem refrained from criticizing his opposite publicly after the war, he returned to Buber in the 1960s when the latter enjoyed a renaissance in his reputation – a renaissance that threatened Scholem’s position as the leading spokesman for Judaism. Ari Barell/Ute Deichmann Internationality as Moral Challenge and Practical Success: The Origin and Early Development of the Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences In the mid-1950s, two Israeli scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Gerhard Schmidt and Amos de-Shalit, and Wolfgang Gentner from Germany succeeded in initiating a large-scale scientific collaboration between the Weizmann Institute, German universities, and the Max Planck Society. Strong opposition from Israeli scientists and a widespread cultural boycott against Germany aside, their scientific, materialistic, and political interests were shared by the political establishment in both countries, ensuring political support. However, the case of the early German-Israeli scientific collaboration highlighted the problem of reconciling the ethos of scientific internationalism – for the sake of the advancement of science as a whole – with other moral principles, such as the exclusion of institutions and individuals who had actively promoted Nazi policies. This article traces the early history of the Israeli-German partnership in the sciences, and illuminates the reasons of its long-term success in light of its eventual, and inevitable, involvement of former Nazi supporters. David Engel The Elite and the Street: The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy The article explores the purported democratization of diplomacy in the aftermath of World War I, and its effects on the manner in which Jews

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sought to interact collectively with their neighbors. It has been widely asserted that the entry of new organizations, including the American Jewish Congress and the Comité des Délégations Juives, into the conduct of Jewish diplomacy during the interwar period signaled a departure from an earlier practice of intercession by wealthy notables in situations of danger (shtadlanut) in favor of one in which representative bodies of the entire Jewish people publicly demanded effective guarantees of rights. However, critical scrutiny reveals that this so-called new Jewish diplomacy did not differ significantly in practice from the old. The new organizations were equally dominated by elites who were profoundly suspicious of popular caprice. A clash between these elites and the populace they claimed to represent emerged in the aftermath of the assassination of Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura by a Jew, Scholem Schwarzbard, in 1926. The Jewish press almost universally lionized the assassin as a national hero, whereas leaders of Jewish diplomatic organizations looked to quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations with their Ukrainian counterparts to resolve tensions between the two groups. As this article shows, in the end, the elites were unable to suppress popular pressures. Lutz Fiedler Drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung – Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg und das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee Through the prism of the life stories of Wassili Grossman and Ilja Ehrenburg, the article deals with the history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, founded in 1942 in the Soviet Union. The life trajectories of these two writers intersected for the first time when they were entrusted with the most important publication of the Committee, the Black Book, which was to document the murder of the Soviet Jews. The article highlights the importance of the Committee, showing that its prohibition in 1948 and the later murder of its leaders can serve to symbolize the crushing of the hopes of so many Soviet Jews, and their belief in the utopia of the communist project, a society where a person’s origin would not matter. After a new bond of collectivity among the Soviet Jews had crystallized in the wake of the Holocaust and the experience of annihilation solely for reasons of origin, that newfound sense of solidarity found itself subject to the suspicion of national particularism in the increasingly more ethnicizing Soviet Union. Such suspicions ultimately gave rise to a wave of anti-Semitism and persecution by the regime. More than any other contemporary works, the texts by Ehrenburg and Grossman document this drama in Soviet-Jewish history, the witnesses of which these writers had themselves become.

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Carole Fink Negotiating after Negotiations: Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund In May 1965, Nahum Goldmann, President of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, announced that he would make no further claims against the German Federal Republic. Yet only four years later, the 75-year-old emissary called for a new restitution agreement on behalf of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who had been excluded from the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement. Goldmann’s long, difficult negotiations with West German officials resulted in the creation of the 1980 Hardship Fund, but with payments far below his original expectations. This outcome reflected not only the strengths and weaknesses of Goldmann’s personal diplomacy, but also the strikingly new West German political, economic, and social environment after 1969. With this chapter of Jewish effort for restitution, the article reflects the changed relations between the Federal Republic and the Jewish world in the middle of the Cold War. Elisabeth Gallas Frühe Holocaustforschung in Amerika: Dokumentation, Zeugenschaft und Begriffsbildung Taking the symposium on “Problems of Research in the Study of the Recent Catastrophe, 1939–1945,” held at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1949, as reference point, the paper sheds light on the American-Jewish commitment to initiate documentation of and research on the Holocaust in the 1940s and early 1950s. Even before this term came to be used to describe the event, an unsystematic, but in many ways pioneering field of research had been established here that prefigured much of the later discourse of Holocaust historiography. From this field emerged three core groups of texts that were published by individuals and organizations: documentations meant to enhance prosecution of the perpetrators; anthologies and memoirs to foster commemoration; and scientific studies aimed at contextualizing, explaining and analyzing different aspects of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jews. To reconsider these early publications provides another telling example that challenges the “myth of silence” created by a generation of historians to characterize the aftermath of World War II. The corpus of texts produced at the time underlines the multifaceted ways in which Jews tried to come to terms with the past and to create public awareness after 1945. At the same time, it reveals fruitful approaches to questions that occupy Holocaust researchers to this day.

