Gershom Scholem and the Non Rational in Jewish History

Peloni:  Geoffrey provides an important lesson regarding the current debate ongoing before the Knesset between the religious blocks and the other parties.  Told thru the lens of another era, it displays the costs which might come from the influence upon political elites by non rational aspects of Jewish thought.

By Geoffrey Clarfield

As Israel is being threatened by both its “friends” like Canada and the UK, as well as Jihadis from Gaza, Syria and Iran we note with anxiety that United Torah Judaism and other members of the religious blocks in the Knesset are threatening to dissolve the government so that the thousands of Jewish men who study in Yeshivas throughout the land do not have to do military service.

This (justifiably) drives modern Orthodox Israelis, traditionalists and secularists crazy as common sense suggests that the physical risk of defending Israel should be spread equally among those citizens who are medically fit to serve. But what English speakers define as reason or common sense is clearly not at work here.

And so we must remind ourselves of the many non rational sources in Jewish history, both present and past, that contribute to such a worldview. The most sobering is the Jewish experience of Shabtai Zvi. So let us take a brief pause from the usual high level of Knesset disputatiousness and examine at least one example of the non rational in Judaism to gain some perspective on the trials of Israel.

This recent Shavuot I decided to read a short biography of a world famous Israeli Jewish scholar of Jewish religion and history, Gershom (Gerhardt) Scholem.

The book in question is Gershom Scholem-Master of the Kabbalah by the American Jewish scholar David Biale. The book came out seven years ago and is part of the very stimulating Yale University Press series “Jewish Lives.” I have read others in the series.

During the height of the “swinging sixties” I was a high school student in Canada and noted with interest that the Canadian Christian majority my age and older, and among whom my family lived, were setting aside Christianity and exploring Eastern religions.

I thought that such a sudden sea change in spiritual outlook must be historically meaningful. It was my first taste of living through a sudden nonlinear disruption in the culture and society into which I was born. I watched with fascination and interest.

And so, not surprisingly I looked to my own tradition to see if there had ever been a parallel, when as the anthropologists of history would say “the world was turned upside down.” I found that indeed that had been the case and the best guide to these “spiritual subterranean disruptions” was to be found in the writings of Gershom Scholem who had made himself the twentieth century’s world expert on Jewish mysticism and what is often called Kabbalah.

In 1968 I was a high school student. I had a Harvard trained English teacher who encouraged each of the members of his class to conduct a research project. Mine was, “Kabbalah-What is it?”

By that time Scholem had published an English translation of his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. I read that book carefully as well as excerpts from the Zohar, which had been published by Schocken Books.

I also read with some curiosity about Christian Kabbalah. However, it took me many years to figure out that Renaissance Humanists and Christian Supersessionists believed that through their understanding of Jewish Kabbalah they could finally bring stubborn Jews into the Christian faith. Quite a back-handed complement from my point of view. That is and was a whole different topic than how Jews felt about their own mystical books.

I eventually put together an essay which was really a long book review of Scholem with perhaps a few quotes from the Zohar. It was extremely hard work for a 15-year-old, but I did it and got a good mark.

However, as I continued to give myself a course in the exploration of Jewish history and civilization during the decades to come, I felt that Scholem had saved me from intellectually projecting modern rationalism back onto Jewish history.

Many of the histories of the Jews that I came to read described its Biblical phase, Hellenistic phase, Rabbinic phase, confrontation with enlightenment (Haskalah), and Jewish nationalism (Zionism) as if it were an unwinding of a peculiar but admirable Hegelian but Jewish “religious rationalism” in a unique manner.

When some years later I read Scholem’s masterful study of the false Messiah Shabtai Zvi, who was like the Beatles of his time to world Jewry, but then unlike the Beatles converted to Islam as the ultimate apostate throwing the premodern Jewish world into existential turmoil.

Scholem had taught me that my tradition, religion, culture, and people were often the recipients and creators of volcanic and subterranean mystical movements of world historical importance. Simply put, Scholem taught me the importance of the non-rational in my own culture and by extension, in other traditions thus making some sense of all those Anglo Canadian youths my age and older, who went off to the Ashrams of the Himalayas or Buddhist monasteries or engaged in Dionysian sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Biale’s biography of Scholem is professionally researched and beautifully written. Biale is clearly a fan but as an empirical scholar he is not averse to showing the darker side of Gershom Scholem.

One aspect of Scholem’s character, which he clearly outlines, was Scholem’s awareness that he was some kind of genius. Scholem was both a gifted mathematician, linguist and historian, and a German Jewish youth Zionist activist with little impulse control and a streak of disputatiousness.

For example he would love his nemesis Martin Buber, then hate him, then love him, idealize him, and denigrate him and, he brought this conflict to Israel when after WWI they both joined the faculty of the newly created Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Mandated Palestine.

