Nearly three times as many people detained in a jail have a serious mental illness (SMI) when compared to community samples. Once an individual with SMI gets involved in the criminal justice system, they are more likely than the general population to stay in the system, face repeated incarcerations, and return to prison more quickly when compared to their nonmentally ill counterparts.

HANS-JOACHIM SCHOEPS AND MY FATHER, Karl Otto David Meyerowitz, were each born in East Prussia in 1909, my father in Königsberg, home of the Jewish Reform Movement inspired by Julius's ancestor Moses Mendelsohn. The intellectual and religious currents unleashed in the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah in the eighteenth century were still being played out in the lifetimes of both our fathers, in my family's case with a little different script but with the same defining characteristics. It may be instructive, then, to briefly sketch the story of another prominent German Jewish family from this milieu. It may provide a richer context for considering the perplexing case of Schoeps.

My father was born into an aristocratic Prussian Jewish family like the original Mendelsohns: his father was a wealthy textile factory owner with a house on the sea and a schooner with a captain and mate as well. Opa Benno Meyerowitz married Oma Kaethe Supplee, a Protestant Huguenot whose ancestors were from St. Petersburg and who, when Hitler came to power, converted to Judaism as a sign of resistance and family unity. She was a concert pianist and accomplished soprano, Benno served as a volunteer impresario of the Königsberg State Opera, and the family spent several nights a week either in the front row of the opera house or backstage watching the action unfold. My father knew Puccini and Verdi in German and studied voice while preparing to take over the family business after attending university. He had two older sisters, Eva and Leni, and their fateful lives also illuminate the social and intellectual world of Prussian Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1922 my father became a Bar Mitzvah in the Great Liberal Synagogue of Königsberg where men and women sat separately and the men on such occasions wore cutaways and high hats. The famous cantor and composer, Louis Lewandowski, who died there in 1894, wore religious garb as well as a high yarmulke, and could have been mistaken for a Lutheran pastor. While the holidays were celebrated at home after a fashion, the Jewish calendar did not greatly influence the lives of the Meyerowitz family.

PRESERVATION AND ADAPTATION: THE ENCOUNTER WITH HELLENISM

Alexander and his successors

In 333 b.c.e. Alexander the Great defeated Darius the Persian and gained access to both Egypt and Mesopotamia. A year later he took Egypt as well as the Mediterranean coast, and Jerusalem, along with all the other cities of the region, submitted. With the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean the Hellenistic period begins. Despite reports in Josephus and later Rabbinic legend, Alexander did not visit Jerusalem. But his battles did take him to Persia, which he finally subdued along with Mesopotamia and surrounding territories as far as the Indus River (in present-day Pakistan). Alexander's untimely death in 323 left his unstable and scattered conquests in the hands of his fractious generals, but the cultural and political changes that took shape in his wake prevailed. The “Hellenistic period” would last until the growing influence over and the conquest of the area by the Romans between 200 and 31 b.c.e.

One of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy, used Egypt's natural borders and wealth to consolidate his rule there and, in 305 b.c.e., declared an independent kingdom. Another general, Seleucus, who ruled Mesopotamia from Babylon, fended off numerous attacks from both indigenous populations and a third general, Antigonus, who controlled Asia Minor (modern Turkey). After surviving exile from his own kingdom, Seleucus finally consolidated his control in 301 b.c.e. when he and a coalition of local military leaders defeated Antigonus at Ipsus in western Asia Minor.

THE WORLD OF ISRAEL'S ANCESTORS (THE BOOKS OF GENESIS THROUGH DEUTERONOMY) AND OUR WORLD

The first five books of the Bible describe the creation of the world (Genesis 1–2) and the earliest history of humanity including the destruction of the inhabited world by a flood, before they tell the story of the ancestors of Jacob, who came to be called “Israel,” which means “he struggles with God.” The story includes the call of Abraham to come to the land of Canaan (Genesis 12) and continues with the lives of Isaac and Jacob. Jacob is named Israel as the consequence of his physical struggle with God (Genesis 32), and he gives that name to the people called Israel. The twelve sons of Jacob/Israel go down to Egypt; after their descendants become a sizable people, they are forced into slavery by a pharaoh. Moses, one of the “Hebrews” (as the Egyptians call these foreigners with their strange, West Semitic language) brought up at the Egyptian court, leads the Hebrews out of slavery and through the wilderness of Sinai to the threshold of the land of Canaan. On the way, Moses gives the people, on behalf of God, civil, religious, and ceremonial laws that identify the Hebrews as the people of Yahweh, who first called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and who delivered the Hebrews from slavery.