gershom scholem

Gershom
Scholem
Master of the Kabbalah

D AV I D B I A L E

New Haven and London

 Frontispiece: Gershom Scholem in his library, 1962
(courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

Copyright © 2018 by David Biale.

All rights reserved.
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10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
 also by david biale

Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History

Hasidism: A New History (with David Assaf, Benjamin Brown,

Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv,
and Marcin Wodziński)

Norton Anthology of World Religions: Judaism (editor)

Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought

Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol

Between Jews and Christians

Cultures of the Jews: A New History (editor)

Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America

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 contents

Preface, ix
1. Berlin Childhood, 1
2. The Abyss of War, 19
3. Scholem in Love, 42
4. The Book of Brightness, 62
5. A University in Jerusalem, 83
6. Redemption Through Sin, 107
7. Kabbalah and Catastrophe, 130
8. The Zionist Return to History, 156
9. The Sage of Jerusalem, 180
A Personal Epilogue, 200
 contents

Notes, 203
Selected Readings in English, 217
Acknowledgments, 221
Index, 223

viii
 preface

Thirty-five years after his death, Gershom Scholem (1897–

1982) continues to cast a long shadow over the world of Jewish
thought. During his lifetime, he won wide acclaim for unearth-
ing the sources of Jewish mysticism and messianism that other
historians, convinced that Judaism was primarily a religion of
reason, had ignored or despised. By restoring myth to Judaism,
Scholem offered a radical new definition of his subject: the Jew-
ish religion consists of paradoxes and contradictions, the ratio-
nal and the irrational. Judaism has no dogmatic “essence” but
is rather made up of whatever Jews have done or thought, no
matter how outlandish or even demonic.
Scholem’s study of Jewish history thus broke out of the nar-
row confines of academic scholarship to provide a revolutionary
way of thinking about Judaism. It is perhaps for that reason
that at a time when the stars of other thinkers, famous in their
day, such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, have some-

ix
 preface

what faded, Scholem has come to inhabit a brighter place in

the Jewish firmament, as a luminary who continues to speak to
us today. In 1973, when the English translation appeared of his
monumental biography of Shabbatai Zvi (Sabbatai Sevi), the
messianic figure from the seventeenth century, the reviews of the
book, as one commentator has noted, had already diverged from
the controversy that the Hebrew edition aroused in 1957. The
reviewers of the English edition spent far less time discussing
Scholem’s subject—few were competent to do so—than talking
about Scholem himself. He had become the subject.
Scholem also transcended the world of scholarship for
other reasons. When he published his memoir From Berlin to
Jerusalem in 1977, he put his stamp on a powerful narrative of
modern Jewish history: by rejecting his bourgeois German
Jewish roots and embracing Zionism, Scholem moved his idio-
syncratic life choices from the margins to a central story. The
German Jews, he alleged, had lived an illusion that was the
“German–Jewish dialogue,” and only those few who became
Zionists saw through this illusion. However, Scholem’s Zion-
ism was anything but conventional, so his critique of the move-
ment that brought him to Palestine in 1923 made his position
both more interesting and more challenging. He defended the
right of the Jews to create their own society yet criticized Zion-
ism for failing to truly renew Judaism.
It is perhaps for all these reasons—intellectual, political,
and cultural—that Scholem’s star has never faded. Remarkably,
in the year that this book is making its appearance, no less than
five other books dealing in whole or in part with Scholem’s biog-
raphy are being—or have been—published (see the bibliograph-
ical note). This is more than at any other time since Scholem’s
death and begs for an explanation. Certainly, as contemporary
Zionism confronts a deep political and moral crisis, Scholem’s
earlier reflections on the price that messianism might exact from
modern Jewish nationalism seem apposite, even if formulated

x
 preface

in a different reality. And his argument for an inclusive definition

of Judaism also has resonance in an age when the battle between
secularism and Orthodoxy has reawakened throughout the Jew-
ish world. And so it is that contemporary writers of different
persuasions find him urgently relevant.
In this book I do something that has not yet been done
with respect to Scholem. The reader will find here an account
of his life with an attempt to understand him from within. By
using diaries and letters, I have tried to enter into his inner life
and view him not only as a thinker and writer but also as a
human being. At the same time, I have engaged with his most
important writings in an effort to integrate them into his life.
As such, this is the study of an extraordinary thinker: not an
ethereal intellectual but a fully embodied person, filled with pas-
sions and paradoxes, much as he described Judaism itself.

xi
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gershom scholem
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 1

Berlin Childhood

Berlin, 1897. The city is exploding with commerce and

culture, a far cry from the tiny Prussian capital of Frederick the
Great. Between 1849 and 1871, when it became the capital of
Bismarck’s unified Germany, its population doubled, to 825,000.
But the city was scarcely fit to serve as the capital of a new Eu-
ropean power. In the 1870s, the socialist leader August Bebel
noted that “waste water from the houses collected in gutters
along the curbs and emitted a truly fearsome smell.”1 Within a
few decades, however, city planners, engineers, and public ser-
vants would transform this primitive backwater into a gleam-
ing, modern metropolis.
By 1897, the population of Berlin had again doubled, to 1.7
million. A year before, work had begun on a modern subway
system, to be completed in 1902, which would take its place
alongside an extensive network of street trams. Museums, opera,
and theater crowned a rich cultural life. And the new Reichstag

1
 gershom scholem

building, completed in 1894 with its impressive dome, sent a

clear message of Germany’s place in the modern world.
The Jews were an integral part of Berlin’s landscape at the
end of the nineteenth century. When Moses Mendelssohn had
entered via the Rosenthaler Gate in 1743, there were only about
2,000 Jews in the city. By 1871 the number had risen to 36,000.
They had won most of their civil rights in mid-century, but with
the emancipation of all German Jews in 1871, they were now
the full equals of their Christian neighbors (they were, how-
ever, still barred from holding academic chairs as well as high
offices in government and the military). In business, the pro-
fessions, and the arts, in particular, they were represented often
beyond their numbers in the population. By 1897, the Jewish pop-
ulation of Berlin had swollen to 110,000, the second-largest Jew-
ish community (after Vienna) west of Warsaw. The community
boasted recently built Reform synagogues, often in the “Moor-
ish” style, but there were relatively few of the Orthodox Jews
more commonly found in the rural communities farther east.
All was not, however, entirely well for these generally pros-
perous, highly Germanified Jews. During the great depression
of the 1870s, a new, racial anti-Semitism emerged that took its
place alongside older religious and Enlightenment hostility to
the Jews. Adolf Stoecker, the Kaiser’s court preacher, gave voice
to some of these sentiments. For the first time, political parties
whose main platform was anti-Semitic competed for seats in
the Reichstag, although they were generally unsuccessful.
In response to these attacks, most Jews took refuge in their
German identity and argued that the best response was to re-
linquish not only the orthodox religious markers of Judaism
but also presumed Jewish “traits.” Thus, in 1897, the year with
which we begin, Walther Rathenau, scion of Germany’s fore-
most electrification company, wrote a scathing polemic titled
“Hear, O Israel,” in which he attacked his coreligionists for
“[your] unathletic build, your narrow shoulders, your clumsy

2
 berlin childhood

feet . . . [your] wheedling subservience and vile arrogance.”2

Rathenau did not advocate conversion, since the baptized Jews
would take these same traits with them into the church, a belief
that echoes arguments of the racial anti-Semites. Despite the
overtones of self-hatred in his essay, Rathenau resolved to re-
main Jewish. But he did not embrace the new Zionist movement,
also a product of the year 1897. Like Rathenau, the Zionists were
determined to transform the physical and behavioral charac-
teristics of the Jews into Muskeljudentum (muscular Judaism), in
Max Nordau’s phrase. For Rathenau, though, the Jews needed to
solve their problems—for which he, like many Zionists, blamed
the Jews themselves—within Germany.
On December 5, 1897, the same year that Rathenau pub-
lished his diatribe and Theodor Herzl convened the first Zion-
ist Congress, a fourth—the youngest—son, named Gerhard,
was born to Arthur and Betty Scholem. The Scholems were a
family of printers who had been resident in Berlin for three
generations. The family originated in Glogau, Silesia, the vast
area east of Berlin, conquered by Frederick the Great in 1742,
and the original heartland of many of the Jews who ultimately
came to Berlin in the nineteenth century. The name Scholem
was a highly unusual family name among European Jews, al-
though it was not uncommon as a first name (derived from the
Hebrew for “peace”). In fact, Gerhard Scholem’s great-great-
grandfather was named Scholem ben Elias. When, after 1812,
the Prussian Jews were required to take last names, Scholem
ben Elias’s widow, Zipporah, indicated that she wished to be
called after the personal name of her late husband—Zipporah
Scholem—and thus was the family name born. Her son Marcus
Scholem moved to Berlin early in the nineteenth century and
married the daughter of a Dutch Jewish merchant. Gerhard’s
grandfather, born in 1833, was named after Scholem ben Elias
(his own grandfather), as was the Jewish custom, and thus bore
the amusing name of Scholem Scholem. However, in a sign of

3
 gershom scholem

Jewish acculturation, this family forebear took the German name

Siegfried in the 1850s in order to signify his enthusiasm for the
operas of Richard Wagner.
Siegfried’s son Arthur Scholem was an Anglophile who had
spent a year in London in the 1880s working in the printing
trade with relatives. Upon his return to Germany, he joined his
father’s printing business, but the two did not get along, and in
1891, Arthur opened his own shop. In 1890, he married Betty
Hirsch and had four sons with her in rapid succession. When
Gerhard was born, the family lived on the banks of the Spree
canal on Friedrichsgracht, but in 1906 they moved a mere fif-
teen hundred feet to Neue Grünstrasse. Arthur’s print shop was
a short walk away. The neighborhood, not far from the city cen-
ter, was favored by many bourgeois Berlin Jews, but those who
achieved greater wealth than the Scholems, such as the family
of Gerhard’s friend Walter Benjamin, moved to the city’s bur-
geoning western suburbs of Charlottenburg and Grunewald.
Nothing remains of the Scholem family house on either street
since Allied bombing, the Russian army invasion of what would
become East Berlin, and Communist urban planning obliter-
ated virtually all of the buildings on both streets.
Arthur Scholem was a bourgeois German Jew typical of his
generation. He had dropped out of gymnasium (high school) and
did not benefit from a university education, although a younger
brother went on to study medicine, a sign of the family’s rising
fortunes. One generation removed from Jewish practices, Ar-
thur had little regard for the Jewish religion: he went to work
on Yom Kippur and made a point of not fasting. On Shabbat, he
would light a cigar and utter a cynical blessing over tobacco.
Like Franz Kafka’s father, whom that writer describes as pass-
ing on an “insignificant scrap of Judaism”3 to his son, Arthur
Scholem had little interest in a Jewish identity for his children.
But he socialized primarily with Jews, a common pattern even
among Jews who had converted to Christianity.

4
 berlin childhood

Kafka noted in his letter to his father (which was never de-
livered) that Hermann Kafka was a typical representative of the
generation of Jews who had migrated from the relatively de-
vout countryside to the cities. Judaism for them was a matter of
childhood nostalgia, not something that they practiced often
or believed in strongly. They expected their children to show
deference to occasional symbols of Judaism, but their own lack
of conviction set a bad example. When Franz Kafka became
interested in Judaism, which we might have expected to have
given him something in common with his father, the opposite
occurred: the father treated his son’s new interest as one more
sign of his ineptitude.
Arthur Scholem was even farther removed from the Juda-
ism of the Silesian countryside from which his ancestors hailed,
and, as we will see, his reaction to his own son’s Jewish commit-
ments was as hostile as that of Kafka’s father. He did don a top
hat and accompany Gerhard to synagogue for his bar mitzvah,
but he deliberately scheduled it for just before his son’s four-
teenth birthday, perhaps as a way of establishing a distance from
the Jewish tradition toward which he still felt it necessary to
make a gesture. As was common among such assimilated German
Jews, the Scholems had a Christmas tree, which they explained
to themselves as a symbol of German culture. When Gerhard
became a Zionist, he found a picture of Theodor Herzl under
the tree on Christmas morning. The present was evidently not
meant to be ironic. Surprisingly, though, given his indifference
to Judaism, when his son Werner married a non-Jewish working-
class woman, Arthur cut off all relations with him, as if to say
that intermarriage was a boundary he dared not cross.
Arthur evidently inherited a volcanic temper from his fa-
ther and, in turn, passed it on to his son Gerhard. The similarity
between father and son may well account for the future rocky
relations between them. Starting in his forties, Arthur suffered
from a worsening heart condition that would ultimately kill him

5
 gershom scholem

at age sixty-one. As a result, his wife, Betty, who worked in the

print shop keeping the books, increasingly took over its man-
agement. To judge by Gershom Scholem’s memoir From Berlin
to Jerusalem, and by the copious letters Betty wrote to her son
over some three decades, she was a highly talented and cul-
tured woman, whose temperament was the opposite of her
husband’s. As opposed to Arthur, she was not averse to throw-
ing in an occasional Yiddish phrase, although she was no more
religious than her husband. Because of Arthur’s illness, he was
not able to accompany her on the trips to the Swiss Alps that
she loved. As a result, she often traveled with her youngest son.
And despite Gerhard’s annoyance with his mother’s irenic na-
ture, she seems to have been able to calm his volatile outbursts.
As will become evident, this couldn’t have been easy.
Gerhard was tall and lanky, with prominent protruding
ears, which caused him no end of teasing in school. He was al-
ready showing his brilliance as a child. An autodidact from an
early age, he skipped his schoolwork while still earning out-
standing grades. Possessed of overweening self-confidence, he
could be brusque and overbearing. Yet he was anything but a
loner. He was garrulous and sociable, with many lifelong friends.
The four Scholem sons provide a remarkable snapshot of
the political options embraced by the German Jews of the late
imperial period. The oldest, Reinhold, became a fervent Ger-
man nationalist, even more assimilationist than the father, and
he never gave up his views, even though Hitler forced him to
flee to Australia. The second, Erich, followed in the rather
middle-of-the-road path of the father. He and Reinhold took
over management of the print shop, and he, too, ended up in
Australia, where Betty Scholem joined her two oldest sons for
the last years of her life (she died there in 1946). The third son,
Werner, took a left-wing turn: he became a radical socialist
even before the First World War, affiliated with the rump anti-
war movement of the German Social Democrats, and after the

6
 berlin childhood

war joined the German Communist Party, becoming one of its

most prominent deputies in the Reichstag in the early 1920s.
Gerhard was closer to Werner than to his two older broth-
ers, who had already left home by his teen years. Werner, whose
temperament appears to have been as stormy as his younger
sibling’s, turned Gerhard into a socialist for a period of time,
taking him to café meetings of young workers and, after the
outbreak of the war, to clandestine antiwar gatherings. Although
they would ultimately part company over Marxism and Zion-
ism (in a long letter from September 1914, Gerhard explained
why he couldn’t embrace historical materialism), the bond be-
tween the two youngest Scholem sons was enormously influen-
tial for Gerhard’s early formation.
The year 1911, when Gerhard was thirteen, marked the
turning point in what was otherwise a conventional Berlin Jewish
childhood. Jewish children received perfunctory religious ed-
ucation in the context of their public schooling. Gerhard’s teacher,
Moses Barol, was a highly learned Russian Jew but a rather un-
successful pedagogue. Yet Barol may have changed the future of
Jewish scholarship when he showed the class a three-volume
abridgement of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. Although
Gerhard would later take great issue with Graetz, he was capti-
vated by the passionate style with which the nineteenth-century
historian related the story of the Jews. Graetz led him to discover
many other Jewish books in the Berlin Jewish Community Li-
brary and also to undertake with his friend Edgar Blum to learn
Hebrew. Barol provided the lessons for a few months, but then
Gerhard took the study up on his own with the passionate in-
tensity that would characterize all his intellectual endeavors.
In his first diary entry, dated February 17, 1913, he noted
that since his bar mitzvah over a year earlier, “I am orthodox
and hate Lindenstrasse [the address of the Reform synagogue]
where I was bar mitzvah [he writes the abbreviation B.M. in
Hebrew characters].”4 He began to attend the small Orthodox

7
 gershom scholem

Alte Synagoge, which was a twenty-minute walk from his house.

By 1912 or 1913, he had also begun to experiment with keeping
the tenets of Jewish law. And he soon joined a small circle study-
ing Talmud with Isaac Bleichröde, the learned great-grandson
of the German Jewish scholar Akiba Eger.
This passion for Judaism soon combined with another life-
long passion: bibliophilia. Rummaging in used bookshops, Scho-
lem began to build a library of Judaica and German literature
and philosophy. So important was this endeavor that when he
came to write his memoirs near the end of his life, he was able
to note with precision when and where he had purchased cer-
tain books. His diary records a particular fascination with the
authors of modern anti-Semitism, in particular Wilhelm Marr
(who invented the term anti-Semitism in 1879) and Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, whose Foundations of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury was one of Hitler’s later inspirations. Scholem studied these
books with great diligence. Naturally, he rejected their ideas as
pure invention, but he allowed that the bourgeois Berlin Jews
might have been happy if the anti-Semites’ fantasies of Jewish
power had actually been true.
Among Scholem’s earliest acquisitions were books by Zi-
onist authors: Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Nathan Birnbaum,
and Max Nordau. This first romance of Zionism through the
written word soon took on more active form when his brother
Werner introduced him in 1912 to the Jung Juda Zionist youth
group, which met in the Tiergarten railway station. Although
Werner would abandon Zionism a few years later, introducing
Gerhard to this group was a service to the movement for which
it still owes him thanks.
Not surprisingly, Gerhard was unable to keep this new
­interest in Judaism and Zionism to himself and provocatively
threw it in his father’s face at the family table. The result, also
not surprisingly, was stormy arguments as Arthur scathingly
rejected both of his sons’ ideological experimentations. In a

8
 berlin childhood

bitter diary entry from early 1913, Gerhard wrote that if he were
Werner, he would have fled the family home “ten times over”
since “with us, nothing more remains of the Jewish family.”5
Werner did, in fact, depart for Hannover that fall, and Gerhard’s
wish to escape his father’s table was fulfilled a few years later, if
not at his own initiative. Arthur may well have seen Gerhard’s
activities as a deliberate attempt at generational rebellion, and
no doubt it was. He would never fully comprehend that Ger-
hard was prepared to make his life choices based on these early
Jewish interests: what might have started as mere adolescent
rebellion became something altogether more serious. However,
to complicate the picture, when Gerhard produced his first trans-
lation from Hebrew into German—the biblical book Song of
Songs—Arthur printed it in a beautiful limited edition in his
print shop. This would not be the last time that Arthur ex-
pressed pride in his son’s scholarship, even if mingled with crit-
icism, via his printing press.
As divergent as Zionism was from the prevailing atmo-
sphere in the Scholem home, it was not as alien as it might have
seemed. Gerhard’s favorite uncle was Theobald Scholem, who
was Arthur’s brother, ten years his junior. Theobald had lively
academic interests in ethnography and history but was not able
to gain a higher education since family reasons forced him,
with another brother, to take over their father’s print shop. He
was a passionate Zionist, and his shop published the young move-
ment’s main German newspapers. Although Theobald was prob-
ably not the major inspiration for Gerhard’s Zionism, Jewish
nationalist ideas must have been in the air at family gatherings,
even as the butt of jokes at Theobald’s expense. In addition,
Theobald’s wife, Hedwig, who was also a Zionist, read Ger-
hard’s Zionist writings with great interest. She learned some
Hebrew and even exchanged letters with Gerhard in that lan-
guage. Theobald and Hedwig, with their daughters Dina and
Eva, emigrated to Palestine after the Nazis came to power.

9
 gershom scholem

What did it mean for a young German Jew, who had little
firsthand experience of anti-Semitism and whose future pros-
pects in Germany were bright, to embrace Zionism a decade
and a half after Theodor Herzl burst onto the world stage? For
many central European Jews, Zionism meant an assertion of
national pride and dignity in an atmosphere of growing nation-
alism. But it did not mean a commitment to the Jewish tradi-
tion, at least no more than for other acculturated German Jews,
nor did it mean any interest in decamping to Palestine. Ger-
hard and his comrades in Jung Juda took a more radical path.
They resolved—and many of them fulfilled the resolution—to
leave Germany as soon as they finished their education. And
they did so out of a profound sense that Zionism meant refash-
ioning their Jewish identities, renewing a Judaism that, in their
view, had calcified in its German incarnation. Zionism and Jew-
ish renewal for these teenagers meant the same thing. What they
sought was not a Jewish state—we will see that Gerhard only
reluctantly embraced political Zionism many years later—but
rather a cultural renaissance based in the Hebrew language and
Jewish sources.
Both Judaism and Zionism stood in diametric opposition
to Arthur Scholem’s instinctive devotion to a liberal, nonreli-
gious German Jewish identity, and that is certainly one major
reason why Gerhard embraced them as a rebellious adolescent.
But his turn to these radical alternatives, although clearly marked
by personal idiosyncrasies—there were few other German Jews
(Aunt Hedwig was one) who actually learned Hebrew!—was
also an expression of a larger, generational revolt. Gerhard be-
longed to the generation of German Jews who would far exceed
their fathers and mothers in terms of education and for whom
the Weimar Republic would ultimately open up professional
opportunities largely or partially blocked in the prewar Second
Reich. Much more secure in their Germanness than their par-
ents, who still felt the need to prove their belonging, they were

10
 berlin childhood

freer to rebel, turning to political radicalism and cultural exper-

imentation in place of bourgeois conformism. Given the greater
opportunities available to Jews in Weimar Germany, the deci-
sion to leave for Palestine was particularly radical.
But this rebellion was often accompanied by anguished
struggle. As Franz Kafka wrote to Max Brod about those who took
up literary creation in German: “Their hind legs were bogged
down in their fathers’ Judaism, while their front legs could find
no new ground. The resulting despair was their inspiration.”6
For Gerhard Scholem, the search for new ground, also at times
marked by despair, would ultimately lead to Palestine, the He-
brew language, and the search for the hidden sources of Judaism.
Scholem’s early search for an authentic Jewish identity was
linked to the overwrought neo-Romanticism that swept up
German youth at the time. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietz-
sche and the poetry of Stefan George promised stirring alter-
natives to the rational bourgeois culture of late Wilhelmine
Germany. And the Wandervogel youth movement, with its cel-
ebration of nature and youthful camaraderie, found its Jewish
analogue in the Zionist Blau-Weiss. Most young Jews did not
see their salvation in such Jewish alternatives, but those who
did participated in larger trends among the youth of Germany
at the time.
Because Gerhard and his comrades in the Jung Juda group
associated their Zionism with a renaissance in Judaism, at the
beginning of 1914 they joined the Berlin youth branch of the
Agudat Israel, the Orthodox movement founded in 1912 in Kat-
towitz, in the Prussian province of Silesia. Although the east-
ern European Jews who established the Agudah intended it as
an Orthodox response to Zionism, it seems that the Berlin branch
must have lacked this ideological dogmatism, for it is hard to
imagine our fervent young Zionists having anything to do with
an anti-Zionist party. The Berlin branch’s promise to teach
Hebrew may have been an initial motivation.

11
 gershom scholem

Gerhard was chosen to be a member of the leadership, but

his romance with Orthodoxy was short-lived. In May 1914, the
executive of Agudat Israel accused Scholem and his comrades
of “not being true to the law.” Harry Heymann, a member of
Jung Juda, declared that he and his group were resigning, and
Gerhard followed up with a letter to the same effect, the first
missive that appears in his collected correspondence. Interest-
ingly, at no point did this controversy revolve around the Agu-
dah’s rejection of Zionism; rather the conflict centered on Ortho-
doxy. In his diary, Gerhard notes, “A month later, I left Orthodoxy.
It wasn’t an easy decision. It excited quite a stir. Now to switch
over to Martin Buber with full sails, also to socialism.”7
In his later memoirs, Scholem claims that his main interest
in the Agudah was a young woman named Jettka Stein, whom
he helped with her schoolwork, but when his romantic advances
were rebuffed, he left the Orthodox organization. There is some
contemporaneous evidence for this account. Stein appears in
his diary more than half a year later; he was clearly still infatu-
ated with her. And two years after that he confessed to his diary
that she was the only reason he attended synagogue. Some
forty years later, Stein appeared at a lecture he gave in Tel Aviv;
she too had immigrated to Palestine, where she became an En-
glish teacher.
But whatever Stein’s role might have been in attracting
Scholem to Orthodoxy or causing him to reject it, his resig­
nation from Agudat Israel must have been a personal crisis of
both religious faith and organizational involvement. In the same
diary entry in which he reports his resignation, he relates that
he has also withdrawn from the Jung Juda leadership, saying
that he’s “finished with organizations. People laugh at me.” That
this self-evaluation was close to the mark receives confirmation
from an incident that took place nearly a decade later, when the
philosopher Hans Jonas saw Scholem for the first time in a meet-
ing debating whether the Blau-Weiss youth movement and the

12
 berlin childhood

organization of Jewish university students should merge. Jonas

describes him interrupting the speakers, waving his huge hands
like a big bird, and shouting at the top of his lungs. Scholem’s
doctrinaire manner and argumentativeness no doubt made him
a difficult comrade, even at age sixteen.
Having abandoned Orthodoxy (at least for a time—he would
return to it episodically), Scholem now turned to the prophet
of Jewish renewal who did not demand obedience to the law.
This was Martin Buber, arguably the most influential Jewish
thinker in central Europe in the first decades of the twentieth
century. Although raised by his grandfather in a partially tradi-
tional setting, Buber broke with religious Judaism and joined
the Zionist movement in 1898, affiliating with its cultural fac-
tion. In 1902 he became the editor of Die Welt, one of the Zion-
ist newspapers printed in Theobald Scholem’s shop. Buber com-
bined a neo-Romantic, völkisch philosophy with a fascination
with Hasidism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he
published collections of the tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav
and of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. The pur-
pose of these books was to demonstrate that Judaism contained
within it forces for spiritual renewal. Thus, Buber’s cultural
Zionism—as opposed to that of other writers of his time—was
not hostile to religiosity, although he decisively rejected what
he called “official Judaism.”
Between 1909 and 1911, Buber delivered in Prague three
lectures, which were published under the title “Three Addresses
on Judaism.” These lectures became the inspiration for Zionist
youth in the German-speaking world since they offered a vision
of Judaism that was the opposite of the liberal, assimilationist
culture of the German Jews. Here was a call to elevate myth
above reason, the Orient over the Occident, and a subterra-
nean, vitalistic tradition over the legalism of the rabbis.
Buber’s Hasidic stories and his philosophy of Jewish re-
newal had a profound effect on the young Gerhard Scholem,

13
 gershom scholem

especially, it seems, after his brief flirtation with Orthodoxy.

The entries in his diary from 1913 through 1915 are shot full of
such Buberian expressions as “der Gott von Erlebnis” (the God
of lived experience). In one of his letters to Werner from Sep-
tember 1914, he counters Werner’s historical materialism by
referring to what he had clearly read in Buber’s Hasidic tales:
“You have perhaps once heard of a mystical sect among us Jews,
the Hasidim in Galicia, who teach socialism sans phrase. They
stand on the soil of unity and myth, which is life.” And quoting
from Buber’s “Three Addresses”: “Before the gates of Rome
sits a leprous beggar and waits. He is the Messiah . . . and for
whom does he wait? For you!” Buber thus pointed the way for
Gerhard to an authentic Judaism that combined messianism
and socialism without reducing the first to Orthodoxy or the
second to Marxism. Werner, on the other hand, dismissed Buber
as a “coffeehouse anarchist.”8
For Gerhard, this was hardly a pejorative. In his 1914 letter
to Werner, Gerhard was already offering anarchism as an alter-
native to his brother’s Marxism. He had for a few years been
reading anarchist writers like Peter Kropotkin, and he also came
to know Gustav Landauer, the highly original German Jewish
anarchist who was murdered during the short-lived Bavarian
Socialist Republic in 1919. Landauer taught an ethical and com-
munitarian form of anarchism that was also deeply mystical.
Although Scholem declared that “I, Gerhard Scholem, do not
stand on the soil of anarchism, even if I greatly honor Gustav
Landauer,” he was, in fact, gravitating toward an anarchism that
might be combined with both Judaism and Zionism. Landauer’s
A Call for Socialism made a particular impression.9
In a diary entry from January 1915, he demanded, following
Landauer, revolution, not reform. This revolution would over-
turn the family and the authority of parents. It would also revo-
lutionize Judaism and Herzl’s Zionism, which Scholem now re-
garded as a sell-out. The true Zionism was anarchism, a break

14
 berlin childhood

from Europe and embrace of the Orient. In a different entry,

he married this anarchism to the philosophy of Nietzsche: his
goal was to write a Judenzarathustra.
Landauer was close to Martin Buber, and Buber also called
himself a religious anarchist, another way in which Scholem
and Buber were similar, even if they ultimately parted ways. On
January 27, 1915, the Berlin branch of Jung Juda held a discus-
sion of Buber’s philosophy. Scholem gave a prefatory lecture
in which he celebrated Buber as the generation’s true prophet.
Unlike Ahad Ha’am, the standard-bearer of cultural Zionism
whose advocacy for Hebrew culture Scholem also admired, Buber
preached revolution rather than gradualism. And unlike Herzl,
who called for a return to Judaism (albeit not to Orthodoxy),
Buber demanded “a renewal of Judaism.” By uncovering the
sources of Hasidism, Buber had shown the young generation
that Judaism possessed the forces of myth and mysticism that
the renewal of Judaism required. Against the rationalism of the
West, Buber called for the Jews to align themselves with “the
creative peoples of the Orient.”10
Despite this lecture delivered to the Jung Juda group,
Scholem’s relations with his comrades, already rocky, as we
have seen, reached a crisis in May 1915. The result of this crisis
was the extraordinary long diary entry of May 22, which reveals
a great deal of the inner turmoil, as well as the megalomaniacal
aspirations, of the seventeen-year-old Scholem. Written in the
third person, as if to prepare the ground for his future biogra-
pher, the entry starts with some lines about his hardworking
but otherwise prosaic family. Remarkably, it was not his father
who came in for the most scathing criticism but his uncle Theo-
bald, who, although unnamed, had to be the object of Gerhard’s
scorn for the idealistic and scholarly airs that he put on in order
to impress his nephew. This is not a little surprising since Theo-
bald, as both a Zionist and an intellectual manqué, was closer
to Gerhard than was Arthur, but perhaps Theobald represented

15
 gershom scholem

for him a bourgeois version of his aspirations, a version that he

needed to overcome.
After this attack Scholem describes how he came to em-
brace Herzl’s Zionism, which led him to immerse himself in
the writings of the Orient. He quickly became disillusioned
with the lack of “soul” in Herzl’s writings but believed that he
could find what he was seeking in other books. He attests here
that his bibliophilia reached virtually manic proportions as he
swallowed books at an incredible speed, becoming known as a
“bookworm and scholar.” However, his comrades in Jung Juda
soon made fun of him as a “big walking conversational lexicon”
and as “Scholem the Buberian.” He came to see these erstwhile
companions as abandoning the great spiritual search to which
he was devoted and settling instead for a kind of quotidian ra-
tionality: “So wondered the wounded youth greatly and as he
also recognized their soullessness, he set forth on his own way
to Zion.”11
This individual path to Zion was bound up with Buber, to
whom he then devotes a lengthy section of the diary entry. In-
deed, a few weeks before this entry, Scholem notes in his diary,
“I’m back in the mood for Buber. I’m in a deep Buberian spirit,”
and conceives of writing Buber a long letter (although he evi-
dently did not do so). A week later, the long letter had turned
into a plan for a whole book on Buber, although he concedes
ignorance about Buber’s biography. It is Buber, he says, who
has come to awaken the somnolent Zionists who only felt them-
selves united by historical memory and “the demonic power of
racial instinct.” In their place, Buber found beauty and spiri-
tual renewal in the despised Jews of the East, in Hasidism. He
conveyed this truth “not only as he found it, but as he found it
in himself ” (Buber’s imaginative retelling of Hasidism, which
Scholem salutes here, would later become one Scholem’s main
criticisms of Buber).12

16
 berlin childhood

Then the entry takes an astonishing turn. Buber may have

proclaimed Jewish renewal, but he was not himself the re-
deemer: “He only wanted to prepare the way for one greater
who would come after him.” Who was this? Scholem answers:

The young man . . . believed deeply that the soul of Judah
wandered among the nations and in the Holy Land, awaiting
the one presumptuous enough to free it from banishment
and from the separation from its national body. And he knew
in his depths that he was the Chosen One. . . . And the
dreamer whose name also signifies that he is the Expected
One [is] Scholem, the Perfect One [a wordplay on Scholem
and shalem, “perfect,” “whole”]. It is he who must equip him-
self for his work and begin forcefully to forge the weapons of
knowledge.13

Scholem thus understood his feverish thirst for the Hebrew lan-
guage and Jewish books as weapons in the messianic mission for
which he believed himself destined. This may also explain his
reading of the New Testament, and especially the Gospel of Mark,
books one might not immediately associate with the renewal of
Judaism. But perhaps the messianic impulses of early Christi-
anity fed his lonely fantasies of a singular historical vocation.
Neither his messianic pretensions nor his wounded rejec-
tion of his Jung Juda comrades would persist for long. While
he clearly continued to consider himself a figure of world his-
torical proportions, he made only a few hints later to claims like
this one. On the contrary, on September 19, he told his diary
that he no longer considered himself the Messiah. But the de-
flation of this role went hand in hand with severe doubts about
Zionism. Indeed, the diary entry is marked by deep melancholy,
even depression. He admits that since early April, he had en-
tertained periodic thoughts of suicide. While the messianic ep-
isode preceded and followed by suicidal thoughts might suggest
that he was cycling between ecstasy and depression, we should

17
 gershom scholem

be hesitant to offer a clinical diagnosis based on a few diary en-

tries. Nevertheless, we will see that throughout his life Scho-
lem was capable of extraordinarily intensive work punctuated
by episodes of withdrawal, lethargy, and even depression. The
cures to which the family doctor, his uncle Georg, repeatedly
sent him may have been a response more to his psychological
states than to physical illness.
By his eighteenth year, Gerhard Scholem had already de-
clared the intellectual and political commitments that would
guide him into adulthood. Ravenously devouring books, he de-
voted himself not to a single field but to the broad philosophi-
cal tradition that was the heritage of young German intellectu-
als of his age. In later years, when he had become a historian of
Kabbalah, he would remain deeply informed by the philosoph-
ical reading of his youth. Side by side with these more general
interests, he taught himself Hebrew and began to delve deeply
into the Jewish literary tradition, starting with the Bible and
extending through the Talmud and medieval texts. This com-
mitment to Hebraism was part and parcel of his commitment
to Judaism, although exactly in which form remained uncer-
tain. And, finally, his Jewish commitment was inseparable from
Zionism. All these early commitments were now to be tested in
the crucible of the First World War.

18
 2

The Abyss of War

The Great War, as it came to be called, burst like a sum-

mer thunderstorm over the European continent in July and
August 1914. After the Austrian archduke was assassinated in
Sarajevo on June 28, the Habsburg government issued an ulti-
matum to Serbia as the pretext for going to war. Although Ser-
bia accepted nearly all the far-reaching demands, Russia had
meanwhile mobilized its army, sending it to the German bor-
der. Demonstrations for and against war swept the streets of
Berlin. On August 1, the Kaiser’s government announced the
mobilization of the German army and the Kaiser himself, ap-
pearing before his subjects, declared, “I recognize in my Volk
no more parties. Among us there are only Germans.”1 As if in
reaction to this patriotic message, the controversy over the war
of late July gave way in August to a wave of military enthusiasm.
Although not everyone succumbed to it, some liberals such as
the patron of the arts Harry Kessler now declared themselves

19
 gershom scholem

conservative nationalists. The Social Democratic Party, which

had opposed war and had sworn to uphold internationalism over
national interests, voted for credits to fund the mobilization.
None of these tumultuous events merited a mention in
Gerhard Scholem’s diary for a simple reason: he and his mother
were high in the Swiss Alps from mid-July to mid-August.
The family doctor had prescribed solitude, an intimation of a
nervous disorder that would play an increasingly prominent
role in the next few years (the previous year, 1913, had also in-
volved a four-week “cure”). In mid-August, the young Scho-
lem wrote a rambling, feverish entry in his diary that crypti-
cally mentions a Kriegslärm (war ruckus) but is otherwise silent
on the guns of August. Instead, he ruminated on the mystical
allure of the high mountains and glaciers and offered scathing
observations on the tourists whose Bible was the red Baedeker
guidebook. Against these laughable bourgeois, he proposed an
alternative: Shabbatai Zvi, the seventeenth-century Messiah,
who spoke out loud the four-letter name of God and yet was
not struck down by lightning. This act of religious heresy as-
sociated with messianism seems to have grabbed Scholem’s at-
tention, almost certainly from his reading of Graetz’s history,
in which the nineteenth-century historian tells the story. Did
he identify with Shabbatai as a messianic figure? The diary
entry is not definitive, but in light of his messianic outburst of
the following year, we cannot discount the possibility. Either
way, this was the first and earliest reference to a figure who
would play an outsized role in Scholem’s personal and profes-
sional future.
Upon his return to Berlin, he found the city in the thrall of
war fever. But not everyone. Gustav Landauer opposed the war,
as did Werner Scholem, who associated himself with the radi-
cal faction of the Social Democrats that rejected it, a faction
that included Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were
murdered in January 1919. Werner took his younger brother to

20
 the abyss of war

clandestine meetings of war resisters and was probably instru-

mental in influencing Gerhard to embrace radical opposition.
Gerhard was soon to fashion his own objections to the war in
Zionist terms.
On February 5, 1915, the Jüdische Rundschau, the main organ
of the German Zionists, published an article by Heinrich Mar-
gulies, a Zionist writer and later director of Israel’s Bank Leumi,
in which he passionately proclaimed that the Zionists should
support the German war effort not just as Jews but even more
as Zionists. Echoing Martin Buber’s language, Margulies ar-
gued that the war provided “the secret of community.” Margu-
lies was later to break with Buber and, like Scholem, would im-
migrate to Palestine in the 1920s. But although Margulies would
eventually prove himself a “real” Zionist, Scholem led the charge
against his article by writing a response and soliciting fifteen of
his friends, including his brother Werner, to sign the statement.
This letter to the editor denounced Margulies and rejected on
Zionist grounds any loyalty to Germany or any of the other
combatant states. For the sixteen signatories, mostly drawn from
the ranks of Jung Juda, Zionism meant rejection of the war (it
is unlikely, however, that Werner signed his brother’s letter on
Zionist grounds). The letter was shown to Arthur Hantke, the
president of the Zionistische Vereingung für Deutschland (Ger-
man Zionist Federation), who, although sympathetic to its sen-
timents, feared that its publication might lead to the banning of
the federation. In a meeting with Gerhard and two of the other
signers, Hantke seems to have persuaded the young Zionists to
withdraw the letter, and it was never published (we know its
content because Scholem transcribed it into his diary).
But the unpublished letter had dramatic consequences for
its author. He took it to the gymnasium to solicit the signature
of his friend Edgar Blum. Another student filched it from his
briefcase and showed it to the school authorities, who, after a
monthlong investigation, decided to suspend Scholem for his

21
 gershom scholem

antiwar activities. This action, rather than outright expulsion,

allowed him to take the Abitur examinations without graduat-
ing. And so, only a few months after his seventeenth birthday
he found himself free of school, and since he had rarely exerted
himself there in any case he seems to have experienced few re-
grets (his father, however, was anything but amused). Taking
advantage of an arcane Prussian law meant for intellectually un-
successful aristocrats, he was able to enroll in the University of
Berlin without a high school diploma. So began his academic
career, with courses in philosophy and mathematics.
Blocked from inveighing against the war in the Jüdische
Rundschau, Gerhard and his Jung Juda comrade Erich Brauer
decided to publish their own underground newsletter, which
they named Die blauweisse Brille (Blue-White Spectacles). The
name suggested both a Zionist (blue and white) perspective on
the war and also a dig at the Blau-Weiss youth movement. Scho-
lem had gone on a number of hikes with the Blau-Weiss, but
rejected their purported Zionism as a sham. This hostility to-
ward the mainstream Zionist youth movement would later in-
fluence much of his political activity within German Zionism.
Die blauweisse Brille came out three times in the summer
and fall of 1915. The two youths contrived to print their news-
paper as a lithograph in Arthur Scholem’s shop without his
knowledge (it seems that one of the workers must have eventu-
ally revealed to Arthur what was transpiring under his nose,
because in the spring of 1916 further publication became im-
possible). Scholem wrote much of the copy, while Brauer, who
would become an ethnographer in Mandatory Palestine, con-
tributed the graphics. In the first issue, Gerhard denounced the
Jewish youth movement (the Blau-Weiss) as “Jewish movement
without youth, Jewish youth without movement, youth move-
ment without Judaism.” He also penned a rather puerile anti-
war poem with the refrain “It was the war!” (Es war der Krieg!),
whose first two stanzas proclaimed:

22
 the abyss of war

Out of the Infinite

In front of you a star rises
Far beyond space and time
You believe that it carries you
You gave yourself to it solemnly,
It was the war!

But it did not lead

As you believe in seeing
Its sparks rising
To the light of the primordial world
It was only a chimera
Which passed through the world
It was the war!2

The poem goes on to suggest that the war is a game launched

by God but devoid of discernable meaning, certainly not the
mystical meaning that others have assigned to it.
In the second issue, Scholem made his Zionist criticism of
the war even more explicit: “Does the way to Zion lie through
the capitals of Europe? We want to draw the line between Eu-
rope and Judah: my thought is not your thought, my way is not
your way.” True Zionists had to reject the war. The nationalist
fervor that gripped Europe in those years had nothing to do
with Zionism, which Scholem wanted to keep free of milita-
rism and blind patriotism.
In June 1915, shortly before publishing the first number of
Die blauweisse Brille, Scholem made the acquaintance of Walter
Benjamin, a student of philosophy and literature five years his
senior. This was to be one of the most decisive relationships of
his life. He had first encountered Benjamin in the fall of 1913 at
a meeting of youth movement activists and was struck more by
his peculiar and intense way of speaking—Benjamin stared at
the ceiling while speaking as if from a script—than by what he
later admitted was Benjamin’s tortuous argument. A year and a
half later, they ran into each other again at a discussion group

23
 gershom scholem

and at the university library. They began to visit each other and
to converse deeply about books—they were both compulsive
bibliophiles—and about ideas. Like Scholem, Benjamin had
broad intellectual interests that spanned European philosophy
and literature. And like his new friend, he had a particular pen-
chant for the esoteric, for subterranean ideas that went against
the mainstream.
The friendship with Benjamin is especially significant for
understanding Scholem’s later reputation not just as a scholar
of Judaism but as a twentieth-century thinker with a global
reach. Even as he immersed himself in Jewish sources—the
Bible, the Talmud, and medieval Jewish thought—he read widely
in many fields. The interplay between his Jewish and non-Jewish
interests, between the “particular” and the “universal,” explains
how a scholar of arcane Jewish mystical texts could break out of
his seemingly narrow field to speak to a much broader audi-
ence. And in many ways, Walter Benjamin was the first mem-
ber of that audience.
Benjamin had been active in the youth movement of the
educator Gustav Wyneken but not in the Zionist youth move-
ment, toward which he maintained an ambivalent attitude. In
fact, one of the mysteries of the Scholem-Benjamin friendship,
immortalized in Scholem’s memoir Walter Benjamin: The Story
of a Friendship, is that Scholem, who was passionately, even dog-
matically committed to Zionism, would adopt a non-Zionist like
Benjamin as his closest friend. Benjamin repeatedly professed
interest in Zionism but was never able or willing to fully em-
brace it. Certainly, there were deep intellectual affinities be-
tween the two men, but as would become evident, their affec-
tive affinity went equally deep. Nonetheless, their differences
over Zionism and Benjamin’s rather manipulative personality
both raise questions, which probably cannot be answered, about
the real foundation of their friendship.
Benjamin was inalterably opposed to the war, and, with

24
 the abyss of war

Scholem present one day in the fall of 1915, consumed large

quantities of coffee before his army medical examination to in-
duce an attack of nerves. The trick worked, and Benjamin won
a deferment, as would Scholem two years later. So the two also
shared a radical antiwar politics, and it was only in later years,
after Scholem immigrated to Palestine and Benjamin became a
kind of Marxist, that their political paths parted.
Benjamin also expressed vehement criticism of Martin
Buber, against both his philosophy of mystical experience and
his support for the war. It seems that Benjamin was crucial in
turning Scholem from a Buberian Hasid to a misnogged (the
term used historically to define opponents of Hasidism). Ben-
jamin argued that Buber represented “female thinking,” what-
ever that meant, probably in reaction to Buber’s mysticism
of experience. Benjamin opposed Buber’s Erlebnis (a mystical
“lived” experience) with a less mystical form of experience, for
which he employed the German word Erfahrung. Scholem
would adopt his friend’s version. In July 1916, Benjamin also
wrote a letter to Buber declining an invitation to contribute to
Buber’s new journal Der Jude. The letter is quite opaque, but
one thing is clear: Benjamin’s objection to Buber was not pri-
marily political—that is, Buber’s support for the war—but
rather centered around a philosophy of language. It was to be
on both political and philosophical grounds that Scholem, too,
would come to reject Buber.
As early as December 1914, Buber had delivered a Hanuk-
kah address in which he hailed the war as generating an experi-
ence of mystical community. Scholem had evidently not been
aware of Buber’s stance when he enthusiastically lectured the
Jung Juda group in January 1915 on Buber’s Zionist philosophy.
But after the row over the Margulies article and Scholem’s
suspension from school, he discovered that Margulies was an
associate of Buber’s. His relationship to his spiritual idol now
entered into a state of crisis.

