Jewisu Mysticism IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Peter SCHAFER Berlin, Germany and Princeton, USA ‘When the organizers of this congress first approached me about giving one of the plenary presentations they suggested a lecture on the study of classical Rab- binic literature and of Jewish mysticism in the 20% century. I don’t think they were motivated by a belief in some inherent relationship between the two areas of research, some mysterious affinity hopefully to be revealed by me, but rather, and much more down to earth, with this topic proposal they simply wanted to kill ewo birds with one stone (if I may use this metaphor), to cover in one lec- ture two major areas of Jewish Studies. For a moment I was tempted to accept the challenge and to put on, so to speak, first the hat of Rabbinic literature and then that of Jewish mysticism but only for a very brief moment—the two hats, I’m afraid, would have merged all t00 soon into a clown’s cap. So we agreed upon “Jewish mysticism in the 20 century,” not a particularly modest choice either. That I decided in favor of Jewish mysticism instead of Rabbinic literature was not only because of my own (present) predilection but also because I would venture the opinion that, within the array of the various disciplines of Jewish Studies, the 20% century may be called with some justification the century of Jewish mysticism, and this in the double sense that it is only in the 20 century that research on Jewish mysticism became an academic discipline (nobody will dispute this), and that during this century hardly any other field of Jewish Stud- ies has been as flourishing and, indeed, as fashionable as Jewish mysticism. ‘This second assertion, of cause, may be disputed but I think we can all agree that the history of scholarship on Jewish mysticism in the 20 century is the history of an unforeseen and most amazing success, certainly by comparison with the pre- vious centuries, in particular with the 19" century. Out of forgotten books and manuscripts, out of the prejudices of the intellectual leaders of a Jewish world which had submitted itself to the rationalism of Christian (Protestant Christian) spirituality arose a new interest in the mystical dimension of Judaism which now, at the turn of this century, even has to defend itself against the reproach of wanting to put mysticism at the very core of Judaism and, as far as academia is, concerned, research on Jewish mysticism at the very core of Jewish Studies. To be sure, this lyric description of the rise of the study of Jewish mysticism out of the intellectual ashes of the 19" century is paet of the success story of the disci- pline and its founder Gershom Scholem, the foil against which his light shines all the brighter. In reaction to this, more recent studies want to prove that the 19 century wasn’t as rationalistically dry and anti-mystical as Scholem wants us to believe, that Graetz, Bloch, Jellinek and others should be taken much more4 PETER SCHAFER seriously also as scholars of Jewish mysticism and not just be ridiculed. But still, as honorable as such attempts to do justice to the scholars of the 19 century are, nothing about their research can compare with the explosion of systemati- cal, planned, and comprehensive research undertaken in the 20 century and accomplished to a large degree by the founder himself (ic is even hard to avoid the impression that the resuscitation of the scholars of the 19" century is not as, innocent as it might appear but in fact part of the rebellion against the towering figure of the founding father of the discipline himseli).. 1 The history of research on Jewish mysticism in the 20 century is mainly the life-history of Gershom Scholem, of his success and failure, and therefore it shouldn't come as a suxprise that I will devote a major part of my deliberations to him.! When the young Gerhard decided, out of a spirit of rebellion against his parents and the assimilationist world of Geman Jewry at the beginning of the 20% century, to turn to Kabbalah as the major object of his personal and scholarly interest—in his early autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem he says explicitly that between 1915 and 1918 he filled many notebooks with excerpts, translations and reflections on the Kabbalah—he started a process the conse- quences of which were at the time less than clear to him. What he knew at this carly stage (he was in his late teens) was that Jewish Studies (which, by the way, he calls in his German writings mostly “Judaistik”) had beaten Mathematics, his other and earlier love affair; but within the realm of Jewish Studies he believed Kabbalah would be only a starter, 10 be succeeded by other areas, in particular by the literature, function and, as he calls it, metaphysics of lament in Hebrew literature, That the preoccupation with Kabbalah was