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Zion

Yaacob Dweck

in Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, ... More

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, in his own way, turned to Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi as part of a larger response to that crisis. If Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby had engaged in something akin to lower criticism in their editing and analysis of Sasportas, Teitelbaum employed analysis similar to higher criticism in his use of Sasportas. If Scholem saw Sabbatianism as generative of a crisis and fundamental rupture in Jewish history and turned to Sasportas as a witness to this crisis, Teitelbaum experienced the middle decades of the twentieth century as a crisis in and of itself. To him, Sasportas was not an intellectual instrument with which to reconstruct the past; rather, he functioned as a moral resource that served as a guide for the proper rabbinic response to religious messianism in the present. Ultimately, Scholem's and Teitelbaum's readings of The Fading Flower of the Zevi placed Sasportas squarely at the heart of a central debate in modern Jewish life: Zionism.Less

Buber versus Scholem and the Figure of the Hasidic Jew: A Literary Debate between Two Political Theologies

Hannan Hever

in Jews and the Ends of Theory

This chapter looks at one of the most famous and significant debates in Jewish studies: between Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber over the character of Hasidism. On the face of it, the debate was a ... More

This chapter looks at one of the most famous and significant debates in Jewish studies: between Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber over the character of Hasidism. On the face of it, the debate was a literary one, centering on the significance of the Hasidic tale and its role in the interpretation of the Hasidic movement. It was a debate between two conceptions of Hasidism, one as a system of theological concepts, and the other as a way of life. Yet this debate was not merely historicist, but topical and political as well. For in this debate, Buber and Scholem negotiated the question of Jewish sovereignty and endeavored to determine the desired relationship between Jews and the state.Less

The Stories of Gershom Scholem

Amir Engel

in Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography

This chapter explains the novelty of the book’s approach over and against the existing literature in the field. It does so by posing the fundamental question regarding Scholem, namely, why is Scholem ... More

This chapter explains the novelty of the book’s approach over and against the existing literature in the field. It does so by posing the fundamental question regarding Scholem, namely, why is Scholem so well known, even as he was mostly a scholar of a decidedly narrow field of knowledge? And why is he still read today? This chapter suggests that in different ways, the scholarly literature on Scholem focused on the philosophical underpinnings of his work. Scholem, it is often argued, is important because his views on Jewish revival, Zionism, language or historiography. This chapter seeks to expose the fallacies and problems of this approach. And it discusses the justifications, the advantages and disadvantages, in reading Scholem, not philosophically, but rather as a story-teller. Scholem it is argued did not merely expose truth that lay hidden in the old manuscripts of Jewish esoteric tradition, but recreated this tradition for his audience and in response to many of the existential questions of his generation.Less

 Conclusions: Mysticism, Metaphysics, and the Limitations of Beit El Kabbalah

Pinchas Giller

in Shalom Shar'abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El

This book is a combination of a historical survey of a kabbalistic school and a study of a “lived tradition” that is, a living community of Kabbalists. Beit El has maintained a direct historical link ... More

This book is a combination of a historical survey of a kabbalistic school and a study of a “lived tradition” that is, a living community of Kabbalists. Beit El has maintained a direct historical link to earlier schools going back to the Safed revival. It is assumed that Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism and that, as “mysticism,” it shares common properties with other mystical traditions in the religions of the world. There seems to be little of the mystical experience in Beit El Kabbalah. The metaphysical object of the practice is clear, however. Beit El kabbalah is obviously an authentic form of Jewish esotericism. Boaz Huss of Ben Gurion University has addressed these reasons with a bracing clarity in recent years. The terms of the “study of mysticism” originated in Christology and have often retained an appropriationist dimension. These anxieties have blinded scholars to certain new developments in the history of Kabbalah. Beit El kabbalah may serves as a wedge to distinguish Kabbalah from “mysticism.”Less

Joseph Weiss: Letters to Ora: To my son Uriel Joseph with love

Sara Ora Heller Wilensky

in Hasidism Reappraised

This chapter looks at the twenty letters that Joseph Weiss sent to the author in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over the years 1949 to 1968. These letters offer an insight into Weiss's spiritual ... More

