## 1. Biographical information




Gershom Scholem was born Gerhard Scholem in Berlin in 1897. The
Scholem family had lived in Berlin since the early part of the
nineteenth century. Gerhard's father Arthur was an assimilated
Jew and German nationalist, quite common among middle-class Berlin Jews
at that time. Arthur Scholem had a successful business as a printer and
it was there Scholem first became exposed to books at a very young age.
There is a story that in 1911, when Scholem had already rejected his
father's politics and openly espoused Zionism, his mother bought
him a portrait of Theodore Herzl as a Christmas present. Another
version has it that the portrait was hung on the Christmas tree in the
Scholem home. There were four boys in the Scholem family three of whom
rebelled against their father's politics and Jewish identity in
different ways. The eldest son Reinhold joined the staunchly
nationalist Deutsche Volkspartie, the third son Werner became a
communist, and Gershom became a Zionist. Having no Jewish education
prior to his Zionist turn in 1911 the adolescent Scholem began learning
Hebrew and studying Talmud in one of the Berlin community schools. By
1915 he was immersing himself in any kabbalistic works he could find
even though he admitted understanding very little. Although Zionism
brought Judaism to the center of the young Gershom's life it
never really inspired religious observance although Scholem tells us in
the biography of his early life *From Berlin to Jerusalem* that
he did experiment with some form of observance while still an
adolescent in Germany. Throughout his life, however, Scholem remained a
committed secularist, and secularism played an important role in his
rendering of Jewish history and the study of Kabbala.




The rift between Scholem and his father grew as Gershom openly
criticized his father's German nationalism and bourgeois
lifestyle. It reached a breaking point after a heated argument about
his brother Werner's impending court-martial for treason while
serving in the German army. Arthur exploded and banished the young
Gershom from the family home, giving him 100 German Marks for his
journey. This forced Gershom to find other living arrangements in
Berlin. He had already become acquainted with the young Zionist Zalman
Rubashov who later became Zalman Shazar, the third president of Israel.
Rubashov, claiming Scholem's banishment made him a "refugee
for Zionism," invited him to board at a rooming house on the west
side of Berlin that housed numerous Eastern European Jewish immigrants
one of whom was Shai Agnon. Many of the Zionists he met there were
older and would subsequently have an important influence on his life
especially after he immigrated to Palestine in 1923.




Inspired by his radical Zionism and utter disdain for German
nationalism Scholem expressed strong opposition to the Great War (and
subsequently nationalism more generally), a belief he held throughout
his life and affected his Zionism later on. Unable to avoid the draft
after two deferments, he entered the German army where he spent a mere
two months before being discharged, labeled a "psychopath
temporarily unfit for duty." Scholem then entered The University
of Berlin with an interest in studying pure mathematics which he
pursued for a few semesters before deciding he did not have sufficient
talent to succeed. It was around that time, in 1917, that Scholem
decided to immigrate to Palestine and the rest of his education in
Germany was geared toward that end. During those years (approximately
1916-1917) he met Martin Buber and, more importantly, Walter Benjamin,
who would have a profound influence on Scholem's intellectual
trajectory.




As was common among college youth in Germany, Scholem attended numerous
universities. He ended up in Munich where he turned his attention to
his dissertation. He produced a translation and annotated version of
one of the first kabbalistic books *Sefer ha-Bahir* (the Book of
Illumination), successfully defending his dissertation in January 1922
and graduating *summa cum laude*. After graduation Scholem put
all his energy into his immigration and in mid-September 1923 set off
for Palestine without any concrete plans as to how he would support
himself.




Soon after his arrival he was offered a position as librarian of the
"Hebrew Section" of the newly founded National Library
connected with what would become the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It
was in that position that Scholem began collecting and cataloging the
hundreds of kabbalistic manuscripts that few had interest in and fewer
could read. His career began at that moment even though he was not
appointed to a faculty position until some time later. Once he received
his faculty appointment, he remained at the Hebrew University until his
death in 1982.


## 2. Early Work




Scholem's early work consists of two main areas of research.
From 1921 (while still in Germany) until around 1936 Scholem spent
untold hours collecting and analyzing every kabbalistic manuscript he
could locate. This required traveling to various libraries in Europe.
Once he arrived in Palestine he concentrated on the growing collection
of Hebrew manuscripts located at the new National Library. This taxing,
arduous, and tedious work created a data base for Scholem that would
serve his entire career. During this same period he undertook a series
of highly critical reviews and essays on previous scholars who dealt
with Kabbala, most of which were published in the German-Jewish journal
*Der Jude* and some in Hebrew *Keriat Sefer* a
journal of Jewish Bibliography centered in Jerusalem. These early book
reviews constitute an important -- and often overlooked--part of
Scholem's career. It is here that he distinguishes himself from
his predecessors and develops the beginning of his historiographical
approach that would only emerge in the next period of his research. His
dissertation *Das Buch Bahir* was published in Leipzig in1923.
His first major publications after his dissertation were *Kitvei Yad
ha-Kabbala*, 1930; *Perakim le-Toldot sifrut
ha-Kabbala*,1931; and *Bibliographia Kabbalistica*, 1927,
all bibliographical works examining his discoveries. In addition he
published more theoretical studies such as "Kabbalat R.
Ya'akov ve-R. Yizhak [ha-Cohen]," 1927; "Ha-Mekubal
R. Avraham b. Eliezer ha-Levi" 1925, 26 and "Die Theologie
des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos" in 1928. Parts of
these studies would appear later in more expanded works dealing with
various kabbalistic periods. In short, Scholem began his publishing
career by first absorbing the entire scope of the history of Kabbala
and then slowly putting it together from the earliest period until the
latest (Hasidism).


