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."