This chapter looks at the twenty letters that Joseph Weiss sent to the author in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over the years 1949 to 1968. These letters offer an insight into Weiss's spiritual constitution and into the extraordinary friendship that developed between him and Professor Gershom Scholem, its vicissitudes notwithstanding. The letters are of value not only for the personal and biographical details they contain, but also because they contribute to a deeper understanding of Weiss's scholarly work, while at the same time enriching one's knowledge of intellectual life in Jerusalem and in the Jewish academic community of the 1950s. Undoubtedly, however, their greatest importance is that they provide a new perspective on Weiss's complex personality and add a unique and personal dimension to his scholarly bequest. Joseph Weiss's letters are unusually frank: they speak of the changing circumstances of his life; his poverty and alienation, particularly during his unsettled period in England in the early 1950s. There are hints of his ambivalence towards Diaspora Jews in England and towards the State of Israel, and one sees his response, wounded and sarcastic, to the criticism of his bold new approach to the study of hasidism.Less

Abyss, Volcano, and the Frozen Swirl of Words: The Difficult and the Holy in Agnon, Bialik, and Scholem

Adam Zachary Newton

in To Make the Hands Impure: Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy

Chapter 7 corresponds itself to the third major part of the book, “Languages.” Its title, “Abyss, Volcano, and the Frozen Swirl of Words” incorporates metaphors drawn from essays by Gershom Scholem ... More

Chapter 7 corresponds itself to the third major part of the book, “Languages.” Its title, “Abyss, Volcano, and the Frozen Swirl of Words” incorporates metaphors drawn from essays by Gershom Scholem and Emmanuel Levinas about the Aktualisierung (“actualization”) or Verweltlichung (“secularization”) of Hebrew in the twentieth century. Restaging the interplay of “difficult” and “holy,” the chapter groups together a set of philosophical essays about translation and language in its material aspect: “Revealment and Concealment in Language” from 1915, by Hayyim Nahman Bialik; “Confession on the Subject of Our Language”, a 1926 letter from Gershom Scholem dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig; and Rosenzweig’s 1926 and 1925 essays, “Scripture and Luther” and “New Hebrew.” The chapter is bookended by excerpts from Bialik’s 1904 poem “Before the Bookcase” and the remarkable hymn to the Hebrew language from 1946, “Engraved Are Your Letters” by the American He- braist Abraham Regelson. Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” and the 1923 essay on translation serve as points of reference, along with Levinas’s “Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon” from 1976. “The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano,” Derrida’s fervent and ingenious 1986 essay analyzing the Scholem letter, and Monolingualism of the Other, his 1996 text on Rosenzweig, provide a postmodern counterpoint.Less

Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss: Notes toward a German-Jewish Dialogue

in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss, the two most important Jewish thinkers, whose prominence, if not preeminence, among the most important German Jewish thinkers is already ... More

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss, the two most important Jewish thinkers, whose prominence, if not preeminence, among the most important German Jewish thinkers is already secured. Despite their influence in their respective fields of kabala and political philosophy, no comparative study of their work has yet been attempted. The biographies of Scholem and Strauss present some striking parallels and contrasts. Scholem was born into a middle-class, assimilated Berlin family, the milieu of which he ridiculed mercilessly in his autobiography. From an early age, he was attracted to political Zionism and was active in the German anti-war movement during World War I, something that proved a profound embarrassment to his parents. Strauss, by contrast, was born into a religiously observant family in the Hessian village of Kirchhain that he would later describe as a home in which “the ceremonial laws were rather strictly observed,” but where “there was very little Jewish knowledge.”Less

Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Foundations of Authority

Miguel Vatter

in Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any ... More

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any attempt to endow Zionism with messianic traits. This chapter, instead focuses on Scholem’s conception of legal authority, arguing that his historiographical work on the mystical tradition of Judaism shows that the authority of the law is a function of the abdication of divine sovereignty and of a mystical idea of God’s Nothingness. Scholem articulates Jewish political theology around motifs found in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and nihilism. His is a political theology of the law after the “death of God.”Less

