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Gershom Scholem: The Mystics' Medium (1977)

[Having long admired Gershom Scholem as a master mind in intellectual history—particularly, Jewish intellectual history—I persuaded the New York magazine Present Tense to commission me to do about him the sort of comprehensive profile that I’d done for the individual features in my book Master Minds (1969). Indeed, the man was an impressive as his books. Had there been an updated/enlarged edition of that book, this would have been reprinted there. Instead, it was reprinted in Present Tense’s own anthology from itself, Jewish Profiles (1991). Little did I think that we would meet again in his native city Berlin just before his death.]

The connection between the renascence of the Jewish people and its historical consciousness is obvious.

—Gershom Scholem

Jewish scholars and Jews in general had more or less forgotten about Jewish mysticism until Gershom Scholem began to publish his research, initially in German in the 1920s and later in Hebrew and English. Today, fifty years later, though himself not a mystic, Scholem is the world’s principal authority on Jewish mysticism. He is widely known and respected as a teacher, a writer, and one of the great intellectual historians of our time.

About himself he once wrote: “I am a specialist, a historian of religion. My subject has been Jewish mysticism. I wrote purely scholarly work before I dared to come out with general reflections. I tried to make a scholarly basis for understanding the phenomenon of mysticism within Judaism. If you go into one thing in a deep way, it branches out in many ways. At the beginning, I thought I would be writing for fifty people. I was surprised that after thirty years the books have thousands of readers.”

Scholem’s books, which began to appear in 1923 when his edition of Das Buch Bahir was published, and now number more than thirty works, have single-handedly revived a lost tradition and made him the most prominent scholar in his particular field and, many believe, the towering figure in all modern “Jewish studies.”

These works are remarkable not only for the quantity of Scholem’s pioneering research but for the depth of his understanding and the quality of his expository style. The material he chose to study—the tradition and teachings of the Kabbalah—includes some of the strangest, most impenetrable books ever written, among them Book Bahir (1180), Sefer ha-Zohar (1280-86), Avodat ha-Kodesh (1531), and Ha-Nefesh ha-Hakhamah (1608).

Such works were produced by mystics, whom Scholem defines as people “favored with immediate, and to them real, experience of the divine, or ultimate reality, or who at least strive to attain such experience.” For him, mysticism is in essence a radically conservative endeavor, reinterpreting the traditional content of a religion for the sake of tradition, and advocating spiritual renewal. “The mystic’s experience,” Scholem has written, “tends to confirm the religious authority under which he lives; its theology and symbols are projected into his mystical experience, but do not spring from it.”

Alternatively spelled Cabala, Kabala, or Qabbalah, the Kabbalah, in Scholem’s definition, is “the sum of Jewish mysticism,” as distinguished from the predominantly rationalistic tradition of Jewish thought that extends from the Torah to most modern Jewish theology. He points out that in Jewish tradition the Kabbalah represents a continuing attempt to portray dimensions of human experience that cannot be empirically verified, particularly man’s relationship to God and the cosmos. Thus, Kabbalistic texts present “symbols of a very special kind, in which the spiritual experience of the mystics was almost inextricably intertwined with the historical experience of the Jewish people.” Scholem made a Herculean, largely successful attempt to make this tradition comprehensible. It is a measure of his success, in this respect, that reading him on Jewish mystical thought is considerably less problematic than reading the originals.

Perhaps his best-known book is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published by Schocken in 1941, which has sold some 40,000 copies in the United States alone. But the distinctiveness of the Kabbalah is most tellingly portrayed in a smaller volume, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, published in German in 1960 and in English translation (Schocken) in 1965 and, like other Scholem books, sprinkled with footnoted references to a library of esoteric materials. (Both books are available as American paperbacks.) In the later work are the succinct definitions quoted here, as well as Scholem’s most comprehensive generalizations about the character and function of mysticism.

In On the Kabbalah, Scholem also reveals the key polemical purpose behind his research-making Jews aware of a tradition that had been suppressed, if not forgotten.

From the start this resurgence of mythical conceptions in the thinking of Jewish mystics provided a bond with certain impulses in the popular faith, fundamental impulses springing from the simple man’s fear of life and death, to which [rationalistic] Jewish philosophy had no satisfactory response. Jewish philosophy paid a heavy price for its disdain of the primitive levels of human life. It ignored the terrors from which myths are made, as though denying the very existence of the problem. Nothing so sharply distinguishes the philosophers and Kabbalists as their attitude toward the problem of evil and the demonic. By and large, the Jewish philosophers dismissed it as a pseudo-problem, while to the Kabbalists it became one of the chief motives of their thinking.

