The Brauer Family

On June 28, 1895, in Berlin, Erich Brauer was born. Nothing in the biography of this child from a German Jewish family suggested that he would become one of the pioneers of Jewish anthropology in Mandatory Palestine. Yet the trajectory emerged early: as an adolescent, he joined the Zionist youth movement Jung Juda, a first anchor in a dual loyalty that would never leave him — to the rigor of German science and to the cause of the Jews. A talented graphic artist, he possessed an exceptional visual eye that his contemporaries immediately noticed: Shelomo Dov Goitein, who would become one of the greatest historians of the medieval Mediterranean world, would describe him as "an observer with a keen eye and a man endowed with profound humanity and wisdom."

It was at Leipzig that Brauer received his training as an ethnologist, within the so-called diffusionist school, then one of the most reputed in Europe for the comparative study of cultures. He defended a thesis on the religion of the Herero and on the "Hamitic thesis," familiarizing himself with the most rigorous methods of German Völkerkunde — systematic observation, collection of vernacular terms, attention paid to objects of material culture. This intellectual baggage, he would bring to Mandatory Palestine, where he settled and began inquiries that no one before him had conducted with this method on the Eastern Jewish communities of Jerusalem.

The holy city concentrated then, in its working-class quarters, an extraordinary fabric of communities: Yemenites and Kurds, Persians and Bukharans, recent immigrants and families rooted for generations. Brauer was fascinated by what Jerusalem offered to those willing to look: the "life of the living people," according to his own expression — not canonical texts, not abstract theology, but daily practices, objects, rites, languages, clothing, trades. He conducted his fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s, within the nascent Hebrew University of Jerusalem, contributing to laying the foundations of a local anthropology that did not yet exist.

This approach carried a significance that transcended science. Brauer affirmed, by the very choice of his subjects, that the Jews of Yemen and Kurdistan deserved the same attentive gaze as any object of European ethnographic research. He implicitly refused the cultural hierarchy that opposed a supposedly "modern" Ashkenazi Judaism to Eastern Judaisms reputed to be frozen or marginal. This intellectual stance joins the fundamental Jewish requirement — kol Yisraël arevim ze laze, "all the children of Israel are responsible for one another" — transposed into the realm of knowledge: no branch of Israel can be ignored or despised without the whole being impoverished by it. In this, Brauer's work fully participates in the Jewish value of talmud Torah extended to knowledge of the world.

Ethnologie der jemenitischen Juden (Heidelberg, 1934)

In 1934, Brauer published in Heidelberg his first major work: Ethnologie der jemenitischen Juden. The work was the fruit of in-depth inquiries conducted among Yemenite Jews settled in Mandatory Palestine, a community that had come in successive waves from a distant Arabian peninsula to establish itself in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Shelomo Dov Goitein reviewed it in vibrant terms, praising the rigor of a researcher "methodical and meticulous" who had produced "a literary work that is a masterpiece in its field." The study contained in particular a thorough analysis of Judeo-Yemenite vernacular terms, religious practices, customs and way of life of a community that had lived for centuries in near-isolation.

The year 1934 was also, for the Jews of Germany, the year of accelerated rise of Nazi peril. That a Jewish researcher from Berlin, trained at the finest German universities, published in Heidelberg — in the language of his future persecutors — an ethnographic monograph on his Yemenite brothers speaks to something of the quiet strength of a vocation. Brauer did not yield to political urgency: he continued to build, stone by stone, the edifice of knowledge, convinced that this knowledge was itself a form of resistance to oblivion.

The Jews of Kurdistan (published posthumously, 1947/1993)

The premature death of Erich Brauer, on May 9, 1942 in Petah Tikva, from the consequences of a rare disease — Scheuermann's disease — interrupted a work still in full formation. He was forty-six years old. He left behind five original journals, deposited in 1975 at the National Library of Israel by the Ethnographic Society of Israel, as well as photocopies of texts and objects collected during his inquiries. He also left a manuscript on the Jews of Kurdistan.

This second major work was not lost. Published in Hebrew in 1947, then translated into English and edited by Raphael Patai at Wayne State University Press in 1993, The Jews of Kurdistan: An Ethnological Study appeared before the academic world in a posthumous form that testifies to the loyalty of Brauer's colleagues to his legacy. The work was also translated into Turkish, a sign of a reach extending beyond Anglophone and Hebrew circles.

The Jews of Kurdistan — speaking Neo-Aramaic dialects, living in the mountains straddling present-day Iraq, Turkey and Iran — represented a considerable scientific challenge. Geographically isolated, they had maintained forms of life and religious practice of remarkable antiquity. Brauer documented them with the same rigor he had applied to the Yemenite Jews: direct observation, collection of testimonies, analysis of ritual practices, family structures and relations with neighboring populations — Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians. The posthumous transmission of the work by Raphael Patai, himself an ethnologist and major figure in twentieth-century Jewish anthropology, speaks to something of the scholarly solidarity that ran through this milieu: to take care of another's work after his death, so that collective Memory might benefit from it, is in itself a virtue that the Jewish tradition recognizes and honors under the name of gemilut hasadim — acts of disinterested kindness.

