Session 4

Scholem as historian of Jewish mysticism: a seeker of historical and transcendent truth? Brief discussion of end reading assignment. Conclusions.

 List of major books: 

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, third ed., 1961

Jewish Mysticism in the Middle Ages, 1964

On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 1965

Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition, 1965

The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 1971

Kabbalah, 1974

On the Mystical Idea of the Godhead, 1976

On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 1976.

   *      *      *

 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Based on lectures given at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York for the year of 1938; subsequently augmented to make 9 lectures.) I have the 1946 Schocken Books edition. Throne-mysticism, the earliest form. Hekhalot, palaces. The Merkhabah, or chariot (of God). Hasidim (both medieval and modern), Lurianism, Sabbateanism. After the expulsion from Spain (1492), mystics move from Gerona (in Catalonia) to Safed, in Galilee. The theme of exile.

Origins of the Kabbalah (JPS,  Princeton University, 1987) Original publication, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala Copyright 1962.

Scholem describes  three periods in the history of the Science of Judaism. During the emancipation period, the Wissenschaft scholars shared a general longing to rid themselves of the particularities standing in the way of assimilation. Conservative and destructive elements in contradiction. Leopold Zunz. Steinschneider: “a decent burial.” Second period, awaiting “the messiah of liberalism.” A mixture of sentimentality and apologetics. Third period: The renascence of the nationalist movement. He revised his position, particularly his view of the last period, in a lecture delivered in London in 1959 entitled “The Science of Judaism, Then and Now.”

Excerpts from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time,” (1963) in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), pp. 6-19). Scholem first posits the sine qua non of Jewish mysticism in the past: the belief in the Torah from Heaven. This becomes apparent for example in the piece some of you may have read, “On the Name of God.” Scholem now speaks of “religious anarchy,” and goes on to say: “It is not surprising that, within this path to anarchy—a way that is no way, yet one nevertheless walked by thousands and tens of thousands of people, every day, every hour—we have no clear knowledge as to whether mystical experience can in our generation assume a crystallized form obligating any sort of community. In my opinion, for the present we need to leave this question unresolved.” (This is followed by reflections on secularization. “Who knows where the boundaries of holiness lie?” he asks, and then “We find it difficult today to judge the possibility of secularization as a camouflage for holiness that has not yet been recognized as such. This is our secular reality here in Eretz Yisra’el…” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

Scholem the bibliophile: Arrived in Palestine in 1923 with 2,000 books, 600 of which were on the Kabbalah. He left a magnificent library of more than 20,000 books to the Jewish National and University Library. Most of them he purchased in Jerusalem in the Old City’s Jewish quarter.

            The Jews were known in ancient times as “the people of the Book.” The book being the book of books, the Bible. In the context of Scholem’s bibliophilic life and work, let me share with you what I remember of a conversation with a former teacher of mine, the poet Ted Weiss. I had been reading the Odyssey, and was up to Odysseus’s visit to the Underworld to find out what he needed to do. He had to offer the shades blood to drink so they could speak to him. I thought this an odd rite, and asked Ted what it meant. He said, it means that you should go to the library, so that the close-mouthed books may speak through your sacrifice.

            Apropos of books, let me conclude with a sentence from a philosopher who has been an important mentor for me: Emmanuel Levinas. I will read the relevant sentence first in its original French, then in English. « Les grands livres du judaïsme nous apportent enfin les décors, disparus depuis que tout se reduisait à une incomprehensible liturgie. Ils restituent l’équivalent des perspectives et des dimensions que les bâtisseurs de cathédrales avaient ouvertes dans l’espace chrétien. Les bâtisseurs du judaïsme ont ciselé dans les livres une minutieuse et précise architecture. Il est temps, en effet, de faire remonter à la clarté de l’intelligence moderne les cathédrales englouties dans les textes» (Difficile liberté, 348). “Judaism’s great books carry with them the decor that disappeared ever since all was reduced to an incomprehensible liturgy. They restore the equivalent of the perspectives and dimensions that the cathedral builders had opened up within the Christian space. The builders of Judaism had chiseled out in their books a minute and precise architecture. It is time to bring up into the clarity of modern intelligence the cathedrals submerged in the texts” (Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand, modified, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

