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Revision as of 20:31, 29 January 2005 by AnyFile (talk | contribs) (Correct some wiki errors)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)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 interset of the young Scholem in the tradiontion was strongly adversed by his father, Arthur.
Thanks to his mother's mediation, he could learn the Hebrew language and study the Talmud with an orthodox rabbi.
he was, on the other hand, like in a stange contrast, actracted also by the laical and socialist Zionism, and he enter in the Jung Juda group.
He studied mathematics, philosophize and Hebrew language at hte university of Berlin. In the universitarian environmenthe met Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin. In this period he become friend with Shemuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahum Bialik, Ahad ha-Am and Zalman Shazar (who was already called Zalman Rubaschoff in this period and who wold be the future president of Israel state). 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 language at the University of Munchen.
He emigrated to Palestinian 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 born of the state of Israel, he was president of the Science National Accademy. In 1965 he got the title of emeritus professor of the Hebrew University.
He died on 20th February 1982.
Scholem based his storiografical approch on the study of the Jewish mysticism with direct contrast to the approach of th 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 death 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 mistique components are as important as the rational ones. He wanted not to follow the same path of who had adopted the mysticism but not the history of Jewishes. 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 reasearch for the Jewish mysticism could not be apart of the historical context. He started from somethig 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 tradicion a strong link between the yesterday's Jews and the today' Jews. (adoption of the Zionism)
Specifically Scholem thinks the Jewish history is made, more or less, of three periods:
- During the Biblical period the monotheism fights against the myth,
without compleatly defeating it.
- In the Talmud period some of the institutions ‐ for examples the notion
of the magical power of the accomplishment the Sacramentents ‐ are removed in favour of the purer concept of the divine trascendence.
- in the medioeval period the impossibility to conciliate the abstract
God of the Greek philosophy with the personal God of the Bibble led the Jewish thinkers, as Maimonide, 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 Qabbalah of luriana. In order to neutralize the sabattianism, as a Hegel's syntesis, the Hassidism would be come out.
Many of the people that had joined the Hassidism because they had seen in it a orthodox congregation considered a scandal that their comunity should have a so close relation with an ehretical movement.
In the same way Scholem made the hypotesis that the source of the 13th century Qabbalah was an hypotetical Jewish gnosticism, preceding the Christian gnosticism.
The storiographical approach of Scholem involved a linguistic theory too. Not according with Buber, Scholen belived in the power of the language to invoke supernatural reality. . In contrast to Benjamin, he put the Hebrew language in a privilegiate position rispect the other languages, as it is the only language able to outline the divine truth. Scholem considered the cabalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation.