Schwarzschild, Stefan Samuel |
Schwarzschild, Steven Samuel (1924–1989)

I. Family Background and Early Years in Germany during the Nazi Period
Steven Schwarzschild was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1924 into a well-known family that had been settled in Frankfurt since the late fifteenth century. Members of the Schwarzschild family had prospered in various endeavors over the centuries, notably in the wholesale textile trade. Other members of the family were intellectually and professionally prominent, including such notable figures in the twentieth century as the physicist Karl Schwarzschild and the anti-totalitarian journalist Leopold Schwarzschild.
Steven Schwarzschild’s parents met in the Jewish youth movement in Germany after the First World War. His father, Fritz Schwarzschild, was educated in the Philanthropin, the liberal Jewish elementary and secondary school in Frankfurt. Fritz Schwarzschild served in the German Army in the First World War, was decorated, and for a brief time at the war’s end took up politically radical views: he was a member of the governing Soviet of the city of Strassburg for the few days of its existence in 1918, before he and it were expelled by French forces as they reclaimed Strasbourg for France. By the early 1920s, Fritz Schwarzschild turned from political radicalism to Liberal Jewish interests. During the 1920s he was General Secretary of the Verband jüdischer Jugendvereine Deutschlands, the union of Jewish youth organizations that were neither exclusively Zionist or anti-Zionist – they were known as the “neutraler Verband,” in the sense that these organizations promoted both a committed Jewish life in diaspora while recognizing the importance of Palestine to Jews everywhere. Steven Schwarzschild’s parents were founding members of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus (the “Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus”), and Fritz Schwarzschild was active as a Jewish adult-education lecturer in towns and cities throughout Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fritz Schwarzschild joined the staff of the newly-created Reichsvertretung, the umbrella organization that endeavored to represent and coordinate Jewish interests in the face of Nazi persecution. Fritz Schwarzschild oversaw retraining programmes to facilitate Jewish emigration and remained with the Reichsvertretung until he and his family themselves emigrated from Germany in 1939.
Fritz Schwarzschild had been warned that Jewish adult men would be subject to arrest at home during the pogrom of November 8, 1938, but that they would probably not be molested travelling on the railways: as indeed he wasn’t, spending several days crisscrossing Germany on trains during the course of the Nazi roundups. But many Jewish young people in training programmes that he oversaw were rounded up, badly beaten in many cases, and sent to concentration camps. Fritz Schwarzschild spent urgent days and weeks rescuing as many of them as he could – with proof of their imminent emigration – from Buchenwald and other camps. And weeks after the pogrom, Fritz Schwarzschild and his family emigrated from Berlin and from Germany.
Steven Schwarzschild was 14-years old in January 1939 when he and his parents and his younger brother Henry departed from Germany. They travelled by air – for fear of Nazi harassment at the land frontiers – to Paris, where they awaited American immigration visas, which the family ultimately received in early August 1939, vouched for by a brother of Fritz Schwarzschild’s settled in New York since the 1920s. The family embarked from the port of Le Havre on August 10, 1939, and arrived in New York a week later, barely two weeks before the outbreak of war and the end of trans-Atlantic civilian shipping from France for the duration of the conflict.

