“Wear it with pride, the yellow star!”

By Paul R. Bartrop, Professor Emeritus of History, Florida Gulf Coast University

Ninety years ago this month, in April 1933, a massive statement of Jewish self-assertion in the light of Nazi antisemitism was made by Robert Weltsch, the prewar editor of a twice-weekly Berlin Jewish newspaper, the Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review).

Born on June 20, 1891, to a long established Jewish family in Prague, his father, Theodore Weltsch, was an active member of the Jewish community and played an important administrative role in communal organizations.

Robert Weltsch studied law at the Karl-Ferdinand German University of Prague, where he joined Bar Kochba, a Zionist student association to which many young Jewish intellectuals were attracted. He served as the association’s leader in 1911-1912. Between 1910 and 1914, he published articles in German language Zionist newspapers, an activity he continued when serving as an officer on the Russian front in the Austro Hungarian army during World War I.

After the war, Weltsch became editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Rundschau in Berlin, where he would remain until he left Germany in 1938. A committed Zionist, he was keen to develop the idea of a joint Jewish-Arab commonwealth for Palestine, in which statehood would be rarely discussed and never advocated.

One of the reasons behind his opposition to a singular Jewish state in Palestine stemmed from his reaction to any form of nationalism or chauvinism, which he attributed to the horrors of war. Given this, he was fearful as to where the organized Zionist movement might lead.

Accordingly, he became one of the leading lights of the movement Brit Shalom, which advocated a bi-national Arab-Jewish presence in Palestine focusing on ideals such as political equality, cultural autonomy and socioeconomic coexistence. This led to hostility from some circles within the Zionist movement and, periodically, there were unsuccessful moves to have him removed as editor of the Jüdische Rundschau.

As one who wielded influence within the German Jewish community through the pages of his newspaper, Weltsch saw that he had an important responsibility to somehow accommodate Nazi antisemitic measures while at the same time showing that the Jewish community would not be cowed.

On April 1, 1933, the Nazis organized a boycott of all Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores in what was arguably the first overtly antisemitic measure adopted by the new Nazi government, and it was a failure.

Weltsch, alert to the possibilities the boycott signified for the future, reacted by publishing an article on April 4, which became famous as one of the earliest Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Jewish persecution. Entitled “Tragt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben Fleck!” (known by its English title as “Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Badge!”), Weltsch’s editorial was a call for the Jews of Germany to recognize the reality of their situation and confront their changed situation with dignity and in solidarity.

He wrote that, in view of the new regime, “Today the Jews cannot speak except as Jews. Anything else is utterly senseless. ... We live in a new period … indicating that the world of our previous concepts has collapsed. That may be painful for many, but in this world only those will be able to survive who are able to look reality in the eye.” He continued, in italics, that in view of the Jewish self-deception that they would always be accepted as Germans, “It is not true that the Jews betrayed Germany. If they betrayed anyone, it was themselves, the Jews. Because the Jew did not display his Judaism with pride, because he tried to avoid the Jewish issue, he must bear part of the blame for the degradation of the Jews.”

He noted that, during the boycott, one often saw “windows bearing a large Magen David, the Shield of David the King. It was intended as dishonor.” Given this development, in which “the Jew is marked as a Jew” with “the yellow badge,” he now called upon the Jews of Germany to “take it up, the Shield of David, and wear it with pride!”

While the Nazis did not actually require Jews to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David until September 19, 1941, Weltsch was instead referring to a German-Jewish community that had, until that time, seen itself as a thoroughly integrated part of German society. Now that the Jews were being marked out, he was alerting them to the need to unite in view of what was now their “difference” from mainstream society — a metaphoric “yellow star,” so to speak.

During these early years of the third Reich, Weltsch made trips to Palestine, reporting back to the Jüdische Rundschau on what he saw there. Though unconvinced that Palestine was the right place for German Jews to live, he tried to encourage them to leave Germany. He was, however, concerned that whatever befell Germany’s Jews would, soon enough, extend across all of Europe, so any refuge — including Palestine — would have to be considered. War, he held, would mean that all German Jews “would be lost.”

He also acknowledged that, with things getting worse by the day, he would be lucky to escape with his life, something he was able to do in September 1938, when he left Germany for Palestine.

He worked there for many years as a correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz and, in 1945, moved to London as the newspaper’s European correspondent, covering the Nuremberg Trials during 1945-1946. He remained in London as a political journalist until his return to Jerusalem in 1978, where he died on December 22, 1982 at age 91.