Jüdischer Verlag

The Jüdischer Verlag was founded in Berlin months after Martin Buber demanded the establishment of a publishing house at the 5th Zionist Congress. It was designed to be a "central agency for the promotion of Jewish literature, art and scholarship." During the more than three decades of its existence, it achieved most of its goals by publishing a broad variety of translations from Hebrew and Yiddish literature, scholarly works on Jewish issues, and a wide spectrum of German Jewish literature and Zionist ideology. Around the turn of the century, the illustrations of E.M. Lilien and Hermann Struck in the publications of the Jüdischer Verlag reflected the first attempts to make not only the contents but also the exterior of Jewish books more attractive. By the end of the Weimar period, bibliographic activities had become a distinct and well-organized field in the cultural landscape of German Jews.

The Jüdischer Verlag was perhaps the greatest contributor to the formation of a full view of Jewish history and culture. It published both the Jüdische Lexicon and the Goldschmidt Talmud translation, the first complete German translation of the Babylonian Talmud that Lazarus Goldschmidt began around the turn of the century and finished in the Weimar period. The Jüdischer Verlag also produced the pioneering ten-volume World History of the Jewish People, by Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow was living in Berlin from 1922-1933 and had originally written his oeuvre in Russian. However, it first appeared in its German translation by Dr. Ahron Steinberg. Steinberg also translated Dubnow's most important Hebrew work, the two-volume history of Hassidism seen in the Bezalel Bookcase.