As always in Scholem, major issues are succinctly defined.

Scholem’s monumental biography, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, originally published in Hebrew in 1957, appeared sixteen years later in America (Princeton University Press, 1973) to favorable reviews and surprising popularity. The initial hardbound edition sold out at $25 per copy; a paperback edition, whose even thousand pages are priced at $9.95, continues to sell briskly. No one but Scholem could have written such a book—the product of decades of dogged, if not obsessive, original research on the principal kabbalistic leader of Jewish history. Sevi was the self-proclaimed messiah who emerged from Smyrna, in southwestern Turkey, in the middle of the 17th Century. Aided by a devoted and effective publicist known as Nathan of Gaza, and capitalizing upon the popular expectation that 1666 would be a turning point in human history, Sevi inspired a messianic, pietistic fervor that converted millions of Jews. Believers in faraway Poland, Holland and Yemen closed their businesses and packed their belongings, waiting for Sevi to call them to Jerusalem. However, the Turkish sultan, recognizing a serious political challenge, had Sevi arrested and then summoned him to Constantinople, offering him the options of death or conversion to the Muslim religion. To the disappointment of his devotees, Sevi chose the latter, taking an Islamic name (in 1666, no less).

Though his movement all but entirely disintegrated, Sevi’s spiritual influence persisted among many Jews. “No doubt this faith had been humiliated and discredited,” Scholem concludes. “Its hope had been vain and its claims refuted, and yet the question compounded of pride and sadness persisted: Was it not a great opportunity missed, rather than a big lie? A victory of the hostile power rather than the collapse of a vain thing?” Acknowledging this as a crucial episode in Kabbalistic social history, Scholem analyzes Sevi and his movement from several perspectives—among them history, psychology, theology, and literary criticism, producing a grandly scaled, spectacularly detailed biography that, despite its scholarly appurtenances, is still quite readable for the layman. Another, his latest, titled On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, and just published by Schocken, contains some of his recent essays as well as a long, informative interview.

When I telephoned Scholem in Israel to request an interview, he inquired in German-accented English if I knew Hebrew. “No,” I reluctantly replied. He then asked how closely I had read the Zohar. “Not very,” I said. There was a heavy pause. “Mr. Kostelanetz, you are not well prepared.” It was clear at the beginning that this was a formidable, testy man, scarcely predisposed to either flattery or journalism.

I went to the second floor of a semidetached house on a tree-lined block in the Rehavia section of Jerusalem where Scholem lives with his wife, Fania. To meet me at the door came a courtly European gentleman, dressed in Continental-style blue suit, black shoes and maroon tie, so different from the informal Israeli attire. He looked like scores of other elderly Jewish men—medium in height and build, with a long nose, his face clean—shaven to the tops of his temples, a crown of white hair, and long ears. But he was considerably more spry than his contemporaries and indisputably more voluble. Speaking English fluently, yet pausing occasionally to find the precise word, he invited me into the front sitting room, adjacent through an open doorway to another room graced by a large desk. Sitting in one easy chair, inviting me to take another, he told me that he and his wife have lived in this comfortable, carpeted, sunny apartment for forty years.

Books lined all the visible walls, from floor to ceiling. He said that the other room is filled with books of and about Jewish mysticism. The bookcases in the room where we talked are devoted to Christian mysticism, Sufi mysticism, studies of the Old Testament. Bookshelves containing works of modern literature and Christian theology also dominated the dining room. In the hallway, shelves ran perpendicularly above our heads from one wall to the other, with the books’ spines facing out in both directions. On one long shelf were copies of his own books, originally published in German, Hebrew and English, along with numerous translations into other languages. Kafka, he told me is passing, is his favorite modern author; the late S. Y. Agnon, who was also a close friend, the best Israeli writer.

Born in Berlin, December 5, 1897, Scholem grew up among four brothers, each of whom distinguished himself in a different way. He described their father, who was in the printing business, as “a typical German petit bourgeois,” elaborating: “Papa worked on Yom Kippur and didn’t go to synagogue. We were not rich, but we were not ever hungry.” Nonetheless, the sons went through the ceremony of bar mitzvah, because “everyone Jewish in Berlin did in those days.”

