Gershom Scholem (Hebrew: גֵרְשׁׂם שָׁלוֹם; 5 December 1897 – 21 February 1982) was a German philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur Scholem and Betty Hirsch Scholem. His father was a printer. His older brother was the German Communist leader Werner Scholem. He studied Hebrew and Talmud with an Orthodox rabbi.
Scholem met Walter Benjamin in Munich in 1915, when the former was seventeen years old and the latter was twenty-three. They began a lifelong friendship that ended when Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in the wake of Nazi persecution. Scholem dedicated his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen), based on lectures 1938–1940, to Benjamin. In 1915, Scholem enrolled at the Frederick William University in Berlin (today, Humboldt University), where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew. There he met Martin Buber, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Zalman Shazar.
In Berlin, Scholem befriended Leo Strauss and corresponded with him throughout his life. He studied mathematical logic at the University of Jena under Gottlob Frege. He was in Bern in 1918 with Benjamin when he met Elsa (Escha) Burchhard, who became his first wife. Scholem returned to Germany in 1919, where he received a degree in Semitic languages at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Together with Benjamin, he established a fictitious school – the University of Muri.
Scholem wrote his doctoral thesis on the oldest known kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. The following year it appeared in book form as "Das Buch Bahir", having been published by his father's publishing house.
Drawn to Zionism and influenced by Buber, he immigrated in 1923 to the British Mandate of Palestine. There Scholem became a librarian, heading the Department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library. In 1927, he revamped the Dewey Decimal System, making it appropriate for large Judaica collections. During the period that he was a librarian of ancient manuscripts at the library of Hebrew University, fragments of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and inventory from the Cairo Genizah moved through the collections he was overseeing. Scholem became a professor of mysticism at the Hebrew University in 1933.
Scholem's brother Werner was a member of the ultra-left "Fischer-Maslow Group" and the youngest ever member of the Reichstag, or Weimar Diet, representing the Communist Party of Germany. He was expelled from the party and later murdered by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Unlike his brother, Gershom was vehemently opposed to both Communism and Marxism. In 1936, he married his second wife, Fania Freud. Fania, who had been his student and could read Polish, was helpful in his later research, particularly in regard to Jacob Frank.
In 1946, Scholem was sent by the Hebrew University to search for Jewish books that had been plundered by the Nazis and help return them to their rightful owners. He spent much of the year in Germany and Central Europe as part of this project, known as "Otzrot HaGolah".
Scholem died in Jerusalem, where he is buried next to his wife in the Sanhedria Cemetery. Jürgen Habermas delivered the eulogy.
Scholem became a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view and became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965, when he became an emeritus professor.
Scholem directly contrasted his historiographical approach on the study of Jewish mysticism with the approach of the 19th-century school of the Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism"), which sought to submit the study of Judaism to the discipline of subjects such as history, philology, and philosophy. According to Jeremy Adler, Scholem's thinking was "both recognizably Jewish and deeply German," and "changed the course of twentieth-century European thought."
At the time Scholem entered his field of study, Jewish mysticism was acknowledged as Judaism's weakest scholarly link by many of the scholars, publishers and cultural leaders of the Jewish community and gentile German scholars who sponsored Scholem's early career, including Martin Buber, Salman Schocken, Franz Rosenzweig, Robert Eisler, Philipp Bloch, Moses Marx, Clemens Baumker, Fritz Hommel and Walter Benjamin.
Scholem told the story of his early research "at the start of my path" in 1922 when he went to Berlin to visit "the only Jewish scholar who had engaged in the study of Kabbalah in the previous generation." Gesturing at the rabbi's library of documents, manuscripts and autographs written by the authors of the Kabbalah, some of which had been inscribed in early modern or medieval centuries, Scholem remarked, "How wonderful it is, Herr Professor, that you have read and learned all this!" to which "...the elderly gentleman replied: 'What! And I also have to read all this nonsense?!" (Though he does not mention the name of the Rabbi in his canonical account of this visit, Scholem explains elsewhere that this scholar—once the Rabbi of Poznań—was Phillip Bloch.)
The analysis of Judaism carried out by the Wissenschaft school was flawed in two ways, according to Scholem: It studied Judaism as a dead object rather than as a living organism; and it did not consider the proper foundations of Judaism, the non-rational force that, in Scholem's view, made the religion a living thing.
In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the minutiae of Halakha, were the truly living core of Judaism. In particular, he disagreed with what he considered to be Martin Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts as well as what he argued was an inadequate approach to Jewish history, Hebrew language, and the land of Israel.
In the worldview of Scholem, the research of Jewish mysticism could not be separated from its historical context. Starting from something similar to the Gegengeschichte of Friedrich Nietzsche, he ended up including less normative aspects of Judaism in the public history.
Specifically, Scholem in his scholarly writing that Jewish history could be divided into three periods:
During the Biblical period, monotheism battles mythology without completely defeating it.