SOURCE: "Richard Beer-Hoffman," in Germany's Stepchildren, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944, pp. 239-54.

In the following excerpt, Liptzin discusses how Beer-Hofmann's Jewish heritage influenced his religious dramas.

When Theodor Herzl, at the close of the last century, proposed his radical solution of the duality in which Jews of the Diaspora found themselves, assimilationists and Jewish Aryans mocked at his visions. The non-German Jews, who flocked to his banner, were primarily interested in the political consequences of his thought, the homeward march of a long exiled people. The Viennese aesthetes and epicureans, who were his early associates, dismissed his Zionist theories with a shrug of the shoulders and a sceptical smile. For many years the influential Viennese organ to which he was a contributor refused to print any news or comments about his messianic complex, and he was compelled to found and to finance a newspaper of his...