Salman Schocken

Salman Schocken

Salman Z. Schocken (Hebrew: שלמה זלמן שוקן‎) (October 30, 1877, Margonin, Province of Posen, German Empire (today Poland) – August 21, 1959, Pontresina, Switzerland) was a German Jewish publisher and businessman.

Salman Schocken ("S" in Salman prounced "Z") was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in Posen. In 1901, he moved to Zwickau, a German town in southwest Saxony, to help manage a department store owned by his brother, Simon. Together they built up the business and established a chain of stores throughout Germany. In Chemnitz and Stuttgart, Schocken commissioned German-Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn to build branches of the Kaufhaus Schocken. In 1915, Schocken co-founded Zionist journal Der Jude (with Martin Buber). After Simon's death in 1929, when his friend Franz Rosenzweig also died, Salman Schocken became sole owner of the firm and established the Schocken Institute for Research on Hebrew Poetry in Berlin. In 1931, he founded the publishing company Schocken Verlag, which, at the time, reprinted the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible.

In 1933, the Nazis stripped Schocken of his citizenship and, the next year, he left Germany for Palestine and, in 1940 with his family except for one son, settled in the United States. In Jerusalem, he built the Schocken Library, also designed by Erich Mendelsohn, was a board member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and bought the newspaper Haaretz in 1937. His son, Gershom Schocken, became the chief editor in 1939 and held that position until his death in 1990. The Schocken family today has a 60% share of the newspaper. Salman Schocken also founded the Schocken Publishing House Ltd. and, in New York in 1945 with the aid of enlisting the aid of Hannah Arendt and Nahum Glatzer, opened another branch, Schocken Books. The Nazis forced him to sell his German enterprises to Merkur AG, but he managed to recover some of his property after the World War II. (Schocken Books has become a division of the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in turn to become from 1960 part of Random House, Inc., thence to be known as the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House, owned by Bertelsmann since 1998.)

Schocken became the patron of Shmuel Yosef Agnon, when he was a struggling writer in Palestine. Recognizing Agnon's literary talent, Schocken paid him a stipend that relieved him of financial worries and allowed him to devote himself to writing. (Agnon went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.)

Schocken's wife's name was Lily; they had five children. He died in 1959 while traveling to Switzerland.