Gershom Scholem: Founder of the Academic Study of Kabbalah

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was the German-born Israeli historian who created the modern academic study of Kabbalah. Working in Jerusalem from 1923, he catalogued manuscripts, dated texts and wrote the narrative of Jewish mysticism that still frames the field, from the Merkavah mystics through the Zohar and Isaac Luria to Sabbateanism and Hasidism. Almost every later scholar has defined their position by agreeing or disagreeing with him.

A Berlin Youth and a Turn to Hebrew§

Gerhard Scholem was born on 5 December 1897 into an assimilated Jewish family of printers in Berlin. As a teenager he rebelled against his father's German patriotism, joined Zionist youth circles, learned Hebrew and began to study the Talmud with traditional teachers. He opposed the First World War, a stance that set him against much of his family; his brother Werner went in a different direction, becoming a Communist member of the Reichstag who was later murdered in Buchenwald in 1940.

In 1915 Scholem met Walter Benjamin, and the two formed one of the great intellectual friendships of the century. Their letters and conversations on language, revelation and messianism fed into both men's work, and Scholem's later memoir of Benjamin is an important source for understanding the philosopher. Scholem studied mathematics, philosophy and Semitic languages at Berlin, Jena, Bern and Munich, where in 1922 he completed a doctorate on the Sefer ha-Bahir, published the following year as a German translation with commentary. The choice was telling: the Bahir is the earliest text of the Kabbalah proper, and Scholem wanted to begin at the beginning.

Jerusalem: Building a Discipline from Manuscripts§

In 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine. He first worked as a librarian, heading the Hebrew department of what became the National Library, and from 1925 taught at the new Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he held the chair of Jewish mysticism from 1933 until his retirement in 1965. His Bibliographia Kabbalistica (1927) listed printed Kabbalistic works and studies, and he spent years in European and Middle Eastern libraries reading uncatalogued manuscripts.

This patient philology was the foundation of everything else. Before Scholem, the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars of the nineteenth century, such as Heinrich Graetz, had generally treated Kabbalah as an embarrassment, a medieval superstition at odds with rational Judaism. Christian and occult writers, for their part, had treated it as a timeless secret doctrine detached from Jewish history. Scholem rejected both views. He insisted that Kabbalah was a central, creative part of Jewish religious history that had to be studied with the same tools as any other body of texts: manuscript comparison, dating, and attention to authors and communities.

He built an institution as well as a body of work. His students and younger colleagues, among them Isaiah Tishby, Joseph Dan and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, became the next generation of the "Jerusalem school". His personal library, rich in rare Kabbalistic printings, is now held as a named collection in the National Library of Israel.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and the Shape of a History§

In 1938 Scholem delivered a series of lectures in New York that became Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), the most influential book ever written on the subject. It presents Jewish mysticism as a sequence of distinct movements:

• Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism in late antiquity, which Scholem described as a form of "Jewish Gnosticism" centred on ascent to the divine throne; see Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism.
• German Pietism (Ḥasidei Ashkenaz) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
• Abraham Abulafia and prophetic Kabbalah; see Abraham Abulafia.
• The Zohar, to which he devoted two lectures, concluding that it was largely the work of Moses de León in late thirteenth-century Castile.
• Isaac Luria and the Safed school; see Lurianic Kabbalah.
• Sabbateanism and Hasidism as the last great movements.

The book opened with a typology of religion in three stages, a mythical stage, an institutional stage and a mystical stage in which the believer seeks to recover the immediacy lost in institutional religion. It was elegant, readable and argued, and it gave English readers their first serious map of the field.

Scholem's other major works filled in the map: Origins of the Kabbalah (German 1962) on the Provençal and Catalan beginnings, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960) and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (1962) on key ideas, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (1960), and the encyclopedia articles later gathered as Kabbalah (1974), still the most compact reference to the whole tradition.

Scholem's Great Theses: Myth, Exile and Messianism§

Several arguments run through Scholem's writing and became the common sense of the field for a generation.

The return of myth. Scholem saw Kabbalah as the re-emergence of mythical thinking inside a Judaism that philosophers such as Maimonides had tried to purify of it. The ten sefirot, a feminine Shekhinah and a cosmic drama of exile and return were, in his view, a mythology hidden within monotheism. He traced part of it to ancient Gnostic motifs that, he believed, reached Provence in texts like the Bahir.

Luria and the expulsion. He argued that the Lurianic myth of contraction, the breaking of the vessels and repair (tikkun) gave symbolic form to the experience of the Spanish expulsion of 1492, turning historical exile into a cosmic condition that every Jew could help to heal.

