Nahum Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann (also Nachum Goldmann , or Goldman , born on 10. July 1895 in Vishnevo , Vilna Governorate , Russian Empire , now Belarus , died on 29. August 1982 in Bad Reichenhall ) was the founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) a of the leading Zionists of his time.

Life

Nahum Goldmann came to Germany in 1900 with his parents as the son of a Jewish family of teachers and writers; from 1901 he lived in Frankfurt am Main , his father published the "Frankfurter israelische Familienblatt". Goldmann studied law, history and philosophy in Marburg , Heidelberg and from 1918 in Berlin . He received his doctorate in law and philosophy from the University of Freiburg in 1920/21 .

During the First World War Goldmann worked for the German news agency for the Orient , which was headed by Eugen Wednesday , among others , and wrote publications for the German Orient Library edited by Ernst Jäckh . In 1922 he founded the Eschkol Publication Society and since 1929 published the Encyclopaedia Judaica . From 1918 he became involved in the Zionist movement , but at that time considered the establishment of the State of Israel to be premature. From 1926 to 1933 he was head of the Zionist Association in Germany. He gave early warning of the serious, acute threat posed by the Nazis to the Jews. From 1929, with interruptions until 1940, he was a representative of the Jewish Agency in Geneva at the League of Nations . In the seizure of power of the Nazis he was talking at the funeral of his father in Palestine to what it through before the arrest Gestapo kept. He returned to Geneva and from there organized the escape and help for persecuted Jews in Europe. From 1940 to 1960 he was an American citizen in the United States .

In the post-war period he advocated an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine. Although he and David Ben Gurion actively supported the establishment of the state of Israel, he considered the establishment premature and warned of an Arab-Israeli war when the state of Israel was proclaimed immediately after the withdrawal of the British mandate. From 1951 he became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency. In 1952 he brokered the Luxembourg Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany . In 1954 a similar balance was achieved between Israel and Austria .

As president of the World Jewish Congress, which he co-founded in 1936, the umbrella organization of all Jewish associations outside the state of Israel, Nahum Goldmann always campaigned for Israel abroad from 1949 to 1978, although at times he was a strong and profound critic of official Israeli politics. From 1956 to 1968 Goldmann was also President of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) . From 1960 he lived in Israel and Switzerland , whose citizenship he had from 1969. In the course of his life he had seven nationalities and most recently lived in Paris for a long time . He died at the age of 87 during a stay at a hospital in Bad Reichenhall.

Goldmann tried to find a compromise with Israel's Arab neighbors. He only saw a permanent chance of survival for the Israeli state if it was ready to accept the historical right of the Palestinians. When he tried to mediate with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 , the Israeli government blocked the conversation. She even considered the attempt to contact PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1974 as treason. Goldmann considered the refusal to negotiate with the PLO foolish. His vision was to make Israel in the form of a "neutralized state" a spiritual and moral center for Jews around the world.

Fonts

• Erez-Israel. Travel letters from Palestine. Frankfurt 1914: online at archive.org ; first published in Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt from No. 19, 1913; all online at Compact Memory
• Looking back after seventy years. (via the travel letters).
• The spirit of militarism. German publishing house, Stuttgart, Berlin 1915.
• The internal situation of Polish Jewry . In: Neue Jüdische Monatshefte, Vol. 1, Issue 12, March 25, 1917, pp. 335–342.
• Statesman without a state. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1970 (autobiography).
• The Jewish Paradox - Zionism and Judaism after Hitler. European Publishing House , Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3434500073
• My life. USA - Europe - Israel. Langen-Müller, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7844-1920-8 (2nd volume of the autobiography).
• My life as a German Jew. Langen-Müller, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-78441771-X (there are further editions).
• Israel has to rethink. The situation of the Jews 1976. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1976, ISBN 3-499-14061-6 .
• Three works in Yiddish: online at archive.org .
• Twelve articles in Jewish-German magazines from 1913 to 1920: online at Compact Memory .

literature

• Raphael Patai : Nahum Goldmann. His missions to the Gentiles. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2004, ISBN 0-8173-5095-0 .
• Dieter Borchmeyer : What is German? A nation's search for itself. Berlin 2017, pp. 588–609.

Web links

Commons : Nahum Goldmann  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Nahum Goldmann in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.munzinger.de/search/document?index=mol-00&id=00000004516&type=text/html&query.key=lCJGVwQT&template=/publikationen/haben/document.jsp&preview=
2. ↑ https://www.munzinger.de/search/document?index=mol-00&id=00000004516&type=text/html&query.key=lCJGVwQT&template=/publikationen/haben/document.jsp&preview=
3. ↑ Bruno Segre: Nahum Goldmann: il profeta dimenticato ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Der Spiegel , September 6, 1982 .