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Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal

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Summary

Lenni Brenner argues that political Zionism was founded on the conviction that Antisemitism was inevitable and could not be fought, and that its central stratagems from Theodor Herzl onward were accommodation to anti-Semitism and pragmatic use of it to obtain a Jewish state, in alliance with imperial and right-wing patrons. The book traces that stratagem through Herzl’s dealings with Lueger, the Kaiser and von Plevhe, the Balfour Declaration and the fight against Bolshevism, the Minority Treaties and the Zionist alliances in Ukraine and Lithuania, the Blut und Boden race ideology of German Zionism and the Negation of the Diaspora, the Zionist Federation of Germany’s abstention from anti-Nazi defence in Weimar, the WZO’s embrace of Benito Mussolini once he turned pro-Zionist, and the ZVfD’s 1933 offers of collaboration to the Nazi regime, culminating in its 21 June 1933 memorandum. It closes with the Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement): the WZO, seeing Hitler’s victory as proof of assimilationism’s bankruptcy, broke the boycott through a trade agreement with Nazi Germany that channelled some 60 per cent of all capital invested in Palestine between August 1933 and September 1939, defended it at the Prague (1933) and Lucerne (1935) Congresses against the opposition of the great majority of Jews, and sought to extend it — so that, in Brenner’s appraisal, the WZO “did not resist Hitler, but sought to collaborate with him”, and only Nazi unwillingness prevented an even greater degree of co-operation (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.3, p.35, p.50, p.58).

What the file is

A book by Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators — A Reappraisal (Croom Helm, Kent, and Lawrence Hill, Westport, Conn., 1983), as an etext arranged and edited by B. R. Sean. 68 PDF pages, about 32,489 words in the text copy. The file contains the Preface and Chapters 1-6 (Chapter 1 “Zionism and Anti-Semitism Prior to the Holocaust”, Chapter 2 “Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil): The Roots of Zionist Racism”, Chapter 3 “German Zionism and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic”, Chapter 4 “Zionism and Italian Fascism, 1922-1933”, Chapter 5 “German Zionism Offers to Collaborate with Nazism”, Chapter 6 “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Zionist-Nazi Trade Agreement”), with Abbreviations and a Glossary at the end of the document. Each chapter’s notes are printed at its end. The text copy is clean and readable, with page markers for all 68 pages, but with frequent etext/OCR slips (missing hyphens and spaces in compounds, garbled note pagination, and individual misprints) recorded under Open questions and in the reading notes without silent correction. The colophon (PDF p.68) gives the printed book as 277 pages (Croom Helm, Kent, and Lawrence Hill, Westport, Conn., 1983; ISBN (GB) 0709906285, USA paperback 0882081640) and the etext as computerised and put on the Net in 1996 by the International Secretariat of the War and Holocaust Tales Ancient Amateurs’ Association (WHOTAAAN) for educational, non-commercial, fair-use purposes; the 68-PDF-page file therefore gives Chapters 1-6 with their notes, the Abbreviations and the Glossary, not the full 277-page book. The Abbreviations and Glossary entries include many organisations (the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish Fighting Organisation, the Judenrat, wartime Polish and Spanish groups) that Chapters 1-6 never treat, confirming the lists serve the whole book.

Section by section

  • Preface (PDF p.1-3): No equivalent overview of Zionism’s interaction with Fascism and Nazism exists, and that absence is “not an accident, but rather a sign that there is much that is politically embarrassing to be found in that record” (PDF p.1). UN delegates in 1947 based support for Israel on what Hitler had done to the Jews rather than on what the Zionists had done for the Jews. Zionism is not, and never was, coextensive with Judaism or the Jewish people; the vast majority of Hitler’s Jewish victims were not Zionists, and the majority of Polish Jews had repudiated Zionism on the eve of the Holocaust. The author, an anti-Zionist Jew, separates the struggle against Zionism from hostility to Jews or Judaism, names progressive Jews who support the Palestinians (Ruth Blau, Elmer Berger, Moshe Menuhin, Israel Shahak, Felicia Langer, Lea Tsemel), and states his conclusion openly: Zionism is wholly incorrect, drawn from the evidence presented.

  • Chapter 1, “Zionism and Anti-Semitism Prior to the Holocaust” (PDF p.3-14; notes PDF p.14-16): Modern Zionism was born amid defeats for Jews in Russia and industrial Europe — Herzl saw the Paris mob howling for Dreyfus’s death in 1895 and Vienna cheering the anti-Semite Karl Lueger. From the beginning the movement represented a Jewish middle-class conviction that anti-Semitism was inevitable and natural; convinced it could not be beaten, the World Zionist Organization never fought it. Herzl’s first diary entry (June 1895): “I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ antiSemitism” (PDF p.3). Herzl did nothing to mobilise for Dreyfus even as French intellectuals, socialists and Gentile opinion defeated French anti-Semitism, and he savaged French Jewry for seeking protection from the Socialists. He favoured confirming Lueger as Vienna’s mayor, meeting Prime Minister Badeni on 3 November 1895 to urge acceptance, and offered to relieve Western rulers and established Jewries of poor Jewish immigrants, testifying in London in 1902 against the Aliens Exclusion Bill by arguing Britain should instead support Zionism and telling Lord Rothschild he had saved English Jews “from an influx of East European Jews, and also perhaps from antiSemitism” (PDF p.5). Chaim Weizmann applied the same doctrine to the Aliens Bill in Trial and Error (1949): “Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them” (PDF p.5).