soon to become his life- work which even earned him a living, he couldn't know; when he finally left Germany in 1923 after he had completed his Ph.D. thesis on the Book Babir at the University of Munich, he still expected to eke out an existence by teaching Mathematics in high schools. What brought Scholem to choose Kabbalah as the object of his research has long been the subject of scholarly debate, especially since his death in 1982. It is true, as Joseph Dan writes that “his road toward the study of kabbalah began with the repudiation of German nationalism and of Jewish assimilationism,” that he was “first and foremost a Jewish nationalist,”? and that his interest in the Hebrew language, in Jewish history, in the study of Talmud and Midrash, and then in Kabbalah (in this order!) is to be seen against the background of his Zionism. It is equally true that he didn’t choose Jewish mysticism because he ' Whar follows is neither an exhaustive evaluation of Scholem’s contribution nor, much less, a compeehensive description of the history of Kabbalah scholarship in the 20" century, Rather, it is the more modest and, admittedly, at the same time ambitious attempt to highlight some major lines of development and co focus on some problems being discussed at present. | had co leave ‘out many important areas of research and to neglect much progress that has been made in par- ticular fields in the last decades of this century 2 Dan, J. 1987. Gershom Scholemr and the Mystical Dimension of Jenish History. New York and London: New York University Press, 8 ffJEWISH MYSTICISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 5 was interested in mysticism in general and wanted to explain Jewish mysticism in the broader framework of mysticism as an encompassing religious phenome- non, But can we simply and categorically conclude from this, as Dan does, that “Scholem did not become a scholar of the kabbalah because he was a kabbalist or a mystic,”® that the major force behind his interest in Kabbalah was his “out- rage at the treatment that the kabbalah had received from previous generations of scholars who had dealt with it” Again, the latter part of Dan’s argument is certainly correct: Scholem clearly wanted to open up a neglected field, and he no doubt took great pleasure and satisfaction from the “pioneering adventure” of discovering an unknown continents However, the former partis less obvious, to say the least. Of course, Scho: lem wasn’t a Kabbalist or a mystic in the sense that he, in the exuberance and ardor of his youth, yearned for mystical experience and shenyore became inter- ested in Kabbalah. This is too simplistic an approach to the dichotomy of mys tic versus scholar of Jewish mysticism. If one reads From Berlin to Jerusalem care- fully, Iam not so sure that one acquires, as Dan maintains, just “an impressive amount of detailed information, but not a glimpse of the soul of its author, and almost no answer to the basic questionmarks surrounding his early life."* When I read the book for the first time I was struck by the continuous emphasis, run- ning as a hitmotif through the whole book, on his quest for the hidden and secret life of Judaism. What Scholem was after, from the very beginning, was Judaism as a living force, something which had been buried much too long under the debris of centuries past. It is because of this ardent quest for what keeps Juda- ism alive that he turned to the Hebrew language, to Jewish history, to the Tal- mud, to Kabbalah and, indeed, to Zionism, not the other way around. It was in the Kabbalah that he finally discovered the bubbling source of Judaism's vitality, certainly not the only source but one which had been neglected or rather delib- erately suppressed and which needed to be uncovered. To be true, Scholem was first and foremost a historian and, as he himself often put it, a philologist of the Kabbalah (he saw a deep relationship between history and philology) but his notion of a historian and historical research is far mote complex than a simple juxtaposition of historian of Jewish mysticism ver- sus mystic may suggest. We have known this ever since 1979 when David Biale first published Scholem’s famous letter to Salman Schocken, written in October 1937.7 In this letter, which he gave the tide “A Candid Word about the True Motives of my Kabbalistic Studies,” he explains in detail what brought him to the Kabbalah and what he hoped to find in it. It opens with the clear statement: In no way did I become a ‘Kabbalist’ inadvertently. I knew what I was do- ing—only it seems to me now that I imagined my undertaking to be much too easy. When I was about to put on the hat of the philologist and withdrew Ibid, 9. Thi. hid, 10. Ibid, 5. Biale, D. 1979. Gershom Scholem Kabbalab and Counter History. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 215 £, English translation, 31 £