## 3. *Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism* and *Origins of the Kabbala*




It is not without irony that Scholem's most celebrated works
were written in German or Hebrew yet his most popular and arguably most
influential work *Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism* was written
in English at a time when most scholarship in Judaica was still being
written in German. By the end of the 1930's Scholem was already
hard at work on Sabbateanism which would result in a major book (two
volumes in Hebrew, one large volume in English) entitled *Sabbatei
Zevi: Mystical Messiah*. A preliminary study on Sabbatean
antinomianism "Redemption through Sin" was published in
1936 and then appeared in English in 1970. During that time, in the
late 1930's, Scholem received an invitation from the Jewish
Institute of Religion in New York City to deliver a series of lectures
on Jewish Mysticism. He accepted the invitation and wrote the lectures
in English (a first for him). These lectures were subsequently
published as *Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism* in 1941. This
work was a watershed for the entire field of Kabbala studies and Jewish
Studies more generally. For the first time he offered a synoptic yet
detailed presentation of the entire history of Kabbala beginning with
the German Rhineland pietists (*Hasidei Ashkenaz*) from the
12th century until Hasidism in the 18th and
19th centuries. In this work Scholem presents his theory of
the authorship and construction of the Zohar, one of the first
programmatic studies of the enigmatic kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, and
offers the first glimpses of his own historiography. Moreover, the last
page of *Major Trends* presents a few parenthetical observations
about the "possibility for Jewish mysticism today" that
would occupy a number of essays later in his career. His
historiographical musings in *Major Trends* are important
because it is here we are presented with Scholem's dialectical
approach to history and his claim, for example, that Lurianic Kabbala
with its intense focus on creation as rupture and catastrophe was a
response to the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492. This suggests that
kabbalistic circles were using metaphysics to reify historical reality,
which led Scholem to coin the term "historiosophy" to
describe his understanding of history and metaphysics. It also offers
another first glimpse of his work on Sabbateanism which Scholem claimed
was a heretical but not necessary deviant form of Jewish mysticism. By
that I mean that even fairly early in his career Scholem held that
Kabbala is a theology that requires a normative law (tradition)
-- largely as a foil -- but is always in dialectical
tension with that law. The fact that antinomianism rose to the surface
in the Sabbatean movement, breaking the normative tradition through its
combination of messianism and mysticism, should not be seen as an
aberration as much as a tragic inevitability. This Sabbatean heresy,
argued Scholem, did not end with the failure of the movement but
influenced, and even set the conditions for, Jewish modernity. His
speculations about possible influences between Sabbatean and Reform
Judaism in Hungary were duly criticized by Jacob Katz for lack of
historical evidence. However, the more theoretical and structural point
about Kabbala more generally and Sabbateanism in particular as being in
tension with normative Jewish law (halakha) and the ways that
Sabbateanism may have (indirectly) informed early Reform which rejected
halakha outright is a topic worthy of further thought even though it
may be historically unprovable. While direct links between Sabbateans
and Reformers have not been definitively unearthed, the geographical
proximity of Sabbateans and early Reformers in Hungary and the extent
to which Sabbateans functioned in clandestine ways is curious.




One of the great merits of *Major Trends*, and why it has
been as influential as it has, is that all the "trends"
included therein are set side by side to give one a sense that there is
a definite trajectory to mystical Judaisms even if that trajectory does
not follow a straight line. The descriptive part of the book begins (in
Chapter 2) with *hekhalot* mysticism and other pre-rabbinic and
rabbinic mysticisms that appear in such apocryphal works as the Book of
Enoch, including angelology and magic. It then moves on to the
Rhineland German pietists, Abraham Abulafia and only then reaches the
*textus classicus* of medieval Kabbala, the Zohar. What are
conspicuous in their absence are *Sefer Yezeria* (the Book of
Creation) and *Sefer ha-Bahir* (the Book of Illumination). These
omissions are intentional. This work is intended to discuss major
trends in *Jewish mysticism* and *not* major trends in
*Kabbala*. The distinction is an important one for Scholem. He
devotes another work called the *Origins of the Kabbala* (that
appears in different versions in German, Hebrew, and English) where he
presents a detailed analysis of the emergence of Kabbala beginning with
the Bahir and the Provencal circle, and maturing in Castile and Gerona
in the two centuries immediately preceding the appearance of the Zohar
in Guadalajara Spain at the end of the 13th century. The
first chapter of *Major Trends* offers us one of Scholem's
earliest lengthy statements on the phenomenology of mysticism that is
expanded later in his lectures at the Eranos conferences and published
in the 1960's. It is here Scholem tries to define
"mysticism" (he admits he is unsuccessful in doing so) and
it is here he reveals some of the people he values as preceding him in
this endeavor (both Jewish and Christian scholars of Kabbala). This
first chapter is an important part of Scholem's early move to
expand beyond the formal study of Kabbala into the area of philosophy
of religion.




