Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History

Joseph Dan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1987
• ISBN:
  9780814720974
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

"An excellent overview of the history of Jewish mysticism from its early beginnings to contemporary Hasidism...scholarly and complex."
— Library Journal

"An excellent work, clear and solidly documented by Joseph Dan on Gershom Scholem and on his work."
— Notes Bibliographiques

"An excellent guide to Scholem's work."
— Christian Century

CHAPTER 1

THE MAN AND THE SCHOLAR

I

THREE BOOKS should be written about Gershom Scholem. This is intended to be one of them. One book should describe Scholem and the twentieth century: his background, his approach to Zionism, and his immigration to Jerusalem (subjects dealt with in his autobiography, From Berlin to Jerusalem),¹ his activity in Jerusalem and at the Hebrew University, his friendships with Agnon² and other great Jerusalem figures, his relationship with Walter Benjamin,³ his social and political views, his impact upon Israeli culture and outlook concerning its past, and all other aspects of a long, fruitful, and extremely active and influential life.

Another book should deal with Scholem the phenomenologist. How did Gershom Scholem understand the meaning of “religion,” “mysticism,” “symbolism,” “mythology,” the relationship between mysticism and language, his concept of the scholarly field of history of religions and history of ideas, his attitude toward the Freudian and Jungian schools in psychology, his understanding of Gnosticism, his concept of Judaism and Zionism, and many other similar subjects.⁴

And one book should be dedicated to Scholem’s scholarship. He worked for 63 years on a history and bibliography of Jewish mysticism and the integration of this history with the general development of Jewish history and culture. The present book intends to be this third book. It does not deal with Scholem the man and his times, nor does it deal with Scholem’s views on the general phenomenological problems which he encountered. It deals only with content, the major outlines of Scholem’s history of the kabbalah, and its integration into Jewish history.

Gershom Scholem published over 40 volumes and nearly 700 studies. About 95 percent of these pertain to the subject of this book. Readers may disagree concerning the question of what Scholem’s importance is. (They also may disagree over where his main contribution to contemporary Judaism is to be found, whether in his relationship and presentations concerning current affairs, or his contribution to the understanding of mysticism and symbolism in general, or his efforts as a historian. But there can be no doubt that Scholem spent his life being a historian in the fullest sense of the term and concentrated all his efforts in this field. It is very rare to find a young man outlining his scholarly career and then following it without deviation for nearly 60 years; but Scholem did just this. His letter to Bialik, written soon after his arrival in Jerusalem, gives the outline for almost all his subsequent work.⁵ Scholem considered that his biographical and bibliographical studies concerning various kabbalists and their works were important. He once said: “All I found were scattered, shabby pages, and I transformed them into history.”⁶ This is an accurate statement, without any qualifications. He saw himself as a historian, he understood his work as being historical work, he dedicated all his efforts to the study of kabbalistic texts as historical documents. There may be different views concerning what is important in his work; there can be no doubt what, in his labor, was important to him.

It is impossible to summarize in one volume the years of scholarship and publications and articles.⁷ All this book intends to bring before the reader are the broadest outlines of the contents of Jewish mysticism and its impact on Jewish religion and history. I have concentrated exclusively on Scholem’s work, but often, undoubtedly, the presentation is influenced by the works of Scholem’s disciples and subsequent work done on the same subjects. The notes, for the most part, are limited to primary sources, besides pointing out some details and comments. I have also included cases of disagreement and controversy. One can consider this work in its entirety as a survey of the current state of the study of the field as a whole.

Before we turn to a general review of Scholem’s scholarly work, a few paragraphs about his biography and his attitude toward Judaism and Zionism are in order. As stated above, there is no intention to present in this framework anything approaching either a full biography or an appreciation of his intellectual response to the main ideas with which his life brought him into contact. These are just bare outlines, to facilitate the understanding of the background of his scholarship.

II

There can be no doubt that the young Gershom Scholem was a rebellious intellectual. Nothing in the background in which he was born could explain this, however. If we compare the spiritual world in which he was born and was raised to the one he created for himself in his young manhood, only contradictions emerge. It is as if Scholem had not preserved in his later life anything from his childhood atmosphere except, most probably, a clear resolution never to return to the same values.

Scholem was born in Berlin in 1897 to a family that was a typical Jewish-German assimilationist one. In later years he used to tell the story (included also in his autobiography), that when his parents wanted to please him, they would do something like hang a picture of Herzl on their Christmas tree. There was nothing in that home that would give any basis or impetus to a stirring of a Jewish interest. Hebrew was unknown and unspoken, and the young, emerging Jewish national movement, Zionism, was completely outside the family’s realm of interest. German nationalism was the accepted norm of thinking, and the first hints of an interest in socialism were apparent. In short, it is impossible to study Scholem’s family to understand what caused him to turn to Judaism and Zionism. Nor is the paradox, like many others, clarified by Scholem’s autobiography, which one would expect to throw some light on his early development.

Scholem’s autobiography is an unusual book. While most autobiographies tend to serve their authors as a vehicle to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings, Scholem’s From Berlin to Jerusalem concerned itself almost exclusively with external facts. That is, he gives detailed information concerning his family, relatives, studies, teachers, books he read, people he met and their background but reveals little about himself. He relates his decisions to study Hebrew, his quest for a teacher in the field of Talmud, his meetings with scholars, and similar incidents, but the natural questions arise: Why did he choose this and not that? What were his motives? What was his attitude toward the various alternatives that stood before him? On these questions there is hardly a word. The reader acquires from reading the autobiography an impressive amount of detailed information, but not a glimpse of the soul of its author, and almost no answer to the basic questionmarks surrounding his early life.

