Nahum Goldmann: Statesman without a State

Preface

Preface ( Nahum Goldmann’s life and career illustrate the complexity of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century. Born in 1895, Goldmann’s meteoric trajectory carried him from the isolation of the East European shtetl, to the acculturated German Jewish milieu of central Europe, and next, as a mature adult, into the international public arena as a premier advocate for Jewish life and the Zionist enterprise in western Europe, the United States, and Palestine (later the state of Israel). Goldmann was neither a Zionist ideologue nor a Jewish public intellectual. He was, however, a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man, capable of producing significant Jewish scholarship and Zionist works. He also proved to be highly influential as a Jewish and Zionist statesman at several critical historical junctures—on the eve of the creation of the Jewish state and thereafter with respect to Israel’s relations with diaspora Jewry, postwar Germany, and the Arab world. That he relished his position as a Zionist gadfly, an independent cultural and political critic, and a man beholden to neither political parties nor ideological movements is beyond doubt. Indeed, Goldmann was a profoundly idiosyncratic and iconoclastic character. He was also a master of political theatre. He proved adept in a variety of social and cultural settings. From early on, he held forth at meetings of rank-and-file Yiddish-speaking activists, Zionist political groups, and elite Jewish figures with the same ease and self-confidence that he later displayed in high stakes discussions and negotiations with American and European leaders, including the German chancellor and even Soviet officials. To this diverse array of activity he added a special flare as a shrewd judge of character while deploying the considerable personal charm and wit of a consummate raconteur. To date, no first-rate, comprehensive scholarly biography of Goldmann exists. This is, arguably, not surprising because Goldmann defies simple categorization as a Jewish and Zionist leader. What was the source of his authority? What role did he play in the Jewish public arena? Why have scholars of Jewish history largely neglected him? Answers to these and related questions frame the chapters in this volume. Here, I will offer merely a brief overview—one that builds on the work of the volume’s contributors, but which does not claim to be vii comprehensive. In a word, although Goldmann was a significant public figure for many decades and played an instrumental role in building up the Zionist movement, the World Jewish Congress, and other leading Jewish cultural and political institutions of the twentieth century, he resisted the seduction of becoming a party loyalist and he rejected the role of protégé so eagerly sought by many of his contemporaries. Nor did he possess what might be called “value added”—those extra and intangible personal, intellectual, and political qualities that elevated Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion to the first tier of Jewish and Zionist leadership. That he has faded from public memory is also due, in part, to an unusual confluence of historic circumstances and personal proclivities, a combination that in his lifetime drove a wedge between him and the dominant Zionist leadership. The key ideational rift in this regard stemmed from Goldmann’s unabashed insistence on the desirability of Judaism’s survival in all its forms, including the vitality of diaspora Jewish life—even as he asserted the primacy of the Zionist cause and the centrality of Israel. Another was his commitment to political reconciliation—initially, with postwar Germany , and subsequently with Israel’s Arab neighbors. The divide was further exacerbated by Goldmann’s confirmed habit of opposing mainstream positions, frequently subverting them, and even acting independently—a predilection that generated some admiration but, more often than not, aroused the ire and consternation of the Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli establishments. Thus, notwithstanding the astonishing and meteoric success of the projects for which he labored so assiduously—some of which became synonymous with modern Jewish life itself—Goldmann never entered Jewish public consciousness as a heroic figure. This volume offers a new and critical perspective for assessing Goldmann’s impact as a key Jewish and Zionist political leader in the twentieth century. Maverick, thinker, and statesman, Goldmann responded with alacrity to the cataclysmic shifts of world history in the 1930s and 1940s and the concomitant sea change in Jewish life for which there was, quite literally, no precedent. Against this backdrop, as the chapters here demonstrate, Goldmann’s philosophical worldview, cultural work, and political and diplomatic orientation proved...