Scholem is convinced that Kabbala is a medieval phenomenon. That is,
while there are important works of Jewish mysticism composed before the
Middle Ages, the metaphysics and cosmology we know as Kabbala emerges
as a reaction against the rationalism of medieval Jewish philosophy
that posits a distant and unapproachable God in line with the
Aristotelian and Platonic (and Neoplatonic) schools. These kabbalists,
while protesting such rationalism, were themselves very influenced by
two dominant trends: Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism. In his
*Origins*, Scholem traces both Gnostic and Neoplatonic
influences on these early kabbalistic thinkers, viewing them as deeply
embedded in their medieval context. Kabbala in this period emerged in
three locales: Provence, Castile, and Gerona and included prominent
rabbinic figures, most importantly Moses Nahmanides. *Origins of the
Kabbala* begins with an analysis of the *Book Bahir* (taken
largely from his doctoral thesis) a work Scholem claims emerges from a
circle of mystics led by the enigmatic Isaac the Blind in Provence
although he suggests some strata of this enigmatic work may originate
in some unknown Jewish Gnostic groups. For Scholem, the *Bahir*
is the first book of Kabbala. When we move to Castile and Gerona,
Kabbala becomes more actively engaged in posing an alternative theology
to rationalist philosophy. Scholem maintains that the Gerona school was
not an independent entity but more of an extension of the earlier
Provencal circle that produced the Bahir. This polemic (between
philosophers and kabbalists and between Talmudists and kabbalists)
continued until the end of the sixteenth century when Kabbala won the
hearts and minds of many Jews after the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and
the forced conversions and expulsions in Portugal in 1496. Scholem
argued this was in large part due to two factors: First, that
philosophy too easily justified bogus Jewish conversion, that is, the
choice to internalize Judaism and abandon outward ritual; and more
importantly, that philosophy could not offer solace for the historical
crisis of the expulsion. After the expulsion Kabbala moves from the
periphery to become the default theology of Judaism. It is in these
polemical centuries, however, that Kabbala develops its most important
features that become the foundation of all subsequent Kabbala. One is
its emanationist theory of creation and the descent of divine effluence
into the world. Another is its elaborate version of *ta'amei
ha-mitzvot* or reasons for the commandments (a discipline initiated
in its medieval form by the most famous Jewish rationalist Moses
Maimonides). Unlike many earlier pre-kabbalistic mysticisms, this
inextricably connects mystical doctrine to Jewish law and ritual. A
classic example of this is Ezra of Gerona's *Ta'amei
ha-Mitzvot* printed erroneously in the name of Nahmanides. Another
is the beginning of kabbalistic exegesis of Scripture. Bahya ben Asher
of Saragossa's kabbalistic commentary is a classical example of
this phenomenon in the pre-zoharic period that is expanded and deepened
later in the Zohar and its commentaries. Yet another is the
proliferation of mystical commentaries on prayer that first emerge in
the Provencal fraternities of Isaac the Blind. Finally in this period
we see the first systematic cosmologies that become templates for later
kabbalistic doctrine. One example would be Azriel of Gerona's
*Sefer Esser Sephirot*. I will discuss the historiographic
issues implicit in these two works in another section. Suffice it to
say that given the many publications of Scholem in this middle period
of his career, *Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism* and
*Origins of the Kabbala* stand out as the most important and
influential. 