II. Flight from Germany and Arrival in the United States
Upon arrival in New York, the family found lodgings in Washington Heights, a neighborhood of New York City that was a magnet for German Jewish refugees, and Steven Schwarzschild enrolled at George Washington High School there. He was 15-years old and already determined to become a rabbi, partly in the spirit of Rabbi Leo Baeck, whom the family had known and admired in Germany. As a high school pupil, he took courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, perhaps contemplating rabbinical training there at the home of the “Conservative” – neither Orthodox nor Reform – religious movement in America. But after completing high school he enrolled instead as a rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati: the home of the Reform movement in America. Steven Schwarzschild’s own family were Liberal Jews in the German tradition. The academic faculty at HUC in that era had a more German-Jewish cast than the JTS faculty, both in terms of personal origins and in the academic training of its faculty, the intellectual roots of whom were in German Wissenschaft-des-Judentums scholarship. JTS, by contrast, had a more Eastern European flavor, in terms of the personal backgrounds of its faculty and in their intellectual and religious outlooks. Hence, it seems, the choice of HUC.
As a rabbinical student at HUC, Steven Schwarzschild was particularly influenced by Samuel Atlas, a European-trained scholar of philosophy and Talmud who arrived in America and joined the HUC faculty in 1942, the year Schwarzschild first became a student there. Atlas introduced Schwarzschild to the writings of Hermann Cohen and the Marburg school of neo-Kantian thought, to which Schwarzschild adhered throughout his life and which became the centerpiece of his Jewish and philosophical outlook. Schwarzschild also found close and lifelong friendships with three HUC classmates: Arnold Jacob Wolf, who went on to be a widely-noted and challenging progressive rabbi in Chicago and at Yale University; Eugene Borowitz, who would become a leading theologian of American Reform Judaism; and Albert Friedlander, a fellow-refugee from Nazi Germany who would be Leo Baeck’s biographer, a prominent Liberal rabbi in London, and a voice for German/Jewish understanding and reconciliation.

III. Rabbinical Training at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and Rabbi in Berlin between 1948–1950 as Emissary of the WUPJ
Steven Schwarzschild graduated from HUC and received rabbinical ordination in June 1948. At that time, the World Union for Progressive Judaism, founded by Lily Montagu and headquartered in London, undertook to sponsor a Liberal rabbi in post-war Berlin, which lacked any such civilian rabbinical presence. Leo Baeck was president of the World Union. One of its vice-presidents was Julian Morgenstern, who had just retired in 1947 as president of HUC: he knew and recruited the newly-ordained Steven Schwarzschild – then just 24-years old – to the position in Berlin. Schwarzschild had not seen Berlin, or Germany, since his flight as a 14-year-old émigré in January 1939. He would now return as an American Reform rabbi, in the midst of the Soviet blockade of the Western sectors of Berlin.
The Jewish community in Berlin was sharply divided among survivors and displaced persons of widely different origins and outlooks. There were standard rabbinical services to be provided to this highly un-standard and traumatized Jewish community. But two unique issues also preoccupied the rabbi. The first was a wave of applications for conversion to Judaism.
Schwarzschild insisted that he had to adjudicate these according to Jewish law, although “to use its own terminology, le’hakel and not le’hachmir,” taking a more lenient rather than a stringent view where possible. In practice, this meant trying to enable persons who had been persecuted for their Jewish ancestry under the Nazis, or who had been loyal to their Jewish husbands or wives, or who at great risk had sheltered Jewish neighbors, to be accepted as Jews. Nonetheless, his determination to act within the bounds of Jewish law set Steven Schwarzschild apart from a purely “liberal” approach.
The second unique issue during his rabbinical tenure in Berlin was over the role of Jews in the burgeoning post-war black market, and the influence of black marketeers on the ethos of the Jewish community. The black-market underworld was plainly at odds with the values and instincts of the liberal German-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum in Schwarzschild’s own background. He was sympathetic to the desperation of Displaced Persons (DPs) to survive, by whatever means necessary, in the immediate aftermath of liberation from the Nazi camps. Nevertheless, he was openly concerned that corruption and criminality were becoming a way of life. Believing that black marketeering was now corrosive to Jewish morale, he did what he could to oppose it publicly. He thought the development of a kind of self-justifying demagoguery in Jewish black market circles especially worrisome: this was the origin, in his view, of a series of affairs in Berlin involving unjustified accusations of antisemitism, and ensuing public demonstrations and riots by Jewish groups or mobs, in one case against a concert tour by Yehudi Menuhin in post-war Germany, in another against the screening of the 1948 David Lean film Oliver Twist.
Steven Schwarzschild would probably have denied that his years in post-war Berlin affected the substance or style of his later work and thought. But his encounter with black market corruption cannot have detracted from the rather austere ethical idealism, and the intellectual and moral commitment to Hermann Cohen and Marburg neo-Kantian philosophy, which were lifelong themes of his teaching and writing.
There were at least two personal consequences of his service in Berlin. One was a continuing friendship with Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin and their families, who never forgot his support for the controversial concert tour and his public criticism of the protesters. The other loomed much larger in his life. Lily Holt had grown up in a Jewish family in London and joined Lily Montagu’s Jewish Girls’ Club as a young girl. In 1946, on Lily Montagu’s advice, she joined the Jewish Relief Unit, a London-based group loosely affiliated to the World Union which provided social service and rehabilitation for DPs and other Jewish survivors in the British zone of occupation in Germany. She met Steven Schwarzschild in Berlin, where they worked together on DP and other matters, fell in love, and married in London in 1949. Lily Schwarzschild died in 2009 in her home in St Louis, USA.