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Philipp Graf The Bernheim Petition 1933: Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period The article relates the outcome of the Bernheim petition of 1933 – the only effective international conviction of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish politics during its twelve years reign – to the rather negative image of a complete failure of Jewish diplomacy during the interwar period. It does so by considering four corresponding parameters which shaped the outcome of the petition in 1933 as well as its later interpretation: 1) the possibly distorted perception of the event in the light of the later extermination of European Jewry; 2) the grounding of the petition within other initiatives of Jewish diplomacy of the day; 3) the specific character of the Geneva Convention as the legal basis for the petition; and 4) the highly favorable international political climate in the spring of 1933. Atina Grossmann Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India The article traces a transnational Holocaust story that has remained essentially untold, marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. The majority of the c. 250,000 Jews who constituted the “saved remnant” (She’erit Hapleta) of East European Jewry, gathered in postwar Allied displaced persons camps, survived because they had been “deported to life” in the Soviet Union. These mostly Polish Jews had either fled to Soviet-occupied territory after the German invasion or were already living there when the Nazi-Soviet Pact took effect. They endured a harsh exile, first in Stalin’s labor camps and special settlements, and then, after an “amnesty” in the wake of the German invasion in 1941, in Central Asia. Their itinerary intersects with two other “exotic” wartime sites. Iran became a center of Jewish relief efforts for the refugees in Central Asia, as well as a crucial transit stop for the Polish army in exile and the so-called Teheran Children on their way to Palestine; Jewish refugees, both allied and “enemy alien,” were also a significant presence in British India, in internment camps, orphanages, and the Jewish Relief Association of Bombay. The article seeks to integrate these largely unexamined Asiatic experiences and lost memories of displacement and trauma into our understanding of the Holocaust and definitions of survivors, and to remap the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue during and after World War II.

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Jenny Hestermann Vor der Diplomatie: Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Brückenbauer? The beginning of the scientific cooperation between Germany and Israel is often viewed as an “ice-breaker” for the establishment of diplomatic relations that followed later on. This article questions the underlying assumption of the “neutral” sciences by 1) considering German-Israeli cooperation against the background of German interests in foreign policy; and 2) analyzing the reports and motives of scientists involved in the process. A first encounter took place at the Weizmann Institute as early as 1959 with a visit of Otto Hahn, Wolfgang Gentner and others, where the parameters of joint future projects and possible German funding were laid out. As a hypothesis, this article proposes that the young German scholarship holders subsequently working at the Weizmann Institute perceived themselves as diplomats, trying to strengthen the ties between the two countries, and reporting about cultural similarities and differences. While this self-perception was congruent with the aims of the Generalverwaltung of the Max Planck Society, it faced opposition from parts of the Israeli colleagues. Brian Horowitz Principle or Expediency: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Displays of Violence and the Construction of His Leadership Horowitz examines violence in the work and writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940), the leader of revisionist Zionism. Following an innovative approach, the article analyzes Jabotinsky’s hard-line expressions of militarism and anti-Arab sentiments in the context of conflicts he faced within Zionism. It further shows how Jabotinsky’s justifications of violence changed over time in the 1920s and 1930s. The author points out that, despite his reputation as militarist, the politician wavered in his zeal, sometimes appearing more aggressive and sometimes less. Due to the fact that Jabotinsky uses violence both on principle and for expediency’s sake – and is therefore deeply contradictory in his attitude – the author argues that no simple pattern of opinion can be discovered. Markus Kirchhoff The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern – Re-Reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article This article examines, on the one hand, whether reflections on the prevalence of the so-called Westphalian state system offer a useful analytical perspective within the realm of Jewish Studies. On the other hand, it points to

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the relevance of particular Jewish cases in the analysis of international relations, international law, and organization in general. Here, the author’s focus lies on the Austrian-American Jewish international lawyer Leo Gross (1903–1990), who is widely acknowledged as having been most influential in bringing attention to that Westphalian international order. Leo Gross’ article The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948, published in 1948 in The American Journal of International Law, is deemed to have been the very origin of the parlance of “Westphalia” in academic discourse. Apart from presenting Leo Gross’ biography, this paper offers a close reading of his “Westphalia” article, juxtaposing it with several aspects of the modern political or “diplomatic” history of the Jews. In conclusion, it will be argued that modern political Jewish history, not least because of its diasporic nature, has been shaped most profoundly by the Westphalian system, and should be considered as a striking example of the mechanics of it. Nathan Kurz In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference This article offers a more nuanced account of the end of organized Jewish activism for minority rights in Europe than what has previously been suggested. A look at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference reveals that, perhaps surprisingly, minority rights still remained a demand of Western Jewish leaders after the Holocaust, and that despite the vastly diminished numbers of Jewish survivors they represented. Yet, what these Jewish representatives and their allies from Romania and Hungary had to realize in Paris was that wartime trends, favoring population transfer and domestic assimilation, rendered these demands unfeasible. In contrasting the very different ways Jewish issues were addressed in this post-World War II diplomatic gathering, and that of Versailles in 1919, the article shows how the Great Powers now no longer seemed to consider Europe’s remaining Jews as central to peace and reconstruction on the continent. Utilizing new archival materials from private and government archives, the paper reconstructs how the largely ignored Jewish appeals became political fodder for British Great Power aspirations and Romanian and Hungarian irredentism. Cecile E. Kuznitz YIVO’s “Old Friend and Teacher”: Simon Dubnow and his Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute Simon Dubnow played a towering role in the history of YIVO as a pioneering Jewish historian and theoretician of diaspora nationalism, as well as a friend and colleague of many YIVO leaders. Moreover, his commitment to