## 4. *Sabbatei Zevi: Mystical Messiah* and the Centrality of Messianism




For Scholem Jewish messianism and Sabbateanism are intimately
connected. This is not because Sabbateanism is the only form of Jewish
messianism but because Sabbateanism represents, for him, the
quintessence of the tension between tradition and its self-destruction
that lies at the root of all forms of Jewish messianism reaching back
to the Hebrew Bible. This idea came to Scholem very early in his
career, decades before he even began serious work on his magisterial
*Sabbatai Zevi: Mystical Messiah*. He was first made aware of
Sabbateanism by his friend Zalman Rubashov probably between 1916-1918,
but he didn't begin research on the movement until 1927 and
published his first article on the Marrano Sabbatean Abraham Miguel
Cardozo "Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham
Cardosos" in 1928. This was followed by the more important
theoretical study "Redemption though Sin" published in
1936. In this essay Scholem posits what would become his central claim
about messianism and tradition. First, that there are essentially two
kinds of messianism; restorative and utopian-catastrophic. Both of
these are manifest in the singular movement of Sabbateanism. The
restorative model envisioned the messianic as a return to an older era
(i.e., the Davidic kingdom) that was revolutionary but only within the
confines of the tradition. The utopian-catastrophic model (Scholem also
calls it apocalyptic) envisions a rupture of tradition and the
inauguration of an entirely new era. While these models existed before
Sabbateanism, the restorative model in the Maimonidean messianism and
the utopian model in the messianic theology of the anonymous
14th century *Sefer Temunah* and later apocalyptic
mystics such as David Reuveni, only in Sabbateanism do they both emerge
fully as "dark forces" that affect, and threaten, the
entire Jewish nation. Moreover, once these forces are unleashed --
especially in a traditional world whose authority had already been
weakened -- they can never again be totally suppressed, even
though the formal Sabbatean movement loses much of its direct influence
by the 18th century either through attrition or religious
conservatism. That is, for Scholem, Sabbateanism is such an important
topic precisely because it re-directs Jewish history by exposing the
underside of Jewish mysticism, Judaism's
"counter-history," in a way that creates the conditions for
Jewish modernity, including Zionism. In this sense, Sabbateanism is the
lynchpin to Scholem's entire intellectual project.




The Sabbatean heresy did not emerge in a vacuum. There are many
theories about why it became as popular as it did. Scholem's
general approach is that while Kabbala, like all intellectual
constructs, reacts to history, it is the esoteric trends that are often
the most potent forces needed to unleash innovation, which is often
deemed heretical (at least at the outset). Thus the roots of
Sabbateanism were not the impoverished or oppressed state of the Jews
(although these factors may have played a role) but the dominance of
Lurianic Kabbala born in mid-16th century Safed. Scholem
notes that the messianic in Lurianism was not apocalyptic and may even
have been a conservative protest again utopian messianists like Reuveni
a generation earlier. Lurianism offered a gradual progressive
messianism of *tikkun* or the reparation of the broken cosmos
built on the foundations of its theory of creation as rupture and
exile. Yet Lurianism also rose at a time (a generation after the
Spanish expulsion) when Jews were in need of a new theology to justify
their new reality. The fact that the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II invited
Jews to re-settle Erez Israel after 1516 and the fact that Lurianic
Kabbala arose in Safed, one of the four holy cites according to
tradition (the others are Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias) gave added
heft to its messianic teachings. In short, according to Scholem, with
Lurianic Kabbala, Kabbala emerged from its subterranean -- and
largely conservative--existence (or at least without a
formidable competitor) and set the stage for the antinomian
counter-traditional dimensions of Kabbala to erupt and gain popular
attention. There are at least three factors that contributed to
Lurianism's success and subsequently the success of Sabbateanism:
(1) the weakening of rabbinic authority in the sixteenth-century (even
considering that the same locale and same decades gave us the
*Shulkhan Arukh*); (2) the lack of any viable ideological
competitor with the demise of philosophy after the expulsion; and
(3)Luria's comprehensive and compelling myth coupled with the
positive historical development of the first systematic, albeit slow,
re-settlement of Jews in Erez Israel since the early Middle Ages.




What Lurianism did not offer was a charismatic messianic figure to
finalize its messianic vision. Here is where Sabbateanism found its
role. Scholem notes that Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zevi's prophet
and spokesperson, largely nullified the need for continued Lurianic
practice once the "messiah" was revealed. Not unlike
Paul's view of the law, for Nathan once the messiah arrived
one's faith must now be focused on his role in finalizing the
process. In fact, culminating the process required the messiah to break
the law in order to redeem his people, thus opening the
"counter-historical" notion of antinomianism that lay
dormant in so much of mystical Jewish doctrine.




After Sabbatai Zevi's decision, under duress, to convert to Islam
and remain under the protection of the Sultan (where he died a decade
later) his disciples split into "moderate" and
"radical" camps. The moderates held that they should remain
Jews, even observant ones, and keep their faith in Sabbatai Zevi as a
secret doctrine. The "radicals" held they must imitate
their master and thus convert to Islam to continue the redemptive
process. Included in this radical camp was Jacob Frank (1726-1791)
(about whom Scholem had little to say) who, with most of his disciples,
converted to Catholicism in 1759. The radicals did not present much of
a problem for the Jews as they disappeared from the community. The
moderates, however, presented a grave problem and inspired a whole
industry of Sabbatean hunting that extended into the 19th
century. The point in all this, according to Scholem, is that
Sabbateanism destroyed Jewish tradition from within a century before
the Enlightenment, and may have even brought the latter into
existence.


