A Book, Its Publisher and Its Author

In early 1935 an advertisement for a new book on the history of Jewish philosophy made its way from Germany to the desk of Robert C. Binkley at Western Reserve University in Cleveland.¹ It survives in his papers, and caught my attention for its ephemerality: the sort of thing you find folded in half to serve as a bookmark in a volume in an antiquarian book store. That, and its elegant typography. It would be more or less forgettable if not for the time and place of its origin. I want to use it as a starting point for an exploration of Binkley’s knowledge and opinions of Nazi policies towards German Jews in the 1930s. He read in newspapers and listened on the radio to reports of book-burnings and the dismissal of Jewish professors, the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht; but he died a month before the German invasion of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and never had to conceive of the world with Auschwitz.

This post is a microhistory, exploring how much we can reconstruct of the setting of the flyer. In following the threads I’ve ended up learning something of the history of Jewish academic publishers in Germany in the 1930s – I hope that you, reader, will find the story as interesting as I did.

The Flyer

The flyer was printed in Breslau (now Wrocław) in Silesia, near the Polish border. It had passed through the office of Swets & Zeitlinger, book dealers on the Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam, whose stamp is on the front and back. It advertises Das Judentum und die Geistigen Strömungen des 19. Jahrhunderts (“Judaism and the Intellectual Currents of the 19th Century”) by Albert Lewkowitz, published by M. & H. Marcus. The publisher’s prices for unbound and bound copies of the book are overprinted in red, reflecting a reduction of two Reichsmarks. It seems to have come to Binkley because he was on Swets & Zeitlinger’s mailing list. Like other Dutch academic bookdealers, Swets invested a good deal of effort into the North American market after the late 1920s, when a new generation of the Swets family took over the business.²

Binkley forwarded the flyer to George F. Strong, head of the Hatch Library at Adelbert College, the men’s counterpart to Flora Stone Mather College, the women’s college, where Binkley taught. Binkley often recommended purchases to Strong.

It seems that Strong took Binkley’s advice, for there is was until recently a copy of Lewkowitz’s book at Case Western. Moreover, Binkley cited it in the Bibliographical Essay of his book Realism and Nationalism, published later in 1935, describing it as covering “[t]he Jewish side of European culture”. It therefore appears that the flyer’s arrival in Cleveland led directly to a sale, a reading and a published citation of Lewkowitz’s work.³

The Book

The book was the tenth and final volume in the series Grundriß der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums (“Foundations of Jewish Studies”), which had been published by Fock in Leipzig from 1906 to 1920. This volume therefore represents not only a move to a new publisher but the brief revival of the series after a hiatus of fifteen years.⁴

As described in the flyer, the book emphasizes the fusion of Jewish ideas into European intellectual life, starting at the time of the granting of citizenship (“Einbürgerung”) to Jews in European countries in the early 19th century. The tone of the flyer is astonishingly optimistic. It frames the project of that time: “This political process is of the deepest significance for the shaping of the cultural life of Jews. A new establishment of Jewish religious consciousness within the European cultural world is the problem which must be solved if Jewish and cultural consciousness are not to diverge.” And it concludes: “In a profound unity of life and creativity, the crisis of culture and its resolution, Jewish and European intellectual life have become one.” (pp. 2–3).

We find a similar optimism in a major publishing project begun in 1925: the Jubiläumsausgabe (Jubilee Edition) of the works of Moses Mendelssohn inaugurated in 1929, the history of which has been traced by Michah Gottlieb.⁶ Mendelssohn was a Jewish philosopher of the German Enlightenment and a central figure of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). At public events in 1929 in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the speeches emphasized his unique ability to synthesize German and Jewish culture, standing with both feet in traditional Judaism and also with both feet in German humanism. He was held up as a model not just for German Jews but for Germany itself as it worked to rebuild its standing in the world after the First World War. As Gottlieb describes it, the tone “reflect[s] a self-confident Jewish community at home in their German and Jewish identities. … The sense one gets is of a Jewish community whose time has arrived.”⁷

Five volumes of the Jubiläumsausgabe were published before the Nazi accession to power in 1933 forced a halt, though other volumes were close to completion. The following year the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for Jewish Studies, the project’s sponsor and publisher through its press, the Akademie-Verlag) was dissolved. Plans to revive the project now focused on the 150th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s death, in 1936. The public discourse on this occasion had a new tone: it emphasized Mendelssohn’s role as a defender of Jewish identity and the civil rights of Jews. Simon Rawidowicz wrote: “In 1929 we all thought Mendelssohn belonged to ancient history. … In 1933 ancient history became the burning problem of the day.”⁸ For Lewkowitz, the values of 1929 were still primary as late as 1934.

