Schocken, Salman

(1877-1959)

   publisher; a bibliophile who derived a fortune from a chain of department stores. Born to a Jewish businessman in Posen, he studied business after attending Volksschule and in 1901 founded Zwickau's famous I. Schocken Sohne with his brother Simon. Focusing on qual-ity control and low prices, the enterprise evolved by 1930 into nineteen stores with six thousand employees and annual sales surpassing one hundred million marks. During the Weimar era Schocken served briefly on the Reichswirtschafts-rat (Reich Economic Council) and was president from 1919 of the Verband der Waren- und Kaufhauser (Federation of Department Stores).

   Despite broad financial obligations, Schocken cultivated his intellectual inter-ests. He had been raised in a traditional Jewish home, and his wish to combine the treasures of the past with a passion for modernizing Jewish thinking turned him into a collector of rare books, especially of art and literature. In 1912 he formed a Zionist group in Zwickau and participated thereafter in Zionist congresses. By the 1920s his stores were of secondary concern to his Zionist endeavors. His key im-portance to Judaism came as a publisher and advocate for Jewish education. Be-ginning with his 1927 plans to produce an anthology of Jewish material drawn from German literature, he became a major publisher of Jewish books in Ger-many, Palestine (later Israel), and the United States. Among the Schocken Ver-lag's first imprints were the initial volumes of the Martin Buber*-Franz Rosenzweig* translation of the Bible. He also founded Berlin's* Institute of He-brew Learning, a center that focused on Jewish poets in medieval Spain.

   Notwithstanding continued prosperity under Nazi rule, Schocken emigrated to Palestine in January 1934. Although his stores were sold in 1938 to "Aryan" buyers, Schocken retained the Verlag (transferred to Palestine, also in 1938; a second concern, Schocken Books, was founded in New York in 1945). He won international acclaim in the 1930s with publication of the collected works of Franz Kafka. But his cultural monument is the library of manuscripts, incunab-ula, and rare books he left to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Designed by Erich Mendelsohn,* the university's Schocken Library was built in 1936 and houses institutes for medieval Hebrew poetry and Jewish mysticism.

   REFERENCES:Siegfried Moses, "Salman Schocken"; Poppel, "Salman Schocken."