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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller Jerry Z. Muller Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000343 In 1977, five years before his death, Gershom Scholem published a memoir of his youth, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (published in English translation in 1980 as From Berlin to Jerusalem). Though it was not his focus, he touched upon the history of his family: his bourgeois parents, the printer Arthur and his wife Betty, and his three brothers. Reinhold, the eldest, became a German nationalist; the next in age, Erich, was a liberal; Werner was a radical leftist who for a few years was a Communist member of the Reichstag; and then there was Gershom himself—Gerhard until he Hebraicized his name—a committed Zionist from his youth. It no doubt occurred to more than one historian of German Jewry that the Scholems seemed to present a real-life counterpart to the fictional family depicted by Sholem Aleichem in Tevye and His Daughters, in which each child followed a different [End Page 457] and characteristic path of eastern European Jewry. Reconstructing the history of the Scholem family thus offers the possibility of portraying the various paths taken by the children of the turn-of-the-century German Jewish middle class. Jay Howard Geller has now taken up that challenge. His book has two aims. The first is to reconstruct the history of the family from its arrival in Berlin in the early nineteenth century through its dissolution through emigration and destruction during the Third Reich, with a coda surveying the later fate of the brothers and their families. The second is to use the history of the Scholem family to exemplify larger patterns—social, educational, religious, and political—in the history of the Berlin Jewish middle class (entrepreneurial and professional, below the level of the titled and the rich, but above that of the working class). The book largely succeeds in both, though there is a certain tension between the two aims—with the family drama sometimes diluted by historical generalizations. The background political narrative of each period, together with the story of the Scholem family, makes the book accessible to those without a background in modern German history, while even those familiar with German Jewish history will gain additional insights and information. Geller's reconstruction is grounded in assiduous research in archives and obscure published works, from high school yearbooks to government statistical reports. His most important source is the Gershom Scholem archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. From very early on in his life, Scholem had a sense of himself as a world historical figure—which he indeed became—and preserved not only his diaries, but also his massive correspondence. A three-volume selection of that correspondence was published in German between 1994–1999, with a one volume selection in English in 2002. Scholem published his correspondence with Walter Benjamin in 1980; an English translation appeared in 1992. In 1999 selections from Scholem's correspondence with his mother, Betty, were published. Since then, his extensive correspondence with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno has also been published. And yet this published correspondence represents only a fraction of the material in the Scholem archive: Scholem was a key node in the international Republic of Letters in the twentieth century, and his papers are a gold mine for the intellectual history of the era. Geller draws on the published as well as unpublished correspondence, primarily that of Scholem with the other members of his family. He also draws on existing biographical studies of Gershom and of Werner. The Scholem family at the center of the book had its origins in Glogau in Silesia. Its founder, Marcus Scholem, moved to Berlin in the early nineteenth century, where his son Siegfried founded a printing business. Siegfried's son, Arthur (Gershom's father), started a printing business of his own, which he ran with help from his wife, Betty—a common pattern among central European Jewish business families. Their...