The CV (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith)
The Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith
Source: A. Hirschberg, in: Wille und Weg des Deutschen Judentums , Berlin 1935, pp. 12-29.
The combination of words 'Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith' denotes the outward form in which a change in the structure of German Jewry has been taking place over the past two generations. In the course of this change, a Jewish will of self-assertion and a German-Jewish consciousness in particular have found expression in ways unparalleled by any Jewry outside German borders.
Like any living organism, there has been a productive tension within the Central Association since it was founded. It is rooted in rationality, and yet at the same time there is a presentiment of irrational developments in its decisions.
It originated in the idea of struggling for rights, but it does not see 'rights' as something abstract, but rather as directly bound to the people who demand them and to those from whom they are being demanded; thus its motto: forthright self-defence. The realisation of constitutional equality should not be achieved by some third party behind the closed doors of offices and courtrooms; the German Jew, who raises his legal claims and pleads for them, wishes to be openly visible.
The constitutional concept of state-citizenship is the focal point of our concerns, but at the same time, C.V. statutes demand the staunch upholding of the German approach: Formal inherited rights should be acquired anew by every generation through the personal acquisition of their prerequisites. The words of our Scriptures - 'Every generation should feel as if it itself had been led out of Egypt' - should be modified: Every Jewish generation in Germany should conduct and rear itself in such a manner as if its behaviour must justify Emancipation [...]
The Central Association created a type of Man of the German Jew whose authenticity and value have stood the test of the events following January 1933 - a man who is bound to Judaism and at the same time is instinctively inseparable from the German cultural essence; a man whom history's setbacks may bend but not break, may jolt but not uproot. An eventual detached study of the history of the Emancipation of German Jewry will come to appreciate the fact that the Central Association, even if it has not achieved anything other than developing this type of man and substantiating him with an ideology, has thereby achieved an incomparable feat [...]
Jews first set foot on German soil many centuries ago. This may well have been mere chance. But centuries of renewed Jewish existence on this soil turned chance into fate. The fact that many generations shared a common life and history on this very same soil for centuries; the fact that they were exposed to the same air, light and sun, that they experienced the same highs and lows of shared troubles and blessings - all this somehow turned these Jews into German Jews.
Eugene Fuchs, the intellectual creator of the Central Association, along with Maximilian Horwitz, its great organiser, characterised this reality of the German-Jewish being as a synthesis of Germanness and Judaism. With this, he wished to demonstrate that the vibrant Jewry in Germany had - through fate and will, through devotion and resistance - achieved a union with Germany in all its mental forms and manifestations, a union that is not a product of a laboratory, but of history. Later on, this synthesis had often been mistaken for a static condition, and so in order to ensure that it will not turn into an empty concept, this synthesis should pose new tasks to each individual and every generation [...]
Our demand for a new emancipation is unrelated to anything political. But precisely because this demand is raised above the realm of all political power-games, it can be regarded as something more basic than that. For we are not demanding anything that might be fundamental to a party whose other policies may be critical or even censorious of the vital issues facing Germany, and thereby strip our legal claim of its scope and justification. On the contrary: we are raising our claim into the only objectively evident community outside the ruling party, not in order to achieve anything political, but to re-establish the continuity of German history in its relation to the German Jews. Every German era had its Jewish question. Whether it was evident at any given time, or not so clear-cut, is irrelevant. In every era there had been both a political and an ideological approach to dealing with it. The concept of Christianity as an ideology during the modification of the Protestant and Catholic States existed side by side with the political forms of absolutism, constitutionalism and democracy.[...] In Germany today, we are witness to politics and ideology wrapped up in one, and precisely now we find ourselves confronting an attitude that sees our very existence as grounds enough for depriving us of our rights.
After the culmination of a Jewish development in Germany that lasted for 120 years and was bound to the ambiguous concept of Emancipation, we find ourselves in a situation that in many respects is more difficult today than it had been at its starting-point. As a singular, structurally unchangeable group, we have been swept away by the high tide of historical developments and hurled onto an unfertile, sandy shore. Here we must continue - while German history and German developments run their course - to rebuild our own meagre Jewish existence in Germany, at the very least on the fringes of German events. [...]
If the legal setting in Germany today does not allow emancipation so long as the racial notions continue to set the preconditions for the granting of rights, then we must seek new forms.
