Max Bodenheimer
- For other uses, see Bodenheimer (disambiguation) or Maxwell Bodenheim.
Max Isidor Bodenheimer (Hebrew: מקס בודנהיימר; 12 March 1865, Stuttgart – 19 July, 1940, Jerusalem) was a lawyer and one of the main figures in German Zionism.
In 1914, he was one of the co-founders of the German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, and seems to be an author of the conception of the establishment of the League of East European States-a German client state with autonomous Jewish cooperation during World War I.[1]
Life
Bodenheimer was born on 12 March 1865 in Stuttgart. He studied at Tübingen, Strassburg, Berlin and Freiburg universities from 1884 to 1889. In 1890 he moved to Köln to start a law practice. In 1891 he published his first Zionist article in a Hamburg newspaper.
He had three children with Rosa Dalberg, whom he married in 1896. Simon Fritz, a professor of zoology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Henrietta Hannah, who wrote a biography of her father, and Ruth lawyer.
In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he submitted an Exposé on the Synchronization of German and Jewish Interests in the World War to German military headquarters in Cologne. He set out his vision to Count Hutten-Czapski of the General Staff, chief of sabotage operations on the eastern front. With support from the General Staff and the Wilhelmstrasse, he established the German Committee for the Liberation of Russian Jewry, together with 6 German Zionist colleagues, on 17 August 1914. He resigned his chairmanship of the Jewish National Fund. Not all Zionists supported the German war effort but the members of Bodenheimer's committee were almost all Zionists. The mission statement pledged the Committee 'to support those powers lined up against Russia on the field of battle in both word and deed.' Bodenheimer wanted the German army to assault the power of the Tsarist empire in the Baltic states, Poland, White Russia and the Ukraine, where he hoped for an 'East European Federation' in which 'all ethnic groups were to enjoy national autonomy', including the Jews, in the Pale of Settlement.[2]
In 1933 he had to emigrate to Amsterdam due to rising Nazi power. He began writing memoirs in 1939, and died soon after on July 19, 1940 at age 75.
References
- ↑ "Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski Jews in Poland - New York 1998, p. 297".
- ↑ Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express, pp.344-345
External links
- The website of The Society for the Commemoration of Max I. Bodenheimer and Hannah Henriette Bodenheimer (list of archives, photo gallery)
- The personal papers of Max Bodenheimer are kept at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. The notation of the record group is A15.
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