Gershom Scholem - biography

Gerhard Scholem who chose to be known as Gershom Scholem (Hebrew: גרשם שלום) (December 5, 1897 — February 21, 1982), was a Jewish philosopher and historian raised in Germany. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern, academic 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.

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 Humboldt University of Berlin, where he came into contact with Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Zalman Shazar. He subsequently studied mathematical logic at the University of Jena under Gottlob Frege. 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 Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Less notable in his academic career was his establishment of the fictive University of Muri with 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, 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 expelled from the party and later murdered by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Gershom Scholem, unlike his brother, was vehemently opposed to both Communism and Marxism.

Scholem died in Jerusalem, where he is buried next to his wife in Sanhedria. Jürgen Habermas delivered the eulogy.

Awards

• In 1958, Scholem was awarded the Israel Prize in Jewish studies.
• In 1968, he was elected president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
• In 1969, he received the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award.
• In 1977, he was awarded the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought.

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 non-rational force that, in Scholem's view, made the religion a living thing.

In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the minutiae of Halakha, were the truly living core of Judaism. In particular, he disagreed with what he considered to be Martin Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts as well as what he argued was an inadequate approach to Jewish history, Hebrew language, and the land of Israel.

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 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.

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 17th century messianic movement, known as 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 a 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 also involved a linguistic theory. In contrast to Buber, Scholem believed in the power of the language to invoke supernatural phenomena. 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.

Debate with Hannah Arendt

Scholem was opposed to the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann. In the aftermath of the trial in Jerusalem, Scholem sharply criticised Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and decried her lack of "ahavath Yisrael" (solidarity with the Jewish people). He also opposed Arendt's interpretation (in letters and the introduction to Illuminations) of Walter Benjamin as a Marxist thinker who predated the New Left. For Scholem, Benjamin had been an essentially religious thinker, whose turn to Marxism had been merely an unfortunate, but inessential and superficial, expedient.

Literary influence

Various stories and essays of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges were inspired or influenced by Scholem's books. He has also influenced ideas of Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and George Steiner. American author Michael Chabon cites Scholem's essay, The Idea of the Golem, as having assisted him in conceiving the Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Selected works in English

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1941
• Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition, 1960
• Arendt and 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, trans. 1971

Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1973

• From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn, 1980.
• Kabbalah, Meridian 1974, Plume Books 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-452-01007-1
• Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
• Origins of the Kabbalah, JPS, 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-691-02047-7
• On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, 1997
• The Fullness of Time: Poems, trans. Richard Sieburth
• On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
• On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
• Tselem: The Representation of the Astral Body, trans. Scott J. Thompson 1987
• Zohar — The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed.