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Overview
As Engel shows, in his search for the truth of Jewish mysticism Scholem molded the vast literature of Jewish mystical lore into a rich assortment of stories that unveiled new truths about the modern condition. Positioning Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine, and later the state of Israel, Engel intertwines Scholem’s biography with his historiographical work, which stretches back to the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, through the lives of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Sabbatai Zevi, and up to Hasidism and the dawn of the Zionist movement. Through parallel narratives, Engel touches on a wide array of important topics including immigration, exile, Zionism, World War One, and the creation of the state of Israel, ultimately telling the story of the realizations—and failures—of a dream for a modern Jewish existence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226428772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Gershom Scholem
An Intellectual Biography
By Amir Engel
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-42877-2
CHAPTER 1
The Stories of Gershom Scholem
In my opinion, my scientific endeavor should be discussed according to its stated objectives, not according to its hidden meanings.
GERSHOM SCHOLEM TO BARUCH KURZWEIL, 1959
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) occupies a central role in our intellectual imagination. The foremost scholar of Jewish mysticism, Scholem was an intellectual giant, "the creator of an academic discipline," in Martin Buber's often quoted assertion, and among the most influential scholars of the previous century. Yet despite his charismatic personality and the many books and articles he wrote, there is something about him that remains mysterious and never fully exposed. Hans Jonas, one of Scholem's close friends and an influential philosopher, reflected in his memoir on what one might have expected to be a fundamental aspect of Scholem's worldview. Was Scholem a religious Jew, in any sense of the word? Jonas noted: "We were completely puzzled about this question." This, Jonas added, "remains one of the unanswered Scholem Enigmas." The irksome presence of such a "Scholem Enigma" surfaced again in a column written in the daily Ha'aretz by one of Scholem's closest students and friends, Joseph Weiss, on the occasion of Scholem's fiftieth birthday. In this column Weiss noted that Scholem's concealment technique was "akin to that of some medieval painter-artists, whose likeness is depicted in the background of their paintings." In his works, Scholem brought to life an array of intriguing characters, among which are Sabbatai Zevi, Nathan of Gaza, and Rabbi Isaac Luria. If Weiss is correct, Scholem hid his own portrait among these men, but where exactly? It is frustratingly hard to say. As Rolf Tiedemann, one of the first and most influential Walter Benjamin scholars, noted, Scholem was "the ultimate authority, only that one could not quite say an authority on what."
Many prominent scholars have written about Gershom Scholem. David Biale's Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-history has set the standard interpretation for some of Scholem's most important and difficult concepts and ideas. A great number of scholarly articles, book chapters, and a handful of other important books have added essential dimensions to the understanding of his life and his work, and they will be discussed in more detail shortly. Nevertheless, I will argue, the scholarly spotlight on Scholem has not yet lifted the shadow that obscures his image. Scholem is still an enigma today, just as he was for Jonas, Weiss, and Tiedemann about half a century ago. Indeed, it often seems that the overall impression many scholars had while working on this topic is rather similar to the one keenly formulated by David Myers in his book on Jewish historiography. In the closing lines of his discussion on Scholem, Myers notes: "One often gets the sense when studying Scholem's life and work that he took a certain delight in throwing critics off his trail, offering clues in various directions before retracting them at random."
Who was Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem? He never claimed to be anything more than a historian of Jewish mysticism, yet he clearly was. Why then did Scholem become so much more than a historian of the Kabbalah and an expert on obscure Jewish texts? Or alternatively, how could an expert on a decidedly limited field of knowledge become so influential and well-known? These are the questions this book sets out to explore.
In this book I strive to shed new light on the enigma of Gershom Scholem by telling the story of his evolvement over and against the existential questions that he faced throughout his life. I argue that in order to discuss Scholem and understand his confrontation with the fundamental questions of modernity one must follow at least two interrelated yet distinct sequences of events, two plotlines, as it were. The first thread follows the events that made up Scholem's life, his biography, and the second is his historiography, his narrative of Jewish mystical tradition and its role in the creation of the modern Jewish nation.
Gershom Scholem was born in 1897 in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family and soon became enthralled by the questions and dilemmas of Jewish life in the modern world. He was a devout Zionist and a political activist already at the age of sixteen. In 1923, Scholem immigrated to Palestine, then a mandate of the British Empire. There, he became a key member of a fringe Zionist organization that advocated the creation of a binational — Jewish-Arab — solution in Palestine. In 1925, he became a lecturer at the newly founded Hebrew University and eventually a key figure in Israeli academic and intellectual circles. Scholem himself recounted the story of his life in a memoir titled From Berlin to Jerusalem, which leaves many of the story's most intriguing details and events undisclosed.
