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Last update - 19:01 02/07/2008 Jewish Studies Apocalyptic man By Steven Aschheim Tags: Walter Benjamin  The diaries of Gershom Scholem only serve to deepen the mystery of the Judaic scholar. But they also provide the raw material for grasping the complexities of one of the most fascinating intellectuals of the 20th century Jewish Studies Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 Translated from German and edited by Anthony David Skinner Belknap Press / Harvard, 384 pages, $39.95 In a diary entry of August 1, 1918, the 20-year-old Gerhard Scholem -- destined to become the leading Judaic scholar, and one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century -- declared: "I am an apocalyptic man, and I live in peace." The first half of that sentence was certainly true; the latter part far less so. For, as his youthful diaries amply demonstrate, Scholem's singular and precocious intellectual development went hand in hand with tumultuous inner turmoil, extreme ideological commitment and a kind of volcanic metaphysical excitement. The diaries covering the years 1913-1919 have now appeared in abridged form in English translation and with commentary by Anthony David Skinner; the full, previously published German diaries extend through to Scholem's departure for Palestine in 1923. The diaries trace in some detail the shifts in Scholem's ideas and opinions, and the evolution of his worldview. Yet, above all the changes, a certain self-possession, a kind of rebellious inner radar, an early and sustained sense of his own special quality and destiny, tied intimately and always to a highly idiosyncratic conception of Judaism, Zionism and the Jewish people, pervades these pages. To be sure, it was, perhaps, only in a moment of adolescent phantasmagoria (in May 1915) that Scholem could go so far as to regard himself as the Messiah: "This young man went alone through the world and looked around to find where the soul of his nation awaited him. He believed deeply that the soul of Judea wandered aimlessly among the nations and in the Holy Land, awaiting the One who would have the audacity to free it from banishment and from the separation from its national body ... And who is this dreamer, whose name already marks him as the Awaited One? It is Scholem, the Perfect One." A few months later, Scholem -- albeit without a trace of irony -- noted, "I do not believe any longer, as I once did, that I am the Messiah" (Skinner omits the latter entry from his translation). For all that, the diaries are filled with Scholem's intimations of his own self-importance and (correctly intuited) genius: "I'll never be able to come up with a story in which I'm not cast in a very central role. Which is preposterous, or rather it's not! What else is there to talk to myself about?? Other than me? ... When I crawl inside myself, I know I'll end up finding all sorts of wonderful things ..." Even moments of confusion and self-doubt (to the point where suicide is considered) are related to the question of his putative greatness: "But I'm not great. I swear to God, I am not. It could be that at some point in the past, at some seminal moment, I gave up on greatness. Yet can this have lasting effects?" These intuitions were accompanied by Scholem's early awareness that his life's work and mission would entail "a truly new sort of commentary": "The mythological interpretation and systematic-theoretical deciphering of the Talmud and late Jewish texts is a task that, until now, has barely been tackled ... In our abysmal state, we're more or less in the dark when it comes to the meaning of the convoluted signs and figures residing in such abundance in these texts. Essentially, this is one of my life's tasks..." And, as master of vast domains of knowledge, this is indeed what Scholem went on to do, pioneering the academic field of kabbalah, poring lovingly over musty texts, integrating into his story sects and movements previously regarded as too obscure, or notorious, for serious consideration and decipherment, and bestowing on them a vitalizing function at the very heart of historical Judaism. "I will always be a teacher of untaught subjects," he declared in December 1918. Moreover, he was able to do so in such a way that excited generations of readers entirely removed from the esoterica of Jewish mysticism. Scholem was able to tap into the sensibilities of his modernist readers for any number of reasons, but certainly among them was his understanding that this esoterica plumbed antinomian and subversive depths, hidden meanings unknowable to what he believed were the shallow rationalist pieties of his assimilationist parents and their generation, against whom he radically rebelled. "They haven't the slightest understanding of the greatness and anti-bourgeois nature of things," he declared. The mystic feeling of reverence, he wrote, was "the intimation that behind everything yawns the ?great abyss' and that one must surrender to the power that animates it." Fodder for fame From early on, and throughout his life, Scholem was drawn to texts in which "danger" and redemption, holiness and taboo were intimately linked. It is no accident that his most deservedly famous essay, concerning Shabbetai Zevi and the Frankist movement, is entitled "Redemption through Sin." Already in December 1915, he enunciated an emotional and intellectual