Gershom Scholem

With origins extending back in time beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls, the body of writings and beliefs known as the Kabbalah has come to be increasingly recognized not only as one of the most intriguing aspects of Judaism but also as an important part of a broader mystical tradition. Here is one of the most enlightening studies ever to plumb its complex depths and range over its rich history, written by the late Gershom Scholem, the world's leading authority on the Kabbalah.

Kabbalah

One of the great masterpieces of Western religious thought, the Zohar represents an attempt to uncover hidden meanings behind the world of appearances. It is the central work in the literature of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. This volume of selected passages from the Zohar, culled by the greatest authority on Jewish mysticism, offers a sampling of its unique vision of the esoteric wonders of creation; the life and destiny of the soul; the confluence of physical and divine love; suffering and death; exile and redemption.

The Book of Splendor : Basic Readings from the Kabbalah

Zohar

Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940. At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

The Story of a Friendship

Walter Benjamin

La cabala

في القبالة ورمزيتها

Ces trois textes, jusque-là inconnus en France, s'enchaînent logiquement : d'une méditation sur la prophétie et la justice à l'occasion d'un commentaire de Jonas, Scholem en vient à s'interroger sur le sens des lamentations dans la Bible, donc également sur Job et Isaïe, et il en tire une leçon sur les deux pôles de la conduite qu'il entend suivre lui-même : le sens du silence, car Dieu ne répond jamais aux lamentations, et l'éducation personnelle à l'endurance : se préparer à quitter l'Allemagne pour ce qui, à l'époque, n'était pas autre chose qu'une aventure très risquée. Cette éducation gravite autour d'une thèse : " Sion n'est pas une métaphore " ; il envisage désormais l'approfondissement de celles des sources juives qui avaient jusqu'alors été négligées pour en faire une discipline supérieure, spirituelle, morale et finalement, politique. Ces textes fournissent, en outre, un document historique sur l'atmosphère juive allemande des années 1920.

Sur Jonas, la lamentation et le judaïsme

One of the great masterpieces of Western religious thought, the Zohar represents an attempt to uncover hidden meanings behind the world of appearances. It is the central work in the literature of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. This volume of selected passages from the Zohar, culled by the greatest authority on Jewish mysticism, offers a sampling of its unique vision of the esoteric wonders of creation; the life and destiny of the soul; the confluence of physical and divine love; suffering and death; exile and redemption. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Zohar, the Book of Splendor

C’è un cuore nella Qabbalah: è lo "Zohar", il «Libro dello splendore», un immenso e rapsodico commento alla "Torah" nato sul finire del tredicesimo secolo in ristretti circoli cabbalistici castigliani e destinato a imporsi come opera principe di una intera letteratura, che fiorirà per secoli. E c’è un cuore nello "Zohar": il capitolo dedicato alla creazione, sigillato nella lucentezza delle sue chiose – insieme chiarissime ed enigmatiche – ai primi diciassette versetti della Genesi. E appunto questo capitolo è stato tradotto e commentato già negli anni Trenta da Gershom Scholem, il massimo storico e interprete della Qabbalah nel nostro tempo, che nell’ampia Introduzione riesce a farci percorrere la vasta tessitura dello "Zohar", conturbante per l’alternanza di brevità ermetica ed espansione omiletica. Con magistrale limpidezza Scholem ci espone il drammatico racconto «preliminare» delle dieci sefirot o «sfere» in cui si dispiega la vita segreta della Divinità, emersa dall’insondabile En Sof. Ed è solo questa cornice che ci permette di cogliere pienamente il tratto distintivo dell’esegesi zoharica, dove le parole della Scrittura «diventano simboli nei quali, per il medium della realtà del principio, del cielo, della terra, si manifesta un’altra realtà». "I segreti della creazione" è stato pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1935.

I segreti della Creazione

A bilingual collection of poetry from pioneering scholar in Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem. With this volume, Scholem's work reaches beyond the confines of the academy and enters a literary dialogue with writers and philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hans Jonas. Gershom Scholem's Greetings From Angelus contains dark, lucid political poems about Zionism and assimilation, parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to writers and friends such as Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Ingeborg Bachmann, S. Y. Agnon, among others. The earliest poems in this volume begin in 1915 and extend to 1967, revealing how poetry played a formative role in Scholem's early life and career. This collection is translated by Richard Sieburth, who comments, "Scholem's acts of poetry still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, simultaneously grounded as they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional." The volume is edited and introduced by Steven M. Wasserstrom, who carefully situates the poems in Scholem's historical, biographical, and theological landscape. One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem virtually created the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Literature played a crucial role in his life, especially in his formative years. This bilingual volume contains his dark, shockingly prescient poems about Zionism, his parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to other writers, notably a series of powerful lyrics addressed over the course of years to his closest and oldest friend, Walter Benjamin. Translator Richard Sieburth comments, “Scholem’s acts of poetry still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, grounded as they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional.”

Poems

Greetings From Angelus

Anson Rabinbach

The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as one of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of his friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem's emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin's death in 1940.

