Goldstein, Julius

Julius Goldstein was born to a Hamburg merchant family in 1873. After completing secondary school he studied philosophy at the Universities of Jena and Berlin and the Technical Institute in Darmstadt, completing his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation in 1903.

From 1903 to 1924, with an interruption for army service in the First World War, Goldstein taught at the Technical Institute in Darmstadt, but never obtained a chair in the department. He was forced to support himself and his family by freelance lecturing and journalism. During this time he lectured in various cities in Germany, and was often away from his family. In 1923-1924 Julius Goldstein took his wife Margarete with him on a lecture trip to America, where they traveled to many cities in the United States. Finally, in 1924 the state government of Hessen appointed him an Extraordinarius over the objections of the Darmstadt faculty. Goldstein remained in that position until his death in 1929 of liver disease.

As a philosopher Julius Goldstein was an adherent of the pragmatic school, being heavily influenced by Henri Bergson, William James and Goldstein's teacher Rudolf Eucken. Goldstein was also very interested in the ethical and social implications of the development of technology. His major works were Wandlungen in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (1913) and Die Technik (1913).

He was active in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens and the B'nai B'rith. He was a prominent opponent of anti-Semitism, giving many public addresses on the topic and writing a widely circulated pamphlet Rasse und Politik (1924), which analyzed and criticized racist ideas. After the First World War, he was active in the Democratic Party of Hessen and served as chief editor of the liberal Darmstädter Zeitung . His editing experience also extended to more academic fields and between 1924 and 1929 he was editor of the Jewish philosophical journal, Der Morgen .

In 1907, Goldstein married Margerete (Gretel) Neumann, the daughter of a middle-class Jewish family in Mainz. She had graduated in 1904 from a teachers' seminary. The Goldsteins had three children in the earlier years of their marriage: Wolfgang, born in 1908, Elsbeth in 1911, and Hannah in 1912. After six years of marriage and these three children she became active in social work, a reflection of the teacher-training she had received before her marriage.

During the First World War, Margarete Goldstein was chairman of the Darmstadt Womens' War-Work Committee ( Frauenhilfe im Krieg ). There she helped arrange feeding centers and soup kitchens, welfare work, and the food education program that instructed Germans on the careful use of food during the war. In 1918, Julius and Margarete Goldstein had their fourth and final child, Ernst. Margarete Goldstein continued to do voluntary work throughout her marriage and until 1932, and helped to support her family by occasionally doing translations as well as sometimes assisting her husband with his writing and with the editing of Der Morgen .

Following her husband's death in 1929 she immigrated to the United Kingdom. There Margarete Goldstein worked as the Organizing Secretary of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in London and in that capacity traveled and lectured throughout Central and Eastern Europe during the first half of the 1930s. In 1938 she married Leon Benevenisti, a British citizen. From 1941-1942 she worked as a social worker with the West Central Jewish Day School. Margarete Goldstein Benevenisti died in 1960.

From the guide to the Julius and Margarete Goldstein Collection, 1834-1944, bulk 1906-1925, (Leo Baeck Institute)