  • Chapter 1 continued — patrons and revolution (PDF p.6-10): Herzl sought a European power to pressure the Sultan for a chartered Zionist colony under its protection, telling the Kaiser in Constantinople on 19 October 1898 that “we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties” (PDF p.6). In St Petersburg in August 1903 he met von Plevhe, organiser of the Kishenev pogrom (45 dead, over a thousand injured), to reopen the Jewish Colonial Trust [see Related pages], asking not for abolition of the Pale of Settlement but for its enlargement, and won endorsement only on condition Zionism confine itself to emigration; he then secretly offered Chaim Zhitlovsky a deal — Jewish revolutionaries to cease their struggle for 15 years in return for von Plevhe’s promised charter for Palestine — which Zhitlovsky scornfully rejected. Contacts with tsarism continued under David Wolffsohn in 1908. In the First World War most Zionists were pro-German; Weizmann in London courted Balfour, whom he privately recorded in December 1914 as sharing “many of her antiSemitic postulates” with Cosima Wagner (PDF p.9); Vladimir Jabotinsky, with tsarist support, built the Jewish Legion and Zion Mule Corps route into Whitehall. The Balfour Declaration was London’s price for American and Russian Jewish support, and it did nothing against the White forces’ civil-war pogroms, in which at least 60,000 Jews were killed; the WZO did not mobilise world Jewry for them. Churchill’s “Zionism versus Bolshevism” (8 February 1920) cast Zionists as the chosen Jewish opponents of Trotsky, and Weizmann at Versailles on 23 February 1919 offered Zionism to the capitalist powers as an anti-revolutionary movement that would transform Jewish energy into a constructive force.

  • Chapter 1 continued — treaties and Eastern Europe (PDF p.11-14): The Minority Treaties won through the Comité des Délégations Juives (the WZO with the American Jewish Committee) were signed by Poland, Hungary and Romania but never enforced — Balfour told the League the treaties preceded it — and only three collective petitions were ever sent; the 1933 German-Polish convention exception kept civil rights for 10,000 Upper Silesian Jews until July 1937. The WZO, middle-class and concerned for British ruling-class opinion, would not ally with the working-class movements prepared to defend Jews, and by the 1920s abandoned action for Diaspora Jewry in situ. In Ukraine the Zionists joined Simon Petliura’s Rada — Abraham Revusky became Minister for Jewish Affairs in January 1919 — and Revusky resigned within a month as pogroms began and Petliura did nothing. In Lithuania three Zionists entered Smetona and Voldemaras’s provisional government in December 1918 on promises of autonomy that were dismantled step by step to 1924, ending in Smetona’s semi-Fascist regime of 1926. Conclusion: anti-Semitism was fought and defeated in France, Russia and the Ukraine without WZO help; the essentials continued under Weizmann, whose refusal to spare time from Zionist work for the fight for Jewish rights Nahum Goldmann recalled in his account of Weizmann’s arguments with Rabbi Stephen Wise.

  • Chapter 2, “Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil): The Roots of Zionist Racism” (PDF p.16-21; notes PDF p.22): “It was antiSemitism — alone — that generated Zionism” (PDF p.16). Herzl himself rejected racial doctrine (his Zangwill discussion), was not devout, had no special concern for Palestine and proposed the atheist Max Nordau as his successor; Nordau, despite his Christian wife, became a confirmed Jewish racist, telling Drumont’s La Libre Parole on 21 December 1903 that Zionism was “exclusively of race” and that he agreed with Drumont on this point (PDF p.17). Cosmopolitan Zionism died with Herzl in 1904; German university graduates who took over the movement translated the Wandervogel’s pan-German volkisch ideology into Zionist terms — Jews were not of German Blut, so they needed their own Boden, Palestine, and Jews and Germans should not mix. Martin Buber [see Related pages] in Drei Reden ueber das Judentum (1911) taught that “the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood” (PDF p.18), and Ignatz Zollschan gave Zionism its social-Darwinist version: Judaism had produced “a nation of pure blood” whose prohibition of mixed marriage kept its treasures from “the admixture of less carefully bred races” (PDF p.18). Einstein lent the race conceptions his prestige; Maurice Samuel’s I, the Jew (1927) professed loathing at an intermarried artists’ colony. The Negation of the Diaspora — shelilat ha’galut — held the entire Zionist spectrum: exile Jews were parasitic, urban, shunning manual labour, and themselves the root cause of anti-Semitism; Hashomer Hatzair’s Weltanschauung (1917, republished 1936) called the Jew “a caricature of a normal, natural human being” (PDF p.20), and Yehezkel Kaufman’s Hurban Hanefesh (1934) culled still worse self-descriptions from Berdichevsky, Yosef Chaim Brenner and A. D. Gordon. Labour Zionism translated the same charges into Yiddish and never won the Jewish working class; in March 1942 Chaim Greenberg admitted Labour Zionist speakers had declared that “To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an antiSemite” (PDF p.21). Blut Zionism would have evolved even if Palestine had been empty; Laqueur’s question whether insistence on the naturalness of anti-Semitism was “‘grist to the mill of Nazi propaganda’” is answered: “It certainly was” (PDF p.21).