The Publisher

The publisher M. & H. Marcus was a Jewish family firm in Breslau, headed by Theodor Marcus, son of one of the founders. It was an academic publisher, with a series of Judaica. Breslau was the home of the third largest population of Jews among German cities (after Berlin and Frankfurt am Main), and was the home of the Breslau Jewish Seminary, established in the 1850s as a liberal seminary to provide training for the rabbinate. H. & M. Marcus handled many of the publications of the Seminary. It also became the official publisher of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums (Society for the Advancement of Jewish Studies) in 1931, and took over the publication of the Mendelssohn Jubiläumsausgabe in 1936.⁹ It stood therefore as a major Jewish publisher in Germany.

A year after Lewkowitz’s book was published, Theodor Marcus went to Reichenberg in Czechoslovakia (now Liberec in the Czech Republic; it was the chief city of the Sudetenland) to teach a week-long course on publishing to young bookdealers. He made an unfortunate remark against militarism: “Once the book trade marches in ranks of four, the book trade dies.” (Wenn der Buchhandel in Viererreihen marschiert, hört der Buchhandel auf!) This was evidently taken as an antifascist sentiment by the Propaganda Ministry, and Marcus’ German citizenship was revoked (the process of “Ausbürgerung” – providing a neat bookend to the enfranchisement of Jews described in the flyer). He was forced to sell up and flee to Prague, where he founded Academia Verlag – the name perhaps a reminiscence of the Akademie-Verlag. When Germany occupied Czechoslovakia he escaped again and moved to Chile. After the war he returned to Europe and settled in Switzerland, and wrote his memoirs of German publishing.¹⁰ It appears that the publications of M. & H. Marcus and Academia Verlag were acquired by the publisher Georg Olms, and Lewkowitz’s book was republished by them as a photo reprint in 1974.

Marcus’ experience shows the unsurprising perils that a Jewish publisher ran in 1935 when contravening Nazi policies even in minor ways. Yet Jewish publishing remained surprisingly robust into the late 1930s. Stefan Münz, who seems to have taken over Marcus’ Judaica publications (including the Jubiläumsausgabe)¹¹, was interested in having Willy Cohn write a history of the Jews of Breslau as late as August 1937.¹² But at the end of 1938 the remaining Jewish publishing houses in Germany were consolidated under the Nazi-controlled Jüdische Kulturbund, as part of the measures to exclude Jews from German economic life after Kristallnacht.¹³ Though the publishers were supposed to have lost their ability to publish independently, it appears that Münz managed to produce unbound copies of a volume of the Jubiläumsausgabe probably in early 1939, but that most of the copies were destroyed by the Gestapo before they could be distributed.¹⁴

The Author

Albert Lewkowitz was an instructor (Dozent) in philosophy at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Jewish Theological Seminary) in Breslau, and the book was the third part of his study of European Jewish philosophy (the first two parts covering the Renaissance and the Enlightenment). It therefore represents thought about Jewish identity in Germany that he had begun years before the Nazis came to power.

The experience of the Breslau Jews in the 1930s is vividly described in the diary of a colleague of Lewkowitz, the historian Willy Cohn. Like Lewkowitz, Cohn was committed to a Jewish identity with deep roots in German culture, and even in German patriotism: he was proud of his military service in the First World War. His books were published by H. & M. Marcus. As the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis came into force he worked successfully to get his older children out of the country, and he and his wife visited Palestine with a view to emigration, but ultimately did not pursue the necessary visas.

In November 1941 Cohn, his wife and the two girls were sent by train to Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania with hundreds of Breslau Jews, all of whom were murdered on their arrival – some of the earliest victims of the Holocaust.¹⁶

Lewkowitz stayed in Breslau until after the Kristallnacht pogroms in November, 1938, which led to the closing of the Seminary and the confiscation of its library.¹⁷ Cohn, always conflicted about emigration, described a conversation with Lewkowitz in April 1939: “Apparently, all he thinks about is how to get out. I have always hated such egocentric thinking.”¹⁸ Lewkowitz and his wife Hildegard ultimately moved to Amsterdam, where he taught at the Netherlands Jewish Theological Seminary.¹⁹ From Amsterdam Lewkowitz applied for a visa to immigrate to the United States. He was included by the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in their program to bring German Jewish scholars to the US, and once it was established that his position at the Seminary (rather than a university) qualified him under the State Department’s rules, his prospects for a visa looked good.²⁰ Unfortunately, visa applications from the Netherlands were handled by the US consulate in Rotterdam, and in May 1940 the consulate and Lewkowitz’ file were destroyed by German bombs (as was Otto Frank’s application).²¹ Before he could gather replacement documents (probably an impossible task) the US had closed its consulates in German-occupied territories, which now included the Netherlands.