Session 3

The entire session will be devoted to a close reading of Scholem's "Jews and Germans," a lecture given at the plenary session of the World Jewish Congress in Brussels in 1966. I am interested in the text for several reasons, some of which might be termed "personal." Scholem's Zionism emerges from the situation of his parents as a Jewish minority within a preponderately Christian, bourgeois society. The son finds the parents' relation to Judaism hypocritical, superficial and insufficient for his own needs. He rejects the pressure to assimilate, and goes to Palestine (1923), remaining there for the rest of his life (he dies in 1982). He writes in both Hebrew and German. I grew up in a household in which any Jewish affiliation was rejected, denied, disavowed. Of course there are important differences between my situation as a young man and that of Scholem--not the least being that while there were inconveniences in being Jewish in the United States where I grew up, there was no danger of being caught up in the Holocaust. Still, the overriding fact of maturing in a situation in which embracing Judaism seemed both necessary and (in its available forms) impossible was common to both myself and to Scholem. 

      Scholem's account of the relationship between Germans and Jews goes beyond what philosophers sometimes term the "incorrigible" realm of first-personal experience. That experience is embedded within a reasoned historical account of the evolution from Jews in Germany to German Jews to the destruction of German Jewry. Since German Nazism was the prime mover of the "Endlösung" (final solution) of the "Jewish question" or "Jewish problem," it seems to me to provide a important data for one who, like myself, would like to try to understand the Holocaust. I say this in full knowledge of the fact that many thinkers (notably Lawrence L. Langer in his Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) have voiced the opinion that the very idea of understanding the Holocaust takes us in a false direction: one that attempts to derive a "positive lesson" from it, or to "preempt" for the purpose of promoting a positive explanatory theory, of enlisting it in a cause of some sort. Others, particularly in France, reject the term Holocaust, a Greek word meaning "whole burnt sacrifice," because it imposes a religious meaning on a catastrophe or a collective atrocity, the victims of which frequently had nothing to do with religion of any kind. They prefer the Hebrew term of Shoah. 

     The reading to be discussed will emphasize the following points or passages:

Part I (71-73) German his mother tongue. “Unforgettable experiences” the “landscape of our youth.” Scholem not opposed to speaking to Germans. The unavoidable pitfalls of the generic terms, “Jews,” and “Germans” (72). 1948 comment by Alfred Doeblin (ibid). ("Jew", a term of abuse. This pejorative sense is prolonged even in 1966 (when the lecture was given) by the avoidance of the term Jew, out of an apparent delicacy. “After having been murdered as Jews, the Jews have now been nominated to the status of Germans, in a kind of posthumous triumph…” A subtle holdover of anti-Semitism in Germany. “Love, insofar as it once existed, has been drowned in blood.” An appeal to “conceptual clarity” and “historical knowledge” (73). A setting aside of the economic considerations of relations between the State of Israel and the German Federal Republic.

Part II (73-80). Eighty percent of Jews lived in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Eastern Europe. Their encounter with the West was Germany: Lessing, Schiller. Assimilation of Jews in Germany to Germans: Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786). German Jews like all other Jews (separated, ghettoized) till around 1820. Those of the “Mosaic persuasion.” Jewish emancipation: 1776 United States of America. First, the Enlightenment, (Haskalah), then Emancipation, meaning the granting of equal rights with other citizens.

Progress of emancipation: 1791, France; 1796 Netherlands; 1808, Kingdom of Westphalia; 1812, Mecklenburg-Schwerin; 1812, Kingdom of Prussia; 1830, Greece; 1832, Canada; 1839, Ottoman Empire; 1842,Kingdom of Hanover; 1849, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg; 1849, Denmark; 1856, United Kingdom; 1861, Italy; 1862, Grand Duchy of Baden; 1863, Danish Duchy of Holstein; 1864,Free City of Frankfurt; 1867, Habsburg Empire; 1869, North German Confederation; 1871, Germany; 1874, Switzerland; 1878, Bulgaria; 1878,  Serbia; 1910, Spain; 1917, Russian Empire; 1923, Romania.

“The Jews [of Germany] struggled for emancipation—and this is the tragedy that moves us so much today—not for the sake of their rights  as a people, but for the sake of assimilating themselves to the peoples among whom they lived” (77).

“The emotional confusion of the German Jews between 1820 and 1920 is of considerable importance if one wishes to understand them as a group, a group characterized by that “German-Jewishness” (Deutschjudentum”) many of us encountered in our own youth and which stimulated us to resistance” (77-78). Importance of Friedrich Schiller.