IV. Starting a Career as Rabbi and Scholar in the United States
Steven and Lily Schwarzschild returned to the USA from Germany in late 1950, and Steven Schwarzschild accepted a post as rabbi to a Reform congregation in Fargo, North Dakota. It might seem a remote place for the German/American and British couple to settle, but both were evidently charmed by the Jewish community there, and they lived there happily for nearly seven years. The rabbi was involved in various public events in North Dakota, including lobbying successfully for repeal of the state’s “anti-miscegenation” law prohibiting racially mixed marriages. While in Fargo, the rabbi earned a Doctorate of Hebrew Letters from HUC with a thesis on the philosophies of history of the quasi-Hegelian Nachman Krochmal and the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.
In 1957, Steven Schwarzschild accepted a post as rabbi to a larger congregation in Lynn, Massachusetts, which was ritually traditional though formally unaffiliated to any Jewish denomination. The rabbi enrolled the congregation in the Conservative religious organization in America, and he became the first US rabbi to be a member of both the national Reform and Conservative rabbinical bodies. At the time he had begun publishing widely on Jewish and philosophical topics – almost always, implicitly or explicitly, from a neo-Kantian “Marburg” point of view – and in 1958 he became editor of the quarterly journal Judaism, published in New York by the American Jewish Congress. The journal was prominent intellectually in the American Jewish world of the 1950s and 1960s and provided a platform for Jewish thinkers across the ideological and religious spectrum.
During his years near Boston, he also developed a bond with Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the Orthodox theologian, who deeply influenced his thought and writing, and also his personal religious practice over the course of the rest of his life.
In 1963, he was offered, and accepted, a year’s position as visiting professor of religion at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In the mid-1960s Jewish studies were newly coming into their own in American universities, and Brown University evidently sought him out because of his growing body of published writing and his editorship of Judaism. The visiting position was renewed for a second year, and he then accepted a permanent post as professor of philosophy and Judaic studies at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. From 1965 until the end of his life in 1989 he held this post at Washington University. The intellectual atmosphere was congenial, and he was professionally and personally very happy there. He died in St Louis in December 1989 of an aneurysm after only a few days’ illness, at the age of 65.

V. Schwarzschild’s Scholarship and His Lasting Legacy
Beginning in the 1950s, Steven Schwarzschild’s scholarly writing included some of the first serious studies in English of such German Jewish thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Hermann Cohen, which helped spark growing interest in them in the English-speaking world. Throughout his adult life, he propounded a rationalist and messianic philosophical and theological position, drawing on Hermann Cohen and “Marburg” neo-Kantianism. He always insisted that this position had concrete political implications: notably pacifism, a neo-Kantian – rather than Marxian – democratic socialism, and as he grew older, a growing alienation from political Zionism. He is described by Menachem Kellner, introducing a volume of Schwarzschild’s writing, as having successfully transplanted to North America the best of a long tradition of Jewish and philosophical reasoning rooted in Europe, enriching North American and world Judaism thereby.
There is continuing interest in Steven Schwarzschild’s work in the Jewish and academic worlds.

The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, edited by Menachem Kellner, SUNY Press, 1990: https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Pursuit-of-the-Ideal2.
Steven Schwarzschild, The Tragedy of Optimism: Writings on Hermann Cohen, edited by George Y. Kohler. SUNY Press, 2018. https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Tragedy-of-Optimism2.
Judaism and Modern Western Philosophy: Collected Writings of Steven S. Schwarzschild, eds. George Y. Kohler and Daniel H. Weiss. Springer 2024. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-69465-3.