Identity: Anti Zionist German Jews

Identity

To the  Zionist leaders, Hitler’s  assumption  of power  held  out  the possibility of a flow of immigrants to Palestine.  Previously, the majority of German Jews, who identified themselves as Germans, had little sympathy  with Zionist  endeavours. German statistic,  compiled prior to the assumption of power by the  fascists, classified the Jewish minority only under the heading “Religious Faith,” and it was left to the fascist legislators  to introduce the concept “race” as a characteristic and thereby include even the  long-assimilated descendants of members  of the Jewish community as Jews. 

According  to  the statistics, there lived in  Germany in 1933  503,000 Jews, constituting 0.76 percent of the total population. Thirty-one percent of all German Jews lived in the capital, Berlin, where they made up 4.3 percent of the city’s population. German statistics also indicate that the population of the Jews in  Germany decreased  in  the years between 1871 and 1933 from 1.05 percent  to 0.76 percent.4

These  German Jews  were  overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, and prior to 1937, the Zionist  Union  for Germany (Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland (henceforth   ZVFD) experienced   great   difficulty  in gaining a  hearing. Amongst the Jews of Germany counted in the  year 1925, there were, for example, only 8,739 persons  (not even 2 percent) eligible to vote in the Zionist Conventions (that is, as members of Zionist organization).5 At the regional elections of the Jewish community in Prussia that were held in February 1925, only 26 members out of 124- elected belonged to Zionist groups.6  A report by the Keren Hayesod submitted to the twenty-fourth session of the ZVFD in July, 1932, said: “In the course of evaluating the Keren Hayesod work in Germany, it should never be forgotten that we in Germany have to reckon not only with the indifference of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hostility.”7

Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith

Thus at the time of the Hitler takeover the Zionists were a fundamentally small and insignificant minority with little influence and it was the non-Zionist organizations that played the dominant role amongst the Jews. At their head was the Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens (CV, or Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith), founded in 1893, which, as its name implies, considered German Jews as Germans and regarded its chief duty as being to combat anti-Semitism.