Gershom Scholem

Even as a very young man, Scholem fought vigorously against the almost imperative demands to assimilate , adopted by a large proportion of German Jews at the beginning of the last century. Thousands were prepared to eliminate their specific identity as Jews, to become as German as the Germans. He felt that the assimilation was more than a marriage of convenience, or of of necessity, but a sacrificial act of self-decapitation.

In Scholem’s world learning Hebrew was not something that German Jews usually did, but it was something that Gershom Scholem did starting at the age of 14 ,in contradiction to the strictures, orders, demands of his thoroughly Germanised father. Besides his study of pure mathematics during World War 1-which he did not support-, Scholem discovered the undiscoverable and more or less lost world of Jewish mysticism , which was collated in the Kabbala.

“The imaginative world of Judaism has found its greatest formulation in the Kabbala. A history of the Kabbala is a highly dramatic affair.” (Gershom Scholem)

The imagined and creatively imaginative world of these neglected texts inspired him throughout his entire life, and he understood at a very early stage that they had the potential to revive and revitalise Judaism , and to clear out the dead wood of the dry rationalisms of dominant rabbinical traditions. He tells us that even the most renowned Jewish scholars who collected the works of the Kabbala didn’t read them, dismissing them as nonsense. Scholem recognised the deep non-rational wisdom buried inside the texts, and after his translocation to Jerusalem in 1923, he dedicated his entire life to the exploration and revival of this lost mystical tradition, making it visible and perceptible again.

“One thing I know for sure : the Kabbalists knew something, that we no longer know.”

In 1946, Scholem became a member of the Commission for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and organized the transport of looted books and manuscripts from the ‘Offenbach Depot’ to the National Library in Jerusalem. He maintained contacts with German colleagues and often spoke in Germany, but he also insisted that the frequently invoked notion of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ had been an illusion and a ‘one-sided dialogue’.

The focus of his Zionism was the revival of Jewish spiritual life and culture. He was actively involved in seeking a constructive form of co-habitation with the Palestinian Arabs. He knew that even after the founding of the state of Israel that here could be no alternative to mutual understanding and respect on every social, political and cultural level.