The Steiner Family

The surname Steiner belongs to the vast family of Eastern European and Judeo-German patronyms that modern lexicography has methodically catalogued. The works of Alexander Beider and Lars Menk, published by Avotaynu, establish its toponymic nature: Steiner indicates the origin of an ancestor from a locality whose name rests on the radical Stein, the stone [A. Beider; L. Menk, Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames, Avotaynu]. This assignment distinguishes it from occupational names, patronyms, or names of virtue, and places it within the long history of Central European Jews compelled, at the threshold of the modern era, to adopt fixed surnames during administrative census campaigns in Germanic empires.

That this surname took root in Germanic-speaking territory is not fortuitous. The economic history of European Jews, as Michael Toch has traced it for the High Middle Ages, shows how profoundly Jewish presence became bound up early on with merchant crossroads and towns of the Rhine and Danube valleys, where commerce, craftsmanship, and lending connected communities. It is upon this ancient foundation of Ashkenaz — the Hebrew name for the Rhenish lands and then, by extension, for all Germanic and Eastern European Judaism — that family names like Steiner were formed, century after century. The stone of the patronym is not merely material: it is the trace of a rooting, the Memory of a place left behind that the name perpetuates long after departure.

What the lineage expresses from the outset is attachment to the Memory of place, that discrete virtue through which European Jews, without land of their own, made the name itself a portable homeland. In this, the Steiners partake of a founding trait of the collective Memory of Israel: fidelity to the origin, however reduced to the sole recollection of a stone.

To understand what it means to belong to an Ashkenazi lineage, one must trace back to the world that shaped it. Between the year one thousand and the thirteenth century, the communities of the Rhine and then of Central Europe developed a religious culture of rare density, where the study of the Law, prayer, and community life formed an inseparable fabric. Jeffrey Woolf has shown how these communities constituted themselves as sacred communities, collectivities where every act of daily life — the marketplace, the tribunal, the synagogue — was ordered by halakha. Piety was not the prerogative of the learned alone: Elisheva Baumgarten has illuminated the ordinary religiosity of men and women, the way in which daily gestures carried an observance that was lived and shared.

This culture was also a culture of the intellect. Ephraim Kanarfogel has traced the intellectual and rabbinical history of medieval Ashkenaz, that center which gave to the commentators of the Talmud, to the Tosafists and to the Rhineland pietists, the Hassidei Ashkenaz, an eminent place in Jewish thought. Haym Soloveitchik, analyzing the transformations of practice and halakhic authority through the centuries, has shown how much this tradition knew how to both preserve and transform itself, hold firm to the text while responding to the upheavals of history.

It is within this heritage that the Steiner inscribe themselves, not as an attested rabbinical dynasty, but as heirs to an ethos. Study as a form of piety, respect for the text as a discipline of existence, responsibility toward the community: these values, borne by medieval Ashkenaz, will resurge in striking fashion, secularized but recognizable, among the modern descendants of the lineage. The talmudic learning of yesteryear will become comparative erudition; fidelity to the Law, fidelity to language and to text. The continuity is one of virtue rather than genealogy.

The modern cradle of the lineage is Bohemia, and particularly Prague, one of the oldest and most prestigious communities in Central Europe. It was there, in Karlín — a suburb of Prague — that Franz Baermann Steiner was born, whose paternal family was rooted in the Jewish world of Bohemia. It was from Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Empire, that the parents of George Steiner came. Between these two cities, Prague and Vienna, unfolds a common history: that of emancipated Austro-Hungarian Jewry, drawn in by modernity, cultural Germanity, and urban professions.

The religious and intellectual transformation of this world was admirably described by Maoz Kahana in his study of the passage "from Prague to Pressburg": how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, halakhic writing itself found itself compelled to respond to a changing world, between fidelity to tradition and pressures of secularization. The Jews of Bohemia and Austria gradually gained access to the liberal professions, banking, law, and the university. The father of George Steiner, Frederick George Steiner, embodies precisely this social type: George Francis Steiner was born in Paris in 1929, son of Viennese Jewish parents, Else (née Franzos) and Frederick George Steiner; their father was chief legal counsel at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank [The Jewish Chronicle].

This ascent had a reverse side, which the next generation would pay dearly for. The brilliant integration of Viennese and Prague Jews, their major contribution to the culture, sciences, and economy of Central Europe, was accompanied by persistent antisemitism that never ceased to rise. George Steiner's parents had to leave Vienna to escape this hostility, as his biographers recall [ActuaLitté]. The lineage here expresses economic action and juridical knowledge as paths of insertion into the city — that old Jewish vocation for learned utility that Daniel Jutte has studied for the age of secrets, when Jews already mediated knowledge, languages, and exchanges between separated worlds. But it also bears the tragic mark of the precariousness of this integration.

Among the Steiner family of Bohemia, one figure stands out through the depth and singularity of his work. Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) was born in Prague and died in Oxford; a social anthropologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist and poet. His linguistic erudition borders on vertiginous: besides German, he was familiar with Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch. [Oxford Jewish Heritage]. He taught at the University of Oxford from 1950 until his death two years later [Wikipedia].

His masterwork, Taboo, belongs to the Zakhor corpus attached to this lineage [« Taboo », Franz Baermann Steiner, 1956, Zakhor corpus]. Published posthumously in 1956, it was subsequently reissued as a Pelican Book in 1967 and remained for years a reference text; his closest friends included Iris Murdoch, Elias Canetti and Mary Douglas. [Oxford Jewish Heritage]. The critical scope of his work is considerable: Steiner reveals how earlier theories on the role of taboo in pre-modern societies were fatally undermined by the postulate that their own societies represented the pinnacle of human achievement. In doing so, he made an important contribution to anthropology's critique of its own disciplinary history.

