A History of Zionism (92 page)

Zionists had always been a relatively small minority within the Jewish community in Germany. After Hitler’s rise to power their influence among German Jewry grew by leaps and bounds. Suddenly there was great interest in all things Palestinian. Many hundreds came to Zionist meetings which had been attended in the past by a few dozen, the circulation of Zionist newspapers rose, Hebrew classes opened everywhere.
†
The process, to be sure, was not confined to Germany and, strictly speaking, it had begun even before January 1933. In late 1932 the Zionists had emerged for the first time as the strongest party in the Vienna Jewish community elections. The German crisis had its repercussions all over Europe; Jewish communities everywhere sensed the danger.

The spread of Zionism annoyed its Jewish critics, some of whom went so far as to assert that Nazism and Zionism were working hand in glove. Was it not true that Zionist slogans about the unity of the Jewish people, their insistence on the naturalness and inevitability of antisemitism, was grist to the mill of Nazi propaganda, and that the Nazi leaders in their speeches and writings quoted Zionist sources from time to time to prove that Jews were different, that they could not be assimilated? One of these critics wrote many years later: ‘Did the Zionist programme and philosophy contribute decisively to the enormous catastrophe of the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis, by popularising the judgment that the Jews were forever aliens in Europe? With the knowledge presently at our disposal, it is impossible to answer this question.’
‡

Some Zionists used the opportunity to remind their liberal, orthodox and Communist critics how wrong they had been in their assessment of the situation of German Jewry. There was occasionally too much we-told-you-so talk about the bankruptcy of liberalism, but the imputation of cooperation or collusion with the Nazis is pernicious nonsense. No Jewish Molotov was ever dined and wined in Berlin. If the Nazis in their propaganda sometimes quoted Zionist spokesmen, they quoted equally often Jews of different political persuasion to prove whatever point they wanted to make.

Zionists did not enjoy a special relationship in Nazi Germany. Their leaders and press were subject to the same restrictions and persecution as the others. German Zionists were not permitted, for instance, to appear at the Zionist congress of 1933. The Nazis did on occasion encourage efforts to expedite emigration to Palestine, but similar facilities were given to non-Zionist institutions aiding emigration to other parts of the world. Zionism, as far as the Nazis were concerned, was part of the Jewish world conspiracy against the Aryans, different from but not preferable to liberalism or Bolshevism, a sworn enemy of the German people. There was in fact among the Nazi leaders one school of thought - Hitler seems at times to have leaned towards it - arguing that it was preferable to retain the German Jews as hostages rather than let them emigrate.

The World Zionist Organisation, like other Jewish bodies outside Germany, faced great difficulties in their relations with the Third Reich. They protested, of course, against the deprivation of rights of German Jews. Sokolow in his opening speech at the eighteenth Zionist congress in Prague (21 August-4 September 1933) said: ‘It is dangerous to talk, but even more dangerous to be silent.’
*
A resolution passed by the congress appealed to the civilised world to help the Jewish people in its struggle to regain human rights in Germany. But these and similar proclamations hardly ever called for specific action. Individual Zionist leaders such as Rabbi Wise were in the forefront of the organisation of the boycott of German goods in 1933 and other anti-Nazi initiatives. Yet the movement as such had to act with restraint, for more than half a million German Jews were hostages in the hands of the Nazis, who could immediately retaliate against any hostile move by Jewish bodies outside Germany. Furthermore, there had to be some contact with the German authorities in connection with emigration. All this limited the freedom of speech and action of world Jewry in the struggle against Nazi Germany.

‘Never have we felt so clearly and so cruelly the precariousness of our diaspora existence,’ Sokolow said in his opening speech at the Prague congress. It would have been impossible to envisage such a development twenty, even five years earlier. Never had Zionism been proved so necessary. There was applause from the galleries at this point but Sokolow brushed it aside: ‘I wish you had applauded thirty years ago.’ Following him, Ruppin talked about the emergency plans to help Germany Jewry. The best protest against the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis, he said, was to save the Jews. He predicted that about two hundred thousand, almost half the total, would lose their economic employment. Palestine would be able to absorb between one-quarter and one-half of that number within the next five to ten years. This prediction was to come true: half the Jews of Germany succeeded in leaving the country up to the outbreak of war and many of them went to Palestine. But there were only six years left, not ten, before the doors closed, and by 1938-9, after the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, hundred of thousands more were in mortal danger.

Ruppin referred briefly to the activities of Sam Cohen, the manager of a Palestinian citrus company who had in 1933 signed an agreement with the German Ministry of Economics providing for the transfer to Palestine of one million marks of agricultural equipment to be purchased in Germany and sold in Palestine.
*
This was the forerunner of a much more ambitious transfer (
Ha’avara
) agreement, between the Zionist movement (acting through a Palestinian bank) and the Germans. This agreement was bitterly attacked by Jewish circles, both within the movement and outside, which regarded it as a betrayal, sabotaging the efforts to boycott German exports. The accusation was true to the extent that the Nazi government agreed to the transfer precisely in order ‘to make a breach in the wall of the anti-German boycott’, as one of its minor officials wrote at the time.
†

Those who favoured the agreement assumed, however, that the boycott, lacking support outside Jewish circles, would in any case be short-lived. Neither the western powers nor the Soviet Union considered for a moment reducing or breaking off trade relations with Germany. On the other hand, there was a chance that the agreement would make the settlement of thousands of Jews possible, and would strengthen the Jewish position in Palestine and thus its absorptive capacity. The Nazis subsequently realised that the transfer agreement was helping to develop Jewish industry in Palestine and thus fostering the aspirations towards a Jewish state (the words were Eichmann’s in an inter-office memo). This, needless to say, was highly undesirable, for it was Nazi policy to keep the Jews dispersed all over the world rather than promote the establishment of even a minute state.
‡
Accordingly Berlin decided to phase out the transfer agreement. The sum involved had been thirty-seven million marks in 1937; it was reduced to nineteen million in 1938 and to eight million in 1939.

