German Politics and the 'Jewish Question', 1914-1919 Lucia Juliette Linares Darwin College Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2019 PREFACE I hereby declare that this dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any other work that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other university or similar institution except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other university or similar institution except as declared in the preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the Faculty of History. All translations are my own unless specified in the text. i ABSTRACT German Politics and the 'Jewish Question', 1914-1919 Lucia Juliette Linares The First World War confronted German politicians with a range of unprecedented, vital questions in the spheres of domestic as well as foreign policy. As the fortunes of war shifted, so did borders, populations and national allegiances. In a period of acute and almost constant political crisis, the German government faced issues concerning citizenship, minority rights, religious identity, nationhood and statehood. My dissertation analyses these issues through the prism of the so-called 'Jewish Question'. The Jewish Question, I contend, casts important new light on Germany’s difficult path towards a new democratic and pluralistic constitution in 1919. Jewish questions revealed the paradoxes of German state-building and the difficulties of breaking down older forms of corporate identity for the sake of national-cultural homogeneity. My principal aim in this dissertation is to offer a novel interpretation of the role that the 'problem' of German Jewry played in the political debates and decisions that paved the way for the Weimar Republic. The relevant historiography still tends to read the Jewish Question with hindsight, that is, in the context of the Holocaust and from a social or cultural historical perspective. While it does not ignore the short- and long-term effects the Jewish Question had on the rise of German antisemitism, my dissertation stresses its contingency and ambivalence. It offers the first sustained examination of the ways in which questions about German-Jewish citizenship and religious as well as national identity shaped the politics of the last Imperial government and influenced the processes of parliamentarisation and democratisation in the final years of the war. The Jewish Question, I argue, affords revealing new perspectives on the difficult birth of the Weimar Republic. ii ACKNOWLEGDEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Martin A. Ruehl for his unwavering support throughout these years. I will forever appreciate and remember how Martin was able to skilfully balance criticism and encouragement in careful measure. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous funding of several institutions. For their faith in me and this project, I would like to thank the Government of Gibraltar, the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Kusuma Trust, the British Federation of Women Graduates, the German History Society, the Cambridge History Faculty and the Simon-Dubnow Institute. Looking back on my postgraduate experience, I will always remember my time as a Leo Baeck Fellow fondly. The guidance I received from Daniel Wildmann, Sharon Gillerman, Raphael Gross and Peter Pulzer helped shape this dissertation. The warm and welcoming staff of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Leopold Müller Library made my stay as a visiting student in Oxford a delight. I am especially grateful to David Rechter for his mentorship. Thanks are also due to my examiners Duncan Kelly and Michael Dreyer for their insightful comments and encouraging words during my viva. Wolfson College Oxford, like Darwin in Cambridge, became a home away from home. I greatly value all the friends I made over these past few years who turned trying moments into joyful ones. A PhD is a winding road, so it was all the more important that I had a Street to rely on. Lastly, I could not have finished this dissertation without my family and Jonas. It is to them that it is dedicated. Lucia Juliette Linares Cambridge, August 2019 iii ABBREVIATIONS AA Auswärtiges Amt, Political Archives of the Foreign Office, Berlin, Germany CV Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger̈ judischen̈ Glaubens, Central Association of Germans of the Jewish Faith CZA Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem, Israel HASt Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, State Archive Stuttgart, Germany KfdO Komitee für den Osten, Committee for the East VdJ Verband der deutschen Juden, Alliance of German Jews ZVfD Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, Zionist Federation for Germany WZO World Zionist Organisation iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface i Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations iv Introduction 