Editor's Notes: Germany’s ‘good Jews’ thought they were safe, New York should pay attention

He had been promising to arrest him since December 2024. At some point, the city’s lawyers told him what any first-year law student could have told him, and so he made a video. That was the news in it. The other hundred seconds were the reason he bothered.

Israel was targeting neonatal care centers. It was starving countless people. It was gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists. Americans were paying for the bombs that do the killing. Netanyahu was the architect of a horrific genocide, a war criminal, not welcome in New York City. Washington should arrest him instead.

October 7 did not come up. There is only one “bad” country outside the United States, and it’s Israel. Not China. Not the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not North Korea. Only Israel.

The UJA-Federation, which does not usually talk this way, opened its statement with “Shame on you.” The Orthodox Union said the video “endangers Jewish New Yorkers” and that the mayor peddles “lies and misinformation that risk inciting further violence against Jews.” Gadi Eisenkot, who has spent his political career trying to get Netanyahu out of office, called it “pure antisemitism, with no basis in fact.”

Eight months ago, 33% of Jewish voters in the city put him there.

That number is what sent me into the German archives. Jews backing a movement that hates them is not a new story. I wanted to know how close the match was.

More of it matched than I wanted. Some of it does not match at all.

Max Naumann was not a crank. Berlin attorney. Captain in the Bavarian Army. Iron Cross First and Second Class, 15 months at the front. When he founded the Association of German National Jews in 1921, respectable people signed up, including the chief editor of one of Germany’s biggest daily papers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes he had money behind him, from established quarters of German Jewry.

His theory was that antisemitism is a reaction. Germans were not born hating Jews. They were reacting to things Jews did. To the Eastern European Jews showing up with foreign manners. To Zionists saying out loud that their loyalty was somewhere else. To Jewish writers who made fun of German patriotism. Take away the provocation and the hatred goes with it.

Everything else follows from that. If Jews cause it, Jews can stop it. Naumann wrote it out in his first bulletin in September 1921: Every decent antisemite admits decent Jews exist but calls them exceptions, and he will stop being an antisemite once we prove “we are not a handful of deserters but an army.”

Start with the theory, which is still in business. Plenty of Jews say the same thing today, only about Zionism. Deal with Israel and the hatred goes away. That is Naumann’s argument, with the nouns swapped. Part of why it survives is that it is comforting. It leaves the Jew something to do.

Then there is where the danger lives, which is always in other Jews. His enemies were the Ostjuden and the Zionists. He accused Eastern Jews of profiteering from the war and wanted their assets confiscated. Different names now. Same trick. And the person making the accusation is never in the group he is pointing at.

He went after his own community’s defense organizations. His whole career was built on attacking the Centralverein, the body that existed to fight antisemitism, and predicting it would collapse. You can hear that argument today from the Left and the Right, sometimes in the same week.

He built a rival. The Verband tried to set up a counter-organization to the Reichsvertretung, German Jewry’s representative body, on the grounds that the Reichsvertretung had Zionists in it. We have a whole field of those now.

He fought Jewish solidarity across borders. His association campaigned against the international boycott of German goods and attacked a world Jewish conference for having no standing to speak on behalf of nationally reliable German Jews. “Jews elsewhere do not speak for us” is not a new sentence.

He said the reports were exaggerated. The Verband published a manifesto claiming Jews in Germany were being fairly treated, and Naumann told foreign reporters the violence was temporary excess, rather than policy. That position was tested in 1935, and the results were published.

I keep returning to this: As the evidence deteriorated, the theory gained traction. Naumann’s monthly reported a circulation of 5,000 in 1926. By 1935, it was 15,000. In between, Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws.

Then there is how it ended. On November 18, 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Final Solution, signed the order dissolving Naumann’s association for attitudes hostile to the state. The Gestapo picked him up the same day and took him to Columbia-Haus, the concentration camp in Berlin-Tempelhof. The historian Niels Tim Dickhaut writes that in that cell Naumann broke the lenses of his glasses and tried to cut himself with the pieces. They let him out five weeks later, disbarred, 60 years old, unemployable. He was looking into escaping to Britain, a country he had spent his whole career attacking for sponsoring Zionism, when cancer got to him first. Plenty of his followers ended up in the camps.

Fourteen years of proving he was the right kind of Jew. The order that shut him down did not have a paragraph for him.

Three things.

The destruction of the Jews was the Nazi platform. Printed, distributed, available to anyone who wanted to read it. Neither American party has anything like that. What we have is tolerated fringes, imported conspiracy language, and taboos that used to hold and no longer do. Bad enough. Not the same category.

There was no Jewish state in 1933, so there was no such thing as legitimate criticism of one. An enormous amount of argument about Israeli policy – including discussions this paper runs every week – has no Weimar equivalent and does not accommodate anyone.

And the third one gives no comfort at all. Naumann’s association topped at around 7,000 people out of half a million German Jews. That is 1.4%, and every serious Jewish body in Germany treated them as an embarrassment. The Jews who thought accommodation would work in Weimar were a fringe that the community rejected. So no, we are not where they were. In Germany, this was a fringe. Here, it is a third of the community.

Naumann’s one defense, if he has one, is that nothing and no one ever told him. There was no notification. There was no single morning when the evidence appeared in a form he could not talk his way around. He had to work it out himself. He got it wrong, and by the time he knew, the Gestapo was at the door.

The 33% do not get that defense.

Nobody has to work anything out anymore. The question is whether a single one of them will say they were wrong.

Most will not, and Naumann is the reason to expect that. His real lesson has nothing to do with Nazis. When you have an explanation for why you are safe, you do not give it up. Usually someone takes it from you.

Two things are worth building while we wait. Community security of the kind the British have in the Community Security Trust (CST) and nobody had on a beach in Sydney in December. And an exit that exists as infrastructure and not as a slogan.

It does not matter because the bill does not go to the Upper West Side. It goes to the man donning a kippah on the subway and to the kids outside the school in Crown Heights who were not asked and who will not be asked next time either.