sensibility that was to inform the dialectical categories of much of his later scholarship: "Everyone stands on his own island, on which there are multiple canyons and abysses, towering peaks, the firmaments of heaven and the depths of hell." All this entailed a passionately motivated knowledge far removed from the detached conventions of "respectable" research. At the age of 21 he expressed a desire that he most definitively fulfilled: "I could create a forbidden library out of the things I hope to know someday" (the results are available for all to see at the Jewish National and University Library, in Jerusalem, where Scholem's remarkable collection is housed.) Apart from providing an indication of the enormous depth and breadth of Scholem's youthful reading in both Western and Jewish traditions (not to mention his other chosen topic of study, mathematics), the diaries contain the geneses of, and raw material for, attitudes that characterized Scholem throughout his later life: the revolt against, and expulsion from, his liberal, petit-bourgeois home; the principled disengagement from Germany and Deutschtum; the intuition that German Jews, in their passionate commitment to that same "Germanism" were simply living a lie; the passionate study, and belief, in the power of salvation, of the Jewish tradition (already in March 1913 he declared, "I relate everything in my field of vision to Judaism"); the radical commitment to (a peculiar brand of religio-metaphysical) Zionism, and the special, recuperative, albeit dangerous, qualities of Hebrew ("The power of Hebrew," he declared in December 1917, "compels me to such a degree that I irresistibly experience Hebrew even in the German language"). Scholem, unconventional as always, was a believer, but hardly a halakhic Jew. The reader who comes to these diaries almost a century after they were written will be struck by the fact that the historical Scholem cannot be understood outside of the excited dynamics of the post-liberal, neo-romantic and "irrationalist" currents of the fin-de-siecle, World War I and Weimar years. The "post-assimilationist" Zionism of his circles combined an urgent awareness of the deep loss of their own Jewish "substance" and the determined search to rediscover and creatively re-appropriate it. They rejected the dominant political (or philanthropic) Herzlian form of their elders' Zionism and formulated a far more personal, existential and spiritual brand, bound to the creation of an authentic cultural Jewish totality, forged very much in the image of Martin Buber's musings on Jewish primordiality and rebirth. Jewish chauvinism It was only because Scholem's formation took place within this generationally distinctive setting that he could exercise intellectual options not available a decade or so before. In that sense he was a product, a key representative of a certain choice offered by his times. Yet, clearly, in most respects he was outstanding, exceptional, self-consciously removed from anything "typical." The diaries record an almost frightening idiosyncratic intensity of thought and feeling, and a kind of strident Jewish chauvinism: "What is certain is that in no other people is there such a stupendous quantity of religious geniuses as with the Jews." As a matter of both temperament and deliberation, Scholem cultivated a self-conscious "fanaticism." The diaries record a surprising and constant emphasis on "purity": "The hybrid," he writes in March 1918, "is our most dangerous foe." Perhaps what he regarded as the hopelessly "assimilationist" times in which he lived and the "outrageous" program he set for himself was a necessary single-mindedness, a purposeful intolerance. Skinner's selections -- he explicitly provides the diaries with a certain narrative shape -- emphasize Scholem's exceptionality by focusing upon three, crucially interrelated aspects of his youthful life: the evolving relationship to the then pervasively fashionable Martin Buber, the charged, hugely meaningful friendship with Walter Benjamin and the transformative influence of the latter upon Scholem's worldview. The diaries trace the (rather rapid) move from Scholem's early romantic admiration of Buber -- "Zionism's most important personality and one of the movement's greatest spiritual forces ... he has discovered the irrational emotions and desires that are the mother of renewal" (written in January 1915) -- to his complete rejection of the latter's emphasis on ecstatic experience (Erlebnis) as opposed to knowledge, textuality and "real" spirituality. He even announces that, by giving up Buber, "I arrived at Zion." Elsewhere, he proclaims: "Buber must be repudiated ... I've developed an increasingly categorical enmity against him." Scholem may well have reached these conclusions on his own but, at the time, the moving force for this change of mind was Walter Benjamin. In August 1916, they conducted a series of conversations on Buber and, as Scholem reports it, "after four days there was nearly nothing left of him." Benjamin's hold over Scholem was magnetic, overwhelmingly powerful, indeed religious (even if, over time, Scholem's absurdly exaggerated expectations were inevitably disappointed). A few diary quotes gleaned from the last quarter of 1917 make this "greatest experience of my life" abundantly clear: "I came into contact with a man of absolute and magnificent greatness.... he was the miracle that occurs