25
 gershom scholem

The same day as the messianic diary entry from May 1915,
Scholem penned the following poem:

Martin Buber, who found the expression

For the deepest longing of the millions
Of our brothers, who live in darkness
Our Buber has turned away.
On the loud paths of history
You have betrayed those who crowned you;
In the cries of war and heroic deeds
You have suddenly seen other visions.
The prophet of Old-New Land lends his word to the war
Bows to the land which we have left,
Goes with those, whom Jung-Juda hates
One way to “Victory.”3

In light of this poem, it now becomes clear that Scholem’s

proclamation of himself as Messiah was wrapped up in the cri-
sis of his relationship to Buber. The older man had become John
the Baptist to his Jesus of Nazareth, a necessary forerunner but
not one capable of fulfilling his eschatological role. Yet, as we
shall see, Scholem’s view of Buber was never so simple as mere
rejection and replacement.
In the first issue of Die blauweisse Brille from the summer of
1915, Scholem and Erich Brauer published a caricature of Buber
by Brauer along with a parody of his writing. A copy made its
way into Buber’s hands, and he reacted, surprisingly, by invit-
ing the two young Zionists to visit him at his home in the
Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin. Scholem describes this
meeting in his memoirs (he mistakenly dates it to March 1916).
In his account, Buber was exceedingly gracious, and “listened
seriously to my speeches without indicating that he had changed
his opinion—while Brauer, who was a very shy man, kept silent.”4
It is likely that Scholem’s later account of this meeting
turned it into an altogether more polite conversation than it
actually was. Given what we have already learned about the

26
 the abyss of war

young Scholem, he was brash to the point of rudeness, talking

incessantly and brooking no disagreement. Raphael Buber, Mar-
tin’s son, described one meeting between the two from a later
date. He saw a gangly young man storm into his father’s study
and shout at the top of his lungs. When the unruly visitor stormed
out, the father had to restrain the son from assaulting his guest.
“That man,” said Buber, “is named Gershom Scholem and he
is destined to become a great scholar.”5
But Buber didn’t take this volcanic act lying down either.
In 1916, Scholem submitted an article on the Jewish youth
movements for publication in Buber’s Der Jude. When the two
met in December, Buber criticized it severely as utterly nega-
tive and lacking in positive proposals. Scholem was clearly taken
aback and wrote petulantly in his diary that Buber had refused
to engage in a real dialogue with him. He accused Buber of
being able to speak only “out of his system,” as if Buber were
the more dogmatic of the two.6
In the spring of 1916, Buber published an essay in the first
issue of Der Jude titled “Die Losung” (The Password), which
stated in even bolder terms the connection between his mysti-
cism of experience and the war. Yet as vehemently as Scholem
railed against both Buber’s philosophy and his politics, he nev-
ertheless saw Buber as a potentially sympathetic addressee or,
perhaps, an adversary worth convincing. In a July 1916 meeting
in Heppenheim (where Buber had moved earlier in the year),
he told Buber about the letter he had organized against Hein-
rich Margulies’s pro-war article and how it had gotten him sus-
pended from school. Since Margulies’s article was shot through
with Buberian expressions, it is hard to fathom just what Scho-
lem intended by highlighting for Buber his opposition to it. In
subsequent years, he met frequently with Buber and also car-
ried on a lengthy correspondence with him; once he began to
study Kabbalah, he shared the fruits of his research with Buber.
It might not be an exaggeration to say that the intellectual sup-

27
 gershom scholem

port he could never win from his father, he sought from Buber.
But his desire for approval from the older man simultaneously
provoked stormy rebellion.
In the summer of 1916, Scholem wrote at times feverishly
in his diary about Buber. These entries demonstrate Buber’s
absolute centrality for the young Scholem trying to chart his
own course toward both Judaism and Zionism. At the begin-
ning of August 1916, he wrote in one of his most outlandish
statements: “Astronomy is the teaching of the inner laws of Zi-
onism. The Three Addresses on Judaism is not as Jewish as the
Theoria motus corporum coelestium [Theory of the Motion of Ce-
lestial Bodies] of Gauss, the builder of Zion. Buber is a mystic,
the greatest of all mystics, but . . . the Messiah will be an as-
tronomer.”7 A few weeks later, he wrote that Buber lacked
mathematics and, consequently, he was not the prophet of the
Messiah! Since Scholem himself was at that time studying math-
ematics, including mathematical astronomy, it would appear
that he was once again entertaining thoughts of himself as the
savior of the Jews. By improbably turning the mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss into a Zionist, he was evidently express-
ing the wish that his own academic studies might have redemp-
tive meaning.
For Scholem, Buber was a teacher who “taught the truth,
but taught it falsely.” In the fall of 1916, he wrote to his friend
Edgar Blum that he had thought much about Buber over the
previous summer and resolved “that I must be and am funda-
mentally opposed to him.” Buber’s movement was a sham be-
cause its ideology was founded in Erlebnis. Ahad Ha’am—the
prophet of cultural Zionism—was truly Jewish and thus the only
one who “stands in Zion.” Buber, on the other hand, was spiri-
tually in Heppenheim. His “dangerous and pernicious” way led
not to Zion but to Prague (that is, to the Buberian circle in
Prague).8
We are now, of course, far from the controversies over the

28
 the abyss of war

Great War. But because for Scholem, as for some other young
Jews, Buber’s mysticism had become the chief philosophical
underpinning for the war, to reject the latter meant to reject
the former. For Scholem, authentic Judaism could only be real-
ized in Zion, and Zion could only be redeemed by authentic
Judaism. Buber betrayed both by his teaching of a mysticism
of experience and by his support for the war. His call to realize
this Erlebnis in the present moment, rather than the utopian
future, turned his mysticism into “the wasteland of the Ghetto.”9
Scholem rejected Buber’s Zionism just as he rejected the Zion-
ism of the Blau-Weiss youth movement, which took much of
its inspiration from Buber: both could realize their aspirations
in Galut (exile or diaspora) outside of history rather than within
it in Zion. His later argument that Buber’s approach to Judaism
was ahistorical had its roots in this rejection of Buber’s mysti-
cism of experience. And already in these early ruminations, he
had adopted the nonmystical experience of “tradition.” Tradi-
tion is what develops within history, while mystical experience
must remain mired in the present moment.
Scholem’s attack on Buber took public form in a debate
that ensued in Siegfried Lehmann’s Volksheim, a club for young
Jews from eastern Europe. Scholem attended a speech by Leh­
mann in September 1916 and engaged in a fiery argument with
the speaker. He made Lehmann a proxy for Buber. Lehmann’s
talk, he said, was delivered in “Buberdeutsch.” Buber’s inter-
pretation of Hasidism, as conveyed by Lehmann, was a form of
“aesthetic ecstasis,” whose goal was to make Hasidism accept-
able to bourgeois Jews. Lehmann’s version of Hasidism was
devoid of actual Hasidic sources, privileging beauty over truth.
In light of Scholem’s frontal assault on Lehmann, it is ironic
that this ostensibly Buberian aesthete immigrated to Palestine
in 1927 and founded the Ben Shemen Youth Village there, thus
contributing greatly to the practical Zionism that Scholem pur-
ported to advocate against him.10

29
 gershom scholem

In these thoughts, delivered orally at the Volksheim, writ-

ten down in his diary and in a long letter to Lehmann, the
eighteen-year-old Scholem sketched out in nuce the main lines
of attack that he would adopt against Buber in two landmark
essays in the 1960s and that would inform his own very different
approach to the study of Judaism. According to the young Scho-
lem, Buber believed that Hasidism represented “subterranean”
Judaism because he hated the Judaism that was “aboveground,”
that is, the rabbinic tradition. Buber sought to detach Hasidism
from this rabbinic scaffolding and celebrate it as a movement
of revolution against Judaism. For Scholem, both the subterra-
nean and the “terrestrial” dimensions of Judaism were neces-
sary. Deeply engaged for several years in the study of Talmud,
he was groping toward an inclusive definition of Judaism in
which myth and law, the irrational and the rational were all
equal parts of the complex dialectic of tradition. As opposed to
the Buberians, Scholem advocated studying Hebrew and all the
textual sources of Judaism.
Scholem’s intemperate performance in the Volksheim had
an unexpected consequence: Franz Kafka’s fiancée, Felice Bauer,
was present and reported on Scholem’s arguments to Kafka.
Kafka wrote back endorsing Scholem’s position in his charac-
teristically paradoxical way: he agreed with Herr Scholem be-
cause Scholem was one of those who demanded too much and
therefore accomplished nothing. When, fifty years later, the cor-
respondence between Kafka and Bauer was published, Scho-
lem was both astonished and pleased. In fact, shortly after the
contretemps with Lehmann, Scholem read Kafka’s parable “Be-
fore the Law,” first published in a Jewish newspaper in 1915 and
later included in Kafka’s posthumous novel The Trial. The par-
able, in which a man in search of the law never gets beyond the
first door, made an enormous impression on him and pointed
to the possibility of a kind of secular mysticism.
The war, which was always close to the surface of these

30
 the abyss of war

i­ntellectual debates, was anything but an abstraction. By the

spring of 1915, all three of Gerhard’s brothers were in uniform.
When they returned home for Passover, Gerhard apparently
made some sarcastic, antinationalist statements in response to
his parents’ pride in their older sons’ service. Arthur responded
by canceling the Passover Seder and declaring, in response to
Gerhard’s opposition to the war on Jewish grounds, that after
the war he would resign from the Jewish community. But the
war took a more direct toll on Gerhard. When one of Werner’s
closest friends died in combat, he wrote despairingly in his diary,
“Send the old men to the war, so that they beat each other to
death, but do not rob us of young blood.”11 In March 1916,
Werner himself was wounded in the foot in an offensive on the
Russian front. And two of Gerhard’s closest friends from school
and Jung Juda, Harry Heymann and Edgar Blum, both fell in
action.
With universal conscription the order of the day, Gerhard
could not hope to avoid his own encounter with the German
military machine. In his memoir, he depicts the process as a rela-
tively rapid one: he was called up to the draft board, feigned
psychosis during a few weeks in a medical hospital, and was dis-
charged. Oddly, he says there that he does not wish to speak
further about the incident, perhaps hinting that there might be
more to say.
In fact, the process lasted more than a year and a half and
involved two spells of actual service in uniform and an extended
stay in a military hospital. In the autumn of 1915, with his eigh-
teenth birthday looming in December, he decided to do some-
thing for which he had criticized Werner at the beginning of
the year: enlist rather than wait to be drafted, in order to avoid
being posted to the infantry, with its horrendous casualty rate.
In late November, his father, exuding patriotic pride, accompa-
nied him to the train to Lower Saxony, where Gerhard began
basic training. He does not appear to have suffered unduly and

31
 gershom scholem

even found a comrade from Berlin with whom he could ex-

change jokes. But he was put on leave after exhibiting signs of
“neurasthenia” (the fin-de-siècle name for what we today call
“stress”) and claiming to have fainted during long marches. In
December, he was examined again, and, after reporting that he
had been sent for cures for neurasthenia three times previously,
he was given a medical deferment.
Did he fabricate these symptoms, as he later claimed? His
uncle Georg, the family doctor, evidently thought that the di-
agnosis of neurasthenia was accurate because in the spring of
1916 he confirmed that his nephew was suffering from a bad
case of nerves (we recall that Georg had sent him for rest cures
several times). Significantly, he attributed Gerhard’s malady to
excessive reading—not the rigors of military training—and pre-
scribed, as Gerhard wrote to Harry Heymann, quoting the doc-
tor, that “you shouldn’t touch a book for six months, moreover
you shouldn’t do anything other than eat, sleep, and go for walks,
blow off a semester at the university, and go on a journey for
the summer from the end of May for four months.”12 For once,
Arthur Scholem was solicitous of his youngest son and agreed to
support a long, bucolic rest in the mountain village of Oberst-
dorf im Allgäu from June 20 to the end of July. Arthur must
have taken his physician brother’s diagnosis seriously.
Some of the letters that Gerhard wrote during this long
vacation suggest that he was hardly at rest. He boasted to Erich
Brauer that he had fifteen to twenty regular correspondents (at
the end of his life, he left tens of thousands of letters for his ar-
chive) and complained when Brauer was too cheap to send him
more than a postcard. He also corresponded with Martin Buber
and sent Buber his long, critical essay on the Jewish youth
movement, which he had been working on for a year and a half.
On the same subject, he wrote scathingly to Brauer about the
Berlin-Lichtenberg Zionist youth group, which was insuffi-
ciently Zionist for his taste. Of their leader, Albert Baer, he says,

32
 the abyss of war

“His memory should be for a blessing, his name will be wiped

out [then in Hebrew: yemach shemo]. That’s what I have to say
about the Jewish youth movement. I’ve lent them Buber. Na!”
And then, maniacally, “We must open up our mouths! Don’t
sleep! [double underlined]. I hope and believe that you will find
comrades for the struggle and for the ideology. Upwards! For
fourteen days I’ve been in a true ecstasy for our cause.”13 If one
symptom of his illness was hyperactivity and grandiosity, Oberst­
dorf does not seem to have cured it.
Upon his return to Berlin in the fall, Scholem again enrolled
in courses at the university in mathematics and philosophy, but
it was becoming clear to him that despite his mathematical tal-
ents, others were much more gifted. By now he was trying his
hand at translations from biblical Hebrew, including the Song
of Songs and the book of Lamentations.
On October 26, he wrote to Blum describing these activi-
ties, including “browsing obscure Kabbalistic texts.” He noted
how little had been written about interpretation, tradition, and
the question of language in Judaism, all themes that would loom
large for him in later years. He was now studying the philoso-
phy of mathematics rather than mathematics itself and had come
to the cryptic conclusion, echoing his earlier statement on Gauss
as a Zionist, that “for me, Zion and mathematics are identical
things and astronomy is the inner law of Zionism.”14
As to Blum’s detailed account of battles on the Russian front,
which had filled his friend’s letter from the previous month, he
responded—insensitively, given the challenges Blum faced in
the trenches—that “the problem of the war no longer exists for
us who are Zionists in the most serious sense.” But the letter to
Blum was returned to sender: more than two weeks earlier,
Blum had been wounded in the pelvis and on November 1 he
died of his wounds. Scholem noted these facts in his diary and
confessed that he was unable to offer any words of consolation
to Blum’s mother since the death of his best friend was the

33
 gershom scholem

frightful work of the devil brought to perfection. He then went

on to meditate darkly about the absence of divine grace and
justice in the world.15
In January 1917, Werner, who was in Halle recuperating
from his wound, took part in an antiwar demonstration on the
Kaiser’s birthday. He was arrested and charged with treason,
although the charge was reduced to the still serious one of in-
sulting the Kaiser (lèse majesté). Gerhard immediately realized
that he too could become a target of the police since he pos-
sessed incriminating letters from Werner. He quickly gathered
up his papers and deposited them at the house of his Jung Juda
friend Harry Heller.
However, punishment for his antiwar views would come
not at the hand of the law but at the hand of his father. Gerhard
seems to have ventured a defense of Werner at the family din-
ing table, which caused a stormy confrontation. On February
15, although he was living at home, Arthur sent him a letter or-
dering him to leave the house as of March 1 and giving him one
hundred marks, after which he would be totally cut off (Arthur
had also cut off Werner). In this letter and a follow-up missive
in May, Arthur recommended that Gerhard volunteer for civil-
ian service with the War Office so that “this will teach you what
gainfully earned bread tastes like and real work will do your ar-
rogance a world of good. What you call work is only a game.”16
The problem that Arthur had with his two youngest sons was
not just their lack of patriotism, which was bad enough, but
their frivolous forgoing of gainful employment for political
and intellectual pursuits. In Gerhard’s case, as he pointed out in
a letter a few months later to his Aunt Käte, who sent him some
money, the main issue was his Zionist activities. In this corre-
spondence, Arthur gave voice to what was often the complaint
of Jewish businessmen toward their sons who turned away
from commerce for loftier pursuits. Arthur’s anxieties over the
vagaries of making a living were not abstract: in August 1916 his

34
 the abyss of war

shop went bankrupt. So he may well have projected his own

economic fears onto his profligate sons.
Before the March 1 deadline Gerhard found lodging in a
pension run by a Frau Struck, which housed a group of Jews
from eastern Europe (Ostjuden), among them the future presi-
dent of Israel, Zalman Rubashov (later Shazar), whom Scholem
had met earlier. Rubashov, who had made a study of aspects of
the Sabbatian movement, evidently played a major role in di-
recting Scholem’s interest to this historical episode, although
his own study of the subject would begin a decade later. In his
memoirs, Scholem waxes nostalgic over the Pension Struck
and the cult of the Ostjuden which he found there. The reality,
though, as revealed in his diary, was less rosy. He complains of
the noise, his fellow boarders and, above all, his landlady.
It was also in this period that Scholem became friends with
the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon (who would win the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1966). He watched Agnon in the reading
room of the Jewish community thumbing through the card
catalogue. When he asked what he was looking for, Agnon re-
plied with mock naïveté: “For books I haven’t read.”17 This
would be the start of a long friendship, sometimes marked by
competition and even hostility. Scholem was clearly intrigued
by Agnon’s deep roots in the Jewish tradition but also by his
skeptical and ironic relationship to it. Scholem translated one of
Agnon’s early stories into German and would later write sev-
eral articles that are still considered classics in the explication
of Agnon’s writing. Agnon responded tongue in cheek with sev-
eral fictional characters based loosely on Scholem himself.
Although the Pension Struck was less than an ideal domi-
cile, Scholem had other worries. In March 1917, the army again
declared him fit for battle and in May gave him his marching
orders. On June 18, Rubashov accompanied him to the bar-
racks in Berlin, and he was then dispatched for duty in a reserve
infantry battalion in Allenstein, in East Prussia. Of his military

35
 gershom scholem

activities, he reports very little, although a photograph from

the period shows him in uniform with his unit. The soldiers
were evidently forbidden to fraternize with the local popula-
tion, visit the town or even pick blueberries in the woods: “So
we run around the woods like idiotic sheep, making dirty jokes
and contenting ourselves in this manner.”18 The one soldier in
his barracks who refused to indulge in vulgar jokes and curse
words was Gustav Steinschneider, a grandson of Moritz Stein-
schneider, one of the founders of the nineteenth-century “Sci-
ence of Judaism,” against which Scholem would later write a num-
ber of fierce polemics. This was the beginning of his friendship
with Gustav. Other members of the Steinschneider family would
be important to Scholem later in life.
Within a few weeks of his arrival in Allenstein, Scholem
developed disturbing symptoms: fainting spells and severe
anxiety (in several letters, he blamed a shaking hand for his
bad handwriting). He was relieved from training and put in
charge of delivering the mail and inspecting the soldiers after
they used the latrine to make sure they disinfected themselves.
His fellow soldiers began to make fun of him for his illness and
made anti-Semitic remarks behind his back. But they evidently
developed a healthy fear of him, since one of the symptoms of
his illness seems to have been violent outbursts in which he
threatened to harm whoever got in his way. Here was a physical
manifestation of the verbal aggression for which he had already
developed a fearsome reputation among the young German
Zionists.
During this period, he carried on an intensive correspon-
dence with his Jung Juda comrades Heller and Brauer, and with
his new friend Werner Kraft, who would become a noted liter-
ary critic and join Scholem in Jerusalem after the Nazis came
to power. Gerhard now signed his name regularly “Gerschom
Schalom” in either Latin or Hebrew characters. He seems to
have adopted the biblical “Gershom” at least half a year earlier,

36
 the abyss of war

perhaps to signify how alien he felt in Germany (the name ger

sham literally means “an alien there”).
On July 25, he was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward of
the military hospital and put under observation by the doctors,
all of whom, he wrote, were Jewish. He exclaimed in a letter:
“The devil can kiss my ass if I am shipped back to the infantry
from here.” He was supposed to remain there for six weeks, but
on August 11 he reported to Kraft that he would soon be re-
leased: “I consider my release as a victory of my psychological
efforts, which have cost me enough.” A few days later, he wrote
to Heller in Hebrew, so as to evade the censor, and announced
that he had fooled the doctors by faking his illness.19
Once again, we are confronted with the question of whether
Scholem, like Thomas Mann’s famous “confidence man” Felix
Krull, really put one over on the Allenstein psychiatrists. If so,
he was playing a dangerous game. Had they judged him to
be faking, he could have stood trial for dereliction of duty and
drawn a long prison sentence. The German military did recog-
nize conscientious objection by pacifists, but many military
doctors considered it a kind of mental illness. Such objectors
could find themselves hospitalized long-term, which might
have become Scholem’s fate as well, even though he did not
claim to be a conscientious objector. In Scholem’s case, the chief
psychiatrist diagnosed a disturbance in his relationship with his
parents, especially his father, as the cause of his “illness,” which
manifested itself in a “visionary state.” He gave Scholem a di-
agnosis of dementia praecox, the nineteenth-century term for
what we today call adolescent schizophrenia, met with Arthur
Scholem, and persuaded him that he needed to take his son
back in order to address the disease. Arthur seems to have been
sufficiently shaken to agree to reconcile with Gerhard.20
The diagnosis of schizophrenia seems puzzling since Scho-
lem exhibited few of the features that we associate with that
disease. However, it happens that we know who the chief psy-

37
 gershom scholem

chiatrist at Allenstein was: Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s fore-

most disciples and the one with whom Freud confessed to a “ra-
cial” kinship. Although in Abraham’s writings about dementia
praecox he typically placed more emphasis on a disturbed rela-
tionship with the mother, he might have seen Scholem’s case as
a variant type. He also saw an overlap in causation between de-
mentia praecox and hysteria, the latter corresponding much
better to Gerhard’s fainting spells and shaking hands. However,
the “visionary state” (perhaps his messianic hallucinations?) that
Scholem described to Abraham might suggest the paranormal
voices of schizophrenia. It seems unlikely that Scholem knew
who the chief psychiatrist was, apart from his Jewish origins, so
he was extraordinarily lucky to have landed in the care of a
Freudian and to have exhibited symptoms that might be attrib-
uted to family dysfunction. By avoiding charges of malinger-
ing, on one hand, and hospitalization, on the other, he seems to
have threaded the needle in winning a discharge. He was hardly
the only person to do so, however: we recall that Walter Ben-
jamin overdosed on caffeine as a way of getting out of the draft
and others in Scholem’s circle also sought medical deferments.
Since the military medical records from Allenstein have
disappeared (possibly destroyed when the Red Army overran
East Prussia in January 1945), we cannot examine Abraham’s
thinking about his case. It is hard to imagine that a psychiatrist
of his experience could be totally fooled. We have already seen
ample evidence of a nervous disorder of some kind including
violent mood swings. Perhaps Scholem was simply exaggerat-
ing symptoms that were already present. Or perhaps Abraham
recognized how extraordinary his patient was and, whether out
of Jewish sympathies or not, went out of his way to arrange for
his discharge.
While he was in the hospital, Scholem’s Buber obsession
continued. By 1917, Buber had retreated from his support for
the war and was also beginning to abandon his mysticism of ex-

38
 the abyss of war

perience for the dialogic philosophy he would make famous in

I and Thou (1923). But one wouldn’t know it from reading Scho-
lem’s diaries and letters. His vitriol continued to mount. From
his hospital bed, he wrote to Werner Kraft about Kraft’s decla-
ration that he “hated” Buber. Scholem replied that he shared
Kraft’s “hatred,” calling Buber “demonic” and “anti-Jewish.” But
he took Kraft to task for rejecting Judaism because he could
not stand Buber. Buber did not represent Judaism, despite the
pedestal on which many of their generation placed him. Scho-
lem claimed that his own immersion in Jewish texts had dem-
onstrated to him how little Buber stood within the tradition. In
other words, Buber endangered Jewish renewal because many
young acculturated German Jews took him as the embodiment
of authentic Judaism. Once they came to reject him, they ended
up rejecting Judaism tout court. Scholem made it clear without
saying so that if Kraft was looking for an embodiment of Juda-
ism, it could be found in Scholem himself!21
In the fall of 1917, now discharged from the military, he
wrote, “In the last period—it is already quite a long time—I
have been in continual unconditional enmity against Buber.
I have a hundred difficult objective and personal objections to
him.” Buber was not a mystic but a mystical author: “Buber is
a false teacher, he teaches the truth, but he teaches it falsely.”
By November, his earlier plan from 1915 to write a biography of
Buber had metamorphosed into its opposite, a plan to write a
refutation of Buber’s whole corpus: “One must write a thorough
critique of all of Buber’s books: from Rabbi Nahman to the
most recent scandal [referring to Buber’s recently published Er-
eignisse und Begegnungen]. The whole lot of it. In his books, the
abyss, which has swallowed Buber up, finds expression or opens
up.”22 Scholem’s complex relationship with Buber, marked equally
by admiration and aversion, had started over the question of the
war. But if his 1915 poem proclaimed, “It was the war!,” little
could he imagine then that this political battle would mush-

39
 gershom scholem

room into a philosophical rivalry that would shape his emerg-

ing sense of himself as a Jew and as a student of Judaism.
At the same time that Scholem struggled with Buber—or,
more accurately, his image of Buber—he continued his related
struggle against the German Zionist youth movement. His first
public volley beyond the hardly public Blauweisse Brille ap-
peared in the first issue of Buber’s Der Jude in 1916 while the
second appeared the following year in the Blau-Weiss’s own
newsletter. Scholem was thus hardly afraid to attack his ene-
mies on their own turf. The gist of his critique was that no
­Zionist youth movement was possible without knowledge of
Hebrew and immersion in Jewish sources. Members of the Blau-
Weiss took his criticism seriously, and it provoked a broad public
debate. His opponents accused Scholem, with some justification,
of an elitist and utopian attitude. Certainly, few were intellec-
tually equipped to follow his lonely path. But there were those
who recognized that his attack on the assimilationist tenden-
cies in the Blau-Weiss was not off the mark. Some of his erst-
while targets, like Heinrich Margulies, ended up adopting his
position.
Scholem’s close brush with the First World War came to
an end in August 1917, although his final discharge did not come
until January 1918, with permission to leave the country granted
in the spring. In the meantime, with a mutual decision that he
should not return to his father’s house, he took up university
studies in Jena. But the emotional rollercoaster which had char-
acterized his encounter with the military now came to domi-
nate his romantic and intellectual life.
A sign of that turmoil was a decision that he took at the end
of November 1917 to translate a series of Hebrew laments into
German, starting with the biblical book of Lamentations and
sections of Job. These translations remained in manuscript, but
in 1919 translations of several medieval laments appeared in
Der Jude. In essays that Scholem wrote in his diary, we learn

40
 the abyss of war

that he considered Hebrew laments to convey the essence of

the Hebrew language, which was wrapped up in silence (there
are striking echoes of Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay on human
and divine language). To translate these quintessential Hebrew
texts into German was, for Scholem, a “farewell present” of a
Zionist to the German language of his youth. But lamentations
drew him in particular, in part because of the epochal destruc-
tion of the war, and in part as reflections of his own emotional
state: the melancholy of a young man ready to say “good-bye to
all that.”

41
 3

Scholem in Love

In October 1917, shortly after his brush with the military,

Scholem transcribed a letter into his diary in which he reported
that only when he had established his true way could he “have
the greatest experience of my life: to come into absolute, splen-
did relationship with one man, who has influenced my life not
by his teaching, but by his being, by the awe in which I hold
him to this day. This man was not a Zionist and came perhaps
first through me to Judaism.” But the “deepest, the absolute Ju-
daism spoke in him, without his having a sense of it.”1 There is
little doubt that this man was Walter Benjamin.
In the more than two years since they had become friends,
Scholem’s relationship with Benjamin had developed beyond
an intellectual companionship into something much more in-
tense. Where Scholem would have stormed against anyone who
did not profess Zionism or Judaism, in the case of Benjamin,
the “deepest, the absolute Judaism spoke in him,” and it was this

42
 scholem in love

insight that led Scholem to believe that he could convert him

to Zionism. When Benjamin later became an idiosyncratic Marx-
ist, Scholem would insist that the true Benjamin was Jewish,
even though Benjamin’s invocation of Jewish sources was epi-
sodic and largely superficial (as Scholem himself noted, much
of what Benjamin knew about Judaism he got from Scholem).
A few months later, in a diary entry written on his twentieth
birthday, Scholem relates that, sitting in his room alone, clearly
pensive if not depressed, he received a brief letter from Benja-
min: “Today midday, as I was just sitting and always thinking
about Walter and yearning for him and wondering why he
doesn’t write, then a short express letter arrived from him.” This
letter, he says, made him happier than anything in his life. Ben-
jamin had written in appreciation of his response to an essay of
Benjamin’s on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Despite what might seem
the purely intellectual nature of this missive, Benjamin made
clear that he had severed his ties with most people, but not
Scholem, with whom he was now in the deepest affinity. Scho-
lem wrote in his diary, “Walter, dear Walter, I thank you out of
my deepest soul, so deep that I will never be able to express this
thanks.”2 A half-year later, he returned to Benjamin’s letter and
called its ten lines “the only perfect letter I have received in
my life.”3 And sixty years after that, he included the full text of
Benjamin’s letter in From Berlin to Jerusalem, although he re-
moved the reference to the gushing emotions of his response,
emotions which nevertheless clearly continued to affect him
for the rest of his life.
It is hard to avoid the possibility that Scholem and Benja-
min’s friendship had a homoerotic component. This specu­
lation finds some support in a strange incident that Scholem
relates in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. In Septem-
ber 1921, he and Benjamin journeyed to a remote village in the
Rhön Mountains and spent two days in a house belonging to
their friend Ernst Lewy. He describes the almost Gothic atmo-

43
 gershom scholem

sphere there: “There was something uncanny about his [Lewy’s]

wife . . . she had the attracting power of a swamp, the magic of
an orchid, and the sucking and frightening quality of a clinging
vine. . . . Mrs. Lewy dominated her husband in a strangely
quiet way. The atmosphere was an enchanting one and affected
all of us.”4
Benjamin and Scholem were housed in a large room with a
huge double bed. When they awoke in the morning, Benjamin
said to Scholem, “When I opened my eyes just now, if you had
been a girl lying there, I would have thought that I was the
bishop of Bamberg” (the previous owner of the house). Scho-
lem makes no comment on this strange remark but immedi-
ately goes on to discuss Benjamin’s proposal for a journal to be
named Angelus.5
It is hard to know what to make of this odd incident, and
we should refrain from considering it explicitly sexual. But
there is something in the awkward way Scholem felt compelled
to tell the story that suggests his own unease, which was not
great enough to cause him to suppress the story but still sufficient
for him to refuse his readers any commentary. In later years,
Scholem came to reflect on the emotional nature of his rela-
tionship with Benjamin and Benjamin’s then-wife, Dora: “Was
it (as it sometimes seems to me in retrospect) that three young
passionate, gifted people who were almost completely depen-
dent on one another and were seeking the road to maturity had
to use one another as release mechanisms in the private sphere?
Were there in this ‘triangle,’ of which we were unaware, un-
conscious emotional inclinations and defenses that had to be
discharged but which we were not able to recognize in our ‘na-
iveté,’ that is, owing to our lack of psychological experience?
I could not answer these questions even today.” Later, he re-
ported Dora’s diagnosis of her husband that “Walter’s intellec-
tuality impeded his libido.”6 He also asked other women who
knew Benjamin how they viewed him, and they all testified that

44
 scholem in love

he was not attractive to them as a man. One said that for her
and her female friends, he did not even exist as a man. And yet
Benjamin had many female lovers in his abbreviated life. His at-
traction to them apparently lay in his unique intellect and way
of conversation. This, in fact, seems to have been true for Scho-
lem as well, but it is peculiar that he felt moved to interview
Benjamin’s female friends on the question of his sexuality.
What is the relevance of such emotional questions for un-
derstanding an intellectual like Gershom Scholem? Are they
merely biographical curiosities or might they shed light on the
remarkable achievements as a historian of Jewish mysticism for
which he is justly famous? A common perception of Scholem
sees him as a scholar laboring in ivory tower solitude to un-
cover sources of Jewish history unknown or neglected. Noth-
ing, however, could be farther from the truth. Two souls dwelled
within his breast: the dispassionate ascetic and the passionate
lover. It is said that real meaning of Zohar (the name of the
most important book of medieval Jewish mysticism) is “Eros.”
If so, then Scholem’s passionate engagement with the Zohar
and the other mystical texts he would end up studying was a
form of amor dei intellectualis (intellectual love of God), but this
same passion governed his relations with people.
In addition, while we may think of him as a lone wolf, in
fact Scholem’s Zionism, like that of many young people of his
generation and the next, was profoundly collective and often
bound up with romantic infatuations as well. It was expressed
in passionate debates among his comrades in Jung Juda, many
of whom—those who survived the war—immigrated to Pales-
tine. And, as one might expect among such ardent young peo-
ple, ideology often led to romance and vice versa. Scholem was
anything but immune from this dialectic.
As his feelings about Walter Benjamin show, the young
Scholem was at times confused about relations between the sexes.
In a muddled diary entry, also from October 1917, he declared

45
 gershom scholem

that the spheres of men and women are different. The public is
not the sphere of women: “I wish not to see them there. I am
not a feminist (Frauenrechtler).”7 A few weeks later, he offered
the following—at times contradictory—meditation on love:

Jewish love—and I love jewishly—is not like goyish love.

Jewish love does not perform magic. Indeed, it could do
this—and here lies its abyss. This is the essence of seduction.
The order [Ordnung] of love means that two people encom-
pass the world, if they are intended for each other. Friend-
ship does not encompass the world. I don’t believe that one
can stand in relation to a girl in any other way than in the
relationship of love. Man is only intended for one woman
. . . although one perhaps loves more [than one]. Friendship
with a woman is either an injured relationship or a swindle.
How can one have a friendship with a woman when one can
only know a woman through love?8

“Abyss” (Abgrund) was one of the most common words in the

young Scholem’s vocabulary, and though it might seem to be a
negative term, at times he seemed to embrace it.
He was preoccupied with the role of women in Zionism
and the renewal of Judaism. In July 1918, he wrote a series of
ninety-five theses for Walter Benjamin’s birthday in conscious
imitation of Martin Luther’s famous ninety-five theses (he never
actually delivered them to Benjamin). Among them: “There is
no female Torah” (no. 29); “There is no female Zionist who
would not be unhappy [a response to the philosopher Hermann
Cohen’s sardonic statement that the Zionists were boys who
just wanted to be happy]” (no. 47); and “There is a category of
German Jewesses who lack nothing [to become] a Zionist than
a husband” (no. 48).9
These statements, which often verge on misogyny, do not
tell the whole story. His early writings contain contradictory
sentiments. In July 1917, he wrote to his Jung Juda friend Aha-
ron Heller from the military psychiatric ward in Allenstein, ap-

46
 scholem in love

pending a postscript to weigh in on what he calls a “matter of

the greatest importance” in their youth movement: “What are
the objections against women in Jung-Juda? There are girls (Grete
Brauer, for example, or others I [can] think of ) who want the
same as we [men] and work towards it. Must our Bund exclude
them?”10 The “Bund” refers here to an idea from the previous
summer when a meeting of the Jung Juda took place in Oberts-
dorf, where Scholem was resting on the orders of his family
doctor. There he conceived the idea of a Bund der Eifer, or “band
of the zealous.”
Some months later, having been released from the army, he
returned to this theme in his diary, at times blatantly contra-
dicting himself. Right before the entry in which he denies that
he is a feminist, he insists that more women must be included
in Jung Juda, because “we mustn’t demand that we isolate our-
selves and because they need our support.” They should take
part in the work of rebirth in their way. “Otherwise people
would have to say that we leave women outside our organized
movement, and that would be completely false for us.”11
As early as two years previously, he had put this position into
effect. In 1915 he exchanged a series of letters with a Julie Schächter,
a member of the Jung Juda group who had leveled a rather
devastating—one might even say “Scholemesque” —critique of
Scholem’s own role in the movement. She attacked him for a
surfeit of words and paucity of action, just the kind of critique
he liked to make of the Blau-Weiss: “We need healthy, pithy
[kernig] Jews. . . . Healthy, simple men with iron will and the
courage to act. Dive deeply into Jewish knowledge. This will
give power and freshness, which we Jews possess, but which we
have lost and [need to] win again.”12 She called on Scholem to
lead the group to become Menschenmaterial.
Scholem obviously took her critique seriously and used the
opportunity to develop his own Zionist philosophy, agreeing
with Schächter that there was too much idle talk among the

47
 gershom scholem

Zionists. He concluded by telling her that his comrade Erich

Brauer had wanted to strike her from the list of subscribers to
Die blauweiss Brille but he had insisted on keeping her. Despite
her “ill-tempered theoretical disagreement” he regarded her as
a “dear comrade.”13
Julie Schächter disappears from view, but other women both
inside and outside the Zionist movement took her place. I have
already noted his infatuation with Jettka Stein in 1914 and 1915.
The Scholem Archive at the National Library in Jerusalem also
contains letters from 1915 and 1916 from a schoolmate named
Stephanie Rothstein, who developed an infatuation with Scholem
and wrote to him in increasingly intimate tones. She reported
her embarrassment when her mother discovered letters from him
to her, letters that have not survived. Unlike Stein, Rothstein
does not appear in Scholem’s memoir. But other women do.
During the academic year 1917–1918, when Scholem was at
Jena, he befriended a remarkable array of women. Since most
of the men were in the army, women made up the overwhelm-
ing majority of students in the German universities, a majority
that Scholem seemed to greatly enjoy. He taught them Hebrew
and endlessly discussed philosophy and Zionism with them.
Among these women were Käthe Hollander, from a baptized
family who had returned to Judaism; Toni Halle, whose sister
married Scholem’s friend Werner Kraft and who later went on
to direct a progressive high school in Tel Aviv; and Valeria Grun-
wald, a medical student of Hungarian origins.
In his diary, Scholem fumes against another female student,
Grete Kramer, who refused to continue Hebrew lessons with
him on the grounds that he frightened her. His reaction more
or less confirms her opinion: “And I am an idiot! Why did I get
involved with this girl, even though she was the cheeriest. . . .
She doesn’t want—this reptile—to learn Hebrew, because she
would have to do it with me and because she is afraid of me, so
she says.” He calls her a “lame idiot” and “dimwitted,” but as if

48
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to show that he has no hard feelings, he notes five days later that
he went to her house for Shabbat dinner.14
Perhaps the most striking of these women was Grete Lis-
sauer, whom Scholem met in 1916 at the University of Berlin in
lectures by Ernst Troeltsch. In From Berlin to Jerusalem, he de-
scribes her as thirty-five years old and the wife of a professor of
medicine who had been called up by the military: “What at-
tracted my attention was not so much her striking dark beauty
and bearing as the notes—protesting against Troeltsch’s some-
what too ‘cultivated’ presentation—that she dashed off in a
large passionate script, using an enormous number of excla-
mation points and question marks. The expression on her face
reflected her emotions as effectively as the expressionistic ex-
plosions in her notebook.” From Scholem’s diaries, it becomes
clear that he developed an adolescent crush on Lissauer. They
argued about philosophy, but Scholem clearly found her atti-
tude toward Judaism highly challenging. She introduced him
to Max Fischer, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, prompt-
ing him to write Fischer a letter which, he claimed, “was not
only to him, but instead ought to be directed to all modern
acherim [a Talmudic term for heretics] and thus also to Frau
Grete Lissauer.”15 Lissauer did not convert to Christianity, but
she later separated from her husband, became a Communist,
and died in Moscow in the mid-1920s.
Yet another woman to whom he appears to have been at-
tracted was Katharina Gentz. He describes her as the first non-
Jewish woman with whom he became friendly, which tells us
something about the relative social segregation of even highly
acculturated families like the Scholems. Gerhard’s brother Wer-
ner married a non-Jewish working-class woman, Emmy Wie­
chelt, which, as we have seen, caused Arthur Scholem to cut off
relations with his third son. Gerhard presumably was not think-
ing of Emmy, with whom he was rather friendly, when he sin-
gled out Gentz as the first Gentile woman of his acquaintance.

49
 gershom scholem

Gentz was seven years older than Scholem, but he consid-

ered her the most impressive student at Jena. She had a fine
bearing and “the face of a noble damsel from medieval times.”
However, she was unapproachable, and the young Scholem
only managed to strike up a conversation with her by pushing
her coal cart up the hill to her apartment, which led to an invi-
tation to tea. The adjectives he uses to describe her suggest the
spell she cast over him: “She exuded an indescribable tranquil-
ity and her great reserve masked an immense human openness.”16
A diary entry from December 18, 1917, confirms this retrospective
memory and suggests that much of Gentz’s spell lay in her Ger-
manness: “Only a German can be like that.”17 This attraction
must have been deeply confusing to Scholem in light of his angry
proclamations that he no longer considered himself German.
All these relationships were passionately intellectual but
were hardly lacking in erotic energy. Scholem also found an av-
enue for expressing erotic feelings in his passion for Jewish texts.
As we have already seen, one of his earliest literary endeavors
was a translation of the Song of Songs, which his father pub-
lished in a beautiful limited edition in 1915. Scholem translated
this biblical text twice more, although the two subsequent trans-
lations were never published. But his diary also contains a ru-
mination dated May 26, 1917, on the Song of Songs. There he
rejects the traditional allegorical reading of the love poem in
favor of a literal one: “The love of the Song of Songs is true love.”
Human love is the true task of Jewish lovers, a love that Scho-
lem here describes as “deep spirituality.”18 Thus, Judaism, spir-
ituality, and love were intimately bound up with one another.
Around the same time as he wrote this fragment, Scholem in-
creasingly began focusing his romantic desire on another woman,
Grete Brauer, whom he mentions parenthetically as an exam-
ple of a girl whose ideology was equal to that of the boys in Jung
Juda. Grete was the sister of Erich Brauer. We’ll follow this story
rather carefully since it is the central, if unacknowledged, chap-

50
 scholem in love

ter in Scholem’s annus amoris, 1918, when his youthful infatua-

tions would yield to a more mature relationship.
Grete Brauer was five years Scholem’s senior, but in one
letter he notes that she is, “thank God, much younger than her
age.”19 He seems to have spent time with her from as early as
the fall of 1916. She was a member of the Blau-Weiss, and Scho-
lem had thrown himself into a single-minded campaign to con-
vince its members to resign on the grounds of the organization’s
insufficient commitment to what he called “radical Zionism.”
In 1917, he toured the country, haranguing groups of Jewish stu-
dents in the Blau-Weiss and noting with pride whenever any-
one announced his or her resignation. Members of Jung Juda
who had left the Blau-Weiss he called Scholem’s people or Scho-
lem mystics, which gives us a vivid picture of how politically
active he was in those years and the way he fancied himself as a
kind of leader. In May 1917, he went for a walk in the forest
with Erich and Grete, noting afterward that Grete had begun
to think along the lines of Scholem and his friends. And he adds
that “she is the first girl whom I have befriended honestly.”20
On October 10, he gleefully announces to his diary that Grete
has succumbed to his importuning and is now officially out of
the Blau-Weiss.
However, Scholem’s relationship with Grete was not only
political. The next month, he reported a deep conversation with
her about knowledge and gender. He had come to the important
realization that women had a different relationship to knowl-
edge from that of men. Women lacked the ability that men had
to communicate their knowledge, which posed the most im-
portant problem in what he calls “the metaphysics of gender”
(Metaphysik der Geschlechter). Yet, we must not conclude that
this is another example of Scholem’s misogyny, for he says that
only idiots think that women cannot gain knowledge and even
greater idiots have founded anti-feminism on this belief. He
calls such attitudes “metaphysical heresy.”21

51
 gershom scholem

A month later still, in the diary entry on Walter Benjamin’s

birthday letter, he notes that the letter had renewed his faith in
God. He then mentions two other friends who have also re-
newed his life: Werner Kraft and Grete Bauer. By February 1918,
his feelings have intensified. Now he tells his diary that he wants
to have an honest talk with her and address her with the familiar
“Du.” If she does not reciprocate, he will establish a distance
from her. And then, in a baffling comment, he says, “My inner
order of life must be changed. I am not worthy of Walter.”22
Might this mean that expressing love for a woman threw doubt
on his love for Walter? A week later, in the same vein: he must
escape the atmosphere of “relationships” in which he lives. The
only relationship that he could see continuing was with Grete,
but it was apparently dead. Of course, his relationship with Wal-
ter was totally different: “It stands at the center of my life, he and
no one else.”23
But was the relationship with Grete Brauer dead? He evi-
dently did not believe so because he wrote her a letter express-
ing his feelings. Interestingly, he did not preserve a copy of this
crucial letter, as was his practice with other important letters.
On March 5, Brauer answered him, saying that she could not
give him what he needed. Cryptically, she says that she is “in an
abyss of mourning” and cannot establish bridges to others.24
Two days later, he answered her with a long, floridly romantic
letter. The more locks and walls she erects around herself, the
more certain he is that he can reach her “aloneness” (Einsam-
keit). He claims that he will not resort to rhetoric, since lan-
guage is holy for him. Oddly for a love letter to a woman, he
refers several times to his feelings for Benjamin: “You are as old
as Walter, and yet the years that you have before me have filled
me with a completely different feeling.”25 He refers also to his
translation of David’s biblical lament for Jonathan, which he
had given her the previous December, a peculiar text if one wishes

52
 scholem in love

to declare a heterosexual love. Clearly, Benjamin continued to

cast a long shadow over his emotional life.
Within the letter are allusions to a disturbed mental state
(at one point he calls it Irrtum, “fallacy”) that had afflicted him
for a long time, perhaps even as long as a year and certainly
since he had been in Jena. For the past fourteen days he had
been in a deep depression, a condition expressed by David’s la-
ment. He clearly believed that Grete had the power to save him
from this malady: “The pure power of your existence is that
which has kept me healthy in this whole time in the deepest
sense and has prevented the burning fervor in which I have lived
and [still] live from burning out.” He concludes: “My love, I
count the hours until your answer.”
On March 11, Brauer wrote asking him to come to Berlin
since what she had to say could not be put in letters. Neverthe-
less, she made her intentions plain: she regretted that she would
cause him pain, but she was living under a “law” from which
she could not free herself (like her “abyss of mourning,” this
“law” remains shrouded in mystery). It was not within her power
to give him what he wanted: “I am not the person who can help
you as you want. I want to be your friend as I was until now;
more than this it is not possible for me to give you.”26 On March
14 he wrote in his diary: “Today a miracle took place: I’ve read
Goethe [as if?] for the first time in my life. This too was the re-
sult of ‘the Greteschen letter,’” thus eliding Gretchen in Goethe’s
Faust with Grete Brauer.27
Scholem resolved to go to Berlin to put an end to what he
called “these unspeakably awful weeks.” In a postcard also writ-
ten on March 14, to his friend Werner Kraft, he says that he
“lives above an underground explosion and flies next perhaps
to an explosion in Berlin.” On March 16, he wrote a desperate
letter to his Jung Juda friend Aharon Heller, asking to stay with
him in Berlin. Scholem needed to come urgently, but his fi-

53
 gershom scholem

nances were in terrible shape, and he had no money for a hotel.

