Gershom Scholem
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Scholem is best known for his collection of lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and for his biography Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah (1973). His collected speeches and essays, published as On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1965), helped to spread knowledge of Jewish mysticism among non-Jews.
He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1958 and was elected president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1968.
Early life
Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur Scholem and Betty Hirsch Scholem. His interest in Judaica was strongly opposed by his father, a printer, but thanks to his mother's intervention, he was allowed to study Hebrew and the Talmud with an Orthodox rabbi.
He studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew at the University of Berlin, where he came into contact with Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, as well as Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Zalman Shazar. He was in Bern in 1918 with Benjamin, where he met Elsa Burckhardt, who became his first wife. He returned to Germany in 1919, where he received a degree in semitic languages at the University of Munich.
He wrote his doctoral thesis on the oldest known kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. Drawn to Zionism, and influenced by Buber, he emigrated in 1923 to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he devoted his time to studying Jewish mysticism and became a librarian, and eventually head of the Department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library. He later became a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view, and became the first Professor of Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965, when he became an emeritus professor.
In 1936, he married Fania Freud.
Scholem's brother Werner was a member of the ultra-left "Fischer-Maslow Group" and a member of the Reichstag, representing the Communist Party (KPD) in the German parliament. He was banned from the party and later murdered during the Third Reich.
Theories and scholarship
Scholem directly contrasted his historiographical approach on the study of Jewish mysticism with the approach of the 19th-century school of the Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism"), which sought to submit the study of Judaism to the discipline of subjects such as history, philology, and philosophy.
Jewish mysticism was seen as Judaism's "weakest" scholarly link. Scholem told the story of his early research when he was directed to a prominent rabbi who was an expert on Kabbalah. Seeing the rabbi's many books on the subject, Scholem asked about them, only to be told: "This trash? Why would I waste my time reading nonsense like this?" (Robinson 2000, p. 396)
The analysis of Judaism carried out by the Wissenschaft school was flawed in two ways, according to Scholem:
- It studied Judaism as a dead object rather than as a living organism.
- It did not consider the proper foundations of Judaism, the irrational force that, in Scholem's view, made the religion a living thing.
In the Weltanschauung of Scholem, the research of Jewish mysticism could not be separated from its historical context. Starting from something similar to the Gegengeschichte of Friedrich Nietzsche he ended up including a lot of the less normative aspects of the Judaism in the public history.
Specifically Scholem thought that Jewish history could be divided into three periods:
- During the Biblical period, monotheism battles myth, without completely defeating it.
- During the Talmudic period, some of the institutions — for example, the notion of the magical power of the accomplishment of the Sacraments — are removed in favour of the purer concept of the divine transcendence.
- During the medieval period, the impossibility of reconciling the abstract concept of god of Greek philosophy with the personal God of the Bible led Jewish thinkers, such as Maimonides, to try to eliminate the remaining myths and to modify the figure of the living God. After this time, mysticism, as an effort to find again the essence of the God of their fathers, became more widespread.
Many of those who joined the Hasidic movement, because they had seen in it an orthodox congregation, considered it scandalous that their community should thus be associated with an heretical movement.
In the same way, Scholem produced the hypothesis that the source of the 13th century Kabbalah was a Jewish gnosticism that preceded Christian gnosticism.
The historiographical approach of Scholem involved a linguistic theory too. In contrast to Buber, Scholem believed in the power of the language to invoke supernatural pheonomena. In contrast to Walter Benjamin, he put the Hebrew language in a privileged position with respect to other languages, as the only language capable of revealing the divine truth. Scholem considered the Kabbalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation.
Works
- Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 1941
- Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition 1960
- The Messianic Idea in Judaism translated 1971
- Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah 1973
- Kabbalah, Meridian 1974, Plume Books 1987 reissue: ISBN 0452010071
- On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead : Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah 1997
References
- [Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library]
- [Biography]
- [An analysis of Scholem's lifework from Commentary]
- [Biographical page]
- Robinson, G. Essential Judaism, Pocket Books, 2000.
Further reading
- Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, second ed., 1982.
- Bloom, Harold, ed. Gershom Scholem, 1987.
- Scholem, Gershom. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. Trans. Harry Zohn, 1980.
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