The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959 (review)

Salman Schocken was the German version of the American dream: a poor Jew from the Prussian eastern provinces moves to a small town in Saxony, builds up one of Weimar Germany's leading chains of department stores, and emerges as an architectural pioneer who has Erich Mendelsohn build the most exciting Bauhaus-style department stores. He becomes a Zionist visionary and a leading spirit behind the rise of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, builds up a publishing house that serves as intellectual comfort during German Jewry's darkest hours, emerges as the publisher of Franz Kafka and a keen promoter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon for the Nobel Prize. As if this were not enough, he founds an institute for medieval Hebrew literature which searches for the Hebrew Nibelungenlied, possesses one of the most precious private collections of rare books in Judaica as well as German culture, and is responsible for the emergence of Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz.

In other words, a biographer's dream. The self-made man from Posen, whom Hannah Arendt called the "Jewish Bismarck" (p. 204), was one of the most versatile figures in an era with no lack of versatile personalities. He was not just the chairman of the Organization of German Department Stores but a person deeply instilled with the ambition to turn his clients into educated people, into Bildungsbürger like himself, and to make his stores aesthetic masterworks of the new Bauhaus style. Next to the underwear counter he would give out poems by Goethe, and with the profit he made, he would support poor writers, such as the young Agnon, who had moved to Germany from Palestine before World War I.

His Schocken Library, a predecessor of modern paperback series, produced one piece of essential Jewish culture after the other in Nazi Germany and became a remarkable monument to spiritual endurance in times of horror. The Patron himself had to leave Nazi Germany, and as he was an active Zionist, it was clear where his path would lead. The department stores remained in the hands of "Aryan" trustees until the end of the Thousand-Year Reich, so Schocken concentrated on his favorite endeavors: a research institute on medieval Hebrew poetry, the preservation of his unique library, and his involvement with the Hebrew University. He founded a publishing house in Israel, bought the newspaper Ha'aretz for his son Gershon (who would turn it into Israel's leading paper), and had Erich Mendelsohn build his private home and his library, which became the unofficial intellectual center of Jerusalem. In the words of his biographer, "it was the only place in town where guests could expect such a high quality of cakes, wines, and light snacks. Being across the street from Golda Meir's residence gave it an added aura of mystery. It was a piece of prewar central Europe lodged in the heart of a Spartan state" (p. 384).

As early as the 1930s Schocken suggested S. Y. Agnon, whom he had supported in the difficult years back in Germany, for the Nobel Prize and used all his connections in Sweden and in the literary world to promote this goal. He published Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, and he financed Gershom Scholem's research on Kabbalah. Still Salman Schocken was not a happy man in interwar Palestine. He was keenly aware of how little difference he was able to make there, in contrast to his time in Weimar Germany, and how little recognition he received. "In Germany I was always a part of things" he told the philosopher Hugo Bergmann. In Palestine, he felt like a nobody, writes David (p. 304).

In 1939 Schocken left Jerusalem for New York and would thereafter return to Israel only for visits. In the United States, he had high hopes of achieving with American Jews what he failed to do in Palestine: to turn them into Bildungsbürger, who would read and produce a Jewish culture comparable to that found in...