Gershom Scholem

Julia Ng

in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Giorgio Agamben’s earliest encounter with Gershom Scholem concerns an essay from 1972 entitled ‘Walter Benjamin and his Angel’,1 Scholem’s first attempt to provide a definitive account of Benjamin’s ... More

Giorgio Agamben’s earliest encounter with Gershom Scholem concerns an essay from 1972 entitled ‘Walter Benjamin and his Angel’,1 Scholem’s first attempt to provide a definitive account of Benjamin’s legacy. At its centre was a short text entitled ‘Agesilaus Santander’, which Benjamin composed on 12 and 13 August 1933 as a gift for the Dutch painter Anna Maria Blaupot ten Cate. In the text, the narrator is first given a ‘secret’ Jewish name, which is then revealed to contain an image of the ‘New Angel’ as well as a ‘female’ and ‘male’ form. Before naming himself as such, the ‘new angel’ presents himself as one of a host of angels that God creates at every given moment, whose only task, according to the Kabbalah, is to sing God’s praises at His throne before returning to the void. By sending his ‘feminine aspect’ to the masculine one, however, the angel has only strengthened the narrator’s ‘ability to wait’; even when face to face with the woman he awaits he does not fall upon her because ‘he wants happiness: […] the conflict in which the rapture of that which happens just once [des Einmaligen], the new, the as-yet-unlived is combined with the bliss of experiencing something once more [des Nocheinmal], of possessing once again, of having lived’. Thus, the narrator continues, ‘he has nothing new to hope for on any road other than the road home’ to the future whence he came, where the as-yet-unlived will have been lived.Less

Messianic Journalism? Benjamin and Scholem Read Die Fackel

in The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

This chapter examines Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem's interpretations of Karl Kraus' journalism. It highlights Benjamin's use of dramatic phrases and superlative forms in his essays on Kraus ... More

This chapter examines Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem's interpretations of Karl Kraus' journalism. It highlights Benjamin's use of dramatic phrases and superlative forms in his essays on Kraus and Scholem's portrayal of Kraus as a “messianic movement of language.” This chapter argues that Benjamin's and Scholem's readings of Kraus powerfully underscore how complex the discourse linking journalistic writing and Jewishness could be, and also how much it mattered during the turbulent war and Weimar years.Less

Nationality, Judaism, and the Sacredness of Language

in Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy

This chapter examines Franz Rosenzweig's views on the questions of nationality, language, and translation in his Jüdische Rundschau. It analyzes the role of German, Jewish, and German-Jewish ... More

This chapter examines Franz Rosenzweig's views on the questions of nationality, language, and translation in his Jüdische Rundschau. It analyzes the role of German, Jewish, and German-Jewish exemplarity in Jacques Derrida's philosophical nationality project, and puts forward Derrida Rosenzweig's views on Jewish existence and Hermann Cohen's views on German Judaism to pursue the question of (Jewish) identity or belonging through the optic of exemplarity. The chapter also considers Derrida's views on the debate between Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem on the issue of translation and sacred language.Less

Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism: A Critical Appraisal

Moshe Idel

in Hasidism Reappraised

This chapter studies the divergences between Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on the nature of kabbalah and hasidism and the appropriate methods for exploring their literatures. Guided by his ... More

This chapter studies the divergences between Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on the nature of kabbalah and hasidism and the appropriate methods for exploring their literatures. Guided by his phenomenological approach, Buber ultimately reached the view that hasidism expressed the quintessence of Judaism. Other types of Jewish spirituality, such as kabbalah and apocalypticism, were for him not essential components of the Jewish religion. In principle, Buber was looking for the perennial element in hasidism that could nourish his own religiosity. Scholem's historical and critical considerations, on the other hand, led him to a theological stance that defined most expressions of Jewish mysticism as authentic Jewish phenomena, in line with his pluralistic vision of Judaism. Buber's romantic posture is conspicuously different from Scholem's critical approach; indeed, Scholem himself pointed out that Buber had ignored some of the more distasteful aspects of hasidism, most strikingly its magical components.Less