He was also in poor health: “Es geht mir sehr schlecht.” But
above all, Heller must keep his visit secret since his parents must
on no account find out about it. What transpired during this
secretive visit is unknown, but in a letter to another woman, to
whom we shall shortly return, he refers to freeing himself—using
the same language as earlier—with an “abysmal explosion.”28
To judge by references to Grete Brauer over the next year,
however, it seems that he had not freed himself at all. The af-
terlife of this first true love was much longer than its life. In
April 1918, he wrote her a puerile poem titled “Farewell to a
Young Girl,” which, despite his feelings for Grete, he seems to
have recycled later and sent to another adolescent flame. In it
he laments the prospect of immigrating to Zion alone: love and
ideology were clearly bound up with each other. In October
1918, now in Switzerland, he wrote in his diary as if he had be-
come the young Werther of another of Goethe’s works: “I think
all the time of Grete. If I should die tonight, I would die with
the thought of dying for her. I think night and day of her.” And
there may even have been echoes of his feelings much later:
in 1920 he included in his diary a letter, probably never sent,
which was meant for Brauer. In the letter he raises the question
of whether Zionism can ever lead to a collective “we,” but even
though the content appears ideological, the failure of his rela-
tionship with Brauer surely lurks beneath the surface. The same
year, he wrote her another poem that he saved in his archive.29
In a melodramatic twist, Grete Brauer ended up marrying
the same Aharon Heller with whom Scholem stayed during his
failed trip to Berlin. Heller went on to become one of the lead-
ing doctors in Palestine and the State of Israel, where he founded
Beilinson Hospital in Tel Aviv. In a cryptic note in the expanded
Hebrew edition of From Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem says that
Heller broke off relations with him when they were both in
Palestine and that this was “the greatest puzzle of my life.”30

54
 scholem in love

Could this rupture have had something to do with Grete

Brauer? We will never know, because Scholem excised her to-
tally from his memoir, as if she had never existed, an astonishing
decision given the rich detail he provided for his youth otherwise.
It was as if the pain that her rejection of him caused remained so
great that he could not bear to recount it sixty years later.
On May 4, 1918, with the permission of the German mili-
tary authorities to leave the country, Scholem departed for
Switzerland. In his later memoirs he describes his sense of “eu-
phoria” in crossing the border. It is in fact possible that this eu-
phoria was not only because he was leaving Germany behind,
but also because he was closing the page on the “abysmal ex-
plosion” of his relationship with Grete Brauer. He was going to
live in close proximity to Walter and Dora Benjamin. He had
clearly transferred his feelings about Walter to Dora, keeping a
picture of the two of them on his desk in Jena (he was the only
nonrelative to attend their wedding in April 1917). When their
son Stefan was born, he was overwhelmed with joy, as if the boy
were his own son or, perhaps, brother (the psychological com-
plexities cannot be unraveled here). Oddly enough, though, it
was not until 1921, long past the Swiss period, that he began to
address Walter and Dora with the familiar Du, even though he
was on that basis much earlier with other friends, such as Wer-
ner Kraft, as well as his comrades from Jung Juda, where such
informality was part of the movement’s ideology.
He initially moved to a room in the village of Muri, outside
Bern, where Walter and Dora were living. There he and Wal-
ter devised a satirical “University of Muri” that spoofed German
universities. The two now picked up the intense conversations
they had abandoned when Walter and Dora left Germany for
Switzerland the previous July. Yet the Swiss ménage à trois was
less than a success. Walter and Dora had screaming arguments,
which Scholem was forced to witness. He also came to realize
that both Walter and Dora were fundamentally amoral, which

55
 gershom scholem

disturbed him greatly. Dora accused Scholem of causing dis-

ruption in their family, at times resorting to letters written in
the name of their infant son Stefan. Her accusations hint that
Scholem himself might have done his share of shouting. These
scenes went on for over a year after he came to Switzerland.
His friendship with Walter Benjamin certainly continued—­
albeit with many crises—but his utopian ideas of what it would
mean to live with Walter and Dora were shattered.
Once again, we need to wonder about the nature of his re-
lationship with Walter, which was able to survive such crises. It
was as if Scholem had fallen under Walter’s spell, a spell that
Benjamin seems to have cast on others as well, despite—or per-
haps because of—his difficult personality. Scholem acknowl-
edges in his memoirs that Benjamin was the only person to
whom he was invariably polite, again evidence that he was under
a kind of spell. And then there was Benjamin’s extraordinary
originality, which Scholem found more stimulating than the
ideas of any other interlocutor. With Benjamin, he felt that he
was in the presence of genius, even though he admitted that
he often found Benjamin’s ideas opaque.
But with the deterioration in his relations with Walter and
Dora, Scholem seems to have experienced a bout of desperate
depression. To Aharon Heller, he wrote:

Never before have I been in such desperate shape. . . . I see

no one other than Walter Benjamin and his wife. I sit com-
pletely withdrawn in my attic room above the fields—like
Agnon’s Torah Scribe, minus his peace of mind. For weeks
I have feared the worst and I feel crushed by a tormenting
uncertainty about whether my recovery, obtained through
Herculean efforts and at the most exacting price, will prove
permanent. Here, of course, I can do what I want: I can
work, think, take walks, or cry. . . . I also know quite well that
I would be defenseless if my genius (I cannot use a lesser
word for it) were to let me down. I now live as I did last sum-

56
 scholem in love

mer, which is all the more terrifying since I must now fend
off real, not feigned madness.31

This is an extraordinary letter: it alludes to the illness that he

feigned in the military hospital but which has now asserted it-
self as a real illness, whatever it was before. And it also contains
an allusion to his sense of himself as a genius whose intellectual
gifts will be the antidote to his depression. The cause of this
depression must have been a combination of the disastrous af-
fair with Grete Brauer, his disillusionment with the Benjamins
and their marriage, and the lack of the companionship that was
so essential to his life in Germany, as much as he wished to
leave that country. As important—indeed crucial—as Scholem’s
Swiss period was in his intellectual evolution, the year in Swit-
zerland was full of crises and repeated thoughts of suicide.
Despite these mood swings, he was not yet ready to declare
defeat in the search for love. A few weeks after his arrival in
Switzerland, he wrote to Meta Jahr, a member of Jung Juda
with whom he been carrying on a bit of a flirtation for some
time. Now that his relationship with Grete Brauer was defini-
tively over, he could indulge in other possibilities. Addressing
her as “liebes Kind,” he says that he writes to almost no one in
Germany except a couple of young women. But he adjures her
not to think too much about him: “In earnest, you should live
entirely ‘anti-Scholemisch.’ But you do so also already.”32 In the
subsequent months, he exchanged a number of touching letters
with Jahr, who like many of the Jung Juda members immi-
grated to Palestine in the early 1920s and was one of the found-
ing members of Kibbutz Bet Zera. In fact, it was Jahr to whom
Scholem sent that sonnet originally written for Grete Brauer.
Whatever Scholem’s feelings may have been for Meta Jahr,
a new woman had appeared on the horizon. While in Heidelberg
the previous January, he had met Elsa ( Escha) Burchhardt, the
daughter of an Orthodox family who was studying medicine

57
 gershom scholem

but found philosophy much more attractive. As was Scholem’s

style, he immediately engaged her in philosophical and Zionist
conversation. Burchhardt wrote to him in the middle of March,
but, consumed by his tumultuous feelings for Grete Brauer, he
failed to answer. After the breakup with Brauer, though, he re-
sponded to Burchhardt, calling his visit to Berlin, as we have
seen, an abysmal explosion.
In July 1918, he wrote to Burchhardt from Bern, upbraid-
ing her for not dating her letters, perhaps already cognizant of
their later importance for his historical persona. In the middle
of a serious discussion of intellectual matters, he suddenly noted
that her last letter “in the deepest sense” didn’t have a stamp,
which “cost me significant expense.” Given Scholem’s notori-
ous stinginess and impish sense of humor, it is hard to know
whether he meant this seriously or as a joke. But he then went
on to say that he was writing to elicit her “wordless silence” which
was “to be encompassed in your love.” The theme of silence
had recurred in Scholem’s adolescent writing as a highly prized
virtue (albeit one to which he devoted many words). Here he
deployed it in the service of romance. The letter is surprising
because no indication of such feelings had appeared in earlier
correspondence or even in his diaries. And it is also noteworthy
that he is still using the formal Sie. Only in October did she write
him in the familiar Du, which left him as ecstatic, he says, as
after a first kiss. In November, he reports rereading her letters:
“One is more mysterious than the other and yet there is no mys-
tery. If she loves me, she could not write in any other way.”33
The next month, though, everything turned topsy-turvy.
Grete Brauer came to visit her brother Erich in Bern, throwing
Scholem into a state of extreme agitation. In his diary he refers
cryptically to “the problem of Heller,” which suggests that the
course that would lead to Grete’s future marriage had already
been set (he also says of Heller, “Naturally I do not say his
name”).34 In a feverish set of diary entries, he compares Grete

58
 scholem in love

to Escha and both of them to Dora! He now thinks that it is the

role of women to renew Zionism, and he even speculates about
their place in the messianic realm. He was clearly in a highly
volatile state in which he could scarcely decide toward whom
to direct his romantic emotions. A week later, though, the tur-
moil began to resolve itself: he now realized that his three-year
infatuation with Walter and Dora was over, and while his feel-
ings for Grete remained strong (throughout the spring of 1919,
he continued to contrast her “purity” to the ethical failings of
the Benjamins), his return to Germany, which he now saw as
necessary, depended on Escha.
In a diary entry from this period, he reveals that for six
weeks he has not written any poetry. This is an indication that
he was in a healthy state of mind: “When I feel well, I don’t write
poetry. When I’m in [a state] of pure enthusiasm, I write prose,
when I’m unhappy, a poem, when angry, a letter, and when I’m
in [a state] of my tikkun [perfection, wholeness], I am silent.”35
Although his fluctuating moods found reflection in the genre
in which he wrote, and although he would never stop writing
either poetry or letters, from this point on more and more of
his energies would find expression in prose.
In February 1919, Escha Burchhardt came to Bern, and this
visit cemented the relationship. In June he wrote a diary entry
in memory of the time they spent together during the winter:
“When she came to me, she didn’t love me yet, but this took
only a few days. Now she wants everything she can get: to be
my lover, my wife, but all she really wants is to have children.
Escha is the type of mother God intended. Is it necessary for
this eternal picture of motherhood to languish without chil-
dren? . . . But I told her I couldn’t have a lover. It’s certain that
one should love her deeply; she has such a feminine movement
to her.”36 Even in this outburst of enthusiasm, he conveys con-
fusion about his role in their relationship. In later years the
question of children would loom large.

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 gershom scholem

In September, Scholem returned to Germany, enrolling in

a doctoral program in Munich. Letters from his father make
plain that Arthur could no longer afford to continue support-
ing him in Switzerland, given the deterioration in the German
mark. But Gerhard was ready to leave Switzerland in any case.
Although his choice of university was certainly dictated by the
strong program in Semitic languages and the trove of Kabbal-
istic manuscripts and books to be found there, it was perhaps no
coincidence that Munich was where Escha Burchhardt resided.
Soon they were living in facing rooms on the Türkenstrasse.
The year before this momentous move, which marked his
turn to professional training and also preparation for immigra-
tion to Palestine, Scholem resolved to write a farewell to the
German Zionist youth movement, echoing the two earlier es-
says I discussed in the previous chapter. He completed the essay,
“Abschied” (Farewell), in Switzerland in June 1918 and published
it in Siegfried Bernfeld’s Jerubbaal, a youth movement journal.
The essay, truth be told, is a bewildering onslaught of ideas,
many of them hard to decipher. Scholem characterized the cul-
ture of the youth movement as “chatter” (Geschwätz), “confu-
sion” (Verwirrung), and “chimeras,” all favorite pejoratives in
the young Scholem’s vocabulary. Hebrew must be the core of
Zionism, but for the youth movement, “Hebrew has been robbed
of its meaning, for the Hebrew of the chatterers could never
become the revelation of a community that proves its reality by
the possibility of being silent in Hebrew.” The only appropriate
response to all this verbiage was silence: “Community demands
solitude: not the possibility of together desiring the same [thing],
but only that of common solitude establishes community.”37
This is surely a strange, even paradoxical, definition of com-
munity, and it suggests that Scholem was far from endorsing
the kind of collectivism that led some of his comrades to found
a kibbutz. He wanted community, but, above all, he also wanted

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solitude. The tension between the two may explain why he

found it so hard to fulfill his Zionist dreams.
As a denunciation of garrulous chatter, the essay certainly
falls short, for it suffers from the very sin it claims to expose (we
recall Julie Schächter’s telling criticism of Scholem’s earlier
writing). A religious tone underlies the essay, even if its writer
was no longer religious. Zionism was linked in his mind to a
revival of Judaism based on an immersion in the sources of Ju-
daism. This immersion was possible only if its adherents learned
Hebrew, which was at the core of Scholem’s ideology. But they
then had to learn to be silent in Hebrew and to create a com-
munity of solitary individuals, a condition that perhaps reflects
Scholem’s own sense of loneliness after he came to Switzer-
land. Exactly how this philosophy might be put into practice
remained unexplained, but there was a clear tension here and
elsewhere in Scholem’s early writings between the solitary in-
tellectual and the highly social student and activist whose life
we have been tracing. Both personas remained true for him not
only in these early years but throughout his life.

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 4

The Book of Brightness

Between the fall of 1919 and the spring of 1923, Scholem

transformed himself from a brilliant autodidact with broad, eclec-
tic interests into a highly disciplined scholar of Kabbalah. He
mastered an astonishing range of sources as well as languages, all
in an extraordinarily short time. Where he had earlier suffered
from swings of mood, he now came to focus like a laser on his
subject. No doubt his relationship with Escha Burchhardt
played a major role in calming the storms that had raged inside
him throughout his adolescence and early adulthood. We find
confirmation of his greater emotional stability in the fact that
he virtually stopped writing in his diary after he moved to Mu-
nich, although he did continue to write fragmentary essays that
he never published. If, as we saw in the previous chapter, writ-
ing prose signified for him a state of “enthusiasm” and poetry,
depression, the Munich period was one of pure enthusiasm and
the prose increasingly academic. Since he only wrote in his diary

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episodically, from this period on we must rely more on letters

and Scholem’s other writings to reconstruct his biography.
Scholem stood out in his generation for mastering classical
and modern Hebrew, as well as a full range of Jewish sources
from the Bible to the twentieth century. What distinguished him,
even before he undertook academic studies in Judaism, was an
almost fanatical insistence on historical accuracy. Where a writer
like Martin Buber might adapt Hasidic texts for his own pur-
poses, Scholem demanded we read these texts on their own terms,
located within history. In order to do so, he came increasingly
to believe that the critical tool he had to learn was philology. To
the contemporary reader, this discipline might appear arcane,
and, in fact, one rarely encounters it in today’s universities. But
in Scholem’s time the glory of the humanistic sciences in Ger-
many was precisely this careful tracing of terms and texts to
demonstrate their inner relationships, authorship, authenticity,
and transmission of ideas. Philology combined literary criticism
with history and linguistics. Scholem’s genius lay in harnessing
this seemingly dry academic discipline to an urgent philosoph-
ical agenda.
As early as July 1918, shortly after he arrived in Switzer-
land, he meditated in his diary on the relations among philol-
ogy, tradition, and silence. As we have seen, the last two terms
were among the most frequent in his early vocabulary. For in-
stance, he mobilized the concept of tradition—the whole Jew-
ish library—against Buber’s mysticism of experience: the first
was historical, the second fallaciously contemporary. Where
Buber’s philosophy degenerated into idle chatter and gibberish,
the true Jewish philosophy had to privilege silence. And the key
to these two was philology, by which he meant a kind of speech
governed by strict rules of evidence.
But it was not a foregone conclusion that he would do a
doctorate in Judaism. Well into his Swiss period, he was still
considering a career in mathematics, even though he had earlier

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concluded that he lacked true genius in that discipline. The

University of Göttingen seemed the best place to pursue such
studies, but he learned from a friend that the town was deadly
dull. On May 15, 1919, he seems to have arrived at a final deci-
sion: “My passion is now for philosophy and Judaism. And I have
an urgent necessity for philology.”1 Oddly, in the lines before
this declaration, he confesses to extreme tiredness and inability
to work. The decision for Jewish Studies seems therefore not
to have been made without inner turmoil. After all, there were
no positions in the field in Germany and certainly not in Pales-
tine, which had no universities. From a career point of view,
mathematics was a better bet, and, in fact, when he set sail for
Palestine, even though he had a doctorate in Semitics, he ex-
pected to teach mathematics in a high school.
Exactly when he decided to make the study of Kabbalah his
primary subject is not entirely clear. His keen interest in that
esoteric discipline had been awakened years before as he filled
notebooks with thoughts on the subject. In July 1919, he indi-
cated that he wanted to write on Jewish theories of language
and that this work would require studying the Zohar. The phil-
osophical question seemingly preceded the disciplinary one. As
intrigued as Scholem was with the subject, however, he ended
up deferring his essay on the Kabbalah’s philosophy of language
for fifty years.
Scholem’s interest in this theme may reflect the influence
of Walter Benjamin, whose 1916 essay on divine and human lan-
guage had struck a dominant chord. The Kabbalistic ideas in
Benjamin’s essay came from his study of the German Christian
Kabbalist Johann Georg Hamann rather than from Jewish
sources. It is striking that not only Benjamin but also Scholem
derived his early ideas about Jewish mysticism from Christian
sources. Scholem had been greatly excited by his reading of
Franz Josef Molitor, a nineteenth-century Christian Kabbalist

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whose philosophical treatment of Kabbalistic ideas appealed to

his own ruminations. In essays throughout his career, he re-
turned again and again to Molitor, even as he disparaged his
own Jewish predecessors. Molitor’s idea that Kabbalah repre-
sented a true subterranean tradition (the meaning of the word
in Hebrew) clearly appealed to Scholem, as did the philosophi-
cal approach that Molitor took to this esoteric subject.
Although Scholem’s letters and diaries do not provide a
conclusive contemporary answer for why and when he decided
to study the Kabbalah, there is retrospective evidence for how
he understood his decision. In 1937 he sent a birthday letter to
the department store magnate and patron of Jewish publishing
Salman Schocken. Schocken had heard about Scholem in 1918
when he was a student at Jena and after meeting him supported
Scholem’s translation work and later both his research and
publications. Schocken clearly appreciated Scholem’s genius,
but, as might be expected, Scholem at times chafed under their
patronage relationship, which had its ups and downs.
Scholem titled his birthday letter “A Candid Word About
the True Motives of My Kabbalistic Studies.” He claimed that
his decision was not arbitrary, only that he thought his task
would be much easier: “Three years, 1916–1918, which were de-
cisive for my entire life, lay behind me: many exciting thoughts
had led me as much to the most rationalistic skepticism about
my fields of study as to intuitive affirmation of mystical theses
that walked the fine line between religion and nihilism.” When
he discovered the writer Frank Kafka, he found in him a secular
expression of this Kabbalistic spirit.

So I arrived at the intention of writing not the history but

the metaphysics of the Kabbalah. I was struck by the impov-
erishment of what some like to call the Philosophy of Juda-
ism. I was particularly incensed by three authors whom I
knew, Saadiah [Gaon], Maimonides and Hermann Cohen,

65
 gershom scholem

who conceived as their main task to construct antitheses to

myth and pantheism, although they should have concerned
themselves with raising them to a high level. . . .
I sensed such a higher level in the Kabbalah. . . . It
seemed to me that here, beyond the perceptions of my gen-
eration, existed a realm of associations, which had to touch
our own most human experiences.
To be sure, the key to the understanding of these things
seemed to have been lost. . . . And perhaps it wasn’t so much
the key that was missing, but courage: courage to venture
out into the abyss, which one day could end up in us our-
selves.2

There are many themes here that would resonate for Scho-
lem throughout his life, and I shall have occasion to return to
this pregnant letter, especially when I come to discussing the
context in which he wrote it in 1937. Even if he largely aban-
doned a philosophical approach to the Kabbalah, at least for
the first decades of his career, his decision to study this esoteric
subject had to do with a philosophical question: What is the
status of myth and of pantheism in the world’s oldest monothe-
istic religion? Whereas Jewish philosophers like Saadiah Gaon
and Moses Maimonides in the Middle Ages and Hermann
Cohen in the twentieth century asserted that they had no place,
Scholem—following Buber—believed that they were essential
to understanding Judaism. (At the time of Cohen’s death in
1918, however, Scholem treated the philosopher as a kind of in-
tellectual hero, an opinion he seems to have repressed.) If pan-
theism was heretical then perhaps heresy—and with it, even
modern secularism—was a part of Judaism and not outside it.
There was something in these recondite, even bizarre books and
manuscripts that might still speak urgently to modern people.
The key was lost and yet might still be recovered if one had
the courage to venture into this abyss (a favorite word in Scho-
lem’s vocabulary, as we have seen). But why an abyss? Because

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the Kabbalistic library was like a maze in which one could be-
come a nihilist or even go mad. In the concluding paragraphs
of the letter, Scholem speaks of the “misty wall of history” that
hangs around the mountain (Mount Sinai?), noting that in trying
to penetrate this mist, he risks suffering a “professorial death.”
However, if the mountain represents metaphysical truth, there
is no alternative to trying to hear a genuine communication from
it than using the tools of philological criticism. Whereas Cohen,
Buber, and other philosophers thought that they could acquire
this truth either by divine revelation or by means of reason,
Scholem believed only in the painstaking spadework of deci-
phering historical texts. His initial intention to write the meta-
physics of the Kabbalah could not be done without first writing
its history.
A shorter manuscript found in Scholem’s papers dated 1921
contains strikingly similar ideas about the ironic necessity of
discovering a mystical truth with the tools of philology (note
that in Scholem’s vocabulary, historical study and philology
were often synonymous). Nearly forty years later, he would re-
turn to these philosophical meditations (he called them then
“unhistorical theses”) about the relationship between the criti-
cal historian and the Kabbalah. What all these texts demon-
strate is that he never abandoned the philosophical questions
that animated him from the first. Or, as he wrote to his mother
in a humorous poem dated November 23, 1919:

What will become of Gerhard Scholem?

First he will become Gershom Scholem
Then he will (hopefully) become Dr. Phil.,
Then a Jewish philosopher
Then an angel in the Seventh Heaven.3

Once he had taken up residence in Munich, he threw him-

self into a wide range of studies, as he reported in a letter to his
parents: philosophy, psychology, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek,

67
 gershom scholem

and even a final course in mathematics. As heavy a load as this

might have been, he still spent the majority of his time in the Ba-
varian State Library consuming Kabbalistic texts and manuscripts.
He needed to teach himself medieval Hebrew paleography in
order to decipher the difficult handwriting in the manuscripts.
And he continued his obsession with mastering the tools of phi-
lology by tracing terms and ideas from one text to another.
After abandoning the idea of writing on the Kabbalah’s phi-
losophy of language, perhaps because the subject was insuffi-
ciently philological, he turned to one of the more idiosyncratic
medieval Spanish mystics, Abraham Abulafia. Abulafia had de-
veloped a prophetic form of Kabbalism that emphasized mysti-
cal experience, something less common among other Spanish
Kabbalists. In the Hebrew edition of his memoir, Scholem con-
fesses that he even attempted some of Abulafia’s mystical prac-
tices and apparently succeeded in experiencing alterations of
consciousness. This is the only time he admitted to practicing
Kabbalah. In a hilarious letter to his parents in June 1920, he
reports rumors that as a result of his Kabbalistic studies he has
learned how to employ black magic to conjure up mice and ele­
phants. Unfortunately, he says, at the present time, all he can
really conjure are texts free of errors (the goal of philology). But
by the time of his examinations, he hopes to be able to produce
camels and similar animals. For reasons he never elucidated, he
abandoned Abulafia for nearly two decades and instead zeroed
in on one of the most difficult early Kabbalistic texts from the
twelfth century, the Sefer ha-Bahir, or “Book of Brightness.”
As focused as he was on his dissertation, he still found time
for many other activities. He took long walks with S. Y. Agnon,
who spent part of the same years in Munich. Together with
Escha Burchhardt, he studied Talmud under the instruction of
a rabbi, Heinrich Ehrentreu. He also continued his translation
work from Hebrew to German, translating a story by Agnon,
Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “Halakhah and Aggada,” a lamenta-

68
 the book of brightness

tion poem composed after a medieval pogrom, and a poem by

the Spanish writer Judah Halevi. Another translation, about
which he felt more ambivalent, was a memorial book for Zion-
ist watchmen in Palestine who had been killed by Arabs. Here
he felt that a cult of martyrdom created too nationalistic and
militaristic a form of Zionism. As a result, he signed a pseudo­
nym to the translation.
He also wrote a number of essays of fierce criticism, now
applying his polemical pen to scholarship rather than Zionist
youth movement politics. He attacked a translation of selec-
tions from the Zohar by Jankew Seidman and an anthology, Lyrik
der Kabbala, by Meir Wiener. In both these cases he argued that
the authors had translated Kabbalistic texts in the style of Ger-
man expressionism under the influence of Buber’s highly ro-
mantic reworkings of the Tales of Rabbi Nahman. Wiener’s book,
in particular, explicitly gestured to Buber’s Erlebnis mysticism,
which, of course, could only arouse Scholem’s ire. He utterly
rejected the idea that mystical writing read as poetry might in-
spire a metaphysical awakening. This was a thorough misun-
derstanding of Kabbalah, a technical corpus of literature that
required not the enthusiasm of the poet but the painstaking
investigations of the philologist.
During the spring of 1920, Scholem was not exclusively
holed up in the library. Munich had been the site of the short-
lived Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1919, and its suppression a
few months later led to the murder of the anarchist Gustav Lan-
dauer (among many others), who had inspired Scholem several
years earlier. Scholem arrived not long afterward, to find that a
great deal of political turmoil remained. Shortly after his arrival,
his eldest brother, Reinhold, whose politics were the most con-
servative of the four brothers, sent him a birthday greeting: “I
hope that your stay in Munich will show you that the German
idea is still alive and kicking and has not been drowned out by
the resonant phrases of coffeehouse socialists. . . . I would be

69
 gershom scholem

very interested if you wrote me about the political happenings

among students. There, too, the Russian and Bavarian Jews
have given us a bad name. Has anti-Semitism flared up at the
university?”4 Reinhold signed the letter, tongue in cheek, Re-
serve Lieutenant and Member of the German Volkspartei (a
party of the center-right). The signature aroused Gerhard’s
irony when he wrote to his parents: “By the way, I want to
thank M.d.V.L.d.R.X.Y.Z. [a parody of Reinhold’s signature]
for his pompous letter, which just goes to show how ‘the reac-
tion rears its head.’”5 The brothers appeared able to rib each
other for their very different politics.
Gerhard also wrote that there was a great deal of anti-­
Semitism afoot at the university, although he steered clear of
student politics, which he labeled a farce. But in March 1920, he
could no longer remain aloof. The Kapp Putsch, which broke
out that month, was an attempt by army officers and members
of the Freikorps (militia units aligned with the far right) to
overthrow the Weimar Republic. The government called a gen-
eral strike, which was an overwhelming success (indeed, it was
the biggest such strike in Germany’s history). The putsch was
put down, but it is generally thought to have severely under-
mined the republic. Gerhard found himself on the streets, and
he reported back to his parents rather laconically that he had
engaged in a fistfight with an anti-Semite.
Another shadow fell over the Munich period in the sum-
mer of 1920. Scholem wrote home complaining of chronic fatigue
and reporting that a doctor had diagnosed childhood scrofula
(a form of tuberculosis of the lymphatic system). Perhaps his
earlier bouts of neurasthenia were in fact the result of this dis-
ease. Subsequent letters from that summer suggest that he con-
tinued to feel ill. It is remarkable, given his condition, that he
was able to be so productive (the condition seems to have cleared
up on its own since no medical treatment for it was then avail-
able, except perhaps Kabbalistic magic!).

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 the book of brightness

It was during his Munich period that Scholem came into

contact with one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the
Weimar Republic, Franz Rosenzweig. A decade older than Scho-
lem, Rosenzweig followed a path back to Judaism that partly
resembled Scholem’s. He came from an assimilated background
and was on the verge of conversion to Christianity when a reli-
gious epiphany turned him back to Judaism. He served in the
First World War and began writing his magnum opus, The Star
of Redemption, on postcards from the front (the book was pub-
lished in 1921). Like Scholem, he learned Hebrew and under-
took translations of traditional texts into German. It was, in
fact, over a translation that the two first came into contact, al-
though Rosenzweig had known of Scholem earlier through his
polemics against the youth movement.
Rosenzweig had translated the blessing after meals into
German and had heard that Scholem had attempted to do the
same. In the spring of 1921, he sent his translation to Scholem
and received a complicated reply. Scholem found the trans­
lation significant and believed that Rosenzweig had solved a
problem of translating religious hymns that he himself had
failed to solve: “The almost blessed richness of your translation
. . . along with the nonmetaphorical uniformity of your stance
. . . something which I regard without hesitation as the legiti-
mate seal over the abyss of the religious agitation of our wretched
people . . . prove that such a realm exists in the German lan-
guage.”6 In this somewhat puzzling statement, he invoked the
“abyss” to characterize contemporary German Jewish life and
lauded Rosenzweig for covering over this abyss with the purity
of his translation. But then he pivoted to attack Rosenzweig’s
adoption of Christian language in order to accomplish his trans-
lation. Rosenzweig answered reasonably that one couldn’t trans-
late a religious text into German without invoking the language
of Luther.
This debate had deeper ramifications. In The Star of Re-

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demption, which Scholem read around the time of this first ex-
change of letters, Rosenzweig linked Judaism and Christianity:
each had a different path to redemption, the first outside his-
tory and the second within it. The two religions were, in a sense,
fraternal twins. Although Scholem regarded this book as the most
significant product of German Jewish thought in the twentieth
century, he rejected Rosenzweig’s basic premise. For Scholem,
the history of the Jews was radically independent of the history
of the Christians. And far from celebrating the fact that Jews in
the Diaspora were outside history, as a Zionist he believed that
the renewal of Judaism could come about only when they reen-
tered history in the Land of Israel. Whereas Rosenzweig, a non-
Zionist, believed in the potential for a “German Judaism” (that
is, a place for a renewed Judaism in Germany), Scholem rejected
the very possibility of a German–Jewish symbiosis. Yet, per-
haps paradoxically, to study the Kabbalah, most of which was
written outside the Land of Israel, required recognizing that
much Jewish creativity took place in the Diaspora.
Two months after this first exchange, in May 1921, Scholem
came to the Frankfurt area to meet with Agnon and Buber (he
still kept Buber abreast of his scholarly adventures). He used
the opportunity to meet with Rosenzweig, a meeting that lasted
a day and a half. Rosenzweig was deeply impressed by his guest,
but his description of the meeting in a letter to a friend was
highly ambiguous:

It was a great day and a half, but not as you think. You fight
with him [but] I immediately laid down my weapons and
learned from and with him. . . . For him, his Judaism is only
a monastery. There he holds his spiritual exercises and, de-
spite all his side remarks, he fundamentally doesn’t care about
[other] human beings. As a result, he has become speechless.
He has only gestures of admiration or opposition. . . . He
is  really “without any dogmas.” One cannot define him by

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principles of faith. I have not yet found such a thing among

West European Jews. He is perhaps the only one who has
really already come home. But he has come home alone.7

This was a remarkably perceptive analysis of the young Scho-

lem: his extreme statements, his pugnaciousness, and his in-
tense inner drive to master Judaism. Rosenzweig’s observation
that Scholem held to no dogmas captures Scholem’s willing-
ness to consider even heresy as part of Judaism. In fact, Rosen-
zweig in another letter labeled him a nihilist who reveled in
nothingness. But Rosenzweig was only partially correct in his
assessment: even if Scholem’s ideas at that age were often con-
fused, he believed in his own version of Zionism and in a return
to Jewish sources, hardly the views of a nihilist. And he was not
a solitary monk of Judaism but, as we have seen, a highly social
animal who believed in utopian Zionism as a collective project.
In March 1922, Scholem was back in Frankfurt for an even
longer meeting with Rosenzweig. He had not been not aware
that the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease)
that would eventually kill Rosenzweig in 1929 had begun to
manifest itself in December 1921. This time, the debate turned
bitter as Scholem violently took issue with the older man’s rejec-
tion of Zionism. Scholem disagreed with Rosenzweig’s spiritual-
ized approach to Judaism: Rosenzweig had embraced Ortho-
doxy. Just as he had been unable to stomach Buber’s spirituality,
so Rosenzweig’s religiosity now left him cold. Scholem came
away from the meeting with the feeling that Rosenzweig was
dictatorial and unable to tolerate differences of opinion; con-
sidering Scholem’s own personality, this suggests that the two
shared too many personality traits to ever achieve a modus vi-
vendi. It was only after this stormy meeting that Scholem learned
of Rosenzweig’s illness, a discovery that left him uncharacteris-
tically feeling guilty. This guilt would affect his later feelings
about Rosenzweig and his philosophy.

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 gershom scholem

Scholem also harbored doubts about Rosenzweig’s Lehr­

haus, an adult education school in Frankfurt that played a major
role in the Jewish renaissance in Weimar Germany. It was vir-
tually impossible to study Jewish subjects in German universi-
ties at that time; Scholem was offered a lectureship in Munich
after completing his Ph.D., which would have made him one of
the only academics in the field in Germany. The Lehrhaus pro-
vided an inspiring alternative to the nonexistent academic Jew-
ish Studies, attracting intellectuals such as Erich Fromm and
Leo Löwenthal, who would go on to have distinguished schol-
arly careers in the United States. But it also attracted a wider
public of young German Jews thirsty for the kind of Jewish
knowledge whose sources had been cut off when the older gen-
eration assimilated. Whatever Scholem’s hesitations might have
been about this enterprise, and regardless of his break with Rosen-
zweig in the spring of 1922, he nevertheless taught twice at the
Lehrhaus, offering a wide range of courses (Kabbalah, the works
of Agnon, the book of Daniel). In the summer of 1923, just be-
fore his emigration for Palestine, he was once again in Frank-
furt, leading Rosenzweig to comment: “Scholem is here for the
summer and he is, as always, unspeakably ill-behaved, but like-
wise, as always, brilliant.”8
Franz Rosenzweig was probably the most intellectually
impressive of all the people Scholem met during his Munich
studies. In From Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem describes other,
more dubious characters with whom he came into contact at
the time, many of them charlatans and imposters who claimed
fraudulently to have knowledge of Kabbalah or other forms of
esotericism. They were drawn to Scholem as his reputation
spread, but he seems to have been equally drawn to them. Of
course, he was only too pleased to demonstrate his monopoly
on Kabbalistic knowledge, but he also seems to have found
genuine amusement in the absurdity of such frauds. Here is an-
other side of Scholem that is perhaps too easily forgotten: his

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ironic sense of humor, which more and more came to replace

the fanaticism of his youth.
One group of such charlatans he did not find amusing was
the circle around Oskar Goldberg. Goldberg, who came from
an Orthodox background, developed a bizarre theology fo-
cused on the five books of Moses interpreted in terms of nu-
merological magic. Following the Kabbalah, Goldberg held
that the Pentateuch was based on the letters of the Tetragram-
maton. Since all the laws and rituals of the Torah are, in effect,
the name of God, the Hebrews had activated the “metaphysical
reality” at their “center” by means of these rituals. By virtue of
this magical procedure, the Hebrews became the most meta-
physical of all peoples. All subsequent biblical and Jewish his-
tory represented a fall from this “reality of the Hebrews” (the
title of Goldberg’s 1925 book). Goldberg’s goal was to recapture
this magical essence in the modern world, which, in his view,
had become mired in polytheistic materialism. Surprisingly,
Thomas Mann based the metaphysical ideas in the first part of
his Joseph and His Brothers on Goldberg’s, but he later satirized
Goldberg as “Dr. Chaim Breisacher,” the purveyor of a Nazi-
like magical racial theory, in his Doktor Faustus.
In the 1920s, the members of the Goldberg circle tried to
entice Scholem to join their ranks since the Kabbalah fasci-
nated them but they had little access to its texts. Scholem re-
buffed their advances, in part in reaction to Goldberg’s hostility
to Zionism but also because he rejected Goldberg’s ahistorical
metaphysics, which sought to re-create the primordial “reality”
of the Hebrews. Goldberg’s odd synthesis of magical meta-
physics with a biological (even racial) definition of the Jews was
utterly repugnant to him. When Goldberg’s Reality of the He-
brews appeared, Scholem attacked it as “the classical work of Jewish
Satanism.”9 Although the Goldberg circle was never large, ref-
erences to Goldberg and his book occur repeatedly in Scholem’s
essays and letters, to the extent that Goldberg almost appears

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to have become an obsession, which continued for decades:

Scholem even wrote the entry on Goldberg for the 1971 Encyclo-
pedia Judaica. It was as if Goldberg’s magical and mystical ideas
required a thoroughgoing debunking, rather than being allowed
to vanish into obscurity. For Scholem, such ideas had no place
in the modern world. Despite his fascination with magic and
mysticism, Scholem was neither a magician nor a mystic.
A figure whom Scholem regarded far more positively, al-
though he also considered him a bit of a charlatan, was Robert
Eisler. Martin Buber first suggested to Scholem that he contact
Eisler, who had founded the Johann Albert Widmanstetter So-
ciety for Kabbalah Research. Eisler was an academically gifted
Viennese Jew who came from a wealthy family and had con-
verted to Christianity for the love of a woman (he nevertheless
still considered himself fully Jewish). He had received two Ph.D.s
from the University of Vienna, in philosophy and art history,
a feat that was theoretically impossible, but he pulled it off be-
cause no one believed the same person could be doing both.
Eisler had published a book on comparative religion titled Cosmic
Cloak and Heavenly Canopy, which Scholem dubbed “hypothesis-
happy.” Scholem found it so hilarious that he wrote to Walter
Benjamin to propose a course by Robert Eisler in their ficti-
tious University of Muri to be called “Ladies Coats and Beach
Cabanas in the Light of the History of Religion.”
Eisler received Scholem as “the heaven-sent angel who
would breathe Kabbalistic life into his paper society.” Scholem
was both charmed and amused by Eisler’s ideas: “The substance
of [his] research was so frivolous that it only drew a skeptical
shudder from me, since I was now subjecting myself to serious
philological discipline. Eisler’s eloquence was as fantastic as his
education. . . . I, at any rate, had never before seen such a bril-
liant, captivating yet suspiciously glittering scholarly phenom-
enon.”10 Scholem was astounded by Eisler’s flood of ideas, which
were usually ungrounded in factual reality. But Eisler took no

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offense when Scholem challenged his premises and his knowl-

edge of Hebrew.
The upshot of their encounter was not the fierce polemical
rejection one might have expected from Scholem but rather
surprising indulgence. And when Scholem came to publish
his first two books (his dissertation and his 1927 bibliography
of Kabbalistic books), they appeared as the first—and only—­
publications in Eisler’s series “Sources of Kabbalah,” under the
aegis of Eisler’s phony society. After the Second World War,
Eisler sent Scholem a bizarre plan for solving the Palestine ques-
tion by shipping all nonreligious Jews back to their countries of
origin or, if they still wanted to live in a Jewish state, by creat-
ing autonomous Jewish enclaves in Vienna and Frankfurt. Scho-
lem finally lost patience with Eisler and returned the manu-
script to him with a one-word comment: “Genug!” (Enough!).11
At the end of December 1921, Scholem completed his dis-
sertation. Given the ambitious questions he had been asking
before he took up his studies over two years earlier, the result
might appear to be quite modest. He had produced a German
translation of the Sefer ha-Bahir with copious notes. But the
initial appearance is deceptive. The Bahir was the earliest work
of medieval Kabbalah, stemming from the twelfth century,
probably in Provence. It introduced the symbolism of the se-
firot, the emanations of God, which would be central to all sub-
sequent Kabbalah. One of Scholem’s lifelong preoccupations
was to be the question of how and why the Kabbalah arose in
southern France and Spain when it did. The Bahir held the key
to this question, although the answer would emerge only in his
later studies.
When we examine Scholem’s dissertation notes, his achieve-
ment becomes even more remarkable. Immediately after each
passage in the text, he appends citations for where later writers
quoted the Bahir. The notes, which are much longer than the
text itself, explore the Bahir’s own Talmudic and midrash sources,

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as well as discuss the interpretations of earlier scholars. The im-

plication of these notes was that the Bahir served as the bridge
between ancient Jewish mysticism and the Middle Ages: the
book thus confirmed the meaning of Kabbalah as “tradition”—
namely, something passed down from antiquity. In order to
provide his scholarly apparatus, Scholem had to work through
seventy-one Kabbalistic texts and manuscripts, as well as vari-
ous manuscripts of the Bahir in Hebrew and Latin. This was in
addition to three German-language compilations of Kabbalis-
tic sources. (The existence of these earlier German books dem-
onstrates that contrary to the impression he sometimes tried to
give, Scholem was not the first to plow this field.) As a result of
his herculean efforts, he now had a sufficient library of sources
under his belt to launch a scholarly career.
Just as he was finishing his dissertation, Gerhard received a
birthday greeting from his father, which is in many ways so as-
tonishing that it is worth quoting at length:

I have not heard much from you, and I would like very much
to know if your doctoral dissertation is in process. I hope
that it will be more readable than the critique of Kabbalistic
lyric [Scholem’s review of Wiener’s Lyrik der Kabbala], whose
virtue seems to lie in the long period it dealt with. In any
case, the mass of knowledge contained in this critique stands
in inverse relationship to the clarity of its expression—and,
I’m sorry to say, that it cost me a mighty intellectual effort
and many tries in order to overcome those lengthy periods
of time. In fact, it pains me to confess that I was unable to
grasp what was described to me as the beauty of the matter.
But maybe that’s only me. And, in my view, it would be inap-
propriate to claim that the many recipients of the first num-
ber of Der Jude, who got your essay as an inducement to
subscribe, were won over by it.
So, when I ask myself how I would write this critique
from the standpoint of the, unfortunately not yet defined,

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“man on the street,” I would say: a pity for all this empty
scholarship and a double pity for all these productive powers
and intellectual labors to have been expended so uselessly. . . .
And so I come again to your birthday with this quiet wish
and strong hope: that you may grasp in this year of your life
that it is necessary in this difficult period to stand with both
feet on the ground, in order not to be blown away by every
wind in the air [Luft] of ideas. Three cheers for Hebraica and
Judaica, but not as a career! You will suffer a bad shipwreck
and who knows if it will prove too difficult for you to reach
safe shores, since you are all-too lacking in strong arms.
So, my son, these are my good and right wishes for you!12

This was not the first time that Arthur had expressed strong res-
ervations about his youngest son’s vocation or about his physical
condition. (Arthur’s one involvement with a Jewish organization
was as a board member of the Jewish gymnastics club, whose cult
of physical fitness positioned him closer to the Zionists than to
his Zionist son.) For many of the hardheaded businessmen of
Arthur’s generation, the intellectual pursuits of their sons made
the sons look like the luftmenschen (literally, “men who live
from the air”) of the eastern European shtetl. This anxiety over
Gerhard’s livelihood was surely sharpened by the inflation of
the early 1920s, which was just beginning to accelerate.
Yet we should not be too hasty in assuming an irreparable
rift between father and son. Arthur’s letter was unquestionably
harsh, but it was also funny. Its tongue-in-cheek humor re-
minds us of nothing as much as Gerhard’s own epistolary style:
hilarious, biting, ironic—even, at times, self-mocking. The apple,
it seems, had not fallen far from the tree. How much Gerhard
was aware of his similarity to his father, both in temperament
and in style, is unknown. And since Arthur succumbed to his
heart condition in 1925 (he had a serious attack in March 1922,
the day after Scholem defended his dissertation), he did not live
to see his prophecy of his son’s “shipwreck” disproven. Indeed,

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of the four Scholem brothers, it was Gerhard who was to have

the greatest success. But it may be that Arthur’s view of his son
was not as negative as the letter implies. In 1920, when Walter
Benjamin met Arthur, he reported to Gerhard: “Your father
succinctly pronounced you a genius—he should know. But may
God preserve every father from having such a genius.”13 If we
turn over the title page of Gerhard’s published dissertation, we
find in small letters a statement of paternal pride: “Printed in
the shop of A. Scholem.” And in October 1925, after Arthur
had died, Betty wrote to Gerhard of how proud he would have
been at his son’s faculty appointment at the Hebrew University.
True, he valued success in business, but like most German
Jews, including those lacking even a gymnasium degree, Ar-
thur also placed high value on intellectual achievement.
Scholem defended his dissertation in March 1922 and since
none of the members of his committee knew anything about
Kabbalah, he was examined on completely unrelated subjects.
He not only passed with flying colors, he was told that if he
wrote a Habilitation (the second dissertation required in Ger-
man universities for an academic position), he would be offered
a teaching post. Already committed to emigrating, he declined
the honor but made sure that his father knew of his teachers’
assessment.
In the next year and a half, he returned to Berlin, took the
State Examination in mathematics to prepare for teaching the
subject in Palestine, and also prepared his dissertation for pub-
lication. He and Escha Burchhardt were now in different cities,
but saw each other a number of times. They resolved to marry
once they had arrived in Palestine (she left before him in the
spring of 1923). But as busy as he was with his scholarship and
teaching at a number of venues, he still had time for Zionist
politics. He wrote several manifestos and took part in a fiery
meeting at which the Blau-Weiss debated whether to merge
with the Association of Jewish University Students, at whose

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meeting, as we saw, the philosopher Hans Jonas witnessed him

disrupting the speakers.
Possibly in response to this meeting, he organized a final
open letter to the Jüdische Rundschau in December 1922. The
letter was a reaction to a development in the Blau-Weiss that
Scholem viewed with great alarm. The movement, which Scho-
lem had earlier attacked for insufficient Zionism, now turned
toward a commitment to immigrate to Palestine. But it had or-
ganized itself along military lines and elevated its leader Walter
Moses to a position of total authority, a disturbing change in
light of the rise of fascist movements in Italy and Germany.
Scholem saw the reliance on the leader’s decrees as a product of
the movement’s earlier lack of ideology. He labeled the new
ideology “unscrupulous mysticism.” Echoing his earlier po-
lemics, he claimed that the Blau-Weiss’s lack of commitment to
Hebrew and to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people was
responsible for its political bankruptcy. A great abyss therefore
separated the sterile Blau-Weiss from the figure of the halutz,
or pioneer, in Palestine.
The letter, Scholem’s final volley against the German Zi-
onist youth movement, laid out some themes that we shall en-
counter again. Mysticism was a dangerous doctrine that in the
wrong hands could fuel the militaristic and authoritarian na-
tionalism that had so infuriated him during the Great War.
The antidote to such an ideology was the Hebrew language
and the renaissance of Jewish tradition. The letter was signed by
fourteen others, some of them the dramatis personae we have
encountered from Scholem’s early years: Erich Brauer, Grete
Brauer, Aharon Heller, Meta Jahr, and Elsa Burchhardt. All
these would fulfill their Zionist commitment in Palestine.
In the summer months of 1923, Scholem prepared his own
journey to the land of his utopian dreams. He packed up his
library of 1,709 books for shipment. The customs required him
to provide a list of the books, a copy of which he kept and

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which gives us today an excellent window into the range of his

reading. In Frankfurt, he met and befriended Fritz (Shelomo
Dov) Goitein, a young Jewish scholar who was also on his way
to Palestine, and they resolved to travel together. Goitein was
to become the greatest historian of the Jews in the Muslim
world and especially of the famed Cairo Geniza.
In order to enter Palestine, then under the British Mandate,
it was necessary to have a “certificate,” or visa. These were lim-
ited, and the Zionist Executive reserved them for pioneers. If
an immigrant had no capital, which could also be used for ad-
mission, he or she had to show either marriage or engagement
to someone in Palestine or the promise of employment with
the necessary skills. Escha Burchhardt had proclaimed a ficti-
tious engagement to a resident, Abu Hushi, who would later
become the longtime mayor of Haifa. When she arrived, she
was invited to live at the home of Hugo Bergman, whom she
and Scholem had met in Bern. Bergman, a classmate of Franz
Kafka and a member of the Prague Zionist Bar Kokhba circle,
had immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and was the director of the
new Jewish National Library. In order to get a visa for Scho-
lem, Escha arranged to have Bergman offer him a fictitious po-
sition as head of the Hebrew section of the National Library.
This fiction would open the door to his entire future.
Scholem left Berlin on September 9, 1923, and traveled to
Munich, where he celebrated Rosh Hashanah. From there, he
proceeded to Trieste, where he met Goitein, and on September
14 they took a steamer to Alexandria. At Alexandria, they boarded
a small coastal ship that brought them to Jaffa on September
20. Burchhardt was waiting for him, and they traveled to Jeru-
salem, where they were domiciled in the Bergman household.
And so began the almost sixty-year saga of Gershom Scholem
in the Land of Israel.

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 5

A University in Jerusalem

Jerusalem, 1923. A very different place from the booming

city of Berlin that Scholem had left. Although it was the largest
city in Palestine at the time, Jerusalem remained a dusty back-
water. When Scholem arrived, it was still not electrified, and sew-
age flowed through the streets. But the British authorities, who
had recently received a mandate over Palestine from the League
of Nations, had begun the process of modernizing the city, pav-
ing roads and establishing a modern postal system (the latter
of great importance to Scholem as an inveterate correspon-
dent). Jerusalem had grown slowly over the preceding quarter-
century. In 1896, it had forty-five thousand residents, but the
number had risen to sixty-two thousand the year before Scho-
lem’s arrival. Of these, thirty-four thousand were Jews, thirteen
thousand Muslims, and nearly fifteen thousand Christians (the
latter a mixture of Arabs and foreigners). The increasing num-
ber of Jews owed much to the wave of immigration—referred

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to in Zionist history as the Third Aliya—that resulted from the

Balfour Declaration in 1917, the British conquest of Palestine
in early 1918, and the civil war in Russia from 1918 to 1921. Most
of the forty thousand immigrants who arrived between 1919
and 1923 were from eastern Europe, and only small numbers,
like Gerhard Scholem and Escha Burchhardt, who came at the tail
end of the Third Aliya, hailed from German-speaking lands.
Within a few weeks of his arrival, Gerhard announced his
engagement to Escha and married her on a Jerusalem rooftop
on his birthday, December 5, 1923. Even Arthur was delighted
with the news of the engagement, responding on November 1
in his customary ironic fashion:

I have read your letter with its somewhat timid announce-

ment of your engagement to Fräulein Burchhardt. I am not
nearly as surprised as you, in your naiveté, seemed to think I
would be. . . . So I wish you every happiness in your marriage.
You seem to think I have something against Fräulein Burch-
hardt. This isn’t true. She comes from a good home, which I
consider so important that I can’t raise the least objection to
your marriage. . . . How you’ll run a household on such a
small salary is your business. You cannot count on financial
help from either set of parents—at least, not from me.1

Arthur’s warning that he was not about to support his youngest

son’s Zionist adventure was, for once, not merely the result of
his reflexive stinginess. The inflation in Germany had reached
record heights. Betty reported to Gerhard two weeks earlier that
her letter to him would cost 15 million marks in postage and
probably 30 million two days hence. Bread cost 900 million,
then 2.5 billion, then 5.5 billion. Although Arthur, with his two
eldest sons, kept the business afloat by printing money for the
government, the one thing for which there was an insatiable
demand, he had good reason to fear for his financial future. But
around the time of Gerhard’s marriage, the mark was stabilized

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with the issuance of a new currency, and Germany entered into

a period of relative stability.
The financial travails of his family seemed to have had little
effect on Gerhard, who made it a practice to order both neces-
sities and luxuries—chocolates, marzipan, sausages—from his
mother. Some four years later, when he had a secure academic
appointment, Betty wrote to him in annoyance, probably both
real and feigned:

It’s really dreadful to get a list of everything we should send

you, followed by a hue and cry because we sent the wrong
thing. . . . You can buy your own filing cabinet, instead of
constantly nagging me for one. I bought two sausages for you
today with my last penny. They’ll be off to you tomorrow.
Leave me in peace for a while! . . . There’s no cure for an
irritable temperament.
Two ties, two books, a towel, and new sausages are on
their way. I haven’t even managed to say a thing about the
family or myself; I’ve done nothing but respond to your
screams, to the point that it brings tears to my eyes. Oh, son!2

Scholem had expected to make a living in Palestine by teach-

ing mathematics, and he quickly received an offer of a position
in a teachers college in Jerusalem. But unexpectedly his host,
Hugo Bergman, turned the fictitious job offer created for his
visa into a real position at the National Library. The library
had its origins in the Midrash Abravanel Public Library, estab-
lished in 1892. In 1905, a group of cultural Zionists laid the plans
for the National Library, and in 1920 the World Zionist Orga-
nization took over the Abravanel Library and renamed it, plac-
ing Bergman at its head. The position that Bergman created for
his houseguest was as head of the Hebrew Division. Although
the salary was lower than the one offered by the teachers col-
lege, Scholem eagerly accepted it, since nothing could have
been closer to his heart than Hebrew books.