Young Gerhart, as he was then known, discovered Judaism for himself, deciding to study· Hebrew seriously and calling himself a Zionist. Religion, curiously, was his form of teenage rebellion. “I signed up at the Jewish community library in Berlin, and I started reading Judaica. That was a big step for me.” In 1915, he purchased a three-volume edition of the Sefer ha-Zohar, which he asked his father to rebind with interleaving white sheets, so that he could make abundant annotations. Springing up from his sitting room chair, he pulled down a fat book, bound in red leather, to show me. It was this volume, now in my hands, with page after page of annotations, that had kindled Scholem’s interest in Jewish mysticism more than sixty years before. In order to read the Zohar in its original language, young Scholem had to learn Aramaic, a precursor of modern Hebrew. (He remains critical of the principal English-language edition that, he says, “left out many of the most important parts.”)

By 1917, soon after one of his brothers was arrested for Communist activities, young Gerhard was thrown out of his father’s house. “He sent me a registered letter ordering me to leave his household by March 1, 1917. He said, ‘It’s all the same—socialism, Zionism. It’s all anti-patriotic.’” When Germany entered World War I, Gerhard was faced with the threat of military service, which he evaded with an insanity plea. “I put on an act without knowing what I was acting,” Scholem once said. “I spent six weeks in a lunatic asylum where I had been sent for observation and checkup. There they ruled me totally insane. Papa had to take me back because the doctors made him.”

Not wanting to stay at home in Berlin, young Scholem attended the University of Jena to study mathematics, his initial academic specialty. He eventually earned a German state diploma, the equivalent of an American M.A. He went to Switzerland in 1919, there beginning his intensive studies of the Kabbalah. “I had to teach myself, because there was no one to teach me.” In 1920 he returned to Germany to take his doctorate in Semitic languages in two years in Munich, with a thesis on the Kabbalah. “I can still quote in Arabic the verses on which I was examined,” he said, smiling engagingly. “All my life I’ve had an uncanny memory for superfluous things—dates, years, numbers.”

At this time he also began to publish essays in Martin Buber’s periodical, Der Jude, and to teach adult education courses on Jewish mysticism. By then he had established himself as a singular figure in German-Jewish cultural life-as he remembers it, “a freak phenomenon—a Jew from a non-observant family who doesn’t want to put on tefillin and all that, but who is sitting and studying Hebrew and busying himself with Judaism, and wants to know what it’s all about, and is a passionate Zionist.”

Acting on his Zionist convictions, Scholem recalled, he immigrated to Palestine in September 1923. Soon after his arrival he had two job offers —one teaching mathematics, the other as the Hebrew librarian of the nascent Jewish National Library. He took the latter. “Since the Zionists are always bankrupt, then as now—nothing has changed—I was paid from the schnorrkasse, from money collected from tourists’ donations. I was paid in cash—ten Israeli pounds a month, the equivalent of ten English pounds—unlike everyone else, who collected pieces of paper. Pay was often delayed for several months in those times. We all lived on credit. Today everyone would go on strike if they were not paid on time.”

When the Hebrew University was founded in 1925, Scholem was among the first to be appointed to the faculty. He had already published scholarly researches on the Kabbalah and resurrected forgotten texts in new editions, and in 1927 compiled a Bibliographica Kabbala. He spent twenty years in the wilderness of minutiae before the 1940s, when he began writing the more general books, such as Major Trends, on which his public eminence is based. “Without this spadework, all generalizations are useless,” he told me. “They are hypotheses of a charlatan.” He then named several recent books about the Kabbalah that, in his opinion, had dubious, insubstantial origins.

He has written exclusively about Jewish thought and the Jewish people, rarely mentioning other religions. “I realized how difficult it must be to understand a religion not one’s own when I read even serious Christians writing about Judaism. They have little feeling for, how you say ....” The ends of his fingers shook, his hands a tense inch apart from each other. “I was careful not to repeat the same mistakes. I have stuck all my life with things I know. It was difficult enough to get a deep understanding of Jewish things.” He paused, ever formal, to adjust his tie. “In general, we should be very careful of what we read about other religions-Far Eastern religions, especially-if it is written by outsiders.”

The telephone rang; his wife answered it. The caller was an academic colleague with a bibliographical query. “Yes. I have the book,” Scholem declared impatiently, pointing to a particular tree in the forest of shelves. “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

Scholem then told me that he came to Israel as a spiritual Zionist who wanted to create a living Jewish society rather than a political state. He began to write in Hebrew and dropped “Gerhard” for “Gershom,” the name which he received at his circumcision. (Nonetheless, his wife and old friends still call him “Gerhard.” He speaks of himself as “Scholem.”)