  • Chapter 3, “German Zionism and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” (PDF p.23-29; notes PDF p.30): German Jewry (0.9 per cent of the population, 60 per cent businessmen or professionals) voted mainly DDP (64 per cent) and SPD (28 per cent); the Nazi vote rose from 2.6 per cent in 1928 to 18.3 per cent on 14 September 1930 on a peasant, professional and shopkeeper base. The Centralverein’s younger members used department-store money to subsidise SPD anti-Nazi propaganda, but the reformist SPD ‘tolerated’ Bruning’s hunger cuts and the Stalinist KPD treated Social Democrats as ‘Sozial Faschisten’; combined they outpolled Hitler 37.6 to 18.3 per cent in 1930 and failed to unite. The ZVfD shares the guilt: contrary to conventional wisdom and to Joachim Prinz’s 1969 recollection, the Juedische Rundschau played down anti-Jewish violence — Kurt Blumenfeld refused to use the November 1923 Berlin riot to enlist Jews — and, in Stephen Poppel’s finding, took no systematic notice of anti-Jewish agitation until 1931. Jacob Klatzkin stated the doctrine in 1925: “If we do not admit the rightfulness of antisemitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism” (PDF p.25). The ZVfD’s adherence to the 1930 Reichstag Election Committee was strictly nominal; Siegfried Moses wrote that defence against anti-Semitism “is not our main task” beside work for Palestine (PDF p.26); in 1932 the leadership organised anti-Communist meetings against ‘red assimilation’. Minorities broke ranks: Georg Kareski’s Juedische Volkspartei looked to the Catholic Centre and misjudged von Papen, and Poale Zion backed the SPD leadership for Zionism’s sake. Weizmann did next to nothing for German Jewry — he had told a Berlin audience in 1912 that “Germany already has too many Jews” (PDF p.28) and Balfour in 1914 that “Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralizing phenomena” (PDF p.28) — and no Zionist demonstration against Hitler was organised in America before he took power. Within the ZVfD, Robert Weltsch and Gustav Krojanker argued respectable Nazi elements might restrain the movement and that Zionists should look positively at its nationalist aspects; Harry Sacher summarised Krojanker: “For Zionists, Liberalism is the enemy; it is also the enemy for Nazism” (PDF p.29). No Zionist voted for Hitler or collaborated before 30 January 1933; the notions were the logical result of decades of justification for anti-Semitism.

  • Chapter 4, “Zionism and Italian Fascism, 1922-1933” (PDF p.31-34; notes PDF p.34-35): The WZO’s attitude to Italian Fascism was determined by one criterion, Italy’s position on Zionism. Mussolini’s early anti-Semitism (the ‘Synagogue’ plot of 1917; Jewish bankers behind Communism by 1919) coexisted with five Jewish founders of the Fascist movement and with pro-Zionism until 1919, when he turned against Zionism as a British cat’s-paw. After the March on Rome (October 1922) the new government assured Chief Rabbi Angelo Sacerdoti it would not support anti-Semitism, an Italian Zionist delegation pledged loyalty to Mussolini on 20 December 1922, and Weizmann met him on 3 January 1923, arguing Italy stood to gain as much as Britain “by a weakening of Moslem power” (PDF p.32). Policy changed only in the mid-1920s; at the 17 September 1926 conference Mussolini offered to help build the Zionist economy. Nahum Sokolow’s 26 October 1927 visit lionised Mussolini: Sokolow announced Fascism was immune from anti-Semitic preconceptions and that “‘true Jews have never fought against you’” (PDF p.33). Sacerdoti found Fascist Doctrine’s principles “no more or less than Jewish principles” (PDF p.33), and Alfonso Pacifici claimed a philosophy of Judaism akin to Fascism’s spiritual Tendenz. Hitler acknowledged Mussolini, in a March 1933 discussion with the Italian ambassador, as the spiritual head of his own movement as well (PDF p.33) and had praised Fascist Italy in Mein Kampf (1926) as fighting the Jews’ three main weapons; Mussolini meanwhile repudiated Nordic racism, and the Zionists, disoriented by his philo-Semitism, hoped he would moderate Hitler — Pacifici in October 1932 contrasted “true and authentic Fascism” with pseudo-Fascist movements using “the blind, unbridled hatred of the Jews” (PDF p.34). Weizmann’s later claim in Trial and Error that Italian Zionists were known to be anti-Fascist is rejected: after 1927 they “could only be thought of as Mussolini’s good friends” (PDF p.34).