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both communal activism and rigorous scholarship inspired YIVO’s efforts to combine engagement and objectivity in its own work. Yet, while Dubnow collaborated closely with YIVO, particularly in the realm of publishing, he resisted attempts to draw him directly into the institute’s day-to-day activities. After settling in Riga in 1933, Dubnow finally visited YIVO’s headquarters in Vilna and considered his move there, although his experiences made him all the more wary of the political maelstrom of interwar Poland. Dubnow’s contacts with YIVO leaders and his ambivalence regarding a relocation to Vilna continued into the years of World War II, until the tragic end of his life. Lisa Moses Leff Zosa Szajkowski: Archivdieb und Pionier der französisch-jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung This article explores the career of Zosa Szajkowski, the Polish-born historian of modern French Jewish history, considered by many as the founding father of his academic field. Szajkowski was also known as an archive thief. Over the course of his career, he took tens of thousands of Jewish documents from Europe and moved them, illicitly, to New York, where he used them as material in his scholarship, and then eventually sold them to Jewish research libraries, where they remain until today. His motivations were complex: at once ideological, scholarly, financial, and, eventually, pathological. Part criminal, part salvager of the French Jewish archival heritage, Szajkowski’s work as a scholar cannot be separated from his work as a thief, and both activities have had a lasting impact on the field of French Jewish history. Sharon Livne/Amos Morris-Reich Early Contacts in Genetics, 1949–1965: A Historical-Sociological Perspective By exploring the case and networks of one individual scientist, the Germanborn Israeli geneticist Jacob Wahrman, this article examines early contacts in one of the fields of science most deeply tainted in Germany after 1945, because of its close ties to the Nazi regime. Contrasting the existing historical narrative about the beginning of German-Israeli scientific cooperation being established in 1959 with the collaboration between Max Planck Society and the Weizmann Institute, the central aim of the article is to demonstrate that – already in the first decades after 1945 – relations between Israeli and German scientists were varied, multileveled, and multidirectional. Bringing together historical and sociological perspectives, the article shows various kinds of individual and institutional motivations, considerations, and justifications for (or against) collaboration, in which science and

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politics were closely entwined. This joint perspective at early exchanges between German and Israeli scientists sheds light on a spectrum of activities, including apparently contradictory tendencies, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. The article concludes with an attempt to situate some of these contradictory tendencies within the broader historical context. James Loeffler “The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective Despite a plethora of recent new approaches to Jewish political history, the story of interwar Zionism is still consistently framed as a dichotomy between diaspora rights-advocacy and state-building in Palestine. This article challenges that persistent historiographical trope by recovering the overlooked Jewish political tradition of Zionist internationalism, whose bearers simultaneously pursued the twin goals of political consolidation in a territorial homeland in Palestine and the construction of national autonomy in the diaspora. Using the case study of Lithuanian Zionist leader and international lawyer Jacob Robinson (1889–1977), this article demonstrates the complementary relationship between autonomist and statist goals in interwar Zionist politics. After tracing Robinson’s rich, complex biography from the 1920s Lithuanian Parliament and the European Congress of National Minorities to the postwar United Nations and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, it concludes with a discussion of the debates engendered by the Eichmann trial about the relationship between Zionism and international law. Miriam Rürup The Right to be Stateless: Dealing with Statelessness after World War II The stateless person is a central figure of the twentieth century. While in the first half of the century, many people were deprived of their citizenship and their implied rights, the situation became even more dramatic after 1945. The uncertainty of a huge group of so-called displaced persons concerning their national belonging urged the international community to find a solution for the problem of statelessness. The 1954 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons reveals that both the nation-states as well as the individuals themselves acted as national players in an international field of diplomatic discourse. While the “right to a nationality” was enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the question of how to deal with stateless people in the everyday political and social practice of the nation-state still remained unresolved. This article argues that the experience of statelessness, and thus the loss of the “right to have rights” (Hannah

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Arendt), ultimately led to the establishment of the human rights system. This system made the classification as stateless “UN nationals” a status worth achieving for Jewish DPs, as it protected them from “repatriation” against their will. Brian M. Smollett Nationalism, Belonging, and Crisis: The Paths of Koppel S. Pinson and Hans Kohn Hans Kohn (1891–1971) and Koppel Shub Pinson (1904–1961) were central figures in the development of the historical study of nationalism during times of unprecedented crisis. This study elucidates and contrasts the paths of both scholars who, in their own ways, lived and worked at the nexus of Jewish scholarship and communal engagement, and more universal concerns. Based on their extensive correspondence, written work, and intellectual biographies, this article demonstrates the shifting priorities of both thinkers in response to the rise of National Socialism, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the complex problems of the post-war order. While Pinson worked on the front lines of attempts to reconstruct Jewish life in the aftermath of Nazi genocide, and sought to revive elements of diaspora nationalism through his work on Simon Dubnow, Kohn’s alienation from Jewish communal life and his conviction that global problems merited more universal intellectual and organizational solutions, led him to place specifically Jewish problems and solutions at the periphery of his thought and activism. Roni Stauber Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik: Die israelische Diplomatie und das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Nationalsozialismus This article examines the role of the Holocaust and its memory in the diplomatic relationship between Israel and West Germany in the 1950s. By discussing the dilemma of exploiting the Holocaust in the diplomatic arena, the different agendas of Israeli leaders and diplomats come to the fore. Moreover, the article sheds light on the different reactions of Israeli diplomacy to the reluctance of the West Germans to confront their National Socialist past, the reinstatement of numerous former National Socialist leaders in the West German administration, and the legal authorities’ hesitation to prosecute Nazi criminals. By the end of the 1950s, however, a change in attitudes is perceivable as a number of German prosecutors began cooperating with Israeli authorities and Yad Vashem in their efforts to prosecute Nazi criminals, who continued to live quietly in West Germany.