In order to gain a better understanding of Scholem's evolvement over and against the fundamental questions of modernity, it is necessary to discuss the main modus of his thought, that is, the story that Scholem himself told through his work as a scholar. For much of his long and industrious life, Scholem wrote about, discussed, and expanded the study of Jewish mysticism. The groundbreaking work he undertook in this field made him a famous man. Scholem's study of the Kabbalah is a vast, complex, and multifaceted edifice. Several scholars have offered a typology for Scholem's works, and a bibliography of his writings was published as a separate volume already during his lifetime. Any attempt to succinctly organize them is a daunting challenge; nevertheless, the discussion in this book focuses on what seems to be the fundamental aspect of this phenomenal accomplishment: Scholem's historiography. Beyond other important aspects of his life's achievements, it is Scholem's historiography of Jewish mysticism, I argue, that serves as the distinct core of his bibliographical, philological, and phenomenological writings.
It is, indeed, his revolutionary metanarrative of the Jewish people, laid out most comprehensively in his magisterial work Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, that serves as the fundament for most of Scholem's other discoveries. In this book, Scholem describes, among other things, the events that led from the Spanish expulsion of 1492, through the formation of the Lurianic Kabbalah in Safed in the sixteenth century, to the explosion of the Sabbatean heretical movement on the plane of history, the repercussions of which, Scholem argued, were felt well into the eighteenth century in, among others, the Hasidic movement. This sequence of interrelated events, Scholem furthermore claimed, decisively shaped Judaism and Jewish life in the modern era. It is this narrative too — Scholem's history of modern Judaism from the Spanish expulsion until the fall of the Hasidic movement — that is discussed in the following chapters.
The two central plots — Scholem's life story and his historiography — are intertwined. For, as I show, Scholem's singular scholarly work is deeply rooted in his no less exceptional life story. Some scholars may find this suggestion inadequate to describe the work of this towering figure. But like that of many other scholars and intellectuals, Scholem's scholarly research is underpinned by assumptions and beliefs developed in reaction to events, problems, and dilemmas that he encountered in the world around him. Like many others, Scholem often sought to comprehend and further explain the social situation in which he lived by uncovering its historical foundations even if he never explicitly claimed to do so. Therefore, as in the cases of other authors, any attempt to understand Scholem's work must take account of the events and dilemmas in the context of which they were created.
* * *
The choice to discuss Scholem's life and work as intertwined stories is part of a continuous, albeit not always explicit, argument about its very nature and value. Indeed, the question why Scholem is still read today, and what relevance he still bears, permeates scholarly discussion just as the "Scholem enigma" once troubled Scholem's personal friends. Thus, for instance, in a 1992 article dedicated to Scholem, Amos Funkenstein writes that the fact that Scholem's work has an echo "in other fields ... both within and beyond the pale of Jewish studies is ... astounding if not paradoxical." Not long after concluding his voluminous study on Scholem's work, and almost fifteen years after Funkenstein's article, Daniel Weidner raised the same problem. Taking Scholem to be "one of the most important representatives of 20th century Jewish thought" as well as "a major spokesman for Jewishness" is, Weidner contends, "a little surprising, considering that his main works are historiographical, consisting of a rather specialized research on the Kabbalah and its role in Jewish history." Indeed, he concludes, "the deeper importance of Scholem's oeuvre remains vague."
These are keen observations. Ostensibly at least, Scholem never wrote anything that could appeal to a wide audience. One is hard-pressed to find, among his several hundreds of publications, any even remotely systematic discussion of issues in general philosophy, politics, film, art, literature, or world history. The few comments he did make on such issues were most often given in interviews. Moreover, as Weidner and others have argued, the overwhelming majority of Scholem's work concerns a relatively narrow corpus within the vast field Jewish studies. And yet his life and works have also been studied by leading literary scholars, such as Harold Bloom, Robert Alter, and Andreas Kilcher, historians like Steven Aschheim and David Biale, and philosophers such as Paul Mendes Flohr and Nathan Rotenstreich, who together created a rather complex if not complicated image. In its entirety, the literature on Scholem casts him, as David Myers noted, in "a myriad of functions: philologist, historian, philosopher, publicist, and Zionist theoretician and critic, not to mention his erstwhile career as a serious student of mathematics." There is therefore a certain peculiarity in Scholem's position in the contemporary cultural imagination. The fact is that although he was predominantly a scholar of Jewish lore, his impact is felt well beyond his narrow field and is evident in a plethora of cultural fields, both within Israeli academia and outside of it. How is that possible?
