Kurt Blumenfeld

Summary

German Zionist leader — long secretary and president of the ZVfD and general secretary of the Zionist Organization between 1911 and 1914 — who, in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, exemplifies the younger generation’s difficulty accepting Franz Oppenheimer as a Zionist, while himself remaining caught in the tension between Germanness and Jewishness (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.109-110).

Blumenfeld wrote of Oppenheimer that he was a member of the Zionist Organization he could not fit in his preexisting concept of Zionism: “He emphasized his Germanness, he wanted to have nothing to do with the Jewish national idea and was nevertheless the opposite of an assimilationist.” (PDF p.109).
He was catapulted to the head of the ZVfD by the revolt of the younger, more radical generation, whose redefinition of Zionism as dissimilation from Germany and ultimately emigration to Palestine defined the intergenerational conflict with Oppenheimer’s generation (PDF p.110).
In a letter to Schalom Ben-Chorin dated December 12, 1954, Blumenfeld spoke of Bodenheimer, Friedemann, Klee and Oppenheimer as first-generation German Zionists who did not recognize that Jews can’t be Germans (PDF p.110).
Despite his post-assimilationist position, Blumenfeld later lamented the lack of appreciation in Israel for German Zionists’ contribution and praised the “German-Jewish symbiosis” as generated “through the collision of German culture and Jewish essence” (PDF p.110).

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