The Modern Intellectual and His Heretical Ancestor: Gershom Scholem and Nathan of Gaza

Extract

Gershom Scholem was without question a brilliant example of the modern Jewish intellectual: neither Talmudic, rabbinical, nor kabbalistic and still less a prophet. More modestly - but with remarkable spiritual energy - he was a historian, a man of learning, a university graduate, a (critical) son of the Haskalah or Hebrew Enlightenment, and a thinker who - without ever ceasing to believe after his own fashion - abandoned the traditional orthodox faith, with its rituals and prohibitions. He was also a modern Jewish intellectual because he was assimilated, shaped by German culture - despite his revolt against assimilation, his fight on behalf of ‘dissimilation’ (to use the term invented by Franz Rosenzweig), and his adherence to Sionism, which caused him to leave for Jerusalem in 1923. In reality he belonged to the first generation of Jewish university intellectuals in Central Europe who burst massively into the institutions of higher education at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries - in contrast to the isolated individuals, generally cut off from the Jewish community, who had had access to academic study in the earlier period.