One solution may be that Jewish mysticism has a much wider relevance than one would assume. However, in light of the vast changes that have taken place within the field of Kabbalah studies over the past few decades, this solution appears unlikely. Indeed, the publication of Moshe Idel's book Kabbalah: New Perspectives in 1988 paved the way for the reexamination of Scholem's historical and philological methods. Among other issues, Idel's book contains a powerful critique of Scholem's methodologies in the study of the Jewish mysticism and calls attention to new methods and facets of Jewish mysticism neglected by Scholem. Idel's study was followed by others, and the result was a paradigm shift that moved the field of Kabbalah studies slowly beyond the methods laid down by its founding father. The continuous stream of scholarly work published in the last decade alone introduces new voices and approaches in the study of Kabbalistic literature. These transformations should have made Scholem's project obsolete, but they did not.
Scholarly fascination with Scholem endures and has perhaps even intensified. Many of his books are still in circulation, and the past few decades have seen a continuous stream of publications, workshops, and lectures about Scholem and his scholarly work as well as the reissuing of some of Scholem's less-known essays. Joseph Dan's observation from 1997 seems therefore still relevant today: "It is not the question of whether Scholem has been correct in one or another of his scholarly conclusions. Today he is a classic of Jewish studies ... Some essential aspects of his achievements are beyond ... detailed discussions and reevaluations." Dan's observation offers a succinct and, I would add, accurate account of a general scholarly sentiment surrounding the image of Scholem and his work. But the problem remains unsolved. One may ask about these "essential aspects" that render Scholem such a pillar of Jewish and Israeli culture beyond "the question of whether Scholem has been correct in one or another of his scholarly conclusions." What are they and where are they to be found? Again, it is frustratingly difficult to say.
The attempt to explain the peculiarity of Scholem's position in the cultural imagination constitutes a defining aspect in the existing approaches to Scholem's oeuvre. The general consensus among scholars seems to be that Scholem is widely read despite his narrow field of expertise and the changes within it primarily because from the depths of Jewish mysticism, of Judaism, or even of the past in general, he excavated some kernel of unyielding philosophical truth. Even if the precise content of this truth is an issue of debate, two major trends emerge from the diverse body of literature that seeks to probe the inner meaning of Scholem's writings. Some scholars, such as Baruch Kurzweil, Amos Funkenstein, Christoph Schmidt, and Benjamin Lazier, have understood Scholem's discoveries to pertain to his Zionist worldview. 24Despite the differences between them, they all argue that Scholem found in the history of Jewish mysticism a certain precursor, model, or paradigm that could serve the spiritual, ideological, or political needs of the emerging body politic of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. Other scholars, such as David Biale, Robert Alter, and Stephan Moses, maintain that Scholem excavated a much larger and more general idea that touches upon the very foundations of knowledge in the modern period. Significantly, these two interpretive possibilities do not necessarily exclude one another and are at times even found in the literature in conjunction. In what follows, I seek to call both these interpretations of Scholem into question, but first let us focus a narrow lens on each, beginning with what may be called the Zionist paradigm.
Most attempts to substantiate an essential link between Scholem's Zionism and his work on the Kabbalah concentrate on his studies of Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbatean movement. The assumption underlying this paradigm is that the heretical Sabbatean movement, which, ostensibly at least, forced Jews onto the plain of world history, served Scholem to prove that Zionism has a precedent within the innermost folds of Jewish history. Perhaps the most succinct and direct formulation of this position is given by Amos Funkenstein who argues: "In Scholem's eyes the Sabbatean movement (and its later developments) was ... a prefiguration of Zionism." The reasons and the intricacies of this argument will be explored in detail in the fifth chapter below, which is devoted to Scholem's study of the Sabbatean movement. Here it will suffice to note that this position was formulated already during Scholem's lifetime (by Baruch Kurzweil), and endures in some of the most recent scholarship on Scholem. That the relation between Zionism and Sabbateanism is one of the most recurring themes in the literature on Scholem is hardly surprising. The tension between the national project of the Jews and the religious history of Judaism is the topic of a heated debate that does not appear to be dissipating any time in the foreseeable future. In the context of this debate, Scholem's views on Sabbateanism seem alive and relevant.
