Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem (Born Gerhard Scholem, December 5 1897 in Berlin, died February 21, 1982 in Jerusalem) was a German-born Jewish philosopher and historian. Scholem studied the roots of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, founding a professorship for the study of the Kabbalah in Jerusalem. He wrote a famous biography of Sabbatai Zevi.

The precocious interest of the young Scholem in Jewish traditions was strongly opposed by his father, Arthur. But thanks to his mother's intervention, he was allowed to study the Hebrew language and the Talmud with an orthodox rabbi. Scholem was no less attracted by secular and socialist Zionism.

He studied mathematics, philosophy and Hebrew language at the university of Berlin. During his studies he met Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin. In this period he became friends with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad ha-Am and Zalman Shazar. He was in Bern in 1918 with Benjamin and he was admitted to the local university. In this city he met Elsa Burckhardt, who would later become his first wife. He came back to Germany in 1919, and he got a degree in semitic languages at the University of Munich.

He wrote his doctor's thesis on the subject of the most ancient known kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. Drawn to Zionism and influenced by Martin Buber, he emigrated in 1923 to Palestine; here he devoted his time to studying Jewish mysticism and became a librarian, and later a lecturer, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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.

Gershom Scholem married Fania Freud.

He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view, and became the first professor for Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965. In 1965 he was given the title of emeritus professor of the Hebrew University.

He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1958. In 1962 he was elected vice-President, and in 1968, President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Scholem died in Jerusalem in 1982, leaving a widow, Fania Scholem.

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). The analysis of Judaism carried out by this school had two important problems, according to Scholem:

In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were as important as the rational ones. He wanted not to follow the same path of those who had adopted mysticism but not the history. In particular he was in disagreement with Martin Buber. He criticized Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts, his ignorance of history, of the Hebrew language, and of the old country 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. This impetus to give justification to the irrational came from, as in the one of the Wissenschaft, Buber, some more some less directly. Different from this, the (gegengeschichtlich) of Scholem make the concept of tradition a strong link between the yesterday's Jews and today's Jews. (The adoption of Zionism)

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 to conciliate the abstract God of the 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, again 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 very controversial arguments. He thought that the messianic movement of the 16th century of the Sabattianism was developed from the medieval Kabbalah of luriana. In order to neutralize the sabattianism, as a Hegelian synthesis, Hassidism emerged.

Many of those who joined the Hassidic 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 Qabbalah was a Jewish gnosticism that preceded Christian gnosticism.

The historiographical approach of Scholem involved a linguistic theory too. In contrast to Buber, Scholen believed in the power of the language to invoke supernatural pheonomena. In contrast to 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 cabbalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation.


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See also: Gershom Scholem, 16th century, 1897, 1918, 1919, 1923, 1933, 1965, 1982, 19th century