Nahum Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann was born on July 10, 1895 in Wisznewo (Vishnevo), a shtetl in the Russian Empire located within the Pale of Settlement, today in Belarus [Britannica; Wikipedia]. This starting point is not incidental: Lithuanian Jewry was the heart of the most rigorous rabbinic Judaism, homeland of yeshivot and the critical spirit that tradition calls pilpul. It was in this atmosphere that the child grew up.

One trait, transmitted through biographical notices, illuminates the entire lineage: shortly after his birth, his parents entrust him to his paternal grandfather and leave to pursue studies in Germany, Lithuania under tsarist rule practicing, in its universities, a severe numerus clausus against Jews [Encyclopædia Universalis]. This detail says two things. First, the thirst for knowledge of a family willing to go into exile to obtain it, against the numerus clausus — this value of study that Litvak Judaism raises to first piety. Second, transmission through the grandfather: it is the old man who, in the shtetl, imprints on the child the first letters of tradition before the West takes hold of it.

The family is described as a household of teachers and writers, and the father as a fervent Zionist [Wikipedia; en-academic]. Here two loyalties intertwine that will define Nahum's entire existence: loyalty to the Book, inherited from his Litvak grandfather, and commitment to Jewish national renewal, inherited from his father. Young Nahum thus embodies, from childhood, this imbrication that the memory of Israel knows well: study is not retreat, it prepares action in the City.

Taken to Germany at a very young age, Nahum Goldmann received a complete university education there. He studied law, history and philosophy at Marburg, Heidelberg and Berlin [Babelio]. This path inscribed him within the great tradition of German Bildung, yet without rupture with his origins: the young man cultivated in parallel a Jewish erudition nourished by his Litvak youth.

This dual culture gave birth to a major intellectual enterprise. After the war, he published with Jacob Klatzkin a Jewish encyclopedia in the German language; its publication was halted following Adolf Hitler's rise to power [Wikimonde]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica in German, which remained unfinished, constitutes one of the most ambitious efforts of the "science of Judaism" of the interwar period — this will to gather and order Jewish knowledge that Perrine Simon-Nahum analyzed in the French case as an act of collective dignity as much as science [Simon-Nahum, 1991]. In giving Judaism a monument of knowledge, Goldmann prolonged the Litvak virtue of study in modern form: no longer merely commenting upon the Law, but offering the Jewish people the ordered memory of itself. This is a lasting contribution to Jewish thought, and a gesture of transmission at the scale of a continent.

An early activist, Goldmann climbed the ranks of the Zionist Organization. He was secretary general of the political commission of the 17th Zionist Congress (1931) [Wikimonde], thus entering the inner circle of Zionist diplomacy at the very moment when Europe was tipping into crisis.

The rise of Nazism made him a target. Stripped of German citizenship in 1935, he took refuge in Honduras and then in the United States [Babelio]. This itinerary of statelessness — from Germany to Honduras, then to America — is not merely an episode: it gave Goldmann an acute awareness of Jewish vulnerability and grounded his conviction that the Jewish people needed institutions capable of representing them everywhere in the world. The exile of 1935 would later know how to plead for other exiles.

It was in this trial that his vocation as a man of institutions was forged. The loss of nationality, an experience shared by so many Jews from Germany, transformed the scholar into an organizer. His response to persecution would be neither despair nor flight alone, but the patient construction of a framework for collective defense — an expression, in deed, of that implication in collective life that Jewish tradition ranks among the highest duties, the one that prefers shared responsibility to individual salvation.

Goldmann's institutional work culminates in the founding of the World Jewish Congress. In 1936, he founded this organization with other leaders [Babelio], intended to give the Jewish communities of the diaspora a unified voice in the face of rising perils.

He later became its president, a position he held for an extended period: he was one of the founders of the World Jewish Congress and its president from 1951 to 1978 [Wikipedia]. French sources place his presidency from 1951 to 1977 [Larousse], a variation in dating that stems from the distinction between the end of effective tenure and formal handover. This near half-century of service places Goldmann among the founding figures of contemporary Jewish diplomacy.

The very idea of a "congress" that brings together the dispersed touches the heart of Israel's collective memory: that of a people united in its dispersion, responsible for each of its members. By building an institution that makes solidarity a political fact — the Talmudic principle according to which all Israel is responsible for one another translated into a diplomatic instrument — Goldmann embodies charity in its broadest sense, that which organizes aid rather than leaving it to the happenstance of goodwill.

The most momentous act of Goldmann's career was undoubtedly his role in the reparations agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, signed in 1952. Negotiating with Germany, barely seven years after the Shoah, exposed him to all manner of fury; Goldmann assumed this responsibility on behalf of the World Jewish Congress and the victims.

This choice was not self-evident. It required distinguishing between forgiveness — which no living person can grant on behalf of the dead — and the recognition of a material duty of reparation toward the survivors and the nascent State of Israel. Goldmann, faithful to the realism that characterized all his action, judged that to refuse dialogue would have abandoned the survivors to Memory alone. Jewish tradition knows this tension: the relationship to the enemy and the stranger is never reducible to vengeance, but seeks, within the limits of the possible, to restore a measure of justice for the living.

The same realism led him, in the matter of the Israeli-Arab conflict, toward a position of moderation. Always realistic, he pleaded on many occasions for peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Israelis [Britannica]. This obstinate pursuit of peace, often against the current, expresses a virtue that the tradition names the pursuit of peace — rodef shalom — and which, in Goldmann, was never weakness but reasoned conviction.

Goldmann's existence was marked by a plurality of nationalities that alone spoke to the Jewish condition of the century. Born a subject of the Russian Empire, educated as a German then stripped of that status, a refugee to the Americas, he was subsequently naturalized as an Israeli in 1962; in 1968, he took Swiss nationality [Larousse]. He also presided over the World Zionist Organization: sources agree on a presidency of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968 [Wikipedia; Britannica].

This institutional nomadism was not dispersion but paradoxical fidelity: Goldmann belonged to the entire Jewish People more than to any State. Israeli in heart and citizenship, he preserved his freedom of speech with regard to the governments of Jerusalem, even if it brought him reproaches. This independence — refusing to conflate love of Israel with assent to every policy — amounts to a form of mingled humility and courage: that of the man who knows himself to be servant of a cause greater than himself.

He died on August 29, 1982 in Bad Reichenhall, in Germany — an ultimate return, laden with irony and meaning, to the country of his education and his downfall [Larousse]. The arc of a life between the Lithuania of his grandfather and the Germany of reparations thus closes on the very soil where everything had been at stake.

From Wisznewo to Geneva, from the grandfather's yeshiva to the salons of chancelleries, the Goldmann lineage as it culminates in Nahum offers a condensed image of Jewish destiny in the twentieth century: uprooting, learning, exile, reconstruction. Each stage of this life carries, attested by facts, a virtue of tradition — the Lithuanian study transmitted by an ancestor, the encyclopedic ambition inherited from the science of Judaism, the endurance of the stateless, the peacemaker's sense of peace.

But if we must name what this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed, it is involvement in collective life — that conviction that the Jew does not save himself alone and that all of Israel is responsible for one another. In making the World Jewish Congress an instrument of solidarity, in voicing the cause of the dispersed and in negotiating for survivors the measure of material justice that the world owed them, Nahum Goldmann embodied, in modern institutions, the old mutual responsibility of Israel. His life was not free from tensions and contestations, and honesty demands we recall this; but it is in this faithfulness to the community beyond borders and passports that his lineage joins the long memory of the Jewish people.