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This is the story of the reemergence of the Jewish community in
Germany after its near total destruction during the Holocaust. In
western Germany, the community needed to overcome deep cultural,
religious, and political differences before uniting. In eastern
Germany, the small Jewish community struggled against communist
opposition. After coalescing, both Jewish communities, largely
isolated by the international Jewish community, looked to German
political leaders and the two German governments for support.
Through relationships with key German leaders, they achieved
stability by 1953, when West Germany agreed to pay reparations to
Israel and to individual Holocaust survivors and East Germany
experienced a wave of antisemitic purges. Using archival materials
from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as
governmental and political party records, Geller elucidates the
reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews'
critical ties to political leaders.
This is the story of the reemergence of the Jewish community in
Germany after its near total destruction during the Holocaust. In
western Germany, the community needed to overcome deep cultural,
religious, and political differences before uniting. In eastern
Germany, the small Jewish community struggled against communist
opposition. After coalescing, both Jewish communities, largely
isolated by the international Jewish community, looked to German
political leaders and the two German governments for support.
Through relationships with key German leaders, they achieved
stability by 1953, when West Germany agreed to pay reparations to
Israel and to individual Holocaust survivors and East Germany
experienced a wave of antisemitic purges. Using archival materials
from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as
governmental and political party records, Geller elucidates the
reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews'
critical ties to political leaders.
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.
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