Presenting and Representing Gershom Scholem: A Review Essay

Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathon Chipman (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997), xix +244 pages.

In his nearly sixty year long academic career, Gershom Scholem published hundreds of books and articles on Jewish mysticism, including its thematic and historical aspects. Each volume of Scholem's corpus displays a unique character and reveals his changing methods and perspectives. Scholem investigated the hidden world of kabbalistic manuscripts and published his findings in various languages, though many studies are limited to one language and remain out of the reach of a wider audience.

An eloquent English translation, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism on Our Time ¹ is a collection of articles that seeks to portray Scholem as a modern Jewish theologian. The collection attempts to show that Scholem, as a scholar, was conscious of the theological implications of the texts he studied and that he viewed them as sources for the modern renewal of Jewish spirituality. It also depicts his concern for the effect his studies might have on those without direct access to primary texts.

This essay will examine the relationship between academic method and ideology in the works of Gershom Scholem, with special attention to this newly published volume. Elsewhere I have argued that Scholem's own perception of his scholarship, if not the content of his studies, can be described in objective terms divorced from ideological and political considerations. ² I will show that this new anthology was edited according to an ideological and nationalistic interpretation of Scholem's scholarly work and represents only one small aspect of his thought and writing. ³ I hope to sensitize the reader to the importance of which Scholem one reads as much as how one reads him. In order to properly situate this selection of essays within the context of Scholem's studies available in English, as well as within his scholarly corpus, the last section of this review will be devoted to a bibliographic discussion.

The editor and translator of this volume present essays concerning Scholem's views on scholarship, Zionism, and the possibility of Jewish mysticism in our time. As Jonathan Chipman writes in his introduction to the volume:

The essays chosen for the present volume shed light upon several aspects of Scholem's personal experience and own spiritual world, including some major historiographical essays hitherto unknown in English. One encounters here a portrait of Scholem who is passionately concerned with the renaissance of the Jewish people in its own land, specifically in its cultural and spiritual dimensions; one whose concerns encompassed issues of cultural life, language, the nature of scholarship, and the religious quest. Albeit not a practitioner of religion in the conventional sense, he was a religious believer and seeker, one who was troubled by the difficulty presented to the possibility of religious experience by the modern consciousness, which made himself and those of his ilk into "religious anarchists" (p. ix).

The volume opens with an essay by Avraham Shapira, who in addition to editing three similar collections of short studies by Scholem, ⁴ has published a number of studies on Scholem's spiritual and intellectual world. ⁵ In this latest collection of essays Shapira finds an intimate connection between Zionism and Jewish mysticism, thereby highlighting Scholem's claim of the potential for spiritual and mystical renewal in the twentieth century. ⁶ Shapira casts Scholem at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century against the background of cultural figures of who held similar views at a time when modern Jewish and Hebrew culture was crystallizing into what it is today. Shapira presents Scholem's Zionism as a necessary aspect of his intellectual and academic life, blurring the distinction between Scholem's academic and spiritual orientations: "It is somewhat reductionist to define Scholem as an 'historian'" (p. xiii).

Despite Shapira's illuminating presentation of Scholem's biography, the growing body of...