Preserver of Jewish culture

By any measure, it was an astonishing generation of Jews that grew to maturity in Central Europe between the last decades of the 19th century and the First World War. Not infrequently, the most successful of these Kraftjuden, or “powerful Jews,” as they were called, were children of families only recently permitted to reside outside the ghetto walls and enforced penury that had kept Austro-German Jewry confined for centuries. Their grandparents had been barred from most professions and denied access to higher education, but once released, the pent-up energy and ambition of their offspring transformed utterly not just the world of traditional Judaism but, equally, the long-forbidden realms of secular culture, science and commerce.

Many of these men and women went on to become iconic names in the history of modern Europe, with shelf-loads of biographies and critical studies devoted to their achievements. Surprisingly, though, Anthony David’s engrossing new book, “The Patron,” is the first full-scale biography of one of the most interesting of these figures, Salman Schocken (1877-1959), whose career, perhaps more clearly than anyone else’s, embodies the brief moment when it was possible for a self-made German Jew to occupy a leading role at the intersection of big business, high culture and Zionism.

The publishing house he founded, Schocken Verlag, contributed powerfully to the transformation of Hebrew from a sacred tongue into a vehicle for modern secular literature, and both his Hebrew and his German titles contain some of the most important Jewish works we have in either language. His contributions to Jewish culture became still more urgent after the Nazi assumption of state power and the ensuing exclusion of Jews from German life. Forbidden to publish “Aryan” authors, Schocken Verlag became dedicated not only to preserving classic Jewish texts but also to showing the continuing vitality of the tradition in the work of 20th century writers like Franz Kafka. No doubt, a modern, secular Jewish culture would have come into existence without Schocken, but deprived of his ardent commitment and financial support, the contours of that new culture might well have been different and its canonic texts not nearly as well known.

Hannah Arendt, who briefly worked for Schocken when they both were exiles in New York, once referred to her employer -- not entirely ironically -- as the “Jewish Bismarck,” while for Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Schocken was not merely a remarkably successful businessman and patron but “a mystical merchant” and “our Don Quixote of the jet-age.” It is impossible to imagine anyone else being described in similar terms -- especially not by temperaments as captious as Arendt’s and Scholem’s -- and David rightly echoes the judgment that “no one better mirrored the fate of German Jews writ large, or embodied its spectrum of opportunities and impossible choices.”

Born in 1877 in Margonin, a drab, economically backward town in the Prussian province of Posen near the Polish border, Schocken was regarded for many years as a typical Ostjude, or “Jew from the East,” a group almost as despised by the more successfully assimilated Jews from the metropolitan areas as it was by out-and-out anti-Semites. Schocken attended the local heder, or religious school, until he was apprenticed to a small merchant at 14, much as his father and grandfather had been before him. Schocken, though, had already become a ferocious autodidact, his imagination initially fired by Goethe’s novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” with its doctrine of individual self-realization, and even as his interests widened and took on a more Jewish inflection, the canon of German Romantic authors remained cherished touchstones for the rest of his life.

Schocken’s apprenticeship taught him rudimentary business skills, but, more important, it left him determined never to settle for the life of a store clerk. He fled to Berlin to make his fortune, only to fail miserably and find himself forced to accept a position as a traveling salesman for a Leipzig textile firm. Slowly, though, in partnership with his older brother, Simon, who was running a mid-size shop in Zwickau, an industrial city in Saxony, Salman Schocken’s ideas about how to improve the merchandising of consumer goods brought him success. The Schocken brothers went into business and from their Zwickau headquarters began to build a chain of ever-larger and more profitable department stores.

Their timing could scarcely have been more propitious. On the way to unification, Germany had defeated Austria and France in war, and now the Empire was dedicated to outstripping its rivals in elegance and luxury as well. Department stores, constructed on a palatial scale and carrying wares from all over the world, became symbols of pride in the country’s prosperity. Revealingly enough, nearly all the great department stores were founded by Posen Jews such as the Tietz brothers, who had migrated to the capital a generation before Schocken and had become one of Germany’s richest families. Traditional small retailers deeply resented these new merchant princes, and attacks on large department stores as inimical to the national spirit became a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda. But the Schocken stores continued to flourish, largely because of Salman Schocken’s innovative marketing and distribution techniques. Unlike his predecessors, he deliberately set out to appeal to the urban working class, not just the prosperous bourgeoisie. His stores were modern in design, often employing radically avant-garde architects such as Erich Mendelsohn, whose 1928 Stuttgart building won international acclaim. The firm successfully survived World War I and hyperinflation to become one of the most profitable business concerns in the Weimar Republic.