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Carsten L. Wilke Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878 The long struggle of nineteenth-century Jews for the rights of their Romanian brethren utterly failed to enforce emancipation in Romania; but it had an important impact on the transnational organization and identity formation of Jewish activists in various European countries. When resuming pro-Jewish negotiations immediately after the French defeat of 1870/71, Adolphe Crémieux was confronted with a group of Berlin intellectuals and businessmen who promoted the Romanian Jewish cause in order to garner support from Bismarck’s Germany for a policy of liberal interventionism. Presided by Professor Moritz Lazarus, the Berlin Romanian Committee challenged the leadership of Crémieux and the Alliance Israélite Universelle through holding an international conference in Brussels in October 1872. This article explores, through the prism of the Alliance archives and contemporary Jewish press records, the relations between the French and German advocates of Romanian Jewry, which subsequently went through alternating modes of competition and collaboration. While existing literature on the subject mainly focuses on the Berlin Congress and its aftermath, a study of the preceding years reveals a conflictual, yet formative phase of Jewish political organization.

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Contributors Irene Aue-Ben-David studied medieval and modern history, sociology and education at the Georg August University Göttingen. She received her PhD from Göttingen University in 2010. From 2010 to 2013 she was a post-doctoral research fellow in a joint research project of the University of Göttingen and the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the German-Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner (1862–1937). Since 2014, she has been coordinating the project “The German-Israeli Cooperation in the Humanities” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center (a joint project with the Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt). Since 2015, she has been the director of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem. Publications: Deutsche Geschichte und Germanistik in Jerusalem. Zu den Anfängen der deutsch-israelischen Zusammenarbeit in den Geisteswissenschaften, in: Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Culture History 11 (2017), no. 1, special issue: The Humanities between Germany and Israel, ed. by Irene Aue-BenDavid, Michael Brenner and Kärin Nickelsen (forthcoming); Deutschjüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert. Zu Werk und Rezeption von Selma Stern, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2017; Constantin Brunners Auffassung vom Judenhass, in: Birgit Erdle/Werner Konitzer (eds.), Theorien über Judenhass – eine Denkgeschichte. Kommentierte Quellenedition (1781–1931), Frankfurt a. M. 2015; Constantin Brunner im Kontext. Ein Intellektueller zwischen Kaiserreich und Exil, Berlin 2014 (ed. together with Gerhard Lauer and Jürgen Stenzel); The Making of a “Classic” of GermanJewish Historiography. Selma Stern’s “Der preussische Staat und die Juden,” in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (2013); Constantin Brunner. Ausgewählte Briefe 1884–1937, Göttingen 2012 (ed. together with Jürgen Stenzel). Ari Barell is a post-doctoral fellow at the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He studied Islamic and Middle East studies, history, philosophy and sociology of science and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Ben-Gurion University, where he received his PhD in 2009. There, between 2005 and 2011, he taught at the Jewish History Department and at the Israel Studies Program. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at the universities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and at Harvard. His current research projects focus on the scientific collaboration between Germany and Israel (with Professor Ute Deichmann) and on the relations between science, technology academia, and social order in Israel. Publications: EngineerKing. David Ben-Gurion, Science and Nation Building, Beer Sheva 2014 (Heb.); “The Million Plan.” Zionism, Political Theology and Scientific UtoJBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 583–595.

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pianism, in: Politics, Religion & Ideology 15 (2014), no. 1, 1–22 (together with David Ohana); Leviathan and the Academia. Was There an Attempt to Nationalize the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Early Years of the State of Israel?, in: Democratic Culture in Israel and in the World 13 (2012), 7–79; Zionist Epistemology. The Case of David Ben-Gurion’s Politics of Numbers, in: Iyunim Bitkumat Israel. Studies in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel 22 (2012), 91–121. Israel Bartal is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2006– 2010). He served as the Chair of the Historical Society of Israel from 2007 to 2015, and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, McGill, University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers, as well as at Moscow State University and the Central European University in Budapest. In the summer of 2016, he was nominated as a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences. Publications: Geschichte der Juden im östlichen Europa, 1772–1881, Göttingen 2010 (Russ. 2007; Eng. 2005; Heb. 2002); Cossack and Bedouin. Land and People in Jewish Nationalism, Tel Aviv 2007; From Corporation to Nation. Jewish Autonomy in Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006), 17–31; The Varieties of Haskalah, Jerusalem 2005 (ed. together with Shmuel Feiner); Exile in the Land. The Jishuv before the Advent of Zionism, Jerusalem 1994 (Heb.); Poles and Jews. A Failed Brotherhood, Hanover, N. H., 1992 (together with Magdalena Opalski). David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of California, Los Angeles. His books have been translated into eight languages and have won the National Jewish Book Award three times. He has recently completed a biography of Gershom Scholem, which will be published by Yale University Press. Publications: Hasidism. A New History, Princeton, N. J./Oxford (together with David Assaf et al.; forthcoming); Traditionen der Säkularisierung. Jüdisches Denken von den Anfängen bis in die Moderne, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2015 (Heb. 2011; Eng. 2011); Judaism, in: The Norton Anthology of World Religions, ed. by Jack Miles, 2 vols., here vol. 2, New York 2015; Blood and Belief. The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians, Berkeley, Calif., 2008; Cultures of the Jews. A New History, New York 2002 (ed.); Eros and the Jews. From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, Berkeley, Calif., 1997.