The second position on the inner meaning of Scholem's writings is more daring, more general, and for this reason somewhat more difficult to formulate. A poignant example of this position is offered by Eliezer Schweid, who, in a highly critical evaluation, writes that Scholem "regarded mysticism as the source from which Jewish religion regenerates itself." In the Hebrew original Schweid uses the rather peculiar term luz to denote the word "source" and continues with a short sentence, omitted from the English translation of the book, stating that, for Scholem, mysticism was the essence (atzmut) and all the rest was vessels (kelim) or costumes (malbushim). These words have obvious Kabbalistic connotations, and thus Schweid's choice is anything but coincidental. Indeed, this formulation strongly suggests that Scholem's reading of the Kabbalah is, in and of itself, a mystical act, conjuring Real Presence from the texts of times past.
A no less bold yet somewhat more specific formulation of Scholem's "revelation" lays emphasis on his understanding and interpretation of language. Scholem wrote considerably about the question of interpretation, meaning, and translation in the Kabbalah and beyond. He was especially preoccupied with issues in the philosophy of language around the end of the First World War, while in close contact with Walter Benjamin. It is indeed no coincidence that much of the literature that discusses Scholem's theory of language does so in conjunction with Benjamin's works. In the most general terms, the argument offered regarding Scholem's thinking on language is that he found in the Kabbalah a principle of commentary that goes radically beyond the "original meaning" of the interpreted text. Thus the "Kabbalistic" interpretation of a text may expose a hidden meaning that could transform or even reverse the overall or apparent "meaning" or effect of that text. In his deeply perceptive study on Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, Robert Alter expresses the idea with the following words: "Scholem's argument is to propose that commentary, which presents itself as a mere supplement to the text or extension or illumination of it, is actually an explosive force for change." Scholem, it is thus argued, discovered that as it draws the innermost aspects of the text to the fore, mystical commentary has the power to pull the text inside out and transform it. This formulation positions Scholem as something of a Jewish Paul de Man. For indeed Scholem, according to Alter, found in the Kabbalah a disruptive system of reading, and it is this that makes him interesting and relevant to this day.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gershom Scholem by Amir Engel. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. The Stories of Gershom Scholem
2. Writing the Myth of Exile: In Search of Political Rejuvenation, 1913–1918
3. Messianism as Symbol: The Lurianic School and the Emergence of a Mystical-Political Society
4. When a Dream Comes True: Zionist Politics in Palestine, 1923–1931
5. Against All Odds: Sabbatean Belief and the Sabbatean Movement
6. For the Love of Israel: The Turn from the Fringe to the Mainstream of Zionist Thinking
7. The Man and the Image
Index
What People are Saying About This
“Engel’s bold retelling of the remarkable life and career of Gershom Scholem is a model of intellectual biography at its most incisive. Skillfully tracing Scholem’s personal itinerary, not only from Berlin to Jerusalem, but also from a Zionism of romantic, anarchistic spiritualism to one of pragmatic, resigned statism, he allows us to appreciate the role historical trauma, both communal and personal, played in his transformation. Even more impressively, he uncovers the ways in which Scholem’s scholarly work on Jewish mysticism and Sabbateanism reflected his growing realization of the dangers of messianic politics in the modern world.”
“Engel’s study of Gershom Scholem is rich in original insights, notably the role of Lurianic Kabbalah in Scholem’s politics and the evolution of his presentation of Sabbatianism. His book makes an important new contribution to the growing fascination with this historian of Jewish mysticism, who, as a seminal twentieth-century thinker, was much more than just an historian.”
“Engel’s study of Gershom Scholem is rich in original insights, notably the role of Lurianic Kabbalah in Scholem’s politics and the evolution of his presentation of Sabbatianism. His book makes an important new contribution to the growing fascination with this historian of Jewish mysticism, who, as a seminal twentieth-century thinker, was much more than just an historian.”
“Engel’s biography of the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem confronts the reader with a double challenge. Against the most solid preconceptions of the humanities, as a contemporary intellectual and political environment, it patiently documents how philological rigor can turn into philosophical inspiration. But on this trajectory of erudition and thought, it shows that Scholem also crossed the border between a noncommittal affinity with Zionism and Zionism as a radically progressive lifeform and political option.”