Salman Schocken

Who was Salman Schocken?

Salman Z. Schocken was a German Jewish publisher and businessman.

Salman Schocken 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 1910 Salman Schocken married Zerline Ehrmann, a twenty-year-old German Jewish woman from Frankfurt. They had four sons and one daughter. Their eldest son, Gustav Gershom Schocken, succeeded his father at the Schocken publishing house in Tel Aviv and at the Haaretz newspaper. In 1915, Schocken co-founded Zionist journal Der Jude. 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.