Part III (beginning pages): 

‘the Germans did not know that they were dealing with such a deep process of decay in the Jewish tradition and in Jewish self-consciousness, and they recoiled from the whole procedure” (81). Alienation.

Session 2

I have always been a great admirer of the novels of Henry James. What I admire most about them is that the author brings out that we humans are not isolated individuals, but a nucleus of relationships. We are in fact made up of a complex of relationships. This multidimensional confluence of people who make up what we are is really beyond the reach of historians, for the most part. Nevertheless, through the reading of diaries and letters, if extant, as well as an author's more public or official writings, it is sometimes possible to see historical figures more in the round. And although I am very much opposed to the notion that we can spare ourselves the effort of reading an author's works, and somehow get to the essential by perusing incidental "notes to the maid" that happen to be penned by an author, it is in some cases extremely helpful, due perhaps in part to our own frailty, to approach an author from his or her less formal side--particularly when we are dealing with a writer whose works are devoted to an area that has its own protocol, so to speak. I am thinking, not just of writers in the sciences, but also of writers of philosophy, social analysis or history, whose minds have been trained in framing the results of their research in a form with which the general reader is less comforatable than are their academic colleagues.

      The theme of this evening's discussion is Gershom Scholem's relationship to his closest friend, Walter Benjamin. I will also comment to a lesser extent on Scholem's relationship with Franz Kafka, which, though not as close as the former, was characterized by controversial insights and puzzled admiration.

       Gershom Scholem kept copious notes of that mixed experiential milieu, his personal and intellectual life, beginning at least as early as 1915 (age 18). He drew on them specifically in writing three works of a personal nature: Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: The  NYRB, 1981), Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 (Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), and From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (1980). (By the way, this way of working from notes is common to all Scholem's works, including those on Kabbalah). He also drew on extensive correspondence, particularly in the case of Benjamin: cf. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992). The Story of a Friendship (which grew out of a 1965 manuscript, now at the Leo Baeck Institute here in New York): in Hebrew, Sipurah shel yedidut (סיפורה של ידידות). 

      The two men met in 1915 in Berlin. The friendship, which went through numerous periods of tension, ended 25 years later, when Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, after being turned back by the Spanish border patrol as he fled the Holocaust. The general orientation of the Benjamin/Scholem intellectual exchange concerned the nature of Judaism, the nature of language, Marxism and Zionism. More specifically, Scholem wanted to convince Benjamin to leave Europe and come to Jerusalem, where he himself had lived since 1923. Secondly, Scholem wished to demonstrate to Benjamin that Bertold Brecht, as well the the Institute for Social Research (which became the New School for Social Research in New York during the Hitler years), were distorting his thought, which was fundamentally that of a renewal of Jewish spirituality. Scholem interpreted the work of both Benjamin and Kafka as that of the only honest form of Judaism that could exist in their time: a Judaism in which messianism took the form of a revelation through nihilism, that is, through absence. Formerly, Scholem had suggested to his friend that it was impossible to explain to the goyim how Kafka describes “the universe in which the redemption cannot be anticipated,” even if “the light of revelation never burned as unmercifully as it does here.” Now he writes, in the fourth quatrain of a didactic poem annexed to a letter to Benjamin of July 1934: "Only thus does revelation appear to an age that has rejected you; only in this, your nothingness, may it apprehend you." In the original German: "So allein strahlt Offenbarung / in die Zeit, die dich verwarf. / Nur dein Nichts ist die Erfahrung, /die sie von dir haben darf."

That train of thought should doubtless be coupled with the last sentences of The Name of God or the Theory of Language in the Kabbalah, a lecture given by Scholem in 1970, and published in Diogenes 79 and 80 (1972). 

What we learn from creation and revelation, the

word of God, is infinitely liable to interpretation, and it is

reflected in our own language. Its radiation or sounds, which we

catch, are not so much communications as appeals. That which

has meaning-sense and form-is not this word itself, but the

tradition behind this word, its communication and reflection in

time. This tradition, which has its own dialectic, goes through

certain changes and is eventually delivered in a soft, panting

whisper; and there may be times, like our own, in which it can

no longer be handed down, in which this tradition falls silent.

This, then, is the great crisis of language in which we find ourselves.

We are no longer able to grasp the last summit of that

mystery that once dwelt in it. The fact that language can be

spoken is, in the opinion of the Kabbalists, owed to the name,

which is present in language. What the value and worth of

language will be - the language from which God will have

withdrawn-is the question which must be posed by those who

still believe that they can hear the echo of the vanished word

of the creation in the immanence of the world. This is a question

to which, in our times, only the poets presumably have the answer.

