The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  The closet, the sink, the portrait, the cry of "Daddy" weigh more in this uneasy history of a childhood than the documents, interviews, letters, political trackings, and all the reportorial rest.

  The Heretical Passions of Gershom Scholem

  ONE MORNING EARLY in February, 1917, Gerhard Scholem, a very tall, jug-eared, acutely bookish young man of nineteen, sat at breakfast with his parents in their comfortable Berlin apartment. It was an hour of family crisis. Gerhard, the youngest of four sons, was the only one still living at home. The three others had all been conscripted for the kaiser's war. Reinhold and Erich were solid German patriots like their father; Reinhold went so far as to call himself, in right-wing lingo, a Deutschnationaler—a German nationalist. Werner, Gerhard's senior by two years, was a hothead and a leftist—he would later become a committed Communist. He had been wounded in the foot in the Serbian campaign and was recuperating in an army hospital. Limping, wearing his uniform, he abandoned his bed and made his way to an antiwar demonstration. He was arrested and charged with treason.

  Over the uneaten pastries, yet another brand of treason was brewing. Gerhard had declared himself to be a Zionist, and was openly preparing for emigration to Palestine. Two years earlier, exposed as the author of an antiwar flyer circulated by a Zionist youth group, he had been expelled from high school. Arthur Scholem, the paterfamilias of this opinionated crew (half of them mutinous), could do nothing about Werner, who was in the hands of the military. But Gerhard was near enough to feel his father's rage, and Arthur Scholem had devised a punishment of Prussian thoroughness. Demanding, authoritarian, uncompromising, practical above all, he was the kind of father we have met before: Kafka's notoriously uncomprehending father, say, or T. S. Eliot's father, a brick manufacturer for whom poets were idlers. Like these stern pragmatists, Arthur Scholem was a businessman; he presided over a successful printing enterprise and a household that could keep both a cook and a maid. At Christmas there was an elaborately decorated tree, surrounded by heaps of presents. When Gerhard was fourteen, he found under the tree a framed portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. "We selected this picture for you because you are so interested in Zionism," his mother explained. ("From then on," Scholem commented decades later, "I left the house at Christmastime.")

  This interest, in Arthur Scholem's view, had increasingly turned excessive and unreasonable. Gerhard had not only hurled himself obsessively into the study of Hebrew; he was entering, with the identical zeal he gave to Latin and German literature, the capacious universe of the Talmud, that oceanic compilation of interpretive biblical commentaries. Every element of these ancient canonical texts attracted him—their ethical and jurisprudential preoccupations; the vitality, in equal measure, of their rational and imaginative insights; their famous argumentativeness and inclusiveness; their dialogical and often dissenting discourse across the generations. The romanticized work of Martin Buber and Heinrich Graetz's panoramic History of the Jews (both of which Scholem eventually took issue with) were the initial stimuli, but he went on to search out the Zionist theoreticians of the time, and anything in Judaica that a bibliomaniacal teenage boy haunting secondhand bookshops could afford.

  All this was too much for the elder Scholem—who routinely paid dues, after all, to the vehemently anti-Zionist Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. The faith might be tepidly Jewish; the primary allegiance—the unquestioned identity, both social and personal—was German. Arthur Scholem believed himself to be an established and accepted member of a stable society. But Werner was a Marxist and Gerhard a Zionist—two sons out of four dangerously dreaming of new worlds yet unborn. No wonder "the discussions at the family table became heated," as Scholem wryly points out in From Berlin to Jerusalem, his concise little memoir of 1977. But by then Gerhard had long since been transmuted into Gershom.

  On that February morning in 1917, the family table was less heated than quietly tense. Arthur Scholem had made his preparations; he waited. The doorbell rang, heralding the arrival of a registered letter. It had been composed two nights earlier, and was addressed to Gerhard:

  I have decided to cut off all support to you. Bear in mind the following: you have until the first of March to leave my house, and you will be forbidden to enter it again without my permission. On March first, I will transfer 100 marks to your account so that you will not be left without means. Anything more than this you cannot expect from me.... Whether I will agree to finance your further studies after the war depends upon your future behavior.

  Your father, Arthur Scholem

  The father's misunderstanding was absolute. He could not fathom a young man opposed to a patriotic war. Having a prodigy on his hands bewildered him—a rebellious prodigy given to devouring Plato and Kant, uncommonly gifted in higher mathematics, and determined to add to this conceptual stew an unfashionable, unpredictable, altogether obstinate dedication to Jewish history and thought. And beyond these perplexities, Arthur Scholem scarcely recognized what Gerhard, in choosing to become Gershom (the name of a son of the biblical Moses), was crucially repudiating—and would continue to repudiate for the rest of his life. Despite Scholem's own mastery of European culture, it was Europe, and Germany in particular, he meant to renounce. His father's loyalties—the passionately held love of the Vaterland that the majority of German Jews plainly felt—he could see only as self-deception. The Jews might be in love with Germany, but Germany was not in love with the Jews. To a Jewish friend who had professed "boundless adoration for German art, Goethe, and our contemporary Richard Borchardt," and who provocatively added, "I hate Martin Buber with all my heart," the nineteen-year-old Scholem responded with what he called "a tremendous intuition" for Judaism:

  I confess that I've never had such a central relationship with any other thing; it has commanded my full attention from the time I began to work and think for myself (to wit, from the age of fourteen). The confrontation with German culture which presents so many Jews with such painful dilemmas has never been a problem for me. Nor has the absolutely non-Jewish atmosphere in my home been able to change this. I have never found or sought out values whose legitimacy was rooted in the German essence. Even the German language, which I speak, disappears for me completely when compared to Hebrew.

  To another correspondent, a few days before, he had announced, "We [Jews] have had a relationship with Europe only to the degree that Europe has acted on us as a destructive stimulation." Both these assertions were made from a bed in a military hospital, where, he reported, "the heavy footsteps of anti-Semitism are always thumping behind my back." Like his older brothers before him, he had been drafted; unlike Werner, he had not been wounded in battle. He was, instead, in a mental ward, suffering from a kind of nervous disorder—and then again it was an invention, "a colossal fabrication," as he put it, to get himself out of the army. In fact it was partly one and partly the other, and it succeeded in freeing him. "I'll be able to work again," he crowed. "I won't be squandering my youth in these odious circumstances, and I can celebrate my twentieth birthday wearing civilian clothes."

  The three-month interval between his father's throwing him out of the house and his induction into the military had turned out to be remarkably fruitful. He went to live at the Pension Struck, a boarding house in an unfashionable neighborhood of Berlin catering to a group of Russian-Jewish intellectuals who held perfervid, if conflicting, Zionist views. Among the polyglot and fiercely literary boarders was a future president of Israel, and it was here that Scholem undertook a translation from the Yiddish (a language new to him) of a volume of memorial essays devoted to Jewish victims of Arab rioters in Palestine: his first full-length publication. During this same period he began his enduring friendship with the Hebrew novelist'S. Y. Agnon, who would one day be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and whose stories Scholem rendered into pellucid German. Scholem had already encountered Walter Benjamin at a Jewish discussion club for young people—"an utterly original mind," he marvele
d. He was then sixteen; Benjamin was five years older. Not long afterward they met again, as university students. (Despite Scholem's expulsion from high school, he was permitted to take his graduation exams and managed to gain university entrance through an academic loophole intended for Junkers.) The two talked of phenomenology and philology; they talked of socialism and historiography; they talked of Chinese philosophy and of Baudelaire, Pindar, and Hölderlin; they argued over Brecht and Zola and Zionism; they were mutually immersed in Kafka. These astonishing exchanges—the bulk of them through a decades-long correspondence indefatigably pledged to ideas, experimental, often playful, and on Benjamin's part somewhat elusive—continued until Benjamin's suicide in 1940, in flight from the Germans. Scholem was frequently the first reader of Benjamin's newest work, and Benjamin was briefly inspired by Scholem's example to study Hebrew, though he never progressed much beyond the alphabet. It was an intimacy rooted in mind. Both of these extraordinary young men were beguiled by the transcendent nature of language. Both were out to recreate intellectual history—Benjamin with the uncertainty of his genius, wavering from subject to subject, Scholem with the certainty of his, leaping with scholarly ferocity into the hitherto untouchable cauldron of Jewish mysticism.

  It was untouchable because it was far out of the mainstream of Judaism, excluded by rabbinic consensus. Normative Judaism saw itself as given over to moral rationalism: to codes of ethics, compassionate conduct, including the primacy of charity, and a coherent set of personal and societal practices; to the illuminations of Midrash, the charms of ethical lore—but mythologies and esoteric mysteries were cast out. Mysticism was regarded as waywardness, and notions of divine immanence seemed too perilously close to paganism. The Zohar, a mystical treatise, was grudgingly admitted for study, but only in maturity, lest it dazzle the student into irrationality. For normative Judaism, ripe sobriety was all; or, if not all, then a significant social ideal.

  Scholem saw something else, and he saw it from an early age. Unlike Freud, who dismissed religion as illusion, Scholem more ambitiously—more penetratingly—believed it to be as crucial for the structure of the human mind as language itself. At twenty-one he wrote to Escha Burckhardt (whom he would later marry and divorce), "Philology is truly a secret science and the only legitimate form of historical science that has existed until now. It is the greatest confirmation of my view of the central importance of Tradition, though of course in a new sense of the word." He named his idea "the philosophy of the Hebrew language" and exclaimed, prophetically, "Oh, if only some day these things could be the focus of my worthy labors!" This ardent cry was more than an inkling or a premonition; it was the annunciation of precocious self-knowledge.

