Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982) was born in Berlin to a Jewish family assimilated into German culture. His father, Arthur Scholem, opposed his son’s desire to study Jewish subjects, but thanks to the support of his mother, Betty Hirsch Scholem, he was able to study Hebrew and Talmud with an Orthodox rabbi. In 1915, Gerhard entered Frederick William University where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew. That year he met Walter Benjamin, with whom he developed a close friendship that unfortunately ended with Benjamin’s death during the Holocaust. At the university, Scholem met Martin Buber, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, and Zalman Shazar. Gerhard eventually specialized in Semitic languages, earning a degree from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His doctoral thesis was on Sefer ha Bahir, probably the oldest known book on Kabbalah.

Attracted to Zionism and influenced by Martin Buber, Scholem emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1923, where he changed his name to Gershom. There, he devoted himself to the study of Jewish mysticism, worked as a librarian at the National Library, and eventually became head of the Department of Hebrew and Judaica. He later joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a professor, where he taught Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, a position to which he dedicated the rest of his life.

Gershom sought to teach these subjects with a different approach than before. He disagreed with the approach taken by the followers of the «Wissenschaft des Judentums» movement, the Science of Judaism, who, he believed, presented Judaism from a strictly rational perspective, much in the style of German universities. Gershom criticized them for studying Judaism more as a dead thing than as a living organism, and for forgetting that the foundations of Judaism included a part that could not be rationally explained, and that this was what made it alive. He argued that the mythical and mystical aspects of Judaism were the truly living core of Judaism and were just as important as the rational part, even more so than the minutiae of halacha.

Gershom Scholem is known as the founder of the modern study of Kabbalah, the branch of Jewish thought that seeks the ultimate truth about the nature of God, good and evil, and humanity’s role in the cosmos. George Prochnik says that for Scholem, Kabbalah preserves the framework of monotheism while shattering the idol that there is a single monolithic truth. Scholem often quoted Isaac Luria, a 16th-century mystic, who said: “Every word of the Torah has 600,000 faces, that is, meanings, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. Each face, each meaning, addresses only one of them; only that child can see and decipher it. Each has his own way of understanding Divine Revelation.”

Gershom Scholem was convinced, David Biale tells us, that modernity, by viewing everything through the lens of reason, had caused Jewish mysticism to practically cease to exist. Just as in pre-modern times, Kabbalah had been a vital force within Judaism, especially among the Hasidim, today, with few exceptions, its presence in the Jewish spirit has been diminished. And Gershom Scholem fought against this all his life, because for him, mysticism is what truly gives life to Judaism.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by George Prochnik, David Biale, and other sources.