Introduction: Material Transfer—Intellectual Transfer: Salman Schocken’s Collections

Abstract

Salman Schocken (Margonin, Poznań, 1877 – Pontresina, Switzerland, 1959) was the owner of a large chain of department stores in Germany and an active Zionist, but his name is first and foremost tied to the history of the Jewish book. As the founder of the Schocken Verlag in Berlin (1931–1938), he was one of the prominent Jewish publishers in the first half of the twentieth century, and continued his work with publishing houses in Jerusalem (later moving to Tel Aviv) and New York. As Volker Dahm’s trailblazing research has shown, Schocken held a central position in the renaissance of Jewish culture in Germany between the wars, and an important role in the renewal of modern Hebrew literature. The ‘Bücherei des Schocken-Verlages’ series, published between 1933 and 1938, remains a monument to German-Jewish cultural life between the world wars. Salman Schocken was an extraordinary collector of books, manuscripts, and art, too. His private interest and knowledge as a connoisseur of German as well as Hebrew books directed some of his activities as a publisher—and vice versa: he bought rare books and manuscripts in order to make them available to research through editions and scholarly studies. For Schocken, both his work as a publisher and his collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts formed part of his Zionism, and the attempt to reconnect dispersed fragments of Jewish culture. His successful chain of department stores in Germany allowed Schocken to purchase German as well as Hebrew and Yiddish books and manuscripts on a large scale during the economically turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, when many private collections were dissolved. Even after 1933, Schocken continued to enlarge and consolidate his collections. He became increasingly aware of the necessity to rescue and to preserve Jewish cultural assets from the National Socialist regime. While his publishing house was liquidated in 1938/1939 and Schocken’s department stores were sold to a German syndicate of banks for a price far below their actual value, Schocken managed to transfer his private collections to Jerusalem, as well as most of the publishing house’s stocks. The transfer was a practical move, and yet it can be considered a symbolic act of salvage, too. Schocken commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953) to design a functional, modern library in Jerusalem to house his collections.