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940

Gershom Scholem was the master builder of historical studies of the Kabbalah. When he began to work on this neglected field, the few who studied these texts were either amateurs who were looking for occult wisdom, or old-style Kabbalists who were seeking guidance on their spiritual journeys. His work broke with the outlook of the scholars of the previous century in Judaica—die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism—whose orientation he rejected, calling their “disregard for the most vital aspects of the Jewish people as a collective entity: a form of “censorship of the Jewish past.” The major founders of modern Jewish historical studies in the nineteenth century, Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger, had ignored the Kabbalah; it did not fit into their account of the Jewish religion as rational and worthy of respect by “enlightened” minds. The only exception was the historian Heinrich Graetz. He had paid substantial attention to its texts and to their most explosive exponent, the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, but Graetz had depicted the Kabbalah and all that flowed from it as an unworthy revolt from the underground of Jewish life against its reasonable, law-abiding, and learned mainstream. Scholem conducted a continuing polemic with Zunz, Geiger, and Graetz by bringing into view a Jewish past more varied, more vital, and more interesting than any idealized portrait could reveal. —from the Foreword by Arthur Hertzberg, 1995

And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality

The Messianic Idea in Judaism

One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general and will be of interest to historians and psychologists, as well as to students of the history of religion. -- Back cover.

Origins of the Kabbalah

Tutta l’opera di Walter Benjamin è protetta dall’ala di un’immagine: quella di un acquarello di Klee, dal titolo "Angelus Novus". E questa immagine, a sua volta, può essere intesa in tutti i suoi densi e sovrapposti significati soltanto se la si mette in rapporto con un breve, stupendo racconto in cui Benjamin svela qual è il suo «nome segreto»: "Agesilaus Santander". Siamo qui, dunque, nel cuore del cuore di un’opera che, sempre più con gli anni, ci appare di una prodigiosa ricchezza di pensiero. E nessuno poteva essere più adatto di Gershom Scholem a interpretare questa cifra nascosta di tutto Benjamin. Scholem, infatti, grande ebraista e autore di fondamentali studi sulla cabbala, fu l’amico più intimo e affine di Benjamin per molti anni. E, proprio per la sua conoscenza magistrale della mistica ebraica, egli poteva apprezzare l’inesauribile sottigliezza teologica applicata da Benjamin con audacia a ogni sorta di materiale ‘profano’, dalla letteratura, al marxismo, alla sua stessa persona. Esaminando puntigliosamente, frammento per frammento, questo «mito dell’angelo», da cui discendono gli aggrovigliati rapporti di Benjamin sia con la Storia sia con se stesso, Scholem ricostruisce una sorta di percorso occulto che si può intravedere nella vita di Walter Benjamin. Il presente volume, oltre al saggio "Walter Benjamin e il suo angelo" (dove il lettore troverà, per la prima volta tradotto, il racconto "Agesilaus Santander"), contiene un profilo di Walter Benjamin scritto da Scholem nel venticinquesimo anniversario della morte del grande scrittore e amico, testo che ci offre una preziosa introduzione alla sua opera.

Walter Benjamin e il suo angelo

Theodor W. Adorno

At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno’s critical social theory and Gershom Scholem’s scholarship of Jewish mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. To begin with, they also harbored a mutual hostility. But their first conversations in 1938 New York were the impetus for a profound intellectual friendship that lasted thirty years and produced more than 220 letters. These letters discuss the broadest range of topics in philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts – as well as the life and the work of Adorno and Scholem’s mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Unfolding with the dramatic tension of a historic novel, the correspondence tells the story of these two intellectuals who faced tragedy, destruction, and loss, but also participated in the efforts to reestablish a just and dignified society after World War II. Scholem immigrated to Palestine before the war and developed his pioneering scholarship of Jewish mysticism before and during the problematic establishment of a Jewish state. Adorno escaped Germany to England, and then to America, returning to Germany in 1949 to participate in the efforts to rebuild and democratize German society. Despite the differences in the lifepaths and worldviews of Adorno and Scholem, their letters are evidence of mutual concern for intellectual truth and hope for a more just society in the wake of historical disaster. The letters reveal for the first time the close philosophical proximity between Adorno’s critical theory and Scholem’s scholarship of mysticism and messianism. Their correspondence touches on questions of reason and myth, progress and regression, heresy and authority, and the social dimensions of redemption. Above all, their dialogue sheds light on the power of critical, materialistic analysis of history to bring about social change and prevent repetition of the disasters of the past.

Correspondence, 1939 - 1969

The author traces his friendship with the philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin, from their youth in Berlin to Benjamin's death in 1940 and includes selections from their letters

A deep and abiding passion, wedded to the keenest of intellects, shaped Scholem's life's work—the study of Jewish mysticism.

Memories of My Youth

From Berlin to Jerusalem

Essays, letters, and articles written by the distinguished Jewish scholar over a fifty-year period. Includes three essays on Walter Benjamin.

Gershom Scholem

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