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Gershom Scholem (born December 5 1897 in Berlin, died February 21, 1982 in Jerusalem) was a German-born, Jewish philosopher and historian. Scholem studied the roots of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, founding a professorship for the study of the Kabbalah in Jerusalem. He wrote a famous biography of Sabbatai Zevi.

Born Gerhard Scholem, Scholem studied mathematics, philosophy and oriental languages. He wrote his doctor's thesis on the subject of the most ancient known kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. Drawn to Zionism and influenced by Martin Buber, he emigrated in 1923 to Palestine; here he devoted his time to studying Jewish mysticism and became a librarian, and later a lecturer, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view, and became the first professor for Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965.

Scholem's brother Werner was a member of the ultra-left "Fischer-Maslow Group"; he was also a member of the Reichstag, the German parliament, representing the Communist Party (KPD), but was banned from the party and later murdered during the Third Reich.

Scholem died in Jerusalem in 1982, leaving a widow, Fania Scholem.

Works

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 1941
• Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition 1960
• The Messianic Idea in Judaism translated 1971
• Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah 1973
• Kabbalah 1974
• On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead : Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah 1997

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Gershom Scholem (born December 5 1897 in Berlin, died February 21, 1982 in Jerusalem) was a German-born, Jewish philosopher and historian. The precocius interest of the young Scholem in Jewish traditions was strongly opposed by his father, Arthur. But thanks to his mother's intervention, he was allowed to study the Hebrew language and the Talmud with an orthodox rabbi. Scholem was no less attracted by secular and socialist Zionism.

He studied mathematics, philosophy and Hebrew language at the university of Berlin. During his studies he met Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin. In this period he became friends with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad ha-Am and Zalman Shazar. He was in Bern in 1918 with ] and he was admitted to the local university. In this city he met Elsa Burckhardt, who would later become his first wife. He came back in German in 1919, and he got a degree in semitic languages at the University of Munich.

He emigrated to Palestine in 1922, where he became director of the Department of Hebrew of the Hebrew National Library He became first professor for Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He married Fania Freud.

After the birth of the state of Israel, he was elected president of the Nationa Academy of Science. In 1965 he was given the title of emeritus professor of the Hebrew University.

He died on 20th February 1982.

Scholem based his historiographical approach on the study of Jewish mysticism with direct contrast to the approach of the 19th-century school of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). The analysis of the Judaism of this school has two important problems, - according to Scholem's opinion,

• It study Judaism as a dead object put on a gloss of a microscope rather than as a living organism.
• It does not take into consideration the proper foundations of Judaism.

The irrational force that make the religion a living thing.

In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mistical components are as important as the rational ones. He wanted not to follow the same path of those who had adopted the mysticism but not the history . In particular he was in disagreement with Martin Buber. He criticize his personalization of the cabalistic concepts, his ignorance of the history, of the Hebrew language and of the old country of the Jewish people.

In the Weltanschauung of Scholem the research for the Jewish mysticism could not be seperated from its historical context. He started from something similar to the Gegengeschichte of Friedrich Nietzsche he arrived to include a lot of the less normative aspects of the Judaism in the "public" history. This impetus to give justification to the irrational came from, as in the one of the Wissenschaft, Buber, some more some less directly. Different from this, the aginst-to-history views (gegengeschichtlich) of Scholem make the concept of tradition a strong link between the yesterday's Jews and the today' Jews. (The adoption of Zionism)

Specifically Scholem thinks the Jewish history is made, more or less, of three periods:

1. During the Biblical period, monotheism battles myth,

without completely defeating it.

1. During the Talmudic period some of the institutions ‐ for examples the notion

of the magical power of the accomplishment of the Sacraments ‐ are removed in favour of the purer concept of the divine transcendence.

1. in the medioeval period the impossibility to conciliate the abstract

God of the Greek philosophy with the personal God of the Bible led the Jewish thinkers, as Maimonides, trying to elimiate the remaining of the myth, to alter the figure of the living God. From this time the mysticism, as efforts to find again the Godness essence of their fathers, spread out.

The notion of the three periods, with its interactions between irrationals and rationals, lead Scholem to enounce some very controversial arguments. He thought that was that the messianic movement of the 16th century of the Sabattianism was developed from the medioeval Kabbalah of luriana. In order to neutralize the sabattianism, as a Hegel's synthesis, the Hassidism emerged.

Many of the people that had joined the Hassidic movement because they had seen in it an orthodox congregation considered it scandalous that their community should be associated thus with an heretical movement.

In the same way Scholem made the hypotesis that the source of the 13th century Qabbalah was an hypothetical Jewish gnosticism, preceding the Christian gnosticism.

The historiographical approach of Scholem involved a linguistic theory too. In contranst to Buber, Scholen belived in the power of the language to invoke supernatural reality. . In contrast to Benjamin, he put the Hebrew language in a privileged position in respect the other languages, as it is the only language able to reveal the divine truth. Scholem considered the cabbalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation.

External links

• an analysis of Scholem's lifework from Commentary
• Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library