Erich Brauer
Erich Brauer (28 June 1895, in Berlin – 9 May 1942, in Petah Tikvah) was a German Jewish illustrator, ethnographer, and ethnologist. As an artist he chose to be known as Erich Chiram Brauer. He often signed his art work "Chiram". Early life He was born in Berlin to Fanny (Krebs) and Adolf Brauer, when it was part of the German Empire under Prussian leadership. As a young man, his first interest was in graphics, and later he added studies in ethnology. Even after he had changed his vocation, he would still decorate his letters and writings with graphic artwork and would later make a livelihood from doing graphic artwork for the Jewish National Fund. In Germany, Brauer belonged to a Jewish youth movement, youth primarily drawn from assimilated Jewish families who had taken an interest in Zionism, and which called themselves Jung Juda (Young Judea). One of the fellow members of this group whom he had befriended was Gershom Scholem. During the years of the First World War, 1915–1916, the two co-edited and published a lithographic magazine entitled, Die Blauweisse Brille ("Glasses in Blue and White"), in which three issues (50-100 lithographed copies) were printed in the printing press owned by Scholem's father, and which treated on the war from a Zionist-Jewish perspective, but written with a comical and humorous flair. Brauer is noted there for his expressionist style. Education and vocation Erich Brauer completed his dissertation in 1924 at the University of Leipzig on the religion of the Herero of South-West Africa. The Folklore Museum of Leipzig sent Brauer to British Mandate Palestine in 1925 to collect ethnological artifacts of the Arabs living in the country. Although Brauer returned to Germany, Brauer would leave his native Germany in later life to settle permanently in British Mandate Palestine where he resided in Tel-Aviv, and afterwards in Jerusalem. In the early 1930s, Brauer returned to Germany to publish his newly written book in German, Ethnologie der jemenitischen Juden (Ethnology of Yemenite Jews), which was finally published in Heidelberg in 1934, under the Nazi regime. That same year, he was also awarded a Lord Plumer scholarship in recognition of his outstanding work in the field of anthropology. This enabled him to work as a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a post which he held for four years. In spite of his efforts, Brauer failed to make anthropology an area of academic interest at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but was only able to garner support for his own private research. When the university could no longer pay for his continued research in the field of anthropology, Brauer continued to conduct private research in the field, until illness forced him to stop. Contributions to ethnology Brauer is the author of two major books, one of which treating on the Jews of Yemen (Ethnologie der jemenitischen Juden), and the other on the Jews of Kurdistan, a book later translated into English and Turkish. These two works are his most popular