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For the better part of the next two years he spent his days
working in the library and devoted his nights to his scholar-
ship. But then, in another stroke of luck, the long-planned He-
brew University was inaugurated, on April 1, 1925, and, with
his Ph.D. from the University of Munich, he was ideally posi-
tioned for an appointment. The idea of a Jewish university, like
that for the National Library, predated Zionism and was moti-
vated in part by anti-Semitic quotas on Jewish university stu-
dents and professors in Europe. But Zionist intellectuals like
Ahad Ha’am and Hayim Nahman Bialik saw a university in Je-
rusalem not just as an answer to anti-Semitism but as the em-
bodiment of the new Hebrew culture that would emanate from
Zion. The enterprise was not without contention since the dom-
inant Zionist labor movement in Palestine regarded intellec-
tual projects as less pressing than agricultural settlement, and
some even thought a university belonged better in the Galut.
Nevertheless, with the energetic efforts of an unusual American
rabbi, Judah L. Magnes, who would become the university’s
first chancellor, sufficient resources were mobilized from do-
nors to permit three initial institutes to be opened: Microbi­
ology, Chemistry, and Jewish Studies. The Institute for Jewish
Studies was initially tiny, and the department of philosophy
consisted of one faculty member: Gershom Scholem (whose
field of studies was, of course, not exactly philosophical).
On November 1, 1925, a half-year after the university’s
opening ceremony on Mount Scopus, several of the newly ap-
pointed faculty gave inaugural lectures. Scholem was preceded
by Joseph Klausner, who had been appointed to the chair in
modern Hebrew literature. Klausner was a passionate national-
ist who supported Vladimir Jabotinsky’s militant, antisocialist
Revisionist Party. Although he saw himself primarily as a histo-
rian of the Second Temple Period (his book on Jesus of Naza-
reth was a widely hailed, if controversial, effort to reclaim the
founder of Christianity for Jewish history), a sharp conflict

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among the founders of the university blocked his appointment

in that field.
Scholem had heard a speech by Klausner in Petah Tikva
shortly after his arrival in Palestine. He found Klausner’s na-
tionalist views repellant and his scholarship superficial. To his
friend Ernst Simon, he wrote of Klausner’s inaugural lecture in
1925: “I consider the appointment of Klausner in an ostensibly
‘non-dangerous’ post like the history of literature as a highly
questionable mistake of pure cowardice (or, in the long run,
fear). . . . You can believe me, it’s obscene to let [someone bet-
ter suited to teach] in a girls’ school hold a position in the Jeru-
salem University. . . . I had the terribly painful task of speaking
after Klausner’s unbelievably stupid and self-important lecture.
In short, God makes his sun shine on all sorts of beasts.”3 Klaus-
ner would continue to be Scholem’s bête noire, representing
both a politics and a kind of popularized scholarship he ab-
horred; in 1927, Scholem would clash with Klausner over the
appointment of a lecturer in Yiddish, which Klausner opposed
on the grounds of extremist Hebraism.
Scholem’s lecture took up a subject that had a long history:
whether Moses de León, a thirteenth-century Kabbalist, had
written the Zohar, the greatest work of Jewish mysticism. The
Zohar purports to have been written by its main protagonist,
the second-century rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, but persistent ru-
mors held that the real author was León, who had promoted the
book in writings under his own name. Several modern Jewish
historians, notably Heinrich Graetz, elevated these rumors to
historical fact. Scholem’s lecture was a refutation of Graetz,
claiming that important sections of the Zohar dated back to an-
tiquity, if not to Shimon bar Yohai. He was no doubt motivated
by Graetz’s contemptuous dismissal of the Zohar as a forgery,
and he had an interest in showing that the Kabbalah, of which
the Zohar was the most important book, had ancient roots. But
the lecture, later published, was based on a strong philological

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foundation, arguing that León’s early writings quote from the

Zohar, which must have come earlier. I shall return to this ques-
tion in a later chapter, because it was one of the few subjects
about which Scholem—so definite in his opinions—changed
his mind.
The next few years witnessed a veritable explosion of pub-
lications. Many of these were reviews in the new bibliographi-
cal journal of the National Library, Kiryat Sefer. But Scholem
also published substantive articles on alchemy and Kabbalah, a
translation of a Hebrew version of a work of Arabic esoteri-
cism, an article on the Sabbatian theologian Abraham Cardozo,
essays on eighteenth-century Hasidism, and a series of articles
on unknown texts of Kabbalistic literature. Some of these were
written in German and some, particularly those in Kiryat Sefer,
in Hebrew. (For much of the period before World War II,
Scholem signed his German writings “Gerhard Scholem”; in
Hebrew, he went under “Gershom Scholem,” the Hebrew name
he began to use with his Zionist comrades during World War I.
However, most of his close German-speaking friends as well
as family continued to call him Gerhard, the name I shall use
when treating his most personal relations.)
Perhaps the most important of his publications during the
1920s were an annotated bibliography of books and articles
dealing with Kabbalah (Bibliographia Kabbalistica, 1927, published,
like his dissertation, in Robert Eisler’s bogus series) and a long
essay titled “On the Question of the Emergence of the Kabbalah”
(1928). The first, 230 pages long, represents a synthesis of all
prior scholarship and lays the groundwork for Scholem’s own
enterprise. It is divided into sections: “Gnosis,” “Kabbalah,”
“Sabbatianism,” “Frankism,” and “Hasidism.” This organiza-
tion of the history of Jewish mysticism shows that Scholem al-
ready had a clear sense of the range of his field—from late an-
tiquity to the Middle Ages and culminating in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. This periodization would dictate the

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table of contents of his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism a de-

cade later, as well as for the subsequent field as a whole.
“The Emergence of the Kabbalah” was a companion piece
to Scholem’s dissertation of six years earlier. Whereas there the
argument was buried in the footnotes, here Scholem undertook
more directly to analyze how and why medieval Kabbalah emerged
when it did. (He would return to this subject in full-length books
in Hebrew in 1947 and, more extensively, in German in 1962.)
He clearly distinguished Kabbalah from Jewish philosophy and
insisted that it be understood as part of the history of religion.
Naturally, Sefer ha-Bahir appears as a bridge between the mys-
ticism of the late rabbinic and Geonic periods of the sixth to
the eleventh century and the Kabbalah of the thirteenth cen-
tury. The Bahir, he says, is not a systematic treatise; rather it is
a collection of myths and symbols from different sources whose
author (or authors) are unknown to us. From what the Bahir
took the symbolism of the sefirot (divine emanations) also re-
mained unclear. Thus, the emergence of the Kabbalah, in terms
of how it arose from earlier mysticism, remained a mystery, al-
though a mystery that Scholem believed had its origins in the
Orient and in the Judaization of ancient Gnostic myths.
In addition to scholarship, Lecturer Scholem was expected
to devote 50 percent of his time to teaching. The Institute for
Jewish Studies was originally intended to be a pure research in-
stitute, but the public’s demand for courses proved too great.
Scholem was not an immediate success as a teacher, at least by
his own account: “[My] attempt to create a philosophical discus-
sion about the fundamentals of Kabbalah among my students
failed as a result of their absolute lack of talent for thinking.”4
His legacy as a teacher would rest more on his doctoral students.
In later years, Scholem would become perhaps the most
powerful faculty member at the Hebrew University, often pass-
ing judgments on appointments in fields far removed from his
own. In these early years, his influence was considerably more

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modest, but he did try to exercise it on a matter of deep per-

sonal concern: bringing Walter Benjamin to Jerusalem as a pro-
fessor of literature. In 1927, while on a six-month sabbatical
devoted to examining manuscripts in France and England, he
spent time with Benjamin twice in Paris, first in April and then
again in August and September (on August 23, the two took part
in a massive demonstration against the execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti and barely escaped a beating by the police). During
their second meeting, Scholem introduced Benjamin to Judah L.
Magnes. Although Magnes was American-born, he had been
educated in Germany and was able to converse with Benjamin
in German. He was much impressed by Benjamin’s desire to
learn Hebrew and undertake studies of Jewish literature from a
metaphysical point of view. Magnes arranged a stipend for Ben-
jamin’s Hebrew instruction, for which Scholem’s wife, Escha,
agreed to serve as instructor. But Benjamin had by then met the
Latvian Communist Asja Lacis, with whom he had fallen love,
and although he repeatedly promised to come to Jerusalem, he
also repeatedly put it off. In October 1928, Magnes sent the sti-
pend in one lump sum for Benjamin to study Hebrew in Berlin,
and he finally spent a couple of months doing so in the spring
of 1929. Scholem was opposed to this method of paying Benja-
min, and he turned out to be prescient. The whole project of
Benjamin’s learning Hebrew came to naught, the result of his
entangled personal life, his indecisiveness, and his duplicity. Al-
though Scholem’s deep connection to his friend continued, this
episode left a permanent scar.
Scholem’s unexpected academic appointment as well as his
marriage to Escha Burchhardt would suggest that his integra-
tion into his new home was as successful as it was quick. But
these personal and professional achievements do not tell the
whole story. On the contrary, he experienced profound disillu-
sionment with both the political and cultural climate of the Zi-
onist Yishuv (settlement) in Palestine. At the end of December

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1924, after he had been in the country only a little over a year,
he described to his friend Werner Kraft the absurd mix of peo-
ple one might encounter there: would-be messiahs and other
strange characters. Of his own attitude toward this menagerie,
he wrote: “I belong in the most decisive sense to the sect of
those who attach apocalyptic views to what will be the fate of
the Zionist movement here.” This enigmatic statement did not
mean that Scholem thought that Zionism should be apocalyp-
tic, but, on the contrary that the movement was threatened by
those who held such views. And he added: “I personally suffer
in the most catastrophic way from linguistic conditions which
one cannot write about rationally. If I should write a treatise
about this one day, I won’t keep it hidden from you.” Here, too,
Scholem was hinting at some ideas that recurred in a number
of his writings from those first years in the land.5
Around the end of 1924, he wrote in an unpublished text
that “the dessication of the language has dried out our hearts. . . .
Metaphysically, the battle that Zionism has won in the world,
we have lost in the land.” Exactly what he meant by dessication
is unclear. Perhaps, to judge from a later writing, he meant that
spoken Hebrew had lost its connection to the literary language
with its deep historical resonance. Nevertheless, he held that
Zionism would “survive its catastrophe.”6
A year later, he wrote to Ernst Simon: “You know that I
came to Palestine without many illusions. After two years, I can
assure you that unfortunately I have no more. We are in God’s
hands on this boat—and we surely have no other—since we can
no longer place our hopes in history. No one should foster the
illusion that what happens here and will occur in the future
(after the open retreat from everything to do with human tik-
kun) has the slightest thing of substance in common with Zion-
ism, in whose name your faithful servant is here.” The problem
was “the conniving sharks and the seven floods out of hell which
have washed over us . . . out of Lodz.”7 This was a frankly prej-

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udiced response to the so-called Fourth Aliya from Poland that

began in 1924. These urbanized and middle-class Polish immi-
grants had no interest in becoming halutzim (agricultural pio-
neers), and even though Scholem himself never got his hands
dirty in the fields, he evidently thought that they were corrupt-
ing the Zionist ethos by engaging in petty commerce. In the
same letter, he also distanced himself from socialism, although
not the socialism he associated with Hasidism, a distinction that
made his critique largely incoherent. The utopian tikkun that
had motivated his Zionism could not be found in the fields of
the kibbutzim or in the shops of Tel Aviv. And it was certainly
too soon to say that it could be found on the streets of Jerusalem.
Scholem’s expressions of disillusionment reached a cre-
scendo in 1926, in a letter in honor of Franz Rosenzweig’s for-
tieth birthday (Rosenzweig’s friends had organized a collection
of such contributions since he was now quite ill). The letter,
which was published only after Scholem’s death, has been widely
referenced, but in order to understand it properly, we need to
look at a number of Scholem’s other unpublished manuscripts
from the same time.
On April 12, 1926, he titled a two-page rumination “The
Despair of Victory.” Zionism had achieved its victory “too early,”
he thought. Zionism and the building of Palestine were not the
same and, indeed, an “abyss” had opened up between “victory
and reality, Zionism and existence. . . . But we have no lan-
guage and therefore our sacrifice is in vain.”8 “Zionism” here
seems to signify not Scholem’s own Zionism but rather the of-
ficial movement from which he continued to feel alienated, as
he had in Germany. On Yom Kippur, 1926, he noted that he
had arrived in Palestine exactly three years earlier. The Zion-
ism that had lured him there was not what he found. Instead, it
had become a farce, and he could find no bridge between his
“secret hopes” and the “hypocritical petty bourgeois national-
ist phrases” of the Yishuv. At least, though, he had succeeded in

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finding one thing: silence, that is, a personal realm of quiet in

which he could work.9
In an undated text, also evidently from 1926, he raised the
question for his generation of German Zionists: “Can we learn
Hebrew?” The problem that had aroused his polemics in Ger-
many had not found a solution in the Land of Israel. In the Yi-
shuv, one confronted the clash between Hebrew as a literary
language and Hebrew as a vernacular, a spoken language. Mod-
ern literary Hebrew was the product and culmination of a long
tradition, and it preserved the echoes of revelation. This lan-
guage is the “fullness and silence of true life . . . [and] is the
only genuine sign of the certainty of rebirth.” Not so spoken
Hebrew, which still lacked any real connection to the literary
language and served as a kind of “perfected Volapük” for the
Jews who didn’t embrace Esperanto (Volapük was an invented
nineteenth-century universal language; it preceded Esperanto).
But it was not a language that could “live in the world.” He
concluded: “The possibility of a language like [the one] in Bi-
alik’s novella ‘Arye Ba’al Guf’ would be a [kind of] redemption
for us.”10 The Hebrew that had so captivated Scholem in Berlin
was the literary language, and it was wrapped up in his utopian
hopes for Zionism. Instead, he found himself alienated from
the day-to-day spoken Hebrew of the Jerusalem streets.
It was in this frame of mind that he wrote his “confession
about our language” for Rosenzweig on December 12, 1926.11
The Land of Israel was like a volcano, but the eruption that
everyone feared—the conflict with the Arabs—masked a more
sinister threat: the “actualization of Hebrew.” People thought
that secularizing Hebrew would “remove the apocalyptic sting”
from the language. But that was an illusion. The “ghostly Volapük”
that people spoke on the streets still possessed the religious
power of the words that might, any day, break through and cause
us to fall into the abyss. Now, as opposed to his argument in the
earlier essay on Hebrew, the problem was not that written and

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spoken Hebrew were two divorced languages, but that the de-
graded spoken language was dangerous because it concealed old
religious meaning.
Referring to the Kabbalistic doctrine that the hidden Torah
consists only of divine names, he wrote: “In the names the
power of the language is decided, its abyss is sealed. . . . God
will not remain silent in the language in which he affirmed our
lives a thousand times and more. This unavoidable revolution
in the language is the only subject that is not spoken about
today in this country. Those who have called the language back
to life do not believe in the trial that they have inflicted on us.
May this recklessness, which leads us on the way to apocalypse,
not bring us to ruin.”12 Scholem feared that even secular Zion-
ism might fall victim to religious radicalism—the “abyss” of
“apocalypse”—because it had revived the Hebrew language. Zi-
onists took a gigantic risk in creating a nationalist movement
based on Hebrew: they walked the fine line between a prag-
matic return to history and the apocalyptic drive to end history.
But since Scholem’s own Zionism was wrapped up in the revival
of Hebrew, it would seem that he himself could not escape the
danger he pointed out for Zionism generally.
It is fascinating that Scholem should send these pessimistic
reflections to Franz Rosenzweig, whose opposition to Zionism
had aroused such fervor in him when the two met in 1922. While
not a Zionist, Rosenzweig was deeply committed to the He-
brew language as the medium through which the literary tradi-
tion of Judaism was transmitted. Perhaps now that he had lived
in Palestine for three years, Scholem had come somewhat closer
to Rosenzweig’s position, even though he still rejected the idea
that the Jews were a people outside of history. Or perhaps he
felt twinges of guilt over having so fiercely attacked Rosenzweig
at a time when he was suffering the first phase of his fatal ill-
ness. Indeed, the following year, on a trip to Germany, he was
told that Rosenzweig, who was now almost totally paralyzed,

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wanted to see him, and he paid him a visit that evidently pro-
foundly affected him.
If Scholem thought that the main problem facing Zionism
was the apocalyptic potential of the Hebrew language, the prob-
lem of the Arabs nevertheless asserted itself as equally pressing
and ultimately linked to the dangers of apocalypticism. In 1925,
Arthur Ruppin, who headed the Zionist land settlement office
in Palestine, organized a study group called Brit Shalom (Peace
Covenant), dedicated to rapprochement between Jews and Arabs.
Although initially not intended to act independently of official
Zionist institutions, it soon took on a distinctly political color-
ation. The founding charter of Brit Shalom, published in 1927,
called for creating “a common life between Hebrews and Arabs
in the Land of Israel on the foundation of fully equal political
rights for the two nations with broad autonomy [for each].”13
At times Brit Shalom called for limiting Jewish immigration and
land purchases, as well as for founding a binational state of Jews
and Arabs with a united parliament. The group’s position chal-
lenged the Zionist consensus for a Jewish majority in Palestine.
Brit Shalom had members throughout Palestine and abroad.
Martin Buber joined from Germany, while Albert Einstein and
Judah Magnes voiced their support without formally joining.
In fact, the total membership of Brit Shalom never exceeded
one hundred (a membership list from 1930 that Scholem kept
listed only thirty-eight names); the extensive library of books
and articles about its history is thus in inverse proportion to its
size and influence. Nevertheless, the group offered a fascinat-
ing window into the thinking of its mainly central European
members, most of them intellectuals.
A number of the leading members of Brit Shalom, such as
Samuel Hugo Bergman, Hans Kohn, and Felix Weltsch were
products of the Bar Kokhba Zionist group in Prague. They
brought with them to Palestine an acute awareness of the prob-
lem of balancing competing ethnic claims, as was the case in

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the Bohemian province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They

were not liberals but rather cultural, even mystical, nationalists
who rejected “integral” nationalism—that is, nationalism based
solely on one ethnic group. The new Hebrew University was a
focal point for Brit Shalom, although many of its members were
not connected to the university and certainly not all the faculty
were members (Joseph Klausner was a particularly vociferous
opponent). Hugo Bergman was perhaps the most prominent
faculty member in Brit Shalom; he held an appointment to teach
philosophy.
One of the most junior members was Gershom Scholem,
but he quickly took a leadership role. Escha Burchhardt also
played an active, if unacknowledged, role, and the Scholem Ar-
chive contains extensive reflections that she wrote on the politi-
cal situation. An early proclamation by Brit Shalom members
that appeared in both Hebrew and German denounced the call
by Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists for a Jewish legion that
would liberate Palestine for the Jews. Arguing that social justice
rather than military force was the correct instrument for pro-
moting Arab-Jewish harmony, the letter lauded the Mandatory
government for withdrawing units of the British Army from
Palestine and for relying on its police force instead; both the
British and the Jews would come to regret this move three years
later. But the six signatories deplored the failure of the British
to enlist equal numbers of Jews and Arabs in the police auxil-
iary. Although his name appears last among the signers, Scho-
lem was the letter’s author.
A series of events at the end of the 1920s dashed Brit Sha-
lom’s hopes for rapprochement between Jews and Arabs. The
casus belli was a dispute over the Wailing (Western) Wall, a flash-
point not only then but since. In September 1928, the Jews set
up a partition between male and female worshippers, an act that
violated a 1925 ruling. When they failed to take the partition
down at the end of the prayers, the British, egged on by Arab

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protestors, sent in armed police, who removed it with a great

deal of force.
In response to the ensuing controversy, Scholem published
an article in the Jüdische Rundschau (“Has an Understanding
with the Arabs Failed?”), stating Brit Shalom’s position on the
Wailing Wall. He tried to strike a balanced tone, criticizing the
“ill will of the Arab side, which Brit Shalom has never denied,
but rather seeks to explain,” and the “tactlessness of the British
authorities.” But he also laid a significant portion of the blame
on a “man who plays an outstanding role in Zionism” and who
had excited the fanatical response of the Arabs by claiming that
the Jews wished to possess the whole Temple Mount (not just
the Wailing Wall).14 Without naming this man, Scholem was
pointing his finger at Menachem Ussishkin, the chairman of the
Zionist movement’s Jewish National Fund, who had made a
speech several months earlier demanding a Jewish state in all of
Mandatory Palestine, including Transjordan. Ussishkin also made
a specific point of demanding that the Temple Mount be given
to the Jews. For Scholem, such dangerous talk had consequences
in the increasing Arab enmity.
But worse was yet to come. On August 15, 1929, a group of
Jewish nationalists from Joseph Klausner’s Committee for the
Western Wall, together with members of the Betar youth group
of the Revisionist movement, staged a march to the Wall and
raised the Zionist flag there. Convinced, evidently, that the Zi-
onists planned to take over the Temple Mount, or what Mus-
lims call Haram al-Sharif (“Noble Sanctuary,” the plateau where
the ancient temples had stood and where two important mosques
now took their place), Arabs began disturbances in Jerusalem.
On August 23, the rioting escalated as thousands of villagers
streamed into the city. The rioting spread throughout the coun-
try, but the worst outbreak occurred in Hebron, where, on Au-
gust 24, 65–68 Jews, most of them ultra-Orthodox non-Zionists
who had lived in the city for generations, were slaughtered. By

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the time the rioting ended, on August 29, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs
lay dead, and 198 Jews and 232 Arabs were injured.
Scholem had some firsthand involvement in these trau-
matic events, and his reactions to them are very revealing about
his conflicted state of mind. He resided until 1932 at 139 Abys-
sinian Road on the border of Me’ah She’arim, an ultra-Orthodox
neighborhood. Although the area was mostly Jewish, it also had
Arab residents. On the first day of severe rioting in Jerusalem,
Friday, August 23, Scholem left his house to pick up his lunch
from his cook, who lived in Me’ah She’arim. He saw a wounded
Arab on the street. When he returned home, his housekeeper
related with great agitation that she had seen Jews attacking the
Arab. He tried to phone either a Jewish doctor or the British
authorities to come to the man’s aid, but to no avail. After eat-
ing his lunch, he decided to go on foot to the Me’ah She’arim
police station. His later testimony continues: “When I reached
the corner where the Arab lay, I saw a truck driven by a Jew,
[with] Dr. Shammas [a Christian Arab doctor], along with sev-
eral Jews standing by the Arab’s body. I, along with several
other Jews, helped Dr. Shammas lift the body of the Arab onto
the truck. I did not go on to the police station. At least an hour
had gone by between my first noticing the Arab and when he
was evacuated to the hospital.”15 Why Scholem waited an hour
before going to the police remains unclear. He was sufficiently
shaken by this and the broader series of events that when he
wrote to his mother to describe what had happened, he noted
that it was only in areas where the Jews were not armed that the
Arab attackers were successful. He failed to note the irony that
in his first political declaration, three years earlier, he had ar-
gued against the Jews arming themselves.
The Zionist authorities charged the attorney Bernard Jo-
seph with assembling Jewish testimony for the Shaw Commis-
sion, which the British government sent to investigate the riots.
Joseph approached Scholem about whether his Arab neighbors

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had had advance warning of the attacks on Jews. Scholem failed

to respond, which prompted Joseph to write a curt note urging
him to do so. At the bottom of the note, Scholem wrote that he
was reluctant to answer because he thought that Arabs might
have evacuated not because of advance warnings but because of
fear of the Jews. This was a position consonant with Brit Sha-
lom’s view that all sides bore responsibility for the events, and
one that was certainly supported by Scholem’s belief that the
Arab he found on the street had been assaulted by Jews. Nev-
ertheless, he did compose an affidavit in English stating that his
neighbor, Hassan Boudiri, had left his house with his whole
family on August 21. After the “disturbances,” Scholem met
Boudiri’s nephew, who told him that the family left not for po-
litical but for medical reasons. Scholem was obviously skeptical
that such was the case. He also noted that Bedouins who lived
in the area had similarly evacuated two or three days before the
riots. This may not have proved that the attacks were premed-
itated, but it certainly suggests some advance planning.16
Scholem’s public involvement with the 1929 riots had an
afterlife. In 1931, the Vaad Leumi (the National Council gov-
erning body of the Yishuv during the British Mandate period)
appointed a committee, led by the venerable Zionist David
Yellin, which undertook to bring a lawsuit to establish Jewish
control over the Western Wall. An article in the Revisionist daily
Do’ar ha-Yom accused Scholem of refusing in his professional
capacity to make Kabbalistic books on the Jewish attachment
to the Wall available to the committee. He responded angrily
by stating that he was no longer an official in the National Li-
brary and that he had never been asked for such books in any
official capacity. The committee was free to take out whatever
books that it might want without his assistance. However, Yellin,
whom he had encountered by chance, had asked him privately
for books from his own library. But since he rejected the idea of
settling the dispute over the Wall in court—a position, he noted,

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that was the same as that held by the chief rabbinate—rather

than by political negotiation, he refused to assist the committee.
In the two years after the Wailing Wall riots, Scholem
published prolifically in Brit Shalom’s journal as well as in the
general press on political matters. He argued for a binational
parliament in which the rights of both communities would be
spelled out in advance. He defended Brit Shalom against the
charge that it was no more than a “junior partner” of the ultra-
Orthodox and anti-Zionist Agudat Yisrael. And he wrote strongly
in favor of the nonpolitical, cultural Zionism—the legacy of
Ahad Ha’am—to which he had pledged allegiance in Germany.
The following, from 1931, gives a good sense of his point of view
in terms that remain relevant today: “If the dream of Zionism
is numbers and borders, and if we can’t exist without them,
then Zionism will fail, or, more precisely, has already failed. . . .
The Zionist movement still has not freed itself from the reac-
tionary and imperialistic image that not only the Revisionists
have given it but also all those who refuse to take into account
the reality of our movement in the awakening East.”17
Above all, his fears that the secularization of Hebrew might
unleash apocalyptic politics took increasingly concrete form
in the highly charged atmosphere of this period. An exchange
with the novelist Yehuda Burla sharpened the issue for Scholem.
Burla, writing in the trade-union newspaper Davar, accused Brit
Shalom of trying to sever the national ties between the Jews in
the Yishuv and those in the Diaspora by calling for limits on
immigration and the formation of a binational entity with the
Arabs. He concluded that Brit Shalom “profaned the nation’s
holy of holies—its hope for complete redemption.” Scholem
responded by denying that redemption—the religious doctrine
of messianism—had any place in Zionism: “I absolutely deny
that Zionism is a messianic movement and that it has the right
to employ religious terminology for political goals. The re-
demption of the Jewish people, which as a Zionist I desire, is in

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no way identical to the religious redemption I hope for in the

future. . . . The Zionist ideal is one thing and the messianic
ideal another, and the two do not meet except in the pompous
phraseology of mass rallies, which often infuse our youth with
a spirit of new Sabbatianism, which must inevitably fail. The
Zionist movement has nothing in common with Sabbatian-
ism.”18 This is an extraordinarily significant statement of Scho-
lem’s views of Zionism and messianism. It surely flowed out
of his resistance to the militaristic nationalism of World War I
Germany, an ideology that he believed reflected the dangers of
applying messianic language and aspirations to politics. The
“mass rallies” which promoted a new Sabbatianism clearly re-
ferred to Revisionist Zionism, the party of Vladimir Jabotinsky
and its militaristic youth movement.
Scholem’s invocation of the seventeenth-century Sabba-
tians also reflected the new turn his research had taken two years
earlier. When he was in Oxford reading Kabbalistic manuscripts,
he came across a text by Abraham Cardozo, one of the leading
disciples of Shabbatai Zvi. Cardozo had justified Shabbatai’s
conversion to Islam with a doctrine of the “holiness of sin”: the
Messiah had to descend into the realm of evil in order to effect
redemption. Scholem found this heretical doctrine within the
heart of premodern Judaism both fascinating and frightening.
In 1928 he published an essay on Carodozo’s theology, his first
foray into the study of Sabbatianism. He concluded the essay
with a contemporary warning:

Thus it was that before the powers of world history uprooted

Judaism in the nineteenth century, its reality was threatened
from within. Already at that time [i.e., the time of Sabba-
tianism] the “reality of the Hebrews,” the sphere of Juda-
ism, threatened to become an illusion. . . . The messianic
phraseology of Zionism . . . is not the least of those Sabba-
tian temptations which could bring to disaster the renewal of
Judaism. . . . As transient in time as all the theological con-

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structions, including those of Cardozo and Jacob Frank [the

leader of an eighteenth-century Sabbatian offshoot in Po-
land], may be, the deepest and most destructive impulse of
Sabbatianism, the hubris of the Jews, remains.19

Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement might have been totally

secular, but by making maximalist demands, it awakened the
same messianic fervor that brought seventeenth-century Sab-
batianism to grief. (Shabbatai Zvi and some of his followers
converted to Islam, while Jacob Frank and his followers con-
verted to Catholicism.) Note also that Scholem invoked the
title of Oskar Goldberg’s Reality of the Hebrews, which he de-
tested, even though Goldberg had no connection to right-wing
Zionism. For Scholem, the “renewal of Judaism”—and not
borders, numbers, and nationalist slogans—was the real goal of
Zionism. Or, as he put it in a letter to Walter Benjamin on Au-
gust 1, 1931: “The development of the last two years . . . made
evident the radical split between my conception of Zionism,
which I heard characterized as a religious-mystical quest for a
regeneration of Judaism . . . , and empirical Zionism, whose
point of departure is an impossible and provocative distortion
of an alleged ‘solution to the Jewish question.’ . . . I do not be-
lieve that there is such a thing as a ‘solution to the Jewish ques-
tion’ in the sense of a normalization of the Jews. . . . Between
London and Moscow we strayed into the desert of Araby on
our way to Zion, and our own hubris blocked the path that leads
to our people.”20
Scholem’s despondency was in reaction to the Seventeenth
Zionist Congress, which took place in Basel, Switzerland, where
the first congress had taken place in 1897. During a fiery debate
over the Passfield Commission’s White Paper, which restricted
immigration, Vladimir Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionist
movement embrace an “end goal” of statehood on both sides
of the Jordan River. When the congress rejected his demand,
he tore up his delegate card and denounced the congress as not

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Zionist. For Scholem, Jabotinsky’s position was an ominous

threat: if his definition of Zionism should prevail, Scholem and
his comrades in Brit Shalom would be drummed out of the
movement and declared heretics. Echoing his earlier statement
that “Zionism succeeded too early,” he wrote to Benjamin:
“When Zionism prevailed in Berlin, which means in a vacuum
from the point of view of our task—it no longer could be victo-
rious in Jerusalem.”21
It was in this cast of mind that Scholem responded to the
death of Franz Rosenzweig, which occurred on December 10,
1929. Thirty days later, he spoke at length at a commemorative
gathering at the Hebrew University and also published a sepa-
rate review of a new edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption
in a Jewish community newspaper in Frankfurt. Rosenzweig’s
death clearly upset him and seemed to call forth the need to de-
fine his relationship to the older philosopher. The eulogy dem­
onstrated Scholem’s profound grasp of the history of philoso-
phy and Rosenzweig’s place in it refuting the abstract doctrines
of German idealism. Rosenzweig had returned philosophy to
the questions of everyday existence and especially death, a stance
that he himself exemplified in his illness and untimely demise.
But in addition to an appreciation of Rosenzweig’s thought,
Scholem used the occasion to articulate his own philosophical
position, with which he had struggled since his youth.
Theology, he believed, had gone into eclipse in the mod-
ern world, and the efforts of various rationalists to revive it
largely added up to a failure: “The divinity, banished from man
by psychology and from the world by sociology, no longer
wanting to reside in the heavens, has handed over the throne of
justice to dialectical materialism and the seat of mercy to psy-
choanalysis and has withdrawn to some hidden place and does
not disclose Himself. Is He truly undisclosed? Perhaps this
last withdrawal is His revelation.”22 Modern man had removed
God from the world by substituting scientific disciplines for the

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divine attributes of justice and mercy. But paradoxically, Scho-

lem thought, God’s disappearance from the world might be a
kind of revelation. Rosenzweig, for his part, believed that the
vehicle for restoring humans’ relationship to the banished God
was the “star of redemption,” configured for Jews as the Star of
David, a symbol that created a connection through Jewish ritu-
als between God, humans, and the world.
Scholem clearly found in Rosenzweig’s star a mystical re-
sponse to rational Jewish philosophies, but he also believed
that Rosenzweig missed the core of such a theology: Kabbalah.
Rosenzweig had disdained Kabbalah, but, not surprisingly, for
Scholem the Kabbalah provided the key to the star of redemp-
tion: “The Kabbalah in its last dialectical form is the last theo-
logical domain in which the questions of the Jew’s life found a
living reply.”23 To be sure, modern Jews, from rationalist phi-
losophers like Hermann Cohen to secular Zionists, ignored or
denigrated the Kabbalah: paradoxically, just when it was most
needed, it was most overlooked. Although Rosenzweig was un-
aware of it, he had provided the question for which Scholem
had the answer: the star of redemption was nothing less than an
invitation to the Kabbalah. In other words, Scholem used his eu-
logy not just to celebrate Rosenzweig’s contribution to modern
Jewish thought but more particularly as a springboard for Scho-
lem’s own theology.
In his review of the tenth anniversary edition of the Star of
Redemption the same year, Scholem added another dimension
to his simultaneous appreciation and critique of Rosenzweig.
He pointed out that Rosenzweig had rejected apocalypticism:
his version of redemption lacked catastrophe or rupture in his-
tory. Scholem saw the question of messianism differently: “Apoc-
alypticism, as a doubtlessly anarchic element, provided some air
in the house of Judaism; it provided a recognition of the cata-
strophic potential of all historical order in an unredeemed
world. . . . Redemption possesses not only a liberating but also

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a destructive force. . . . Rosenzweig sought at least to neutralize

it in a higher order of truth. . . . [I]n Rosenzweig’s work the life
of the Jew must be seen as the lightning rod whose task it is to
render harmless its destructive power.”24 This 1930 text con-
tained almost identical language to what Scholem would use
nearly three decades later in an essay on the messianic idea in
Judaism. Apocalyptic and the anarchic forces gave new vitality
to the “well-ordered house” of Judaism, but they did so at a high
price. These forces needed to be “neutralized” if they were not
to destroy Judaism and the Jews. It was this neutralization that
Rosenzweig provided in his philosophy. Scholem clearly en-
dorsed the move, but he also regretted that Rosenzweig had
made it without acknowledging the historical power of Jewish
apocalypticism. So sensitive was Scholem about his interpretation
of Rosenzweig, however, that when Rosenzweig’s widow, Edith,
wrote in October 1931 to congratulate him for coming around
to a positive view of Star of Redemption, he responded with an
essay-length letter making his position even more complicated.
As his political statements from the same time reveal, Scho-
lem viewed the Revisionist Zionists as conjuring up the same
dangerous forces of apocalypticism in the realm of politics. He,
too, wanted to neutralize these forces but not at the expense of
eradicating them entirely. In his historical work—and espe-
cially in the great essay “Redemption Through Sin”—Scholem
remained at once fascinated but also horrified by the anarchic
forces that Rosenzweig had ignored but that continued to ani-
mate even the modern history of the Jews.
And so it was that Scholem’s first eight years in the Land of
Israel were marked at once by professional success and political
despair. His own secret yearnings for Zion, which had brought
him into conflict with the German Zionist youth movement,
were now replicated in a new form in Zion itself. His utopian
vision for Zionism had little to do with a return to the East
(“the desert of Araby”) and certainly not with the trappings of

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a state. The more Zionism strove for such a state, the farther it
seemed from his goal, as unclear as that goal often seemed. And
the more Zionism embraced nationalism, the more it seemed
to him to summon the demons of apocalypse, as his study of
Jewish history made plain. It was that study, the discovery of
old Jewish texts, writing about them, and teaching about them
to a growing circle of students, that Scholem now came to see
as his contribution to the renewal of Judaism.

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 6

Redemption Through Sin

In March 1932, Gershom Scholem received a research

leave from the Hebrew University and departed to spend more
than half a year in Italy and Germany. Traveling, it seems, with-
out Escha, he disembarked at Naples and hurried on to Rome,
eliciting an admonishment from his mother for failing to visit
the sights. She wrote, quoting ironically from Goethe’s Faust:
“Parchment—is that the sacred fount / from which you drink,
to still your thirst forever?”1 But parchment was his sacred fount,
so he immersed himself in the Vatican Library, imbibing Kab-
balistic manuscripts at a furious pace. He did not, however, en-
tirely isolate himself in scholarship. In response to Betty Scho-
lem’s inquiry about conditions in fascist Italy, he noted that
while Mussolini’s regime had little interest in anti-Semitism, it
otherwise trumpeted extreme nationalism.
Fascism in Italy certainly had relevance for Germany. Al-
though neither Scholem nor his mother could have known what

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was coming, they both harbored serious anxieties as the Wei-

mar Republic came apart. Indeed, over the previous year, Betty’s
letters to her son had been filled with frantic accounts of the
hardships facing the family in the deepening economic depres-
sion. Gerhard’s response was characteristically self-interested.
His father’s will had tied up his share of the inheritance in the
print shop, which was now in danger of failing. He complained
to his mother that he could not live as a scholar in Jerusalem
without the additional income provided by the business. But
the family would soon have more ominous problems.
From Rome, he traveled to Berlin. There he missed seeing
Walter Benjamin, who was in France. But he met for the first
time Hannah Arendt, a young philosopher who would become
a close friend and important interpreter of his work. Arendt
had written a doctoral dissertation with Karl Jaspers after hav-
ing studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. She had
become a convert to the Zionist cause and would soon flee to
Paris, where she befriended Benjamin and worked for the Zi-
onist organization evacuating Jewish children to Palestine.
While Arendt was very much to his liking, he had an aller-
gic reaction to another German Jewish intellectual, Hans-Joachim
Schoeps. Only twenty-three years old in 1932, Schoeps was
­already making political and theological waves among the Ger-
man Jews. Although most Jews were politically liberal, or even
farther to the left, Schoeps favored a far-right politics, includ-
ing a hankering for the Prussian monarchy, and he had formed
a youth group, the Vortrupp, to advance his goals. He vehemently
rejected Zionism for its secularism and failure to embrace Ger-
man identity. After the Nazis came to power, he attempted with-
out a shred of success to negotiate a modus vivendi with them.
Scholem was unable to stomach either his views or his actions.
In addition to his bizarre politics, Schoeps had completed
a doctoral dissertation, which he published as a book, Jewish
Belief in This Epoch. Scholem acquired a copy of the work and

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wrote a savage denunciation of it in the Bavarian Jewish com-

munity newspaper. His article has received little attention, per-
haps because of the obscure publication in which it appeared
and because it was a review of an equally obscure book, one that
is, by now, long forgotten. But the review was of signal impor-
tance for Scholem since he used the occasion to develop his own
theology beyond his earlier reflections on Franz Rosenzweig.
When he sent the article to Benjamin, his friend immediately
understood its significance and congratulated Scholem on his
achievement.
Schoeps had fallen under the influence of the Swiss Ger-
man Protestant theologian Karl Barth, and he aspired to write
a Jewish version of Barth’s theology. He rejected the Oral Law
and wanted to resurrect a biblical theology based on a “dialec-
tical theology” of revelation. For Scholem, such pandering to
Barth’s theology was no better than the nineteenth-century Ger-
man Jewish rationalist aping of liberal Christianity. Schoeps’s
theology was virtually devoid of Jewish sources, which, predict-
ably, also enraged Scholem, for whom mastery of the whole
Jewish canon was essential.
It would have been easy to dismiss Schoeps, but Scholem
offered his own alternative to his opponent’s theology. In terms
that we can recognize from his youthful writings, he asserted
that the truth of Judaism lay in tradition, the vast and variegated
literary sources of the previous three thousand years. This tradi-
tion was grounded in revelation, but revelation was “the abso-
lute, meaning bestowing that becomes explicable only through
. . . tradition. . . . Nothing in historical time requires concreti-
zation more than the ‘absolute concreteness’ of the word of
revelation.” The “concrete word of God” (the phrase was one
that Schoeps lifted from Barth) had no meaning in itself but
became meaningful only as human beings responded to it and
gave it meaning in the literary tradition.2
Scholem’s theology had its roots in the Kabbalists’ idea of

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a hidden God and of a secret tradition, but it also sounds simi-

lar to the negative theology of Moses Maimonides, the great me-
dieval Jewish rationalist, about whom Scholem was teaching at
the time at the Hebrew University. (Since there was not yet a
scholar of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University, Scho-
lem had to teach philosophy in addition to Kabbalah.) Both
Maimonides and the Kabbalists, though approaching the prob-
lem from different angles, imagined God as inaccessible and un-
knowable to human beings directly. (On this point, they were
not so distant from Barth.) The Kabbalists tried to solve this
problem by portraying emanations of God, called sefirot, as
knowable dimensions of God, but, like Maimonides, they be-
lieved that beyond these emanations lay the unknowable Infi-
nite, or ain sof. These ideas from the historical sources of Juda-
ism resonated deeply with Scholem since they seemed to provide
the key to how to think about God in the modern world. As he
concluded from reading Rosenzweig, perhaps God’s revelation
in the modern world could only be his absence.
The ideas that Scholem developed in the Schoeps review
would reappear over the next several years in an intensive cor-
respondence with Walter Benjamin about Franz Kafka. For both
Benjamin and Scholem, Kafka had become an essential figure,
although they differed on how to understand him (we saw how
Scholem deployed Kafka as a secular Kabbalist in his 1937 letter
to Salman Schocken). Benjamin spent a number of years writ-
ing a long essay on Kafka, a shortened version of which Scho-
lem arranged to have published in 1934 in the Jüdische Rund-
schau. For his part, Scholem introduced Kafka to a generation
of students at the Hebrew University by teaching seminars on
his work. He told Benjamin that Kafka considered himself a
Zionist, although whether Kafka, who did devote himself to
studying Hebrew toward the end of his life, considered himself
a Zionist is debatable.
Benjamin argued that God and revelation were utterly ab-

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sent from Kafka’s work; his writing was instead all about exile
and the desire for redemption. For Scholem, on the other hand,
God was a nihilistic force in Kafka’s writings, and the main
problem was the question of revelation and the Law rather
than redemption. Kafka expressed from a secular point of view
the Kabbalistic idea that the true meaning of the Law, and thus
revelation, is hidden and esoteric: “Kafka’s world is the world
of revelation, but of revelation seen of course from that perspec-
tive in which it is returned to its own nothingness.”3 But where
the Kabbalists believed they had the key to unlock this hidden
wisdom, Kafka’s “Kabbalah” was modern: the key to the esoteric
truth was forever lost. The Law, Scholem wrote, can never be
fulfilled, a formulation that echoes his statements about Zion-
ism. Indeed, in 1934, combining his despair about God’s revela-
tion with his despair about Zion, he wrote a poem about Kafka’s
Trial which begins:

Are we totally separated from you?

Is there not meant for us, God, in such a night,
Any breath of your peace
Or of your message?

Can the sound of your word

Have so faded in Zion’s emptiness
Or has it not even entered
This magical realm of appearance?4

Scholem returned to Jerusalem in early November 1932 for

the opening of the academic year. By now, the drumbeat her-
alding Germany’s descent into Nazism was loud and furious.
On November 20, Betty wrote to her son, “I read in Voss [the
Vossische Zeitung, a liberal Berlin newspaper favored by many
Jews] that Hitler will become chancellor after all. But he won’t
be any different from the others.”5 It is hard to think of a less
accurate prophecy. Hitler was appointed chancellor on January
30, 1933. A month later, a deranged Dutchman set fire to the

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Reichstag, providing the Nazis with the pretext to smash their

enemies on the left. One of the first people they picked up was
Werner Scholem, although they released him after five days.
Werner had reason to feel that he might not be harmed
further. He had been expelled from the German Communist
Party in 1926 for Trotskyist leanings and had soon afterward
abandoned politics completely for a career as a lawyer. He was
hardly a threat to the Nazis. But his prominence in the early 1920s
as one of the most vociferous members of the Reichstag and his
easily caricatured Jewish physiognomy were not forgotten, es-
pecially by Joseph Goebbels, who mentioned him by name in a
number of his speeches before and after the Nazis seized power.
On April 23, 1933, Werner and his wife, Emmy, were both ar-
rested. It appears that Emmy was the regime’s initial target; she
was accused of involvement in a conspiracy to infiltrate the
army. However, she was released five months later while Werner
continued to languish in prison (Emmy soon escaped to Lon-
don with their two daughters). Two years later, he was put on
trial for treason and acquitted, but immediately thereafter taken
into “protective custody”: imprisonment in a concentration
camp. Goebbels was not about to forgive the Jew Scholem for
his barbed taunts of the Nazis ten years earlier.
Betty Scholem was frantic to help her son, spending untold
hours at Gestapo headquarters and making arduous trips to con-
centration camps. Her efforts proved futile and took an enor-
mous toll on her health. Her letters to Gerhard offer a remark-
able account of what life was like for Jews in Nazi Germany,
especially when a family member fell afoul of the regime. Ger-
hard himself was equally concerned about his brother, although,
like Betty, he could not understand why Werner, who had had
an exit visa and a letter of recommendation to a university in
Switzerland, had not decamped before he could be rearrested.
Later, in 1935, he tried to get Werner a certificate to immigrate
to Palestine, but without success. Walter Benjamin’s brother

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Georg also fell into the hands of the Gestapo, and Walter and
Gerhard exchanged anxious information about the fate of their
respective siblings.
Scholem immediately understood the historical import of
what was happening in Germany. On several occasions, start-
ing in 1933, he compared the situation of Jews in Germany to
the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, one of the great-
est traumas in Jewish history and one that would play a major
role in his own later reflections. But the main difference be-
tween Spain in 1492 and Germany in 1933, he believed, was that
there were no “national Spanish Jews”—that is, Jews whose pri-
mary identification was with their country rather than their
religion. (He might have been thinking of his brother Reinhold,
who identified first and foremost as a “national German.”) The
German Jews, because they had assimilated and viewed them-
selves as German, were less able to resist the new regime. Of
course, for the Spanish Jews, conversion to Christianity had of-
fered an escape from expulsion, something that was not true
for the German Jews. Writing to Benjamin after the April 1, 1933,
boycott of Jewish shops, Scholem wondered whether an active
pogrom in Germany, as opposed to the “cold pogrom” of the
boycott, might benefit the Jews since it “represent[ed] almost
the only chance of bringing about something positive from
such an eruption.”6 Such an eruption, of course, did occur five
and half years later on Kristallnacht and, as Scholem intuited,
it caused a new torrent of refugees to flee Germany, many of
them to Palestine.
In Palestine, the effect of the Nazis’ seizure of power was
felt almost immediately as terrified German Jews flooded the
country. By July 1933, over six thousand Jews had immigrated,
a number that would rise to ten thousand by year’s end. Many
of these immigrants were professionals. Employment could be
found for doctors and engineers, but for academics, especially
in the humanities, the prospects were dismal. Scholem exerted

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himself on behalf of some of these scholars. In August 1933, at

a time when many Jewish professors were being thrown out of
their positions in Germany, Scholem received his promotion to
full professor.
Scholem helped secure employment for Hans Jonas, a scholar
of ancient Gnosticism whom he had met during his student
years. And he made a major effort to bring Martin Buber to Je-
rusalem by chairing a task force charged with creating a chair
in comparative religion. In a letter to the university authorities,
he wrote that there was no one better in the world to teach the
subject than Buber. And in a letter to Buber, he reported on his
efforts with extravagant praise for the man with whom he had
clashed so ferociously during the First World War. Scholem
must now have been aware that he was secure in his professor-
ship whereas Buber, who had lost his position at the University
of Frankfurt, was a supplicant. Buber would elect to remain in
Germany to support educational efforts among the besieged
German Jews, finally coming to Jerusalem in 1938, when he took
up a chair at the Hebrew University.
Other friends were not so fortunate. The literary critic Wer-
ner Kraft, who had been working as a librarian in Hannover,
had no real hope of employment, as Scholem wrote to Benja-
min. Kraft came to Palestine in 1934, but, like many German
Jews, he failed to learn Hebrew and had to eke out a marginal
existence working for foreign institutions in Jerusalem. Another
of Scholem’s friends, Gustav Steinschneider, had a more sur-
prising career in exile. We recall that Scholem and Steinschnei-
der met in the German army before Scholem was hospitalized
in the psychiatric ward. Steinschneider never acquired either
an academic degree or a profession. Although he was not a Zi-
onist, he came to Palestine after Hitler’s rise, with no hopes of
employment. Scholem intervened with his old boardinghouse
friend Zalman Rubashov, who in turn contacted Meir Dizen-
goff, the mayor of Tel Aviv, and a solution was found: Stein-

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schneider became a street sweeper, a “profession” that allowed

him the free time during the day to inhabit Tel Aviv’s literary
cafés. Later on, he married Toni Halle, Scholem’s friend from
his university days.
Steinschneider’s younger brother Karl also came to Pales-
tine, though not from Germany; he had been in California for
the previous six years working in the citrus industry. Scholem
had met Karl in the German Zionist youth movement in 1916.
Karl spent several years in Palestine in the early 1920s, working
in agriculture; he would become a teacher in agricultural train-
ing schools. On the side, Karl developed into S. Y. Agnon’s
main translator into German, and, as Scholem would write after
Agnon received the Nobel Prize in 1966, it was Karl who made
it possible for the Swedish committee to read Agnon’s work.
For both literary and ideological reasons, Scholem felt a deep
kinship with Karl, whom he referred to in a letter to Benjamin
as “one of the people in Palestine closest to my heart.”7
Perhaps most important among the new arrivals was Kitty
Marx, the niece of Agnon’s wife, Esther, who was to marry Karl
Steinschneider in April 1933, a month after leaving Germany,
with Scholem serving as a witness at the wedding. Scholem had
evidently met Marx while still in Germany, possibly through
Karl, although he was also friendly with the Judaica scholar
Moses Marx, her uncle. The two met again in Oxford in 1927
when Marx was working on her Ph.D. in English literature, which
she received from Freiburg University. During that visit, Scho-
lem introduced her to his mother. After Marx arrived in Pales-
tine, Scholem reminded his mother of that meeting, referring
to her as “the enchanting Kitty Marx.”8 Marx, a highly intelli-
gent and strikingly beautiful woman, would work in Mandatory
Palestine and the young State of Israel in senior positions in
the government bureaucracy. She attracted many suitors, and
Scholem, reporting to Benjamin on her wedding, wrote that Marx
was “the undisputed world record holder for rejected marriage

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proposals.”9 Her uncle S. Y. Agnon even wrote a (probably fic-

tional) story in which Marx rejects a Gentile suitor as a result
of a prayer book that Agnon gives her.
Before immigrating to Palestine, Marx, on Scholem’s rec-
ommendation, visited Benjamin, bringing with her Scholem’s
polemic against Hans-Joachim Schoeps. The two evidently hit
it off and immediately developed a strong intellectual affinity.
Marx brought several of Benjamin’s manuscripts to Palestine
for safekeeping with Scholem. Shortly after her arrival, she and
Scholem talked far into the night about Benjamin, since Scho-
lem was thirsty for news about his friend. In the subsequent
weeks and months, Kitty Steinschneider’s name appears with
great frequency in the Scholem-Benjamin correspondence as
they sent greetings to and from her, while Benjamin complained
flirtatiously that she owed him a letter. She also served as a kind
of secretary, copying Benjamin’s important essay on language
so Scholem could send his copy to Benjamin (Benjamin, now in
France, had fled without most of his papers). Kitty also offered
to pay for Benjamin to come to Palestine, but that project con-
tinued to flounder.
The arrival of so many German-speaking intellectuals
changed the social makeup of the Jerusalem community. Many
of them settled in Rehavia, where in 1932 the Scholems and the
Bergmans had built a house with two apartments. From 1935
to 1946, a group of these intellectuals met to socialize and ex-
change ideas. Initially composed of the Egyptologist Ya’akov
Polotsky, the classicist Yohanan (Hans) Levy, and Hans Jonas,
the group called itself “Pil” (Hebrew for “elephant”) after the
first letters of each of their last names. They were soon joined
by Shmuel Sambursky, the first physicist at the Hebrew Uni-
versity and later a historian of science; George Lichtheim, a
historian of Marxism; and, inevitably, Gershom Scholem. Scho-
lem immediately grasped the joke in the group’s name and pro-
posed a modification based on the names of the new members:

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“Pilegesh” (Hebrew for “concubine”). The Pilegesh Society

met on a weekly basis, and the conversation took place in Ger-
man. Although Scholem had repudiated the German language
while still in Germany, in fact, he never abandoned his mother
tongue, writing scholarly articles in both German and Hebrew.
Even his daily life was bilingual, and this at a time when He-
brew purists were demanding monolingualism.
The Pilegesh Society debated theology, history, and poli-
tics. Members also enjoyed writing poems in German about
each other. Shmuel Sambursky was particularly talented, and
one of his favorite subjects was Scholem. This witticism captures,
tongue in cheek, Scholem’s domineering personality:

When he speaks masterfully, in a voice

That brooks no contradiction and boldly scales
The mountain, determined that no other’s choice
To follow him shall succeed, no matter how he rails,

He’ll seize the dwarf and bat him to and fro

Till all audacity gone, the fellow says “enough!”
While others, looking on, enjoy each throw,
When suddenly a thoughtless word and rough

Short-circuit-like renders him mute.