  • Chapter 5, “German Zionism Offers to Collaborate with Nazism” — opening (PDF p.35-38; chapter continues beyond this part): Werner Senator’s remark that Zionism always politically assimilates to the countries it operates in is proven by the ZVfD’s adaptation to the Nazi regime: believing their shared contempt for liberalism, common volkish racism and mutual conviction that Germany could never be the Jews’ homeland could induce the Nazis to support them, “the ZVfD solicited the patronage of Adolf Hitler, not once but repeatedly” (PDF p.35). Its goal was an ‘orderly retreat’, Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation to Palestine. Kurt Tuchler persuaded SS Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein to visit Palestine and write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. In March 1933 Goering summoned Jewish leaders — Julius Brodnitz (CV), Heinrich Stahl (Berlin Jewish community), Max Naumann (VnJ) and Blumenfeld — to demand the New York rally of 27 March against the announced 1 April boycott be called off, and a delegation sent to London; the ZVfD sent Martin Rosenbluth and Richard Lichtheim with the CV’s Ludwig Tietz. In London the trio promoted Palestine as the logical refuge and tried to head off anti-Nazi efforts abroad; Shaul Esh’s research shows they sent cables in the Zionist Executive’s name asking recipients to declare to the Reich Chancellery that they did not condone an organised anti-German boycott, contrary to Rosenbluth’s memoir claim of a cryptic plea to Wise to stand firm — “There is no evidence that any effort was made to signal Wise to this effect” (PDF p.37). Joachim Prinz’s 1937 account alludes to the ZVfD memorandum to the Nazi Party of 21 June 1933, printed in full here (PDF p.37-38): it offered the regime a solution “in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening”, accepted the new state’s “principle of race”, declared “we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group” (PDF p.38), and held that “Boycott propaganda … is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build” (PDF p.38). Brenner calls the document “a treason to the Jews of Germany” (PDF p.38). The ZVfD also tried to get the August 1933 World Congress called off; it took place, and the Nazis used the occasion to announce a deal with world Zionism — the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), taken up in Chapter 6.

  • Chapter 5 continued — the Rundschau under the regime (PDF p.39-41; notes PDF p.43-44): What the Jewish public could see was the Rundschau’s public line. Editor Robert Weltsch marked the 1 April boycott with ‘Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride’, blaming Jewry’s guilt in failing to heed Herzl’s call, and attacked left-wing Jewish journalists in the Nazi press’s own terms; the Nazis did not force these denunciations, and after the Holocaust Weltsch was contrite but never claimed they had. The ZVfD leaders held liberalism and parliamentary democracy dead, counterposed Mussolini’s ‘good’ Fascism to Hitlerism’s ‘excesses’, and ran with triumphant racism: the Rundschau’s 4 August 1933 essay ‘Rasse als Kulturfaktor’ held that Jews, living in Germany as a ‘foreign race’, had “to respect racial consciousness and the racial interest of the German people absolutely” (PDF p.40), that race was decisive and that out of “blood and soil” the being of a people is determined; pre-1914 ‘Voices of the Blood’ were reprinted to prove the movement had always been racist, with the rider that Jews should be racists but not chauvinists — ‘above race is humanity’. Joachim Prinz was its most strident propagandist: in Wir Juden the Jew was a “psychopathological arsenal of rare abundance” (PDF p.40), parliament and democracy were happily shattering, and “a state which is constructed on the principle of the purity of nation and race can only have respect for those Jews who see themselves in the same way” (PDF p.41). Arnold Zweig, writing abroad in 1937, still praised the Rundschau as the most independent, courageous and ablest German newspaper, although it sometimes went too far “seeking its own national idealism in the Nazi spirit” (PDF p.41).

  • Chapter 5 continued — ‘The Exclusive Control of German Jewish Life’ (PDF p.41-43): Not even the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 challenged the belief in an ultimate modus vivendi: the HeChalutz Centre proposed emigrating the entire Jewish community over 15-25 years in exchange for liberalised currency transfer, vocational training and ‘political means’, and the Rundschau printed A. I. Brandt, head of the Nazis’ press association, calling the laws “both beneficial and regenerative for Judaism as well” (PDF p.41). The ZVfD’s goal became ‘national autonomy’ in segregated institutions, and on 15 January 1936 the Palestine Post reported its executive’s demand for recognition as “the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life” (PDF p.42). Hopes faded only before mounting terror; there was no anti-Nazi activity by ZVfD leaders in the whole pre-war period and only tiny youth involvement in the underground, some of it under KPD influence, while the bureaucracy attacked the KPD. The WZO leaders approved the affiliate’s general line; Boris Smolar of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency protested in 1935 that the Rundschau had come out and “practically agree[d] to the anti-Jewish limitations which exist in Germany” (PDF p.42). Conclusion: critics who saw cowardice were wrong — the German Zionists saw themselves as “would-be partners in a most statesmanlike pact”, deluded, since no modus vivendi was ever remotely possible; they had not fought Hitler before his victory “out of their deepest conviction, which they had inherited from Herzl, that anti-Semitism could not be fought”, and so ended “as the ideological jackals of Nazism” (PDF p.43).

  • Chapter 6, “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Zionist-Nazi Trade Agreement” (PDF p.44-53; notes PDF p.59-62): Hitler’s position in 1933 was insecure and Germany depended on the world market, in which Jews were powerful in two of its biggest markets, Eastern Europe and America; the regime’s own experts feared it might not survive resolute opposition abroad. The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott was announced by New York’s Jewish War Veterans on 19 March 1933, but the veterans spurned Communist unity, Untermyer’s Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League would not picket illegally, and Stephen Wise opposed a boycott — writing “You cannot imagine what I am doing to resist the masses” (PDF p.45) — until the American Jewish Congress called one in his absence in August 1933 and allowed picketing only in autumn 1934. The American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith and the Board of Deputies refused to back it, and Agudas Yisrael opposed it religiously; but “of all of the active Jewish opponents of the boycott idea, the most important was the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers” (PDF p.46). Under ‘The Appeal of the Blood Idea’, Emil Ludwig thanked Hitler for bringing thousands of Jews “back to the fold” (PDF p.46) and Chaim Nachman Bialik held that Hitlerism had “perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation” and declared “I, too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea” (PDF p.47). The first dealings were Sam Cohen’s: his Ha Note’a transfer plan, grasped by Consul Heinrich Wolff in Jerusalem as a way to “make a breach in the wall” of the boycott (PDF p.47-48), produced a May 1933 agreement for one million Reichmarks ($400,000) in farm machinery; Cohen released frozen Jewish National Fund monies and undertook to weaken the London Boycott Conference from behind the scenes, as Gestapo agent Fritz Reichert later reported — the conference “was torpedoed from Tel Aviv” (PDF p.48). Chaim Arlosoroff, the Jewish Agency’s Political Secretary, superseded him, proposing a liquidation company with German State, British and Italian participation to evacuate German Jewry; he reached a preliminary understanding in May 1933, returned from Berlin on 14 June, and was assassinated two nights later, which did not slow the accommodation (PDF p.48-49).