Emancipation means for us today to be able and to be entitled to value ourselves and to live, to think and feel according to our true beings, and not according to perceptions of our being; and to do all this within the borders that contain the graves and homes of Jews forty generations back; borders which hold the work-places and resting-places of the living and coming generations, and amidst the people with whose ideas, wishes and feelings we have joined together to form our valuable and inseparable unity. [...]
We do not betray the idea of German Jewish Emancipation when we claim that if German Jewry were suddenly today to have complete equality, it would not make the same use of it as it did in the past era. It is necessary to place things in perspective in order to appraise the processes of development in relation to various periods . German Jewry of the Emancipation era adopted the then valid German civic ideals of education and property for the individual as prerequisites for the economic and cultural greatness of the totality. A German Jewry of today enjoying the same equality would already be shaped in accordance to the way of thinking and pace of life of its younger generation, and through them would recognise, as the German youth of today does, that honour and dignity are acceptable and desirable ideals. [...]
The ending of the era of liberalism and its individualism also marks the end of the view that acknowledgement of the value of individual Jews is enough for the achievement of a general recognition of Jewry. As a means toward the emancipation of Jews in Germany, we must therefore witness a revival of the value of a German-Jewish collective, and through it we will be accepted as members of this collective. Our aim is to maintain intact the inner strength of the German-Jewish community within Germany - materially, physically and spiritually. This community should distance itself as little as possible from the general pace of life of its environment, just as it should not isolate itself in instances where living connections with the surroundings still exist. [...]
The practical, immediate program of the Central Association in 1933 was unequivocally defined. It saw its job in helping those people for whom material and spiritual tensions arose between the concept of their existenceΓÇöis also the concept of the Central Association - and the reality. It sought to help them by creating some form of balance between the two that was feasible in the circumstances of the time. [...]
Having acknowledged the inseparable common fate of the German Jews - which finds its practical expression in the fact that the C.V. concerns itself indiscriminately with all Jews - necessarily made the Central Association the leading body responsible for the practical efforts towards union within German Jewry . The Central Committee for Relief and Reconstruction of the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung) essentially owes its ideological and material founding to the C.V., which put at its disposal the best man of the younger generation, Ludwig Tietz , who unfortunately passed away at an early age. Likewise, the creation of the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung) was largely due to the ideological and material efforts of the Central Association. By creating and co-operating with these first-rate bodies in a supra-partisan fashion, the Central Association relinquished nothing of its essential principles. It acted out of the consideration that the common outcast state of German Jewry calls for a unified representation and that the C.V.'s influence in these first-class bodies can ensure the carrying out of its principles in work, planning and representation [...] [The C.V.] strives for its ideology to find its way into cultural, economic and Jewish-political issues. It wants an economic policy that does not resort to liquidation, but that aims rather at a restructuring within existing possibilities. Through key figures in the economy, it tries to teach the people an additional approach that does not see economic processes in financial terms alone. In this, as in the cultural field, the C.V. believes that it has found a way in which the new emancipation of German Jewry can take place, after it will have assimilated into those patterns of life of a future environment that will once again think positively of us.... Its Jewish opponents in the national-Jewish [Zionist] camp, as well as in the radical-assimilatory camp, know that the Central Association is not only capable of maintaining its spiritual and intellectual holdings within German Jewry with keenness and vigour, but that it is also capable of increasing these holdings in the coming generation. It will resist any attempt to tear the Jewish people out of their historic standing in Germany and thereby to deprive them either of the German thinking or of Jewish responsibility and joint surety [...]
The normalisation of the professional structures must not be schematic. A choice of profession that has only migration in mind must be avoided. We cannot, after all, allow ourselves the luxury of training our younger generation using general Jewish resources to specialise in a way that would enable them to make their living only in a specific working position and only in Germany. We must make our people fit for living anywhere in the world where honest and true application of one's work is needed; but choosing a profession within Germany must be encouraged as the essential factor in the preparation for emancipation. In other words, the Jewish organisations should be given the authority to counteract the self-willed or short-sighted inclinations, wishes and resentments of the younger generation...
The Central Association feels the colossal burden of the responsibility imposed on it by the historic situation of German Jewry, by its tradition and by the trust of the people.... It does not expect that its adherents remain unmoved, unperturbed, untouched during a time of re-evaluation of all values, when all of their foundations are being shaken up. It does demand of them, however, that they re-examine the moral and practical reasoning underlying their principles and that they give these principles the new intellectual substantiation that the situation necessitates.
