Salman Schocken (1877–1958), who founded one of the most modern department store chains in the Weimar Republic, started his entrepreneurial endeavors with a small shop in Zwickau. Throughout his career, he sustained cultural institutions and individual Jewish writers, collected literature and art, supported the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founded the Schocken Verlag Berlin, the most important Jewish publishing house during the Nazi era. After his family’s emigration to Mandate Palestine in 1934, the forced sale of all stores, and the closure of the publishing house at the end of 1938, Schocken continued his work first in Jerusalem and later in New York, under completely different conditions.
The archive documenting the variety of Schocken’s activities has been preserved at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem. Schocken himself designed this repository’s arrangement, which in its current state reflects modern organizational practices and ideas as well as the challenges multiple forced translocations and recontextualizations posed to his idea of archival order. As a structured entity, the archive keeps records of separate fields of Schocken’s activities and sometimes the nature of their interrelation. It reveals transnational social networks as well as losses: the loss of people, property, and documents. Strategies of »self-archiving« and historical documentation during the Nazi era constitute a particularly telling example of attempts to confront absences and destruction.
Against this backdrop, the workshop explored the Schocken Archive in Jerusalem as a transnational repository of knowledge and a roadmap to examine Schocken’s life and work from a new angle.
Speakers
Asher Biemann, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Emily Bilski, Curator and Art Historian, Jerusalem
Susanna Brogi, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg
Dani Hacker, JTS Schocken Institute for Jewish Research
Miriam Frenkel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yemima Hadad, Leipzig University
Caroline Jessen, Dubnow Institute, Leipzig
Markus Krah, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, NY
Amit Levy, University of Haifa
Enrico Lucca, Dubnow Institute, Leipzig
Stefanie Mahrer, University of Bern
Philipp Messner, Schule für Gestaltung Basel
Mike Rottmann, Goethe University Frankfurt
Judith Siepmann, Dubnow Institute, Leipzig
Ada Wardi, Graphic Designer and Curator, Tel Aviv
Yfaat Weiss, Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Dubnow Institute, Leipzig
Michael Zank, Boston University, MA
Organization
Leipzig University, Chair of Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Theology
Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow
In close cooperation with the
JTS – Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, Jerusalem.
Concept
Caroline Jessen and Yemima Hadad