On January 4, 1929, in a Jewish family of Russian émigrés settled in Vienna, Erich Brauer was born — the man the world would know as Arik Brauer. His father was a shoemaker in the working-class district of Ottakring. Nothing in this modest childhood of 1930s popular Vienna promised anything other than the ordinary — but the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 shattered that ordinariness and plunged the family into the extraordinary of persecution.

On Kristallnacht, in November 1938, young Erich was hidden by the caretaker of his father's workshop. His father was arrested and died in a concentration camp. Erich survived in occupied Vienna, concealing the mandatory yellow star, blending into the neighborhood's population, living clandestinely in the very heart of the Reich's capital. This experience — surviving a few hundred meters from those who wanted to kill you, in the city of your own birth — marked his view of the world and of humanity forever. It would permeate his entire future work, from the blood-red depiction of Abel's murder by Cain to the strange creatures populating his dreamlike forests.

Immediately after the war, in 1945, Arik Brauer enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Albert Paris Gütersloh. There he met Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden — five artists whom history remembered together under the name Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Their common style combined the technical precision of Flemish masters, the dreamlike depth of Surrealism, and a mythological and mystical imagination that, in Brauer's case, drew explicitly from Jewish tradition — the Bible, the Kabbalah, Hasidic tales, the memory of the Shoah.

After his studies, Brauer traveled throughout Europe and Africa, danced in France, performed on stage as a singer, and received recognition for his career in this domain — the Amadeus Prize was awarded to him for his contribution to Austrian song, a singular blend of Yiddish culture, popular music, and avant-garde. In 1957, he went to Israel, where he met Naomi Dahabani, who became his wife. The couple had three children; one of his daughters, Timna Brauer, became an accomplished musician and singer herself.

Arik Brauer's visual work is today preserved in major Austrian and international museums. The Leopold Museum in Vienna dedicated a major retrospective to him in 2014. The Jewish Museum of Vienna paid him tribute, emphasizing that his multifaceted work participated in a rebuilt Jewish cultural presence in post-war Austria. Through painting, song, architecture, and poetry, Arik Brauer affirmed for seven decades that the Jewish people remained alive — that its myths, its colors, and its stories deserved to be translated into visible, audible, inhabitable forms. He died in Vienna on January 24, 2021, in the very city where he was born, where he had nearly died as a child, and where he had ultimately triumphed.

Before the ethnologist and the artist, before Mandate Palestine and post-war Austria, the name Brauer carried the memory of a trade. In the Central and Eastern Europe of preceding centuries, the Jewish brewer and innkeeper occupied a singular position at the intersection of economy and sociability. The tavern run by a Jew in the Polish or Galician shtetl was at once a commercial hub, a meeting space between the Jewish community and the surrounding peasantry, and sometimes the only place where men of different stations could speak to one another.

In noble Poland, the system of arrenda — the leasing of seignorial rights over taverns, distilleries and breweries — frequently placed Jews at the head of these establishments. The nobleman owned the lands and the monopoly of production; the Jew managed its daily operation, assuming the relationship of proximity with peasants, selling beer and spirits, keeping accounts, sometimes granting credit. This economic position was at once an opportunity and a vulnerability: it exposed Jewish intermediaries to the resentments that the seignorial system aroused, making them bear, in the eyes of part of the peasantry, responsibility for an exploitation of which they were not the ultimate beneficiaries. Antony Polonsky demonstrated how this economic structure, characteristic of the Polish-Lithuanian regions from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, contributed to defining the place of Jews in the urban and rural society of Eastern Europe [Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 2012].

It was in this universe that the name Brauer probably found its origin, or at least its social confirmation. Ashkenazi brewers and innkeepers were assigned, at the moment of the hereditary fixing of surnames, the name that designated their activity in German — the language of Prussian and Austro-Hungarian administration. The form Brauer, without Slavic suffix or toponymic marker, ties its Jewish bearers to the germanophone cultural area: Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia-Moravia, or Austrian Galicia where German was the official language. The variant Bräuer, with umlaut, is its direct phonetic equivalent, while parallel forms such as Breuer, Breier or Brayer testify to the dialectal diffusion of the same root in the Rhineland and Alsatian areas.

