Gershom Scholem

Berlin in this era

Berlin in the modern era was a crucible where Jewish intellectual life flourished and fractured under the pressures of emancipation and catastrophe. After 1850, the city became a center of Jewish theological ferment—the cradle of the Reform movement under Abraham Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars who sought to reconcile Jewish tradition with European Enlightenment thought in lecture halls and newly constructed synagogues. By the early twentieth century, Berlin's Jews numbered over 170,000, prosperous merchants and professionals alongside yeshiva students and Zionist organizers debating the future of Jewish peoplehood in coffeehouses and meeting rooms. The city's intellectual prestige drew some of the era's greatest sages—Saul Lieberman's philological mastery, Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg's bridge-building between Eastern European and Western Jewish worlds. Then came the darkness: the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 shattered this world. Synagogues burned, libraries were ransacked, communities were annihilated. Few of the great scholars survived; those who did carried Berlin's lost intellectual legacy to Jerusalem, America, and the rebuilt yeshiva world of the postwar diaspora, their work a testament to a vanished golden age.

About Berlin

Berlin, the capital of Germany on the Spree, is documented from the thirteenth century and became the capital of Prussia in 1701 and of the German Empire in 1871. Its Academy of Sciences, founded in 1700 with Leibniz as first president, and its university, opened in 1810, made it a leading centre of mathematics, physics, chemistry and medicine. Jews were readmitted in 1671; Moses Mendelssohn made the city a hub of the Jewish Enlightenment, and the New Synagogue of 1866 marked the community's later prominence. In Christian thought, Friedrich Schleiermacher helped found the university, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer later studied and lectured. Under Nazi rule its Jews were driven out or deported; the Wall divided the city from 1961 to 1989.

In Berlin at the same time

Moritz Steinschneider, Azriel Hildesheimer, Elias Plessner, Hermann Cohen, Dovid Tzvi Hoffman, Bernhard Jacobsohn

Across the traditions, in Berlin at the same time

• Karl Weierstrassscience
• Rudolf Virchowscience
• Rudolf Lipschitzscience
• Adolf von Baeyerscience
• Emil Fischerscience
• Jacobus van 't Hoffscience
• Emil von Behringscience
• Paul Ehrlichscience