Gershom Scholem

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Gershom Scholem was born Gerhard Scholem on 5 December 1897 in Berlin into a prosperous, thoroughly assimilated bourgeois Jewish family. His father Arthur ran a printing business and expected his sons to find their way into German professional life; what the eldest son found instead was the Communist International, and what the second found was Kabbalah. The contrast between the two brothers measures the distance Scholem traveled from his milieu. Werner Scholem became the youngest member of the Communist delegation in the Reichstag, a leading figure in the left wing of the Communist Party of Germany alongside Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, and was expelled from the party in 1926 after siding with the Left Opposition against Stalin. He was arrested after 1933, transferred to Buchenwald in 1938, and shot by the SS on 17 July 1940. Gershom had already been gone from Germany for seventeen years.

The Zionist break and the path to Jerusalem

Scholem’s departure from his family’s world was philosophical before it was geographical. He arrived at an orthodox study house as a teenager, opened the Talmud for the first time, and encountered a tradition that his parents had effectively abandoned. He began learning Hebrew in earnest, encountered Zionist writings, and decided that the German-Jewish synthesis his father’s generation inhabited was a contradiction rather than a synthesis. By the time he registered at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study Semitics — he had also studied mathematics, philosophy, and mathematical logic at Jena — the rupture with his family over Zionism was complete. His doctoral dissertation, a critical edition and commentary on the Sefer ha-Bahir, the enigmatic Provençal text that marks the threshold of classical Kabbalah, announced what his scholarly life would be.

He emigrated to Palestine in 1923. He was twenty-five. He spent the first years working at the National Library in Jerusalem, cataloguing its Hebrew manuscripts and revising its classification system, and building what would eventually become one of the finest Judaica libraries in private hands, bequeathed to the National Library after his death. In 1933, when Hitler’s assumption of power dissolved the normal career paths for Jewish academics in Germany, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem created the first professorship in Jewish mysticism in any university in the world, and appointed Scholem to it. He held the chair until 1965 and remained active at the university until his death on 21 February 1982.

Walter Benjamin and the Angelus Novus

In Munich in 1915, Scholem had met Walter Benjamin, a meeting that would produce one of the most documented intellectual friendships of the twentieth century. They argued about theology, language, and Zionism — Scholem pressing Benjamin to emigrate to Palestine and study Hebrew, Benjamin perpetually deferring — and they wrote to each other without interruption for a quarter of a century. The correspondence, published after both were dead, is among the central documents of German Jewish thought in the years between the wars.

Benjamin purchased Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus in 1921. He described it in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as the face of an angel blown backward into the future by the storm of progress, unable to stop and gather what the storm has broken. Before his final escape attempt from Nazi-occupied France, he entrusted the print to Georges Bataille, who hid it at the Bibliothèque nationale; after Benjamin’s death at Portbou, Spain, on 26 September 1940, Theodor Adorno received the print and, following Benjamin’s wishes, sent it to Scholem. It passed eventually to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it now hangs. For Scholem the Angelus Novus was not merely a keepsake: he identified Benjamin’s reading of it with a messianic awareness of catastrophe that he recognized as structurally related to what he was finding in the Sabbatean literature.

Against the Wissenschaft des Judentums

The academic study of Judaism in the nineteenth century had been dominated by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the “science of Judaism” — a philological and historical school that sought to establish Jewish studies as a recognized discipline within European universities. Scholem had a complicated relationship with its legacy. The philological rigor it pioneered was exactly the method he would apply to kabbalistic manuscripts; but its attitude toward its subject he found disabling. He argued that scholars like Heinrich Graetz and Moritz Steinschneider had treated Kabbalah not as an object of serious inquiry but as an embarrassment — irrational, superstitious, the flotsam of popular credulity that a modern, rational Jewish scholarship needed to explain away or quietly inter. The phrase he returned to in his critique was that these scholars aimed at giving Jewish mysticism “a decent burial.” The field Scholem set out to build demanded the opposite posture: that Kabbalah was not the decay of a rational Judaism but one of its most characteristic and historically consequential expressions, continuous with the same textual and interpretive imagination that produced the Talmud.

The polemic was not merely methodological. Scholem held that the Wissenschaft scholars had produced a self-fulfilling portrait — a Judaism pruned of its mystical, messianic, and antinomian energies, a sanitized tradition that matched what German liberals thought religion should look like. Against that picture he posed the full record: the Zohar’s erotic theology, the Lurianic catastrophe-narrative, Sabbatean antinomianism, Hasidic immanentism. His conviction was that “there is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system” — and that Jewish mysticism, studied in its particularity, was the living heart of Jewish historical experience, not its dead weight.

