The Scholems
A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II.
Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Geller (Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1949 1953), a Judaic studies professor, recounts in this excellent history spanning many decades, the four sons of the upper-middle-class Berlin Jewish couple Arthur and Betty Scholem went off on very different personal, professional, and political paths between the two world wars. The two oldest, Reinhold and Erich, ran the family business (their grandfather's prosperous print shop), then later immigrated to Australia. Werner, the second youngest, became a leader of the German Communist Party and was murdered at Buchenwald in 1940 under mysterious circumstances. By far the best known is the youngest, Gerhard (later Gershom), a Zionist who immigrated to Palestine, founded the modern study of Jewish mysticism, and became arguably the 20th century's leading Judaica scholar. Geller effectively uses the family as a prism through which to examine the history, development, and mores of the German-Jewish haute bourgeoisie before the Third Reich. He notes, for example, how extensive assimilation and intermarriage were: although German Jews often looked down on the "goyim," in 1929 27% of German-Jewish men and 18% of women married non-Jews, a far higher proportion than in America at the time, and the Scholem family Kiddush cup was inscribed "Christmas 1921." Well-researched and engagingly written, this is a fine contribution to German-Jewish biography and history.