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Ute Deichmann received her PhD and habilitation from the Department of Genetics at the University of Cologne in 1991 and 2000 respectively. Since 2000, she has been head of the working group “History of Biological and Chemical Sciences,” since 2011 as Extraordinary Professor. From 2003 until 2007, she was Research Professor at the Leo Baeck Institute, London, and co-leader of its research project “Jews in German-Speaking Academia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In 2007, she became Founding Director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her current research is on various topics related to the history and philosophy of modern life sciences, and on Israeli-German scientific collaboration. Publications: Genes, Genomes, Cells, and Systems in 21st-Century Life Sciences, in: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 58 (2015), no. 2 (special issue ed. together with Michel Morange and Anthony S. Schechter); Kultur und Identität in der Wissenschaft. Der Beitrag jüdischer Forscher zur internationalen Bedeutung deutscher Naturwissenschaft – ein jüdischer Beitrag?, in: Elke-Vera Kotowski (ed.), Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden. Eine Spurensuche in den Ursprungs-, Transit- und Emigrationsländern, Berlin/Munich/Boston, Mass., 2015, 205–221; Jews and Sciences in German Contexts. Case Studies from the 19th and 20th Centuries, Tübingen 2007 (ed. together with Ulrich Charpa); Flüchten, Mitmachen, Vergessen. Chemiker und Biochemiker in der NS-Zeit, Weinheim et al. 2001; Biologists under Hitler, Cambridge, Mass., 1996. Jörg Deventer studied history, German studies and pedagogy at the universities of Bielefeld and Hamburg. He received his PhD from Hamburg University in 1995, where he also completed his habilitation in 2001. Between 2001 and 2008, he was a research associate and academic coordinator at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO). Since 2010, he has been Chief Research Associate, and since 2011, Deputy Director at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture. His main fields of research are European Jewries in the early modern period and pre-modern cultures of conversion, as well as noble elites in the Habsburg Monarchy (c. 1550–1750). Publications: Konversionen zwischen den christlichen Konfessionen im frühneuzeitlichen Europa, in: Marlene Kurz/Thomas Winkelbauer (eds.), Glaubenswechsel. Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 7 (2007), no. 2, 8–24; Zwischen Ausweisung, Repression und Duldung. Die Judenpolitik der “Reformpäpste” im Kirchenstaat (ca. 1550–1605), in: Aschkenas. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 14 (2004), 365–385; “Confessionalization.” A Useful Theoretical Concept for the Study of Religion, Politics, and Society in Early Modern East-Central Europe?, in: European Review of History 11 (2004), no. 3,

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403–425; Das Abseits als sicherer Ort? Jüdische Minderheit und christliche Gesellschaft im Alten Reich am Beispiel der Fürstabtei Corvey (1550– 1807), Paderborn 1996. David Engel received his PhD in 1979 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, and Chair of the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. He is fellow at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University and editor of the journal Gal-Ed. On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. Publications: The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard, 1926–1927. A Selection of Documents, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016 (ed.); Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust, Stanford, Calif., 2010; Zionism, Harlow/New York 2009; Between Liberation and Flight. Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership, 1944–1946, Tel Aviv 1996 (Heb.); Facing a Holocaust. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1993; In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1987. Lutz Fiedler studied medieval and modern history and philosophy at Leipzig University. From 2006 to 2013, he was a doctoral candidate at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University with a thesis on the history of the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen). Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC-Project “Judging Histories. Experience, Judgement and Representation of World War II in an Age of Globalization” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Publications: Matzpen. Eine andere israelische Geschichte, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2017; Ein Paradigma der Moderne. Jüdische Geschichte in Schlüsselbegriffen. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 70. Geburtstag, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016 (ed. together with Arndt Engelhardt, Elisabeth Gallas, Philipp Graf, and Natasha Gordinsky); Der letzte Winter des Internationalismus. Vergangene Utopien einer jüdisch-arabischen Gegenwart im Nahen Osten, in: Nicolas Berg et al. (eds.), Konstellationen. Über Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 65. Geburtstag, Göttingen/Oakville, Conn., 2011, 403–426; Historisches Urteil und Politische Kritik. Über jüdische und israelische Selbstverständnisse im Konflikt, in: Sandra Lehmann/Sophie Loidolt (eds.), Urteil und Fehlurteil, Vienna 2011, 171–186; Habsburger Verlängerungen. Imperienkonzepte im Werk Hans Kohns, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 477–508.