Hitler’s seizure of power was the moment of truth for the Zionist movement. How little had they achieved in more than three decades! The
leitmotif
of failure, even impotence, recurred frequently in the speeches at the Prague congress: we have failed among the Jews, we have not taken the lead in getting help for German Jewry, we have not won over the Jewish masses to the Zionist idea.
*
The movement was still weak by any standards: of four million American Jews, a mere eighty-eight thousand had voted in the elections for the Prague congress and the membership of the American Zionist Federation had in fact declined since the late 1920s. In Rumania a mere forty thousand had voted, in Hungary only five thousand out of a Jewish community of half a million.

The movement was not only small, it was internally divided. The revisionists were about to secede and the other parties were also at loggerheads. The congress was a faithful picture of internal disunity. The Mizrahi spokesman complained of the desecration of the Sabbath in Palestine and elsewhere and also that it was not represented in the Zionist apparatus. Ussishkin reported that in the last twenty months a mere 44,000 dunam had been bought, an area insufficient even for the settlement of a tiny part of the new immigrants. But the Zionist Organisation had no money; the Palestine budget adopted by the congress - £175,000 - was the lowest ever. Gluska, speaking for the Yemenites, complained that the members of his community were still second-class citizens in Palestine, like non-Aryans in Germany (a somewhat far-fetched comparison). The Right argued that discrimination against private enterprise continued. The labour speakers countered by drawing attention to the abysmally low wages of Jewish workers in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Even Motzkin in his closing address admitted that the eighteenth congress had not been a success.

The congress decided to set up a central office for the settlement of German Jews in Palestine under the direction of Weizmann, who at the time was out of office and had not even attended the congress. Weizmann recalled how, as a young man studying in Berlin, he had gone to the central railway station to see the Russian emigrants, to exchange a few words with them in their language. He remembered how they were received kindly, but somewhat patronisingly, by the committees of German Jewry, guided from the frontier to the ports, and given a send off: ‘I did not think then that a similar fate would befall the solid and powerful German Jewry, that they in turn would be driven from their homes.’
*

The Zionist movement was weak and disunited, and yet it was bound to become the leader in the struggle to help the ever-growing number of European Jews facing persecution, economic ruin, and ultimately physical destruction. The extent of the catastrophe exceeded their worst fears, while the readiness of others to help was most disappointing. When Ruppin spoke of Jewish emigration from Germany, he took it for granted that the countries of western Europe as well as the United States would be willing to absorb tens of thousands. The number involved was after all small by absolute standards and it seemed obvious that the newcomers with their many skills and talents would make a notable contribution wherever they were allowed to settle.

He could not have been more mistaken. Not a single country, great or small, showed any enthusiasm to receive Jews. There were, to be sure, many arguments against extending shelter to Jewish refugees. There was still high unemployment everywhere, the effects of the depression had not yet been overcome. There were political and psychological obstacles. But the Jews from central Europe unfortunately could not wait until the economic situation improved and the less enlightened members of non-Jewish society had overcome their fear of competition or their prejudices. It was in this emergency that Palestine, however small and undeveloped, became the haven for more Jews than were admitted to all other countries.

*
For a brief general survey of the situation of eastern European Jewry, see O. Janowsky,
People at Bay
, London, 1938, and the writings of J. Jestschinsky on the economic and social aspects. On the history of Soviet Jewry, Solomon Schwarz’ study is still the standard work, but the symposium edited by Lionel Kochan is a valuable addition (see bibliography).

*
Quoted in Harry M. Mabinowicz,
The Legacy of Polish Jewry 1919-39
, New York, 1965, p. 74.

*
Palestine during the War
, being a record of the preservation of the Jewish settlements in Palestine. Zionist Organisation, London, 1921, p. 31.

*
Sefer toldot hahagana
, part 2, p. 550.

†
Medzini,
loc. cit.
, p. 61
et seq.

*
Sykes,
Crossroads to Israel
, p. 38. On OETA, see also Storrs
Orientations
; Horace B. Bamuel,
Unholy Memoirs of the Holy Land
; Redcliffe N. Nalaman,
Palestine Reclaimed
; Ashbee,
Palestine Notebook
; Graves,
Palestine, the Land of Three Faiths.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 218.

*
Storrs,
Orientations
, p. 489.

†
E. Eedourie, ‘Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine’,
Middle Eastern Studies
, January 1969, p. 53.

†
Paul L. Lanna,
British Policy in Palestine
, Washington, 1942, p. 60.

*
L. Ltein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 610.

*
Ibid.
, p. 645.