Depolitisation of Jewish Communities in Germany: the Liberal Programme: Jewish Communities Are Only

We always speak of the Jewish Community as a religious Community, for we Liberals see the community based on religion, which is the foundation and the content of Judaism, the “Juedisch-liberale Zeitung”, writes in another article in the same issue. We have repeatedly declared, it says, that we see nothing in the Jewish Community other than a religious community. Since there is a great deal of talk of late about the distinctiveness of the Jews, we must say that this distinctiveness exists only insofar as every religious community has its own specific sociological structure. Even the Jewish community of “like fate” is not to be understood in any other sense. Mohammedans, too, for example, have this same identity and community of fate. All the hundreds and thousands and millions of people who in the course of history came to Judaism as proselytes came with the idea of accepting the Jewish fate like all Jews. Are there any communities whose members do not share a like fate? When people unite together for any purpose they have identical interests in respect of the life of those communities, and therefore they are subject to a like fate.

If we speak of Jews who have become atheists, we are able to speak in the same way of Protestants who have become atheists. People are born just as much members of the Protestant Church as they are born members of the Jewish community, and so long as we do not speak of an atheist Protestant, so long as we do not consider Protestantism as something more than a religion, we have no right to see in Judaism anything more than a religion.

Judaism is a religion and Jewish communities must be religious communities. As religious communities, they were constituted anew in Germany when the German Jews left the National and cultural walls of the ghetto and definitely became German citizens, members of the German people, and as Jews remained linked together for two purposes, the continuation of political emancipation and the exercise of their religious faith. The prime condition for obtaining political emancipation was and still is to-day the renunciation of Jewish National separatism.

As a result of political interests being intruded into the life of the Jewish Communities, large numbers of non-Zionist Jews have seen their political emancipation endangered by the political activities of the Zionists who happened to have obtained control of the Communities. It was to restore the Community to a purely religious Community that the last elections to the Jewish Community were fought, in which the Liberals regained control.

Let us illustrate our position by supposing that we Liberals, when we were in control prior to 1926, had regularly given subsidies to an anti-Zionist fighting fund. Would the Zionists, on securing control of the Community in May 1926 not have stopped this subsidy? And the fight against Zionism, to us who conceive of Judaism in the universal sense is no less sacred than Zionism is to the Zionists. We have not foregotten that in many communities the Zionists tried to stop the subsidies to the Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, although the work which the Central Union does in combating antisemitism is important to all Jewish living in Germany, Zionists as much as anti-Zionist. We Liberals, for our part, have always made it clear that our first task would be to put an end to the national Jewish institutions in the religious Jewish Community, and so depolitise the religious community.