only once in a generation ... This man is the only one who has fundamentally changed me to the core ... No one on this earth could be a prophet of God besides him; he has purified and refined my spirit as only a prophet can purify and refine." Scholem's second wife, Fania, once said Benjamin was the only person Scholem had really loved. There was clearly a homoerotic -- not homosexual -- component to this rather one-sided relationship ("Yes, if I could only have him near me -- and I want him very close -- my healing would be complete"), intensified by Scholem's rather jealous attitude to Benjamin's wife, Dora. Scholem reports upon this neurotic emotional triangle at times in tiresome detail. But, of course, what ultimately really matters are the ways in which Benjamin helped to influence Scholem's life-long spiritual and intellectual outlook. That influence was palpable. For, as Scholem proclaimed, in Benjamin was "the deepest, most absolute Judaism -- all without his having the foggiest idea that this was what he was doing." What, sketchily, were the main ingredients of the "teaching", as he called it, that Scholem breathlessly imbibed from his friend? Certainly, the diaries reveal a newly found Benjaminian insistence on the centrality of language, a belief that its hidden, deeper layers (even at the "innermost core of silence") could penetrate to "truth": "Judaism's philosophy of language," Scholem wrote in November 1916, "is entirely concealed (yes, entirely) within a disguised core that is always active wherever the Torah is studied and transmitted. It is in the Torah, as a divine book, that the philosophy of language appears least problematic: as the language of God it must be the language of truth, of every truth." "The Messiah," Scholem declared, "will be the last -- and first -- philosopher of language." In related fashion, Scholem formulated a conception of textual commentary as a vital force in the active shaping of a dynamic tradition that owes much to his friend: "I've been giving a lot of thought to commentary as the conception of Order in the Jewish world of spirit. It follows logically that if commentary is truly the ultimate task, as Benjamin says quite correctly, then the world is made up of script and language, which would be a fundamental insight. Important in this regard is a treatment of the spiritual essence of commentary in Judaism." All this merged with a deeply "messianic" and redemptive sensibility. In 1917 he wrote: "The greatest image of history is to be found in the messianic realm. Walter once said that the messianic realm is always present, which is an insight of stupendous importance -- though on a plane which I think no one since the prophets has achieved." Scholem also picked up Benjamin's interest in, and the revolutionary potential of, the subterranean, and the downtrodden (as his later work on the Sabbatians and Frankists clearly indicates): "The idea of a messianic movement growing out of a gang of swindlers ... thieves, pimps, and sluts ... God's chosen people as swindlers -- this would be quite a movement." Skinner's selection places special emphasis upon Benjamin's overwhelming influence. (Scholem's obsession with, and translation of, Lamentations was equally a commentary on the pain and disappointment he experienced later with Benjamin.) Multifarious pursuits Yet, he was also, formidably, very much his own man. It was Scholem alone who not only provided the groundwork for the ongoing emplacement and study of Kabbalah as a legitimate academic pursuit but who also, uniquely, provided us with a grand historical narrative plotting the structure, dialectical conflicts and evolving meanings of Jewish existence. Moreover, his fascination with the intertwined demonic and redemptive possibilities of the antinomian and the subversive (early on Franz Rosenzweig dubbed him a nihilist) predated his encounter with Benjamin. Given these propensities, perhaps the biggest surprise of the diaries is Scholem's radical religiosity, his search for absolute spiritual purity, his abiding faith in divinity. To the end, he maintained what he wrote in 1919: "that what keep us humans together is divine judgment and not empirical forces." The conundrum that was Scholem remains: the apocalyptic metaphysician -- disguised in scientific scholarly garb; the great resuscitator of the play of mystic and irrationalist forces within Judaism -- and an advocate of non-chauvinist, humanist politics (clearly, many of his followers and students have not pursued this latter path); a man deeply disappointed with Zionism's failure to realize what Scholem (rather obscurely) regarded as its deep religio-spiritual potentialities -- while always staunchly defending its empirical reality against opponents of the state. The diaries will not help us solve these mysteries and contradictions -- they may even deepen them. But they do provide us with the raw material for grasping the humanity and complexities of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century. Steven Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies, and teaches history, at the Hebrew University. Haaretz Books, July 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   Death penalty Iran hands down death sentence to man who spied for Israel. Robot hospital The place where IDF treats droids wounded in the line of fire.

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