This is only something I recently started investigating, but i am shocked that I did not know more about the German Revolution and its relationship to Nazism.
Aside from Hitler's personal feelings against Jews, since much of the Jewish population backed the Soviet Union-backed communists in the German Revolution, could the Nazis rise to power and universally accepted intolerance of Jews be related to the German Revolution?
It just struck me as being odd that it's rarely discussed that Germany was nearly destroyed and turned into a Soviet-backed Communist state had it not been for the Weimar Republic winning the revolution. And being that alot of the Jewish population at that time favored the eastern-European communist side of the conflict, i can start to see where the seeds of division started.
As a 2017 parallel, it seems similar to if the Netherlands had a revolution where the majority of its Turkish-heritage citizens backed the Islamist side of the revolution against a secular nativist side.
Any thoughts on this?
Did Jews disproportionately back Communism and "nearly destroy" Germany in 1919? The operative German word for this premise is Quatsch.
Jews were approximately 1% of the German population in 1919, but the population was very heterogeneous in its political views. While there were people of Jewish extraction at the extreme edges of the German left like Rosa Luxemburg, there were also Jewish archconservatives and plenty of German patriots who were Jews. There is a clear quantification of this latter assertion with the Judenzählung (Jew Census) which the German Army conducted in 1916. The census-takers sought to prove the claim that Jews were shirking their duties and not serving at the front, but they ended up proving the opposite: Jews were more likely than their Gentile counterparts to serve in the front. Max Rothmann, a distinguished Jewish professor of neurology and veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and whose sons served in the war noted that despite the obstacles thrown in their way, his sons served the Kaiser. Walther Rathenau, the Jewish industrialist and one of the men responsible for the scientific management of the German war economy, aptly said of the growing antisemitism of his country:
The more Jews die in this conflict, the more persistent will be their opponents' complaints that the Jews did nothing but sit behind the front lines profiteering from the war. The hatred will double and triple.
Rathenau's 1916 letter proved to be prophetic; although the evidence abounded that German Jews were not some alien fifth-column, but rather a largely assimilated and quite patriotic group. Many of the Jews who were on the extreme German left were both outnumbered by Gentiles like Luxemburg's colleague Karl Liebknecht and in many cases were non-practicing Jews.
In general, German Jews broadly supported not Communism in the early years of Weimar, but rather the Republic itself. A number of German Jews gravitated towards the SPD or center-left and liberal parties of the Republic like the DDP. Most of these politics of these parties were not about embracing Lenin or taking a wild leap into revolution, but rather to stabilize the Republic and salvage something tangible from the defeat the Kaiser and his generals had created. Rathenau was an example of this stabilizing politics. As Foreign Minister, he pushed to end Germany's isolation and normalize Germany's intra-European relations. Despite his leeriness of the USSR, the Rapallo Treaty gave Germany a degree of leverage against the Western powers. German right-wing Freikorps assassinated Rathenau for his efforts.
Overall, most of Weimar's Jews stood for stability and the Republic. Max Liebermann became the head of the Prussian Academy of Arts; Bernhard Weiss the Deputy Police Chief of Berlin; Einstein, well, was Einstein; the list goes on. German Jews were mostly centrist in their politics, with the population starting to skew a little towards the center-left because of the growing antisemitism on the German right such as the DNVP and the insurgent NSDAP. One of the tragedies of German history is that the extreme antisemitism of the NSDAP was directed at what was arguably the most assimilated Jewish population in the whole of Europe.