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The Modern Intellectual and His Heretical Ancestor: Gershom Scholem and Nathan of Gaza

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Michael Löwy
Michael Löwy*
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris
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Gershom Scholem was without question a brilliant example of the modern Jewish intellectual: neither Talmudic, rabbinical, nor kabbalistic and still less a prophet. More modestly - but with remarkable spiritual energy - he was a historian, a man of learning, a university graduate, a (critical) son of the Haskalah or Hebrew Enlightenment, and a thinker who - without ever ceasing to believe after his own fashion - abandoned the traditional orthodox faith, with its rituals and prohibitions. He was also a modern Jewish intellectual because he was assimilated, shaped by German culture - despite his revolt against assimilation, his fight on behalf of ‘dissimilation’ (to use the term invented by Franz Rosenzweig), and his adherence to Sionism, which caused him to leave for Jerusalem in 1923. In reality he belonged to the first generation of Jewish university intellectuals in Central Europe who burst massively into the institutions of higher education at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries - in contrast to the isolated individuals, generally cut off from the Jewish community, who had had access to academic study in the earlier period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 48 , Issue 190 , June 2000 , pp. 102 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2000

References

Notes

1. See, by Gershom Scholem (1956), The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism (I). Diogenes, 14; The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism (II). Diogenes, 15; (1967), Mysticism and Society. Diogenes, 58; (1972), The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (I). Diogenes, 79; The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (II). Diogenes, 80; (1979), Colours and their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism (I). Diogenes, 108; (1980), Colours and their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism (II). Diogenes, 109.

2. Gershom Scholem (1963). Wissenschaft von Judentum einst und jetzt. Judaica, 1, 147-50.

3. David Joseph Biale (1977). The Demonic in History: Gershom Scholem and the Revision of Jewish Historiography. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, p. 171.

4. Gershom Scholem (1982). MiBerlin LeYerushalaïm. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. [English translation: Gershom Scholem (1980). From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth. New York: Schocken Books.

5. This letter is in an appendix to David Biale (1979), Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 216.

6. Gershom Scholem (1921-2). Lyrik der Kabbala? Der Jude, 6, 55.

7. Max Weber (1970). Economy and Society. Paris: Plon, pp. 464, 473. [English edition: (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

8. Gershom Scholem (1973). Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676. Revised and augmented edition. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Series, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

9. Gershom Scholem (1971). Une éducation à judaïsme. Dispersion et unité, 11, pp. 153-4, 159.

10. Gershom Scholem (1978). Fidélité et utopie. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, pp. 53-4.