Scholem was no different even in private conversation. He enjoyed talking about his early life, about people he met, and about things he had done. Those who met him frequently and talked with him a great deal recognized most of the events included in From Berlin to Jerusalem, because they served as the basis for anecdotes he related in his conversations. However, the motives, the reasons, the emotions—these Scholem kept hidden in his book as well as in his conversations.

It was not known, until after his death in 1982, that Scholem left a large number of personal letters in his files. His widow, Fania (a relative of Freud), is working now to sort them out, arrange them chronologically and by subject, and prepare a selection for publication. There is a possibility that these letters may shed some light on the questions which we are discussing here.

If Scholem did not leave us with a statement of his motives concerning his major decisions in his early life, to some extent his actions speak for themselves. All his actions point in one direction: an intense, extreme sense of rebellion.

Not only in his early life, but throughout the 65 years of his career, Scholem was and remained a fierce foe of German nationalism. He expressed it in the most difficult circumstances during the First World War, when he belonged to the tiny minority among German Jews who opposed the war wholeheartedly and without reservation (without, however, joining the communists, who also opposed the war). He never forgave some of his friends and teachers who were carried away by the German nationalistic spirit and in one way or another supported, even if halfheartedly, the war effort. When called to army service, Scholem successfully persuaded the doctors that he was mentally unbalanced and therefore should be exempt from army service. This act never gave him any qualms nor did he express any misgivings. The war was nothing of a Jew’s concern, and he expressed in this way his complete and resolute negation of the spirit of German nationalism that prevailed in his home and toward which he felt nothing but alienation and hatred.

This basic attitude is reflected in his response in later years to the horrible questions of the Holocaust and subsequent relationships with Nazi and post-Nazi Germany. His resolute answer to Hannah Arendt concerning the evil of Nazi Germany is a clear example, but only the best-known one. In one of his essays he deals with the problem of the role of Jews in modern German culture, and points out, like nobody else before him, the stark asymmetry in the description of this process. Scholem pointed out that only Jewish writers and historians had stressed the Jewish contribution to German culture in the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, when the Nazi regime took over. He asked: Where are the German historians who accept the thesis that Jewish spiritual force was integrated into modern German culture? Where is the German who will admit that there was a meeting (Scholem even used a sexual expression to describe such a meeting) between Judaism and Germanism in the modern period? The love affair between Jews and German culture that began in the middle of the eighteenth century was a completely one-sided one, Scholem explained; there was no expression of any German appreciation of the Jewish contribution. Nazi anti-Semitism, one may infer, was for Scholem a deep expression of the German-Jewish relationship, a far truer expression than the idyllic picture of an “interrupted love affair” that could have been resumed were it not for the brutal intervention of the Nazis.

How much of this did the young Scholem understand before he decided to repudiate his home and turn to Jewish nationalism and Hebrew studies? We cannot know, but it is possible to imagine that the fierceness of his rebellion reflected a deep-seated aversion toward the assimilationist world in which he was raised and that he remained steadfast and committed throughout his life to the values he adopted in his adolescent years when he rebelled against those which governed his family and his education.

It should also be noted that Scholem chose, when adopting Judaism and Zionism, the least popular alternative among those he could have followed, and probably the most difficult one. Young Jews at that time were joining various socialist and leftist groups, and the young Scholem was aware of their ideology and politics. Socialism never appealed to him, even though a great and important friendship in his life was with Walter Benjamin, a profound (though an unorthodox) socialist thinker.

To become a socialist, one did not have to study a forgotten, neglected language like Hebrew, and certainly could study texts easier to follow than the Talmud. Yet Scholem chose the most difficult way and followed it with a dedication which would characterize his attitude to every subject he would deal with throughout his life.

What came first—Zionism or Judaism? Did Scholem adopt Jewish nationalism first, and then, in order not to appear hypocritical, begin to study Jewish history, Hebrew, and the Jewish classical texts, or was it the other way round—first the interest in Hebrew and Judaism, and only later the awakening of Jewish nationalism, followed by Zionist activity? It seems from Scholem’s statements on this subject that adherence to nationalism came first, but that his cultural interest was never separated from his Zionist ideology. The two were fused together very early in his life.

It is clear that Scholem did not choose to be a student of mysticism first, and then of Jewish mysticism second. His road toward the study of the kabbalah began with the repudiation of German nationalism and of Jewish assimilationism. This brought him to the Hebrew language, to Jewish history, and to the study of the Talmud and Midrash. Only much later did he choose the neglected field of the kabbalah as the subject to which he would dedicate over 60 years of scholarly work. That is, often one reads descriptions of Scholem depicting him as a great mystic, who used scholarship as a vehicle to express his innermost feelings toward God and the creation, toward history and divine revelation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As has been intimated above, Scholem was first and foremost a Jewish nationalist. Then he studied Jewish culture thoroughly. Only then did he become a scholar of the history of the kabbalah.

It is interesting to note how seldom the term “Jewish mysticism” appears in Scholem’s writings in the 1920s. He dedicated himself (as we shall see below) to the study of the history of kabbalistic texts but without characterizing them as revelations of Jewish mystical creativity. It was not until his series of lectures in New York, after which his first book in English appeared (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1941, when Scholem was 44 years old and had written nearly a hundred studies) that the subj...