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Max I. Bodenheimer (1st from left). Pictured is the delegation of the Zionists, who had come to Palestine at the end of October 1898 to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II . From left to right: Bodenheimer, Wolffsohn, Herzl, Moses Schnirer, Joseph Seidener
Max Isidor Bodenheimer (born March 12, 1865 in Stuttgart , † July 19, 1940 in Jerusalem) was a German jurist of Jewish religion, pioneer of the Zionist movement in Germany and subsequently influential official of the Zionist World Organization. Herzl's nickname for Bodenheimer was occasionally Hajoll (Heb. Chajal = soldier, also code designation in telegrams, etc.).
Life
Bodenheimer studied law until 1889 in Berlin, Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen, settled in 1890 in Cologne and opened there in 1893 a law firm, which he operated until 1933.
In 1896, Max Bodenheimer married Rosa Dalberg (born December 7, 1876, died March 24, 1938) at the Zionist Congress in The Hague in 1907 to found the Association of Jewish Women for Cultural Work in Palestine, the predecessor of the WIZO. The marriage came from the three children Fritz Simon (1897-1959, Professor of Zoology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Henrietta Hannah (1898-1992, biographer of her father) and Ruth (1900-1941, lawyer).
The seizure of power by the National Socialists forced Bodenheimer 1933 to emigrate to Amsterdam. After retreating from the Zionist movement in 1934, the family moved to Jerusalem in 1935, where Bodenheimer devoted himself to writing his autobiography, but was otherwise active in journalism. There he died on July 20, 1940.
Political career
For a long time Bodenheimer had dealt with the situation of the Jews. From 1889 onward, too, the realization that Judaism represented a nation matured, and he began to engage in the Zionist movement. His first article appeared in 1891. Are the Russian Jews a nation? in the Hamburg weekly The Menorah, the others followed, especially (also 1891) his booklet Where to go with the Russian Jews or Syria, a refuge of the Russian Jews (a part of the former administrative unit Syria was Palestine).
He gradually contacted various Zionist organizations and worked closely with David Wolffsohn since his first meeting in February 1892. Together with him Bodenheimer founded in 1893 the Cologne Association for the Promotion of Agriculture and Crafts in Palestine. In 1894 he participated with Gustav cloth in Hamburg at the founding of the Free Israelite Association. Also in 1894 was under Bodenheimer leadership the first National Jewish Association in Cologne (later "ZVfD"), whose president he was (and remained until 1910).
Max Bodenheimer memorial plaque, Cologne Richmodstr. 6
From May 1896 Bodenheimer was in close correspondence with Theodor Herzl. Before the two met for the first time, the "National Jewish Association of Germany" was founded in Bingen on July 11, 1897, and Bodenheimer was elected its chairman. Herzl and Bodenheimer met at the first Zionist World Congress, which began on 29 August 1897 in Basel and participated in the Bodenheimer as a delegate of the German movement. There he was elected to the Action Committee, to which he belonged until 1921. From 1901 to 1922 Bodenheimer was the Congress Attorney of the Zionist World Congress.
On Herzl's travels to Constantinople and Jerusalem, Bodenheimer accompanied him in October and November 1898, when Herzl, in talks with, among others, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Sultan Abdulhamid II, strove to found his own state, "Israel."
In May 1899, Bodenheimer initiated together with others the Jewish National Fund. In addition to his involvement in the German Zionist movement, he was mainly responsible for a concept on the organizational statutes of the World Association. This concept was adopted at the 5th World Congress, 1901, and the founding of an International Fund, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose second president =- after Kremenetzky =- Bodenheimer from 1907 to 1914 was.
Bodenheimer also became a member of the Organizing Committee, in 1910 he took over his chairmanship with the aim of reforming the organizational structures. The reform became necessary due to the emergence of party formations within the organization, which Bodenheimer had initially criticized. The reforms were intended to regulate the positions of these parties within the World Federation and were implemented at the 10th Congress in August 1911 in Basel.
As a result, Bodenheimer's influence increased internationally, while in Germany, with the change of the headquarters of the German Zionists from Cologne to Berlin, decreased. Especially between 1912 and 1914 Bodenheimer openly opposed the more radical sentiment of the German movement, which was now dominated by Kurt Blumenfeld. This meant that Bodenheimer 1912 for the first time not participated in the German Zionist Congress. Bodenheimer spent the March and April of the year on behalf of the JNF in Palestine.
At the beginning of the First World War, 1914, moved on the initiative Bodenheimer, the headquarters of the JNF from Cologne to The Hague. Subsequently, he (together with Franz Oppenheimer, Adolf Friedemann and other Zionists) initiated the "Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Jews", later renamed the "Committee for the East", whose goal was to improve the situation of Jews in Germany and Austria. Hungary occupied Russian territories. So as not to question the neutrality of the World Association, Bodenheimer was not appointed Chairman of the Committee. Franz Oppenheimer took over the chairmanship instead. In November of that year he resigned from the chairmanship of the JNF, but remained a member of the Board of Directors.
1921 became the fateful year for Bodenheimer: in April he voted, with the majority of the JNF Board of Directors, to try to buy land in Palestine and passionately defended this decision at the 12th World Congress in September 1922 in Karlovy Vary. This appearance should also be his last intervention at a Zionist World Congress. The new leaders in the World Association, among them the newly elected President Chaim Weizmann in 1920 , slowly broke away from the era of Theodor Herzl. This led in December to the fact that many of Herzl's companions were not re-elected to the board of the JNF, among them Bodenheimer.
Bodenheimer had one last major appearance in Germany in 1928, when the Cologne Jewish Community gave him the organization and presentation of the Jewish exhibition as part of the International Press Exhibition "Pressa".
In 1929 Bodenheimer finally broke with Weizmann's policy and joined the revisionists around Zeev Jabotinsky. As its delegate, he participated in 1931 in Basel at its last World Congress. With his resignation from the Revisionist Party, 1934, Bodenheimer withdrew into private life.
Little is known that in 1933 he had written a drama about the life of Jesus (In the matter of Jesus, under the pseudonym M. Bodmer).
Fonts
• That's how Israel became. From the history of the Zionist movement. Memories of Dr. Max Isidor Bodenheimer (edited by Henriette Hannah Bodenheimer on the basis of the Hebrew unfinished biography of 1952), Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt a. M., 1958
Literature
• Bodenheimer, Max. In: Encyclopedia of German-Jewish authors . Volume 3: Birk-Braun. Published by the Archives Bibliographia Judaica. Saur, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-22683-7 , p 250-255.
• Henriette Hannah Bodenheimer (ed.): In the beginning of the Zionist movement . Frankfurt am Main 1965.
• Dies .: The Zionists and Imperial Germany . Bensberg 1972.
• Dies .: The breakthrough of political Zionism in Cologne 1890-1900 . Cologne 1978.
• This .: Max Isidor Bodenheimer (1865-1940). In: Rhenish Life Pictures, Volume 12. Edited by Franz-Josef Heyen. Rheinland Verlag, Cologne 1991, pp. 233-256.
• Wilhelm Sternfeld , Eva Tiedemann: German exile literature 1933-1945. An organic bibliography . Vorw. By Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer , Schneider, Heidelberg / Darmstadt, 1962.
• Zitron , Lexicon Zioni, column 57
• Herzl's diaries, passim
• Roland Geiger: On the edge of knowledge . In: Yesterday 5th ed. By Roland Geiger, St. Wendel 2004, pp. 94-101.
Web links
• Literature by and about Max I. Bodenheimer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography of Bodenheimer (German)