For poets do not share the doubt that most mystics have in

regard to language. And poets have one link with the masters

of the Kabbala, even when they reject Kabbalistic theological

formulation as being still too emphatic. This link is their belief

in language as an absolute, which is as if constantly flung open

by dialectics. It is their belief in the mystery of language which

has become audible.

I would like to conclude this evening's thoughts by developing a saying that Gershom Scholem was fond of quoting from the art historian Aby Warburg: "Der liebe Gott lebt im Detail." The dear God lives in the details. This was evident to the art historian, since in esthetics the breadth of a line or the shade of a color can make all the difference. And it applies to the philologist that Gershom Scholem was as well--a man who knew the texts of the Kabbalah better, perhaps, than anyone of his time, and was cognizant of word choice and nuance. But I would like to apply the concept to a broader domain. We know that there is more than one religion in the world, and yet we are grateful for our own. We are familiar with it as with our own family. Similarly, we know that there are many languages, but we are grateful to know our own so well that we can express nuances of feeling, differentiate between intersecting ideas. This differentiation, this endless richness of detail, this infinite finiteness, if I may so express myself, makes it possible, in my view, to use the material, limited sphere in which we live to approximate certain linguistic gestures that carry us a bit beyond it. Through espousing the accidental etymologies of words, through knowing and loving our tradition as a child knows the delineations of his mother's face, we allow ourselves to enter a realm of values Edmund Husserl expressed as being "the universal particular." Marcel Proust said that he knew there were more beautiful mothers in the world, but as a child he wanted none other than his own. We are not wrong, then, to cherish our "particularism." I will go so far as to say that, as far as we are given to see, it is in such details that God lives.

     Religion brings the crisis implied in the oxymoron, the "universal particular" to a head. The apt and accurate formulation "universal particular" is a philosophically successful and accurate one. But as a form of expression, it is philosophical, i.e. abstract. Can the particular truly be expressed, accomplished or realized in the abstract? In other words, can philsophy do more than merely formulate the problem? The particular can be stated, or enunciated, in the abstract, but by its very nature it seeks more than that. The ecumenical pays a heavy price for its ecumenicalism: it allows itself to drop its unacceptable specificity. It is the philosophical use of language itself that stands as a barrier here. Here we have, perhaps, the link to the poetic use of language to which Scholem alludes in the passage quoted above. And it may not be insignificant that Scholem has a penchant for a poet one could hardly have expected: the great American poet Walt Whitman. "By God," he quotes from "Leaves of Grass," I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." My surprise is shared by Boaz Huss, in the recent article (2005) published by Oxford University Press. 

"

Scholem concludes his reflections on the possibility of Jewish mysticism in his day with a reference to none other than Walt Whitman—who represents, in his words, “a sense of absolute sanctity within absolute secularity”—as an example indicating hope for a renewed appearance of Jewish mysticism. Scholem elsewhere expresses this neo-romantic concept, which sees literature and art as the heirs of religiosity in a secular age, in his presentation of Kafka as a modern bearer of the Jewish mystical spirit. He concludes his essay “Ten Non-historical Statements about the Kabbalah” as follows: “For in a uniquely lofty way, Kafka gave expression to the boundary between religion and nihilism. For that reason, certain readers in our day see in his writings—which are representations in secular terms of a kabbalistic sense of the world (which he himself did not know)—something of the demanding light of the canonical, of the variegated whole.”(Boaz Huss, ASK NO QUESTIONS: GERSHOM SCHOLEM AND THE STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MYSTICISM, 144-45, Project Muse).

We have opened up more vistas here than we have time to explore. Let me simply conclude that what the philosopher expresses as the universal in the particular tends to be actually pursued and to some degree realized, perhaps, by the lover, not of knowledge (philo-sopher) but of words (philo-logist). The two figures closest to Scholem, Benjamin and Kafka, both lived in and through the signifiers (the concrete elements) of language, the former as a thinker of literary and cultural manifestations, the latter as a writer whose stories seem to renew a mysticism through an unsettlingly new sense of the the mysterious, the strange, the singular, which German calls the "unheimlich." And what is fiction, if not the acceptance of the the fact that the the essential (i.e. God) cannot live without the details?

       

Session 1

Let's meet (introduction of participants).

