Gershom Scholem : From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

Noam Zadoff

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781512601848
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. Scholem famously recounted rejecting his parents' assimilationist liberalism in favor of Zionism and immigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation's intellectual landscape in Mandatory Palestine. Despite Scholem's public renunciation of Germany for Israel, Zadoff explores how the life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins.

CHAPTER 1

CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Indifference, on the one hand, and, on the other, unlimited glorification of the form, of spoken Hebrew, without any connection to the content of traditional Hebrew culture, even though it was what gave meaning to every word in Hebrew—these are the characteristics of the new Jewish settlement, the yishuv, in this matter, which is of supreme importance. There is apprehension, lest the younger generation of Hebrew speakers, growing up in this atmosphere, might perhaps be Hebraic in an extreme manner, but far less Jewish than its parallels in Germany and America, where outstanding teachers are at work. Though they do not speak and write in Hebrew, they are much closer to the sources of Judaism.

SHMUEL HUGO BERGMANN, “GEISTIGES LEBEN”¹

Beginnings in Palestine

A Young German Jewish Man Arrives in Palestine

On the morning of September 20, 1923, Yom Kippur, a coastal steamer slowly approached the port of Jaffa in Palestine. The ship, “which bore freight and a few passengers and anchored in various ports between Alexandria and Istanbul,” was arriving from Egypt one day late, after being unexpectedly delayed in Port Said.² Among the few passengers on deck were two young men who had been born in Germany, each of whom was to become, in his respective field, a pathfinder in the history of twentieth-century Jewish studies. One of them, the Orientalist Shlomo Dov Goitein, remained on the anchored ship and sailed on to Haifa, the next port. The other, Gershom Scholem—whose fiancée, Escha Burchhardt, had come to greet him—disembarked and arrived, for the first time in his twenty-six years, at his desired destination, in Zion. After spending ten days in Tel Aviv and Ein-Ganim, near Petach-Tikvah, where he spent the Sukkot holiday with friends from his Zionist youth movement in Berlin who had come to Palestine a short time before him, Scholem reached Jerusalem, where he lived until his death. Professionally speaking, Scholem’s absorption into Palestine was easy and rapid. In his first week in Jerusalem he had two job offers. The first was to serve as a mathematics teacher in the teachers’ college in Jerusalem, and the second was to become a librarian in the Hebrew Department of the National and University Library. The library’s director, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, was to become a close friend of Scholem. The two had already met in Bern, and Scholem lived in Bergmann’s house immediately after his arrival in Jerusalem. After some hesitation, Scholem chose the librarian’s job, though the salary was lower. In the library he could deal solely with topics that interested him, whereas he had some trepidation about being a teacher: “As a teacher I would have to correct papers in the afternoon as well, and who could say whether my pupils would not laugh at my Berlin-accent Hebrew?” he wrote in his memoirs.³ Scholem worked in the National Library for about four years, until he received a full-time appointment as a lecturer in Kabbalah at the new Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

From a personal point of view as well it appears that Scholem’s highly successful adaption to life in the Land of Israel took only a short time. On December 5, his birthday, he married his fiancée, Escha Burchhardt, on the roof of the Mizrachi teachers’ seminary in the center of town. Rabbi Simcha Assaf—who later became a professor of Talmud, the rector of the Hebrew University, and a member of the Israeli Supreme Court—officiated at the wedding. (Gershom and Escha’s marriage lasted twelve years. In 1936 they divorced, and Gershom married Fania Freud, his student—a marriage that lasted for the rest of his life.) In December 1924 Gershom and Escha lived in a rented apartment on Ethiopia Street, at the edge of the Meah Shearim neighborhood. At that time Meah Shearim was full of old Hebrew books, including works of Kabbalah, for which there was almost no demand, and they were sold very cheaply. Thus, Scholem, an enthusiastic book collector, was able to explore that “dialectical Paradise,” as he called it, and enlarge his library without interference, at least until other book collectors arrived and expressed interest in esoteric Hebrew literature.⁴

In other ways as well, Scholem adjusted without significant difficulty. His body became used to the local climate without succumbing to any of the many diseases that ordinarily afflicted immigrants,⁵ and in his memoirs he described his arrival in Palestine as entering a new social network that lasted for many years. He made friends with immigrants of longer standing, most of whom had come from Eastern Europe, and renewed old friendships, mainly with members of the Zionist youth movement in Germany who were working in agricultural settlements.