Sabbateanism and modernity. In his famous essay "Redemption through Sin" (1937) and his monumental Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Hebrew 1957, English 1973), Scholem treated the messianic movement of 1665–1666 not as a bizarre episode but as a mass movement prepared by Lurianic teaching, whose antinomian aftermath helped erode rabbinic authority and opened paths to Enlightenment and reform. See Sabbateanism and Jacob Frank and the Frankists.

Hasidism as neutralised messianism. He read early Hasidism as preserving Lurianic intensity while turning it away from acute messianic expectation toward personal communion with God (devekut).

Eranos, Zionism and Public Controversy§

From 1949 Scholem lectured regularly at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, alongside Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin and the circle around Carl Jung. Several of his best essays began as Eranos lectures. Historians of religion have since debated how far this setting, with its interest in archetypes and religious experience, shaped the way Kabbalah was presented to the wider world.

Scholem was a committed but unconventional Zionist. In the 1920s he belonged to Brit Shalom, a small association that advocated a binational state for Jews and Arabs. His Zionism was cultural and historical rather than religious: he wanted the Jewish people to recover the whole of its past, including the parts that rationalist historians had hidden. He received the Israel Prize in 1958 and served as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1968 to 1974.

He also engaged in public argument. His exchange of letters with Hannah Arendt in 1963, after her Eichmann in Jerusalem, became one of the best-known disputes among Jewish intellectuals of the period. Toward the end of his life he published a memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem, and a book on his friendship with Benjamin. He died in Jerusalem on 21 February 1982.

Critics and Revisions after Scholem§

From the late 1980s Scholem's synthesis was challenged. Moshe Idel's Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) argued that Scholem had been too historicist, explaining ideas by external events, and too ready to see Gnostic influence. Idel proposed a more phenomenological approach, distinguishing theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah from ecstatic Kabbalah, and stressed continuities with older rabbinic and mythical traditions rather than sudden borrowing. Many historians now doubt that the Spanish expulsion explains Lurianic doctrine, since key Lurianic ideas have earlier roots and Lurianic Kabbalah spread widely only in the seventeenth century.

Yehuda Liebes questioned the single-author view of the Zohar, proposing a circle of Castilian Kabbalists; later scholars such as Daniel Abrams have gone further, describing the Zohar as a body of texts shaped by editors and printers over centuries (see The Zohar). Elliot Wolfson reopened questions of gender, vision and the body that Scholem had touched only lightly. Boaz Huss and others examined Scholem himself as a figure of his age, showing how his categories of "mysticism" and "myth" belonged to early twentieth-century German thought. David Biale's study of Scholem as a writer of "counter-history" argued that he deliberately recovered suppressed currents to renew Jewish self-understanding.

Even his critics treat Scholem as the founder of their discipline. His dating of texts, his identification of authors and his editions remain basic tools, and the questions he posed are still the questions the field asks. For the tradition he studied, begin with What Is Kabbalah?, and for the wider academic study of hidden traditions see esotericism and the academy.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Gershom Scholem?§

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was a historian of Jewish mysticism, born in Berlin and active in Jerusalem from 1923. He founded the academic study of Kabbalah and wrote Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Sabbatai Sevi.

What is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism about?§

Published in 1941 from lectures given in New York, it surveys Jewish mysticism from Merkavah mysticism to Hasidism. It argues that Kabbalah developed in distinct historical stages and presents the Zohar as mainly the work of Moses de León.

Was Scholem himself a Kabbalist?§

No. Scholem was a secular scholar who studied Kabbalah historically, although he took its ideas seriously as religious thought and wrote about them with evident sympathy. He did not practise Kabbalah or present himself as a teacher of it.

Why do scholars criticise Scholem today?§

Critics such as Moshe Idel argue that he overstated Gnostic influence and explained ideas too directly by historical events like the Spanish expulsion. Others question his single-author view of the Zohar and his concept of mysticism, while still relying on his textual work.

Sources and further reading§

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism — Gershom Scholem, 1941
• Origins of the Kabbalah — Gershom Scholem, 1962
• On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism — Gershom Scholem, 1960
• Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 — Gershom Scholem, 1973
• Kabbalah — Gershom Scholem, 1974
• From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth — Gershom Scholem, 1980
• Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship — Gershom Scholem, 1981
• Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History — David Biale, 1979
• Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah — David Biale, 2018
• Kabbalah: New Perspectives — Moshe Idel, 1988
• Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos — Steven M. Wasserstrom, 1999