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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish to the Core

Suzanne Vromen

in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity and how it evolved over time. Her experience as a Jew was the foundation of all her thinking, and her Jewishness was ... More

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity and how it evolved over time. Her experience as a Jew was the foundation of all her thinking, and her Jewishness was inseparable from her work as a whole. Arendt was different from other Jewish thinkers prominent in the 20th century, such as Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. While these scholars had an ahistorical appreciation of what it meant to be a Jew, Arendt undertook, through different stages, a historically rooted critique of the Enlightenment and of beliefs in Jewish assimilation.Less

Kabbalah: Introductory Remarks

Moshe Idel

in Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: A Survey

This chapter discusses Jewish culture's continuous oscillation between two attitudes toward the majority cultures in which they exist: the particularist and the universalist. Particularism is marked ... More

This chapter discusses Jewish culture's continuous oscillation between two attitudes toward the majority cultures in which they exist: the particularist and the universalist. Particularism is marked by adherence to Jewish rituals and the Hebrew language, universalism by the adoption of cultural attitudes and practices prevailing in the larger, non-Jewish cultures in which Jews have lived. These two tendencies produced two corresponding approaches among historians of Judaism: nineteenth-century historians emphasized universalist and integrative factors. In the twentieth century, especially after the Holocaust, particularism acquired a positive moral valence and universalism a negative one. This perspective reflects the strong influence of Gershom Scholem's axiology, which emphasized the importance of Kabbalah as a particularist lore. The recent positive attitude toward Kabbalah depends to a very great extent on the pivotal change in the view of the nature and role of Jewish mysticism produced by Scholem's magisterial studies.Less

Order

Robert S. Lehman

in Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

The book’s fourth chapter reads Walter Benjamin’s earliest programmatic writings in light of early-twentieth-century debates over the legacy of Kantianism. And it treats in particular Benjamin’s ... More

The book’s fourth chapter reads Walter Benjamin’s earliest programmatic writings in light of early-twentieth-century debates over the legacy of Kantianism. And it treats in particular Benjamin’s attempt to replace Kant’s transcendental philosophy—Kant’s ostensibly complete description of the conditions of human cognition—with what Benjamin refers to as a “doctrine of orders,” a system of interlinked but non-identical structures of knowledge derived from linguistics, theology, aesthetics and other domains. It finds Benjamin taking seriously Kant’s claim that human experience is constitutively finite and expanding this notion of constitutive finitude to include the Kantian transcendental itself, leaving the latter open to transformation through its encounters with a material, historical outside. Although references to Kant are rare in Benjamin’s later writings, a modified version of Kant’s philosophy—this is the claim of the chapter—is the foundation for Benjamin’s later critique of historicism.Less

Walter Benjamin's Grave: A Profane Illumination

in Walter Benjamin's Grave

This chapter discusses the experience of Hannah Arendt, who came looking for Walter Benjamin's grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and ... More

This chapter discusses the experience of Hannah Arendt, who came looking for Walter Benjamin's grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and France but found nothing. She wrote Gershom Scholem shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Scholem was not impressed. Years later he seemed downright dismissive, bringing his book-length memoir of Benjamin to an end with these words: “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” It was an abrupt and sour note on which to end the story of a life, as if the dead man had been cheated of an ending, and what one had gotten instead was a suspension, a book whose last page was missing. Benjamin's name was not written anywhere, Arendt had informed Scholem. Yet name or no name, she found the place where he was supposed to have been buried to be overwhelming.Less

The Jewish Messiah–​Christian Messiah Distinction

Matthew V. Novenson

in The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users

Gershom Scholem is perhaps its best-known modern proponent, but the essentializing distinction between the Jewish messiah (earthly, political, delivers from oppression) and the Christian messiah ... More

Gershom Scholem is perhaps its best-known modern proponent, but the essentializing distinction between the Jewish messiah (earthly, political, delivers from oppression) and the Christian messiah (heavenly, spiritual, delivers from sin) goes back as far as Justin Martyr. In this chapter it is argued that this familiar and influential distinction is fatally undermined by counterexamples on the one side as well as the other. Many Jewish messiah texts bend the messiah myth to accommodate contingent historical developments and persons, while many Christian messiah texts obstinately maintain utopian aspects of the messiah myth despite their nonfulfillment in the career of Jesus. It is argued, furthermore, that the enormous popularity of the Jewish messiah–Christian messiah distinction has always been a result, in large part, of its rhetorical utility for religious self-definition and interreligious dialogue.Less

After the Messianic Idea

Matthew V. Novenson

in The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users

The modern study of ancient messianism has long been dominated by variations on the messianic idea hypothesis, a legacy of nineteenth-century metaphysical Idealism. Recent research has raised damning ... More

The modern study of ancient messianism has long been dominated by variations on the messianic idea hypothesis, a legacy of nineteenth-century metaphysical Idealism. Recent research has raised damning objections to this received paradigm, but no better, alternative account has yet emerged. This chapter suggests such an alternative account. It proposes that what we call messianism is most basically a way of talking about the world, a set of linguistic resources—and, equally important, linguistic constraints—inherited from the Jewish scriptures. Ancient Jewish and Christian texts about “messiahs”—from Second Isaiah to the Talmud Bavli, and at myriad points in between—are participants in one great ancient Mediterranean language game. If so, then rather than stipulating a definition of “messiah” and going in search of it in the sources, we ought to return to the sources and follow the way the words run.Less

Et in Arcadia Ego

Aaron W. Hughes

in Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam

Chapter 5 deals with the overused trope of “golden age” as applied to al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). The chapter examines the uses and the work to which this trope has and continues to be put. It builds ... More

Chapter 5 deals with the overused trope of “golden age” as applied to al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). The chapter examines the uses and the work to which this trope has and continues to be put. It builds on the idea of the extracurricular need to establish a “golden age” to talk romantically about a past that will hopefully be future again. Now, however, the focus is on how “reason” played an integral part in this relationship. It begins by showing how and why nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars created the trope of the “golden age” of Muslim Spain and how their construction has now largely become the truth. Just as nineteenth-century German scholars looked to the Orient as the place of intellectual repose, German-Jewish scholars did something similar when it came to Muslim Spain. The locus of al-Andalus thus functioned as a utopia, the mirror inverse of their dystopian present.Less