Schwarzschild, Fritz

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), philosopher and theologian, belonged to the important personalities of the German Jewish intellectual life after the First World War. Franz Rosenzweig started the Freie Juedische Lehrhaus, where he tried to teach Jewish tradition and culture as part of real life experience and in this way bring it closer to assimilated German Jewry. He wrote several philosophical works and translated the Hebrew Bible with Martin Buber. The Franz Rosenzweig collection contains manuscripts of many of Franz Rosenzweig’s smaller works, some of his personal items, and correspondence with his parents and with more than fifty of his friends and colleagues. The collection contains other correspondence, and a great number of newspaper clippings, photographs, and some objects.

The collection contains the records of the Jewish Agricultural Settlement Corporation (JASC), the American branch of the Juedische Landarbeit GmbH, an organization that sought to resettle German-Jewish farmers to Brazil during the 1930s. The files mostly concern the legal and financial maintenance of the organization, but there are also some documents about the settlements and the settlers, particularly from 1939 to 1941. The documents after 1946 concern refunds and the legal administration of JASC.