“Authorized Guardians”: The Rejection of Occult and Contemporary Kabbalah

Boaz Huss

in Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality

The chapter examines phenomena that remained outside the scope of what was considered Jewish mysticism: the topics scholars chose to ignore. It discusses how researchers of Jewish mysticism relate to ... More

The chapter examines phenomena that remained outside the scope of what was considered Jewish mysticism: the topics scholars chose to ignore. It discusses how researchers of Jewish mysticism relate to contemporary Hasidic and Kabbalistic movements and examines why the category was not applied to these movements. The chapter examines the claim of Buber, Scholem, and many of their followers that the Hasidism of the eighteenth century was the final stage of Jewish mysticism. It reveals why later forms of Kabbalah and Hasidism were not regarded as authentic expressions of Jewish mysticism, and why they did not, therefore, receive any scholarly attention but were the object of contempt. In this chapter, I show that the disregard of Scholem and his pupils toward the Kabbalistic formations of their times derived from a national-theological position and an Orientalist ambivalence. The researchers of Jewish mysticism—who viewed themselves as the authorized guardians of the Kabbalah—believed that the authentic continuation of the Jewish mystical tradition was rather to be found in academic research, which would reveal the historical significance of Kabbalah and Hasidism, and their mystical and metaphysical origins.Less

Jewish Mysticism and National Theology

Boaz Huss

in Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality

Chapter 2 examines the formation of the concept of Jewish mysticism, the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish forms of mysticism, and the construction of an academic research field ... More

Chapter 2 examines the formation of the concept of Jewish mysticism, the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish forms of mysticism, and the construction of an academic research field dedicated to what was defined as “Jewish mysticism.” It describes the application of the adjective mystical to Kabbalah by Christian scholars since the seventeenth century, the appearance of the term “Jewish mysticism” in the writings of German Romantic theologians in the early nineteenth century, and the adoption of the term by Jewish scholars in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. It further examines the “revelation” of Jewish mysticism by Martin Buber and the establishment of the research field dedicated to Jewish mysticism by Gershom Scholem and his pupils. The chapter discusses the ideological and theological contexts in which the category of mysticism was shaped in the nineteenth century and the processes that led to the establishment of Jewish mysticism—as a category and as an academic research field—in the framework of modern theological-national discourse and as part of the Zionist nation-building endeavor.Less

Coda

Yaacob Dweck

in Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas

This coda details how Jacob Sasportas, as well as his three most intensive readers—Jacob Emden, Gershom Scholem, and Joel Teitelbaum—all perceived their worlds to be in crisis. For Sasportas, the ... More

This coda details how Jacob Sasportas, as well as his three most intensive readers—Jacob Emden, Gershom Scholem, and Joel Teitelbaum—all perceived their worlds to be in crisis. For Sasportas, the crisis in the middle of the 1660s was one of order. This manifested itself as contempt for the law. Sasportas used all the resources of the textual tradition he called his own to make sense of the world around him, a world that a Messiah whom he had never met and who lived half a world away had turned upside down. He gestured toward a position that validated his own provisional skepticism as a better path to genuine repentance than the ardent and collective certainty of the Jewish crowd. A half century after Sasportas died, Jacob Emden reedited and reprinted Sasportas, thereby forging an image of Sasportas as a heresy hunter. A century and a half after Emden's death, Gershom Scholem turned to Sabbetai Zevi and the messianic movement around him, which enabled Scholem to tell a story about Jewish immanence without the law. Meanwhile, Joel Teitelbaum lived through the same geopolitical catastrophe as Scholem but reached a different conclusion about it. Just as Sasportas had the courage of his convictions to speak out against the Jews of his day, nearly all of whom had become believers in Sabbetai Zevi, Teitelbaum similarly rebuked the Jews of his own time, nearly all of whom had become Zionists.Less

A Reevaluation of the “Khmelnytsky Factor”: The Case of the Seventeenth-Century Sabbatean Movement

Ada Rapoport-Albert

in Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising

The Khmelnytsky uprising and its violent aftermath devastated many Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially the Ukraine. The paper considers whether, or to what extent, ... More