Thus Scholem’s immigration and the beginning of his life in the Land of Israel was (at least as he described it retrospectively) a success story from the personal, social, and ideological points of view. Scholem wrote to his friend Werner Kraft in Germany about his impressions of the Land of Israel and life there about a year after his arrival. In his autobiography, Scholem quotes a Hebrew translation of a portion of this letter (without mentioning that it was addressed to Kraft). There he describes Palestine as an ambiguous place, but one that mainly inspired and excited him. In the second part of the letter, which was published only after his death, Scholem describes the local cultural life in a different tone, and far less enthusiastically:

FIGURE 1 Escha and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem 1924. From the collection of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

The waters of my life flow slowly here. I cannot speak at length about the conditions that determine my attitude toward the country. Without doubt I am among those who tend toward the most apocalyptic opinions with regard to the fate of the Zionist movement here. There is no way you can imagine the worlds that meet here. Life here is an open invitation to thinking people to go out of their minds, and in any event it is inevitably necessary to assume that there is a theological background for even the most ridiculous forms of life, if you don’t want “to stand out”—standing out happens here openly, sometimes in the form of the messiah, and sometimes in the form of a labor leader, and sometimes in much more frightening disguises. Indeed one may say everything about the new Land of Israel, if you want to understand me correctly, especially bad things—and how could this not be otherwise—in the indescribable collisions of unrestrained powers of creativity from six continents including the upper world? However, it seems necessary to me to admit one thing, that more things are happening here than in other corners of the universe.⁶ I personally suffer in the most catastrophic possible way from the attitudes toward the language [Sprachverhältnisse], about which it is impossible to write in a sober way. If I ever write an essay on this, I won’t hide it from you.

The intellectuals in this country are as bad as anywhere, as [bad as] Jewish intellectuals can be, but they aren’t enigmatic like the ghosts you describe to me! In this country (a phenomenon that only developed completely at the Zionist stage) they are only one thing: stupid. Stupid in a surprising way, I tell you. The phenomenon of primitive, true (not to say original) stupidity of the Jews is apparently completely unknown in the Diaspora. This is one of the strongest impressions of the country. I don’t say this as a joke. In this apocalyptic country, indeed only here, it is possible to encounter Gartenlaube figures in Hebrew,⁷ a most exciting phenomenon. One can also meet the last of the kabbalists here.⁸

Along with the ambivalent feelings of wonder and amazement that his new city and its atmosphere aroused in Scholem, here he presents the cultural situation of the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community in the Land of Israel) in unequivocally negative terms. In the latter part of the letter—which, as noted above, he chose to omit from his autobiography—one senses Scholem’s disappointment with his encounter with the cultural and intellectual side of the Land of Israel. This disappointment is understandable and natural if we examine the place of Palestine in the world of Jewish culture at that time, especially in comparison to the situation that prevailed in Berlin, where Scholem came from. If the Land of Israel of the 1920s can be placed on the margin of Jewish intellectual life, Berlin can be called its omphalos. Scholem’s passage from this vital center to the margin, even with the purpose of making the latter central, certainly entailed many difficulties and was neither unequivocal nor ideal, as Scholem depicted it years afterward. This process, with the disillusion inherent in it (as expressed in his letter to Kraft), can be better understood by examining Scholem’s Zionist expectations of the Land of Israel, which had taken shape in the circles of Hebrew culture in which he had been involved in his youth. These circles fashioned the Hebrew cultural ideal that he brought with him when he immigrated and made a deep mark on the way he envisioned Zionist achievements in the land of his choice.

