Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem (Berlin, 1897 – Jerusalem, 1982) was a historian and philologist of German birth who settled in Israel. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, known as Kabbalah. His work turned a field long treated with suspicion or dismissal into a rigorous discipline grounded in close philological analysis of the sources.

Born into an assimilated Jewish family, he studied mathematics, philosophy and oriental languages in Berlin, Jena, Bern and Munich. In 1922 he submitted his doctoral thesis, a translation and commentary on the Sefer ha-Bahir, the oldest known kabbalistic text. A year later he emigrated to Palestine, influenced by Martin Buber and his ties to Zionism. He worked as a librarian and, from 1933, taught Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement in 1965.

His reading placed mysticism at the heart of Jewish life. Against the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, which he felt treated Judaism as a dead object, he argued that myth and mysticism mattered at least as much as reason and the minutiae of Halakha. He proposed a three-stage history of Judaism and advanced controversial hypotheses, among them that Sabbateanism grew out of the Lurianic Kabbalah and that the thirteenth-century Kabbalah drew on a Jewish gnosticism older than the Christian kind. He also held that Hebrew carried a singular spiritual force.

His friendship with Walter Benjamin and his correspondence with Franz Rosenzweig and Leo Strauss shaped his path. Books such as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism became standard references, and his influence today reaches the history of religions and European thought of the twentieth century.