For Zweig, Jewish national community must grow organically, not be forced.

Evidence

Zweig believed that national renewal would come about through the transformation of a Jewish Volksgemeinschaft (an ethnic and national community). Writing again from the eastern front, he expressed to Buber his belief that the unity of the Jewish people could not be forced. “It is something natural,” he contends, “like everything organic, it emerges; like everything godlike, it adapts itself. In the meantime, if we Jews, together with other Jews, organize a community [Gemeinschaft] in which the human being can express most purely the best powers of his human nature … we will produce something that will become national.” The face of the eastern Jew, at times marked by its “oriental” features, becomes in its ultimate incarnation the “face of the Messiah.” The oriental and the messianic strains blur in Zweig’s text. For him—as intimated in several places in the text—the final redemption of the Jewish people seems possible only in the Jewish homeland, in the Orient itself. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 442

Categorization

• DEFINE: Volksgemeinschaft is glossed as ‘an ethnic and national community’ — its specifically organic, non-civic connotations are the load-bearing point.