Lewkowitz experienced the same treatment from the German occupying forces as did Dutch Jews, and was in fact a neighbor of the Frank family in Amsterdam. He is mentioned briefly in an entry in Anne Frank’s diary as one of the friends who checked on their old flat after they went into hiding. Lewkowitz and his wife were taken from Amsterdam to the Dutch transit camp for Jews at Westerbork in 1943, and from there to the “exchange camp” at Bergen-Belsen in 1944. They were among the few who were actually exchanged. Otto Frank included his name in a list of people who should receive a copy of Anne Frank’s diary when it was published. Lewkowitz and his wife settled in Haifa, where he died in 1954.

The ways in which Nazi Jewish policy brought lives to ruin are hardly news. For Binkley in 1935, though, an American professor raised to revere German academia (his mentor Ralph Lutz took his Ph.D. at Heidelberg), there must have been a process by which the idea that a book like Das Judentum und die Geistigen Strömungen des 19. Jahrhunderts would be banned in its home country became thinkable – a process nudged along by the book burnings and dismissals of Jewish faculty, and the mounting stories of atrocities. In a future post I mean to explore Binkley’s reaction to Nazi policies over the course of the 1930s.

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1. See above. I’ve scanned the flyer and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.↩︎

2. Hendrik Edelman, “Nijhoff in America: Booksellers from the Netherlands and the Development of American Research Libraries – Part II,” Quaerendo 42, no. 1 (January 1, 2012), pp. 57–58.↩︎

3. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871, The Rise of Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), p. 330 in the first printing. The Bibliographic Essay was updated by the publishers in December 1958, and printings after that date have the citation on p. 331, introduced with “Judaism and its position in European intellectual history are discussed in …”. Binkley put Realism and Nationalism into its final shape while he was teaching in New York over the summer of 1935. It is possible that he based the citation only on the flyer, or that he used New York Public Library’s copy of Lewkowitz, one of the eight copies in American libraries listed in the 1956 National Union Catalog (vol. 331 p.66), and the only copy in New York (see the map included in this post). On the basis of the NUC or the CWU catalog I can’t be certain that either copy was purchased in early 1935, however.↩︎

4. “Grundriss der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums,” in Wikipedia (German).↩︎

5. Volker Dahm, Das jüdische Buch im Dritten Reich. 1: Die Ausschaltung der jüdischen Autoren, Verleger und Buchhändler (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1979), col. 298.↩︎

6. Michah Gottlieb, “Publishing the Moses Mendelssohn Jubiläumsausgabe in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 53, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 57–75.↩︎

7. Gottlieb, p. 65.↩︎

8. Gottlieb, p. 72.↩︎

9. Gottlieb, pp. 67–68.↩︎

10. Theodor Marcus, “Als Jüdischer Verleger vor und nach 1933 in Deutschland,” Bulletin des Leo Baecks Institut 7, no. 26 (1964), pp. 151–2.↩︎

11. Gottlieb, p. 68.↩︎

12. Cohn, pp. 149–150.↩︎

13. Dahm, pp. 164–167.↩︎

14. Gottlieb, p. 74 n. 100.↩︎

15. Cohn, pp. 314–16.↩︎

16. Cohn, p. xviii.↩︎

17. Jenka Fuchs, “From the Critical Study of Jewish History and Culture to ‘Enemy Research’ and Provenance Research: The Library of the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary,” in Collecting Educational Media, ed. Anke Hertling and Peter Carrier, Making, Storing and Accessing Knowledge (Berghahn Books, 2022), pp. 158ff.↩︎

18. Cohn, p.246.↩︎

19. Most of the biographical details for Lewkowitz presented here are from the Anne Frank Stichting Knowledge Base.↩︎

20. Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College.” In Judaism Within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 356.↩︎

21. Rebecca Erbelding and Gertjan Broek, “German Bombs and US Bureaucrats: How Escape Lines from Europe Were Cut Off.” US Holocaust Museum (blog), July 6, 2018.↩︎