  • Chapter 6 continued — Prague, the Ha’avara and its defence (PDF p.49-53): At the August 1933 Prague Congress the leadership limited discussion of Germany to a minimum, made only a buried request to the League of Nations, and defeated Vladimir Jabotinsky’s boycott resolution 240 to 48 — Jabotinsky discredited by the arrest of his Revisionists for Arlosoroff’s murder and by his own brownshirts’ appearance in the hall. The Nazis announced the pact the day before the boycott debate; when its truth emerged, “pandemonium broke loose” and Berl Locker lied that the executive “had nothing to do with the negotiations” (PDF p.50). The leaders would not take official responsibility for the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), pretending it bound only Germany and their own Anglo-Palestine Bank. Its mechanics let emigres recover the value of German goods bought with their deposits after sale in Palestine; losses reached 30-50 per cent by 1938 but remained three to five times better than any other destination; the 50,000-mark limit meant only 650 million to the United States, yet “some 60 per cent of all capital invested in Palestine between August 1933 and September 1939 was channelled through the agreement with the Nazis” (PDF p.50), and 16,529 over-quota ‘capitalists’ produced an artificial boom. Berlin soon took part payment in foreign currency, the WZO solicited customers in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq and later sold German goods in Britain. Selig Brodetsky and Moshe Beilenson defended the pact — Beilenson: protest had failed for generations and “now we have another weapon in our hand, a strong, trusty and sure weapon: the visa to Palestine” (PDF p.51) — while the great majority of Jews opposed it: Abba Hillel Silver called negotiation “unthinkable” (PDF p.52), Wise named it the new golden calf, “the Golden Orange”, and held Palestine’s primacy ceases “when it comes into conflict with a higher moral law” (PDF p.52). Weizmann still sought more: Cohen’s proposed Berlin visit for Weizmann to discuss the full liquidation bank was declined by the Nazis, and on 3 July 1935 Weizmann wrote to Arthur Ruppin that the WZO should pursue “the constructive solution of the German question through the transfer of the Jewish youth from Gemmany to Palestine, rather than with the question of equal rights of Jews in Germany” (PDF p.53; “Gemmany” as printed). Ruppin’s Jews in the Modern World (1934) blamed the Jews and sought a modus vivendi; Lewis Namier’s preface expressed ‘understanding’ of anti-Semitism, toned down only after Weizmann warned him it would be quoted in Germany (PDF p.53-54).

  • Chapter 6 continued — Lucerne and the appraisal (PDF p.54-59): At the 1935 Lucerne Congress, under the heading phrase drawn from Gustav Krojanker’s later pamphlet — “trying to derive the utmost advantage from it in the Zionist sense” (PDF p.57) — the Judenstaat Partei’s demand to repudiate the Transfer was shouted down amid cries of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Schuschnigg agents’; Moshe Shertok (Moshe Sharett) defended the Executive: protests and boycotts were expressions of a force “the Zionist movement had yet to create such a force for itself” (PDF p.54-55). Enzo Sereni proclaimed “we have nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that we used the persecution of the Jews in Germany for the upbuilding of Palestine” (PDF p.55), and Weizmann that the only dignified reply was “the edifice erected by our great and beautiful work in the Land of Israel” (PDF p.55). Wise, struck from the speakers’ list and readmitted only on threat of walking out, capitulated and endorsed the Ha’avara; the Congress’s only protest was cancelling half a day’s session, and only the NEMICO Middle East selling operation was sacrificed, under the Egyptian Zionist Federation’s threat of exposure. World Jewry and the Jewish Chronicle condemned the Congress; in New York in December 1935 the ex-Bundist Baruch Charney Vladeck told Locker the Transfer was “double bookkeeping of the most flagrant sort” and “a blot on the Jews and on the world” (PDF p.57). Krojanker urged going further — help the Nazis break the boycott in Europe by extending Ha’avara — not knowing the leadership had already created the London INTRIA bank in March 1936 for German goods in Britain; oranges went to Germany and, under the swastika flag, to the Low Countries, and even after Kristallnacht (dated 11 November 1938 in the text) Ha’avara’s manager offered reduced rates on Nazi boats (PDF p.57-58). Mosley’s Blackshirt gloated over the contradiction. Preliminary appraisal: the Nazis were the prime gainers; “all excuses that it saved lives must be strictly excluded from serious consideration” — the 1930s defence was that it saved wealth, not lives (PDF p.58); the WZO “did not resist Hitler, but sought to collaborate with him”, and only Nazi unwillingness prevented greater co-operation. Weizmann, Shertok and their co-thinkers were at best “the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain; moral and political failures” (PDF p.59). The book closes with Nahum Goldmann’s account of Edvard Benes in 1935: “What matters in a situation of this sort is a people’s moral stance, its readiness to fight back instead of helplessly allowing itself to be massacred” (PDF p.59).