He moves his mouth like an insentient beast
Speaking with muscles that utter not a toot,
As if life had no value in the least.10

Scholem’s tempestuous character had evidently not changed

much since his youth, although his position as a respected pro-
fessor and the admiration of his friends had tamed its more de-
structive tendencies.
This was not, however, the case in the most intimate sphere,
his marriage. Precisely when his relationship with Escha began
to disintegrate is not entirely clear. In January and again in May
1929, she wrote two letters to Scholem, in the first of which,
titled “On the Characteristics of a Boy (Bube),” she lamented

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Gerhard’s lack of appreciation for her as both an intellectual

and as an intimate partner (she complains that he is more at-
tracted to actresses in the cinema). As we might expect, he
made high demands in terms of food. The picture she draws is
of someone who is not really prepared for a companionate
marriage based on love and mutual respect.11 What she does
not say, but what became clear later, was that Scholem was not
willing—or perhaps unable—to have children. (Scholem’s child-
lessness with both of his wives is a subject he has left no trace
of in his diaries or letters, so we don’t know whether it was a
deliberate choice.)
By 1932 or 1933, it seems, he had become sufficiently de-
tached from his marriage to contemplate alternatives. In 1932,
a young Polish woman who had recently arrived in Palestine
enrolled in his seminar on Kabbalah. Fania Freud, a distant
cousin of Sigmund, was, according to Hans Jonas, not particu-
larly attractive, but she possessed a highly desirable skill in Je-
rusalem at that time: excellent knowledge of modern Hebrew,
acquired during her gymnasium education in Poland. As a
­result, a number of German Jewish intellectuals vied for her
attention. In addition, she was intelligent, well-educated, and
blunt in her opinions. When the relationship started between
Freud and Scholem is unclear, but something was certainly afoot
by 1934.
After a silence of over eleven years, Scholem suddenly began
to write again in his diary. The often-feverish tone recalls an
earlier period in his life when inner turmoil also produced the
need to put his thoughts down on paper. In the first new entry,
dated July 13, 1934, he attributed his desire to write to the death
of the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, an important figure in Scho-
lem’s intellectual life, whom he met through Agnon in Ger-
many. (Recall that one of Scholem’s earliest publications was
a translation of Bialik’s “Halakhah and Aggada” into German.)
He also wrote a four-page essay on Kafka and Kabbalah, reca-

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pitulating themes that were appearing in his letters to Benjamin

during this same period. In this diary entry, he struggled with
the questions of whether there is divine justice and whether it
is possible to be both a sinner and a just person.
Did he mean this last question in a personal sense, perhaps
related to his marriage? Perhaps so; he was not only involved in
a relationship with Freud (we do not know whether it was pla-
tonic), but he had also now fallen in love with his friend Kitty
Steinschneider. Kitty and Karl had moved to Rehovot shortly
after their marriage, and Scholem, who had corresponded with
her on occasion before she came to Palestine, now began to
write much more frequently. The two met a number of times
during this period. One such get-together had to be aborted
due to an unexpected meeting of the humanities faculty at the
university, causing Scholem to write humorously—and perhaps
flirtatiously—that he hoped they would find an occasion when
“a man might meet his [female] friend (not his wife).” The
words for “female friend” and “wife” are almost identical in He-
brew, giving him the opportunity for the coy wordplay. Kitty
may have also functioned as a kind of muse: the poem he sent
to Benjamin about Kafka was dedicated to her and written “for
her theological education.”12 And his archive contains two other
poems evidently inspired by her.
In the summer and fall of 1934, his feelings for Kitty inten-
sified. Since she did not reciprocate, he told himself to pack
away his emotions. He petulantly wrote in his diary that he had
to do all the work to keep the relationship—whatever it might
have been—alive. On September 12, 1934, he wrote to her com-
plaining of an “infinite and unexplained alienation that exists
between us” and of her failure to inform him when she came to
Jerusalem. He confessed rather obliquely that the previous half-
year had been especially depressing for him. Since Yom Kippur
was approaching, he allowed that perhaps he was at fault for
their breach and he asked her forgiveness.13

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This inner turmoil continued at least until November. He

confessed then to his diary that what he had experienced was
“the truest feeling. Much truer than Grete. But it is dead and
love has nothing here that can transform into friendship.” He
also wrote that Fania Freud, who was visiting her family in Po-
land, was about to return, and he had therefore decided to lock
away his correspondence with Steinschneider, along with “a
beautiful picture unworthy of belief that she has sent me.”14 This
was the only time after 1920, it seems, that he spoke of his bur-
ied feelings about Grete Brauer, whose place in his affections
was now taken by Steinschneider.
It is little wonder that Kitty Steinschneider failed to re-
spond to his advances. She had married Karl only a year and a
half earlier and in July 1934 gave birth to their son, Assaf. More-
over, it is not at all clear what Scholem wanted from her: per-
haps a platonic ménage à trois. The situation bears an uncanny
resemblance to Scholem’s relationship with Walter and Dora
Benjamin in Switzerland shortly after the birth of their son. He
seems here to suggest that Kitty did write back, but what her
response was remains mysterious since the Scholem Archive
contains only a few letters from her to him, while preserving well
over seventy letters written over some fifty years from him to
her, donated by her son after her death. These later letters sug-
gest no special passion but are rather filled with reports of his
activities. Since Scholem saved every letter he ever got, two pos-
sibilities exist: Kitty never answered him, which might have been
the case in 1934 but cannot have been for all the other years of
their friendship, or someone—Scholem himself? Fania Freud?—
destroyed her letters. In any event, despite the tensions that
arose between them in 1934, Kitty and Gerhard remained close
the rest of their lives.
In 1935, his marriage to Escha took a disastrous turn: he
learned that she was having an affair with Hugo Bergman,
the  Scholems’ next-door neighbor, for whom Escha worked

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at the National Library as private secretary. In the incestuous

world of Jerusalem intellectuals, this was one of the most in-
cestuous of affairs, given the intertwining of Bergman’s and
Scholem’s careers, first at the National Library and then at the
university (Bergman became rector of the university in 1935),
not to mention their shared house. Some evidence exists that
the affair started in the 1920s, perhaps as early as when Escha
came to Jerusalem in 1923, a half-year before Scholem arrival,
and stayed in Bergman’s house.
Bergman’s diary from the time contains painful evidence of
the breakdown of the Scholems’ marriage. Escha was in a frag-
ile state. Several times during this period, she left Jerusalem for
long stays at the hot springs in Tiberias. Gerhard reported these
trips to Benjamin as cures for sciatica, but it seems as likely that
she felt herself unable to be in his presence. It seems also pos-
sible that she suffered bouts of depression. As we might expect,
Gerhard could not contain his anger and treated her very badly,
frequently shouting at her. Escha came crying to Bergman pro-
claiming: “Either a radical solution or death.”15 On another oc-
casion, she told Bergman how desperately she wanted children;
she did not want to be left alone in the world.
By June 1935, a separation seemed increasingly inevitable.
In light of the chaos this prospect produced in Scholem’s life,
he wrote to Benjamin that a visit to Jerusalem was impossible—
although Benjamin was not really ready to set sail. Gerhard re-
mained conflicted for at least a half a year about whether he should
divorce Escha, but he finally did so on March 26, 1936, writing
a few weeks later to Benjamin that these events had “caused very
great inward and external difficulties in my personal life.” A
few days after the divorce, Fania Freud broke off their relation-
ship. In his diary, he speaks about a crisis in his work and notes
that this crisis was one of the reasons for his divorce (the oppo-
site seems more likely). To Benjamin he wrote, perhaps more
accurately, “My ability to work has been quite paralyzed.”16

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Working through mutual friends, he was able to convince

Freud to change her mind. By the fall, they were engaged, and
they married on December 4, 1936, the day before his birthday.
The same day, he wrote to his mother: “I’m afraid that I have
some news that will disappoint you. I must inform you that I
decided to marry Fania Freud, a woman whom you know but
who has been unjustly and unfortunately cast in a bad light.”
Signed: “Your newly married but regrettably disobedient (thank
God disobedient) son.”17 Betty had visited Jerusalem in 1935 and
must have met Fania then, and evidently she blamed her for
ruining Gerhard’s marriage to Escha. She clearly held Escha in
high regard and as late as the 1940s corresponded with her from
her exile in Australia.
Escha married Hugo Bergman as soon as Bergman was
able to obtain a divorce from his own wife. She fulfilled her
wish to have children with Bergman, bearing two daughters.
And it appears that Scholem made his peace with the new ar-
rangement: the correspondence over the divorce suggests that
it was surprisingly amicable. In fact, his relations with both Hugo
and Escha remained friendly, and he corresponded warmly with
them when they were abroad.
Gerhard and Fania moved to 28 Abarbanel Street in Reha-
via, no small operation given the size of his library. He would
remain there for the rest of his life, but as a renter, since, as
Fania reported after his death, he believed quixotically that a
Jew should not own property in the Land of Israel. At a later date,
he purchased two cemetery plots, one for himself and one for
Fania, and told her with impish humor that now he had become
a property owner. His sole real property was his library, which
lined every wall, leaving only a space on which was later hung
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the painting that inspired Walter
Benjamin’s meditations on the philosophy of history. In 1937,
Scholem published a small, tongue-in-cheek booklet, “Kabbal-
istic Books Missing from the Library of Gershom Scholem.”

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To his chagrin, the appearance of the booklet immediately

drove up the prices of the missing books.
In the spring of 1936, an uprising of the Palestinian Arabs
swept the country, surpassing the riots of 1929. The violence
also reached Jerusalem. Scholem reported to Benjamin: “Life
goes on as usual on the surface, but in reality everything has
changed. Almost every younger person, which, above all, in-
cludes students at the university, has been conscripted . . . even
if privately, to defend against open raids which may occur at
any time (and are often attempted). If this keeps up much lon-
ger, I will also be obliged to spend several hours at night sur-
veying the landscape from the rooftop.”18 Later, Fania also stood
watch on the roof.
Scholem’s claim to have been paralyzed by inner turmoil in
the period before his divorce is belied by his bibliography. He
may have felt paralyzed, but he continued to publish, often at
a furious pace. Of particular note are books and articles that
appeared in German from the Schocken Publishing House in
Germany. Salman Schocken had undertaken to publish transla-
tions of important Jewish sources as well as scholarly articles
aimed at a wide public. When the Nazis came to power, Schocken
became an important force in the cultural resistance to perse-
cution. In addition to books, he published an almanac (pocket-
book-size collections of essays and translations), which came
out annually between 1933 and 1939, when the Nazis shut down
Schocken’s operation and he moved it to Jerusalem (the Schocken
Library in Jerusalem became an important research institu-
tion). Scholem published a series of works in the 1930s through
Schocken, including a reissue of his doctoral dissertation and
a small volume of translations from the Zohar, “The Secrets of
Creation,” as well as studies on Sabbatianism and Ashkenazi
Hasidism. He had proposed to Schocken a comprehensive pro-
gram for studying Kabbalistic literature, and these publications
were down payments on that project. Although his relations

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with Schocken were at times rocky, the department store mag-

nate remained an ongoing and important source of cultural and
financial support.
Scholem’s first publication in the Schocken Almanac in
1933–1934 was an essay on the Kabbalah after the 1492 expul-
sion of Jews from Spain. In light of the comparisons he made in
his letters between 1492 and the flight of Jews from Germany
in 1933, the essay must be read not only as historical explication
but also as a meditation on contemporary events. The Lurianic
Kabbalah, named for Isaac Luria of Safed in the sixteenth cen-
tury, taught that the cosmos started with the self-expulsion of
God; the world could only be created in the empty space from
which God was absent. Luria’s myth of creation thus involved
a catastrophe of divine exile. God not only reveals himself; he
also hides himself. This paradoxical theology could not have
arisen, in Scholem’s view, without the catastrophe of 1492. If
read together with the theological views Scholem expressed in
his review of Schoeps, it might now appear that the Jews needed
a new Kabbalah to address the catastrophe of 1933. This new
Kabbalah Scholem seems to have found in the fiction of Franz
Kafka, since the modern age required a kind of secular Kab-
balah from which God is absent.
What do these publications in German tell us about Scho-
lem? He had, of course, bid good-bye to Germany and to the
German Jews when he emigrated in 1923, but, as we have seen,
he continued to publish in German, not only in scholarly jour-
nals but also in more popular venues like the Jüdische Rundschau
and Jewish community newspapers. And as the Pilegesh Soci-
ety also demonstrates, he continued to enjoy intellectual banter
in his mother tongue. More important, by publishing in Ger-
man for German Jews during the Nazi period, Scholem showed
that he never turned his back on the community of his birth, no
matter how much he disdained its desire to assimilate.

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It was, however, in Hebrew that his most important work

of this period appeared, a long essay that, possibly more than
any other of his writings, secured his reputation in the eyes of
both his colleagues and a wider public as the most provocative
Jewish scholar of his generation. The essay appeared in 1937 in
the journal Knesset of Mosad Bialik, the publishing house estab-
lished after the great poet’s death in 1934. The title of the essay
was “The Commandment Fulfilled by Its Transgression” (Mitz-
vah ha-Ba’ah be-Averah) or, as it would appear in a later English
translation, “Redemption Through Sin.” Scholem appears to
have launched research on this essay as early as 1934, when he
referred to it in a letter to Walter Benjamin dated June 20. There
he reported ironically that he had purchased a seat in a Jerusa-
lem synagogue as “atonement” for writing an essay on religious
nihilism. He noted several times that he wrote the essay in He-
brew because “this essay . . . can only be written in Hebrew,
anyway, at least if the author is to remain free from apologetic
inhibitions.”19 Zionism had made it possible for Jews to explore
the most heretical moments in Jewish history since it freed
them from the need to justify themselves in the eyes of the
non-Jewish world. In later years, Scholem would emphasize re-
peatedly that Zionism should not dictate a particular view of
Jewish history but rather make possible the fullest exploration
of all facets of the Jewish experience.
The subject of “Redemption Through Sin” is the theology
of the Sabbatian movement, especially after Shabbatai Zvi’s
apostasy to Islam in 1666. While Shabbatai had performed var-
ious “strange acts” before his conversion, such as turning the
fast of the Ninth of Av (the date when the two Temples in Jeru-
salem were destroyed, also supposedly the date of the Messiah’s
birth) into a feast day, recent historians had tended to view the
messianic movement he led with some sympathy. But this atti-
tude did not extend to the period after he converted and the

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movement descended into religious nihilism and wholesale vi-

olation of Jewish law. Insofar as historians had paid attention to
these later Sabbatians—and Scholem thought that no one had
fully appreciated how widespread their movement was—they
treated them with criticism and contempt. It was this picture
that Scholem proposed to correct.
Many of the faithful eventually returned to normal Jewish
practice, but others, probably the minority, continued to believe
that Shabbatai Zvi was the Messiah. These believers split into
two groups: the “moderates” who thought that only Shabbatai
Zvi needed to descend into the deepest realms of evil (namely,
to convert to Islam) to accomplish his mission and that they there-
fore remained halakhic Jews, and the “radicals” who thought that
they should emulate him. The latter group evolved into the Dön-
meh sect in the Ottoman Empire (these ma’aminim, or believ-
ers, converted to Islam but had their own Sabbatian rituals) and
the Frankists in eighteenth-century Poland, followers of Jacob
Frank, who converted to Catholicism. In the case of the Frankists,
even before their conversion they performed antinomian acts
(deliberate violations of the Law), including sexual orgies. With
Frank, Sabbatianism descended decisively into nihilism.
Scholem starts his essay by pointing out that both Ortho-
dox and modern rationalist scholars were blinded by their own
apologetic positions from giving this movement of religious
nihilism its due. For Scholem—and this was his most explosive
claim—Sabbatianism was the central event in Jewish history on
the eve of modernity. He describes how the Sabbatians’ hereti-
cal theology grew out of earlier Jewish mysticism, a key pillar of
medieval Jewish religion, which, while not heretical, neverthe-
less contained the seeds of heresy. By shaking the foundations
of traditional faith, Sabbatianism paved the way for modern
movements, such as the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Re-
form Judaism, and even secularism.
Sabbatianism therefore had a paradoxical career: it was a

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movement within Jewish mysticism, but it produced the secu-

lar rejection of traditional religion:

Even while still “believers”—in fact, precisely because they

were “believers”—they [the Sabbatians] had long been draw-
ing closer to the spirit of Haskalah all along, so that when
the flame of their faith finally flickered out they soon reap-
peared as leaders of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals, or
simply complete and indifferent skeptics. . . . Those who
survived the ruin were now open to any alternative or wind
of change; and so, their “mad visions” behind them, they
turned their energies and hidden desires for a more positive
life to assimilation and the Haskalah, two forces that accom-
plished without paradoxes, indeed without religion at all,
what they, the members of “the accursed sect,” had earnestly
striven for in a stormy contention with truth, carried on in
the half-light of a faith pregnant with paradoxes.20

No reader can ignore the passionate rhetoric in which Scholem

tells his story; this is anything but dry history. Phrases like
“ruin,” “wind of change,” “pregnant with paradoxes,” “catas-
trophe,” and “rupture” fill the essay and give it a sense of exis-
tential urgency. There can be little doubt that Scholem had
come to inhabit the minds of his subjects, experiencing the cri-
sis of their faith in a very personal way.
Nowhere did Scholem’s tense relationship to his subject
become more fraught than in in the last section of the essay,
devoted to Jacob Frank (Fania had translated Frank’s Polish
writings for him). He begins:

Jacob Frank (1726–91) will always be remembered as one of

the most frightening phenomena in the whole of Jewish his-
tory; a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested
motives or otherwise, was in all his actions a truly corrupt
and degenerate individual. Indeed it might be plausibly ar-
gued that in order to completely exhaust its seemingly end-
less potential for the contradictory and the unexpected the

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Sabbatian movement was in need of just such a tyrant, a man

who could snuff out its last inner lights and pervert whatever
will to truth and goodness was still to be found in the maze-
like ruins of the “believers’” souls. . . . [H]e remains a figure
with something hidden, tremendous if satanic power.21

There is something shockingly vitriolic about Scholem’s lan-

guage here. It was as if, when it came to Frank, he had aban-
doned the objectivity he preached at the beginning of the essay,
as if he felt it necessary to construct him as a demonic or satanic
figure, to make Frank so repulsive that he, the historian, would
not fall for his seductive charms.
Shmuel Sambursky intuited as much in a poem he wrote
about Scholem three or four years after the publication of “Re-
demption Through Sin:”

O, fisher in the quagmire of murky waters,

You interpret distant stammering as form
Transform a whirling, whipping wave of words
Into sense-filled sentences well-structured and long,
Expending thus the intellect’s precious hoard
On matters of a lower order, true.
You should rise up from Zohar’s swirling bleak and blackish fog
Into the realm of true and healthful light
Before the Frankists’ rotting, poisonous fruits
Accomplish their dark deed and do you in.22

Did Scholem escape the “Frankists’ rotting, poisonous fruits”?

The years 1934–1936 were a period of profound personal tur-
moil, as his marriage collapsed and he found himself buffeted
by powerful romantic emotions. He clearly struggled with issues
of good and evil, as his ruminations on Kafka show, and per-
haps he felt deep guilt about his behavior in his personal rela-
tionships. We have seen that in the birthday letter to Salman
Schocken of 1937 (thus written just after the publication of “Re-
demption Through Sin”) he confessed to his attraction to the

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“fine line between religion and nihilism.” Could he have seen

in the Sabbatians—and perhaps most of all in Jacob Frank—a
frightening example of what happens when there is no law and
no morality? In fact, beneath his damning words about Frank
lies an inescapable fascination, as if Frank personified his own
demons. This simultaneous attraction and repulsion hints that,
even though Scholem never says so explicitly, the remarkable
rhetoric of the essay might be a projection onto history of its
author’s own innermost struggles.
At the same time, “Redemption Through Sin” can also be
read against the backdrop of the political catastrophe of the
1930s. It is hard to escape the feeling that the way Scholem de-
scribed Jacob Frank, the demonic “tyrant,” pointed toward a
much more demonic figure on the contemporary stage. If Scho-
lem had earlier worried about right-wing Zionists resurrecting
the “hubris” of the Sabbatians, the world now faced a much
greater evil, which had already seized one member of his fam-
ily. The historical catastrophe of the expulsion from Spain now
seemed to foreshadow a world in which God was hidden and
nihilism unleashed.

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 7

Kabbalah and Catastrophe

By 1937, Scholem’s personal life had regained stability, his

marriage to Fania providing him with an intellectual and do-
mestic helpmeet. But the situation in Germany continued to de-
teriorate. While his two older brothers began to organize their
immigration to Australia, Werner remained in the hands of the
Gestapo. During her 1935 visit, Betty had opened an account in
Palestine with three hundred pounds sterling in case of emer-
gencies. In July 1937, she protested what she called Gerhard’s
blocking of withdrawals from the account as well as his chutz-
pah in using the money in the account—her own money—to
buy her a jacket as a seventieth birthday present. The money
would become essential the following year to buy an exit visit
for Erich.
In Palestine, the most hotly debated political news was the
report of the Peel Commission, which the British had dispatched
to propose a solution to the Arab uprising. The commission’s

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White Paper, issued in July 1937, for the first time suggested
partitioning the country between Jews and Arabs. Scholem’s
stance was ambivalent: “I am in principle against partition be-
cause I consider an Arab-Jewish federation for the entire area of
Palestine to be the ideal solution,” he wrote on July 10.1 How-
ever, he recognized that conditions for such a federation, which
Brit Shalom had advocated in the 1920s, no longer existed and
that there was no possibility of achieving anything better than
partition. He also lamented the Peel Commission’s rejection of
the Balfour Declaration and of Hebrew as an official language, as
well as what seemed to be the abolition of Jewish rights in Jeru-
salem. He had now become a political pragmatist, even though
he had not forgotten the utopian ideals of his youth. In the end,
the Arabs rejected the Peel Commission’s recommendations,
and it would take more than a decade—and much bloodshed—
for partition to become a reality.
In the same month, Scholem received an invitation from
the American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Stephen S. Wise
to serve as a visiting professor at the Jewish Institute of Religion
in New York and to present the Hilda Stroock Lectures. Here
was a golden opportunity to summarize and synthesize his
studies of Kabbalah for a general audience. The shape of these
lectures, to be titled “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” was
already apparent in the article he published in 1932 in the Ger-
man Encyclopedia Judaica, whose table of contents closely mirrors
that of the later lectures. It was also apparent in the detailed pro-
posals he made to Salman Schocken for a comprehensive ac-
count of Kabbalistic literature and its content. But while the
Schocken program never came to fruition, the Stroock Lec-
tures provided the occasion for a partial fulfillment of his more
ambitious agenda.
Remarkably, Scholem wrote the lectures (there were seven,
with two more added later) before he left Jerusalem, in less than
two months, from the middle of November 1937 to early Janu-

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ary 1938. His English was not yet adequate for writing lectures,
so he decided to have them translated. He feared that translating
from Hebrew to English would present too steep a challenge,
so he wrote the lectures in German, and George Lichtheim, the
scholar of Marxism in the Pilegesh Society who had spent part
of his youth in England, rapidly rendered them into fluent En-
glish. It is also likely that given the time constraints, Scholem felt
he could write the lectures faster in his native tongue. In later
years, a mythology surrounded the lectures, since they never ap-
peared in Hebrew during his lifetime, although they were trans-
lated into many other languages. Some said that Scholem wanted
to force his students to read them in English. Closer to the
truth was Scholem’s stated view that, if he had allowed a He-
brew translation, he would have felt compelled to drastically
revise and expand the lectures. A Hebrew version of the book
did not appear until 2016.
In February 1938, Scholem stopped off in Paris on his way
to New York where he met up with Hannah Arendt and her hus-
band, Heinrich Blücher. As the head of the Paris office of Youth
Aliya, Arendt had several times accompanied groups of chil-
dren to Palestine, and the friendship between her and Scholem
deepened there. Walter Benjamin had also become friends with
Arendt, who would later play a significant role in bringing his
work to the attention of the English-reading public. The four
friends met several times during Scholem’s Paris stay.
Scholem had not seen Benjamin now for eleven years. The
two engaged in extended debates, mostly over Marxism, which
had long claimed Benjamin’s allegiance. Although Scholem had
previously indicated his reservations about Benjamin’s politics
in letters as well as in restrained conversation during their last
meeting, the discussion in Paris was much more bitter and vo-
ciferous. Benjamin now presented his views on language from
a Marxist perspective, which clashed dramatically with the ear-
lier theological approach that had so enamored Scholem.

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Benjamin had become connected with the neo-Marxist In-

stitute for Social Research, later known as the Frankfurt School,
which had transferred its operations from Germany to New
York. He feared in particular that conflicts with Max Hork-
heimer, the institute’s director, over ideology—Horkheimer saw
Benjamin as more of a mystic than a Marxist—could jeopardize
his stipend, virtually his only source of financial support. This
was also the rather implausible reason he gave in the late 1930s
for not visiting Palestine. Although neither man knew it, this was
to be their last meeting, since Benjamin canceled their planned
meeting in Paris for August 1938, when Scholem was to return
to Palestine via France. How his final meeting with Benjamin
might have affected Scholem’s feelings about him remains un-
clear. As exasperating as he had found Benjamin over the years—
in their difficult personal relations in Switzerland, Benjamin’s
scandalous misuse of the Hebrew University stipend, their po-
litical differences—his deep feelings for his friend seemed to
overcome any obstacles.
From Paris, Gerhard, accompanied by Fania, set sail for
America. He was obviously greatly excited by the adventure. He
had requested his mother to find him American guidebooks in
Berlin; she had trouble finding any, and no doubt preoccupied
with more pressing concerns in 1938 Nazi Germany, asked him
acerbically why he couldn’t get some in Jerusalem. On the boat,
he met the theologian Paul Tillich and his wife (Tillich had
fled Germany for America in 1933), who immediately befriended
him. He was just as warmly received in New York and quickly
made friends with a number of important intellectuals, notably
Shalom Spiegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the
neo-Marxist philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, whom
he met at the Tillichs’ apartment and who had himself just ar-
rived in the United States from England (he had fled Germany
in 1934).
On the face of it, he and Adorno, who was a leading figure

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in the Frankfurt School, had little in common, especially po-

litically. But they immediately hit it off, and the correspondence
between them, which lasted from 1938 until Adorno’s death
thirty-one years later, testifies to deep intellectual affinities as
well as personal affection and a shared sense of humor. In the
1960s, Adorno sent Scholem his book Negative Dialectics, and
Scholem confessed that he had nearly broken his head trying to
comprehend it. But he made a valiant effort to do so and treated
Adorno’s very different sensibility with great sympathy. Adorno,
for his part, was more open to theological reflections than one
would expect of a philosopher steeped in dialectical material-
ism. He was astonished when Scholem showed him how the
Kabbalists wedded Gnostic myth to Neoplatonic philosophy,
thus making it comprehensible to a philosopher like himself.
Their correspondence does not contain exclusively weighty in-
tellectual matters. At one point, Scholem wittily sends Adorno
a recipe for cholent (the traditional eastern European Sabbath
casserole) for his Christmas dinner; Adorno was Christian on
his mother’s side and Jewish on his father’s.
It appears that Adorno, who himself possessed an overbear-
ing intellect, remained in awe of Scholem, at least in part be-
cause Scholem had access to esoteric knowledge beyond Adorno’s
ken. Here was an excellent example of how Scholem’s ground-
ing in the German philosophical tradition had made him an
intellectual who could hold his own with others outside the
Jewish tradition, even as he made the Kabbalah accessible to
them. Adorno immediately recognized in him not a parochial
scholar but a world-class intellect whose field of study happened
to be Judaism.
During his stay in America, Scholem paid a visit to the
Frankfurt Institute’s New York office and found much to ap-
plaud, including the presence of Leo Löwenthal, the sociolo-
gist whom he knew from Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus, and Herbert
Marcuse, the Hegelian philosopher and later guru of the New

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Left, whom Scholem had met in Berlin. On the other hand, he

had a distinctly negative reaction to Max Horkheimer, whose
personality and Marxist views he could not abide.
Scholem’s lectures took place between the end of February
and March 25 and were a great success. Over the next three
years, he worked to expand them significantly for publication
by Schocken’s new American branch (the actual printing was
done in Tel Aviv, leading Scholem to complain bitterly about
delays in proofreading the English text). Since the book that
ensued, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, still counts as Scho-
lem’s most influential publication, it is worth taking stock of
some of the key arguments he presented there. Before doing
so, however, we should note what was not included in the lec-
tures. Most notably absent was the subject of Scholem’s disser-
tation, the origins of the Kabbalah in Provence and Spain in
the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This would be the
theme of a book in Hebrew published in 1948 and later trans-
lated into German and English. He probably decided to leave
out this central question because he had amassed so much ma-
terial on it that he could not imagine confining it to one lecture
or chapter.
In the preface to Major Trends, he also confesses that the
last chapter, on Hasidism, was only a preliminary and tentative
survey of that eighteenth-century movement. To delve more
deeply would also require an entire book, one that Scholem
never wrote. He did write a series of lectures on the subject,
which were delivered in English in 1949, but he never pub-
lished them as a book. Only long after his death did a group of
Israeli scholars assemble his various articles on Hasidism into
a Hebrew volume titled The Latest Phase, while the manuscript
of the English lectures remained buried in the archives.
The preface to Major Trends is a colorfully written reflec-
tion on the twenty years of Scholem’s career as a scholar of Jewish
mysticism. He presents himself as an archaeologist confronting

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“a field strewn with ruins” that required painstaking spadework

in order uncover the riches that lay beneath the surface. All oth-
ers who had approached this task had contributed little more
than obfuscation and unfounded conclusions. He was therefore
a pioneer in virgin territory, “constrained by circumstance and
by inclination to perform the modest but necessary task of
clearing the ground of much scattered debris and laying bare the
outlines of a great and significant chapter in the history of Jew-
ish religion.”2 Note that Scholem’s language here mimics the
rhetoric of Labor Zionism: he, too, was redeeming the land with
his scholarly labor.
While it was certainly the case that no one had undertaken
the philological and historical studies to which he had devoted
himself since 1919, this self-presentation obscures the fact that
both Jewish and Christian scholars had laid the groundwork
for Scholem’s achievement. A cursory perusal of Scholem’s Biblio-
graphia Kabbalistica of 1928 makes this plain. He may have thought
himself a giant standing on the shoulders of pygmies, but with-
out those “pygmies” it is doubtful if he could have seen as far.
The first chapter of Major Trends is a general introduction
that takes on the questions What is mysticism? and What dis-
tinguishes Jewish mysticism from others? Scholem lays out his
general theory of mysticism. Religions start with an immediate
experience of God, which they then formulate with laws and
other social institutions that distance human beings from the
divine. Mysticism represents a “romantic” return to the reli-
gion’s revelation, an attempt to recapture the immediacy that
the laws and institutions have obscured. But of course this third
stage can never recover the primitive religion of revelation. In-
stead, it represents something new, since it recognizes the “abyss”
between man and God. This theory was hardly original. In the
sphere of Judaism, thinkers such as the liberal German Jewish
rabbi Leo Baeck and Martin Buber had already suggested sim-
ilar ideas, although not focused on Kabbalah as the core of “ro-

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mantic religion,” a term used by Baeck. With this theory, Scho-

lem was taking his place among those who wanted a return to
Judaism that did not involve adopting Jewish Law.
Jewish mysticism had certain unique characteristics. As op-
posed to other mystical traditions which tended to privilege
ineffable experiences of God, Kabbalah had a positive attitude
toward language, for it saw revelation as a linguistic event (a
favorite theme of Scholem’s since his student days). It repre-
sented the resurgence of myth within a monotheistic religion;
the Kabbalists did not consider myth and monotheism oppo-
sites. And its focus was not on mystical experience, but on eso-
teric knowledge of God. The Jewish mystics did not write au-
tobiographies in which they related their experience of union
with the divine, but effaced their own lives by writing “theoso-
phy,” speculations on God’s inner workings. (Scholem described
an exception to this rule, the thirteenth-century “prophetic
Kabbalist” Abraham Abulafia, in the fourth lecture, which is
devoted solely to this remarkable figure.)
An especially troubling distinction between Jewish and
other mysticisms—Scholem was thinking primarily of Chris-
tian mysticism—appeared at the end of this introductory
chapter. Kabbalah, he says, is a masculine doctrine: “It lacks the
element of feminine emotion . . . but it also remains compara-
tively free from the dangers entailed by the tendency towards
hysterical extravagance. This exclusive masculinity[,] for which
Kabbalism has paid a high price, appears rather to be connected
with an inherent tendency to lay stress on the demonic nature
of woman and the feminine element of the cosmos.”3 Women
represent God’s attribute of “stern judgment” (the female “side”
of the divine sefirot), and the demonic is the offspring of this
feminine sphere. The Kabbalah’s failure to include personal
mystical experience was also connected to the masculine since
women in other traditions were outstanding writers of mysti-
cal autobiography.

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Scholem here veered away from pure description—there

were no female Kabbalists—into a much more subjective judg-
ment when he equated “feminine emotion” with “hysterical ex-
travagance.” Of course, as a man of his time, he was not free of
prejudice against women (we recall that when he was in Jung
Juda in Germany, he declared himself not a feminist, but he
also argued for the inclusion of women). What makes this state-
ment more complicated is that Scholem believed strongly that
the “demonic” was an integral part of Judaism and that only he
was willing and able to ferret it out. In thirteenth-century Kab-
balah, the demonic was seen as originating with God, as a re-
sult of the masculine failing to properly counterbalance the
feminine. Is this why he says that Kabbalah paid a “high price”
for its “exclusive” masculinity? What would Kabbalah have been
if it were not exclusively masculine? Although Scholem never
answered these questions, it would seem that his understanding
of gender in the Kabbalah was more complicated than a sim-
plistic dismissal of the feminine as hysteria. In fact, in his chap-
ter on the theology of the Zohar (chapter 6), he emphasized with
evident fascination the highly erotic nature of the Kabbalah’s
depiction of God, consisting of male and female elements in a
state of constant sexual coupling.
Indeed, Scholem’s fascination with the demonic generally
underlies much of his writing, especially about Sabbatianism,
as we saw in the previous chapter. If the demonic originated
out of God in Kabbalah, it also had a highly ambivalent mean-
ing in German literature. Goethe’s Faust plays upon the demonic
as both positive and negative, so when Scholem came to study
the Kabbalah, he already possessed such a contradictory sense
of the demonic from German culture. The centrality of this
word in his vocabulary can be understood only against this Ger-
man background.
The fifth chapter of Major Trends was the only one to pre­
sent the kind of philological arguments found in his more tech-

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nical articles, and he delivered it in Hebrew to an audience

consisting largely of American Hebraists such as Shalom Spiegel.
He did so because he assumed, as he wrote in the book’s pref-
ace, that most of his English-speaking audience would not be
interested in his subject, the authorship of the Zohar. He advised
his readers to skip the chapter unless they were specialists.
But this modesty was misplaced. In both the lecture and
the chapter, Scholem unleashed a bombshell: the author of the
Zohar was Moses de Léon, the thirteenth-century Kabbalist whom
traditional enemies of Kabbalah in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries had charged with fabricating the work and at-
tributing it falsely to a rabbinic sage. As noted earlier, in his
inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University, Scholem had argued
that the Zohar was based on an ancient text that Moses de Léon
had found and quoted from in writings under his own name.
But now, in a rare reversal for someone usually so sure of
himself, he came around to Heinrich Graetz’s view that Moses
de Léon was the author of the Zohar. Noting the appearance of
Spanish words and place-names in the text’s oddly artificial Ar-
amaic and pointing out how Moses de Léon had cleverly quoted
from the Zohar in order to promote the book he had allegedly
found, Scholem came to the conclusion that the Zohar was in
reality a forgery. Yet where those hostile to the Kabbalah (such
as Graetz) used the charge to besmirch its cardinal text, Scho-
lem made this conclusion support his general theory of mysti-
cism and employed a less judgmental term: “pseudepigraphy”
(false writing), that is, attributing one’s own authorship to a ven-
erable ancient figure. If the third stage of religion was meant to
recover the ancient immediacy of God’s revelation, what better
way to do so than by writing a mystical text in the name of an
ancient authority? For the medieval mystics the teachings of
Kabbalah were anything but new; they were handed down in
secret for centuries and only made visible at a late stage of his-
tory. Given Scholem’s own belief in the centrality of tradition

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as the realm in which revelation is interpreted and transmitted,

Moses de Léon’s brilliant forgery was precisely what made it
such a powerful text.
After solving the problem of the Zohar’s authorship, Scho-
lem turned to a discussion of its major ideas. He followed this
with the history of the Kabbalah after the Jews’ expulsion from
Spain, enlarging on the article he had published in German on
the subject that was also a response to the Nazis’ assault on the
German Jews. Although he never mentioned contemporary
events in the Stroock Lectures (nor had he in the German ar-
ticle), there can be little doubt that he continued to see the wa-
tershed event in 1492 as a historical precedent for what was
happening before his eyes in Germany. The sixteenth-century
Lurianic Kabbalah offered a myth of divine exile and catastro-
phe that paralleled the historical exile of the Jews from Spain.
And it also offered a myth of tikkun, the restoration of God’s
original harmony, that paralleled the Jews’ hope for messianic
redemption.
The Lurianic myth provided the theological springboard
for the chapter “Sabbatianism and Mystical Heresy.” Building
on his “Redemption Through Sin” essay, Scholem explained
the development of Sabbatianism’s heretical theology out of the
writings of Nathan of Gaza, the leading prophet of the move-
ment. Sabbatianism was not, as Graetz and others had argued,
a response to persecution in the seventeenth century, such as the
pogroms against the Polish Jews in 1648–1649, but instead a
direct product of the ideas of Lurianic Kabbalah. Insofar as any
historical event had caused this mass messianic outbreak, it was
the expulsion from Spain. Since Scholem believed, as he first
argued in “Redemption Through Sin,” that Sabbatianism de-
stroyed rabbinic authority and prepared the way for Jews to
enter the modern age, a direct line could be drawn between the
expulsion from Spain, Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbatianism, and
modernity.

