- By Alex Grobman, Alex Grobman, PhD
- | March 5, 2026
Part XVI Alex Grobman, PhD
As antisemitism continued to emerge in new areas of the Reich, German Jews responded to their increasing isolation by creating a national network of organizations to provide assistance to local Jewish communities, notes historian Ismar Schorsch. The establishment of the Grossloge Unabhängiger Orden Bnei Briss (1888), the Centralverein (1893), the Verband der Vereine für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (1893), the Kartell-Convent der Verbindungen deutschen Studenten jüdischen Glaubens (1896), the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (1901), the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums (1902), the Verband der deutschen Juden (1904), the Vereinigung für das Liberale Judentum (1908), and the Verband der Jüdischen Jugendvereine Deutschlands (1909) demonstrate the urgency and resolve with which German Jews organized their assets to resist the numerous challenges they were forced to confront.
The Centralverein and the Verband were the only organizations openly fighting antisemitism. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch rejected the proposal to grant the Centraiverein a mandate to represent German Jewry, fearing it would lead to “a central authority for all German Jews,” Schorsch said. An article in Der Israelit, a German Orthodox Jewish weekly newspaper published from May 15, 1860, until Nov. 3, 1938, maintained that the status of the emancipated Jew was far superior to that of his medieval forebears and that antisemitism was God’s method of nudging the Jews back to their Jewish roots. The abnormal sensitivity of the modern Jew was a response to his nonreligious conduct. The Israelit reiterated its conviction of 1893 that antisemitism could best be opposed in cooperation with the liberals.
On Dec. 27, 1900, the proposal was also rejected by 60 Jewish leaders meeting in Berlin. The Zionists’ support for the recommendation was the “kiss of death,” Schorsch said. Four years earlier, the Board of the Munich Jewish Community barred the first Zionist Congress from meeting in Munich. They were not disposed to consider a proposal fundamentally odious and now advocated by the Zionists.
Anti-Zionism: A Breach of Neutrality
Animosity toward the Zionists was reflected in a vote at the national convention of the Centralverein in March 1913, when it radically abandoned its position of neutrality to adopt an anti-Zionist resolution.
So long as a German Zionist sought to secure a homeland for the Jews of Eastern Europe and support and foster an appreciation of German identity, the Centralverein was happy to have them as members. “But we must separate ourselves from the Zionist who denies any feeling of German nationality, who feels himself a guest among a host of people and nationally only a Jew.”
The Centralverein urged German Jews to say, “No to Zionism and Yes to Germany,” notes historian Sidney M. Bolkosky. It asserted that the only part Zionism had to play in Germany was to raise funds. Most European Zionists accepted this restriction and often limited their work to fundraising. Recruiting became a subordinate function.
The initial hostility did not abate over time. Some meetings called by opponents of Zionism to derail the idea before it acquired supporters became so contentious that police had to intercede, Schorsch said. Individual Zionists were subjected to group pressure. Some had difficulty securing employment; others were dismissed from their work or boycotted.
In 1912 a prominent member of the Jewish community explained the differences between German and other Jews. The problems Eastern European Jews faced were political and national, which could be resolved by emigrating to Palestine. In contrast, German Jews were successful living in Germany to the point where they were Germans “who [were] able to dine with the Kaiser.”
Walter Rathenau (1886-1922)
Walter Rathenau, a leading German industrialist, writer and politician who became foreign minister of Germany from February 1922 until his assassination on June 24,1922, was probably the most renowned critic of Zionism, Bolkosky adds. “My people are the Germans and no one else,” he declared. “The Jews are for me a branch of the German nation….” Rathenau’s remarks, Bolkosky said, were “indicative” of the views espoused by most German Jews.
In his essay “Hear, O Israel!,” published on March 16, 1897, in the journal Die Zukunft (The Future), Rathenau urged Jews to assimilate more rapidly into German society. He did not believe this would be achieved by converting to Christianity, since “Baptism will certainly not bring an end to the Jewish question.” The individual Jew might benefit from this separation, but the Jewish community would not. “Were half of Israel converted,” he said, “nothing would come of it but an impassioned ‘anti-Semitism against the baptized,’ full of spying and snooping on the one hand and mendacity and hatred against renegades on the other. This new anti-Semitism would be even less healthy and less moral than the contemporary movement.”
First published under a pseudonym, Rathenau argued that German Jews were personally responsible for their social isolation and the hatred they engendered. His solution was to shed “tribal attributes, which … are odious to our countrymen, and a replacement of these attributes by more appropriate ones. If such a metamorphosis also brought about an improvement in the balance of our moral values, this would be all the better. The final result of the process should not be Germans by imitation, but Jews of German character and education.”*
When it became clear his essay helped foment antisemitism, Rathenau removed it from the volume in which it appeared, according to historians Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. The Nazis made “Hear, O Israel!” mandatory reading in German schools.
When this “vitriolic essay” first appeared in 1897, the review in the Centralverein’s periodical was so restrained, Schorsch said, it accepted all the criticisms leveled against German Jews. When it was reprinted in 1902, the Centraiverein responded severely. Rathenau was berated for his “malice, distortions, errors, and unproven assertions,” Schorsch declares.
This did not mean that the German Jewish elite was oblivious to antisemitism, even during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), asserts Mendes-Flohr. Rathanu’s appointment as foreign minister of the nascent republic was viewed with apprehension by the Jewish community. Not long after he assumed office, Albert Einstein and Kurt Blumenfeld, the leader of the Zionist movement in Germany, pleaded with him to resign. They were alleged to have advised him that at this period in German history, “a Jew could at most be the Minister of Posts, not Foreign Minister.” Rathenau was assassinated a few months later by extreme right-wing enemies of the Weimar constitution, who condescendingly called the new state a “Judenrepublick.”
*Translation from “The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History,” Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, Eds.
Verband der deutschen Juden
Those who advocated for an organization to represent German Jews were not deterred. On April 25, 1904, around 130 delegates representing large communities, regional organizations, and major organizations, except the Jews of Bavaria and Württemberg, met to establish the Verband der deutschen Juden.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.