  • Abbreviations (PDF p.62-63) and Glossary of Jewish and Zionist Organisations (PDF p.64-68): One-line expansions and characterisations of the bodies the book names — and of many, from the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish Fighting Organisation to the Judenrat, that only the full book treats — from the AJC’s double expansion (American Jewish Committee, “bourgeois assimilationist organisation”; American Jewish Congress, “Zionist organisation identified with rabbi Stephen Wise”) to Ha’avara Ltd., “Trading company set up by World Zionist Organisation to trade with Nazi Gerrnany” (PDF p.65; as printed), closing with the copyright and etext colophon (PDF p.68).

Key passages

Evidence the work relies on

  • Herzl’s diaries and writings as cited: Lowenthal (ed.), The Diaries of Theodor Herzl; Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vols. II-IV; Lewisohn (ed.), Theodor Herzl: A Portrait; Stewart, Theodor Herzl; Elon, Herzl (Chapter 1 notes 1-21; Chapter 2 notes 1, 3).
  • Weizmann’s writings: Trial and Error (1949), cited throughout Chapters 1, 3 and 4, including for the Aliens Bill, the von Plevhe verdict (“the step was not only humiliating, but utterly pointless”, PDF p.8), the Versailles appearance and the Italian Zionists’ supposed anti-Fascism; Weisgal (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. VII, for Balfour’s Cosima Wagner conversation — with Brenner’s note that Weizmann changed that record in Trial and Error (Chapter 1 note 22) — and for the 1914 “Germans of the Mosaic faith” statement (Chapter 3 note 12).
  • Contemporary Zionist press and publications: the Juedische Rundschau (Blumenfeld, Moses, Rom, Weltsch), Hashomer Hatzair’s “Our Shomer Weltanschauung” (December 1936), Buber’s On Judaism / Drei Reden ueber das Judentum, Zollschan’s Jewish Questions (1914), Samuel’s I, the Jew and You Gentiles, Frommer in the Jewish Call (Shanghai, May 1935), Kaufman’s “Hurban Hanefesh” in Issues (Winter 1967), Greenberg’s “The Myth of Jewish Parasitism” in Jewish Frontier (March 1942), Krojanker’s Zum Problem des Neuen Deutschen Nationalismus as reviewed by Harry Sacher in the Jewish Review (September 1932).
  • The ZVfD memorandum to the Nazi Party of 21 June 1933, quoted extensively (PDF p.37-38, Chapter 5 note 9), described as buried until printed in German in Israel in 1962; Prinz’s 1937 account of the 1933 mood (Chapter 5 note 8); Rosenbluth’s Go Forth and Serve and Shaul Esh’s research on the March 1933 London delegation’s cables (Chapter 5 notes 2-7).
  • Histories and studies cited: Poppel, Zionism in Germany 1897-1933; Laqueur, A History of Zionism; Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany and Socialist, Anti-Semite and Jew; Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain; Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews; Carpi on the Catholic Church and Italian Jewry and on Weizmann’s political activities in Italy (including the British Embassy in Rome report of the 3 January 1923 meeting); Ledeen, “Italian Jews and Fascism”, Judaism (Summer 1969); Robinson et al., Were the Minority Treaties a Failure?; Gringauz on Jewish national autonomy in Lithuania; Portnoy (ed.), Vladimir Medem, for Zhitlovsky’s account; Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.628, 637 (Chapter 4 notes 12-13).
  • Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism”, Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920, p.5 (Chapter 1 note 24); Stein, The Balfour Declaration (Chapter 1 note 26); Goldmann, “Dr Stephen S. Wise”, in A Galaxy of American Zionist Rishonim (Chapter 1 note 35).
  • For Chapter 5’s close: the Juedische Rundschau itself — Weltsch’s ‘Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride’ editorial and the 4 August 1933 ‘Rasse als Kulturfaktor’ essay (via Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, pp.148-149, and Rundschau p.392); Prinz’s Wir Juden as reported by Pinson in the Menorah Journal (Autumn 1936) and Matuvo in Issues (Winter 1966/7), and Brenner’s interviews with Prinz (8 February 1981) and Arnold Paucker (28 October 1980); Arnold Zweig, Insulted and Exiled (1937), p.232; Margaliot, ‘The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws’, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, pp.85-89 (the HeChalutz plan and the Brandt statement); ‘German Zionists Seek Recognition’, Palestine Post, 15 January 1936, p.1; Smolar, ‘Zionist Overtures to Nazism’, Jewish Daily Bulletin, 8 March 1935, p.2 (Chapter 5 notes 11-28).
  • For Chapter 6: Yisraeli, ‘The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. VI (1971), pp.131-132, and Braatz, ‘German Commercial Interests in Palestine: Zionism and the Boycott of German Goods, 1933-1934’, European Studies Review (October 1979), pp.500, 504 — the sources for Consul Wolff’s dispatches, Reichert’s report and Cohen’s London undertaking (Chapter 6 notes 7-11, 29); Arlosoroff’s plan and article in the Jewish Economic Forum (1 September 1933) and Labor Palestine (June 1933) (notes 12-13); Congress reporting in the Jewish Daily Bulletin (29 August and 1 September 1933), New Judaea (September 1933) and the Zionist Record (notes 15-18, 23); Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety, p.212, and Rosenthal, ‘Chaim Arlosoroff 40 Years Later’, Jewish Frontier (August 1974), p.23, for the Ha’avara figures and the 60 per cent claim (notes 19-20); Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, p.129, for selling German goods in Britain and INTRIA (notes 22, 49); Weizmann’s letters to Ruppin (3 July 1935) and Namier (1 October 1933) in Litvinoff (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. XVI, pp.54, 464-466 (notes 30-31, 35); Ruppin, The Jews in the Modern World (1934), pp.xiii, 256-7 (notes 32, 34); the Lucerne debate in the Canadian Zionist (September 1935), Novick, Zionism Today (1936), and New Palestine (20 September 1935) (notes 36-38, 40); ‘Debating the Issues of the Transfer’, Call of Youth (January 1936), for the Vladeck-Locker debate (notes 46-47); Krojanker, The Transfer: A Vital Question of the Zionist Movement, pp.7-10, 15 (note 48); Goldmann, Autobiography, pp.112, 148 (notes 33, 53).

