Gershom Scholem

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Gershom Scholem (December 5, 1897 – February 21, 1982), also known as Gerhard Scholem, was a Jewish philosopher and historian raised in Germany. He is widely regarded as the modern founder of the scholarly study of Kabbalah, becoming the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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.

Contents

[edit] 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 Gottlob Frege, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Zalman Shazar. He was in Bern in 1918 with Benjamin when 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. Less notable in his academic career was his establishment of the University of Muri along with Walter Benjamin.

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, later Israel, 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 of 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 his second wife, Fania Freud.

Scholem's brother Werner was a member of the ultra-left "Fischer-Maslow Group" and the youngest ever 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.

Scholem died in Jerusalem.

[edit] 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 Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were as important as the rational ones. In particular he disagreed with Martin Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts, his ignorance of history, of the Hebrew language, and of the land of Israel of the Jewish people.

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:

  1. During the Biblical period, monotheism battles myth, without completely defeating it.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

The notion of the three periods, with its interactions between rational and irrational elements in Judaism, led Scholem to put forward some controversial arguments. He thought that the messianic movement of the 17th century of the Sabattianism was developed from the medieval Lurianic Kabbalah. In order to neutralize sabattianism, Hasidism had emerged as a Hegelian synthesis. Many of those who joined the Hasidic movement, because they had seen in it an Orthodox congregation, considered it scandalous that their community should 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.

[edit] Controversies

Scholem was opposed to the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann. In the aftermath of the trial in Jerusalem, Scholem sharply criticised Hannah Arendt on her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In Scholem´s words, Arendt´s lack of "ahavath Yisrael" (love to the Jews) was expressed in her harsh criticism of the Jewish representatives during the Holocaust.

[edit] Selected works in English

  • Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 1941
  • Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition 1960
  • From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. Trans. Harry Zohn, 1980.

Hannah Arendt und Gershom Scholem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt. In: Encounter 22/1 (1964)

  • The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish Spirituality translated 1971
  • Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah 1973
  • Kabbalah, Meridian 1974, Plume Books 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-452-01007-1
  • Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship. Translated from German by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
  • Origins of the Kabbalah, JPS, 1987
  • On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead : Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah 1997
  • The Fullness of Time: Poems (translated by Richard Sieburth)
  • On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
  • On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
  • Zohar - The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah (Ed.)

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, second ed., 1982.
  • Bloom, Harold, ed. Gershom Scholem, 1987.
  • Campanini, Saverio, A Case for Sainte-Beuve. Some Remarks on Gershom Scholem's Autobiography, in P. Schäfer - R. Elior (edd.), Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought. Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, Tübingen 2005, pp. 363-400.
  • Campanini, Saverio, Some Notes on Gershom Scholem and Christian Kabbalah, in J. Dan (ed.), Gershom Scholem in Memoriam, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 21 (2007), pp. 13-33.
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