Salman Schocken

Salman Z. Schocken (Hebrew: שלמה זלמן שוקן‎‎) (October 29, 1877, Margonin, Province of Posen, German Empire (today Poland) – August 6, 1959, Pontresina, Switzerland) was a German Jewish publisher and businessman. He lived in Germany until 1934, when he first emigrated to Palestine, and then in 1940 to the United States.

Salman Schocken ("S" in Salman pronounced "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. They forced him to sell his German enterprises to Merkur AG, but he managed to recover some of his property after World War II.

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