The etymology ties the name to Middle Low German brūwer and Middle High German briuwer, "brewer." Alexander Beider and Lars Menk, in their reference dictionaries, document precisely this stratum of Jewish professional surnames, for both the Judeo-German area and for the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia. They also recall the methodological caution that is required: Brauer is a common German name, borne equally by very numerous Christian families in northern Germany, and the Jewish belonging of a given bearer must be established case by case through community sources and confessional registers [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German Surnames].

The generalization of hereditary surnames among Jews of the Germanic lands resulted from a series of legislative measures concentrated between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Edict of Toleration of Joseph II (1782), followed by the Patent of 1787, obliged Jews of the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs — Austria, Bohemia, Galicia — to adopt fixed, heritable German names. Prussia followed with the Edict of Emancipation of 1812. It was within this legal and administrative framework that surnames such as Brauer, descriptive and occupational in nature, crystallized and departed from the domain of local designation to become durable family names.

This fixation did not occur uniformly. In communities of the Rhineland and western Prussia, the process was often earlier and more orderly; in eastern Galicia, where imperial administration encountered a more dispersed community and one less literate in official languages, names were sometimes assigned by local functionaries according to less coherent logics. The result is that families bearing the same name Brauer may originate from very different contexts — one family from Posen, another from Brody, a third from Prague — with no kinship connecting them.

From the 1880s onward, massive Jewish migrations from Eastern Europe transformed the geography of the name. The persecutions of the Russian Empire — the pogroms of 1881–1884, legislation of the 1880s restricting the rights of Jews, then the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 — triggered a massive exodus toward Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America. The bearers of the name Brauer thus spread far beyond their area of origin: Brauer communities became established in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires. In the United States, where the name is today strongly represented, it encompasses both descendants of Jewish migrants and descendants of Christian German migrants — testimony to the fundamental homonymy of an occupational surname over which no group holds exclusivity.

Jonathan Frankel analyzed how, among Jews of the Russian Empire between 1862 and 1917, movements blending socialism and nationalism — the Bund, territorial Zionism, political Zionism — mobilized entire generations of young people precisely from these families of small merchants, artisans, and innkeepers whose name Brauer carried the memory [Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 1981]. Bearers of the name Brauer presumably shared these ideological shifts — emigration westward, adherence to revolutionary movements, aliya to Palestine — without any individual file allowing it to be documented with precision. This is the probable collective horizon of a widespread name, inferred from context, rather than the trajectory of a single lineage.

The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism was not born from a manifesto or a prior theory. It emerged from the friendship of five young artists who found themselves at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1945-1951: Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Anton Lehmden and Arik Brauer. What these men shared was not an aesthetic doctrine but a common experience — that of having lived through or survived the Nazi catastrophe in the very city that had been, at least partially, complicit in it.

For Arik Brauer, art was from the outset charged with a mission that the experience of persecution made urgent: to name what had nearly been erased, to represent what the torturers had sought to render invisible, to restore to Jewish tradition a visibility that the years of concealment had to take from it. His style, unmistakable among all others, conjugated the precision of the Flemish masters — whom he studied and copied with the rigor of a conservator — and a visionary imagination nourished by Jewish sources: the Hebrew Bible, the Kabbalah, the tales of the Talmud and the Hasidic stories that oral tradition had transmitted. His paintings peopled forests of hybrid creatures, skies of winged prophets, backgrounds of landscapes ablaze with colors, some of which recalled the illuminations of medieval manuscripts.

Among his most celebrated works, his representation of the murder of Abel by Cain — blood red, a contained violence that resembles a stifled cry — says something essential about what Brauer meant by "painting": not decoration, not entertainment, but the making visible of what human consciousness carries of the heaviest and most irreducible. Through the figure of Cain, it is the entire question of evil and its transmission that Brauer posed on canvas — a question that the Shoah had made burning with actuality for every Jew of his generation.

But Arik Brauer was not only a painter. He was also a singer-songwriter, dancer, architect and poet. He designed sets for opera houses, recorded albums mixing Yiddish and German, Hebrew and Viennese dialect, and received the Amadeus Prize for the whole of his musical career. This plurality of forms of expression was not dispersion: it was coherence. Brauer believed that Jewish art, to be living, must invest all the forms through which humanity communicates itself — color, voice, body, stone, word. The reconstruction of Jewish culture in postwar Austria was not a solitary project: it was a collective gesture, made possible by the survival of a few and by their obstinacy in bearing witness.

One could not fully understand what the Brauer lineage experienced without evoking the spiritual world in which the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe were immersed for two centuries — that world of Hasidism, born in Podolia in the mid-eighteenth century and progressively conquering Jewish society in Poland and Galicia until the twentieth-century catastrophe.

