Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem was born Gerhard Scholem on 5 December 1897 in Berlin, into an assimilated German Jewish family. As a young man he turned toward Zionism and traditional Jewish study against his family's more secular assimilationist leanings, and he began studying mathematics, philosophy and Semitic languages at German universities, completing a doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on an early Kabbalistic text. He counted the philosopher Walter Benjamin among his closest friends during these Berlin years, a friendship that continued by correspondence for the rest of Benjamin's life.

In 1923 Scholem emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settling in Jerusalem, where he became a librarian at the newly founded Hebrew University before being appointed, in 1933, its first professor of Jewish mysticism, a position created essentially around his own emerging scholarship. He remained at the Hebrew University for the rest of his career, training the first generation of academically credentialed scholars of Kabbalah and building the archive and methodology the field still relies on. He died in Jerusalem on 21 February 1982.

His friendship with Walter Benjamin, formed in their Berlin youth, continued through decades of correspondence after Scholem's emigration, and Scholem became, after Benjamin's death in 1940, one of the principal custodians and early editors of his friend's scattered papers and unfinished work, a role that placed him at the center of Benjamin's posthumous reception as well as his own separate scholarly career. Scholem also helped establish the Hebrew University's wider institutional culture of rigorous textual scholarship, serving for a time as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Before Scholem, serious academic scholarship had largely treated Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as a marginal or embarrassing byway of Jewish intellectual history, unworthy of the rigorous philological attention given to Talmudic or philosophical texts. Scholem rejected that dismissal, arguing that mystical and messianic currents were central rather than peripheral to Jewish religious history, and building his case through painstaking manuscript research into figures and movements, including the medieval Zohar and the seventeenth century messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi, that had never before received comparable scholarly treatment.

His 1941 book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, based on lectures delivered in New York, became the founding synthesis of the field and remains its most widely read single work, tracing Jewish mystical thought from its late antique roots through medieval Kabbalah to the Hasidic movement. Scholem's insistence on treating these currents historically, as products of specific times and social pressures rather than as timeless esoteric truths, set the methodological standard the field has followed since, and virtually every later scholar of Kabbalah works in some relation to the framework he established.