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Whether or not this theory was historically valid, what

Scholem accomplished in his book was to fashion a grand myth
of his own to explain the great turning points in Jewish history
of the previous five hundred years. This was a secular myth that
joined the history of national trauma to mystical ideas. And
even though the expulsion from Spain was the catalyst, Scho-
lem’s myth argued for the development of Jewish history largely
through internal forces rather than as a result of external causes.
At the heart of his sweeping picture were esoteric ideas, the se-
cret doctrines of the Kabbalists. Scholem’s area of study, far
from being on the margins of Jewish history, he now turned
into its core.
The Sabbatianism chapter also contained a surprising ar-
gument about why Shabbatai Zvi was seen as the Messiah: he
suffered from manic depression. Nathan of Gaza had inter-
preted the Messiah’s alternating states of euphoria and passivity
in Kabbalistic terms, which explained Shabbatai’s “strange ac-
tions” as having meaning beyond the psychological. His de-
pressive states were the result of “demonic and erotic” tempta-
tions, while his “states of exaltation” produced his charismatic
influence over his followers.
This is the only instance in all Scholem’s voluminous writ-
ings where he resorted to a psychiatric diagnosis (including
learned footnotes!) of one of his subjects. His argument strik-
ingly employs terms that might have applied to his own mental
states twenty years earlier. Did he see some resemblance be-
tween the Messiah of Izmir and his own youthful messianic fer-
vor? It is noteworthy that he emphasized in this context that
manic-depressive illness “does not lead to decomposition and
destruction of the human personality and in particular does not
affect intelligence.” He then notes of Shabbatai Zvi that “as a
Kabbalist and a scholar he does not appear to have raised him-
self above mediocrity.”4 Why follow the first statement with
the second? If Scholem saw a similarity between himself and

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Shabbatai, he also hastened to distinguish himself from his less

intellectually gifted subject. We cannot do more than speculate
on Scholem’s motivation for offering this diagnosis, but it is
noteworthy that he never entirely liberated himself from the
conflicting states of ecstatic enthusiasm and paralyzing melan-
choly that he had experienced in his youth.
The final chapter of Major Trends concerned eighteenth-
century Hasidism, the movement of charismatic rabbis and their
circles of followers, which Scholem argued was the “latest phase”
of the history of the Kabbalah. He held, along with other stu-
dents of Hasidism such as Martin Buber and Simon Dubnow,
that the creative period in this movement was limited to the
eighteenth century. And since eighteenth-century Hasidism was
the latest creative phase, the history of Kabbalah effectively
ended then. (After Scholem’s death, this conclusion would come
under attack.) Based on his belief in the centrality of Sabbatian-
ism to all subsequent Jewish history, he tried to show that Ha-
sidism, too, arose out of the vestiges of Sabbatianism in Poland.
But instead of aligning itself with the acute messianism of the
Sabbatians, such as Jacob Frank, Hasidism “neutralized” mes-
sianism by channeling it into the relationship between the Tsad-
dik (the spiritual leader) and his Hasidim (the term literally means
“pious,” but in the context of Hasidism it means “followers”).
Scholem ended Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism with a
highly provocative story initially told by the nineteenth-cen-
tury Hasidic leader Israel of Rishin and transmitted to him by
S. Y. Agnon:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he

would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and
meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was
done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz
was faced with the same task he would go to the same place
in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we
can still speak the prayers—and what he wanted done be-

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came reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of

Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the
woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know
the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do
know the place in the woods to which it all belongs—and
that should be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when an-
other generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was
called up to perform the task, he sat down on his golden
chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we can-
not speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can
tell the story of how it was done. And, the storyteller adds,
the story, which he told, had the same effect as the actions
of the other three.5

Does this story indicate the decay of a religious movement

transformed from a mystery into a tale? Not at all: the tale it-
self contains the same miraculous power as the place in the for-
est and the lighting of the fire. In our time, Scholem implied,
the historian is the one who tells the tale and connects his audi-
ence to the sacred tradition, even if he himself is not a believer.
For all that, Scholem held out the possibility that the story
might not be over: “The story is not ended, it has not yet be-
come history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomor-
row in you or in me. . . . To speak of the mystical course which,
in the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more
deeply than in the entire history of Exile, destiny may still have
in store for us . . . is the task of prophets, not of professors.”6
The last sentence of the lectures clearly alluded to the expul-
sion of the German Jews—and possibly also the looming as-
sault on European Jews generally—which Scholem now saw as
an even greater catastrophe than the expulsion from Spain.
Following the completion of his lectures, Scholem spent
time in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary examin-
ing Kabbalistic manuscripts that had been unavailable in Eu-
rope. He next took a road trip to Cincinnati in order to visit

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Hebrew Union College for the same purpose. The trip gave
him a chance to experience America outside New York City. As
he wrote to Benjamin, although he found America a “strange
world,” he was clearly fascinated by everything he found.7 Eu-
ropean to his core, he would return eagerly to America in the
future as a visiting professor at Brown and Boston Universities
in addition to lecturing elsewhere.
He returned to Palestine at the end of the summer, greatly
satisfied with his U.S. expedition. But his high spirits were not
to last. In November came the news of Kristallnacht in Ger-
many, and Betty, who had resisted emigration on account of
Werner’s imprisonment, now realized that she had to leave as
soon as possible. He also developed a problem with his eyes
and had to undergo an operation that left him temporarily un-
able to work. As he wrote to Shalom Spiegel on January 1, 1939,
he was completely exhausted. Moreover, the partition plan pro-
posed by the Peel Commission had gone up in smoke and the
Mandatory government had stopped issuing certificates, a di-
saster only mitigated by officials turning a blind eye to illegal
immigration (four thousand Viennese Jews had just arrived in
that fashion, fleeing the Nazi terror which had overtaken their
country the previous March).
As winter turned to spring and summer, matters did not
improve. His eye problems continued at least into March. On
May 23, the British Parliament, anticipating war and wanting
to ensure that the Arabs would remain quiescent in the coming
conflict, approved a new White Paper that severely limited
Jewish immigration and land purchases. At the end of June,
Scholem wrote to Benjamin of the “unmitigated despondency
and paralysis, which have gripped me for months in the face of
the state of things here. . . . In this darkness I only know how
to be silent.” He believed that the capitulation of the English to
the Arabs’ violence would only encourage Jewish violence. And
he was particularly concerned that “the future of Judaism is to-

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tally cloaked in darkness.” As he had long thought, Palestine

was necessary for the revival of Judaism, but it appeared now
that Palestine itself was endangered: “We are living in terror.”
As a result, he was unable to undertake new research, but in-
stead worked on turning his New York lectures into a book, a
task he completed in the summer of 1940, and preparing lec-
tures on Shabbatai Zvi.8
At the same time, he reported some positive accomplish-
ments. He was lecturing on Sabbatianism for the first time to a
class of sixty or seventy students, an enormous number for the
Hebrew University at the time. And Salman Schocken had de-
cided to fund a Center for Kabbalistic Research in his library in
Jerusalem, to be headed by Scholem, who tongue in cheek re-
ferred to it as the “Scholem School.”
In the spring of 1939, Hannah Arendt sent him the manu-
script of her book on Rahel Varnhagen, the German Jew who
had run an Enlightenment-era salon in Berlin and had ulti-
mately converted to Christianity. Arendt had been working on
this project for around a decade since finishing her doctoral
dissertation and had described it to Scholem during their Paris
meeting in 1938. The book was a case study in the failure of
Jewish integration in Germany and, as such, could only have
won Scholem’s admiration, albeit with an interpretation that
reflected somewhat more his ideas than Arendt’s: “It’s a superb
analysis . . . and shows that a relationship built on fraud, such
as the German Jews’ relationship to ‘Germanness’ could not
end without misfortune. By fraud, I mean the assumption that
everything always had to come from one side, and that the
other side was only ever allowed to deny itself. . . . Pity, I don’t
see how the book will ever find a publisher.”9 In fact, Scholem
would play a significant role in the book’s ultimate publication
in 1957. When in 1940 Arendt had to flee the Nazis in France,
Scholem’s copy of the manuscript was the only one that sur-
vived, and it became the basis for Arendt’s book. Moreover,

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Scholem’s understanding of its thesis would lead to his own

later essay “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue.”
He and Arendt, both committed, even if idiosyncratic Zionists,
shared a deep affinity concerning the failure of German Jewish
assimilation.
The onset of the Second World War found all the Scholem
family except Werner out of harm’s way: Betty, Reinhold, and
Erich, with their families, in Australia, and Werner’s wife, Emmy,
and their two children in London. During the period of the
Phoney War (September 1, 1939, until the invasion of the Low
Countries and France in May 1940), Scholem was able to con-
tinue his correspondence with Benjamin, although in school-
boy French, since German was now verboten. As an “enemy
alien,” Benjamin was interned by the French government, but
he was released after three months (Arendt went through the
same experience).
But the summer and early fall of 1940 brought disaster. On
July 17, an S.S. guard in Buchenwald murdered Werner. The
circumstances of his death are not clear. It is possible that Com-
munist prisoners, who ruled the camp internally, might have
betrayed Werner to the S.S. since he was a Trotskyist—Trotsky
was murdered by an agent of Stalin in Mexico the following
month. Word of Werner’s death did not reach Gerhard until
October, in a letter from Betty written on September 27 (he
noted it in an undated diary entry). His reaction to his brother’s
death is hard to gauge since he did not mention it in any of his
writings during the war. It was only in 1977, when he published
his memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem, that he acknowledged it in
print, dedicating the book to his murdered sibling.
This terrible news was soon followed by an even greater
shock. After the Germans conquered France, both Benjamin
and Arendt fled to the south. On September 25, 1940, Benja-
min was turned back while trying to cross the Spanish border.
He had in his possession a visa to the United States, obtained

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for him by Adorno and Horkheimer, but he lacked a transit visa

from Spain to Portugal. Sometime that night, he poisoned him-
self with morphine and was found dead the next day. Arendt, in
Marseille, heard the story of Benjamin’s suicide and passed on
the dreadful news to Scholem. It quickly became the main sub-
ject in his correspondence with Adorno.
There is something curious about Scholem’s reaction to
this tragic turn of events. Adorno was deeply upset and kept
asking why Benjamin had done it—after all, the rest of his party
was eventually allowed into Spain. Scholem’s response was sur-
prisingly restrained, even cold; like the bibliophile he was, he
quickly turned to a plan to save Benjamin’s writings: he and
Adorno later collaborated on publishing Benjamin’s correspon-
dence and collected writings, a project that launched the recov-
ery of Benjamin’s reputation. He also dedicated Major Trends
to Benjamin, something he had planned to do even before Benja-
min’s suicide. But the only explicit expression of Scholem’s feel-
ings on hearing this news came in a letter to Shalom Spiegel
nearly a year later: “I’ll never recover from this terrible blow.”10
Could it be that Scholem was incapable of expressing an
emotional response to the deaths of these two important fig-
ures in his life? This seems unlikely. More probable is the op-
posite: he was so profoundly shaken that he could not bring
himself to respond, as if he had to harshly suppress his feelings
in order to carry on. The two deaths, coming almost simulta-
neously, may have provoked an extended period of melancholy
and even occasional paralysis that lasted for most of the war,
emotions that merged with his response to the larger catastro-
phe of the Holocaust.
A diary entry from January 9, 1943, conveys the depths of
his despair. The entry seems to have been occasioned by the
death on January 1 of Arthur Ruppin, the venerable German
Zionist activist who was also the founder of Brit Shalom: “The
death of Ruppin is reflected for me from only one perspective:

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it arouses envy. As such, I am not able to distance myself from

my travails and from my innermost desires. . . . In the past two
weeks, I have not exchanged a word with anyone in which I
have not had to fight against yawning. I now realize for the first
time in a decisive and truthful way that my youth, in which I
believed in such a paradoxical way, is over. This is what is so
difficult to grasp. My youth is over, but I can’t grasp a different
life. Things have reached such a state that I am no longer able
to read in a focused way. This is the worst sign for me.”11 In the
same lengthy entry, he moved from his sense of personal de-
spair to equally dismal reflections on Zionism. Of the five hun-
dred thousand Jews in Palestine, only fifty thousand were there
for the same reason he was, to revive Judaism. The others were
building the land, of course, but, reacting to the recent news of
the Holocaust, he believed that they were doing so for a nation
that no longer existed. Alienated from the political and social
projects of the official Zionist movement, Scholem staked out
a lonely, elitist position.
Several months later, he took issue with a declaration put
out by a group of intellectuals in response to news of the Holo-
caust. The Yishuv had become aware of the dimensions of the
Holocaust in late 1942 when sixty-nine Palestinian citizens held
by the Nazis were freed in an exchange and brought the infor-
mation with them. The intellectuals, who ranged from Joseph
Klausner on the right to Hugo Bergman on the left, issued a
declaration calling for a vigorous campaign to rescue the Euro-
pean Jews. Scholem refused to sign the declaration, claiming
that no adequate historical perspective existed to help Jews
know how to respond to the terrible news from Europe. More
important, he denied that Zionism had prophesied the Holo-
caust, as the declaration stated. This was a retrospective distor-
tion of the meaning of Zionism, which, in his view, was not a
movement to save Jews but a movement to save Judaism. In fact,
it is striking how little Scholem wrote about the Holocaust in

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later years, and he repeatedly refused to use the European ca-

tastrophe as the primary justification for Zionism.
Other diary entries from the period of the war reflect sim-
ilar despondency. The day after his birthday in 1944, he penned
an even darker meditation: “Is it true that God is revealed in
the isolation of a broken life? Why, then, is everything in my
life so dark, without any way out, and jarring? . . . Sometimes I
still struggle desperately with the remnants of the great dreams
that once inspired me, as if I could still write them on some
piece of paper or another—and I’ve lost faith in the strength
needed for that. Everything is so much in vain, so hopeless.”
And on May 7, 1945, reflecting on the imminent end of the Eu-
ropean war, he was consumed by a sense that all the sacrifices
of the Jewish people had been in vain. In addition to the na-
tional tragedy he felt personal despair: “I am alone. How alone
I am is hard to say. I went through this war alone. Friends in
the true sense are no longer.”12 In an interview after his death,
Fania revealed that she had had no idea of how alone Scholem
had felt during his life and deeply regretted that he could not
share this feeling even with her. She may have been referring
especially to the war years.
There were other deaths during the war besides those of
Benjamin and Werner Scholem. In 1942, his childhood friend
Erich Brauer passed away. Brauer had suffered since childhood
from a crippling disability (he had a deformed spine), which
may have shortened his life: he was only forty-five at the time
of his death. Scholem memorialized him in a short but moving
article in the Hebrew labor daily Davar. Even more consequen-
tial was the death of Berl Katznelson on August 12, 1944, at the
age of fifty-seven. Katznelson was one of the founding fathers
of the labor movement in Palestine, and as the editor of Davar
and the founder of the Am Oved publishing house, its cultural
leader. Scholem had become a close friend of Berl (as he was
familiarly known). The labor leader would frequently drop by

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the Scholem household and was visiting the night before his
death, a coincidence that shook Scholem to his core. A year
later, he wrote a powerful reminiscence of that night, “The Last
Night of Berl Katznelson.”
Perhaps as a result of the deaths of so many who were close
to him, on July 14, 1943, at age forty-five, Scholem composed
his will in handwritten Hebrew, leaving all his possessions, which
amounted primarily to his library, to Fania. He specified that
she could choose to sell or donate his books to the Hebrew Uni-
versity, but he also requested that she arrange for the publica-
tion of his collected writings “in three or four volumes”13 in his
memory. While there is nothing out of the ordinary about a
middle-aged man making his will, in Scholem’s case, it may
well have reflected his morbid frame of mind.
Although his private ruminations suggest that he suffered
from paralysis, Scholem continued to be active in his scholar-
ship and at the university. At the end of May 1941, he campaigned
for the position of dean of humanities against his old nemesis,
Joseph Klausner, defeating Klausner by a vote of 16 to 11. This
result was followed by right-wing student protests in favor of
Klausner. There can be little doubt that Scholem’s victory was
seen as having political overtones, even though he was no lon-
ger active in any political organization such as Brit Shalom. He
closely followed the activities of Brit Shalom’s successor, the
Ichud, led by Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, but he did not
join the group.
He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the po-
liticization of the university and in July 1943 resigned from the
Friends of the Hebrew University when they imposed a politi-
cal litmus test on faculty members. It would appear that this
litmus test was directed against left-wing professors, and it may
have been a by-product of the Biltmore Program of the previous
year, a Zionist resolution demanding Jewish statehood (or “con-
federation,” as it was called) in Palestine. For those like Scho-

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lem who had never favored statehood as the “end goal” of Zi-
onism, the new political orthodoxy was hard to stomach. His
resignation letter argued passionately for academic freedom: the
Hebrew University ought to be equally tolerant of a Martin
Buber, who favored a binational Jewish-Arab state, as of a Jo-
seph Klausner, the militant nationalist.
These personal and political contexts are essential to an
understanding of Scholem’s most important and even shocking
publication of the war years. In 1944 he unleashed an extraor-
dinary fusillade against the field of Jewish Studies, both histor-
ical and contemporary. “Meditations on Jewish Studies” pur-
ported to be “a preamble to a Jubilee Lecture that will never be
given,”14 for the twentieth anniversary of the Institute for Jew-
ish Studies of the Hebrew University. Instead of delivering the
address to his colleagues, he published it in Luah Ha’aretz, the
annual booklet of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, which Salman
Schocken had purchased in 1937. Scholem intended a broad,
general audience for his remarks.
He wrote in a rich, acerbic Hebrew similar to the language
of “Redemption Through Sin.” On one level, it was a devastat-
ing condemnation of the German Jewish founders of the Sci-
ence of Judaism. They had wanted to use scholarship to sup-
port their assimilationist goals: Moritz Steinschneider (one of
the movement’s founders, as well as the grandfather of Karl and
Gustav) was reputed—perhaps apocryphally—to have said that
he regarded it as his task to give Judaism a decent burial. These
bourgeois rationalists wanted “to remove the irrational stinger
and banish the demonic enthusiasm from Jewish history. . . .
This was the decisive original sin. This terrifying giant, our
history, is called to task . . . and this enormous creature, full of
destructive power, made up of vitality, evil, and perfection, must
contract itself, stunt its growth, and declare that it has no sub-
stance. The demonic giant is nothing but a simple fool who ful-
fills the duties of a solid citizen, and every decent Jewish bour-

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geois could unashamedly bid him good-day in the streets of the

city, the immaculate city of the nineteenth century.”15
However, the nineteenth-century historians were not en-
tirely blameworthy. About Leopold Zunz and Steinschneider,
two of the most important representatives of this school, he
wrote: “The optimism famous in their opinions is a lie and a
mask—there is something of the sitra ahra [the “other side,”
the Kabbalistic name for evil]. . . . I must confess that the fig-
ures of Zunz and Steinschneider have attracted me [for a long
time]. . . . [T]hey are truly demonic figures.”16 By calling these
scholars “demonic,” Scholem was expressing grudging admira-
tion. If historical Judaism itself contained elements of the de-
monic, then these historians were not so far, after all, from the
true content of their subject. The very destructive side of their
scholarship had a positive role to play since history was an eter-
nal dialectic between destruction and construction.
How did this work? The elements of Jewish history that
the rationalist scholars condemned might become the building
blocks of a new world: “It is possible that what was termed de-
generacy will be thought of as a revelation and light and what
seemed to them impotent hallucinations will be revealed as a
great myth . . . not the washing and mummification of the dead,
but the discovery of hidden life by removal of the obfuscating
masks.”17 This grand reversal, in which irrational myth might
claim pride of place over rationalism, was only possible because
of Zionism, which removed the need for Jews to pretend to be
consistently respectable and rational.
But here Scholem turned to his real target: his colleagues
at the Hebrew University. In place of assimilationist sermons
and rationalist apologetics, they substituted nationalist rhetoric
and apologetics: “We came to rebel but we ended up continu-
ing. . . . All these plagues have now disguised themselves in na-
tionalism. From the frying pan into the fire: after the emptiness
of assimilation comes another, that of nationalist excess. We

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have cultivated nationalist ‘sermons’ and ‘rhetoric’ in science

to take the place of religious sermons and rhetoric. In both cases,
the real forces operating in our world, the genuine demonic,
remains outside the picture we have created.”18
Why did Scholem train his rhetorical artillery on the uni-
versity that was his intellectual home? The sense of alienation
he experienced during the war years surely played a role. The
increasing nationalism of the period also provided the context
for his attack on the harnessing of scholarship for political ends.
But there may be more to it than that. The word demonic ap-
pears primarily in Scholem’s vocabulary in his discussion of
Sabbatianism, especially Jacob Frank, in “Redemption Through
Sin.” Jewish history required the demonic, even if the demons
might threaten to destroy it. When Scholem spoke of the fail-
ure to give the demonic its due in Jewish Studies, could he have
been thinking not only about his colleagues but also about
himself? Could it be that he, too, felt himself to blame for the
failure he attributed to the other historians of his day?
During the early 1940s, Scholem had planned to write a
book-length version of the ideas that he proposed in “Redemp-
tion Through Sin” and in the Sabbatianism chapter of Major
Trends. The book was intended to encompass the Kabbalistic
ideas that preceded Sabbatianism, the Sabbatian movement dur-
ing Shabbatai Zvi’s lifetime, and the afterlife of Sabbatianism
until the early nineteenth century. The idea came originally from
Berl Katznelson, who had heard Scholem lecture on Jewish
messianism, including Sabbatianism, at a “month of learning”
for workers in Rehovot in August 1941. Katznelson proposed to
Scholem a three-volume work that would be published by Am
Oved. But the book failed to materialize on schedule. In letters
from the war years, Scholem repeatedly referred to it as forth-
coming while he produced instead a series of focused studies
on Sabbatianism.
According to Fania, reporting after Gerhard’s death, he

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stopped working on the book when he misplaced the extensive

introduction he wrote between 1942 and 1945. This introduc-
tion resurfaced shortly before his death, and it was published in
a posthumous edition of his biography of Shabbatai Zvi. There
is something unconvincing in this story, however. In the first
place, Scholem kept meticulous records and saved much less
important writing. In addition, it would have been an easy mat-
ter for him to reconstruct the introduction from memory, since
most of it repeated his earlier arguments about the failure of
Orthodox and Enlightenment scholars to give Sabbatianism its
due. In fact, Scholem did write a manuscript on Shabbatai Zvi
during the war, as was revealed by a recent discovery in the
Schocken Library. It turns out that he promised it to two pub-
lishers: Berl Katznelson and Salman Schocken, who was his
patron. Schocken, for his part, expressed great irritation with
Scholem for behaving duplicitously about this manuscript,
which was never published in the form he wrote it during the
war. Whether due to the conflict between publishers, the ad-
ditional discoveries he continued to make about the subject, or
his depressed state of mind—or all of these together—Scholem
felt compelled to postpone his promise to restore the demonic
to Jewish history.
The “lost” introduction reveals a great deal about his men-
tal state during those years. The first few pages are an extended
rumination on truth in history. He declares that there is “no
greater error than a simple truth.” Truths bandied about like slo-
gans may excite people, but they serve only appearances. The
real truth of history is concealed, full of complications and par-
adoxes. History works by a dialectical process in which ideas go
underground and are then transmuted into their opposites. We
recognize this as the process Scholem described in “Redemp-
tion Through Sin,” where the religious nihilism of the Sabba-
tians resurfaced in the form of secular Enlightenment. Histori-
ans who only paid attention to the nihilism of the movement

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missed the more complicated truth: Sabbatianism represented

a powerful drive for a new world of freedom and for the re-
newal of Judaism from within. This drive came to a tragic end
because the times were not ripe for its fulfillment.
This introduction contains Scholem’s strongest affirmation
of Sabbatianism as a movement of liberation whose failure was
a tragedy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the “simple
truth” he excoriated was nationalist propaganda, by which he
meant not only nationalism generally but Zionism specifically.
The inward renewal of Judaism, the ideal that attracted him to
Zionism in his youth, had never been realized, and instead of
embracing the dialectic of creation and destruction necessary
for such a renewal, the Zionists had become like all other na-
tionalists throughout the world. The failure of Sabbatianism,
its collapse into nihilism, presaged the failure of Zionism as
Scholem understood it.
By reading this lost introduction together with “Medita-
tions on Jewish Studies” from 1944, we can arrive at a compli-
cated picture of Gershom Scholem during the war. Shocked by
the deaths of two of his closest companions from his youth and
in despair over the fate of the European Jews, he questioned
whether he could tell the “demonic” story of Sabbatianism in
such a way as to contribute to the contemporary renewal of Ju-
daism. If the Holocaust he witnessed was a catastrophe even
greater than the Jews’ expulsion from Spain, where was the revo-
lutionary movement of renewal that might succeed where Sab-
batianism had failed?

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 8

The Zionist Return to History

In 1945, Hannah Arendt published an article titled “Zion-

ism Reconsidered” in the Menorah Journal. It marked the cul-
mination of a number of earlier articles that Arendt had written
in New York during the war years in which, despite her earlier
work with the Zionist Youth Aliya, she voiced increasing criti-
cisms of the official Zionist movement. The essay, written in
1944, was a response to the World Zionist Organization’s meet-
ing in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that year. The organization re-
affirmed and strengthened the Biltmore Program of two years
earlier, which had made some form of a Jewish state Zionism’s
goal after the war. For Arendt, the demand for a Jewish state
marked the victory of the right-wing Revisionists over the Labor
Zionists, who had earlier refused to foreclose other solutions to
the problem of Palestine. Arendt herself would soon become
active in the Ichud group of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes,
serving as their American spokesperson as they advocated for a

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binational state. But the essay took an even more extreme posi-
tion, attacking the kibbutz movement for political passivity and
praising the Soviet Union’s nationalities policy as a model for
Zionism.
Scholem reacted vehemently when Arendt sent him the ar-
ticle: “I read the elaboration of your argument while vigorously
shaking my head.”1 While he shared her distaste for the politics
of David Ben-Gurion (although why, he does not say), he took
great exception to her tone and her bewildering embrace of
Marxist arguments. He accused her of assembling an array of
accusations against Zionism that amounted to anti-Zionism.
For Scholem, whose utopian Zionism had repeatedly foundered
when faced with reality, Arendt’s own utopianism was divorced
from the reality of Palestine and, he implied, lacked the most
elementary sympathy for the challenges that the Jews faced there.
He, too, had favored a binational solution but he had come to
the bitter realization that it was no longer possible. And while
the exchange over Zionism included no reference to the Holo-
caust, there can be little doubt that Scholem’s impatience with
Arendt’s ethereal criticisms reflected his horror at the events in
Europe. The exchange of letters between the two over this essay
is highly revealing. Although they agreed to disagree and not
let their dispute ruin their friendship, a line had been drawn over
Zionism that would lead to all-out warfare over similar issues
nearly two decades later.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Scholem would come
face to face with the catastrophe in a way not yet possible in
Palestine. It became clear even before the Nazis surrendered
that they had pillaged vast quantities of books, manuscripts, and
archives from Jewish institutions throughout Occupied Eu-
rope. The American occupation forces in Germany gathered
together much of this material in warehouses, eventually con-
centrating them in Offenbach, outside Frankfurt. A committee
that included Scholem was formed at the Hebrew University

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on May 6, 1945 (two days before the German surrender), to

consider how to repatriate this literature to Jerusalem, since it
was the view of the committee members that its proper place
was in the Jewish national home.
This view was not without controversy, however. The po-
sition of the occupation authorities was that all the looted ma-
terial should be returned to its countries of origin. But it was
unthinkable for most Jews that the books and manuscripts
should be sent back to Poland, Lithuania, or Germany, where
the communal institutions that had housed them had been de-
stroyed, along with most of their Jews. Yet if they were not re-
turned to their countries of origin, where should they go? The
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint),
represented by the historian Koppel Pinson, aimed to bring
these stolen materials to the United States, at least initially to
the Library of Congress, while British Jews also asserted their
desire to acquire materials. YIVO, the research institute for
east European Jewry that had relocated from Vilna to New York,
sent Lucy Dawidowicz, who would later become well known as
a historian of the Holocaust, to retrieve materials that the
Nazis had plundered during their occupation of Lithuania. An
umbrella committee under the name Jewish Cultural Recon-
struction (JCR) was eventually formed in 1947 under the lead-
ership of the historian Salo W. Baron, to coordinate all these
efforts. Baron hired Arendt to lead the JCR’s work in Germany.
So a number of prominent Jewish intellectuals were involved in
the recovery of looted cultural materials. At times, these various
Jewish organizations worked in concert with one another, united
by the urgent need to save the Jewish materials before they dis-
appeared into the hands of indifferent European regimes, but
at other times they worked in competition with one another.
Before the formation of the JCR, there was no obvious
mechanism to coordinate these efforts. On January 24, 1946,

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the Hebrew University committee decided to send two repre-

sentatives to Europe to make a survey of the materials and see
which might be brought to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, the
committee chose Scholem, whose knowledge of Jewish books
was unsurpassed, as one of the two. The other was the head of
the National Library, Avraham Yaari. Even before their depar-
ture in April, though, Scholem and Yaari came into conflict.
Although they were supposed to have equal authority, Yaari did
not have an academic appointment, so Scholem demanded that
he, as a full professor, be given veto power if they disagreed.
Despite an attempt by Judah L. Magnes, the president of the
Hebrew University, to mediate, Scholem was inflexible. It is
rather dispiriting to read the correspondence between Scho-
lem and Magnes, in which Scholem magnifies petty issues into
major disputes and inflates his academic status. The dispute
between the two continued after they arrived in Paris on April
14, but Yaari, fed up with dealing with Scholem and frustrated
by the delays in getting into Germany, returned to Jerusalem
on May 15. Scholem was now on his own.
It was not possible to enter Germany without a visa from
the American authorities, and this was not forthcoming, pos-
sibly blocked by the Joint, which was supposed to be assisting
them. Scholem wrote to Stephen S. Wise, the American Zion-
ist leader, as well as to Magnes, to urge intervention at the high-
est levels in Washington. While he waited impatiently for weeks
in Paris, he occupied himself by giving lectures to young Jews,
both French and refugees, on the cultural situation in the Land
of Israel. He saw himself as a shaliach, a Zionist emissary, whose
role was not only to rescue books but also to rescue people.
This was his first experience as a full-fledged agent of Zionism,
albeit through the Hebrew University, and it clearly brought
him, an inveterate dissenter, closer to the official movement.
While he cooled his heels in Paris, he received the devas-

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tating news that his mother, Betty, had died in Australia. He set
down his reaction in his diary on May 17, 1946:

Yesterday evening I got word that Mother died on May 5 just

as we were touring Versailles! . . . I’ve been waiting for this
moment for several (!) weeks and yet I still feel utterly petri-
fied all the way to my heart. I don’t know—what a feeling of
awful petrification, of growing abandonment that makes it
impossible for me to figure out my place in the world. Mother
was a more important factor in my life in recent years than
earlier. Her image became much clearer when she passed
seventy . . . and I became even more connected to her soul in
a number of ways. Her sufferings in Australia brought her
closer to us, and her courage surprised us. I had an easygoing
mother who did not demand to interfere and knew how to
take care of herself with great wisdom. Those things that
distanced me from her in earlier years, thirty years ago, have
vanished into nothingness.2

If several years earlier Scholem had felt that his youth had
come to an end, Betty’s death brought this feeling home with a
vengeance. He was no longer the rebellious young man whom
his mother had to rein in with gentle, often witty, reproaches.
And Betty’s death, together with those of Werner Scholem and
Walter Benjamin, finally spelled the end of his personal ties to
Germany.
While he waited for his visa, he made a trip to Zurich be-
tween May 24 and June 5. Here his mood took a turn for the
better. In Zurich he made the acquaintance of a circle of the
followers of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. This encounter
was to be of decisive importance because it led several years later
to a long-term association with the annual Jungian-inspired Era-
nos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. He also met with Jung
himself and had a cordial and interesting conversation with the
great psychologist, although he was on his guard because of re-
ports of Jung’s earlier sympathy for Nazism. Scholem’s Zurich

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friends defended Jung, but Scholem was not entirely convinced

until the liberal German rabbi Leo Baeck told him that Jung
had personally expressed remorse over his earlier political sen-
timents. Nevertheless, there are those who wonder at the ease
with which Scholem, always so skeptical of the good intentions
of Germans, accepted Baeck’s reassurance about Jung.
From Zurich, he went to Prague, Bratislava, and Vienna
in search of looted books, a venture that lasted most of June.
Hugo Bergman had preceded him to Prague and had already
reported on the trove of materials there. In Prague he met the
historian Otto Muneles, who before World War I had jour-
neyed to Galicia, where he became a Hasid of the Rebbe of
Belz and later served as the head of the burial society in Prague.
During the Holocaust, his wife and two children were mur-
dered, and he was forced by the Nazis to work sorting pillaged
books in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. After the war, he contin-
ued this work in Prague, now for the purpose of rescuing the
books for the survivors. Muneles left a profound impression on
Scholem. He was a man whose faith had been utterly destroyed
and who had embraced the rabbinic statement of heresy: “There
is no justice and there is no judge.” From an obituary Scholem
wrote after his death in 1967, it becomes clear that this encoun-
ter was perhaps the earliest and most shocking that Scholem
had with a survivor of the Holocaust: “You had the impression
that even in his veins the blood had frozen.”3 But with Muneles’s
aid, he was able to assemble a good account of the stolen books
and manuscripts in Prague and to begin the process of transfer-
ring some of them to Jerusalem.
Finally, with the intercession of the Joint, which continued
to play an ambiguous role throughout his mission, Scholem re-
ceived permission to enter Germany on June 24, 1946, and ar-
rived on July 1. He went “undercover” as an educational officer
who was supposed to lecture to the refugees in the Displaced
Persons camps. In this capacity he needed to wear an American

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army uniform and was provided with a driver and a jeep (a pho-
tograph of the forty-eight-year-old professor in an ill-fitting
American army uniform is an incongruous sight). He did, in
fact, visit a number of camps, where, as in Paris, he gave talks
on the Zionist Yishuv, one of them, for the first time, in Yid-
dish! His reaction to his meetings with survivors was mixed.
On one hand, as with his encounter with Otto Muneles, he was
profoundly shaken by their experiences. But he also found them
so different from his image of utopian Zionists that he feared
the effect they would have on the Yishuv if and when they came.
As we have seen, the Zion of his dreams was not primarily
meant as a refuge.
Scholem took up residence in Frankfurt, half of which was
destroyed. He commuted to Offenbach, where he set to work
examining the well-organized piles of books and documents.
The warehouse housed the Rothschild Library from Frankfurt
and other collections from around Germany. At its height, it
contained some 1.5 million books, but many of them had al-
ready been sent back to their places of origin by the time Scho-
lem arrived. He lamented that he should have arrived in April,
as had been originally planned. During his stay in Germany,
which lasted until nearly the end of August, he also traveled to
Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin. In Munich, where he still re-
tained some connections from his student days, he tried to ar-
range for a rare manuscript of the Talmud to be donated to the
Hebrew University, but he was not successful.
The visit to Berlin at the beginning of August was particu-
larly difficult. On August 2, he went to find the family apart-
ments on Friedrichsgracht and Neue Grünstrasse, but as he
wrote in his diary, “Everything is destroyed!! The inner city—
dead.”4 He was clearly shaken to realize that the city of his child-
hood was no more. He went for Friday evening services to the
Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue, which was also partly destroyed,
and noted how strange it was to celebrate Shabbat in Berlin after

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a fourteen-year absence. Some days later, he was involved in an

automobile accident that did nothing to improve his mood.
While in Offenbach, Scholem worked with a young Amer-
ican Jewish chaplain, Herbert Friedman. Together they packed
five boxes with especially valuable materials. The American au-
thorities, possibly under pressure from American Jewish lead-
ers, prohibited the export of the boxes to Palestine. Scholem
returned to Jerusalem in late August without them, but in early
January 1947, Friedman smuggled the boxes out of Germany to
France and from there to Antwerp, where he stowed them with
the library of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, which was
en route to Palestine. The plot came to light after the boxes had
already arrived in Jerusalem, and Scholem was accused of con-
spiring with Friedman to steal valuable books and manuscripts
from U.S. custody. An article in the army newspaper Stars and
Stripes estimated their value at $3 million. Scholem hastened to
respond that the real value could not have been more than
$10,000 and that he was ignorant of Friedman’s escapade, which
had been hatched more than four months after his departure
from Germany.
It is hard to know where the truth lies here. In the chaos of
postwar Germany, theft of looted books was hardly unknown,
and, in any case, Scholem certainly believed that the five boxes—
as well as all the other stolen materials—belonged to the Jewish
people, and that the Hebrew University was their proper trustee.
To take such materials, far from constituting theft, was more
properly to restore them to their rightful owners or, since most
of their owners had been murdered, to the nation to which, for
Zionists, all Jews belonged. Nonetheless, he might not have
actually conspired with Friedman in this dramatic heist. Either
way, Scholem the bibliophile found that the Shoah of the Jew-
ish books provided a singular way for him to connect to the
Shoah of the Jewish people.
Although Scholem’s trip to Europe in 1946 was his most

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intensive effort to rescue books, he continued to be involved as

the deputy chair, with Hannah Arendt as secretary, with the
Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. Despite the initial distrust be-
tween Scholem and the Americans, he came quickly to realize
that it was more important to rescue the books before they dis-
appeared into foreign hands than to win them only for the Yi-
shuv. A common front with the Americans, who, after all, were
friends and colleagues, now seemed essential. Tensions did not
entirely vanish, however, as later letters between Scholem and
Arendt attest.
When he returned to Jerusalem at the end of August 1946,
he was exhausted both physically and mentally. According to
his own testimony and that of Fania, he seems to have suffered
an emotional collapse: unable to work and peripatetically mov-
ing from one bed to another in his apartment. An inveterate
socializer under normal circumstances, he received barely any
visitors. This depression—the diagnosis seems apposite here—
lasted nearly a year. It is hard to diagnose its cause. Certainly,
Scholem’s firsthand encounter with the effects of the Holo-
caust had to have been traumatic, as was the encounter with the
ruins of Germany. But in light of his state of mind during the
war, his reaction to his 1946 trip appears to be the culmination
of a longer crisis.
On December 5, 1947, by now recovered, Scholem cele-
brated his fiftieth birthday. His students—and at this point he
had something like a dozen of them—staged a celebration. Jo-
seph Weiss, who had come to Palestine from Hungary in 1940,
gave the most memorable speech, which was published later in
the daily Haaretz. He pointed out the contradiction between
Scholem’s personality, which reveled in “dialectical negations
and paradoxical affirmations,” and his seemingly dry scholar-
ship. Weiss tried to resolve this contradiction by arguing that
their teacher camouflaged his true metaphysical commitments,
which were by definition esoteric. It would seem, said Weiss,

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that Scholem was drawn to his esoteric subject by his own de-
sire to keep his true motives hidden.5
Weiss surely identified something essential in Scholem as a
historian of Jewish mysticism: the paradox of a seemingly secu-
lar scholar immersing himself with such passion in the most
arcane religious texts. As should now be abundantly clear, the
power of Scholem’s scholarship lay in his ability to make it ur-
gently important to modern readers by conveying the urgent
importance that he himself felt. And he recognized that Weiss
was right on target. In a letter to Hugo and Escha Bergman,
who were in Sweden at the time, he reported on Weiss’s chutz-
pah with approval: in discerning that Scholem did indeed have
an esoteric metaphysical agenda, his student had learned some-
thing crucial from his teacher.
The relationship between Scholem and Weiss was, in fact,
one of the most important for both of them. Weiss had a highly
sensitive temperament, and he would find it impossible to live
in the pressure cooker of the new State of Israel. Despite his
Zionist commitment, Scholem was sympathetic to Weiss’s di-
lemma and worked to find Weiss a fellowship in Britain or Amer-
ica. However, when Weiss submitted his dissertation from En-
gland, Scholem refused to accept it, considering its last chapter
incomprehensible and lacking in scholarly foundation. Never-
theless, their epistolary relationship continued. Weiss wrote to
Scholem using an elevated, rabbinic diction that at times became
tongue in cheek. And Scholem responded, always supportively.
Weiss planned to write a biography of Scholem modeled on
Nathan Sternhartz’s biography of his master, the Hasidic rebbe
Nahman of Bratslav, which is composed of a string of anecdotes.
Weiss was profoundly influenced by Rabbi Nahman, about whom
he wrote several seminal articles. Like Nahman’s disciple, Weiss
collected anecdotes about Scholem and wrote them down on
scraps of paper. The scraps, however, remained scraps, and the
book was never published.

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In 1966, Weiss manifested symptoms of flagrant schizo-

phrenia and, in 1969, committed suicide. His death was shat-
tering for Scholem, who at a memorial half a year later spoke
of Weiss as his favorite student. It might not be too speculative
to suggest that Weiss was the closest Scholem ever had to a son.
Later insinuations that Scholem had driven Weiss to suicide by
not accepting his dissertation are belied by the letters, which
reveal a very different story, characterized by intimacy and pa-
ternal concern.
Scholem’s letter to Hugo and Escha Bergman of 1947 also
conveyed his thanks to Hugo for an essay dedicated to Scholem
on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in which Bergman, pos-
sibly referring to the last sentence of Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism, called on Scholem to take up the mantle of prophet
in addition to that of professor. Scholem responded that he no
longer believed in prophecy, and he satirized Martin Buber for
posing in the phony mantle of the prophet Elijah. He was prob-
ably referring to the testimony that Buber and Judah Magnes
gave to the U.N. Special Commission on Palestine, at which
the two, representing the Ichud group, had argued for a bi­
national state. Even Magnes, wrote Scholem, “whose honesty
clearly far exceeds that of Buber,” seemed to have given himself
over to flights of illusion. Scholem obviously thought a bina-
tional state in Palestine had become impossible by late 1947.6
By the time he wrote to the Bergmans, the U.N. General
Assembly had already voted to partition Palestine, a civil war
between the Jews and Arabs had broken out, and sniping had
become a daily occurrence on the “seam line” in Jerusalem be-
tween the two communities. By the spring of 1948, Jerusalem
was under siege, cut off from the coastal plain and enduring
food shortages as well as attacks on civilians. Scholem was to spend
the months of the siege in Jerusalem, and he even noted that
fact on a manuscript of lectures on Hasidism that he delivered
in New York in 1949. In his diary from the period, he inserted

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his identification card for the Civil Guard, so it seems that he

did not remain holed up in his study during the momentous
events of Israel’s War of Independence. He was also drafted by
the Haganah (the Jewish military force) to prevent the plunder
of books. As he put it amusingly, “Which meant that I prevented
myself from taking part in the corresponding looting.”7
But he was also engaged in a project with contemporary
ramifications that he published in the year of the war: a piece of
detective work into the origins of the Star of David as a Jewish
symbol. Here was the historian taking up the role of debunker
of a historical myth. As opposed to what everyone commonly
believed, he argued, the Star of David had appeared only infre-
quently as a Jewish symbol before the nineteenth century. It was
primarily a magical symbol used on amulets. (It is a reflection
of Scholem’s view of the Kabbalah that Kabbalistic magic—
called “practical Kabbalah”—was not considered essentially
Jewish, as was “theosophical” Kabbalah.) The Prague commu-
nity was possibly the first to adopt the Star as a Jewish symbol
in the sixteenth century, perhaps even earlier. From there, it
spread to other central European Jewish communities.
The Star seems to have acquired messianic significance in
the Sabbatian movement and its aftermath, as, of course, it did
much later in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. In the nine-
teenth century, Jews eager to prove how similar they were to their
Christian neighbors, used it to adorn their synagogues. When
the Zionists put the six-pointed star on their flag, they were
merely adopting for nationalist purposes what had earlier stood
for assimilation. But the symbol for them served the subtle func-
tion of pointing to the future—and thus to secular redemption—
rather than to past glories, since its association with King David
was purely legendary.
In his argument, Scholem was leveling a hidden critique of
the relationship of Zionism to Jewish history just as the move-
ment had succeeded in winning a state: its cardinal symbol was

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less historical than its members thought. The Star of David

was, in Scholem’s telling, an “empty symbol.” It acquired real
meaning not when the German Reformers put it on their syna-
gogues or when the Zionists put it on their flag but when the
Nazis made the Jews wear it as an emblem of degradation:

The yellow Jewish star, as a sign of exclusion and ultimately

of annihilation, has accompanied the Jews on their path of
humiliation and horror, of battle and heroic resistance. Under
this sign they were murdered; under this sign they came to
Israel. If there is a fertile soil of historical experience from
which symbols draw their meaning, it would seem to be
given here. . . . [T]he sign which in our own days has been
sanctified by suffering and dread has become worthy of illu-
minating the path to life and reconstruction. Before ascend-
ing, the path led down into the abyss; there the symbol re-
ceived its ultimate humiliation and there it won its greatness.8

Only out of the horror of the Holocaust had the symbol para-
doxically become its opposite, a badge of pride. In these scant
lines—and almost nowhere else—did Scholem give the most
powerful expression to his feelings about the Holocaust and its
connection to the State of Israel. And it is doubly striking that
he published this essay in the same place, Luah ha-Aretz, in
which a few years earlier he had published his cry of despair
over the state of Jewish Studies. He seemed to believe that just
as Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbatianism were responses to the
expulsion from Spain, so a myth of redemption was necessary
in modern times in response to the destruction of European
Jewry. Just as Shabbatai Zvi had descended into the abyss of
antinomianism, so the Jewish people had descended into the
abyss of genocide in order to be resurrected. The State of Is-
rael, while not the messianic redemption, was thus a fitting an-
swer to the greatest catastrophe of Jewish history.
For Scholem, the creation of the first Jewish state in two

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thousand years aroused ambivalent feelings. It was a necessary

response to the Holocaust, but he worried that it would not
always have positive consequences. In an interview after his
death, Fania Scholem reported that he said at the time that the
Jewish people would pay a high price for a state won under the
circumstances of the time. To have experienced in such a short
space both the Holocaust and the creation of the state was
perhaps more than any people could bear. Because now all the
resources of the Jews had to go into defense, the spiritual role
of Israel would have to suffer. And it is hardly necessary to add
that for Scholem, the true task of Zionism was spiritual: the
cultural renewal of the Jewish people. Yet there can be little
doubt that he was deeply moved by the drama of renewed Jew-
ish sovereignty. Shortly after the war, he and Fania officially
changed their names, as did many Israelis of the time. The new
Hebrew state now formally recognized him as Gershom.
With the end of the War of Independence, Scholem turned
his full attention back to his research. In 1949, he delivered a
second series of lectures, on Hasidism, at the Jewish Institute
of Religion in New York and on the way back to Israel partici-
pated for the first time in the Eranos Conference in Ascona,
Switzerland. This marked the beginning of yearly journeys to
Ascona, trips that allowed him also to vacation in some of his
favorite Alpine landscapes. He would give twenty-nine lectures
there between 1949 and 1979. The Eranos Conferences gave
him the opportunity to present his work in German. In an ad-
dress in 1974 upon receiving the Literary Prize of the Bavarian
Academy of Arts, Scholem spoke of his shock on encountering
the German language in 1946 after the Nazis had so degraded
it. He noted that the Eranos Conferences allowed him to “once
again express myself properly in the German language without
submitting to the provocation originating in that same shock.”9
Although the Eranos Conferences were initiated by fol-

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lowers of Jung in 1933—and Jung participated in them until the

early 1950s—they were hardly “Jungian.” Instead, they included
a wide array of intellectuals from different disciplines, includ-
ing the history of religions; Mircea Eliade, the founder of the
“Chicago School” of History of Religions was a central figure.
(Eliade had been a member of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard
in the 1930s, news of which in the 1970s created a crisis, not un-
like his earlier discomfort with Jung, for Scholem, who had be-
friended the historian of religion.) Scholem became an impor-
tant participant in this cosmopolitan circle of intellectuals, but
in a diary entry in 1952, he noted with chagrin that the partici-
pants were interested in him more as a “Berlin” intellectual than
as an Israeli. Eranos also offered him the opportunity to de-
velop his ideas in a comparative context beyond his immediate
field, which led to presentations such as “Kabbalah and Myth,”
“The Historical Development of the Shekhinah,” and “The
Messianic Idea in Judaism.”
In 1951 he recorded a surprising visit in his diary. Ben Zion
Dinur, his historian colleague at the Hebrew University who
was serving as Israel’s first minister of education, had come to
propose that Scholem accept an appointment as the next presi-
dent of the Hebrew University. Judah Magnes, the founding
president, had died of a heart attack in 1948. A long discussion
between the two ensued, but Scholem refused the offer. As he
wrote, he had no patience for idle chitchat with wealthy donors
and feared that his evident boredom would undermine his ef-
fectiveness. He was undoubtedly correct about why he might
not be the right man for the job, but Dinur’s proposition is clear
evidence of the stature that Scholem had acquired not only in
his own field but in the university generally.
If the 1940s were a time of despair and depression, Scho-
lem seems to have recovered his footing by the 1950s. At long
last, he was able to make great progress on the delayed study of
Sabbatianism. In early 1957, he published a two-volume biogra-

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phy of the mystical Messiah with Am Oved. This massive work

was limited to the Sabbatian movement during the Messiah’s
lifetime; the volume about the movement after his death never
materialized, even though Scholem was to publish many ex-
cerpts from it in the form of lengthy articles.
Sabbatai Sevi (to use the spelling of the enlarged 1973 En­
glish translation) was an instant sensation in Israel. For those
who had not read—or could not read—the chapter on Sabba-
tianism in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the biography pre-
sented for the first time the whole complex and tragic story of
the Messiah from Izmir. Here, Scholem expanded on his sug-
gestion in Major Trends that Shabbatai Zvi suffered from bipolar
disorder or manic depression, quoting a variety of sources. In a
lengthy introduction, he advanced his argument that the prox-
imate cause of the great messianic movement was not something
external to Jewish history, such as the Chmielnicki massacres of
1648–1649, but rather ideas internal to Judaism and, more spe-
cifically, the Kabbalah. The seventeenth-century dissemination
of Luria’s sixteenth-century teachings, which refocused Kab-
balah on redemption rather than creation, created the intellec-
tual ferment whose result was the Sabbatian movement. For
Scholem, it was ideas ultimately that moved history.
Scholem’s biography of Shabbatai Zvi cemented his repu-
tation, which had been building for decades, as perhaps the
preeminent historian of the Jews. The book was bold, passion-
ately written, and deeply researched, reading like a detective
novel (Scholem’s favorite leisure reading). Building on his ear-
lier work, it advanced the highly original argument that a move-
ment seen by many as marginal and unimportant was, in fact,
the central drama in Jewish history on the doorstep of the mod-
ern world. Scholem’s painstaking assembly of the widest range
of sources was intended to demonstrate how the Sabbatian move-
ment during Shabbatai’s life encompassed the whole Jewish
world, from Yemen in the south to Morocco in the west, Am-

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sterdam in the north, and Poland to the east. From his prison
cell in Gallipoli, Shabbatai Zvi and his immediate retinue con-
ducted a propaganda campaign throughout the Ottoman Em-
pire and beyond to create a truly national movement of re-
demption. And in the last pages of his long book, Scholem turned
from the biography of Shabbatai Zvi to the memory of the
movement in stirring language that should now be familiar:

The Sabbatian legend is the historical form in which the

person of Sabbatai Sevi affected later generations. . . . A
longing for redemption through the mystical power of holi-
ness, combined with a nightmarish awareness of demonic
force, invested this legend with a sense of mystery and trag-
edy, present even in the versions of the non-Sabbatians try-
ing to recount the story of the great messianic revival that
shook a whole people. . . . Was it not a great opportunity
missed, rather than a big lie? A victory of the hostile powers
rather than the collapse of a vain thing? . . . The legend of
the great actor and imposter, and the legend of the elect whose
mission ended in failure, together form the legend of Sab-
batai Sevi as it lives in the memory of the Jewish people.10

For all these reasons, the book excited not only admiration
but also opposition. Chief among the opponents was Baruch
Kurzweil, an Orthodox professor of Hebrew literature at Bar-
Ilan University. Although Scholem had crossed swords with any
number of critics over the years, his controversy with Kurzweil
was undoubtedly the bitterest as well as the one with the high-
est stakes. Over a period of ten years starting in 1958, Kurzweil
leveled a series of attacks that aimed to turn Scholem into the
arch-demon of secular Zionism. Scholem presented himself as
an objective historian, charged Kurzweil, but in fact he identi-
fied with the Sabbatians by creating a subjective, historical nar-
rative that placed Sabbatianism at the center of Jewish history.
Kurzweil averred that Scholem had succumbed to a belief in
“demonic irrationalism” and that his research on Sabbatianism

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was “a grandiose and dangerous attempt to bestow a secular in-

terpretation of Judaism.”11 Scholem had become not only the
historian of the messianic movement but also its advocate, since
he embraced Sabbatianism for its nihilism. More or less ac-
cepting Scholem’s interpretation, Kurzweil argued that secular
modernity, including Zionism, was the long-term product of
the Sabbatian revolt against rabbinic authority. Far from for-
eign imports, and here Kurzweil agreed with Scholem, these
modern movements derived from an internal Jewish source.
In this way, wrote Kurzweil, Scholem undermined the def-
inition of what constitutes Jewishness, which, for Kurzweil was
rabbinic law and biblical ethics. If Sabbatianism was as legiti-
mately Jewish as these older traditions, then Judaism lacked any
essential meaning. Scholem wanted the heretics to be counted
as “kosher” Jews. Even worse, by embracing Sabbatian nihil-
ism, Scholem was linking it to modern movements of myth
that rejected the Jewish idea of God. Here, Kurzweil specifi-
cally referred to Jung’s celebration of myth and the uncon-
scious. Scholem, he said, was nothing but a Jewish mouthpiece
for Jung, who, as we have seen, had associations with Nazism.
In short, Kurzweil drew a direct line between Sabbatianism,
modern secularism, Jung, and Nazism. By serving as the thread
to connect all of these movements, Scholem had allied himself
with the devil and embraced the demonic.
Kurzweil’s frontal attack on Scholem was part of his larger
battle against all forms of Jewish secularism and especially against
modern Jewish historians, starting with those of the nineteenth
century and including Scholem and his colleagues at the He-
brew University. (Sitting at the new Bar-Ilan University, Kurz-
weil sometimes sounded as if he had a chip on his shoulder be-
cause he did not have a position in Jerusalem.) He echoed and
even quoted Scholem’s 1944 essay on the Science of Judaism,
but included Scholem in the list of offenders. However, where
Scholem had upbraided his colleagues for leaving the “demonic”

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out of their picture of Jewish history, Kurzweil turned the ta-

bles and argued that they had all included the demonic (that is,
secularism) and that this was their sin. With Scholem, the he-
retical potential in all the earlier historians had become actual.
In his attack on Scholem as the modern apologist for Sab-
batianism, Kurzweil was reenacting the anti-Sabbatian polem-
ics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moses Hagiz,
Jacob Sasportas, and Jacob Emden, rabbinic authorities of the
time, had conducted heresy-hunting campaigns against both
explicit and covert Sabbatians. Kurzweil took up the same cud-
gels against Scholem, as if the messianic movement had now
morphed into secular Zionism, with Scholem hiding his true
Sabbatian identity behind the guise of an “objective” historian,
just as earlier Sabbatians had disguised themselves as rabbinic
Jews. In his argument for incorporating such heretical move-
ments as Sabbatianism as legitimate expressions of Jewish his-
tory, Scholem had become a heretic himself.
Kurzweil was the most extreme critic of Scholem, although
at the same time Scholem’s colleague Zvi Werblowsky wrote a
similar review of Sabbatai Sevi, claiming that Scholem and his
students were sympathetic to the Sabbatians. Werblowsky, how-
ever, worked closely with Scholem; he translated the biography
for publication in English. After Scholem’s death, the Israeli
philosopher Eliezer Schweid would unleash a similar attack.
As we have already had occasion to note, however, Scho-
lem’s attitude toward Sabbatianism was more complicated than
these critics allowed. Yes, he was fascinated by this movement
of heresy and believed strongly that it was a crucial force in
Jewish history; to ignore it meant to ignore the role that the
demonic played. His view of history included all the competing
forces: rational and irrational, philosophical and mythic, legal
and antinomian. As opposed to Kurzweil, he was not prepared to
expel the heretics. But at the same time, as his politics demon-
strate, he was equally worried about the effect the demonic

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might have on the Jews, possibly destroying Zionism by turn-

ing Jewish renewal into apocalyptic destruction. The dialectic
of history, which he found so compelling, was also extraordi-
narily dangerous.
Scholem never responded publicly to Kurzweil, although
his archive contains some correspondence between them. He did
not recognize himself in Kurzweil’s angry portrait. Kurzweil’s
attempt to connect him to Nazism via Jung was particularly of-
fensive, as well as irresponsible. As we have seen, Scholem satis-
fied himself that Jung had atoned for his earlier sympathies for
Nazism, and, in any case, the two men crossed paths only once,
at the Eranos Conference in 1952. Although he occasionally
used a Jungian term like “archetype,” his fascination with myth
—one of Jung’s important contributions to psychoanalysis—
predated any knowledge of Jung by several decades (he owed it
much more to Martin Buber). Scholem was not a Jungian, and
his participation in the Eranos Conferences was a thin reed on
which to hang an association with Nazism.
Nevertheless, aspects of Kurzweil’s critique are worth tak-
ing seriously. The problem, not of objectivity but of the identi-
fication of a historian with his sources, was one that Scholem
wrestled with in his own mind. He was not a Kabbalist, but he
found compelling resonance between the Kabbalah’s theology
and his own modern meditations on God and revelation. He
did not believe in divine revelation at Mount Sinai, but he be-
lieved that God worked through the literary tradition. He was
not a Sabbatian, but he found in the Sabbatians’ desire for na-
tional redemption and for revolt against a decaying world in-
spiration for his own revolt. In fact, Scholem’s historical work
remains so powerful, even decades after his death, because of
the interplay between his scholarship and questions that mod-
ern Jews face.
Although he did not address Kurzweil directly, a highly
unusual publication of his shortly after Kurzweil’s review of the

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Shabbatai Zvi biography can be read as a kind of response. This

was a contribution to a Festschrift for Daniel Brody, whose
publishing house in Zurich brought out many of Scholem’s Ger-
man writings in the decade and a half after the war. To a certain
extent, “burying” a publication in a Festschrift was a way of in-
dicating some ambivalence about it, but Scholem did allow it
to be included later in one of the volumes of his collected Ger-
man essays under the title Judaica. Scholem titled his contribu-
tion to the Brody volume “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms About
the Kabbalah.” In writing in this laconic form, he was harking
back to the ninety-five theses he wrote in his youth and dedi-
cated to Walter Benjamin. He was also no doubt alluding to
Benjamin’s own last writing from 1940, his “On the Concept
of History,” which is organized in the form of ten theses. And,
of course, in compiling ten aphorisms, rather than some other
number, he was alluding to the Kabbalists’ ten sefirot: his aph-
orisms would share something with the Kabbalah, even though
he was not a Kabbalist.
The first aphorism deals directly with the irony of writing
the history (or philology, as he calls it in the aphorism) of the
Kabbalah. The historian deals with the “veil of fog” that sur-
rounds his subject, that is, its historical residue rather than its
essence.12 But this is also the problem of the Kabbalist: he trans-
mits what can be known of God but not the ineffable and un-
knowable essence of God. Kabbalah means “tradition” in He-
brew, but the Kabbalist transmits something that can never be
transmitted since it lies beyond language. And this, too, is the
problem of the historian, who can never recover the immedi-
ate truth of the past, but only the truth as it has been refracted
through centuries of the literary tradition. Scholem thus played
with the ironic similarity between the secular historian and the
Kabbalist: both seek to uncover a hidden truth, although for
the first that truth is in history, while for the second it is God.
In the tenth aphorism, he returned, twenty years later, to

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what he wrote in the 1937 birthday letter to Salman Schocken.

