Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah

251 Pages·2018·2.45 MB·English

by  David Biale

gershom scholem

Gershom
Scholem
Master of the Kabbalah
DAVID BIALE
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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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959384
ISBN 978-0-300-21590-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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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