The Future of the Jews: A Response to Werner Sombart

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We want to scrape off the eggshells of the ghetto and live as children of the present in the midst of German intellectual life, but without breaking with our past and shaking off the legitimate Jewish idiosyncrasy of sentiment and thought. We too want a revival, a renaissance of Judaism, and not the kind of assimilation that dissolves [the Jews] completely in the Other, repudiates fathers, disdains family traditions and the hallowed customs of ancestors, and conforms to the Other not because it is better, but because it is other. We want to remember our fathers with pride and remain loyal to our past. “Proud of their particularity and loyalty” is how our king recently described the German tribes.¹ This is what our tribe should be told too. In order to preserve the Jewish way of being and thinking we do not need to go to Palestine, we do not need a Jewish state. On German soil we want to be and remain Germans, proud of our particularity and loyal. [ . . . ]

Gentlemen, I am among the men who cofounded the Central Organization of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein) and the Association of German Jews. Both organizations are designed to include all Jews. Do not permit Sombart to sow the spirit of dissension among us; I do not want our Zionists to celebrate him as their standard-bearer because he is enthusiastic about a Jewish national state and does not accept us Germans as fully German. We agree with the Zionists not only in pride and self-confidence and in striving to banish the mental attitude that, through a misunderstood assimilationism, has become so dangerous for Jewry; we also agree with them in improving the social situation of the Jews through peaceful cultural work. We disagree on whether the Jews today are still a people, a nation, a race; we disagree on the necessity or usefulness of a Jewish state, and on whether it will be possible or necessary to create a state that is supposed to be not just a homeland for the eastern Jews but also a homeland for the western Jews.

But these differences regarding the goal are so negligible compared with the long and vast distance that we need to cover together that I urgently beg all to agree that for now we are walking together on the road along which Jewish spirit is being revived on the soil of our German culture and our German fatherland. We want to work together on the task of unifying Jews, march united, even if, in the far distance, our ways will part. I cannot imagine that the Zionists will tolerate that men like Sombart should be their standard-bearers.