A hundred years before Kafka, he notes, the Frankist from Prague
Jonas Wehle wrote a never-published manuscript in which he
attempted to formulate heretical messianism in the language of
the Enlightenment. Wehle raised the question of whether par-
adise had not lost more with the expulsion of Adam and Eve than
had human beings themselves. Could it be that some “sympa-
thy of souls” connected Wehle with Kafka, whose own writing
Scholem had earlier called “heretical Kabbalah” on “the border
between religion and nihilism”?13 Since Scholem identified so
strongly with Kafka, we would not be in error in assuming a
“sympathy of souls” between Scholem himself and the Frankist
Jonas Wehle. Again, Scholem was no Sabbatian or Frankist,
but he definitely felt a kinship with those who searched for re-
ligious meaning at the outer limits of religion.
A publication from the next year gave him the opportunity
to address some of these questions from a historical—as opposed
to the “unhistorical”—perspective. In 1959, he gave his annual
lecture at the Eranos Conference, titled “Toward an Understand-
ing of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (like most of his lectures,
this one was first published in German in the Eranos Yearbook).
The essay is one of Scholem’s most capacious and synthesizing,
ranging far beyond the Kabbalah back to the Bible and forward
to modern times. He posited that Judaism has three attitudes
toward the world: conservative (the reign of halakhah, or Jew-
ish Law), restorative (restoring the ancient Kingdom of David
with its temple and sacrifices), and utopian (resurrection of the
dead, eternal peace, and so on). The messianic idea is made up
of the dialectical interplay among all three.
One radical type of utopian messianism is apocalyptic, the
belief in a catastrophic rupture in history in which the world
as we know it would end. He says about the apocalyptic: “From
the point of view of the Halakhah, to be sure, Judaism appears
as a well-ordered house, and it is a profound truth that a well-

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ordered house is a dangerous thing. Something of Messianic

apocalypticism penetrates into this house; perhaps I can best
describe it as a kind of anarchic breeze.” Scholem would seem
to be endorsing apocalyptic movements like Sabbatianism as
just such an “anarchic breeze.” Yet a closer look at his argument
reveals something different: “I would say that the great men of
Halakhah are completely entwined in the realm of popular
apocalypticism when they come to speak of redemption.”14 In
other words, the very “anarchic breeze” so necessary to revive
a conservative tradition is part of that tradition and not a for-
eign or heretical infection. And so Scholem should be under-
stood as a champion not only of the heretical but rather of a
tradition that is at once conservative and revolutionary.
He concluded the essay with a reflection on “the price de-
manded by Messianism.” To live the messianic idea means to
live “a life lived in deferment,” rather than a life lived in the
present moment. Because the Jews have lived such a deferred
life, they have discharged the tension from time to time in
movements of messianic redemption:

Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompa-

nied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in
the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to
Zion. . . . Born of the horror and destruction that was Jewish
history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not
to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messian-
ism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure
this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the
crisis of the Messianic claim which has virtually been con-
jured up—that is the question which out of his great and
dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to
his future.15

This is one of the most stirring passages in all of Scholem’s

oeuvre and it is a summation of his thinking about Zionism and
messianism going back to the 1920s. Zionism is not a messianic

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movement, even as it borrows so much of its energy from the

messianic tradition. Where messianism reaches for unattain-
able “meta-history,” Zionism acts within the “concrete realm.”
But because it borrows so much of its hope from messianism,
it risks falling into the same abyss as Sabbatianism and destroy-
ing everything it sought to create. The Holocaust, which might
be the very spark that ignites such an apocalyptic catastrophe,
could also be the ground for building an enduring edifice within
history.

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 9

The Sage of Jerusalem

In 1958, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, Gershom Scho-

lem was awarded the Israel Prize, the Jewish state’s highest ac-
colade. It was an award for a lifetime of scholarship, but it was
perhaps no coincidence that it came only a year after the pub-
lication of his most controversial work, Sabbatai Sevi. Despite—
or perhaps because of—the radical implications of his work,
by the beginning of the 1960s, Scholem had become that rare
­luminary in the scholarly firmament: a public intellectual who
spoke with authority beyond his field of expertise. He was now
sought after to make statements on affairs of the day. He was
also widely seen as an almost oracular voice on all matters Jew-
ish, expressing a viewpoint that was at once Zionist and secular
yet deeply steeped in Jewish history.
But the years had not dulled his sharp tongue or curbed his
zest for polemics. In 1962, he received an invitation from Man-
fred Schloesser to contribute to a volume in honor of the Ger-

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man Jewish writer Margarete Susman. The theme of the vol-

ume, wrote Schloesser, was to be the “German-Jewish dialogue.”
On December 18, Scholem wrote back to Schloesser in high
dudgeon. There was no such thing as a “German-Jewish dia-
logue,” he thundered. It was really a one-sided dialogue, in which
the Jewish supplicant never received an answer, an unrequited
love affair of the Jews for German culture (we recall that he had
already made this point in virtually the same terms in 1939 in
response to Hannah Arendt’s book on Rahel Varnhagen). The
only Germans who took this “dialogue” seriously were the anti-
Semites, and they, of course, had a violent idea of how to end it.
Although Scholem never mentioned him by name, he may
have had in mind Martin Buber’s notion of dialogue, which
Buber articulated in I and Thou in 1923. The true kind of dia-
logue, in which one partner sees the full humanity of the other,
was precisely what was missing between Germans and Jews.
Scholem published his reply to Schloesser in the Susman Fest-
schrift and afterward independently as “Against the Myth of
the German-Jewish Dialogue.” He later expanded it into a long
lecture and essay, “Jews and Germans.” Tellingly, he wrote these
essays in German and published them in German venues: his
intended audience was German rather than Jewish, which meant
that in the process of rejecting the dialogue he was actually re-
newing it, if on different terms. And we might say that Scholem’s
many writings in German after the war, as well as his frequent
lectures in Germany, were all intended to create a dialogue with
the Germans on a new basis. While he judged the German na-
tion as a whole guilty for the crimes of the Nazis, he neverthe-
less believed that there were many individuals innocent of these
crimes who might provide the basis for this new dialogue.
Scholem’s critique of the idea of a Jewish–German symbio-
sis or dialogue came simultaneously with the capture, trial, and
execution of Adolf Eichmann, and it is probable that the con-
nection was not coincidental. A short article that he wrote against

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capital punishment for Eichmann made this clear. Unlike those,

such as Martin Buber, who opposed the death penalty on prin-
ciple, Scholem made a different argument: the German people
might see the execution of Eichmann as expiation for their sins
and a way of providing closure to the Holocaust. For Scholem,
the wound had to be kept open if there were to be any hope of
future dialogue between Jews and Germans, since only on the
basis of Germany accepting its guilt could there be anything to
discuss.
The Eichmann affair started on May 11, 1960, when Israeli
secret agents apprehended Eichmann, one of the key function-
aries in the Holocaust, near his home in Argentina and spirited
him away to Israel. On May 22, Israel’s prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion, electrified the country with his announcement to
the Knesset that Eichmann was in Israel and would stand trial
for his role in the destruction of the European Jews. The trial
opened in Jerusalem nearly a year later, on April 11, 1961.
The New Yorker commissioned Hannah Arendt to cover
the trial, although she was only present for a few weeks of the
proceedings. While in Jerusalem, she reconnected with old
friends from Germany, but Scholem was away on a research trip
and they missed each other. Perhaps had they been able to dis-
cuss Arendt’s initial impressions of the trial, matters might have
turned out differently. But in the event, Arendt published a se-
ries of articles and then turned them into a book in 1963 under
the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
The book excited a controversy that still reverberates more
than a half-century later. Arendt blasted David Ben-Gurion—
an old nemesis of hers—for staging a show trial that aimed to
tell the whole story of Holocaust, beyond Eichmann’s more
limited role. She leveled criticism at the Judenräte, the Jewish
councils forced by the Nazis to do their bidding. And she por-
trayed Eichmann himself as “banal,” his evil more a crime of
thoughtlessness than of pathological anti-Semitism.

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When Scholem received the book, he exploded. He wrote

Arendt a scathing letter, questioning her condemnation of the
Jewish councils and arguing that no one could pass judgment
about their behavior under conditions of extreme terror. He
took particular exception to her sarcastic tone, charging that
she lacked ahavat yisrael (love of Israel). Arendt responded by
insisting that she loved no particular people—Germans, Amer-
icans, or Jews—but only her friends. She reminded Scholem
that she had never thought of herself as anything but a Jew, a
biological given like her gender.
Since gender plays virtually no role in Arendt’s philosophy,
one might be tempted to conclude that Jewishness was also im-
material to her, which would explain her lack of ahavat yisrael.
However, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, the book that made
her reputation more than a decade earlier, as well as in the book
on Rahel Varnhagen and numerous essays over the years, Arendt
grounded her historical and political analysis squarely in Jew-
ish life in the modern world. It was the experience of Jewish
refugees, for example, that forced the world to confront the
collapse of the nation-state. The Jewish condition was at the
very heart of Arendt’s writing, even if her gender was not. Per-
haps she did not love the Jewish people, but she was certainly
obsessed with them. And, conversely, while Scholem obviously
identified with the Jewish people and its fate, his attitude, going
back to his youth, toward those many Jews with whom he dis-
agreed could hardly be called “love of Israel.” In short, the de-
bate about ahavat yisrael, over which so much scholarly ink has
been spilled, may be a red herring.
It was certainly true that Arendt’s sharp tone toward vari-
ous Jewish authorities, from David Ben-Gurion to the leaders
of the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils, was often uncharitably
hostile and reflected an inability to walk in their shoes. (Her
hostility to Jewish leaders was long-standing and had not started
with the Eichmann book.) But even if Scholem was correct that

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it was too soon to render historical judgment on those who had

to confront the Nazi terror, Arendt’s willingness to offer a sharp
critique of the official Jewish leadership was something Scho-
lem, at least in his youth, would have applauded. And he re-
mained highly critical of Ben-Gurion’s statism and realpolitik
well into the 1960s. Now, however, he saw Arendt’s hostility to
the way the Israelis tried Eichmann as a demonstration of her
lack of understanding of the relationship between the Jewish
state and the Holocaust.
One aspect of the debate between Scholem and Arendt has
drawn less attention than it deserves. Scholem pointed out that
in subtitling her book “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” Arendt
was renouncing the idea of “radical evil,” which had played an
important role in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt re-
sponded that she had indeed decided that there was a kind of
bureaucratic evil that was essential to understanding the crime
of genocide. Here was a place where Scholem’s own research
pointed in a different direction: he believed in the existence of
the demonic, the source of what Arendt had called radical evil.
If the demonic in the case of Sabbatianism had produced a ni-
hilistic revolt against rabbinic law, in the case of the Nazis it
gave rise to mass murder. No amount of intellectual somer-
saults over “thoughtlessness” could conceal this eruption of the
demonic. While the demonic in Scholem’s view—as well as in
the view of the Kabbalah—was a dialectical product of the di-
vine, its origins in God by no means lessened its malevolence
or destructive power.
Scholem and Arendt recognized that their epistolary ex-
change was of great intellectual importance, and they agreed
to publish it in both German—the language of the letters—and
English. Although a tremendous amount of writing has swirled
around Arendt’s Eichmann book over the years, the Scholem-
Arendt exchange remains seminal and was recognized as such
at the time. But the bitterness of the exchange persisted. Arendt

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broke off communications. When Scholem was on his way to

New York in 1964, he wrote to her in the hopes of breaking
through her silence and setting up a meeting. Evidently still
deeply wounded, she again failed to respond. The final letter
in their correspondence was thus from him, and for the last de-
cade or so of Arendt’s life (she died in 1975) an unbridgeable
chasm separated the two.
In fact, even before the Eichmann trial, Arendt’s private
view of Scholem had become critical. In 1957, she wrote her
impressions of Scholem to her friend Kurt Blumenfeld, who had
warned her to beware of Scholem: “He [Scholem] is highly intel-
ligent but not really clever. In addition, he is self-absorbed. . . .
He fundamentally thinks that: the center of the world is Israel;
the center of Israel is Jerusalem; the center of Jerusalem is the
university; the center of the university is—Scholem. And the
worst thing is that he seriously thinks that the world has a cen-
ter.”1 Arendt here ironically adapted a saying of the Hasidic
master Nahman of Bratslav that may apply to the Messiah, put-
ting Scholem instead in the center. Despite—or perhaps be-
cause of—their friendship, she equated what she viewed as his
narcissism with his Zionism.
Five years after the Eichmann controversy, Scholem re-
turned to what he perceived as Arendt’s arrogance in a private
response to an Arendt essay on Walter Benjamin. Arendt had
flippantly said that Benjamin was prepared to learn Hebrew
when the Zionists promised him three hundred German marks
or, later, dialectical materialism when the Marxists offered him
a thousand French francs. Noting that Arendt had once been a
half-Communist and, at other times, a Zionist, Scholem could
not understand how she spoke “from her sovereign height” so
disparagingly of two movements she had once endorsed.2 Need-
less to say, he rejected out of hand her characterization of Ben-
jamin’s motives (although she might not have been totally off
the mark).

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There was something deeply tragic about this polemic:

two friends, who came from similar backgrounds and had both
come to Zionism in rebellion against German Jewish assimila-
tion, were now driven apart by what should have united them.
Scholem accused Arendt of having been infected by ideas of
the German left, but he surely knew, as Arendt reminded him,
that her intellectual roots were in German philosophy, as were
his. They both defined their Zionism in utopian terms. But
Scholem’s years living in Israel necessarily distanced him from
Arendt, who did not share the profound existential experiences
of Israel’s War of Independence and struggles to form a new
society composed of immigrants and survivors. Arendt could
not fully understand how all of these experiences shaped Scho-
lem’s response to the Eichmann trial and rendered him hostile to
what he perceived as Arendt’s airy intellectual exercise. In the
end, the overbearing personalities of both these intellectuals,
as well as their different life experiences, got the better of their
friendship and destroyed it.
Side by side with this very public falling-out with Arendt
came a new set of polemics against Scholem’s old nemesis, Mar-
tin Buber. Buber and Scholem had by now been colleagues at the
Hebrew University since 1938, and relations between them were
generally quite collegial. Nevertheless, in 1961, Scholem let loose
in the American magazine Commentary with an attack on Buber’s
interpretation of Hasidism. In a nutshell, he criticized Buber’s
understanding of the eighteenth-century Pietistic movement
as ahistorical, based on Hasidic tales rather than on the more
theoretical Hasidic sermons. He charged that Buber had pro-
jected his own existentialist philosophy on a movement whose
core theology actually renounced the world, rather than, as
Buber argued, affirmed it. Whereas Buber thought that “wor-
shipping through the material” meant that the Hasidim made
the everyday sacred, Scholem contended that the phrase actu-
ally meant the opposite: to “annihilate” the material world.3

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When Buber, deeply wounded by what he regarded as

Scholem’s profound misunderstanding of his work, responded
to this devastating critique two years later, Scholem’s private
reaction was scornful. He wrote to Theodor Adorno: “Three
weeks ago, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, old Buber published a
rejoinder—the lamentable response of a helpless blabberer—
to my criticism of his Hasidic interpretations.” Two years later,
on June 20, 1965, he again wrote to Adorno, this time reporting
on Buber’s funeral a week earlier. Scholem had been asked to
say a few words of eulogy. He admitted to Adorno that he was
reluctant to speak lest he utter “a bald-face lie.” Fortunately,
Fania had provided him with three “talking points” which al-
lowed him to squeak by without revealing his real feelings about
his deceased colleague.4 And three years after Buber’s death,
Scholem wrote to George Lichtheim that the first time he saw
a Jew with a picture of Jesus on the wall was when he visited
Buber in the Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin during the
First World War. The tone of the letter makes it clear that he
had viewed it then—as he continued to view it—with a measure
of contempt.
The year after Buber’s death, Scholem chose to devote his
Eranos lecture to “Buber’s Conception of Judaism,” which is
less overtly critical than the earlier essay on Buber’s interpre-
tation of Hasidism. Scholem starts out by explaining Buber’s
attraction—as a kind of Jewish heretic—for young, assimilated
central European Jews of the early twentieth century. But he
then levels a devastating observation about “the almost total
lack of influence of Buber in the Jewish world, which contrasts
strangely with his recognition among non-Jews.”5 Whatever
Buber’s attraction might have been earlier, by the post–World
War II era, at least in Scholem’s eyes, he had ceased to matter
much to Jews.
As to their disagreement over Hasidism, Scholem recounts
a meeting with Buber in 1943 in which he presented to the

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older man his critique of Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism.

Buber responded: “If what you are now saying were right, my
dear Scholem, then I would have worked on Hasidism abso-
lutely in vain, because in that case, Hasidism does not interest
me at all.”6 A more telling contrast between a philosopher and
a historian cannot be imagined.
Scholem’s critique of Buber continued to rankle even after
Buber’s death. Grete Schaeder, a Buber disciple who had pub-
lished The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber in 1966, wrote to
Scholem that she was so distraught about his attack on Buber’s
interpretation of Hasidism that she was not able to bring her-
self to meet him. She makes clear how hurt Buber had been by
Scholem’s earlier words. Scholem answered Schaeder with a his-
torical reflection on his struggles with Buber in his youth and
concluded that, had he drawn on his unpublished youthful writ-
ings (most probably from his diary), he would have formulated
his essay even more sharply.
Why did Scholem feel compelled to attack Buber repeat-
edly both in public and in private in the years immediately be-
fore and after Buber’s death? It is noteworthy that in his unpub-
lished English lectures on Hasidism of 1949, he was far less
critical of Buber. But in a 1958 letter to the Swiss Jewish phi-
losopher Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, he criticized Buber for
his unhistorical interpretation of Hasidism and for his view
that the Hasidim continued the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.
So by the late 1950s, Scholem had returned to the sharply crit-
ical view of Buber that had characterized his youth.
We have the sense that Scholem was completing some un-
finished business—both scholarly and psychological—in the two
articles that framed Buber’s death in 1965. For Scholem, Buber
was a lifelong foil, the embodiment of an approach to Jewish
mysticism that Scholem had to conquer in order to rule. In
1933, he had praised Buber to the university authorities as the
greatest expert in the world in the field of religious philosophy.

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Buber might teach comparative religion, but he, Scholem, would

dominate the discipline of Judaica. Yet he was not content to
leave his youthful Buber complex in the past. Perhaps Buber
remained a voice of reproach, the ghost of Scholem’s own ear-
lier Erlebnis enthusiasm, and the essays of the 1960s repre-
sented a kind of return of the repressed, a desire to settle accounts
with a figure who remained both mentor and antagonist. More-
over, Buber was enjoying a renaissance in the 1960s, particu-
larly in Germany and the United States. If Scholem saw himself
as the representative of authentic Judaism, then Buber’s renewed
fame might have provoked him to revive the polemics of a half-
century earlier.
However, in 1977, when Scholem came to write his memoir
From Berlin to Jerusalem, he recounted his early meetings with
Buber in far more irenic terms than were actually accurate. He
concluded the passage on Buber by saying that even though he
“later had great and far-reaching differences of opinion with
Buber” and “I could not be blind to his weaknesses . . . I always
greatly respected him—even revered him—as a person. . . . He
was totally undogmatic and had an open mind toward different
opinions.”7 It was almost as if he now regretted his harsh criti-
cism of a decade earlier, if not also his criticisms from the
World War I period. Certainly, he could not say of himself that
he was “totally undogmatic and had an open mind toward dif-
ferent opinions.”
These contradictory views of Buber bear witness to the
role the older man played throughout Scholem’s life. On some
level, Scholem understood that without Buber, there would have
been no Scholem, since it was Buber’s passionate argument for
the role of myth in Judaism that had influenced Scholem in his
youth. It might not be an exaggeration to say that the intellec-
tual support he could never win from his father he sought from
Buber. But this desire for approval from the older man simulta-
neously provoked stormy rebellion, for Buber was a figure with

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whom Scholem continued to wrestle, even as he eclipsed his

erstwhile rebbe as the greatest scholar of Jewish Studies in the
twentieth century.
Buber may also have been on his mind when he delivered
another Eranos lecture in 1963, “Tradition and Commentary
as Religious Categories in Judaism” (the English version of this
lecture was published under the title “Revelation and Tradition
as Religious Categories in Judaism”). Here, too, he returned to
themes from his youth, when he had searched for his own defi-
nition of Judaism against Buber’s mysticism of experience. We
recall that at that time he contrasted the idea of tradition with
Buber’s Judaism based on the experience of divine revelation. A
decade and a half later, in his review of Hans-Joachim Schoeps’s
book, he came back to tradition as the medium through which
the voice of revelation is refracted and given meaning. In a
­letter to Theodor Adorno, Scholem explicitly connected the
Schoeps review to his Eranos lecture, which often borrowed
from the earlier work word for word.
The Eranos lecture appears on the face of it to be an analy-
sis of rabbinic and Kabbalistic texts rather than a statement of
Scholem’s own belief. Scholem brings in a number of famous
texts that demonstrate how the rabbis allowed for a startling
range of interpretations of biblical revelation, including inter-
pretations contrary to the Bible’s own meaning. Tradition en-
compasses an infinitude of interpretations, no matter how con-
tradictory, in which every position a rabbinic authority announces
has its grounding in the revelation at Sinai. Yet this seemingly
scholarly account does little to conceal Scholem’s own views.
As he wrote in the 1937 birthday letter to Salman Schocken, he
believed that Franz Kafka’s writings had a “halo of the canoni-
cal” probably because they were open to an infinite number of
readings.8 Without passing judgment on whether Scholem was
right in describing historical Judaism as involving an “anarchy”
of interpretations, we must recognize that the philosophy he

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found in the sources from the tradition closely matched his

own philosophy of Judaism.
As the sage of Jerusalem, Scholem was frequently called
upon to offer political commentary, especially about Zionism
and the State of Israel. We have seen that after the rise of Na-
zism, he withdrew increasingly from the political arena. Disil-
lusionment certainly played a role. In 1961, Geula Cohen sent
him her memoir of her years in Lehi, the Jewish underground
known also as the Stern Gang. In the 1940s, Cohen had been
the radio broadcaster and newsletter editor for this splinter
group, which engaged in terrorism and also flirted with messi-
anic ideas. Cohen had studied with Scholem, and he responded
with a kind of paternal warmth, even as he disagreed vehemently
with her right-wing politics.
Cohen’s book caused him to reflect on the critical decisions
that had confronted everyone in the years before the establish-
ment of the state. While not denying that war or even terrorism
might in certain circumstances be justified, he nevertheless found
Cohen’s ideology “quite repugnant.” He too had had his dreams,
although they were not the same as hers: “Even today my dreams
do not conjure up the Kingdom and the heroism that enthralled
you and your friends. But history makes equal fun of both your
dream and mine. For the victory was not the one we hoped to
see.”9 The State of Israel was not the messianic kingdom that
Cohen desired, but neither had it produced the renewal of Ju-
daism that Scholem had pursued since his youth.
Yet Scholem had not lost his belief in the dialectic of his-
tory, what the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom he quotes,
called “the ruse of reason.” In 1965, he responded to the receipt
of Georges Friedmann’s End of the Jewish People? Friedmann
was a French sociologist who had won some notoriety for his
argument that the State of Israel was creating a nation that was
no longer Jewish and, as such, was contributing to the demise
of the Jewish people. Scholem’s response was telling. He dis-

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agreed with Friedmann but confessed that “the Israeli nation,

which has separated itself from the Jewish people, is marching
toward its ruin.” Nevertheless, where Friedmann had gone wrong
was to “underestimate the tremendous power of reconstituting
historical memory through dialectical swings of the pendulum.”
This swing of the historical pendulum would come as the result
of a crisis that Scholem believed could be overcome by “the
creative power of the Jewish genius, however indefinable.”10
In his letter to Friedmann, we find in a nutshell Scholem’s
dialectical philosophy. He knew when he set out on his life’s
journey from Berlin to Jerusalem that Zionism would provoke
a crisis of Jewish culture and identity, but he had faith that the
forces unleashed by the Jewish national movement would also
provide the solution to this crisis. His meditation in 1926 on
the apocalyptic dangers inherent in the revived Hebrew lan-
guage and his fears of the messianic nationalism of the Revi-
sionists from the same period continued to haunt him. But he
also believed that these same forces, properly harnessed, could
dialectically produce a Jewish renaissance. And his reference to
“the tremendous power of reconstituting historical memory”
must surely refer to his own scholarly project.
Although no longer as politically active as he had been in
the 1920s and early 1930s, Scholem paid keen attention to po-
litical developments and, from time to time, took part in public
debates. In 1965, for example, he signed a statement in favor of
the Mapai (Labor) Party of Levi Eshkol. The elections of that
year included a new party, Rafi, that David Ben-Gurion had as-
sembled with a number of younger politicians, such as the former
general Moshe Dayan. Scholem’s old hostility to Ben-Gurion’s
statism and aggressive foreign policy must have informed his
decision to speak out with others against Ben-Gurion’s chal-
lenge to the Labor Party, which Ben-Gurion had led for decades
before splitting from it. The statement, almost certainly not writ-

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ten by Scholem, warns against Ben-Gurion’s leadership, which

it characterizes as a danger to Israel’s democracy.
Scholem was abroad during the Six-Day War on a mission
for the Israeli Embassy in London, but he was in Israel during
the tense weeks before hostilities commenced. Within months
after Israel’s sweeping victory, an intense public debate began,
which has not ended to this day, about what to do with the con-
quered territories. A group of intellectuals and political leaders,
including members of the Labor Party, as well as more right-
wing Zionists, formed in July 1967 under the banner of “Move-
ment for a Greater Israel,” by which they meant annexation of
the territories. In August, Scholem, together with a long list of
other intellectuals, artists, and writers, signed an opposing state-
ment with the headline “Security and Peace, Yes—Annexation,
No.” The statement argued that the Six-Day War was a jus­
tified war of self-defense but that annexation of the territories
would constitute “a danger to the Jewish image of the state, to
its humanistic and democratic character, or to both.”11 The goal
of Israeli policy must be first and foremost the pursuit of peace
and the avoidance of creating obstacles to that goal.
In the years after the 1967 war, Scholem, by now one of
Israel’s most famous intellectuals, was increasingly called upon
to defend his country in world public opinion. Journalists beat a
path to his door on Abarbanel Street, and he was also frequently
interviewed when he traveled abroad. While he was forthright
in his criticism, especially at home, of Israel’s occupation of the
territories seized in the war, when it came to attacks from those
outside the country on Israel’s right to defend itself and, more
broadly, on Zionism, he was equally forthright in defense of his
country. Even if he had had his doubts when he came to Pales-
tine about establishing a Jewish state, he had little doubt later
that the state had every right to exist. On October 17, 1973,
while the Yom Kippur War was still raging, he signed a letter to

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the New York Times with twenty other liberal professors from the
Hebrew University that excoriated the Arab countries for their
refusal to recognize Israel’s existence and their perfidious at-
tempt to destroy it.
From time to time, he also expressed himself on domestic
matters. The recurrent debate over “who is a Jew?” arose from
Israel’s Law of Return, which guaranteed immediate citizen-
ship to Jews. But how should the state define those to whom the
law pertained? Should it be the halakhic definition (a Jew is the
child of a Jewish mother or a convert) or the Nazi definition (a
Jew is someone who has one Jewish grandparent)? Who should
control conversion? In 1970, these unsettled questions again came
in front of the Knesset, generating considerable controversy both
within Israel and among diaspora Jews. In March 1970, Scho-
lem spoke to a convention of American Reform rabbis meeting
in Jerusalem on the subject. Addressing his audience as a histo-
rian rather than a rabbi, he asserted that Judaism is a “living
and undefined organism. It is a phenomenon which changes and
is transformed in the course of its history.”12 In the Middle Ages,
those who disagreed with the rabbis were either punished or
left the Jewish fold. When the rabbis lost their power in the
modern world, those who disagreed with them could remain Jews
and define Jewishness their own way. We are not surprised to
learn that he rejected any dogmatic definition of a Jew, prefer-
ring instead an open, one might even say anarchistic, definition.
In his talk Scholem mentioned a moving example of this
new freedom from his own family. We recall that his brother
Werner had married Emmy, a non-Jewish German woman, much
to the outrage of their father. Many years after the Holocaust,
one of Werner’s daughters, who because her mother was not
Jewish could not be considered halakhically Jewish, returned to
Germany and asked the Jewish community of Berlin to accept
her. They did so since she was the daughter of a Jewish father
and she wished to be counted among them. He might have also

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mentioned that Emmy herself returned to Germany and was

accepted by the Jewish community of Hannover to live in the
Jewish retirement home. Scholem retained a warm relationship
with his brother’s widow throughout her life and visited her on
trips to Germany.
These examples from his family demonstrate how capa-
cious was Scholem’s definition of Jewishness, grounded as it
was in a profoundly secular sensibility. And he held that such
a broad definition was made possible by Zionism: “With the
realization of Zionism, the fountains of the great deep of our
historical being have welled up, releasing new forces within us.
Our acceptance of our own history as a realm within which our
roots grow is permeated with the conviction that the Jews, fol-
lowing the shattering catastrophe of our times, are entitled to
define themselves according to their own needs and impulses;
and that Jewish identity is not a fixed and static but a dynamic
and even dialectical thing.”13
In 1980, Scholem gave one of his last interviews, this time
in English, to the New York Review of Books. Titled “The Threat
of Messianism,” it recapitulated in language and themes many
of his long-standing preoccupations. But it also broke new ground
in terms of Israeli politics. In 1974, religious Zionists had formed
the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), which, based on a mes-
sianic ideology, aimed to establish settlements in the occupied
territories. With the election of the right-wing leader Menachem
Begin, the settlement enterprise acquired strong government
backing, and the number of Israelis living in the territories ac-
celerated. Asked how he would characterize this settlement move-
ment, Scholem was adamant: “They are like the Sabbatians. Like
the Sabbatians, their messianic program can only lead to disas-
ter. In the seventeenth century, of course, the failure of Sabba-
tianism had only spiritual consequences; it led to a breakdown
of Jewish belief. Today, the consequences of such messianism
are also political and that is a great danger.”14 Here he was clos-

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ing a circle. Just as he had warned in the 1920s that the Revi-
sionists were modern Sabbatians whose messianism threatened
the very existence of Zionism, so, half a century later, their
religious stepchildren constituted an existential threat. If not
checked, these messianists would exact a high price. This was
the cautionary tale his historical studies of Jewish messianism
moved him to tell.
Having retired in 1965, Scholem was free to travel, and
he did so with relish, holding visiting professorships in Swit-
zerland, the United States, and Germany. He developed deep
friendships with German intellectuals such as the philosopher
Jürgen Habermas whose home in Starnberg, near Munich, he
visited frequently, commenting humorously on Frau Habermas’s
cooking and spoiling their two daughters with pralines. He
later took Habermas and his wife on an extensive tour of Jeru-
salem and other places in Israel.
He continued to publish prodigiously. He closed another
circle by returning to the subject he first conceived in 1919 for
his dissertation: the linguistic theory of the Kabbalah. And he
continued in hot pursuit of the theme he announced in his
“Redemption Through Sin” essay: the subterranean linkages
between the vestiges of Sabbatianism and the Jewish Enlight-
enment. One of the most thrilling of these adventures was the
strange career of Moses Dobruschka, a Frankist, who took part
in the French Revolution under the name of Junius Frey and
was guillotined during the Terror. Although his friend and col-
league Jacob Katz wrote a trenchant critique of Scholem’s dia-
lectical theory of the way religious heresy turned into secular
enlightenment, he was not dissuaded.
In the last decade of his life, he also turned to memoir. In
1975, he published his book on Walter Benjamin with the sub-
title “The Story of a Friendship.” He made extensive use of let-
ters and diaries from his personal archive, which was not yet
available to the public. This book found an eager audience, for

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interest in Benjamin was just then beginning to take off, fueled

also by Scholem’s earlier work with Adorno in publishing Ben-
jamin’s correspondence, as well as by Hannah Arendt’s publica-
tion of Benjamin’s essays in English. Walter Benjamin: The Story
of a Friendship is as revealing about Scholem as it is about Ben-
jamin. Two years later, he turned to writing his own autobiog-
raphy, which concludes in 1923, his first year in Palestine. From
Berlin to Jerusalem became an instant hit, written in Scholem’s
customary vigorous German style and drawing rich portraits of
individuals and events from his youth.
His spirit remained provocative and lively even in old age.
And his wit and sense of the absurd remained equally keen, as
did his fascination with religious fakery and humbug. A letter
that he wrote in 1978 to a young scholar of Kabbalah, Daniel
Matt, who had served as his teaching assistant at Boston Uni-
versity, is worth quoting at length for what it reveals about Scho-
lem’s playful manner. Matt had reported to Scholem on his trip
to India and his visits to various gurus. Matt also inquired about
Scholem’s knowledge of 1960s folk music. Written with flair
in English, Scholem’s letter betrays the persistence of his Ger-
manic syntax:

My opinion of the swamis seems to be a little more reserved

than yours. I smelled a rat in several of those whom I en-
countered. . . . I wonder how you could manage not to go
the short way from Goa to Pondicherry, to the ashram of the
most famous Jewess after the Holy Virgin, or whatever title
you want to give to Maria, who, according to the latest pro-
nouncements of the previous pope . . . was bodily transfig-
ured into Heaven. Has the ashram of Miss Miriam Mizrachi
of Marseilles—later Mrs. Richards, and a great pupil of the
famous former terrorist transformed into a saint, who one
day recognized her as being an avatar of the goddess Kali—
not attracted you, or at least your Jewish pride? Or were you
perhaps prevented from being so by some vicious thought

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you heard from your former teacher Scholem? . . . Who was
or is, Robert Zimmerman, called Bob Dylan? Being an old
racist, please let me know if he is a Jew. . . . My receptivity
to music is, alas, nothing; therefore I forgo the pleasure of
listening to “Blonde on Blonde” or even the more seducing
“Desire.” The title “Highway 61” arouses no desire in me.
Maybe I am too old for it.15

In old age as in youth, he was forever inquisitive and open—

albeit with skepticism—to new ideas. When Matt informed him
of new discoveries in the authorship of the Zohar, Scholem won-
dered in the same letter whether he might have missed some-
thing in his own scholarship, but, then again, noted that there
were “new discoveries every day.” He congratulated Matt and
then said, slyly: “And may I express the hope that they will stand
up to critical scrutinizing.”16
At that beginning of a 1975 lecture, Scholem explained to
the audience how he had somehow become attracted to the
study of Kabbalah and could not find anyone to explain it to him:
“So I had to grope my way by myself, which is called scholar-
ship.” Always eager to provoke the more staid members of the
profession, when asked what new fields of Jewish Studies needed
investigation, he answered without hesitation: “the history of
Jewish criminals.”17
In October 1981, he came to Berlin to participate in the
opening of the Wissenschaftskolleg, the new German institute
for advanced study, where he gave the inaugural lecture and was
appointed a fellow for its first year. He was feted as one of the
greatest living intellectuals born in Germany and, despite his
earlier imprecations against the existence of a German–Jewish
dialogue, he was clearly eager to participate in a new version of
such a dialogue, with himself at its center.
However, he was not in good health. During the summer
of 1981, he began to experience abdominal pain. Despite a two-
week vacation in Sils Maria, in the Swiss Alps, the pain contin-

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ued, and in September, he underwent tests in Zurich, where he

was spending the month. Two polyps were removed from his
colon, and he was given a tentative diagnosis of Paget’s disease
of the pelvis (a condition in which the bones thicken). In De-
cember, he fell and injured himself. He was forced to return to
Israel. The trip, initially planned for just the winter holiday,
now took an ominous turn as he was hospitalized in Jerusalem
with worsening pain. The doctors were unable to come to a firm
diagnosis, and his condition deteriorated (he may have devel-
oped a rare form of bone cancer as a result of the Paget’s disease).
By the end of January 1982, he was too weak to continue
work, and he wrote to Peter Wapnewski, the director of the
Wissenschaftskolleg, that he would be unable to return to Ber-
lin. Closing another circle, he asked for Kitty Steinschneider—
whose friendship he had continued to cherish over the years—
to be at his side. When he became too weak to answer his
correspondence, she did so for him, writing to a German col-
league that Professor Scholem was too ill to answer but should
he return to health, he would surely meet with the colleague in
Germany in the spring.
He did not return to health, and he died on February 21,
1982. He was buried in the Sanhedria cemetery of Jerusalem in
the only property he owned in the Land of Israel. His tomb-
stone refers to him not only as a researcher of the Kabbalah but
also as “a man of the Third Aliya.” This designation, usually ap-
plied to the pioneers who worked the land, may not be how we
think of this Germanic scholar in his suit and tie. But it is cer-
tainly apt, for he, too, dug deep into arid soil to bring forth a
world both strange and wondrous.

199
 A Personal Epilogue

Although many decades have passed since Gershom

Scholem’s death in 1982, his image still looms large over the
field of Jewish Studies and, indeed, over intellectual life gener-
ally. He is now widely regarded as one of the great thinkers of
the twentieth century, in addition to one of its greatest Jewish
historians. There have naturally been many critiques of various
of his arguments, but, regardless of how convincing any of these
might be, the power of his oeuvre remains, carried by its rhe-
torical passion and remarkable erudition. His greatest accom-
plishment—to make his esoteric subject crucially important to
modern women and men—stands unchallenged.
When I was a college student in the early 1970s, I discov-
ered Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and devoured
it as one might a sacred text. Here, it seemed to me, was hidden
the secret of how a secular historian might immerse himself
in religious sources and find in them meaning for the modern

200
 a personal epilogue

world. Today, many years and a career later, I still find that
Scholem provides a sterling model for how to write the history
of Judaism.
Some years after I first read Major Trends, when searching
for a topic on which to write a dissertation, I suggested to Jacob
Katz, then a visiting professor at UCLA, that I might like to
write about Scholem. His eyes lit up and he said, “No one in
Jerusalem would dare to do such a thing, but everyone there
will read it.”
I was fortunate to have had a number of meetings with
Professor Scholem, starting in 1975, when I interviewed him
for the dissertation, later published as Gershom Scholem: Kab-
balah and Counter-History (this was the first book-length study
of Scholem’s thought in what is now a small library of such
studies). In our first meeting, he spoke virtually nonstop for
four hours, an experience that cannot be captured on paper. He
was clearly pleased that a young student from California wanted
to write about him, or, more precisely, about his thought.
To write a biography of Scholem while he was still alive was
impossible, since the diaries and most of the letters I have used
here were not accessible at the time. (See the bibliographical
note for what is now available in English.) In fact, I had not
thought to write such a biography until I received an unexpected
invitation from Steven J. Zipperstein, one of the co-editors of
the Yale Jewish Lives series, to do so. One rarely has the oppor-
tunity that this invitation provided to return to one’s earliest
work late in a long career and see the subject with fresh eyes.
Following the publication of my first book, I saw Profes-
sor Scholem several more times. He appeared by surprise at an
award ceremony for my book and delivered some ironic words
of praise: “I read this book and to me it seemed more like a
novel . . .” The last time I saw him was in the autumn of 1980,
when my wife and I paid him and Fania a social call at his Jeru-
salem apartment, which had one of the most remarkable pri-

201
 gershom scholem

vate libraries in the city, with books covering every inch of

every wall except for the space where Klee’s small painting An-
gelus Novus hung. We chatted about many subjects, but he seemed
most exercised by the increasing encroachment of the religious
in Jerusalem who were taking over venerable neighborhoods
like Rehavia, the bastion of German- and other European-born
Israelis. For a moment, he seemed not much different from any
other European bourgeois Jew, and at that moment I was struck
by a heretical thought: he had become his father.
And yet, of course, not his father, who never escaped the
confines of the assimilated German Jewish culture of his age.
For even if Gershom Scholem had shed the rebellions of his
youth to become one of the most respected thinkers of his gen-
eration, he had done so by wagering on the improbable: leav-
ing Germany for the barren hills of Judea and researching a
subject widely considered disreputable. He won those improb-
able bets, leaving behind a flourishing Hebrew University and
Hebrew culture, as well as a field of scholarship now recog-
nized as central to the history of Judaism. His father would have
been proud.

202
 notes

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German and He-

brew sources are mine.

Chapter 1. Berlin Childhood

1. Quoted in David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic,
2000), 17–18.
2. Quoted in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The
Jew in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
268.
3. Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings,
trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken,
1954), 172.
4. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwür-
fen bis 1923. 1. Halbband: 1913–1917; 2. Halbband: 1917–1923 (Frankfurt:
Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000), 1:9 (February 17, 1913).
5. Ibid., 1:1 (February 18, 1913).
6. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans.

203
 notes to pages 12–29

Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 289 (to
Max Brod, June 1921).
7. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:24 (undated entry).
8. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994–1999), 1:6 (September 8, 1914); 1:9 (Werner Scholem to Ger-
hard Scholem, September 8, 1914).
9. Ibid., 1:6 (September 8, 1914).
10. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:111–112 (January 27, 1915).
11. Ibid., 1:117 (May 22, 1915).
12. Ibid., 1:103 (May 8, 1915); 1:119 (May 22, 1915).
13. Ibid., 1:120 (capitalizations retained from the German for
certain words for emphasis).

Chapter 2. The Abyss of War

1. David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic, 2000), 122.
2. Gershom Scholem, “It Was the War,” in David Biale, Ger-
shom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1979), 241n42. Copyright © 1979, 1982
by David Biale.
3. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwür-
fen bis 1923. 1. Halbband: 1913–1917; 2. Halbband: 1917–1923 (Frankfurt:
Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000), 1:121 (June 22, 1915). © Jüdischer
Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1995. All rights
reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. The
“Old-New Land” is a reference to Theodor Herzl’s utopian Zion-
ist novel.
4. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 72.
5. Story related to me independently by Michael Löwy and
by Buber’s longtime secretary and archivist, Margot Cohen.
6. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:457 (December 21, 1916).
7. Ibid., 1:347 (August 1, 1916).
8. Ibid., 2:213 (no date); Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 3 vols.
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994–1999), 1:55 (October 26, 1916).
9. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:399 (September 10, 1916).

204
 notes to pages 29–46

10. For Scholem’s position in this paragraph and the next, see

the letters from October 4 and 9, 1916, in Scholem, Briefe, 1:43–52;
and Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:396–399 (September 10, 1916).
11. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:58 (November 21, 1914).
12. Scholem, Briefe, 1:28 (April 1, 1916).
13. Ibid., 1:42 (July 17, 1916).
14. Ibid., 1:55 (October 26, 1916).
15. Ibid.; Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:416 (November 9, 1916).
16. Betty Scholem and Gershom Scholem, Mutter und Sohn
im Briefwechsel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 13 (May 12, 1917), trans-
lated in Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 41.
17. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 91.
18. Scholem, Briefe, 1:77 (to Erich Brauer, July 15, 1917).
19. Ibid., 1:84 (to Aharon Heller, July 25, 1917); 1:93–94 (to
Werner Kraft, August 11, 1917); 1:97 (to Heller, August 15, 1917).
20. Ibid., 1:95 (to Harry Heymann, August 14, 1917); Scho-
lem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 95.
21. Scholem, Briefe, 1:94 (August 11, 1917).
22. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:61–63 (October 21, 1917); 2:70 (No-
vember 11, 1917).