## 5. Eranos and the Phenomenology of Religion




In the year 1933, on the suggestion of Rudolph Otto, the Dutch
heiress Olga Froebe-Kapteyn initiated an annual conference on her
estate near Ascona, Switzerland that became known as the Eranos
Conference. The goal of this gathering was to bring together scholars
of different religious traditions to discuss themes related to religion
and spirituality. Scholem attended many of these conferences, presented
numerous papers, and took part in the larger ecumenical discussions. In
the years Scholem attended, Carl Jung was a central figure and many of
the themes in the conferences reflected Jung's particular
interest in religious symbolism and mythology. Other important figures
included Mircea Eliade, Henri Corbin, Karl Lowith, Gerhard van der
Leeuw, Erich Neumann, and Paul Tillich. This conference proved to be an
important outlet for Scholem to move beyond his more parochial studies
in Israel and explore the areas of comparative religion and
phenomenology that interested him in his youth. It also enabled him to
return to a more cosmopolitan European and international setting and
present his more specific Hebraic research to a new audience. Scholem
published some of these essays in the conference's annual
proceedings, the *Eranos Yearbook*, and some in German and
English journals. Other essays from Eranos appeared in a six-volume
collection entitled *Judaica* published in Germany between
1963-1997. The best collection of some of these articles in English
appears in *On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism*, 1965. In
particular "Religious Authority and Mysticism,"
"Kabbalah and Myth," and "Tradition and New Creation
in the Ritual of the Kabbalists" represent Scholem's
attempt to present his research to a non-specialist yet educated
audience of scholars of religion and psychology. While some of his
students claim that these essays do not make up an essential part of
Scholem's oeuvre, others claim that, in fact, these are some of
the richest and perhaps the most provocative dimensions of
Scholem's intellectual project. Combined with other essays such
as "Tradition and Revelation as Religious Categories in
Judaism" these essays address larger questions of philosophy and
phenomenology of religion as they relate to Kabbala that are not dealt
with in his more technical Hebrew essays. When later scholars reflect
on the intellectual trajectory of Scholem's project, these essays
prove indispensable. Moreover, the relationships he cultivated from
attending these conferences expanded his own thinking and, by
extension, his reconstruction of the history of Kabbala.


## 6. Historiography and Theology




Early on Scholem became committed to critical historical scholarship
as a mode of not only understanding the past but reconstructing the
present. That is, history and philology were, for him, the only basis
for any legitimate Jewish theology in a world that could no longer
support authentic mysticism. While he did write theological essays, one
could argue that his historical/philological essays also had a
theological foundation. Scholem grew up in a world (Weimar Germany and
then Mandate Palestine) that was rife with intellectual activity all
focused on the reconstruction of Jewish life and culture around
Zionism. The Hebrew University (which began as an "Institute for
Jewish Studies" in 1924) where he taught, was expressly created
for that purpose. Scholem's historical work emerged as a critique
of two distinct movements.




The first was the *Wissenschaft des Judentums* (the Science
of Judaism), led by the 19th century Jewish historians
Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, and Henrich Graetz.
These historians reconstructed Jewish history for a newly
emancipated western European Jewish community placing special emphasis
on normative rabbinic literature and culture (Talmud and Midrash) and
the medieval rationalist tradition as the backbone of Judaism. They
ignored or disparaged all forms of mysticism and Kabbala, claiming it
to be an outdated and dark part of the Jewish past. Scholem's
entire re-construction of Kabbala (and by extension of Judaism) would
be an unrelenting battle against them. As he wrote in a 1944 essay
"Modern Jewish Studies" "In brief: the stones that
were rejected by the builders [the Science of Judaism] will become the
cornerstone." Scholem referred to their rejection of
Kabbala as the "origin sin" of the Science of Judaism from
which everything else was merely an extension. This sentiment was
reiterated in a 1962 essay "What Others Rejected: Kabbala and
Historical Criticism" delivered upon receiving one of the
Rothschild Prizes. While Scholem claimed laconically that the exilic
and thus apologetic mentality that tainted the Science of
Judaism's historical project was not, in fact, rectified with the
new national and sovereign consciousness he also acknowledged that
nationalism (one form of Zionism) presented its own distorting lenses
even as it corrected some mistakes of the past.




