Scholem, Gershom

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SCHOLEM, GERSHOM

SCHOLEM, GERSHOM (1897–1982), was the founder of a school of rigorous historical and philological study of Jewish mysticism (Qabbalah). Although earlier Jewish historians had treated Qabbalah, they generally regarded it either as disreputable or, at best, as a part of Jewish philosophy. Scholem showed that the mystical tradition was a discipline in its own right, and, by the discovery and dating of hundreds of manuscripts, he established its textual and intellectual history. A prolific writer, he issued his findings in numerous publications.

Scholem was born in Berlin to a family of printers. Although his parents were partly assimilated, Scholem became a passionate Jew and a committed Zionist. He taught himself Hebrew and acquired a Jewish education while still in secondary school. Opposed to World War I on Zionist grounds—that it was against the interests of the Jews—he was expelled from school for circulating a pamphlet against the war.

Scholem was initially influenced by Martin Buber but broke with him over the question of the war. He criticized Buber for using mystical categories to support the German war effort. Later, he developed this criticism of Buber into a polemic against Buber's ahistorical treatment of Jewish sources, especially Hasidism.

In 1919, Scholem decided to write his doctoral dissertation on Qabbalah, and he chose as his subject the early qabbalistic text Sefer ha-bahir. Completing this work in Munich in 1922, the following year he emigrated to Palestine, where he found a position as librarian in the emerging Hebrew University. When the university opened in 1925, he was appointed lecturer in Jewish mysticism and was promoted to professor several years later. He served in this capacity until his retirement in 1965.

Scholem's studies of the history of Jewish mysticism can be found in 579 entries in his bibliography. His most important works include Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (first published in 1941), Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Hebrew ed., 1957; rev. English ed., 1973), Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (1962), and The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (1971).

At the heart of Scholem's historiography is the belief that myth is crucial to the vitality of a religious tradition, an idea that betrays the influence of German romantic thinkers such as von Baader. Scholem identified the central myth of Qabbalah as Gnostic. He argued that already in late antiquity, Jewish mystics had developed a monotheistic version of Gnostic dualism. This Jewish Gnosticism persisted in underground traditions and made its way from Babylonia via Italy and Germany to southern France, where it surfaced in Sefer ha-bahir. In a number of important books and articles, Scholem described how these ideas sparked the development of the qabbalistic movement of Provence and Spain in the thirteenth century. He showed how this movement culminated in Sefer ha-zohar (The book of splendor), which he demonstrated to have been the work of Mosheh de León at the end of the thirteenth century.

Scholem traced the history of the Gnostic myth of Qabbalah through sixteenth-century Lurianic Qabbalah to the Shabbatean messianic movement of the seventeenth century. His work on Shabbateanism argued that this heretical movement was not a marginal phenomenon in Jewish history but instead the central event of the seventeenth century. By undermining the hegemony of the rabbis, Shabbateanism became the great watershed between the Middle Ages and modernity and foreshadowed the rise of antinomian secularism. Thus, Scholem argued that the rise of modern Judaism was a consequence of an event within the Jewish religious tradition and not simply the result of outside influences. Secularism, rather than constituting a break from Jewish history, was a product of a dynamic within Jewish history itself.

Scholem's history of Jewish mysticism sweeps from late antiquity to the threshold of modernity, and in his hands, Qabbalah became the key to the history of the Jews during this long period. Scholem argued that Judaism is not a monolithic tradition but consists instead of a dialectical interplay of conflicting forces. Only by understanding this tradition in its anarchistic entirety can one grasp the "essence" of Judaism.

Behind Scholem's historiographical achievement lay a philosophy of modern Judaism that combined Zionism with a kind of religious anarchism. Scholem held that only in a Jewish state could nonapologetic history be written, and only there could the Jews again become the subjects of their own history. He saw the Judaism that would come out of the Zionist movement as something different from either Orthodoxy or the rationalism of the nineteenth century. Similar to his version of historical Judaism as a dynamic conflict between opposing forces, the new Judaism would be pluralistic rather than monolithic.

Bibliography

Scholem's complete bibliography to 1977 was published by the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, 1977). For biographical information, see Scholem's From Berlin to Jerusalem, translated by Harry Zohn (New York, 1980). For an analysis of Scholem's thought, see my Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).