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Carole Fink received her PhD in International History from Yale University in 1968. She is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Ohio State University, where she taught between 1991 and 2011. She has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Binghamton University, N. Y., and Canisius College in Buffalo, N. Y. As visiting professor, she has worked at Columbia University, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and, recently in 2016, at the University of Jena. Professor Fink is the author and editor of a dozen books, among them two prize-winning works. She is currently writing a book on West German-Israeli Relations between 1965 and 1974. Publications: Cold War. An International History, Boulder, Col., 2014 (2nd ed. 2017); Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938, Cambridge/New York 2004; The Genoa Conference. European Diplomacy, 1921–1922, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1984 (2nd ed. 1991); Marc Bloch. A Life in History, Cambridge/New York 1989 (trans. into six languages). Elisabeth Gallas studied cultural studies, German literature and sociology at the universities of Leipzig and Kopenhagen. She received her PhD from Leipzig University in 2011 with a study on Jewish cultural property restitution after 1945. From 2012 to 2015, she was research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute of Holocaust Studies, and held a Minerva Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She joined the Simon Dubnow Institute in 2015, where she is heading the research unit “law.” Publications: “Das Leichenhaus der Bücher.” Kulturrestitution und jüdisches Geschichtsdenken nach 1945, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 22016; Locating the Jewish Future. The Restoration of Looted Cultural Property in Early PostWar Europe, in: Naharaim. Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 9 (2015), no. 1–2, 25–47; Hannah Arendt. Rückkehr im Schreiben, in: Monika Boll/Raphael Gross (eds.), “Ich staune, dass Sie in dieser Luft atmen können.” Jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland nach 1945, Frankfurt a. M. 2013, 233–263. Philipp Graf studied history and German literature at Leipzig University. He was a doctoral student at the Simon Dubnow Institute from 2003 to 2006, and a Ernst C. Stiefel Global Fellow at New York Law School in 2006/07. From 2007 to 2015, he was a research associate within the Academy Project “European Traditions – Encyclopedia of Jewish Cultures” at the Simon Dubnow Institute, where he now holds a position as research associate. His latest research project explores the political biography of the communist lawyer Leo Zuckermann (1908–1985). Publications: Ein Paradigma der Moderne. Jüdische Geschichte in Schlüsselbegriffen. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 70. Geburtstag, Göttingen/Bristol, Conn., 2016 (ed. together with Arndt

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Engelhardt, Lutz Fiedler, Elisabeth Gallas, and Natasha Gordinsky); Erinnerungskultur in der DDR. Das Beispiel Anna Seghers, in: Andreas H. Apelt/Maria Hufenreuter (eds.), Antisemitismus in der DDR und die Folgen, Halle (Saale) 2016, 139–154; Ante el Holocausto. El exilio comunista germano-parlante en la Ciudad de México, 1941–1946, in: Michaela Peters/ Giovanni di Stefano (eds.), México como punto de fuga real o imaginario de la cultura europea en la víspera de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Munich 2011, 239–259; Die Bernheim-Petition 1933. Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008. Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Cooper Union, New York City, where she has taught modern European history and gender studies since 1996. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in 1984, taught at Mount Holyoke College from 1983 to 1988, at Columbia University from 1988 to 1996, and as a visiting professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2008/09 and 2014/15. She is co-authoring a volume on “Gender and the Holocaust.” Besides the survival of Jewish refugees outside of Europe during the Holocaust, her current research focuses on the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship. Publications: Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, Detroit, Mich. (ed. together with Mark Edele and Sheila Fitzpatrick; forthcoming); Transnational Jewish Stories. Displacement, Loss and (Non)Restitution, in: Jay Geller/Leslie Morris (eds.), Three Way Street. Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, Ann Arbor, Mich., 2016, 362–384; Wege in der Fremde. Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen Feldafing, New York und Teheran, Göttingen 2012; Remapping Relief and Rescue. Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II, in: New German Critique 39 (2012), no. 3 117, 61–79; Grams, Calories, and Food. Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949, in: Central European History 44 (2011), no. 1, 118–148; Jews, Germans, and Allies. Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton, N. J., 2007 (2nd ed. 2009; Ger.: Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte. Begegnungen im besetzten Deutschland, Göttingen, 2012). Jenny Hestermann studied sociology, history and religious studies at the University of Bremen. She received her PhD from the TU Berlin (Centre for the Research on Antisemitism) in 2015. From 2010 to 2013, she was a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, funded by the Leo Baeck Fellowship and the Studienstiftung. Since 2015, she has been working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt. Her current research project revolves around the historical devel-

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opment of the cooperation between Germany and Israel in the Humanities. Publications: Inszenierte Versöhnung. Reisediplomatie und die deutschisraelischen Beziehungen von 1957–1984, Frankfurt a. M. 2016; Beyond Atonement. Remarks on the Research Paradigms in German-Israeli Relations, in: Trumah, Zeitschrift der Jüdischen Hochschule Heidelberg 23 (2016); Ein “Tag der tiefen Trauer.” Israelische Reaktionen auf den Umbruch in der DDR und die deutsche Wiedervereinigung, in: Deutschland Archiv 2014, ed. by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 2015, 112–125; Atonement or Self-Experience? On the Motivations of the First Generation of Volunteers of Action Reconciliation for Peace, in: Working Papers European Forum at the Hebrew University, ed. by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Jerusalem 2014. Brian Horowitz studied Russian languages and literatures at New York University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 1993. From 1993 to 2003, he taught at the University of Nebraska. Since 2003, he has been teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans, La., where he holds the Sizeler Family Chair in Jewish Studies and is Chairman of the German and Slavic Departments. Publications: Vladimir Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, Detroit, Mich., 2016 (ed. together with Leonid Katsis); Russian Idea – Jewish Presence. Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life, Brighton, Mass., 2013; Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia, Seattle, Wash./London 2009; Empire Jews. Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Russia, Bloomington, Ind., 2009. Markus Kirchhoff studied modern history, communication sciences, and German studies at the universities of Essen and Dublin. He received his PhD at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2003. Since 1999, he has been a research associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig. Since 2007, he has been heading the research unit of the Saxonian Academy of Science in Leipzig, which published the 7-volume Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (2011–2017). His research and publications are especially concerned with the modern political history of the Jews. He is currently preparing a larger study on German Jews and international politics in 1918–1919. Publications: Art. “Wiener Kongress,” in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, ed. by Dan Diner im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 7 vols., here vol. 6, Stuttgart 2015, 397–401; Konstellationen. Über Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 65. Geburtstag, Göttingen/Oakville, Conn., 2011 (ed. together with Nicolas Berg, Omar Kamil, and Susanne Zepp); Looted Texts. Restituting Jewish Libraries, in: Dan