Major Trends and the philological revolution

Scholem had spent the 1920s and 1930s publishing critical editions of kabbalistic manuscripts, cataloguing the National Library’s collections, and writing in Hebrew and German for specialist audiences. In early 1938, invited to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York by Shalom Spiegel, he delivered the series of lectures that became Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published by Schocken Books in 1941. The book is nine lectures running from the Merkavah throne-chariot mysticism of late antiquity through the emergence of Kabbalah in Provence and Gerona, Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic technique, the Zohar, Isaac Luria’s Safed school, Sabbateanism, and Hasidism. Delivered in English — a language Scholem had learned relatively late — at the moment Germany annexed Austria, its combination of archival depth and sweeping historical narrative gave the field its first synthetic frame.

What Major Trends accomplished was to insist that each of these movements was susceptible to the methods philology and the history of religions had applied to every other body of texts: manuscript genealogy, linguistic analysis, authorship inquiry, historical context. Kabbalah was not the province of credulous practitioners or romantic enthusiasts; it was a tradition with a recoverable history, and that history could be told with the same precision brought to the Greek New Testament or the Arabic philosophers.

The book was revised through its third edition (1954). A fiftieth-anniversary conference was held in Berlin in 1991. It has never been out of print.

The Zohar: from promised refutation to philological proof

When Scholem opened his career at the Hebrew University around 1925, his entry point into the Zohar question was essentially adversarial: he had provisionally accepted that the thirteenth-century Castilian kabbalist Moses de León was the Zohar’s author — the case argued by Adolph Jellinek in 1851 and accepted by Graetz and others — but wanted to examine whether the evidence would hold. Through the late 1920s and 1930s he worked through the Aramaic of the Zohar in systematic detail: its grammar, its vocabulary, its anachronisms, its debts to medieval sources including Rashi, ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Nahmanides, and its ignorance of the geography of Roman Palestine. The evidence converged. By the time of the Major Trends lectures in 1938, Scholem had satisfied himself that de León was the principal author of the Zohar’s main body — not merely the circulator of an ancient discovery but the creator of a literary masterwork in artificial Aramaic — and that the Tikkunei Zohar and Raya Mehemna were by a later imitator working in a different hand.

The argument in lectures five and six of Major Trends became the scholarly consensus for a generation. It did not, of course, settle every question. Yehuda Liebes, in “How the Zohar Was Written” (published in Studies in the Zohar, SUNY Press, 1993), argued that the Zohar was not one man’s work but issued from a circle of Castilian kabbalists around de León. The debate about the Zohar’s composition belongs to the Zohar entry; what is Scholem’s is the philological demonstration that placed the Zohar in a historical moment and a human hand, ending the pseudepigraphic fiction as a scholarly matter (while leaving it intact as a devotional one).

Sabbatai Ṣevi and the Lurianic preparation thesis

Scholem’s largest single work was Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, published in Hebrew in 1957 and in English translation by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky in 1973 (Princeton/Bollingen). It is a study of the seventeenth-century messianic movement that convulsed the Jewish world: Sabbatai Ṣevi’s proclamation in 1665, Nathan of Gaza’s theological elaboration of his mission, the mass movement that followed, the apostasy to Islam in 1666, and the long aftermath of Sabbatean crypto-Judaism and antinomian theology that fed into both Frankism and aspects of early Hasidism.

The book’s central thesis was that the Sabbatean explosion was not an aberration but a consequence. Scholem argued that Lurianic Kabbalah — the system Isaac Luria taught at Safed in the early 1570s, recorded by Hayyim Vital and disseminated across the Jewish world over the following century — had made the Jewish masses susceptible to messianic crisis by giving cosmic weight to the experience of exile. The Lurianic narrative of divine contraction, broken vessels, and scattered sparks awaiting human redemption was, in Scholem’s reading, a mythological processing of the 1492 expulsion from Spain; once that narrative was widely diffused, it created the emotional and theological ground on which a messianic claim could land with explosive force. The Sabbatean movement was Lurianic messianism brought to its logical, catastrophic extreme.

This thesis generated substantial scholarly debate. Moshe Idel, in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988), argued that Scholem had overstated the diffusion of Lurianic Kabbalah before the mid-seventeenth century, that it had remained in elite circles rather than reaching the broad Jewish public that Scholem imagined primed for Sabbatai Ṣevi, and that Sabbatai Ṣevi himself neither studied Lurianic Kabbalah closely nor always endorsed it. The debate between these positions is live in scholarship and is treated in detail in the Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbateanism entries.

Eranos and the comparative-religion milieu

From the 1940s onward, Scholem was a regular participant in the Eranos conferences at Ascona, Switzerland — the annual summer gatherings organized by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn that brought together scholars of religion, psychology, and mythology from across Europe and America. Carl Jung was the presiding intellectual figure; Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerényi, and Joseph Campbell were among the regulars. The Eranos milieu is treated in its own entry (Comparative Religion and Eranos); what belongs here is the question of what Scholem took from that milieu and what he resisted.