Second, in the early decades of the 20th century the philosophies of
Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber -- the former a neo-Kantian
rationalist, the latter a romantic existentialist--were immensely
popular. Scholem rejected both grand schemes in favor of careful
historical analysis of the regnant literary sources of Judaism. In
addition, in response to Adolph von Harnack's influential *The
Essence of Christianity* (Harnack argued, among other things, that
Christianity was rooted in Gnosticism and thus needn't be
dependent on any Jewish sources damaging the very idea of a German
Jewish culture) theologians such as Leo Baeck argued for an
'essence' of Judaism to counter Harnack's position
that Judaism was irrelevant and illegitimate for Christianity.
Buber and Scholem both rejected the notion of an essence of Judaism yet
both differed on the alternative. Buber focused on the notion of
*Erlebnis*, or intuitive experience, as the anchor of a
human's relationship to God via revelation (or relation). That
is, for Buber, experience was a meta-lingual phenomenon and thus
language was inferior to pure experience. For Buber, then, there is no
essence of Judaism but there may be an essence of religious experience
that transcends language and thus particularity. Scholem rejected this
and argued that Judaism can only be renewed through the historical
consciousness of *Erfahrung* or concrete historical experience.
This kind of experience is mediated through language, specifically, the
language of the textual tradition. Influenced by Walter
Benjamin's early theory of language, Scholem argued that language
was of "divine origin" (however this is understood) and
thus the experience of revelation was itself linguistic. For Scholem,
therefore, there is no essential religious experience as *all*
human experience is mediated through language and thus particular to a
cultural and linguistic context. He also held there was no essence of
Judaism if by that we mean some core sets of values that can be
exhibited in all forms of Jewish literature. 




For him Judaism is, according to one close reader of Scholem
"an anarchistic plurality of sources." Thus the best way to
understand Judaism is through the philological and historical analysis
of those sources without any pre-conceived vision of a grand narrative
that unites them. Scholem's position against the Essentialist
school surfaces in the first chapter of *Major Trends* where he
struggles to define the mystical experience. It surfaces again in the
1960's and 1970's in light of the nature of language in
"On the Name of God and Linguistic Theory in Kabbala." The
"Name of God" essay was a topic Scholem first expressed
interest in writing in the early 1920's until he realized he did
not have sufficient knowledge of Kabbala to do so. The essay was
published in two parts in 1972. In *Major Trends* he navigates a
position between the essentialists and the pure constructivist
position. It should be noted that even given Scholem's dependence
on language, he does not advocate a pure constructivist position on the
nature of experience. That is, he does *not* argue there is
simply no meaning whatsoever to experience outside of language or that
there is no experience outside of language. Language for Scholem is a
vehicle for understanding experience but whether it is, in fact, the
very origin of experience is something Scholem never definitively
argues and remains a issue of debate among Scholem's
interpreters.




The historiographical dimension of Scholem's reconstruction of
Judaism is perhaps his most contested thesis. He offers a kind of
Hegelian position. In brief it unfolds as follows: The biblical period
is where Judaism struggles to free itself of pure myth and, while
partially successful, never quite severs itself from the mythic world
of its surroundings. This period is followed by the rabbinic period of
late antiquity introducing the institutional period of the Jewish
religion. The rabbis suppressed myth, magic, and cult in favor of a
normalized legal system that rationalized biblical mythic motifs and
presented a God who, while not impersonal, was more distant from human
experience than in the biblical period which was centered on prophecy.
The Jewish Middle Ages began with Judaism's absorption of
Hellenistic/rational culture and produced a God even more distant than
the rabbinic God. Moreover, in this period while law remained
obligatory it was challenged by reason as the sine qua non of the
religious life. Myth moves from a sate of suppression to being outright
rejected. It is here, Scholem posits, that Kabbala enters. In part a
reaction against medieval rationalism (curiously not unlike
Scholem's rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism of the
Science of Judaism) Kabbala emerges in part to revive the biblical myth
and also offer myths of its own born from a reification of rabbinic
Midrash into a mystical cosmology. In Hegelian fashion, this mystical
period then results in a renewal of rationalism in the Enlightenment
where mysticism moves underground again (it is rejected by the
proponents of the Science of Judaism) to be followed by its resurgence
in yet another period of Jewish self-assertion and its re-connection to
land and power in Zionism. This dialectical approach has been duly
criticized as "too neat" ignoring the messy edges of any
historical epoch. For example, some have argued that Scholem
intentionally downplays the mythic components in rabbinic Judaism and
the ways in which early kabbalists also fashioned themselves as
philosophers. For example, the ecstatic mystic Abraham Abulafia wrote
commentaries to Maimonides' rational work and did not consider
his own project as contradictory to Maimonides. The critique continues
that Scholem favored the more "mythic" kabbalistic schools
such as the Rhineland pietists, the Zohar, Luria, Sabbatai Zevi, and
Hasidism because they serve his purpose and viewed those who do not as
not central to the historical trajectory of Kabbala.