This work is inseparable from a destiny marked by the Shoah. Childhood friend of H. G. Adler, Steiner designated him as his literary executor; like his close associates Adler and Canetti, his work bore upon the causes and consequences of the Shoah. His writings manifest a rare and distinctly Jewish intellectual virtue: the refusal of the domination of the gaze. In his profound aversion to the imposition of Western values upon non-Western peoples, his writings relentlessly denounce the prejudices that Western observers brought to their texts. Respect for the stranger, recognition of the dignity of the other, distrust of the conqueror's arrogance: these are learned expressions of the biblical commandment to love the stranger, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt". Franz Steiner, exiled, bereft of his own engulfed in catastrophe, made of anthropology a plea for alterity — and he joined thereby, without emphasis, one of the highest voices of Israel's moral conscience.

The second major figure of the lineage is George Steiner, whose work alone irrigates six of the seven archival items in the Zakhor corpus attached to this family. George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929 at the American Hospital in Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, to Viennese Jewish parents, Frederick George and Else Steiner (née Franzos). His education was multilingual from the outset: archetype of the European intellectual, steeped in multiple cultures through trilingual education in German, French and English, a passionate defender of Greco-Latin classical culture, he was one of the rare contemporary thinkers capable of reading in the original works written in numerous languages. [JeSuisMort.com].

The family's fate changed with the war. Born in Paris to Viennese Jewish parents in 1929, he left France in 1940 for New York. This flight saved him: the family escaped the deportation that was to engulf the greater part of European Jewry. From this uprooting, George Steiner made the very substance of his thought. His monumental work, After Babel — one of his best-known writings, published in 1975 [The Jewish Chronicle] — makes translation the paradigm of all human understanding [« Après Babel (After Babel) », 1978, Zakhor corpus]. In Bluebeard's Castle, Nostalgia for the Absolute, The Antigones, The Portage of A. H., Lessons of the Masters: so many titles gathered in the Zakhor corpus that decline the same meditation on language, culture and evil [Zakhor corpus].

What George Steiner elevates above all is the contribution to thought and literary knowledge as a form of fidelity. His reflection on the relationship between master and disciple, the heart of his Lessons of the Masters, extends in a striking way the old Jewish institution of transmission, from the rav to the talmid, that unbroken chain through which the text passes from generation to generation. His obsession with the barbarism that coexisted with German high culture — the enigma of a country of Goethe become a country of camps — is a Jewish meditation on evil and the survival of meaning. By making language a homeland and reading an act of fidelity, George Steiner embodied that vocation which he himself named that of the "extraterritorial" man: the Jew of post-Auschwitz whose home is the text. The Yiddish and German-Jewish tradition from which he descended — that wandering culture whose history Jean Baumgarten wrote, that cultural Jewish Renaissance of Central Europe that Delphine Bechtel described — finds in him one of its last and most luminous expressions.

There is no proof of a direct blood relation between Franz Baermann Steiner of Prague and George Steiner of Vienna and Paris. The surname, toponymic and widespread throughout the German-speaking world [A. Beider; L. Menk, Avotaynu], forbids us to assert a common lineage. It must be said with the probity this book demands: the Steiner lineage is not here an ancestry attested by archival documents, but a community of destiny and vocation, revealed by the remarkable convergence of two lives.

Yet this convergence is striking. Two men bearing the same name, born twenty years apart in the Austro-Hungarian Jewish world; two exceptional polyglots for whom the multiplicity of languages was the very substance of thought; two exiles whose lives were shaped by the Shoah—one by the loss of his own, the other by salvation through flight; two men established in the English university world, Franz at Oxford, George at Cambridge then Geneva and Cambridge. Where the archive falls silent on blood kinship, intellectual tradition reveals a kinship of the spirit. It is at this precise point that Memory and History answer one another: the former gathers under a single name what the latter cannot connect through genealogy, but which both recognize as a shared inheritance.

Lisa Silverman has shown how Central European Jews, in the interwar years, had to constantly renegotiate their belonging, "become" Austrians or Czechs while remaining Jewish, within a besieged identity. The Steiners belong to this in-between generation: too Germanic to be only Jewish in some eyes, irredeemably Jewish in the eyes of those who persecuted them. Their common response was to make universal culture their territory, without ever renouncing the Memory of Israel. In this, the Steiner lineage illustrates a virtue that Jewish tradition has carried through exile: the transformation of loss into transmission, of wandering into knowledge, of mourning into work.

At the end of this journey, the Steiner lineage appears less as a dynasty than as a figure: that of the Central European Jew who became, by the force of history, guardian of languages and Memory. From the stone inscribed in the name to the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, a single vocation takes shape, one that crosses centuries and borders.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has borne, it is fidelity to text and word — Talmudic knowledge become universal knowledge, transmission of masters, respect for the stranger and their language — that this lineage will have best expressed. Franz Baermann Steiner made of anthropology a defense of alterity and a denunciation of the arrogance of the powerful; George Steiner made of translation and reading acts of survival, a way of holding meaning upright after catastrophe. Both, distant heirs of the learned piety of medieval Ashkenaz [ref:9 ; ref:4], prolonged into the century of shadows this immemorial Jewish conviction: that studied, transmitted and respected speech is what, from generation to generation, saves mankind from barbarism.

The Steiner lineage thus joins the collective Memory of Israel at the most vital point of its vocation — there where the landless people made the Book its homeland, and fidelity to speech its perpetual covenant. May this Great Book, in its turn, be a stone thereof.