At Eranos, Scholem presented Kabbalah within a comparative-religion frame — as a body of mystical symbolism with structural resonances to Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and the symbolist traditions of other religions. He delivered lectures there on the Shekhinah, on the golem, on religious authority and mysticism, which later appeared in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (German 1960, English 1965). He engaged seriously with Jung and acknowledged the structural parallels between kabbalistic imagery and Jungian archetypes, but he was equally careful to insist on the irreducibly particular historical character of each tradition. The symbol, for Scholem, was not a transhistorical constant but a historically generated form that carried its specific tradition’s weight — which is why the comparison had to proceed through philology, not through typological overlay.

On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism

On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1965) collected the Eranos lectures and other essays and introduced Scholem’s method to a broader readership. Its central preoccupation was the question of how a tradition that begins with a claim of divine revelation — Torah as the word of God — can sustain an interpretive culture of inexhaustible proliferation without either dissolving the claim or foreclosing the interpretation. The kabbalists’ answer, in Scholem’s rendering, was the symbol: the sacred text is not a code to be decoded once and set aside but a “concentrated… reality” that remains “transparent” to the divine through precisely its resistance to exhaustion. The essay on the Golem traced the creature of artificial life from rabbinic legend through the Loew legend and into German Romantic fiction, arguing that the golem was a mythological figure for the kabbalist’s own creative power — the making of life as a reflex of the interpretive animation of text.

The essay on the name of God and linguistic theory laid out what became one of Scholem’s most influential formulations: that revelation communicates not propositions but a medium — the divine word is not content but infinite communicability — and that this is why the same text can sustain an endless chain of authoritative interpretations. The critique of modernity embedded here was pointed: a Judaism that had abandoned the claim of revelation had also abandoned the engine of its interpretive life.

The Arendt exchange over Eichmann

In 1963, Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, reporting on the trial of the Nazi functionary and advancing the concept of “the banality of evil.” Scholem wrote to Arendt with a sharpness that shocked many in their shared circle: he accused her of lacking Ahabath Israel — love for the Jewish people — and of writing with a “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious tone” toward the victims. Arendt replied that she had never loved any collective, only individuals, and that solidarity demanded not the suppression of thought but its exercise.

The exchange crystallized a disagreement that went beyond Eichmann. Scholem held that the historian of the Jewish people must maintain a form of committed relationship to that people, not as a bar to criticism but as a condition for understanding. Arendt held that the demand for solidarity was incompatible with the independence that truth-telling required. They did not resolve it; they continued to collaborate on the publication of Benjamin’s papers. The correspondence was published and is one of the sharpest documents in the postwar debate about the obligations of Jewish intellectual life.

The field Scholem left

When Scholem died in Jerusalem on 21 February 1982, he had produced something that had not existed when he began: an academic discipline. The catalogue of his achievements was not merely the major books but the manuscripts located, identified, and edited; the doctoral students trained; the classification system built; the series of the Eranos volumes that carried kabbalistic scholarship into comparative religious studies; the transformation of the National Library’s Judaica holdings into a research collection of world standing.

The revision of his paradigm was already underway at his death. Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988), the most consequential single critique, argued that Scholem’s concentration on the theosophical-theurgic stream of Kabbalah and on its Gnostic genealogy had underplayed the ecstatic-prophetic current recovered in the manuscripts of Abraham Abulafia — a tradition whose techniques of letter-permutation, breath control, and prophetic aspiration had less to do with Gnosticism and everything to do with very old Jewish meditation practice. Idel also pressed a continuity thesis against Scholem’s periodic-rupture model: where Scholem saw Kabbalah emerging from a crisis and Sabbateanism erupting from a Lurianic preparation, Idel saw older, quieter continuities that Scholem’s dramatizing historical narrative had obscured. Liebes’s circle-of-authors challenge to the Zohar attribution, the manuscript-theory critiques of Daniel Abrams, and the post-Idel generation of scholarship on Abulafia, Cordovero, and the Safed school all measure their distance from Scholem as a point of origin.

The tradition he took seriously as a scholar — Jewish mysticism from the Merkavah throne-visions through the classical Kabbalah, the Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Frankism, and Hasidism — was, in his own framing, the living heart of Jewish history: not a deviation from normative Judaism but the form in which Judaism’s most audacious speculative energies had been at work. The claim has been argued about ever since he made it. That it can be argued about, in the terms he set, is itself the measure of his achievement.

→ Related: Kabbalah · Jewish Mysticism · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Lurianic Kabbalah · Christian Kabbalah · Hasidism · Frankism · Sabbateanism · Comparative Religion Eranos · Esotericism