Nahum Goldmann
| Nahum Goldmann | |
|---|---|
Nahum Goldmann
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| Born |
Nahum Goldmann June 10, 1895 Vishnevo, Russian Empire (now Vishnyeva, Belarus) |
| Died | August 29, 1982 (aged 87) Bad Reichenhall, Germany |
| Cause of death | Atelectasis |
| Known for | Founder and president of the World Jewish Congress |
Nahum Goldmann (Hebrew: נחום גולדמן) (July 10, 1895 – August 29, 1982) was a leading Zionist and the founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress from 1948 to 1977.
Nahum Goldmann was born in Vishnevo, Russian Empire, a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (now Vishnyeva, Belarus), the son of a teaching and writing Litvak family, whose father was an ardent Zionist. At the age of six, he moved with his parents to Frankfurt, Germany, where his father entertained leading Zionists and intellectuals, and where he attended the Musterschule. In 1911, while still in high school, he and his father attended the Tenth Zionist Congress. Goldmann went on to study law, history, and philosophy in Marburg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He graduated in law and philosophy.
In 1913, he visited Palestine for four months, publishing his impressions the following year in his book, Eretz Israel, Reisebriefe aus Palästina (Eretz Israel, Travel letters from Palestine), which was published in two editions. In the period 1916-18, Goldmann worked for the German "Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient", an intelligence and propaganda bureau related to the German Foreign Office, which tried to instrumentalize ethnic and religious nationalist currents within the Ottoman Empire such as Panturkism, Islamism and Zionism for German interests, to fight back increasing British and French influence in the region. In that period, the head of "Nachrichtenstelle" was Prof. Dr. Eugen Mittwoch, a leading German Arabist and Orientalist and at the same time a leading personality in Germany's Jewish community. During this period, he attempted to enlist Kaiser Wilhelm's support for the Zionist ideal. In 1922 he founded the Eschkol-Publikations-Gesellschaft (Eschkol Publication Society), and was involved in publishing a Zionist periodical. In 1929 he and Jakob Klatzkin started the project Encyclopaedia Judaica, which reflected the work of the leading Jewish scholars of the day. Eschkol published ten volumes of the Encyclopaedia Judaica in German and two volumes in Hebrew. Goldmann was falsely denounced by the Nazis as a secret communist agent shortly after the Beer Hall Putsch. In 1934 he married Alice Gottschalk and they had two sons, Michael and Guido.
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