ABSTRACT
German Zionists made positive contributions to the revival of Jewish consciousness during the Weimar years. Perhaps most important of all, their ideology was a whetstone against which the liberal majority sharpened its own identity. The themes of creating a nationalism on a higher moral plane and of employing it solely for the good of mankind found support among other German Zionists, too. Many of them assumed that this "modern, moral, i.e., Jewish nationalism" assured the rights, and hence the friendship, of the Arabs in Palestine. The liberal counterattack can only be judged a success. The Centralverein remained the acknowledged Jewish self-defense organization, notwithstanding Zionist efforts to hand its functions over to other bodies. The communities stayed almost solidly in liberal hands, with Zionist inroads limited and localized. The German Jews themselves stubbornly resisted the blandishments of Jewish nationalism. German Zionism's predicament was but part of a larger impasse affecting all of Jewish nationalism.