Schocken’s passion for business never diminished, but it did not erode his literary zeal either. As his wealth increased, he became a noted collector, acquiring first editions of writers like Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although his brother had long been a Zionist, Schocken only gradually became drawn to the movement, less out of longing for a Jewish homeland than as an expression of disgust with what he called the “repellent liberal, assimilated and superficial German Jewry” that had snubbed him as a young man.

He began to acquire Jewish books and manuscripts on an unprecedented scale and became a regular delegate at German Zionist conferences. Powerfully moved by Martin Buber’s “Tales of Rabbi Nachman” (1906) and “The Legend of the Baal-Shem” (1908), Schocken sought out Buber and began a lifelong search for Jewish writers with whom to collaborate on a program of cultural renewal. In 1916, he established a fund to subsidize Jewish scholarship as well as a research institute for Hebrew poetry, recruiting figures like Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gerhard (later, Gershom) Scholem and his greatest discovery, a virtually unknown Hebrew writer from Galicia who adopted the pen name S.Y. Agnon and would eventually win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Schocken eventually became convinced that his team of researchers had little interest in producing books able to attract a large readership, and in 1931 he decided to establish his own publishing house. Underwritten by profits from his department stores, Schocken Verlag set a new standard for typographical excellence and accessibility.

But the instinct that had served Schocken so well in business failed him completely in political affairs, first in Germany and again in Palestine. Convinced that Nazism was a transient phenomenon, Schocken was unable initially to take Hitler seriously. He saw the party faithful, who had come to Nuremberg to participate in the infamous mass rallies, take off their uniforms to go shopping for bargains in his store, and he was certain that economic common sense would soon blunt the Nazi appeal.

Indifferent to the lure of any ideology, Schocken could never understand its hold on others. In 1934, though, as the situation worsened, Schocken left for Palestine, managing to take his entire library with him. Using a variety of feints and subterfuges, Schocken Verlag continued to publish in Germany until 1938, when it finally was closed by the government. The department stores, too, were expropriated for about 5% of their real value, but even that amount sufficed to make Schocken one of the wealthiest immigrants in Palestine. There, he continued to subsidize writers like Agnon and Scholem and again hired Mendelsohn, himself now a refugee, to build a splendid library to hold his collection of Judaica.

At first, Schocken threw himself into his new life in Jerusalem, contributing generously to the establishment of the Hebrew University and buying what eventually became the country’s leading newspaper, Haaretz. But he soon grew disillusioned with the Zionist political leadership and resentful that they paid no attention to his advice. Like many wealthy benefactors, Schocken expected to be heard, and he was deeply offended when his counsel was ignored.

His cosmopolitan faith in great literature, including German writing, as a value in its own right and his resistance to the politicization of culture alienated him from the most influential voices in the country, and in 1940 he left Palestine for New York, ostensibly to raise money for the Hebrew University, but at least in part out of a sense of alienation from the realities of Zionist state-building. In 1945, he founded Schocken Books in New York and enlisted Arendt and Nahum Glatzer as his editors. Their inaugural volume was a book about Marc Chagall by his wife, Bella, and it was followed by English translations of Buber, Kafka, Agnon, Scholem and Walter Benjamin. For a long time, Schocken Books was the preeminent English language publisher of secular Jewish writing, creating a mass readership for a subject and constellation of authors on whom few other American publishers were willing to take a risk.

But the success of his new enterprise was not enough to satisfy him. In America, the position he had held in Germany and had hoped to re-create in Palestine was no longer even a plausible dream. He traveled restlessly between America, Israel and Europe, and in 1950 became a U.S. citizen, according to David, “more as a defiant gesture against the state of Israel than as an expression of affinity for the United States.” After the West German government restored his ownership of the stores not located in the eastern zone, Schocken sold them again and continued his wandering. When he died in Switzerland in 1959, he had alienated most of his family, former co-workers and proteges. But he had stayed faithful to the impulses that had fed his dreams in Posen more than half a century earlier, and when his body was found in his hotel room, in his hands he was clutching rare editions of “Faust” and Rabbi Nachman’s stories.

A final, mordant postscript to Schocken’s remarkable career was fashioned not by the cultural legacy that distinguished him from the other businessmen of his generation but by the conjunction of finance and publishing whose logic he would have recognized better than anyone. In 1987, his heirs sold Schocken Press to Random House, which, only a few years later, was itself acquired by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, founded by a Prussian lithographer in 1835. So, in a sense, the Schocken list has indeed been brought home again. But whether it is a homecoming he would have welcomed is another question. *