Self-deception and the dark side of history: Gershom Scholem’s mythology of Counter-Enlightenment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gershom Scholem was always skeptical about the promises of Enlightenment, which did not necessarily accompany the emancipation of the Jews and all too often implied the negation of their collective identity. To counter the myth of Enlightenment that drove Jewish assimilation, he developed a counter-narrative that can be conceived of as a critical mythology. To do so, he refered to Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as different as the cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche, the Catholic kabbalist Franz Joseph Molitor, and the Neo-Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. His historiography sketches a genealogy of Jewish Enlightenment that is not driven by abstract reason, but a result of an internal dialectics of the Jewish tradtion that culminates in antinomian sabbatinism. By depicting main protagonists of this genealogy, namely Sabbatai Sevi, Jakob Frank, and Moses Dobrushka, less as heroes than as ambivalent and obscure personalities, Scholem’s narrative becomes even more complex and gives a fascinating account of how Jewish thinking can learn from Counter-Enlightenment thought.