Hasidism transformed the way entire families lived their Jewishness. Glenn Dynner demonstrated how this revivalist movement, centered on the figure of the tsaddik — the righteous one, the spiritual master — and on joy as a path to God, had taken root in the towns and countryside, touching precisely artisanal and commercial circles [Dynner, Men of Silk, 2006]. Innkeepers, brewers, small merchants — those whose name Brauer carries the economic memory of — were often among the first to embrace the movement, which offered them a spirituality that was accessible, unmediated by the Talmudic erudition reserved for the few.

Martin Buber, in his Tales of the Hasidim, captured something of the universe of these ordinary men elevated by the grace of Hasidism to an intense spiritual dimension [Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 1963]. The tavern, the road, the market — these sites of the most humble everyday existence where relations between Jews and non-Jews unfolded — became, in this perspective, spaces of revelation and transmission. It is not beyond possibility that bearers of the name Brauer, in these Galician or Polish towns, lived this spirituality of the tavern and brewery as an ordinary form of piety — unknowingly, without saying so, but practicing it each day.

This layer of collective memory is, for the Brauer lineage, properly irreconstitutable in its details: no document, no register, no correspondence makes it possible to name a particular brewer ancestor in a particular village of Galicia and connect him to a particular Hasidic current. But it is historically plausible and culturally significant. It speaks to what the name carries most profoundly: belonging to a world where trade, community, prayer, and sociability formed an indissociable whole, which administrative modernity and then the Nazi catastrophe would break apart.

Erich Brauer (1895–1942), Hebrew name Erich Chiram Brauer — German Jewish ethnologist, born in Berlin on June 28, 1895, died in Petah Tikva on May 9, 1942. Trained in ethnology at Leipzig within the diffusionist school, he became involved early in the Zionist movement Jung Juda before settling in Mandatory Palestine, where he conducted pioneering investigations of Yemenite and Kurdish Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. His first major work, Ethnologie der jemenitischen Juden (Heidelberg, 1934), was hailed by Shelomo Dov Goitein as a masterpiece in its field. His second work, The Jews of Kurdistan, published posthumously in Hebrew in 1947, then in English in 1993, was edited by Raphael Patai. He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of anthropology in Mandatory Palestine and his field journals were deposited at the National Library of Israel.

Arik Brauer (1929–2021), born Erich Brauer, Hebrew אריק בראואר — Austrian painter, singer-songwriter, architect and poet, born in Vienna on January 4, 1929 in a family of Jewish émigrés of Russian origin, died in Vienna on January 24, 2021. Son of a shoemaker in the working-class district of Ottakring, he survived the Shoah by hiding in occupied Vienna, while his father perished in a concentration camp. Co-founder of the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism with Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden, he developed a style at the crossroads of Flemish precision and Jewish mysticism, drawing on the Bible, the Kabbalah and Hasidic tales. A prolific painter whose work has been exhibited at the Leopold Museum and in major international collections, he was also an award-winning singer and father of musician Timna Brauer.

The name Brauer condenses, in its two syllables, a part of the history of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. A transparent occupational name — that of the brewer, fixed by imperial edicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — it testifies to the economic integration of Jews into the society of villages and countryside, where the tavern and brewery were vital points of collective life. From Prussia to Galicia, from the Rhineland to Silesia, the Jewish bearers of the name Brauer lived at the intersection of two worlds: that of the Jewish community with its prayers, its feasts and its obligations, and that of the surrounding Christian society with its markets, its lords and its officials.

The destinies that this book has drawn from the shadow do not form a single tree. They form something more precious and more just: a constellation of distinct figures, united by a common name and by the same fidelity to what Judaism has always asked of its children — to act, to create, to transmit, and never to forget those whom history has rendered invisible.

Erich Brauer the ethnologist (1895–1942) embodies with particular clarity the virtue of knowledge as an act of justice. He cast upon the Jews of Yemen and Kurdistan the attentive and rigorous gaze that no one before him had dared to cast with such method, refusing any hierarchy among the branches of Israel, affirming through his books that these communities deserved to be known, documented, honored. Arik Brauer (1929–2021) extends this fidelity by other means: where the scholar documented, the artist painted; where the ethnologist collected Yemenite terms and Kurdish rites, the painter invoked biblical mysticism and the memory of the Shoah to affirm that the Jewish people were still alive.

Between these two figures — that of the scholar who died in 1942 as Europe burned its Jews, and that of the Viennese survivor who transmuted persecution into a work of art — stands the essential thing that the Brauer lineage will have, above all, best expressed: knowledge in the service of collective memory. Not knowledge as ornament or as distinction, but knowledge as care given to the other, as refusal of erasure, as participation in that long chain by which Israel remembers itself through centuries and continents. The ethnologist and the artist, the Berliner who died in Petah Tikva and the Viennese survivor who lived to ninety-two, say together that the Brauer lineage will have chosen, in the face of destruction, the same answer: the creation of a work intended for others, entrusted to the memory of those who would come after them.