The Khmelnytsky uprising and its violent aftermath devastated many Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially the Ukraine. The paper considers whether, or to what extent, these catastrophic events may have triggered the emergence of what, by the mid 1660s, had become the mass messianic movement of Shabetai Tsevi – an Ottoman Jew who first proclaimed his messianic vocation in 1648.Less

Introduction

in Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik

Any new treatment of the work of Martin Buber (1878–1965) on Hasidism has to take into consideration the debate that arose in the wake of Gershom Scholem's critical reexamination of the premises ... More

Any new treatment of the work of Martin Buber (1878–1965) on Hasidism has to take into consideration the debate that arose in the wake of Gershom Scholem's critical reexamination of the premises underlying Buber's interpretation of Hasidism. “The theoretical literature,” Buber held, “is the gloss, the legend is the text, and in spite of the fact that it is a legend which has been handed down in an extreme state of corruption, and which it is impossible to recover in its purity, it would be foolish to object that [the] legend cannot transmit the reality of Hasidic life.” Objecting to this, Scholem argued that what Buber claimed to be the “essence” of Hasidism was not central to the intellectual landscape of the movement. Rather, in Scholem's view, the theoretical literature, with its theosophical, mystical doctrines, constituted the spiritual basis of Hasidism. This book seeks to historicize the debate through a close textual analysis of select sections of Buber's Legende and the writings of the early Buber, which allows the author to revisit and clarify the underlying hermeneutical and aesthetic issues. Her intention is not to defend Buber against his critics. Rather, she aims to consider the variety of issues bearing on his hermeneutical task of mediating to the Jewish reader the nature and cultural significance of religious experience in Hasidism as it bears on aesthetics and thus on a Jewish modernism.Less

The Study of Hasidism: Past Trends and New Directions

Immanuel Etkes

in Hasidism Reappraised

This chapter evaluates past trends and new directions in the study of hasidism. One question which has dominated the study of early hasidism is what factor or factors may account for the emergence ... More

This chapter evaluates past trends and new directions in the study of hasidism. One question which has dominated the study of early hasidism is what factor or factors may account for the emergence and rapid spread of the movement. The mere fact that this question has occupied so many minds for so long needs no justification, in so far as the endeavour to discover the causal relationships between phenomena and events is a sine qua non of historical thinking. Nevertheless, what has lent this question its particular poignancy is the extraordinary speed with which hasidism gained acceptance throughout eastern Europe, and the persistence of this process despite the vehement opposition encountered by the new movement. The most influential attempts to answer this question have been those of Simon Dubnow, Benzion Dinur, and Raphael Mahler. All three historians sought to explain the emergence of hasidism and its rapid dissemination against the background of what Dubnow called the ‘historical framework’, that is to say, the political, economic, and social circumstances of eastern European Jewry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Another important trend in the study of hasidism is represented by the work of Gershom Scholem and his followers. The crucial question for Scholem was the religious and spiritual identity of the new movement.Less

Toward the Present and the Future: Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Barbara Honigmann

Katja Garloff

in Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

This chapter shows that even Scholem's “Jews and Germans,” despite its explicit rejection of the past Jewish love for things German, relies on tropes of love to conjure the possibility of a future ... More

This chapter shows that even Scholem's “Jews and Germans,” despite its explicit rejection of the past Jewish love for things German, relies on tropes of love to conjure the possibility of a future German-Jewish dialogue. Another famous German Jewish thinker, Hannah Arendt, is more outspoken in her valorization of love as a mode of sociopolitical intervention. In her biography of a Jewish salonnière of the Romantic era, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Arendt affirms the love of the pariah as a form of solidarity that is rooted in shared experiences of marginalization. Finally, the chapter turns to the decade after the 1990 unification of Germany, when the theme of interreligious or intercultural love enjoyed much popularity both in mainstream feature films and in contemporary German Jewish writers. Barbara Honigmann, for instance, dramatizes failing Jewish-Gentile love affairs to show how memories of the Third Reich continue to disrupt German-Jewish relations in the present. But this is not a negation of love as a trope of interreligious or intercultural mediation. Love remains an important trope in Honigmann, one that allows her to imagine a new kind of German Jewish diaspora.Less