The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959

I have read a number of reviews of this book all of which praise Anthony David for his detailed study of the life of Zalman Schocken. David paints the portrait of a remarkable Renaissance figure, an innovative empire- building businessman , a great patron of the Arts, a humanist, Zionist builder of cultural life in the land of Israel. Schocken was born in Posen in Prussia, but built a business empire throughout Germany. His department- stores were forerunners of today's Malls. He combined in them a sense of the aesthetic ( Bauhaus architect Eric Mendlesohn was his designer) with a real understanding of the customers' needs. He also was an autodidact a lover of German and Jewish culture. The shock of his life came with the coming of the Nazis to power, and from then on he shifted most of his activities to Jewish cultural work. He also to a degree recreated a bit of the business empire he had in Germany, in then Palestine and the United States. 'Schocken Books' is one of his cultural monuments. He was the patron of Buber,Scholem, Elsa Lasker-Schuler, and most notably Agnon. Schoken had an eye for talent and an ability to support and sustain it. One of his major moves was his purchase of the newspaper 'Haaretz' as wedding gift for his son. This would become the Israeli equivalent of the NY Times. Schocken was also a great patron of the Hebrew University. Schocken contributed much to the building of Hebrew culture in the land of Israel, and Jewish culture throughout the world. A highly recommended work.

This is a professionally-written biography of the late German-Jewish philanthroper Zalman Schocken. I learned many things from this biography that I hadn't known about his life: that he was actually from Prussian-controlled Poland and thus, was not a "blue blood" German Jew, about his innovations in commerce which lead to the massive successes of his department store chain, and his relationship with other German-Jewish figures in the Zionist movement such as Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and S.Y. Agnon. I learned that Agnon kept his right-wing and very anti-Arab attitudes out of his books because his 40-year patron, Zalman Schocken, told him to do it. I learned that Schocken Books published a whole line of Jewish-subject-related books in Germany after the Nazis came to power, even exploiting their sepearation laws to be a "Jewish publisher." Up until the Nazis come to power, Schocken appears to be a man of talent and relevancy, both in the realm of business and also in the realm of Jewish cultural revival. The last 25 years of his life are portrayed as those of a man who has had the cultural and business orientation ripped away from him by Adolf Hiter and in relying on his previously-used models of success and meaning,falling into irrelevance. The author has worked hard to understand all of the angles of Schocken's life: as a businessman, as a successful autodidact and lover of literature and philosophy, as a philathroper, and even a bit about his personal life and his relationship with his family. The author has also mastered the intellectural and political background in which Schocken's life occurs, both in Germany and then in Jewish-Palestine, which eventually became Israel. Zalman Schocken was certainally a character and personality of an exceptional and excentric order and this books comprehensively explores all aspects of his life, his business endeavors, his social visions, his philonthropic endeavors, his ideas about culture, Judaism, and his relationships with other people.