Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah by David Biale (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah by David Biale Michael A. Meyer David Biale. Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 232 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942000032X In 1958, during an undergraduate year spent in Jerusalem, I received an invitation to visit Gershom and Fania Scholem in their Rehavia apartment. Aside from the courtesy and warmth with which the unexcelled—and sometime notorious—scholar of the Kabbalah welcomed my roommate and myself, the most lasting impression was of the library. In each room, volumes of various sizes stretched from floor to high ceiling, with additional books perched on dangling shelves suspended from above. Now close to forty years after Scholem's death, it is the abundance of books written about him and his brothers that arouses attention. A few years before Scholem passed away in 1982, David Biale was able to interview him and in 1979 to publish a first biography. In that volume, titled Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Biale argued that—for all of his critique of German Wissenschaft des Judentums—Scholem must be seen as extending that tradition into a new Zionist stage; his rebellion was not so much in opposition to the legacy of Leopold Zunz as it was directed against the bourgeois values that characterized much of German Jewry. Biale tried to link Scholem with Hermann Cohen in his rational approach, albeit directed toward a "history of irrationalism." As his title indicates, Biale at that time chose to understand Scholem's historiography as a "counter-history," by which he meant that underneath his predecessors' interpretations of Jewish history lay a vital "secret tradition," which for Scholem found expression in the Kabbalah. In his new book, Biale shifts the emphasis from Scholem's historiography and from what he had called his "anarchistic theology" to Scholem's life, an area whose details had remained largely hidden until they came to light in his publicly available archive, his letters, and his diaries. Having earlier focused on his thought, Biale turns his account toward Scholem's humanity, a subject almost as complex as his dialectical thinking. His goal is to understand Scholem "from within." In his youth Scholem was an enfant terrible, scarcely agreeing with anyone on anything for very long. His personality was ironic, and he was an expert poseur. The student of mystery was himself, in many ways—and perhaps purposefully—mysterious. As one would expect of a biography, David Biale organizes his brief volume chronologically. He begins with a description of the Scholem household in which Gerhard (as he was then called) suffered from a father whom Biale compares with the father of Franz Kafka. In rebellion, the son for a time became Orthodox, but that phase soon gave way to a Zionism mostly out of harmony with any other youthful Zionists. Like Theodor Herzl, the young Scholem also secretly believed that he might be "the Chosen One." Like his brother Werner—and unlike Martin Buber and most German Jews —Gerhard opposed World War I; by feigning psychosis he was able to gain a medical discharge from the army and avoid service in combat. Or were there perhaps genuine symptoms of mental illness? Biale at least raises that possibility. [End Page 453] In Berlin, Scholem was able to make the acquaintance of men who played a major role in Hebrew culture, among them Bialik and Agnon. But the only long-term and profound friendship was with Walter Benjamin, with whom he carried on a correspondence until Benjamin's tragic death by suicide in 1940. Benjamin was one of the few—perhaps the only one—whom Scholem regarded as his intellectual equal. The most original chapter in Biale's volume is that titled "Scholem in Love." Here Biale suggests that the Scholem-Benjamin relationship may have contained a homoerotic component. And later he raises the possibility that the reason Scholem had no children with either of his two wives may have been due to impotence. But the young Scholem did have numerous female friends, and, in a 1917 letter to Werner Kraft, he expresses the hope that his future children will speak Hebrew. Scholem's early interest in...