Analysis

The work’s method is documentary accumulation within an openly stated anti-Zionist argument: each chapter assembles dated statements, diary entries, memoranda and press articles by Zionist leaders and organisations, quoted at length with note references, and reads them as a single continuous doctrine — anti-Semitism as inevitable, emigration as the only remedy, imperial or right-wing patronage as the means — rather than as separate episodes. Its strongest evidence is primary and self-incriminating in form: Herzl’s diary, Klatzkin’s 1925 statement, the Rundschau’s own record, Sokolow’s 1927 words to Mussolini, the full text of the ZVfD’s 21 June 1933 memorandum, the German officials’ own dispatches on breaking the boycott (Wolff, Reichert) and Weizmann’s private 1935 letter to Ruppin. The two closing chapters add a structural argument the earlier ones only imply: Hitler’s regime in 1933 was economically vulnerable to resolute foreign opposition (Chapter 6’s opening), so the boycott’s failure and the Ha’avara’s scale — 60 per cent of capital invested in Palestine to September 1939 on the figure cited — are presented as consequences of choices, not of necessity; Brenner accordingly excludes the later ‘saved lives’ defence on the ground that no contemporary defender of the agreement made it. Its limits, on the evidence it gives, are those of that design: opposing voices appear mainly as foils (the assimilationist CV, Zhitlovsky, the Labour Zionist critics of Sokolow, the boycott’s own timid leaders), conjecture is occasionally flagged but present (the surmise about what Weizmann said to Evans Gordon, PDF p.5; the speculation about the Nazis’ timing of the pact announcement, PDF p.49), the work does not weigh Zionist leaders’ stated motives beyond the doctrine it attributes to the movement as a whole, and its promised discussion of Arlosoroff’s assassination does not appear in this file. The file itself is an excerpt: the printed book runs to 277 pages and the etext gives only Chapters 1-6 with the Abbreviations and Glossary, so the work’s own final evaluation of the WZO’s role during the Holocaust — expressly deferred at PDF p.58 until ‘the other interrelationships between the Zionists and the Nazis are properly dealt with’ — is not in this file. The etext’s slips require the quotations to be checked against the printed book for scholarly use.

People, organizations, places and events

Lenni Brenner, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, World Zionist Organization, Zionist Federation of Germany, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Balfour Declaration, Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), Chaim Arlosoroff, Sam Cohen, Stephen Wise, Joachim Prinz, Nahum Goldmann, Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott, Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, Moshe Sharett, American Jewish Committee, Histadrut

Concepts

Zionism, Antisemitism, Negation of the Diaspora, Racism, Fascism

How it relates to other sources

  • With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Chapter 1, which quotes Brenner’s The Iron Wall for Herzl’s 1896 offer to the Sultan and the von Plevhe meeting and its judgement that the WZO considered itself bound by no criteria of ordinary humanism: this book gives the fuller, earlier statement of that record — the same von Plevhe meetings of August 1903 (PDF p.6-8), Herzl’s Kaiser audience and the “taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties” pitch (PDF p.6), and the Churchill “Zionism versus Bolshevism” article that Awad & bean also quote at length.
  • With Zionist Colonialism in Palestine: both derive Zionism’s character from its own leaders’ statements, and Sayegh’s claim that Zionist leaders preached assimilation, not anti-Semitism, as the chief enemy is given a documentary pre-history here — Herzl’s refusal to combat anti-Semitism (PDF p.3), Klatzkin’s rightfulness doctrine (PDF p.25) and the Negation of the Diaspora literature (PDF p.19-21). Brenner’s Chapter 2 treatment of race — Buber, Zollschan, Samuel — is the closest parallel in the wiki to Sayegh’s three corollaries of racial self-segregation, exclusiveness and supremacy, though Brenner locates the racism in the Diaspora doctrine itself, as a product of German volkism, rather than in the colonisation of Palestine.
  • With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: Kanafani’s two parallel lines of Zionist policy — closest alliance with Britain and internal mobilisation — are the Palestine end of the patronage strategy Brenner documents in Europe; Brenner adds that the same movement declined to mobilise against the White pogroms that accompanied the British-backed intervention in Russia (PDF p.9-11).
  • On Weizmann: where The Question of Palestine quotes Weizmann’s 1918 letter to Balfour on the Arabs, Brenner quotes his statements on Jews — the saturation doctrine (PDF p.5), “Germany already has too many Jews” (PDF p.28) and agreement with the cultural anti-Semites (PDF p.28) — and records that he changed the Balfour/Cosima Wagner record in Trial and Error after the Holocaust (Chapter 1 note 22).
  • With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: Brenner’s Chapter 6 is the pre-history of boycott as a weapon in this conflict from the other side — a boycott of Nazi Germany in 1933 whose most important Jewish opponent, on his evidence, was the Zionist movement itself, broken in Palestine by the Ha’avara because the movement’s primacy doctrine put building the state above resistance; Barghouti’s boycott is a Palestinian-led campaign against the state that building produced.

