The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller (review)

Studies of German Jewry have become much more sophisticated and subtle in recent decades. Instead of somewhat sterile arguments about whether Jews in German-speaking lands were assimilated or not, scholars are much more likely today to discuss the German-Jewish experience in terms of an integration and acculturation that left German Jews as Germans and Jews, in their own sub-culture, as David Sorkin, following in the path of George Mosse, outlined in his path-breaking book, The Transformation of German Jewry, in 1987. This excellent portrayal of the Scholem family continues this approach, showing just how German, and how Jewish, the members of the family were, despite the ample political spectrum they covered, even among a set of four brothers, Reinhold, Erich, Werner, and Gershom, from fairly conservative liberal; to progressive democrat; to communist, albeit one ejected from the party because of his opposition to Stalin; and finally, and most famously, left-wing Zionist.

Gershom (originally Gerhard) was the star that makes the Scholem family worthy of particular interest, and he is given his due in two chapters devoted to his experience in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. Of particular interest, given current debates, is the fact that in the 1920s, as a left-winger and a "cultural" Zionist, Scholem was a member of "Brit Shalom," hence an opponent of the need for a Jewish state, and an advocate instead of a binational, Jewish-Arab state. He changed his mind later, given the force majeure of the Arab Revolt, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel, but it is a reminder that Peter Beinart's recent conversion to a one-state, binational solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has strong, ideologically Zionist roots. Scholem's immense contribution to modern Jewish scholarship is also discussed, but much more sketchily and briefly than one might have assumed. But that is understandable, because he is not the center of the book (much as that would probably have pained him), rather the family is. Indeed, if anyone is central to the book it is Gershom's mother, Betty, whose correspondence with her sons is one of the major documentary sources on which this well-researched, scholarly book rests.

This, as with so many German-Jewish families, is a story of social, economic, and cultural success, followed by economic and political peril, and appalling persecution and destruction. Geller tells how a poor Jew came to Berlin, started a family, how his son came to set up a printing company that achieved, eventually, a level of considerable prosperity. A now extensive family saw another printing company being founded, also with some success, all of which was severely shaken by World War I and its chaotic aftermath. The twenties offered a period of apparent recovery and promise, in which family members chose quite different paths: into left-wing politics, Zionism, or continued integration, and partial economic recovery (partly by printing record labels). While Gershom left to Palestine to realize his Zionist dream, Werner pursued a notorious (if failed) career in radical politics, and the older brothers tried to rescue the family firm. Then arrived the Great Slump, and the Nazi takeover, the destruction of German Jewry, with the Scholem family members reluctant to leave, as with so many underestimating the acute danger German Jews were in.

Many managed to flee just in time, but others, most prominently in this book, Werner, the left-wing brother, became victims of the Nazi genocide. One could indeed argue that even those who survived and mostly prospered were themselves victims of the Nazi terror, forced to leave their world, the world they were so well-versed in, and not all able to recreate as satisfactory a one elsewhere, in this case Australia for the elder two brothers. Even Gershom in Palestine-Israel was...