Biale well describes Scholem’s phenomenally erudite, and text based historical scholarship. Scholem was an etymologically inclined historian who like an American cultural anthropologist, tried to get into the inner mind of past writers through a nuanced understanding of words and their associations.

This could not help but put him on a collision course with the mostly Eastern European revivalists of modern Hebrew who wanted a national language that could support math, chemistry, physics, history politics and diplomacy- practical language for a renewed state and people.

More like Ahad Ha Am, Scholem argued that unless the Jews of the Mandate immersed themselves in the often-perceived mystical ravings of the Kabbalists of the past they would lose their soul to modernity. He was not on the side of Herzl’s radical secularism, yet by moving to Jerusalem after WWI Scholem admirably put his money where his mouth was and became an influential and respected member of the third aliya.

Unfortunately, Scholem, Buber and so many other German Jews at the Hebrew U and in Jerusalem did not farm the land or engage in commerce and so were somehow protected from (or simply ignored) the massive hostility of surrounding Arabs and their soon to become Nazi patrons.

Despite the obvious hostility of Arabs like Haj Amin al Husseini Scholem along with about one hundred mostly German Jews in Palestine formed a “Brit Shalom” where they deluded themselves that Jewish national salvation could be had through a bi national state.

Scholem’s staunch ally Judah Magnes, rector of the Hebrew University at the time was so overinvested in this fallacy that he had a heart attack the day Ben Gurion declared independence in 1948. Academics can really and often be blind to what is going on in front of their faces.

Biale well describes Scholem’s family life, his two marriages, his early recognition of the genius of the then unknown writer Franz Kafka, his brother like friendship with Walter Benjamin, his friendship with Hannah Arendt, his breaking with her intellectually over the Eichman trial which he supported and his friendship with S.D. Goitein.

Goitein like Scholem, brought back to life to the Jewish people and the scholarly world the rich documents and social history of the Jewish people when most of us lived in the Middle East during the middle ages and participated in the India trade from Morocco to Malaya.

At the end of the day Scholem took what was thought of as marginal by mainstream Jewish historians and Zionist thinkers and taught them that Jewish mysticism and the catastrophe of Shabtai Zvi was central to the Jewish soul and not to be dismissed.

Simply put, he pointed out that Jewish culture and the Jewish soul was both Apollonian and Dionysian at different times in different measure. On a personal side he may have unconsciously studied and explicated Jewish mysticism and Shabtai Zvi, for in his youthful Zionism Scholem had a short lived delusion that he himself may be the Messiah and so there is an almost Freudian resonance between the object of Scholem’s lifetime scholarship and his own explosive temperament and partly delusional narcissism.

German Jews who came to Israel before 1948 as either immigrant Zionists or unwilling refugees, created much of the intellectual, medical, and legal infrastructure that merged with the new state when it declared its independence.

Yet at the same time they often looked down at the Eastern European Ashkenazim who formed the majority of the Yishuv at that time, who worked the soil or opened shops. Most German Jews were also ambivalent about the role of Hebrew. Scholem was exceptional in that he outdid the Eastern European linguistic nationalists with his demand that modern Hebrew connect with its history, its etymology, and the pure poetry of its mystical tradition.

On the other hand, Scholem was a man of no military understanding or experience. He had a poor grasp of Islamic antisemitism, no understanding of the legal standing of the Mandate for Palestine and a long-term deafness to the existence of a Palestinian State called Jordan that was carved out of the Mandate and Eretz Israel and given to Bedouin from Arabia-the Hashemites.

And so sadly after the 1973 war he decided that Judea and Samaria no longer deserved to be considered part of the Biblical heartland of the Jewish state and he supported the creation of yet another Palestinian Muslim entity in Zion, which would and did become the launching pad for a decades long terror war against Israel and that continues to this day.

In 1982 Scholem passed away as a national public intellectual and internationally famous scholar, a profound historian of religion and a poster boy (old man) of the Israeli left.

Nevertheless, Scholem changed my understanding of my people, its religion and history and he gave me a love for the poetics of the Zohar and other Kabbalistic writings which remains with me to this day. At the same time he reminded me of non rational factors in Jewish history and psychology. When Shabtai Zvi announced that he was the Messiah almost the entire Jewish world, both Sephardic and Askhenazic believed him. The catastrophes that followed can be found in all of the Jewish history books (Fortunately, Scholem’s delusion that he was the Messiah was a short lived adolescent crisis).

And so when we see that the Israeli government may be brought down during a time of national crisis by men who prefer prayer over fighting, and who cynically let the modern Orthodox and the secular Israelis defend them, then we must soberly remind ourselves that this has happened before. One should never forget the power of the non rational in Jewish history, no matter how distasteful that memory might be. It is instructive.