1 Historiography 8 Scope 18 Chapter outline 21 I. A genealogy of the Jewish Question 24 Reform in the Prussian state: Bruno Bauer's Die Judenfrage (1842) 26 Race and the nation: Heinrich von Treitschke's Unsere Aussichten (1879) 29 Nationalism and patriotism: Nationaljude als Staatsbürger (1897) 39 The question of national consciousness in Franz Oppenheimer's 45 Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein (1910) Nations in the German state: Werner Sombart's Die Zukunft der Juden (1911) 53 Jewish questions, European questions: Moritz Goldstein's 64 Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnaß (1912) The Jewish Question: emancipation, assimilation, cultural homogeneity 68 II. The Jewish Question in war time: Germany's eastern policy, 1914-1916 72 From Stuttgart to Berlin: the diplomatic work of Max Bodenheimer 76 Planning the Zwischenreich: Bodenheimer's memorandum 80 Ideas into practice? Eastern European Jews as mediators of German interests 86 All noise on the Eastern Front: Congress Poland and Jewish cultural autonomy 91 v Richard Lichtheim and German-Jewish collaboration in the Middle East 95 The Committee for the East and the afterlife of its policies 104 III. Constitutionalism and secularism in the Jewish census of 1916 108 Facts behind the figures: the origins of the census 112 Do not count on us: the public response to the census 116 A constitutional violation? The avowal of the census 120 Not adding up: inconsistencies and the conclusion of the Jewish census 126 1919 and still counting: the legacy of the Judenzählung 129 IV. 'Article 113 leads into the deepest questions of the concept of 135 nationality': minority rights in the Weimar constitution The protagonists: Hugo Preuss and Oskar Cohn 138 'On a practical level it will always be about language': 144 the wording of Article 113 Vying for influence: German-Jewish organisations and Article 113 154 Language triumphs 160 V. 'Tagesordnung: Judenfrage': A German (Jewish) united front at Paris 162 Preparing for Paris: the German delegation and minority protections 163 Formulating a position on the Jewish Question for Paris 169 The German delegation and the Treaty of Versailles 177 National minority rights and the German Question 182 Setting a double standard? Minority obligations in the Treaty of Versailles 186 Jewish rights and the Minority Treaty 188 Jewish questions, German questions 195 Conclusion 198 Bibliography 216 Appendix 243 vi INTRODUCTION Everybody is talking about the "Jewish Question". But if you ask what the Jewish question really is, then out of a hundred respondents fifty will awkwardly remain silent or stammer something insufficient, and from the other fifty you will hear different answers.1 With this remark Sigbert Feuchtwanger2, the lawyer and Vice President of the Jewish Cultural Community of Munich, captured a quintessential problem of the so-called 'Jewish Question' (Judenfrage)3 as it was debated in Germany in the early twentieth century. His comments suggested the multitude of issues at stake. What seems most revealing about Feuchtwanger's statement, published in July 1917, is that in an Empire faced with famine, the burden of total war and a government in crisis, the Jewish Question was on the public agenda at all. In this thesis, I examine how the Jewish Question functioned in German political discourse and German politics. Focusing on the years of the First World War, I explore the ways in which the Jewish Question sheds light on Germany's liminal period between its autocratic-militaristic past and parliamentary-republican future. Jewish questions revealed the paradoxes of German state-building and the difficulties of breaking down older forms of corporate identity for the sake of national-cultural homogeneity. Using the Jewish Question, I aim to reassess the difficult birth of the Weimar Republic. In what follows, I will begin by outlining the origins of the Jewish Question in German states in order to argue that the term was not, as is commonly assumed, solely an antisemitic trope imposed on the Jews. Rather, I contend, it was a multivalent and contingent term, which was also invoked frequently by Jews. The intractability of the Jewish Question, I argue is reflected in the modern scholarly literature where different interpretations of the Jewish Question abound. More often, it is referenced in connection with the rise of Nazism, or in the debate on the German-Jewish symbiosis without a detailed analysis of what the term meant, or how it functioned. Addressing this omission by analysing the function of the Jewish Question in German politics, I focus on political ideas and practices in their cultural context. 1 'Die "Judenfrage" führt jeder im Munde. Aber fragst du, was eigentlich die Judenfrage ist, so werden von hundert Befragten fünfzig verlegen schweigen oder Unzulängliches stammeln, von den anderen fünfzig wirst du verschiedene Antworten hören'.