In the 1930s he was a member of Brit Shalom, a political organization favoring closer Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine, which included Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the American rabbi who became the first president of Hebrew University, among other prominent members. The group’s political position, he now admits, was naive. “It has come out that almost all dual-national countries explode from within. Forces tear them asunder. I don’t say I’m glad about this; history shows this. That was the only political group I ever belonged to.” The phone rang again, with another call to return.

Although he retired from the Hebrew University in 1965 at the age of 68, Scholem has been active in many other spheres. From 1968 to 1974 he served as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 1975 he became a member of the newly formed Israel Institute of Advanced Study. Late in 1975, he was Boston University’s first Visiting Andrew W. Mellon Professor, teaching a course on Jewish mysticism and conducting a seminar on Jewish messianism. He lectures frequently around the world. Most of his recent books are collections of previously published essays—not only The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken 1971) and On Jews. and Judaism in Crisis, but three volumes in German, titled Judaica I-III (1963,1970,1973) and a large new one in Hebrew which sold out its initial printing of 5,000 copies in a few months. He usually copy edits and proofreads translations in all the languages he knows.

Scholem describes himself as a procrastinating writer who spends most of his days “doing nothing,” which is a busy writer’s euphemism for reading voraciously and making notes. As a deadline approaches, he harnesses his energies and writes in a rush. “Then,” his wife told me, “there is no night and no day, no food and no people.” Most of Sabbatai Sevi, for instance, was written in a matter of months, in London in 1954; two more chapters were later added in Israel. One major Scholem book still unavailable in English, though translated into French and German (the latter by Scholem himself, who· expanded it to three times the original Hebrew length), deals with the origins of the Kabbalah. Another in German, published in 1975, relates Scholem’s friendship with the legendary German writer Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940 at the age of 48. “That is an important book,” he exclaimed, pointing his finger at me and then pausing as he recollected my ignorance of other languages. “It is a great pity that you cannot read it.” [It subsequently appeared in English.]

Having discovered his ultimate subject at the beginning of his scholarly career, Scholem applied his enormous energies to mastering it. “What interests me is the inner workings of Judaism—understanding Jewish history and Jewish thought,” he declared, emphasizing the crucial terms. “What forces were contributing to making Judaism survive? I could see a dimension of Judaism that, in the Nineteenth Century, in the emancipated countries, was forgotten. Forgetting Jewish mysticism was one of the prices that European Jewry paid for its enlightenment. They were proud in their time to demonstrate that Judaism could be a rational thing, a left-wing Protestantism.” He paused, looking at me over the top of his glasses. “I was neither for Kabbalah nor against Kabbalah, but I knew it was of relevance to understanding Judaism as a living thing.”

Is his work related to the general revival of interest in mysticism? “Consciously, my work was not connected,” he said. “My initial interest was solely in Judaism. Of course, there is zeitgeist. There are things which structurally have some affinity to Kabbalah decidedly, in my opinion. William Blake, for instance, can describe a world that resembles that of the Kabbalists. In his own time, he was considered a scandalous atheist. To a modern man who studies the Kabbalah, Blake’s world is very familiar.” Having spent a year at Brown University just before I arrived there in 1958, Scholem remembered talking with the great Blakist, my own principal professor a few years later, S. Foster Damon, yet more non-religious, who became a major Blake scholar by similarly unraveling texts previously thought inscrutable.

“Mysticism is a certain stage in the development of a religious system. Therefore the mysticism of Christianity reinterprets its tradition much as Jewish mysticism does. They are similar in form, but not in content. The next question is what are the cognate structures that have appeared, without historical connection, in several times and several religions, not only in Judaism and Christianity, but in Hinduism, Sufism?

“Do you see those six books?” he exclaimed, pointing to uniform editions on a top shelf. “They were written by Jacob Boehme, an uneducated shoemaker, a Christian who lived around 1600. They are as close to the Kabbalah as anything can be.” He paused to punctuate his next point. “We know very little, very little, about the workings of the human brain. We are just beginning to discover. That has been proved by the successes and excesses of psychoanalysis, which set us thinking about the limits of our knowledge. There are now several schools of psychology that are all working on shaky grounds—no less shaky than the Kabbalah, which is also an attempt. I consider religion the center of everything-more so than, say, the social sciences.”

No one questions the quality of Scholem’s scholarship; the more serious critics are contemporary Kabbalists who doubt if a non-practitioner can best interpret the sacred texts. On the other hand, Stefan Moses, a professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University, himself a devout student of Kabbalah, recommends Scholem’s books to his own students, as simply the best guides there are to the subject.