One of the vexing questions in Scholem's historiographical
rendering of Kabbala is the place of myth in medieval kabbalistic
literature. On the one hand, Scholem seems to prefer symbol over myth
when discussing Kabbala, suggesting that Kabbala's reification of
the biblical narrative does not yield a mythic drama, including a cadre
of mythic figures, but rather a series of symbolic clusters or
hypostatic forms that are identified through the prism of the
personalities in the Hebrew Bible. On the other hand, in numerous
places Scholem suggests Kabbala re-introduces myth into the Jewish
discourse as a critique of Judaism's rational expositors. Critics
have suggested Scholem underestimated the mythic nature of theosophic
Kabbala (the Zohar and its interpreters) and was too invested in
notions of symbolism that were common in his time (e.g. Jung, Ricoeur,
Eliade). In any event, the question of myth versus symbol in Kabbala
remains an important issue to be examined by Scholem's readers
and future scholars. One important consequence of this question is
whether one defines Scholem's dialectical historiography as
Hegelian or psychoanalytic. If we say myth yields to symbolism in
Kabbala, Kabbala's new Jewish theology would better fit into the
Hegelian mode as an antithesis to medieval rationalism. If we say myth
dominates symbol in Kabbala, we could argue for a case of the Freudian
"return of the repressed" where the ancient Israelite myth
repressed by rabbinic institutionalization and medieval rationalism
returns to undermine both, even as it ostensibly remains wedded to the
orthodoxy rabbinic Judaism provides.




In any case, it is hard to know exactly how seriously Scholem intended
us to take his dialectical historiography or whether, in fact, it
served more as a heuristic tool to enable us to see a sweeping picture
that subsequent generations could revise. It is also worth considering
how much the warp and woof of the messianic and antinomian that
underlies much of Scholem's historiography of Kabbala is born
from, and serves, his Zionism, In an interview a short time before his
death he admitted that he believed his work was already
"dated" and thus, I assume, in need of revision and
revaluation. Given the waning belief in grand narratives,
Scholem's historiography has met sharp criticism yet there is
little doubt its main features have thus far stood the test of
time.




A second component that accompanies Scholem's dialectic of myth,
rationalism, and mysticism is his theory of esotericism. Committed to
the notion that social and cultural change are driven by ideas more
than events, Scholem adds that the ideas that often have the most
profound impact are esoteric ones that are suppressed yet surface when
certain historical conditions arise. This serves as one of his main
criticisms of *Wissenschaft des Judentums*, that is, that the
presentation of Judaism without its esoteric components is not only
bad history but misunderstands the main forces that drive change in
Jewish life and ideas. One scholar termed this Scholem's
"counter-history." For Scholem Judaism's ostensible
anchor, tradition, is always in danger of undermining itself because
it contains the seeds of its own demise in the form of esotericism,
mysticism, and myth. As history unfolds, it often adjusts and survives
its own inner challenge but other times, as in Sabbateanism, it does
so only by a combination of draconian means (this often backfires) or
by exercising its own elasticity to absorb the heretical and thereby
make it normative.




For Scholem, the one case where tradition may not have been able to
recover is modernity. For him modernity, and the secular, undermines
the central pillar of tradition, its belief in the divine nature of
Scripture. Once this goes, he posits, in some way the dialectic is
broken in that mysticism needs tradition as its foil in order to
survive. The shattered ideational foundation of Jewish identity in
modernity can only be replaced with something that is heretical,
messianic, and secular: that is, Zionism. One scholar refers to this as
Scholem's "creative anarchy." In his famous last
comments on the last page of *Major Trends* Scholem acknowledges
that modernity destroyed the conditions for mysticism as we knew it
historically but he acknowledges it could indeed rise in a different
guise in the future. This all seems to embody Scholem's own
identification as a "religious anarchist." He may mean
numerous things by this enigmatic assertion. He may mean that he
believes, as mentioned above, that Judaism has no essence but is only a
series of connected yet not always coherent textual traditions and sets
of ideas. He may also mean that he believes controlled anarchy as the
demise of any heteronomous authority sets the proper conditions for the
discovery of suppressed esoteric trends in a society. As he believes
these trends are crucial to understanding any culture, he supports
religious anarchy to the extent that it enables "the
professor" of Jewish mysticism to do his (or her) work. In this
second case, anarchy appears synonymous with secularity.


## 7. Zionism




As mentioned, Scholem became a Zionist in 1911 when he was 14 years
old. In many ways, and like many in his generation and locale, his
Zionism was one of protest against the bourgeois lifestyle and
assimilated Jewish identity of his parents. In his native Germany
Herzl's political Zionism was dominant but Scholem soon met
Eastern European immigrants and became exposed to the spiritual and
cultural Zionism of Ahad ha-Am. He became involved in the Zionist youth
movement Blau Weiss (but later spoke out critically against it) and was
strongly influenced by the charismatic Martin Buber who was a leader
among the Zionist youth in Germany at that time. He committed to
immigrating to Palestine quite early in his life, to some extent
motivated by the banishment from his home the fact that he was young,
still unmarried, and had few financial obligations. In any case, once
he arrived in Palestine he quickly became part of the German immigrant
intelligentsia, some of whom had formed a group called Brit Shalom
dedicated to the creation of a Jewish-Arab binational state. Some in
the group were committed radicals and liberals and others, like
Scholem, were more pragmatic in their approach, although he also viewed
binationalism as a moral obligation. In either case, almost all the
members of Brit Shalom came from Germany (or spent time there) and,
having experienced the Great War, had a bitter disdain for nationalism
in general. They all saw the dangers of ethnocentric nationalism from
their German past and all, as Zionists, wanted to deter any Jewish
state from repeating those errors.