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Diner/Gotthart Wunberg (eds.), Restitution and Memory. Historical Remembrance and Material Restoration in Europe, New York/London 2007, 161– 188; Diasporische versus zionistische Diplomatie, 1878–1917, in: Aschkenas. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 17 (2007) [2008], no. 1, 123–146; Surveying the Land. Western Societies for the Exploration of Palestine, 1865–1920, in: Benedikt Stuchtey (ed.), Science across the European Empires, 1800–1950, Oxford/New York 2005, 149–172; Text zu Land. Palästina im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs, 1865–1920, Göttingen 2005. Magnus Klaue studied German literature, philosophy, as well as film and theatre studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he finished a dissertation on Else Lasker-Schüler. There, from 2003 to 2008, he was a teaching fellow at the Department of German Literature. Between 2008 and 2014, he has been writing and working as an editorial journalist for a German weekly newspaper in Berlin. In 2015, he joined the Simon Dubnow Institute as a research associate. His research interests include modern German and Austrian literature, especially the history and poetics of German-Jewish literature, and the early Frankfurt School. He is currently working on a study about Max Horkheimer. Publications: Jargon und Idiom. Anmerkungen zur Geschichte einer folgenschweren Verwechslung, in: Max Beck/Nicholas Cooman (eds.), Sprachkritik als Ideologiekritik. Studien zu Adornos Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Würzburg 2015, 119–136; Mit doppeltem Blick. Max Horkheimers bürgerliche Gelehrsamkeit und wissenschaftliches Unternehmertum, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 13 (2014), 437–460; Vom Geschmack zur Idiosynkrasie. Zum Wandel von Geschmacksurteil und ästhetischer Erfahrung in der Kulturindustrie, in: Dirk Braunstein/Sebastian Dittmann/Isabelle Klasen (eds.), Alles falsch. Auf verlorenem Posten gegen die Kulturindustrie, Berlin 2012, 111– 166; Poetischer Enthusiasmus. Else Lasker-Schülers Ästhetik der Kolportage, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2011; Unterwegs. Zur Poetik des Vagabundentums im 20. Jahrhundert, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2008 (together with Hans Richard Brittnacher). Nathan Kurz is an Early Career Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, University of London. Having studied modern Jewish history at Yale University, he received his PhD in 2015. He is currently working on his book about the transformation of collective Jewish politics after the Holocaust and its coincidental overlap with the advent of international human rights. Publications: “Saving” the Jews of the Diaspora. A History of International Jewish Aid (together with Lisa M. Leff), in: Hasia R. Diner (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora (forthcoming); Jewish Memory and the Human Right to Petition, 1933–1953, in:

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Simon Jackson/Alanna O’Malley (eds.), From the League of Nations to the United Nations. New Approaches to International Institutions (forthcoming). Cecile E. Kuznitz received her bachelor from Harvard University and her PhD from Stanford University. From 2000 to 2003, she taught at Georgetown University. Since 2003, she has been teaching at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y.), where she is currently Associate Professor of History. She has held fellowships at YIVO, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Publications: At Home in the City. Jewish Urban History between the New and Old Worlds, in: American Jewish History 100 (2016), no. 2, 221–232; YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation, New York 2014; An-Sky’s Legacy. The Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture, in: Gabriella Safran/ Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), The Worlds of S. An-sky. A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, Stanford, Calif., 2006, 320–345; Art. “Yiddish Studies,” in: Martin Goodman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, New York 2002, 541–571. Lisa Moses Leff received a PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 2000. From 2000 to 2009, she taught history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Since 2009, she has been teaching at the American University in Washington, D. C., where she is now Professor of History. She has won fellowships from the French Government’s Chateaubriand program, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and Oxford University. She is currently serving as Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies. Publications: Colonialism and the Jews, Bloomington, Ind., 2017 (ed. together with Ethan B. Katz and Maud S. Mandel); Jewish Migration and the Archive (ed. together with Joachim Schör and James Jordan), London/New York 2016; The Archive Thief. The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust, Oxford/New York 2015; Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France, Stanford, Calif., 2006. Sharon Livne studied political science and Jewish history at the University of Haifa, where she received her PhD in 2008 and serves as Teaching Fellow until today. Since 2009, she has been research fellow at the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University

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of Haifa, whose research is mainly concerned with German-Israeli scientific cooperation. Since 2015, she has taken part in the project “The GermanIsraeli cooperation in the Humanities,” led by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University, and the Fritz Bauer Institute. Publications: Fundraising and Collaboration. The Administration of Hebrew University and the German Question, 1959–1965, in: Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Culture History 11 (2017), no. 1: The Humanities between Germany and Israel (forthcoming; together with Amos Morris-Reich); Emotional Dichotomies. The Children’s Press in Postwar Germany, in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 38 (2010), 167–180. James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. Between 2013 and 2015, he was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in International Law and Dean’s visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D. C. He received his MA and PhD in history from Columbia University and his BA in social studies from Harvard University. His research interests include the history of human rights, American Jewish politics, contemporary Jewish culture, and the history of Jewish music. Publications: The Law of Strangers. Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought (ed. together with Moria Paz; forthcoming); Rooted Cosmopolitans. Human Rights and Jewish Politics in the Twentieth Century, New Haven, Conn. (forthcoming); The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism. The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 “Declaration on Human Rights,” in: Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015), no. 2, 274–295; The Most Musical Nation. Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, New Haven, Conn., 2010. Amos Morris-Reich is Associate Professor at the Department of Jewish History and Thought, and director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. His research focuses on Jewish history within the conceptual foundations of European, particularly German, social science and social thought, the history of antisemitism within science, and Israeli cultural ideology. Publications: Ideas of “Race” in the History of the Humanities (ed. together with Dirk Rupnow; forthcoming); Race and Photography. Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980, Chicago, Ill./London 2016; The “First Letters” of Jacob Wahrman, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 61 (2016), 199–218; The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, New York/London 2008. Gil Rubin is a PhD candidate in modern Jewish history at Columbia University, New York. He received his BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusa-

