A tale of two families: Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and the generational conflict around Judaism - establishing Jewish identity under Nazi rule

In Order to Reconstruct the Past, Historians sometimes have to be voyeurs, looking into the'r subjects' most private lives. Their binoculars are diaries, memoirs and personal letters, through which they gain occasional glances into the living rooms of previous eras. Gershom Scholem's correspondence with his mother constitutes an extraordinary source of this kind. It is not only of essential value for the Scholem student, but, also, for the student of German-Jewish history in the first third of this century. In this respect, the Scholem correspondence is comparable to only one other similar set of letters, those of the German-Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig.(1)

The two publications are of special importance to the social historian becausc they disprove a common stereotype of German Jewry which has emerged from reading German-Jewish history backwards from its ultimate catastrophe. "It has become a common view," as Fritz Stern critically remarks, "to hold that German Jewry somehow represents the epitome of craven assimilation and submission."2 Many German Jews of the first third of the twentieth century cannot be classed as craven assimilationists; rather, they were eager to appropriate a knowledge of Judaism, one which their parents or grandparents could no longer pass on to them. The number of German Jews from assimilated

families who became interested in their Jewishness was small at the turn of the 20th century, but grew steadily in the Weimar period. By 1933, the Jewish community of Weimar Germany had created its own sub-culture with its belletristic literature, various publishing houses, literary journals, encyclopedias, and, perhaps most important, its own framework of adult education, the Lehrhaus.(3)

Sons

No two individuals better represent this movement of select numbers of German Jews coming from the periphery to the center of Jewish life than Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem.(4) At the same time, their lives stand for the two principal options of those German Jews who renewed their ties with Judaism. Rosenzweig envisioned the future of German Jews in Germany. He became the most profound Jewish thinker of Weimar Germany, the founder of a Jewish adult education system, and - together with Martin Buber - translator of the Hebrew Bible into German. Scholem, on the other hand, had - as he himself stated - "no longer any hopes for the amalgam known as |Deutschjudentum' and expected a renewal of Jewry only from its rebirth in Israel."(5) He emigrated to Palestine in 1923, at the age of twenty-five, becoming the founder of the academic discipline of Jewish mysticism and the foremost scholar of Jewish Studies in this century.

As Stephane Moses observed,

what [Rosenzweig and Scholem] had in common seems to have been essential: the same rejection of assimilation, the same personal itinerary of return to Judaism..., in short a similar internal journey of "dissimilation." But while the point of departure was virtually identical for both, their conceptions of the goal modern Judaism must set for itself were irreconcilable.(6)

The different destinations of Rosenzweig's and Scholem's intellectual itineraries have been much discussed; their common point of departure, however, has attracted much less attention.

Both Rosenzweig and Scholem left a large personal correspondence that provides an insight into their family relations. Although both were outstanding representatives of German Jewry, their letters help illustrate the generational conflict which could be observed among broader segments of German Jewry. They represented what may be called "the return of fallen Jews;" a revitalized interest in Judaism of a generation that was brought up without any concrete sense of its Jewishness. Their path, however, constituted but one of several possible options of selfperception and identification from which young German Jews could, and did, choose.

The four Scholem sons epitomize, in microcosm, the diversity of German Jewry at the beginning of the century. Gershom, born in Berlin in 1897, was the only one to become a Zionist, and he, alone, among his brothers, possessed a drive to learn more about Judaism. Although he was to become a world-renowned professor of Jewish mysticism later in life, he was not the most famous of the siblings while still in Germany. That honor went to his brother, Werner, who had joined the Social Democratic workers' youth organization in 1912, and was a member of the Reichstag for the Communist party from 1924 until 1928, when he diverged from the party line and was ousted from the KPD. Another brother, Erich, was a member of the liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei and represented the views of the mainstream organization of German Jews, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens. The oldest brother, Reinhold, was a German nationalist who supported thc conservative Deutsche Volkspartei, but, according to Gershom, would have joined the Deutschnationalen had they welcomed Jewish members. His assimilationist tendencies were even more pronounced than those of his father.(7) Both Reinhold and Erich ridiculed Gershom's "Judalzation," while they abhorred Werner's political development. Not too surprisingly, Gershom had the closest relationship with his Communist brother, who, likewise, rejected the bourgeois spirit of the rest of the family.