Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

Zionists and anti-Zionists formed a long-lasting and bitter division, one which was solved
only at the behest of the least friendly imaginable foe, the Nazis.
The role of Zionism
George Mosse argues that Zionism was a particular form of European
nationalism—an older, 19 th -century variety. This model is one of inclusiveness, of
identity based much less on race or religion than on shared cultural identity. 53
Assimilationists shared in the basic assumptions of early German nationalism, and
wanted nothing more than to join it, pinning all of their hopes on the development of just
those more liberal elements of nationalism. But Zionists did not; they could not.
Zionism is not a reflection of liberal nationalism: Jewish assimilationism is. Zionism is,
almost by definition, a reaction to another kind of nationalism, one that was based more
on exclusivity for its definition. 54 It is, in clear distinction to the integrationist model,
based on a notion of community that is based on religion and common ethnic identity. It
is obvious from the perspective of the present that the CV and its allies bet on the wrong
horse: their vision of the nation, and their place within it, was giving way to something
altogether less open and inclusive. The story that this study will pursue in examining the
Nazi period is not least the story of the increasing consensus among the Jews of Leipzig
that Zionism was the only useful language of national identity. This realization was
made very much under the gun. The Nazis agreed with the desirability of emigration to
Palestine, for a while, and the period of Nazi domination is at times a striking study of
53
George L Mosse, Confronting the Nation. Jewish and Western Nationalism. 1993, Brandeis University
Press: Hanover and London. 126.
54
This is of course more true for some groups—the Revisionists—than for others. This point will be
revisited below.
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