In his recent essay on Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Harold Bloom, the DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale, cites Scholem as the only sure authority on the Jewish mystical traditions, certifying that “he has made himself indispensable to all rational students of his subject.”

Scholem is religious, though not scrupulously observant. He works on Saturday (though never on Yom Kippur) and no longer attends synagogue regularly, though he once did. His bald head is bare; his wife has never kept a kosher kitchen. “If I had had children,” he said, “I would have been more observant. It is important that such traditions get passed on. I try to behave as somebody who believes that God exists. Of this I am sure. I never was an atheist. I do not understand atheists—how they can live with a set of values, without being troubled by the nonsense of it. I do not understand how they can stand up to a nihilistic scheme of values, where there is no guarantee of conscience other than brutal power.” By acknowledging the existence of God, Scholem also accepts the importance of faith apart from reason, and thus the aspirations and activities of people with extreme faith—the Jewish mystics.

Nonetheless, the primary paradox is that this sane, largely rational man has spent more than sixty years tenaciously studying the most extraordinary bunch of eccentrics who ever called themselves religious Jews. The second paradox is that most mystical thought implicitly disapproves of scholarly bookishness such as Scholem’s. “Anyone who concerns himself seriously with the thinking of the great Kabbalists,” he once wrote, “will be torn between feelings of admiration and revulsion.”

In his new book, Scholem reprints a long essay, originally written in German, which severely criticizes the philosopher Martin Buber, Scholem’s early editorial benefactor and then a colleague at the Hebrew University. Buber’s best-known books deal with the later Kabbalistic writings of Hasidic Jews. In his essay, Scholem questions Buber’s scholarship, his intellectual structures, his piety, his language, his influence—a rather comprehensively devastating polemic. “Buber was an artist,” Scholem explained over lemonade and his wife’s cakes, “but he hated to be called one. His approach was esthetic. He was not interested in analytical understanding. He had a sound mistrust of philology.” From his stance as a scholarly writer, committed to academic empirical standards, Scholem regards Buber’s books about Jewish mysticism as more valid as literature—”poetry,” he says—than as scholarship.

I asked Scholem about the current “relevance” of his work. “I despise that question,” he shouted, both index fingers pointing forbiddingly. “Scholars should not work for relevance to others, but because they think it worth being done. This question has two dimensions—for yourself and for the mood of the times. I do not care about the latter. One may be alone; one may have thousands of readers. Had I written my books in 1840, when Jews were trying to forget these things, nobody would have cared. They would have called the books ‘irrelevant.’ They would have said that there is a crazy Jew in Berlin who likes such things.”

Scholem supports the separation of church and state, even in Israel. He objects to laws that enforce social restrictions on the Sabbath, as most Israelis are not observant. “Jewish religion would mean much more to most of us and to younger people if it were not part of the political machinery, which uses religion to win support in exchange for political and material favors. If the religious in Israel did not have this political support, they would be weaker materially but stronger spiritually.” He mopped his brow with his handkerchief. “Religious experience doesn’t lie down. Religion is extremely forceful.” In more respects than one, Scholem remains a spiritual Zionist, particularly concerned with the quality of mental life in Israel, among Jews.

P.S. I saw him again in Jerusalem in 1978, when he invited a friend and myself to his apartment the following Sabbath at precisely 1:30 pm. When we arrived, we noticed that some people were already there. As we stayed, we noticed that others had come, apparently given later times for arrival; and we realized that it was time for us to leave. I then understood that the Scholems had staggered their well-wishers so that we all recognized that we should not stay too long.

[Our final meeting came in his native Berlin late in 1981, just a few months before he died, when I invited him for dinner at the apartment of my friend Mechthild Rausch, a Berlin writer who had produced books about the German avant-garde. I picked Scholem and his wife up at their hotel and took them by taxi to her apartment, where they had to climb stairs, he complaining in English all the way. Once they sat down, she produced a copy of her book Paul Scheerbart—Jenseitsgalerie. Gesammelte Zeichnungen , which had just appeared. Clutching the large volume to his chest with both arms, Scholem declared with a glowing smile, “I have many Scheerbart books but I don’t have this.” Complaining stopped, and pleasant conversation in both German and English was had by all. Her book, she imagined, must have gone back to Jerusalem. The moral of the story, not to be forgotten, is that the gift of a special book to a true bibliomaniac will quell all complaints.]