The Scholems

A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction

Jay Howard Geller

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501731587
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Map of the Scholems’ Berlin in the 1920s
• Members of the Scholem Family
• Introduction
• 1. Origins: From Glogau to Berlin
• 2. Berlin Childhood around 1900: Growing Up in the Growing Metropolis
• 3. Things Fall Apart: The First World War
• 4. Life in the Time of Revolutions: The Early Weimar Republic
• 5. The Gold-Plated Twenties and Beyond: Promise, Prosperity, and Depression in Interwar Germany
• 6. In the Promised Land: A New Home in Jerusalem
• 7. The Maelstrom: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
• 8. Cresting of the Fifth Wave: Gershom Scholem’s Palestine in the 1930s
• 9. Afterlives: Sydney and Jerusalem
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index