Open questions

  • The file is an excerpt of the 277-page printed book (colophon, PDF p.68): Chapters 1-6, Abbreviations and Glossary only. Chapter 6 expressly defers the final evaluation of the WZO’s role during the Holocaust until “the other interrelationships between the Zionists and the Nazis are properly dealt with” (PDF p.58); those chapters are not in this file, and the Abbreviations and Glossary name many bodies Chapters 1-6 never treat (the Jewish Fighting Organisation, the Judenrat, the Working Group, Vaad Hazalah and others), evidently treated elsewhere in the full book.
  • Arlosoroff’s assassination (16 June 1933, on the text’s dating: he returned 14 June and was killed two nights later) is introduced with “The killing will be discussed below” (PDF p.49), but no discussion of the killing itself follows in this file — only its use at Prague, where Revisionists stood arrested for it and most delegates were convinced of their complicity (PDF p.49-50). Who killed Arlosoroff is not established by this file.
  • The abbreviation AJC is used in the text for the American Jewish Congress (Wise’s organisation, PDF p.45) while the Abbreviations list (PDF p.62) expands AJC twice — American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress; the Glossary also has the Committee as “Rightwing assimilationist grouping” and the Congress as “Zionistdominated organisation identified with rabbi Stephen Wise”. Which body a given AJC reference means must be settled from context.
  • Kristallnacht is dated “11 November 1938” in the text (PDF p.57); the date is preserved as printed, and the file gives no second dating to check it against.
  • Krojanker’s name is spelled “Krodanker” once (PDF p.57) against “Krojanker” everywhere else in the text and notes; Ruppin’s book is cited both as Jews in the Modern World (PDF p.53) and The Jews in the Modern World (Chapter 6 note 32).
  • Printed/etext slips preserved as printed in the reading notes: “GreatBritain” and “Lenni” title spellings (PDF p.1), “catcheted” and “impermissable” (PDF p.2), “Pripet Marches” (PDF p.4), ”] 2 December 1914” for 12 December 1914 (PDF p.9), “pp. ixxii” (PDF p.6), Weizmann’s Balfour statement as “demoralizing phenomena” (PDF p.28), Mussolini quotations’ spellings “Ceorbaum”, “Rotschild”, “Wamberg”, “Schyff” (PDF p.31), “Carlo Schanzar” (PDF p.31), “Michaclis” in the Chapter 4 notes (PDF p.35), “Der Steurmer” (PDF p.36), “after l933” with a letter l (PDF p.35, and again PDF p.45), “buded” for buried and “Fathedand” for Fatherland in the memorandum quotation (PDF p.37-38), “Uto pia Incorporated” (PDF p.41), “move ment” (PDF p.41, p.57 and Chapter 6 note 48), “PalestinePost” (PDF p.44), “unti1 1935” and “a dot” for a riot (PDF p.49-50), “govemment”, “Melboume”, “snew golden calf” (PDF p.52), “Gemman”/“Gemmany”/“concem”/“omy” in the Weizmann letter quotation (PDF p.53), “epitomy” (PDF p.54), “Luceme” (PDF p.55), “of ficial” (PDF p.57), “Gerrnany”, “Arnerican”, “Ilerzlia”, “NEMI CO”, “fdr Deutschland” in the Glossary (PDF p.65-68), “Internationl Secretariat” in the colophon (PDF p.68), and garbled note pagination throughout (“pp. 2934”, “pp. 901”, “pp. 34” for the Vladeck-Locker debate). Whether each slip is the 1983 book’s or the etext’s cannot be settled from the text copy alone.
  • Brenner conjectures, and labels as conjecture, that Weizmann asked Evans Gordon for support for Zionism in their friendly discussion (PDF p.5); neither man recorded what was said, on the evidence given. He likewise flags as speculation that the Nazis timed the Ha’avara announcement to discourage the Prague boycott resolution (PDF p.49).
  • The memorandum’s claim about the movement is Brenner’s reading of a ZVfD document; the WZO-level endorsement the remaining text supplies is of the ZVfD’s general line (PDF p.42), not a documented WZO response to the 21 June 1933 memorandum itself.
  • The Preface dates Begin’s leadership of the “selfstyled ‘ZionistRevisionist’ movement” in Warsaw to September 1939 (PDF p.2); no further detail is given.

Coverage

PDF p.1-68 of 68, read in full, in two parts (part 1: PDF p.1-38; part 2: PDF p.39-68).

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