Democratic-Zionist Group
The Democratic Fraction was an opposition internal Zionist party that formed in December 1901 just before the fifth Zionist Congress in Basel . The group consisted largely of writers, artists and young academics. Among the founding members were Berthold Feiwel , Martin Buber , Ephraim Moses Lilien , Chaim Weizmann and Leo Motzkin .
In contrast to the majority of Western European Zionists around Theodor Herzl , who understood the national project primarily as a reaction to anti-Semitism and the Jewish misery in the East, the Democratic-Zionist Fraction saw Zionism not only as a way out of economic and political distress, but also as a possibility for a comprehensive renewal of Jewish culture. The Zionist self-image of the group was strongly influenced by the thinking of Achad Ha'am . In their program, formulated in mid-1902, there are not only terminology borrowed from ethnic psychology , but also clear influences from the philosophy of Henri Bergson .
The faction made its first appearance at the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, where it emphatically demanded a national cultural policy and thus came into conflict with Theodor Herzl and the political-diplomatic currents in Zionism he represented. On the last day of the congress there was an open rebellion against Herzl. The 37 members of the parliamentary group left the room for an hour when the conference management postponed the cultural debate they had requested.
At the conference of Russian Zionists chaired by Echiel Tschlenow in Minsk (September 4 to 10, 1902) with more than 400 participants and thousands of guests, during which the main focus was on the organizational question and the cultural question (large-scale lecture by Achad Ha ' am on national cultural work), the Democratic Group appeared for the first time as a closed organization - under the leadership of Motzkin and Weizmann. The holding of an official dinner by the Democratic Group on Yom Kippur 1902 in Bern , a day on which fasting is actually religiously prescribed, caused some excitement with public criticism and journalistic counter-declarations (see Die Welt Nr. 51, December 19, 1902) .
As early as 1904, the group disbanded. In the short period of its existence, the Democratic-Zionist Fraction maintained a secretariat in Geneva led by Weizmann, but its activities were mainly limited to the Jewish publishing house associated with the fraction and to propaganda for the project of a Jewish university. Despite its short lifespan, the faction left clear traces on Zionist thought and politics. Some crucial developments in the field of national cultural work were initiated by its members.
literature
- Michael Berkowitz: Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993.
- Berthold Feiwel : Currents in Zionism . In: Ost und West Volume 2, 1902, Col. 687-694.
- Michael Heymann: The Uganda Controversy. Vol. 1, Jerusalem 1970, Vol. 2. Jerusalem 1977.
- Israel Klausner: Democratic Fraction . In: Encyclopaedia Judaica, version 1.0 (electronic resource), Judaica Multimedia Israel, Jerusalem 1997.
- Program and Organization Commission of the Democratic-Zionist Group (ed.): Program and organizational statute of the Democratic-Zionist Group . Self-published, Charlottenburg 1902.