Chapter 3. Scholem in Love

1. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwür-
fen bis 1923. 1. Halbband: 1913–1917; 2. Halbband: 1917–1923 (Frank-
furt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000), 2:54 (October 15, 1917).
2. Ibid., 2:90–91 (December 5, 1917).
3. Ibid., 2:274 (July 23, 1918).
4. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friend-
ship (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 105–106.
5. Ibid., 130.
6. Ibid., 87, 95.
7. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:58 (October 17, 1917).
8. Ibid., 2:75–76 (November 5, 1917).

205
 notes to pages 46–57

9. Ibid., 2:300–306 (July 15, 1918).

10. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994–1999), 1:83 (July 17, 1917). Emphasis in the original.
11. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:58 (October 17, 1917).
12. Scholem, Briefe, 1:340n2.
13. Ibid., 1:25–28 (February 4, 1916).
14. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:46–47 (October 1, 1917); 2:52 (Oc-
tober 5, 1917).
15. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 73–74; Scholem, Tagebücher,
1:305 ( June 10, 1916).
16. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 100, 101.
17. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:93 (December 18, 1917).
18. Ibid., 2:99 (no date).
19. Scholem, Briefe, 1:103 (to Aharon Heller, October 2, 1917).
20. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:16 (May 17, 1917).
21. Ibid., 2:74 (November 4, 1917).
22. Ibid., 2:139 (February 24, 1918).
23. Ibid., 2:145 (March 1, 1918).
24. Scholem, Briefe, 1:374–375n1 (March 5, 1918).
25. Ibid., 1:142–144 (March 7, 1918).
26. Ibid., 1:375n4 (March 11, 1918).
27. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:150 (March 14, 1918).
28. Gershom Scholem, Briefe an Werner Kraft (Frankfurt:
Suhr­kamp, 1985), 71 (March 14, 1918); Scholem, Briefe, 1:145–146
(to Aharon Heller, March 16, 1918); 146–148 (to Escha Burchhardt,
March 24, 1918).
29. The poem has been published in the original with a trans-
lation in Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems, trans.
Richard Sieburth (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003), 54–55; Scholem, Tageücher,
2:398–399 (October 13, 1918); “To Grete,” in Scholem, Tagebücher,
2:634–635 (June 10, 1920).
30. Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, expanded
edition based on the Hebrew edition (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1997), 75.
31. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and

206
 notes to pages 57–73

trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2002), 76–77 (June 23, 1918).
32. Scholem, Briefe, 1:157 (May 28, 1918).
33. Ibid., 1:166 (July 23, 1918); Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:409
(November 25, 1918).
34. Scholem, Tagebücher, 2:410 (November 26, 1918); 2:417
(December 18, 1918).
35. Ibid., 2:424 (December 25, 1918).
36. Ibid., 2:459 ( June 21, 1919), translation from Anthony
David Skinner, ed. and trans., Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of
Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2008), 304.
37. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Es-
says, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 55–57.

Chapter 4. The Book of Brightness

1. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwür-
fen bis 1923. 1. Halbband: 1913–1917; 2. Halbband: 1917–1923 (Frank-
furt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000), 1:444 (May 15, 1919).
2. Quoted in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and
Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979),
74–76.
3. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 108. © Gershom Scholem. © All rights reserved by
and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
4. Betty Scholem and Gershom Scholem, Mutter und Sohn
im Briefwechsel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 58 (November 25,
1919), translated in Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982,
ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 108.
5. Scholem and Scholem, Mutter und Sohn, 59 (December 6,
1919), translated in Scholem, Life in Letters, 109. Translation slightly
modified.
6. Scholem, Life in Letters, 117 (March 7, 1921).
7. Rosenzweig, letter to Rudolf Hallo (May 12, 1921), in Franz

207
 notes to pages 74–93

Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and

Edith Rosenzweig (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 704. Em-
phasis in original.
8. Rosenzweig, Briefe, 482 (May 30, 1923).
9. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994–1999), 1:230 (to Ernst Simon, December 22, 1925). Emphasis
in the original.
10. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 129–130.
11. Ibid.
12. Scholem, Life in Letters, 118–119 (incorrectly dated), trans-
lation revised based on Scholem and Scholem, Mutter und Sohn,
80–81 (December 3, 1921).
13. Scholem, Life in Letters, 112 (April 17, 1920).

Chapter 5. A University in Jerusalem

1. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 128 (November 1, 1923).
2. Ibid., 159 (January 31, 1928).
3. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994–1999), 1:230 (January 22, 1925).
4. Ibid., 1:233 (to Ernst Simon, May 12, 1926).
5. Ibid., 1:222 (to Werner Kraft, December 17, 1924).
6. Gershom Scholem, untitled manuscript (end of 1924),
Gershom Scholem Archive (National Library, Jerusalem) 4* 1599.
277.1.52.
7. Scholem, Life in Letters, 145 (to Ernst Simon, September 2,
1925).
8. Gershom Scholem, “The Despair of Victory,” April 12,
1926, Scholem Archive 4* 1599.277.1.57.
9. Gershom Scholem, “From My Diary, 1926” (Hebrew),
Scholem Archive 4* 1599.277.1.60.
10. Gershom Scholem, “Einige Bemerkungen über He-
bräisch und Hebräischlernen,” undated [1926?], Scholem Archive
4* 1599.277.1.25.

208
 notes to pages 93–103

11. The article was first published in Stéphane Mosès, “Lan-

gage et sécularisation chez Gershom Scholem,” Archives de sci-
ences sociales des religions 60 (1985): 85–96. For the original German,
see Michael Brocke, “Franz Rosenzweig und Gerhard Gershom
Scholem,” http://www.steinheim-institut.de/edocs/bpdf/michael
_brocke-franz_rosenzweig_und_gerhard_gershom_scholem.pdf
(accessed October 3, 2017).
12. My translation of Brocke, “Franz Rosenzweig und Ger-
hard Gershom Scholem,” 21.
13. “Brit Shalom Society: Regulations” (Hebrew), She’ifoteinu
1, no. 1 (1927): 53.
14. Gershom Scholem,“Ist die Verstäundigung mit den Arab-
ern gescheitert?” Jüdische Rundschau 33 (1928): 644.
15. Scholem Testimony on 1929 Events, Central Zionist Ar-
chives L59/115, quoted in Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of Arab-Israeli
Conflict: 1929, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham, Mass.; Brandeis
University Press, 2015), 109–110.
16. Material Concerning Brit Shalom, Scholem Archive 4*
1599.07.253.2.
17. Gershom Scholem, “The Final Goal” (Hebrew), She’ifoteinu
2 (1930): 156.
18. Yehuda Burla, “The Covenant of Failure” (Hebrew), Davar,
November 27, 1929; Gershom Scholem, “Three Sins of Brit Sha-
lom” (Hebrew), Davar, December 12, 1929, 2.
19. Gershom Scholem, “Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus
im Lichte Abraham Cardosos,” in Scholem, Judaica: Studien zur
jüdischen Mystik, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968–1973), 1:146.
20. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friend-
ship (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 171–174.
21. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem,
1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre
Lefevere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 173.
22. Gershom Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The
Star of Redemption,” trans. Paul Mendes-Flohr in Scholem, On the
Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avra-
ham Shapira (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 203.

209
 notes to pages 104–117

23. Ibid., 205.
24. Gershom Scholem, “On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s
Star of Redemption,” trans. Michael A. Meyer, in Scholem, The
Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish Spirituality
(New York: Schocken, 1971), 323. The essay originally appeared in
the Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 10 (1931): 15–17.

Chapter 6. Redemption Through Sin

1. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 199 (March 18, 1932).
2. Gershom Scholem, “Offener Brief an den Verfasser der
Schrift, ‘Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit,’” Bayerische Israelitsche
Gemendezeitung, August 15, 1932, 243. Reprinted in Gershom Scho-
lem, Briefe, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994–1999), 1:466–471.
3. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scho-
lem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and
Andre Lefevre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 126
( July 17, 1934).
4. Gershom Scholem, In the Fullness of Time, trans. Richard
Sieburth, ed. Steven Wasserstrom (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003), 100 (trans-
lation revised). Reprinted by permission of Richard Sieburth.
5. Scholem, Life in Letters, 203 (November 20, 1932).
6. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 29
(February 28, 1933).
7. Ibid., 44 (May 4, 1933).
8. Betty Scholem and Gershom Scholem, Mutter und Sohn
im Briefwechsel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 298. See also Betty’s
response, ibid., 302.
9. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 44
(May 4, 1933).
10. Hans (Shmuel) Sambursky, “The Crooked Giant,” from
Hans Jonas, Memoirs, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Christian Wiese
(Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 88. Copyright
© 2008 by Brandeis University Press. Reprinted with permission

210
 notes to pages 118–128

of University Press of New England. Typographical error in line

4—“not” for “no”—corrected.
11. Escha Else Bergmann Archive (National Library, Jerusa-
lem) 4* 1547.02.67. (The catalogue of the archive spells the last
name “Bergmann.”)
12. Gershom Scholem, note dated Wednesday night, Febru-
ary 15, 1934, Gershom Scholem Archive (National Library, Jerusa-
lem) 4* 1599.01.2554; Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Ger-
shom Scholem, 122 (July 9, 1934).
13. Gershom Scholem, note to Kitty Steinschneider, Septem-
ber 12, 1934, Scholem Archive 4* 1599.01.2554.
14. Gershom Scholem, Diary (November 25, 1934), Scholem
Archive 4* 1599.265.
15. Samuel Hugo Bergman, “Tagebücher” (October 21, 1935),
Samuel Hugo Bergmann Archive (National Library, Jerusalem) 4*
1502.02.47. (The catalogue of the archive spells the last name
“Bergmann.”) I thank Enrico Lucca for sharing this material from
Bergman’s unpublished diaries.
16. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem,
176–177 (April 19, 1936).
17. Scholem, Life in Letters, 277 (December 4, 1936).
18. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 181
( June 6, 1936).
19. Ibid., 174 ( June 20, 1934).
20. Gershom Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” trans.
Hillel Halkin, in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other
Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 140–141.
21. Ibid., 126–127. Translation slightly modified based on the
Hebrew original.
22. Hans (Shmuel) Sambursky, “To Scholem,” from Hans
Jonas, Memoirs, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Christian Wiese
(Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 88. Copyright
© 2008 by Brandeis University Press. Reprinted with permission
of University Press of New England. Translation modified based
on German original.

211
 notes to pages 131–152

Chapter 7. Kabbalah and Catastrophe

1. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 280 (July 10, 1937).
2. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd
rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1995), xxv.
3. Ibid., 37.
4. Ibid., 290, 293.
5. Ibid., 349–350.
6. Ibid., 350.
7. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scho-
lem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and
Andre Lefevre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 214
(March 25, 1938).
8. Ibid., 255–256 (June 30, 1939).
9. Ibid., 257.
10. Scholem, Life in Letters, 312 (July 17, 1941).
11. Gershom Scholem, “Tagebücher: Ende 1922 Juli 1934–
Nov. 34; 1935–48,” 65, Gershom Scholem Archive (National Li-
brary, Jerusalem) 4* 1599.265.22, translated into Hebrew and
quoted in Noam Zadoff, Mi-Berlin le-Yerushalayim u-ve-Hazarah:
Gershom Scholem bein Yisrael ve-Germania ( Jerusalem: Carmel,
2015), 179.
12. Scholem, “Tagebücher,” 74, quoted in Zadoff, Mi-Berlin,
197; Scholem, “Tagebücher,” 79–80, quoted in Zadoff, Mi-
Berlin, 197.
13. Gershom Scholem, will, July 14, 1943, Scholem Archive 4*
1599.02.8a.
14. Luah Ha-Aretz (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1944–1945), 94.
15. Gershom Scholem, “Meditations on Jewish Studies” (He-
brew), Devarim be-Go (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 396. An English
translation that differs somewhat from mine can be found under
the title “Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies” in Gershom
Scholem, On the Possibility of Mysticism in Our Time, ed. Avraham
Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publica-
tion Society, 1997), 51–71.

212
 notes to pages 152–173

16. Scholem, “Meditations on Jewish Studies,” 391.

17. Ibid., 399.
18. Ibid., 402.

Chapter 8. The Zionist Return to History

1. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 330 (January 28, 1946).
2. Gershom Scholem, “Mi-nisiyotai be-Shlihut be-Europa”
(Diary), 15 (May 17, 1946), Gershom Scholem Archive (National
Library, Jerusalem) 4* 1599.265.24.
3. Noam Zadoff, Mi-Berlin Mi-Berlin le-Yerushalayim u-ve-
Hazarah: Gershom Scholem bein Yisrael ve-Germania ( Jerusalem:
Carmel, 2015), 224.
4. Scholem, “Mi-nisiyotai be-Shlihut be-Europa” (Diary), 45
(August 2, 1946). Emphasis in original.
5. Gershom Scholem and Joseph Weiss, Halifat Mikhtavim,
ed. Noam Zadoff (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2012), 383–385; translation
quoted in Anthony David Skinner, “Introduction,” in Lamenta-
tions of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919, trans. An-
thony David Skinner (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2008), 4.
6. Scholem, Life in Letters, 341 (to Hugo and Escha Bergman,
December 15, 1947).
7. Ibid., 356 (to Isaac Leo Seeligmann, August 3, 1948).
8. Gershom Scholem, “The Star of David: History of a Sym-
bol,” trans. Michael A. Meyer, in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in
Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken,
1971), 281.
9. Gershom Scholem, “My Way to Kabbalah,” in Scholem,
On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays,
trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Soci-
ety, 1997), 24.
10. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 2nd ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973), 928–929.
11. Baruch Kurzweil, Ba-Ma’avak al Arkhai ha-Yahadut (Tel
Aviv: Schocken, 1969), 134, 111.

213
 notes to pages 176–193

12. Gershom Scholem, “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über die

Kabbala,” in Scholem, Judaica: Studien zur jüdischen Mystik, 3 vols.
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968–1973), 3:264.
13. Ibid. 3:271.
14. Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the
Messianic Idea in Judaism,” trans. Michael A. Meyer, in Scholem,
Messianic Idea, 21.
15. Ibid., 35–36.

Chapter 9. The Sage of Jerusalem

1. Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, Die Korrespondenz
(Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), 174–175 (January 9, 1957).
2. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and
trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 433–434 (to Hans Paeschke, March 24, 1968).
3. Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Interpretation of
Hasidism,” trans. Michael A. Meyer, in Scholem, The Messianic
Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 227–250; originally
published as “Martin Buber’s Hasidism,” Commentary (October 1,
1961): 305–316.
4. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, “Der liebe
Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel, 1939–1969, ed. Asaf Angermann
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2015), 286 (April 22, 1963); 354–355 ( June
20, 1965).
5. Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Conception of Juda-
ism,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner Dannhauser
(New York: Schocken, 1976), 128.
6. Ibid., 167.
7. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 72.
8. Quoted in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and
Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 31.
9. Scholem, Life in Letters, 366–367 (December 15, 1961).
10. Ibid., 411–412 (July 18, 1965).
11. “Security and Peace, Yes—Annexation, No” (Hebrew),
Haaretz, December 15, 1967, front page.

214
 notes to pages 194–198

12. Gershom Scholem, “Who Is a Jew?” in Scholem, On the

Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed.
Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1997), 93.
13. Ibid., 98–99.
14. David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview
with Gershom Scholem,” New York Review of Books (August 14,
1980): 22.
15. Scholem, Life in Letters, 473–474 (July 20, 1978).
16. Ibid.
17. “Gershom Scholem—Conception of Tselem, the Astral
Body in Jewish Mysticism,” YouTube (accessed November 3, 2017);
private conversation with the author.

215
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 selected readings in english

For Scholem’s biography in English, the best source, al-

though it does not treat Scholem’s youth, is Noam Zadoff, Ger-
shom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Waltham, Mass.:
Brandeis University Press, 2017). Additional insights can be found
in Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (Chi-
cago: Chicago University Press, 2017). A great deal of biographical
material on Gershom Scholem can also be found in Mirjam Zadoff’s
biography of Scholem’s brother Werner Scholem: The Red Job: A
Biography of Werner Scholem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2017). A biography of all four Scholem brothers that
gives a detailed social history of their background is Jay Howard
Geller, The Scholems: Gershom Scholem, His Family, and the Jewish
Middle Class in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forth-
coming). Finally, George Prochnik has written a detailed biogra-
phy of Scholem interwoven with his own autobiography in Stranger
in a Strange Land: In Search of Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem (New
York: Other Press, 2016).

217
 selected readings in english

The first study of Scholem’s philosophy of Jewish history is

David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). An interpretation of
Scholem’s thought that compares him to other Weimar-era intel-
lectuals is Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the Eu­
ropean Imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008). On the intellectual relationship between
Scholem and Walter Benjamin, especially their interpretations of
Franz Kafka, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Mo-
dernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1991). See also Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Pro-
fane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For the way Scho-
lem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer confronted the up-
heavals of their time, see Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klem-
perer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001). On the historical evolution of Scholem’s
studies of Sabbatianism, see Yaacob Dweck, “Introduction to the
Princeton Classics Edition,” in Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi:
The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2016).
Scholem’s two memoirs, written in the last decade of his life,
are Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1981) and From Berlin to Jerusalem (New York:
Schocken, 1980). A translation of selections from his youthful
diary is Anthony David Skinner, ed. and trans. Lamentations of Youth:
The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008). Skinner has also translated selected let-
ters from throughout Scholem’s life in his edition of Scholem’s
A Life in Letters, 1914–1982 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002). An English translation of Scholem’s correspondence with
Walter Benjamin in the 1930s can be found in The Correspondence
of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom
Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre (New York: Schocken,
1989).
Scholem’s own writings on Kabbalah and other subjects in the

218
 sel ected readings in english

field of Jewish Studies are too numerous to mention. Several col-

lections are noteworthy: the volume containing “Redemption
Through Sin” is The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in
Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). The essay “Medi-
tations on Jewish Studies” (under a different title) is in On the Pos-
sibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avra-
ham Shapira, and trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1997). A volume that contains some of Scho-
lem’s writings from his youth is On Jews and Judaism in Crisis:
­Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken,
1976). Scholem’s two most important books are Sabbatai Sevi, trans.
R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016), and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken,
1995).

219
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 acknowledgments

My first thanks go to Steven J. Zipperstein, co-editor of

the Yale Jewish Lives series, who invited me to write this book, a
project that I had entertained but dismissed in earlier years. Steve’s
friendship and intellectual companionship, going back to graduate
school at UCLA, have been a great gift. He also provided some
excellent critical interventions as the manuscript unfolded.
I am in the debt of the members of the Scholem Workshop
(or, as we call it, the Scholemaniacs), which has met twice, first at
Indiana University and then in Zurich, to discuss our common in-
terests in writing Gershom Scholem’s biography: Steven Aschheim,
Amir Engel, Eric Jacobson, Andreas Kilcher, Shaul Magid, Daniel
Weidner, Mirjam Zadoff, and Noam Zadoff. Noam has been par-
ticularly generous in sharing his knowledge of the Scholem corpus.
I was honored to be hosted by two institutions during the
writing of the book: the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, Ger-
many, in the summer of 2015 and YIVO at the Center for Jewish
History in New York in the fall of 2016. I thank them for their sup-

221
 acknowledgments

port. I also thank the Scholem Library and the Scholem Archive
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for several research visits
to explore their holdings and for organizing a lecture in January
2017 on writing Scholem’s biography.
A number of people either read versions of the manuscript
and/or shared their views of the subject in conversation. I thank
Asaf Angermann, Steven Aschheim, Rachel Biale, Jay Geller,
Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Enrico Lucca, Jonatan Meir, George
Prochnik, Paul Reitter, Dan Schifrin, Naomi Seidman, Assaf Stein-
schneider, Mirjam Zadoff, and Noam Zadoff. A special thanks to
Avraham Shapira for two long conversations and for sharing his
extensive archive. I also thank Emilia Engelhardt for assistance in
deciphering some of Scholem’s more difficult German handwrit-
ing. Finally, this book has benefited greatly from Susan Laity’s
meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.

222
 index

Abraham, Karl, 38 Benjamin, 108, 132, 185, 197;

Abulafia, Abraham, 68, 137 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 182–184;
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 187, estrangement from G.S.,
190, 197; and Benjamin’s suicide, 184–186; friendship with G.S.,
147; Negative Dialectics, 134; 132; internment in France, 146,
relationship with G.S., 133–134 147; Jewishness of, 183; The
Agnon, S. Y., 35, 68, 72, 115, 118, 142 Origins of Totalitarianism, 183,
Agudat Israel, 11–12, 100 184; and recovery of looted
Ahad Ha’am, 8, 15, 28, 86, 100 books, 158, 164; Zionist critique
American Jewish Joint Distribution by, 156–157
Committee (the Joint), 158, 159, assimilation, 4, 113, 145–146, 151,
161 180–181, 186
Am Oved publishing house, 149, 153, Association of Jewish University
171 Students, 80–81
anarchism, 14–15  
anti-Semitism, 2–3, 8, 70, 86 Baal Shem Tov (Israel), 13
apocalypticism, 104–105, 177–178 Baeck, Leo, 136–137, 161
Arab-Jewish rapprochement (Brit Baer, Albert, 32–33
Shalom), 95–96, 97, 100 Balfour Declaration, 84, 131
Arab uprising (1936), 123, 130 Bar-Ilan University, 173
Arendt, Hannah: on assimilation Bar Kokhba Zionist group, 82, 95–96
failure, 145–146, 181; and Barol, Moses, 7

223
 index

Baron, Salo W., 158 National Library, 82, 85; and

Barth, Karl, 109 news of Holocaust, 148; in re-
Bauer, Felice, 30 patriation of looted books, 161
Bavarian Academy of Arts, 169 Berlin (Germany): growth and
Bavarian State Library, 68 modernization of, 1–2; G.S.’s
Bebel, August, 1 visits to, 162–163, 198; Jewish
Begin, Menachem, 195 population of, 2; Scholem family
Ben-Gurion, David, 157, 182, 183, 184, residences in, 4, 162
192–193 Bernfeld, Siegfried, 60
Benjamin, Dora, 44, 55–56, 59, 110 Betar youth group, 97
Benjamin, Stefan, 55, 56 Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 68–69, 86, 93,
Benjamin, Walter, 4, 41; antiwar 118
politics of, 24–25; and Arendt, Biltmore Program, 150, 156
108, 132, 185, 197; arrest of Birnbaum, Nathan, 8
brother, 112–113; on Buber, 25; Blauweisse Brille, Die (newsletter), 22,
draft avoidance by, 25, 38; on 26, 40, 48
Kabbalah, 64; on Kafka, 110–111; Blau-Weiss youth movement, 11, 12–13,
marriage to Dora, 44, 55–56; and 22, 29, 40, 51, 80
Kitty Marx, 116; Marxist perspec- Bleichröde, Isaac, 8
tive of, 132–133; “On the Concept Blücher, Heinrich, 132
of History,” 176; on Arthur Blum, Edgar, 7, 21, 28, 31, 33–34
Scholem, 80; sexuality of, Blumenfeld, Kurt, 185
44–45; stipend for Hebrew books, looted, repatriation of, 157–159,
instruction, 90, 132, 185; suicide 160–164
of, 146–147 Boudiri, Hassan, 99
Benjamin, Walter–Scholem relation- Brauer, Erich, 22, 26, 32, 36, 48, 50, 51,
ship: beginnings of, 23–24; 58, 81, 149
correspondence, 52, 102, 103, 109, Brauer, Grete, 47, 50–51, 52, 53, 54–55,
110, 113, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 125, 57, 58–59, 81, 120
132, 144, 146; differences over British Mandate, 82, 83–84, 99
Zionism, 24, 42–43; G.S.’s dis- Brit Shalom, 95–96, 97, 99, 100, 103,
illusionment with Benjamins’ 131, 147
marriage, 55–57, 59; and G.S.’s Brody, Daniel, 176
memoir, 24, 43, 196–197; G.S.’s Buber, Martin, 12, 32, 72, 76, 95, 136,
reaction to Benjamin’s suicide, 150; Benjamin’s critique of, 25;
147; homoerotic component of, binational state advocated by, 151,
43–45, 52; meetings in Paris, 90, 156–157, 166; cultural Zionism
132–133; ninety-five theses, 46 of, 13; G.S.’s critiques of, 25–30,
Ben Shemen Youth Village, 29 38–40, 186–189; G.S.’s eulogy for,
Bergman, Escha (Else). See Burch- 187; Hasidic interpretation of,
hardt, Escha 13–14, 16, 29–30, 142, 186–188;
Bergman, Hugo, 165; affair with Escha I and Thou, 39, 181; immigration
Burchhardt, 120–121; in Brit to Palestine, 114; influence on
Shalom, 95, 96; essay dedicated G.S., 13–14, 15, 16, 66, 189–190;
to G.S., 166; on Hebrew Univer- and Jewish renewal, 13, 15, 17, 39;
sity faculty, 96, 121; marriage to mystical philosophy of, 63, 69;
Escha Burchhardt, 122; with war support of, 25–26, 27, 29

224
 index

Buber, Raphael, 27 Eranos Conferences, Ascona, 160,

Burchhardt, Escha (Else), 165, 166; 169–170, 175
affair with Hugo Bergman, Eranos lectures, by G.S., 187, 190
120–121; in Brit Shalom, 96; Eshkol, Levi, 192
courtship by G.S., 57–58, 59, 60,  
62, 68; divorce from G.S., 121; Fischer, Max, 49
emigration to Palestine, 80, 81, Frank, Jacob, 102, 126, 127–128, 129,
82; as Hebrew instructor, 90; 142, 153
marriage to Bergman, 122; Frankfurt School (Institute for Social
marriage to G.S., 84, 117–119 Research), 133, 134–135
Burla, Yehuda, 100 Freud, Fania. See Scholem, Fania
  Freud
Cardozo, Abraham, 101–102 Friedman, Herbert, 163
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, Friedmann, Georges, End of the Jewish
Foundations of the Nineteenth People?, 191–192
Century, 8 Fromm, Erich, 74
Cincinnati, G.S. in, 143–144  
Cohen, Geula, 191 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 28
Cohen, Hermann, 46, 66, 67 Gentz, Katharina, 49
Commentary (magazine), 186 George, Stefan, 11
  German Jews: and assimilation, 4, 113,
Davar, 100, 149 145–146, 151, 186; Berlin neigh-
Dawidowicz, Lucy, 158 borhoods of, 4; civil rights of, 2;
Dayan, Moshe, 192 comparison to Spanish Jews’
demonic: in Jewish history, 153, expulsion, 124, 143; dialogue
173–174; and modern secularism, with Germans, G.S.’s critique
173; in Nazism, 129, 184; in Sab- of, 181–182; family names of, 3;
batianism, 129, 153, 174, 184 generational differences among,
Dinur, Ben Zion, 170 10–11, 79; and intermarriage, 5,
Dizengoff, Meir, 114 194–195; and Jewish identity, 2–3,
Dobruschka, Moses (“Junius Frey”), 4–5, 74; and Nazis’ seizure of
196 power, 111–113; political options
Dönmeh sect, 126 of, 6–7; refugees in Palestine,
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Idiot, 43 113–117; social segregation of, 49
Dubnow, Simon, 142 Germany: G.S.’s postwar visits to,
  161–163, 195, 196, 198; repatria-
Eger, Akiba, 8 tion of looted books, 157–159,
Ehrentreu, Heinrich, 68 160–164. See also Nazi Germany
Eichmann, Adolf, 181–184 Goebbels, Joseph, 112
Einstein, Albert, 95 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 53, 54,
Eisler, Robert, 88; Cosmic Cloak and 107, 138
Heavenly Canopy, 76–77; Wid- Goitein, Fritz, 82
manstetter Society for Kabbalah Goldberg, Oskar, Reality of the
Research, 76 Hebrews, 75–76, 102
Eliade, Mircea, 170 Goldschmidt, Hermann Levin, 188
Emden, Jacob, 174 Graetz, Heinrich, 87, 139, 140; History
Encyclopedia Judaica, 131 of the Jews, 7, 20

225
 index

Grunwald, Valeria, 48 Heller, Aharon (Harry), 34, 36, 46–47,

Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), 53–54, 56, 58, 81
195 Herzl, Theodor, 3, 5, 8, 10, 16
  Heymann, Harry, 12, 31, 32
Ha’aretz (newspaper), 151, 164 Hollander, Käthe, 48
Habermas, Jürgen, 196 Holocaust: and Eichmann controversy,
Haganah, 167 181–184; and German guilt, 181,
Hagiz, Moses, 174 182; G.S.’s response to, 168–169;
Halevi, Judah, 69 and meaning of Zionism,
Halle, Toni, 48, 115 148–149; meetings with survivors,
Hamann, Johann Georg, 64 157, 161–162, 164; news of, 148
Hantke, Arthur, 21 Horkheimer, Max, 133, 135, 147
Hasidism, 123; Buber’s interpretation  
of, 13–14, 16, 29–30, 186–188; Ichud group, 150, 166
G.S.’s lectures on, 135; and Institute for Jewish Studies, Hebrew
messianism, 142–143; opponents University, 86, 89, 151
of, 25 Institute for Social Research (Frank-
Hebrew language: G.S.’s commitment furt School), 133, 134–135
to, 18, 30, 41, 60, 61, 94; G.S.’s intermarriage, G.S.’s views of, 5,
letter to Rosenzweig on, 92, 194–195
93–94; and historical accuracy, Israel: and dialectic of history, 191–192;
63; and Jewish renewal, 10, 11, 17, Eichmann controversy in,
81; secularization of, 92, 93–94, 181–184; Jewishness defined in,
100; translation into German, 9, 194–195; Law of Return, 194;
33, 40–41, 68–69, 71; and occupied territories, 193; right
Zionism, 40, 60, 61, 94 to exist, 193–194; and settlement
Hebrew Union College, 144 movement, 195–196; statehood,
Hebrew University: Benjamin’s 168–169; War of Independence,
stipend from, 90, 132; Bergman 166–167, 186. See also Hebrew
on faculty of, 96, 121; Brit Shalom University; Palestine
connected to, 96; founding of, Israel of Rishin, 142–143
86; German Jewish refugees on Israel Prize, for G.S., 180
faculty of, 114; G.S.’s attack on Italy, fascist, 107
Jewish Studies, 151–153; G.S.  
elected dean at, 150; G.S. on Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 86, 96, 100, 101,
faculty of, 86, 89–90, 96, 110, 114, 102–103
121, 186; G.S.’s inaugural lecture Jahr, Meta, 57, 81
at, 87–88; Institute of Jewish Jaspers, Karl, 108
Studies, 86, 89, 151; politicization Jerubbaal ( journal), 60
of, 150–151, 152–153; presidency Jerusalem: encroachment of religious,
offer to G.S., 170; and repatria- 202; modernization of, 83–84;
tion of looted books, 157–158, riots in (1929), 98–99; siege
159, 160–164; Rosenzweig com- of (1949), 166; Wailing Wall
memoration at, 103 dispute, 96–97. See also Hebrew
Hebron riots, 97–98 University
Hegel, G. W. F., 191 Jewish Cultural Reconstruction ( JCR),
Heidegger, Martin, 108 158, 164

226
 index

Jewish identity, 2–3, 4–5, 11, 74 Jewish identity of, 4–5; and Kab-
Jewish Institute of Religion, New balah, 65, 111, 118–119, 124, 177
York, 131, 169 Kafka, Hermann, 5
Jewish National Fund, 97 Kapp Putsch, 70
Jewishness, defining, 194–195 Katz, Jacob, 196, 201
Jewish renewal: of Buber, 13, 15, 17, 39; Katznelson, Berl, 149–150, 153, 154
in Germany, 72; and Sabbatian- Kessler, Harry, 19–20
ism, 154–155; and Zionism, 61, Kibbutz Bet Zera, 57
72, 102, 155, 169, 182, 191 kibbutz movement, 157
Jewish Studies, G.S.’s attack on, Kiryat Sefer (journal), 88
151–153 Klausner, Joseph, 86–87, 97, 148, 150,
Jewish Theological Seminary, New 151
York, 143 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus, 122, 202
Jonas, Hans, 81, 114, 116 Knesset, 125
Joseph, Bernard, 98–99 Kohn, Hans, 95
Jude, Der (journal), 25, 27, 40, 78 Kraft, Werner, 39, 48, 52, 53, 91, 114
Judenräte ( Jewish councils), 182, 183 Kramer, Grete, 48
Jüdische Rundschau, Die ( journal), 21, Kropotkin, Peter, 14
81, 97, 110, 124 Kurzweil, Baruch: attacks on G.S.,
Jung, Carl Gustav, connection with 172–175; response of G.S.,
Nazism, 160–161, 170, 173, 175 175–179
Jung Juda Zionist youth group, 8, 10,  
11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 45, 47, 51 Lacis, Asja, 90
  Lamentations, book of, translation
Kabbalah: Buber-Scholem correspon- from Hebrew, 33, 40
dence on, 27; charlatans and Landauer, Gustav, 14, 15, 20, 69
imposters, 74–77; Christian Lehmann, Siegfried, 29, 30
sources for, 64–65; history of, León, Moses de, 87–88, 139, 140
176; and Kafka, 65, 111, 118–119, Levy, Yohanan (Hans), 116
124, 177; Lurianic, 124, 140, 168; Lewy, Ernst, 43
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Lichtheim, George, 116, 132, 187
135–143; as masculine doctrine, Liebknecht, Karl, 20
137–138; motive for study of, 64, Lissauer, Grete, 49
65–66; mystical practices of Löwenthal, Leo, 74, 134
Abulafia, 68; mysticism defined, Luah ha-Artz (annual), 151, 168
136; origins of, 135; overlooked by Luria, Isaac, 124, 171
modern Jews, 104; philological Lurianic Kabbalah, 124, 140
tools in study of, 67–68; practical, Luxemburg, Rosa, 20
167; publications of G.S. on,  
88–89; Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Magnes, Judah L.: and Benjamin’s
Brightness), 68, 77–78, 89; stipend, 90; and binational
Stroock Lectures, 131–132; Zohar, statehood, 95, 150, 156, 166;
45, 64, 69, 87–88, 123, 139–140, Hebrew University presidency
198 of, 86, 170; and repatriation of
Kafka, Franz, 190; “Before the Law” looted books, 159
parable of, 30; Benjamin on, Maimonides, Moses, 66, 110
110–111; on German Jews, 11; Mann, Thomas, 37, 75

227
 index

Mapai (Labor) Party, 192 (1936), 123, 130; Arab violence in,
Marcuse, Herbert, 134–135 144–145; and Biltmore Program
Margulies, Heinrich, 21, 25, 27, 40 for statehood, 150, 156; binational
Marr, Wilhelm, 8 state plan for, 151, 156–157, 166;
Marx, Kitty. See Steinschneider, Kitty British Mandate, 82, 83–84, 99;
Marx civil war in, 166–167; cult of
Marx, Moses, 115 martyrdom in, 69; German
Matt, Daniel, 197–198 Jewish refugees in, 113–117;
messianism: and apocalypticism, 105, immigration of G.S. to, 81–82;
177–178; of Buber, 14; G.S.’s immigration to, 10, 11, 29, 45, 57,
identification with, 17–18, 20, 26, 60, 80; partition of, 131, 166; Peel
28, 38; and Hasidim, 142–143; Commission report, 130–131;
Sabbatian, 125–126, 141–142; of Polish immigrants in, 91–92; riots
settlement movement, 195–196; in (1929), 97–100; Wailing Wall
and Zionism, 100–101, 178–179 dispute, 96–97, 99–100. See also
Molitor, Franz Josef, 64–65 Hebrew University; Israel
Mosad Bialik, 125 Palestine, G.S. in: and binational
Moses, Walter, 81 statehood, 157, 166; in Brit
Muneles, Otto, 161, 162 Shalom, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103;
muscular Judaism, 3 disillusionment with political
mysticism. See Kabbalah and cultural climate, 90–95,
  105–106, 148; financial support
Nahman of Bratslav, 13, 165, 185 from family, 84–85, 108; German
Nathan of Gaza, 140, 141 Jewish refugees aided by, 113–115;
National Library, Jerusalem, 121, 159; on Hebrew University faculty,
G.S.’s position at, 82, 85–86; 86–90, 96, 107, 110, 114, 150;
Kiryat Sefer, 88; origins of, 85 home of, 122–123; with National
Nazi Germany: conditions for Jews in, Library, 82, 85–86; on partition,
112–113; imprisonment of Werner 131; in Pilegesh Society, 116–117,
Scholem, 112, 130, 144; Kristall- 124; publications of, 124–125;
nacht, 144; murder of Werner response to Jewish statehood,
Scholem, 146; refugees from, 168–169; and Wailing Wall riots,
113–117, 146; seizure of power, 98–100
111–112; Star of David symbol in, Passfield Commission, 102
168. See also Holocaust; World Peel Commission, 130–131
War II Pilegesh Society, 116–117, 124, 132
New York City, G.S. in, 133–135, 185 Pinson, Koppel, 158
New Yorker, 182 Polotsky, Ya’akov, 116
New York Review of Books, 195  
New York Times, 193–194 Rafi party, 192
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 15 Rathenau, Walther, 2–3
Ninth of Av, 125 redemption, 104–105, 111, 171, 175
Nordau, Max, 3, 8 revelation, divine, 109, 110–111, 137, 139
  Rosenzweig, Edith, 105
Palestine: Arab-Jewish rapprochement Rosenzweig, Franz: commitment to
movement (Brit Shalom), 95–96, Hebrew language, 94; on G.S.,
97, 100, 147; Arab uprising in 72–73; G.S.’s eulogy of, 103–104;

228
 index

G.S.’s letter on Hebrew language emigration of, 144, 146; financial

to, 92, 93–94; illness and death problems of, 84, 85, 108, 130; and
of, 94–95, 103; Lehrhaus of, 74, Fania Freud, 122; on Jewish life
134; The Star of Redemption, 71–72, under Nazis, 111, 112; tempera-
103, 104–105, 167; translations ment of, 6
from Hebrew, 71; Zionism Scholem, Emmy Wiechelt (wife of
opposed by, 72, 94 Werner), 49, 112, 146, 194, 195
Rothschild Library, Frankfurt, 162 Scholem, Erich (brother), 6, 31, 130,
Rothstein, Stephanie, 48 146
Rubashov, Zalman (Shazar), 35, 114 Scholem, Escha Burchhardt (first
Ruppin, Arthur, 95, 147–148 wife). See Burchhardt, Escha
  Scholem, Fania Freud (second wife),
Saadiah Gaon, 66 123, 127, 133, 149, 150, 164, 187,
Sabbatianism, 123; of Cardozo, 101–102; 201; courtship by G.S., 119, 120;
demonic in, 128, 129, 153, 173–174, on G.S.’s view of Jewish state-
184; G.S.’s biography of Shab- hood, 169; as Hebrew speaker,
batai Zvi, 153, 154, 170–172; 118; marriage to G.S., 122; on
heretical theology of, 125–129, misplaced introduction to
140; and Jewish renewal, 154–155; Sabbatianism book, 153, 154
Kurzweil’s attacks on G.S., Scholem, Georg (uncle), 18, 32
172–175; messianism of, 125–126, Scholem, Gershom (Gerhard): and
141–142; as national movement, Benjamin (see Benjamin, Walter–
171–172 Scholem relationship); biblio-
Sacco and Vanzetti case, 90 philia of, 8, 16, 202; bilingualism
Sambursky, Shmuel, 116, 117, 128 of, 117, 124; Buber critiqued by,
Sasportas, Jacob, 174 25–30, 38–40, 186–189; Buber’s
Schächter, Julie, 47–48, 61 influence on, 13–14, 15, 16, 66;
Schaeder, Grete, 188 childlessness of, 59, 118; death of,
Schloesser, Manfred, 180–181 199; death of mother, 159–160;
Schocken, Salman, 131, 151; G.S.’s divorce from Escha Burchhardt,
birthday letter of 1937 to, 65, 110, 121; education of (see university
128–129, 177, 190; as publisher studies); emissary for repatriation
of G.S.’s works, 123–124; and of looted books, 159, 160–164;
Shabbatai Zvi biography, 154 emotional collapse of, 164; at
Schocken Publishing House, 123–124, Eranos Conferences, 160,
135 169–170, 175; Eranos lectures of,
Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 108–109, 116, 187, 190; eye problems of, 144;
124, 190 family background of, 3–6; family
Scholem, Arthur (father): death of, name of, 3; fiftieth birthday cele-
5–6, 79; generational differences bration, 164–165, 166; “Gershom”
with sons, 34–35, 79; and Jewish name change, 36–37, 88, 169;
identity, 4, 5, 49; printing busi- health problems of, 70, 198–199;
ness of, 4, 22, 84, 108; relation- Hebraism of (see Hebrew lan-
ship with G.S., 5, 8–9, 31, 32, 34, guage); Jewishness defined by,
37, 78–80, 84 194–195; marriage to Escha
Scholem, Betty Hirsch (mother), 3, 4, Burchhardt, 84, 117–118, 120–121;
80, 107, 115; death of, 159–160; messianic episodes of, 17–18, 20,

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 index

Scholem, Gershom (continued ) Sabbatai Sevi, 153, 154, 170–172,

26, 28, 38; Munich period, 60, 62, 174, 180; with Schocken Pub-
67–80; nervous disorder of, 17–18, lishing House, 123–124; “Ten
20, 32, 33, 36, 37–38, 53, 57, 70; in Unhistorical Aphorisms About
old age, 196–199; and Orthodox the Kabbalah,” 176–177; “Toward
religion, 7–8, 11–13; in Palestine an Understanding of the Mes-
(see Palestine, G.S. in); personal- sianic Idea in Judaism,” 177–179;
ity of, 5, 27, 58, 73, 117, 164; physi- Walter Benjamin: The Story of a
cal appearance of, 6; political Friendship, 24, 43, 196–197
influences on, 6–7, 14–15; rela- Scholem, Hedwig (aunt), 9
tionship with father, 5, 8–9, 31, 32, Scholem, Marcus (great-grandfather), 3
34, 37, 78–80, 84; retirement of, Scholem, Reinhold (brother), 6, 31,
196; romantic relationships of, 69–70, 113, 130, 146
48–55, 57–59, 60, 62, 118, 119–120, Scholem, Siegfried (grandfather), 4
128; scholarly reputation and Scholem, Theobald (uncle), 9, 13, 15–16
stature of, 24, 170, 180, 193, 200; Scholem, Werner (brother), 8, 9, 14;
Swiss period, 55–60, 63; transla- imprisonment by Nazis, 112, 130,
tions from Hebrew into German, 144, 146; intermarriage of, 5, 49,
9, 33, 40–41, 50, 68–69, 118, 123; 194; Jewish identity of wife and
travel to Germany, 161–163, 195, children, 194–195; murdered by
196, 198; travel to United States, S.S., 146; radical politics of, 6–7,
133–135, 143–144, 185; visiting 20, 112; and war resistance, 21, 34;
professorships, 196, 197; will of, war service of, 31
150; on women’s role, 45–48, 51; Scholem, Zipporah (great-great-
during World War I (see World grandmother), 3
War I); during World War II (see Scholem ben Elias (great-great-
World War II). See also Kabbalah; grandfather), 3
Sabbatianism; Zionism Schweid, Eliezer, 174
Scholem, Gershom (Gerhard), secularism, Kurzweil’s attack on, 173
publications: “Against the Myth Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Brightness),
of the German Jewish Dialogue,” 68, 77–78, 89
146, 181; Bibliographia Kabbalistica, Seidman, Jankew, 69
88, 136; “Buber’s Conception of settlement movement, 195–196
Judaism,” 187; From Berlin to Shabbatai Zvi: conversion to Islam,
Jerusalem, 6, 43, 49, 54, 74, 146, 101, 102, 125–126; G.S.’s biography
189, 197; in German, 124, 181; of, 153, 154, 170–172; manic-
“Jews and Germans,” 181; in depressive diagnosis of, 141–142,
Kiryat Sefer, 88; Major Trends in 171; as Messiah, 20, 126
Jewish Mysticism, 135–143, 147, 153, Shaw Commission, 98
166, 171, 200–201; “Meditations silence, theme of, 58, 63
on Jewish Studies,” 151–153, 155; Simon, Ernst, 87, 91
“On the Question of the Emer- Six-Day War, 193
gence of the Kabbalah,,” 88–89; Song of Songs, translation from
“Redemption Through Sin,” Hebrew, 9, 33, 50
125–129, 140, 151, 153, 196; “Reve- Spanish Jews, expulsion of, 113, 124,
lation and Tradition as Religious 140, 143, 168
Categories in Judaism,” 190–191; Spiegel, Shalom, 133, 144, 147

230
 index

Spinoza, Baruch, 188 Wandervogel youth movement, 11

Star of David, origins of, 167–168; as Wapnewski, Peter, 199
star of redemption, 104 Wehle, Jonas, 177
Stein, Jettka, 12, 48 Weiss, Joseph, 164–166
Steinschneider, Gustav, 36, 114–115 Weizmann, Chaim, 163
Steinschneider, Karl, 115, 119 Welsch, Felix, 95
Steinschneider, Kitty Marx, 115–116, Werblowsky, Zvi, 174
119–120, 199 “who is a Jew?” debate, 194–195
Steinschneider, Moritz, 36, 151, 152 Widmanstetter (Johann Albert)
Stern Gang, 191 Society for Kabbalah Research,
Sternhartz, Nathan, 165 76. See also Eisler, Robert
Stoecker, Adolph, 2 Wiechelt, Emmy. See Scholem, Emmy
Stroock (Hilda) Lectures, 131–132, Wiechelt
135–143 Wiener, Meir, Lyrik der Kabbala,
Susman, Margarete, 181 69, 78
  Wise, Stephen S., 131, 159
Talmud, study of, 68 Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, 198, 199
theology: eclipse of, 103–104; women: and Kabbalah, 137–138; in
redemption, 104–105, 111, 171; Zionism, 45–48, 51, 59, 138
revelations of God, 109, 110–111; World War I: antiwar resistance,
of Sabbatianism, 125–129, 140, 20–23, 30–31, 34; Buber’s support
171; of Schoeps, 109; tradition for, 25–26, 27, 29; conscientious
as source for, 109–110. See also objection in, 37; deaths of G.S.’s
Kabbalah friends in, 31, 33–34; generational
Tillich, Paul, 133 conflict over, 34–35; military
tradition, 109, 190 enthusiasm for, 19–20; military
Troeltsch, Ernst, 49 service of G.S., 31–32, 35–38, 40
  World War II: Benjamin’s suicide,
United States: G.S.’s visits to, 133–135, 146–147; deaths of G.S.’s friends
143–144, 169; and repatriation of during, 149–150; disillusionment
looted books, 158, 159, 163, 164 with Zionism, 148; emigration of
university studies: in Berlin, 22, 33; Scholem family, 146; mental state
completion of dissertation, 77–78; of G.S. during, 149, 154, 155, 164.
decision for Jewish doctorate, See also Holocaust
63–64; defense of dissertation, World Zionist Organization, 85, 156
80; father’s financial support in, Wyneken, Gustav, 24
60; in Jena, 40; Kabbalah as  
subject for, 63–68; in Munich, Yaari, Avraham, 159
67–68 Yellin, David, 99
Ussishkin, Menachem, 97 YIVO, 158
  Yom Kippur War, 193–194
Varnhagen, Rahel, 145, 181, 183  
Vortrupp youth group, 108. See also Zionism: as anarchism, 14–16; Arendt’s
Schoeps, Hans-Joachim criticism of, 156–157; Bar Kokhba
  group, 82, 95–96; Blau-Weiss
Wailing Wall dispute, 96–97, 99–100; youth movement, 11, 12–13, 22, 29,
1929 riots, 97–100 40, 51, 80; of Buber, 29; collective

231
 index

Zionism (continued ) messianism, 100–101, 178–179;

nature of, 45, 60–61, 73; cultural, and muscular Judaism, 3; and
13, 15, 28, 85, 100, 169; German nationalism, 94; radical, 51; Re-
youth movement criticized by visionist, 101, 102–103, 105; state-
G.S., 40, 60, 81, 105; Hebrew hood definition of, 102–103; and
language as core of, 40, 60, 61, war resistance, 21–23; women’s
94; and Holocaust, 148–149, 162; role in, 45–48, 59, 138. See also
and immigration to Palestine, Palestine; Palestine, G.S. in
10, 11, 45, 57, 60, 80, 81–82; in- Zionist Congress, Seventeenth, 102
fluences on G.S., 8–10; and Zipperstein, Steven J., 201
Jewish renewal, 61, 72, 102, 155, Zohar, 45, 64, 69, 123; authorship of,
169, 191, 192; Jung Juda group, 8, 87–88, 139–140, 198
10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 45, 47, 51; and Zunz, Leopold, 152

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