Gershom Scholem by David Biale

Author:David Biale [Biale, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300215908
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

7

Kabbalah and Catastrophe

BY 1937, Scholem’s personal life had regained stability, his marriage to Fania providing him with an intellectual and domestic helpmeet. But the situation in Germany continued to deteriorate. While his two older brothers began to organize their immigration to Australia, Werner remained in the hands of the Gestapo. During her 1935 visit, Betty had opened an account in Palestine with three hundred pounds sterling in case of emergencies. In July 1937, she protested what she called Gerhard’s blocking of withdrawals from the account as well as his chutzpah in using the money in the account—her own money—to buy her a jacket as a seventieth birthday present. The money would become essential the following year to buy an exit visit for Erich.

In Palestine, the most hotly debated political news was the report of the Peel Commission, which the British had dispatched to propose a solution to the Arab uprising. The commission’s White Paper, issued in July 1937, for the first time suggested partitioning the country between Jews and Arabs. Scholem’s stance was ambivalent: “I am in principle against partition because I consider an Arab-Jewish federation for the entire area of Palestine to be the ideal solution,” he wrote on July 10.1 However, he recognized that conditions for such a federation, which Brit Shalom had advocated in the 1920s, no longer existed and that there was no possibility of achieving anything better than partition. He also lamented the Peel Commission’s rejection of the Balfour Declaration and of Hebrew as an official language, as well as what seemed to be the abolition of Jewish rights in Jerusalem. He had now become a political pragmatist, even though he had not forgotten the utopian ideals of his youth. In the end, the Arabs rejected the Peel Commission’s recommendations, and it would take more than a decade—and much bloodshed—for partition to become a reality.

In the same month, Scholem received an invitation from the American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Stephen S. Wise to serve as a visiting professor at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and to present the Hilda Stroock Lectures. Here was a golden opportunity to summarize and synthesize his studies of Kabbalah for a general audience. The shape of these lectures, to be titled “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” was already apparent in the article he published in 1932 in the German Encyclopedia Judaica, whose table of contents closely mirrors that of the later lectures. It was also apparent in the detailed proposals he made to Salman Schocken for a comprehensive account of Kabbalistic literature and its content. But while the Schocken program never came to fruition, the Stroock Lectures provided the occasion for a partial fulfillment of his more ambitious agenda.

Remarkably, Scholem wrote the lectures (there were seven, with two more added later) before he left Jerusalem, in less than two months, from the middle of November 1937 to early January 1938. His English was not yet adequate for writing lectures, so he decided to have them translated.

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