Memorable protagonists make a story, and the Scholem family members lend their impressive personalities to this engaging tale by Jay Howard Geller. Indeed, the Scholem family as portrayed here calls to mind the merchant family in Thomas Mann's epic novel, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901). The Scholems were printshop owners in Berlin for three generations; this is the story of their origins, upward climb, influence, emigration, and decline. Geller focuses on the biographies and choices of two generations, each with four Scholem brothers. The first set, born in the 1860s and 1870s, participated in processes of urbanization and modernization that were central to the rise of Liberal Judaism. Arthur Scholem was the oldest; his four sons, Reinhold, Erich, Werner, and Gerhard (later Gershom), were all born in the 1890s. With this second set of brothers, Geller compellingly tells of four very different, yet on some level representative, German-Jewish experiences in the early twentieth century. The Weimar and Nazi eras feature prominently, as does the First World War. Whereas Gershom Scholem and Werner Scholem are well-known figures in German and Jewish studies (and the subjects of numerous recent biographies by scholars including David Biale, Amir Engel, Noam Zadoff, Mirjam Zadoff, and Ralf Hoffrogge), The Scholems is the first study of the whole family.

Through concrete aspects of daily life as it unfolded for the Scholem family, Geller tells the history of modern German Jewry more broadly. In doing so, Geller seamlessly offers a detailed and accessible look at political, economic, and social developments, with careful attention to class, gender, and antisemitism. For example, the Scholem family printed money for the government during hyperinflation. They printed gramophone records and Judaica (including for the Soncino Society of Jewish book collectors) in the late 1920s. After the Nazis came to power, they relied on Jewish customers such as the Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau. Letters exchanged between family members—especially Arthur's wife Betty and her son Gershom, an ardent Zionist based in Jerusalem beginning in 1923—shed additional light on bourgeois culture and traditions, household roles, as well as family dynamics, travels, and struggles. For Geller, the romantic choices and partners of the Scholem men illustrate a range of social phenomena, including intermarriage between Jews and Christians (Werner's wife Emmy), Orthodox Jewry (Gershom's first wife Escha), and the tendency of quarreling couples to emigrate first and then later divorce (Erich and his first wife, Edith).

In The Scholems, the fates of individual family members are also married to the fates of political movements. Gershom's political influence was not based in Germany, but rather among Yishuv Jews living in Palestine. As printers who took over the family business, Reinhold and Erich were invested in the success of German democracy. Erich supported the liberal German Democratic Party; Reinhold was a German patriot who joined the center-right German People's Party. Geller underscores the tremendous political impact of Werner, who “insisted that the Communists run their own candidate in the [1925] election, rather than endorse a centrist or socialist candidate,” thereby robbing the centrist candidate of votes and resulting in the election of Paul von Hindenburg (101). Werner was arrested in 1933 and figured in Nazi propaganda about “typically Jewish physical features” (155). As both a Jew and a prominent communist, Werner was incarcerated throughout the 1930s and killed in Buchenwald in 1940. In 1932, Werner presciently commented on the “disintegration of the Jewish bourgeoisie,” noting that “the decline of the family is taking place very quickly” (124). This remark also supports Geller's take on 1930s German Jewry.

One of the main interventions Geller makes is to reframe German-Jewish history using the years 1812 to 1939 as signposts. Geller considers this period of just over 125 years to be a “long German-Jewish century” in the vein of the “long nineteenth century” referenced by scholars of modern Europe (6, 171). By choosing the emancipation of Jews in Prussia in 1812 as a starting point, Geller elevates the significance of Prussia and Berlin within German-Jewish studies. This relatively late date notably disregards many centuries of earlier achievements by Jews in German-speaking lands. Yet within Jewish studies more generally, Geller's emphasis on key nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century developments in central Europe can be taken as an implicit response to historian Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century (2004), in which Slezkine claims only the twentieth century as the Jewish century. In contrast to Slezkine, who is more invested in Russian/Soviet contexts and migration, Geller sees the Second World War as a hard stop for (German-)Jewish flourishing. Everything thereafter falls into the category of “afterlives” (193), a term that limits the possibilities for new forms of German-Jewishness in Germany or its diasporas.

Still, Geller is especially attentive to the paths of German Jews beyond Germany. Gershom Scholem's friendship with Walter Benjamin—including their time together in Switzerland and Paris—is nicely woven into the family history. Chapters 6 and 8 deal extensively with Zionism, the Yishuv, and migration to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. These chapters serve as an important reminder that the study of German Jews is tied in many ways to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Individuals including Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergmann, and Hannah Arendt aimed to shape perceptions of this conflict in different ways. Scholem and Bergmann were involved in the political movement Brit Shalom, which advocated for “Jews and Arabs to live together in a binational state” and recommended policies that were highly controversial among Yishuv Zionists (132). In addition, chapters 7 and 9 examine other factors that influenced emigration from Nazi Germany, including the economics of emigration.

Jay Howard Geller's fresh, extensively researched, and wonderfully readable account of the Scholem family should become required reading for students and scholars of German-Jewish history and culture. It is especially well suited to those interested in the Weimar-era Jewish Renaissance, Jewish intellectual history, Zionism, or responses to antisemitism. In fewer pages and far less dialogue than an epic novel, The Scholems teaches German-Jewish history through one family's experiences.