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lem, where he studied philosophy and history in the School of History honors program. His dissertation project explores the impact of World War II on Jewish politics, and the entangled histories of minority rights and population transfers in the 1940s. Publications: From Federalism to Binationalism. Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism, in: Contemporary European History 24 (2015), no. 3, 393–414; Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt. An Intellectual Friendship, in: Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Culture History 9 (2015), no. 1–2, 73–88; The End of Minority Rights. Jacob Robinson and the “Jewish Question” in World War II, in: Jahrbuch des SimonDubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 55–72. Miriam Rürup is director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She studied history, sociology and cultural anthropology at the universities of Göttingen, Tel Aviv and Berlin and received her PhD from TU Berlin in 2006. From 2010 to 2012, she was research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D. C. Previously, she has also served as Assistant Professor at the Department of Medieval and Modern History at Göttingen University and has held positions at the Foundation Topography of Terror in Berlin, the Franz Rosenzweig Center in Jerusalem, and the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig. Her research interests concern GermanJewish history, the history and post-history of National Socialism, gender history as well as the history of migration, citizenship and statelessness. Publications: Alltag und Gesellschaft, Paderborn 2017; Von der Offenheit der Geschichte. Der Umgang mit Staatenlosigkeit und die weltbürgerliche Idee, in: Bernhard Gißibl/Isabella Löhr (eds.), Bessere Welten. Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften, Frankfurt a. M. 2017, 71–102; Das Geschlecht der Staatenlosen. Staatenlosigkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland nach 1945, in: Journal of Modern European History 14 (2016), no. 3, 411–436; In der Hauptrolle: Der Pass. Staatenlosigkeit auf und hinter der Bühne im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt, in: Gisela Dachs (ed.), Grenzen, Berlin 2015, 37–49; The Citizen and its Other. Zionist and Israeli Responses to Statelessness, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 59 (2014), no. 1, 37–52; Ehrensache. Jüdische Studentenverbindungen an deutschen Universitäten 1886–1937, Göttingen 2008. Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan studied musicology, philosophy, German literature and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department for Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, and affiliated to the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2014, he joined the project “The German-Israeli cooperation in the Humanities” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center (a joint

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project with the Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt). Publications: The Re-Education of German POWs as a German-Jewish Task. The Case of Adolf Sindler, in: Naharaim. Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte/Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Culture History 11 (2016), no. 2, 247–272. Brian M. Smollett is Associate Dean of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He previously taught Jewish and European history at Queens College and Hunter College in New York. He holds advanced degrees from Binghamton University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the City University of New York, where he received his PhD (2014). His research focuses on the intersection of Jewish thought and identity with various conceptions of nationalism. Publications: The Sephardic Experience East and West. Essays in Honor of Jane Gerber (ed. together with Federica Francesconi and Stanley Mirvis; forthcoming); Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience. Essays in Honor of Robert M. Seltzer, Leiden 2014 (ed. together with Christian Wiese). Roni Stauber is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. He serves as the academic head of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust and is also a member of the Yad Vashem Scientific Committee. Stauber has published and edited books and numerous articles on the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly on the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society and its establishment, and on the relations between Israel and Germany. Publications: The Impact of the Sinai Campaign on Relations between Israel and West Germany, in: Modern Judaism 33 (2013), 235–259; Collaboration with the Nazis. Public Discourse after the Holocaust, London 2010; Laying the Foundations for Holocaust Research. The Impact of the Historian Philip Friedman, Jerusalem 2009; The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s. Ideology and Memory, London/Portland, Oreg., 2007; The Roma. A Minority in Europe. Historical, Political and Social Perspectives, New York/Budapest 2007 (ed. together with Raphael Vago); A Lesson for this Generation. Holocaust and Heroism in Israeli Public Discourse in the 1950s, Jerusalem, 2000. Carsten L. Wilke received his PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of Cologne and the Diploma in Religious Studies from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1994. After working as a research fellow in Heidelberg, Duisburg, Mexico City, and Philadelphia, Pa., he has been Associ-

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ate Professor of History at the Central European University in Budapest since 2009, where he is presently head of its Center for Religious Studies. His research explores the social and cultural interaction of Jews with their non-Jewish environment in medieval and modern Europe. Publications: The Marrakesh Dialogues. A Gospel Critique and Jewish Apology from the Spanish Renaissance, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2014; Histoire des juifs portugais, Paris 2007; Die Rabbiner der Emanzipationszeit in den deutschen, böhmischen und großpolnischen Ländern 1781–1871, 2 vols., Munich 2004; “Den Talmud und den Kant.” Rabbinerausbildung an der Schwelle zur Moderne, Hildesheim/Zürich/New York 2003; Jüdisch-christliches Doppelleben im Barock. Zur Biographie des Kaufmanns und Dichters Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Frankfurt a. M./New York 1994.