Nahum Goldmann is one of the prominent Jewish personalities of the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania in 1895, he was raised in Germany, where his family had moved five years later. He launched himself very early into public life; at fifteen he was already publishing his first political articles. In 1913, at eighteen, he left for several months for Palestine, and his impressions were published in Germany in 1914 under the title Eretz Israel, Reisebriefe aus Palaestina (Eretz Israel: Travel Letters from Palestine). During the First World War he was at the Jewish Section of the German foreign ministry. Engaged in the Zionist movement, he published in the early 1920s, together with Jacob Klatzkin, a periodical: Freie Zionistische Blaetter (Free Zionist Pages). In the same period the idea of compiling a Jewish encyclopedia was born in these two minds, and they created a publishing house for the purpose. And in 1928, the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Judaica was indeed published. In all, ten volumes in German and two in Hebrew had time to appear before Hitler’s rise to power interrupted this activity. In the 1960s, Nahum Goldmann would relaunch “his” encyclopedia, but in English.
A sincere and active Zionist, Goldmann is no less inclined to criticize the leaders of the Zionist movement; he reproaches them for their lack of interest in the political and cultural life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In his view, the future Eretz Israel would not be in a position to take in the whole of the Jewish people; it should serve only as a source of inspiration and an instrument of renaissance for the rest of the Jews destined to remain elsewhere in the world. They were not to be neglected.
For some years Nahum Goldmann clashes with Weizmann, whom he reproaches for wishing to co-opt non-Zionists into the Jewish Agency. He succeeds notably, at the 17th Zionist Congress in 1931, in blocking the election of Weizmann to the presidency of the Zionist Organization. The two men would nonetheless draw closer some two years later. At the same time, Goldmann has to leave Germany as early as 1933. At the end of that same year he is elevated to the presidency of the Committee of Jewish Delegations; two years later he represents the Jewish Agency before the League of Nations. He creates, with Stephen Wise, the World Jewish Congress, of which in 1936 he becomes chairman of the executive committee. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he leaves for the United States, where he soon directs the American section of the Jewish Agency.
During the years of the British mandate over Palestine, Nahum Goldmann campaigns for the creation of a Jewish state. In 1937, he is among the supporters of a plan to partition the region, preferring sovereignty over only a part of historic Israel to territorial dreams. Consequently, he ranks among the supporters of Ben-Gurion at the Biltmore conference, and until 1948 he expends himself in an active, even decisive way, for the immediate creation of a Jewish state. After that creation, he becomes co-chairman of the Zionist Organization and, on the death of Stephen Wise, he is elected president of the World Jewish Congress.
Goldmann is at the origin of the negotiations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany for the indemnification of the victims of the Nazi regime and for the reparations paid to the State of Israel. He also leads the Jewish delegation at the indemnification conference (the Claims Conference), before conducting analogous negotiations with Austria. His stature allows him to represent the whole of the Jews, both the Hebrew state and the Jews of the Diaspora.
Nahum Goldmann always advocated the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish life, but at the same time he opposed vehemently those who denied the permanence and the importance of the Diaspora. For him, the threat to these dispersed Jews no longer came from antisemitism, but from assimilation, from the fact of their integration (and their prosperity) into the surrounding society. For him, the struggle of the Jews from now on had to have as its objective the safeguarding of their rights to difference, to uniqueness. This, according to him, was the principal role of the Jewish people and its leaders, whose efforts should turn toward education.
From 1962 onward, Goldmann leaves the United States and becomes an Israeli citizen, but without taking part in the political life of the State. He then divides his time between Israel and Europe. In 1968 he becomes a Swiss citizen, while continuing to crisscross the entire Jewish world. He often issues critical judgments against the Israeli leaders, accusing them of narrow-mindedness. He reproaches them notably for overestimating Israeli power and that of Tsahal, and for following, for this reason, too rigid a policy; for his part, he advocates more flexibility and moderation in relations with the Arab states. And also a less negative attitude toward the USSR, notably with regard to Soviet policy in the Middle East, as well as toward the treatment of Soviet Jews by the authorities. He also reproached the Israeli leaders for displaying inadequate attitudes toward the Jewish Diaspora.
These attitudes evidently create friction between him and the Israeli political officials, all the more so as it is not clear whether his criticisms reflect his personal opinions or those of the World Jewish Congress or of the Zionist Organization. Relations between Nahum Goldmann and the rulers of Israel worsen still further after the Six-Day War; on that occasion a distancing had been felt between him and the Hebrew state. The pressure of the partisans of an unconditional support for Israel grows from then on and, at the 27th Zionist Congress in 1968, Goldmann does not present his candidacy for the post of president.
For many long years, his personal stature allowed Nahum Goldmann to be at once an ardent but lucid Zionist, and a defender of the particular interests of the worldwide Diaspora. Until his death in 1982 he personified the manifold facets of Jewish political life and reflection.