Gershom Sholem (1897-1982), born Gerhard Sholem, , was a German Jew who became a Zionist. His best-known work is probably Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.  The best and most interesting autobiographical work we have of the early period of his life is titled From Berlin to Jerusalem, Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 1980). He emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1923. A useful overview of Scholem's life and work may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gershom_Scholem

For the purposes of the following lectures, the recently published English translation of selected diaries of Gershom Scholem will prove particularly helpful: Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 207). Skinner's introductory quote is an apt emblem of Scholem as a historical figure: "A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's." (Jean Paul Richter).  Reinforcing this line of thinking, Scholem's method "bears a resemblance to the way some medieval masters once liked to smuggle their image into the features of one of the thousands of figures crowding a painting of masses of men. This is Scholem's esoteric ruse. His esotericism isn't absolute silence but rather a kind of camouflage. With his thick tomes and philological research, he has apparently turned the figure of the metaphysician into that of a scholar..." (Intro. to Lamentation of Youth, 4, quoted from Josef Weiss "Gershom Scholem: Fünfzig Jahre," Yediot Ha Yom, Dec. 5, 1947).

In a recent talk I gave at Johns Hopkins on a book I am in the process of translating, Témoins du futur (Witnesses for the Future) by Pierre Bouretz, I summarized the perception of Gershom Scholem by that author as follows: "Gershom Scholem is the originator of the critical/historical study of Kabbalah and of the Zohar in particular. He has left us a moving and revealing account of the failed symbiosis of Jews and Germans at the beginning decades of the last century. Gershom Scholem, the complicated Zionist, and the careful analyst and tabulator of the Sabbatean movement, the interpreter of the significance of that failed Messianism."

The spiritual quest of the philologist: I frankly ‘lifted’ the title for this series of four lectures on Gershom Scholem from an essay with that title by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a historian of ideas at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and professor at the Hebrew University as well. I do not reproach myself for that borrowing; I have never been a particular fan of spurious originality. Call it my penchant for “classicism” if you will. More specifically, I do not underestimate the challenge involved in original thinking. Unlike the way things are in the area of the arts, true originality in the field of ideas necessarily involves having made a serious attempt to assimilate what has already been thought in one's field. Otherwise, originality is either purely accidental or limited to a subjective experience, and not conducive to any sort of fresh contribution to the advancement of learning. Therefore the only originality I may claim for the orientation of this series is to have fully appreciated the implications of Mendes-Flohr’s formulation: “The Spiritual Quest of The Philologist.” What attracts me to that expression is its oxymoronic tenor, which I will emphasize in the form of what I take to be its implicit question: How does the notion of spirituality comport with that of philology? Philology, surely, particularly since post-Enlightenment textual criticism, does not evoke spirituality. The underlying question that I would have you bear in mind, then, over the next few weeks, is: “In what sense may the career of Gershom Scholem be interpreted as exemplary of a marriage between the scholarly and the spiritual?" Let us take as our first clue a principle that is specific to Judaism. It is contained in the Talmudic passage: (Pirkei Avot, 2:5): “He (Hillel) used to say: An uncultivated person can have no fear of sin: a man lacking instruction cannot be pious.”

            This connection between piety and scholarship, though jeopardized by the critical method since the Enlightenment period of the 18th century, runs deep in the Jewish tradition. I do not quote the Pirkei Avot here as “proof;” indeed, it has been said that to quote the Talmud is to quote the ocean. We must not forget the countervailing voice of tradition in Psalm 8, verse 3: מיפי עוללים ("Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings (hast thou founded strength)…”. Can the inspiration of the naïve unlettered in any way be reconciled with the injunction of study on the part of the philologist (=lover of words)? Scholem himself may have adumbrated the direction of a vector resolving the two imperatives when he said in the course of an interview with Muki Tsur in 1975: “If humanity should ever lose the feeling that there is mystery—a secret—in the world, then it’s all over with us” (Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 48). How can this sense of mystery be construed as contributing to a resolution of this tension? Let me suggest that the wonder and curiosity inborn in the infant can only be kept alive through the ongoing work of a spiritual quest, a quest that must be continued throughout life. Perhaps the “experience” of the world has a negative component, when not constantly leavened by an equal and opposite impulse toward a spiritual research focused beyond the world, toward transcendence.

Group questions and discussion. 

Reading assignment for session 2: Scholem's "Jews and Germans," On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), pp. 71-78, to "and which stimulated us to resistance."