Scholem's active participation in Brit Shalom was fairly
short-lived. He soured on the idea after the 1929 Hebron riots where
Palestinian Arabs marauders attacked and killed Jewish civilians. This
massacre, which was a watershed event for many on the Jewish left at
that time, gave Scholem pause at to whether any true co-existence
could be possible. However, as late as 1937, in a letter to Walter
Benjamin, his life-long friend who never accepted Zionism, Scholem
wrote against partition (of separate Jewish and Arab states) and
upheld his belief in binationalism as the "moral ideal
solution." After the Holocaust Scholem's belief in binationalism
eroded even more, even though he never abandoned a belief that, given
other circumstances, it was the best option. In a letter in 1972 he
admitted Brit Shalom had mistakenly read the historical situation and
that "Hitler totally changed the perspective." As time
went on Scholem became reconciled with the state, and even defended
it, although be spoke vociferously against the settlements after 1967
and saw the movement as a dangerous combination of messianic
triumphalism and mystical optimism.




Scholars disagree as to the extent Scholem separated the two parts of
his life, first as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and second as a public
intellectual, particularly a Zionist. Some argue that his Zionism is
reflected in his entire scholarly career while others suggest he
successfully bifurcated both parts of his life. As a believer in the
almost mystical power of language he maintained that the revival of the
Hebrew language in Mandate Palestine/Israel was necessary to bring the
esoteric components of the tradition -- founded so deeply on the
play of language -- to the fore. He also believed that Zionism in
Mandate Palestine/Israel, as a growing culture in need of a new
identity, was fertile ground for a renaissance constructed from the
resources of forgotten dimensions of the tradition. This is not to say
he believed in some kind of neo-kabbalistic culture. He did not.
Scholem remained a committed secularist throughout his life believing,
I think, that secularism and secular Zionism were a crucial part of any
new Jewish society. Perhaps, then, even those who maintain that
Scholem's academic work is not tainted by his ideology can agree
that for him Zionism, in its cultural and political manifestations,
served as the necessary frame for his project of reconstructing Jewish
history from the perspective of mystical esotericism.


## 8. Contemporary Jewish Life and the Future of Jewish Civilization




Throughout his career Scholem played the important role of public
intellectual in Mandate Palestine/Israel. He often wrote in Israeli
newspapers, magazines, was frequently interviewed in print and radio,
and weighed in on a variety of political, cultural, and social issues.
Many of these essays were collected in the two-volume *Devarim
be-Go* published in 1976 and a third volume entitled *'Od
Davar* published in 1989. A selection of these and other essays
were published in English in *Jews and Judaism in Crisis*, 1976
and more recently in *On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism
Today*, 1997. In these volumes Scholem reflects on everything from
the state of the university, general Israeli education, Israeli
politics, the state of the Diaspora, and personal reflections of his
own on studying Jewish mysticism. These include book reviews, short
comments about his contemporaries, and letters he wrote to various
colleagues and friends. One of his most well-known, and revealing,
letters about his own investment in the study of Kabbala was a 1925
letter to the Israeli poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik that was published in
Hebrew in *Devarim be-Go* and now appears in German translation.
Scholem knew the importance of his stature as the founder of the modern
study of Kabbala and he responded by engaging with issues of his day
from that perch. He was often self-deprecating about his
"popular" essays but he took them very seriously and they
occupied a fair amount of his psyche and energy.




He also wrote hundreds of letters to scholars and dignitaries around
the world that have recently been published in *Gershom Scholem: A
Life in Letters: 1914-1982*. The correspondence between him and
Walter Benjamin was published separately as *The Correspondence of
Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin: 1932-1940*. A volume of his
poetry was published as *In the Fullness of Time: Poems*, 2003.
A new volume of his early diaries has just been published as
*Lamentations of Youth: the Diaries of Gershom Scholem,
1913-1919*, 2008.




Coming in Israel in the 1920's when Zionism was still a
revolutionary cultural project Scholem knew he was in the midst of a
secular revolution whose origins, according to him, extended back to
the distant esoteric past. His role was not simply to unearth but also
to interpret, not only publish but to educate a generation. He was
arguably the most important Jewish Studies scholar in the twentieth
century and surely one of its most important and influential
voices.




The hundreds of texts and personalities he brought to light from
late antiquity to modernity and the forcefulness and complexity of his
grand theses about Kabbala and Jewish history has fed more than three
generations of scholars and will surely nurture many more. More
recently, he is being discovered in European circles as an important
figure in Weimar Jewish culture. Serious studies in German are
presently being published by young scholars who know little about
Kabbala and do not have much interest in Zionism but view Scholem as an
important intellectual and philosophical mind compared with such
figures as Benjamin, Strauss, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Arendt. His
intellectual reach was, in fact, extraordinary, and thus this new
interest should be celebrated.