Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

They thus displayed the degree to which they had become German, ironically by
embracing an explicitly un-German philosophy. 55
Zionism is of course a richly complex set of ideologies, and there are many
different and competing versions of it. In Leipzig alone, there were representatives of the
Zionistische Vereinigung, the mainstream affiliates of the World Zionist Organization,
the Poale Zion, critical from the left of the mainstream as insufficiently attentive to the
issues of the working class, and, on the right, of State—or Revisionist —Zionists,
demanding a Jewish state and harsh confrontation with the British. These groups were
engaged in an ongoing debate with one another that was sometimes quite extreme. For
instance, the Poale Zion referred to the State Zionists as “these Jewish fascists” 56 and to
the Zionistische Vereinigung as “clerical lackeys”. 57
Zionism and the reactions to it provided the single largest point of identification
within the Jewish community of Leipzig during the 1920s. Through this issue, dramas of
assimilation, Orthodoxy, and class were played out in a way that everyone could
understand, and as the rise of the Nazis came closer, more and more Jews turned to
Zionism. The bitter divisions aroused by the debates around Zionism were a reflection of
real divisions in the community. But so too was the tone of those debates—the very
assumptions and language of Zionism and those who opposed it—proof of a set of shared
assumptions about political culture and identity in that community. Those assumptions
were largely based on an emerging language of exclusionary nationalism.
55 Carl Schorske, in his Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, places Theodor Herzl squarely in a context with emerging,
and decidedly exclusionary, visions of nationhood. Here, too, we see Herzl, a Jew brought up in an
assimilationist world, carried by a developing language of politics in Germany [writ large, to include
Vienna, which is one of Schorske’s points] to a position physically outside of Germany.
56 StAL PP-V 4424, 15 May, 1933.
57 Ibid., no date but next to clipping dated 14 May, 1925.
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