Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies

The Berlin-born historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem was a towering intellect of Jewish scholarship in the twentieth century. Born into a highly acculturated family, in his youth Scholem embraced an idiosyncratic Jewish spiritual and cultural national identity and immersed himself in the study of Judaism in the face of parental opposition. At the same time, he read voraciously across the human sciences, from philosophy and sociology to the history of mystical life, in part in dialogue with his close friend Walter Benjamin. As his diary demonstrates, Scholem was also a political radical in his own way, embracing anarchism of a sort and pacificism in the face of World War I (whereas an older brother, a fierce German nationalist, became a decorated soldier). Finally, during this period, Scholem first embarked on the program of research that would define his career: the study of the Jewish mystical tradition, which nineteenth-century modernizing Jewish ideologies of all sorts had tried to bury as crude irrational superstition. In 1923, he settled in Jerusalem and began working as a librarian at the Hebrew University, which appointed him as lecturer in Jewish mysticism in 1925, and several years later, as full professor. In the decades that followed, Scholem demonstrated to modern scholars that mystical thought and practice had been part of almost every iteration of traditional Judaism, and that the study of kabbalah was essential to the academic field of Jewish intellectual history. He also argued, controversially but compellingly, that Jewish mysticism had functioned as an independent and at times disruptive, anarchic, and volcanic force in Judaism, often standing in tension with Jewish law and lending itself fatefully to explosive upsurges of messianic impatience and antinomianism that periodically shook diasporic Jewish life. Scholem even suggested that Zionism was in some sense rooted in a longer history of mystical-messianic impatience with diasporic powerlessness and waiting. When his massive study of the seventeenth-century messianic figure Shabbetai Tzvi was translated into English and other European languages, his work became known in intellectual circles outside the world of Jewish studies. His 1941 collection of essays and lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), is among the most epochal volumes of Jewish scholarship in the twentieth century.