Bialik and Agnon

The Germany of Scholem’s youth, during World War I and under the Weimar Republic, saw the renewal and flourishing of Jewish culture. The awakening and organization in the Jewish communities and the immigration of Zionist Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe who became active in Germany made a deep impression on cultural life there and made cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, and Bad-Homburg into vibrant centers of Jewish culture.⁹

For Scholem, as for many German Jews of his generation, the encounter with Jews from Eastern Europe was one of the formative experiences of his youth and had a deep influence on his path in Zionism. These encounters, both through the writings of Martin Buber, which Scholem both admired and criticized, and through his personal acquaintance with Buber, played a critical role in Scholem’s progress on the path that led him to the Land of Israel. Indeed, if one traces the movement of Hebrew Zionist cultural centers from their origins in Eastern Europe through Germany on their way to the Land of Israel, one may say that the time of their flourishing in Germany, especially in Berlin, overlapped with the years when Scholem’s Zionist consciousness was formed. This flourishing was accompanied, mainly among Zionist youth, by a strong feeling of nostalgia for Eastern Europe and its Jews.¹⁰ Years later Scholem explained the essence of the attractive power of the Judaism and Jews of Eastern Europe as part of the process of forming an independent Jewish identity and part of the resistance to the assimilated German identity of his parents’ generation, which was generally representative of German Jewry at that time:

The more we encountered the not at all infrequent rejection of Eastern European Jewry in our own families, a rejection that sometimes assumed flagrant forms, the more strongly we were attracted to this very kind of Jewishness. I am not exaggerating when I say that in those years, particularly during the war and shortly thereafter, there was something like a cult of Eastern Jews among Zionists. All of us read Martin Buber’s first two volumes about Hasidism, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman and The Legend of the Baal Shem, which had appeared a few years earlier and had made Buber very famous. In every Jew we encountered from Russia, Poland, or Galicia we saw something like a reincarnation of the Baal Shem Tov or at any rate of an undistinguished Jewishness that fascinated us. These contacts and friendships with Eastern European Jews have played a great role in my life.¹¹

An encounter of this kind took place during World War I in Berlin and gave rise to a complex relationship that continued throughout Scholem’s life. This was with a young author who was born in Galicia and named Shmuel Czaczkes—that is, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who was living in Germany at that time. When Scholem first saw him in the public library of the Berlin Jewish community, at the beginning of the war, Agnon was already a famous writer and a well-known figure among the Zionist youth there. Scholem and Agnon were introduced in 1917 by a mutual friend, Max Strauss. They liked each other, and a friendship grew up between them. Agnon, who was about ten years older than Scholem, charmed the latter with his personal magnetism and unique style. “The Russian Jews with whom I lived in Pension Struck were by nature and by character intellectuals, basically enlighteners and enlightened people,” Scholem wrote in his memoir. “Agnon, however, had come from quite a distance, as it were, from a world of images in which the springs of imagination flowed profusely. His conversations often enough were altogether secular in nature, but he spoke in the style of his stories’ heroes, and there was something irresistibly magnetic about this rhetorical style of speaking.”¹² Scholem described Agnon’s arrival in Germany as “a great event,”¹³ because Agnon was seen as unique in comparison with the other Hebrew authors who were known in Germany at that time. As he was both from Eastern Europe and also from the Second Aliyah (the second wave of secular Zionist immigrants to Ottoman Palestine), his foreign way of talking, the content of his conversation, and his behavior were entirely new, and in the eyes of the Zionist youth of Germany, he glowed with the light of the authentic Judaism of the East.¹⁴

Agnon was unique in Scholem’s view and in that of his generation because Agnon belonged to foreign worlds they yearned for, and because of the special way that he described those worlds and made them available to the culture of the West—through his stories and tales. The worlds that were rendered visible to Scholem and his generation through Agnon’s stories stood in contrast to the German Jewish bourgeois milieu, with its assimil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Metaphysical Clown
• Part I: “Continuity of the Crisis”
• Part II: The Unparalleled Catastrophe
• Part III: Ein Tiefes Heimweh
• Afterword: From Berlin to Jerusalem
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names