THE PATRON: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959

Salman Schocken (1877–1959) led an extraordinary life. An East European Jew by birth, he flourished as a businessman and cultural entrepreneur in Germany, Palestine and Israel, and the United States. His great marketing insight was that common people desired quality goods, so long as they were affordable. Before WWI and into the 1920s, he turned a small retail shop into a modern department store chain, following the most efficient business principles and commissioning the great modernist architect Erich Mendelssohn to design his flagship store. But Schocken's true loves were books and Jewish and German culture. He amassed a library of treasures, including medieval Jewish manuscripts and first editions of Goethe and others. A modern Medici, Schocken supported with stipends and advice (not always desired) many of the great Jewish cultural figures of the first half of the 20th century, including S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. Like so many German Jews, his belief in German rectitude and culture blinded him to the seriousness of the Nazi threat, and only very late and with a great deal of good fortune was he able to move his family and some of his wealth to Palestine. His greatest legacies were the establishment of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in which he played a key role, and Schocken Books, which remains to this day an important imprint. This biography by David, editor and translator of Gershom Scholem's letters, is serious and illuminating, but the writing can barely keep pace with the colorful character that was Salman Schocken. (Dec. 1)