  Two years on, he was a doctoral student who described his dissertation as "a vast foundational philological-philosophical monograph on an early kabbalistic text from around the year 1230.... Nothing worthwhile that's any longer than four pages has been written about it." His work on this text, Sefer ha-Bahir, was pioneering scholarship, but it was far more than that. In the framework of conventional Jewish historiography it signaled a revolution. Scholem was uncovering a tradition hidden underneath, and parallel to, normative Jewish religious expression. Below the ocean of interpretive commentary lay another ocean, also of interpretive commentary, but in imagistic and esoteric guise: "a strictly monotheistic form of gnosticism," Scholem called it, "according to which the God of Israel is the true God of the mystics." (Pagan and Christian Gnosticism posited an antagonistic duality: the false Creator-God of the Jews, and the covert true God.) Scholem's encyclopedic research took him through the centuries; no one before him had ever systematically ordered and investigated the manifold varieties of Jewish mysticism. The position of classical Judaism was that the essence of God is unknowable: "Thou canst not see My Face." The Kabbalists sought not only to define and characterize the Godhead—through a kind of spiritualized cosmogonic physics—but to experience it. Kabbalah had been rabbinically shunned for its claims of ecstatic ascent to the hidden sublime; it had been rabbinically scorned for its connection to folk religion and magic. Scholem himself was unapologetic in confronting the lower forms of Kabbalistic practice. "In this descent from the heights of theosophical speculation to the depths of popular thought and action," he acknowledged,

  the ideas of the Kabbalists undoubtedly lost much of their radiance. In their concrete embodiment they often became crude. The dangers with which myth and magic threaten the religious mind are exemplified in the history of Judaism by the development of Kabbalah, and anyone who concerns himself seriously with the thinking of the great Kabbalists will be torn between feelings of admiration and revulsion.

  Revulsion might be inspired by such ritualized acts of magic as "putting on the Name," a fourteenth-century ceremony whereby a sleeveless garment made of deerskin parchment is inscribed with the secret names of God. After donning this, and a cap to match, and invoking the help of angels, the adept is obliged to fast for seven days, following which he calls out the divine Name over a body of water. If a green shape rises up, he is judged unclean and must repeat his fast, along with giving alms. But if the apparition emerges as red, he is purified, and may enter the water up to his loins—the climax of an initiation said to clothe him in formidable otherworldly strength.

  Yet despite these degraded theurgic usages, Scholem was determined to pry the loftier facets of a suppressed mystical tradition from their concealment, partly to complete and clarify the historical record, and partly to disclose arcane and majestic imaginative constructs, themselves marvels of human intellect. It was a kind of literary archaeology. His chief excavating tool was philology—the study of texts and their origins. Scholem has been compared to one of the greatest of the grand exegetes and codifiers of Jewish tradition—Maimonides, the twelfth-century physician and polymath, who read Torah with an Aristotelian eye. But Maimonides was a proponent of rationalism. Scholem was in pursuit of the opposite. He looked to theosophy, as manifested in Kabbalah: "those religious streams within Judaism," he explained, "which strive to arrive at a religious consciousness beyond intellectual apprehension, and which may be attained by man's delving into himself by means of contemplation, and the inner illumination which results from this contemplation."

  This is almost too general a definition, given the complexities of the several generations and branches of Kabbalah (a word that means tradition, literally "what is received") in its luxuriant fecundity from the first millennium to its latest expression in the eighteenth century. The most influential of all these movements came to fruition in the town of Safed, in Galilee, in the sixteenth century, when an elite community of initiates gathered around Rabbi Isaac Luria and began to compose the astonishing works that comprise what is called the Lurianic Kabbalah. Not all the Lurianic ideas were new, but they expanded in an original direction under the pressure of one of the most catastrophic upheavals in Jewish history: the Inquisitorial persecutions of the Jews of Spain, and their expulsion after a golden age of high creativity. Here was yet another historic exile (the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, inaugurating the dispersion, was primal), and its thunderous effects had their mystical echo in a cataclysmic symbolism.

  In the beginning—indeed, before the beginning—God's luminous essence filled the pleroma, the stuff of nothingness that was everywhere. Then God performed an act of tsimtsum, self-limitation, contracting in order to make room for Creation: "Without contraction there is no creation, as everything is God," Scholem writes. "Therefore, already in its earliest origins the creation is a kind of exile, in that it involves God removing Himself from the center of His essence to the secret places." But certain lights, or sparks, or brilliant emanations, of God trickled out nevertheless. These were the sefiroth, God's qualities or potentialities—the vital ten arteries, so to speak, of His Being. They can be listed as Primeval Will; Wisdom; Intuition; Grace; Judgment; Compassion; Eternity; Splendor; All Fructifying Forces; and last, the Shekhinah, "the hidden radiance of
the totality of the hidden divine life which dwells in every created and existing being." These powerful divine lights flowed into the vessels that are the material of the created world; too fragile to contain such magnitudes, they broke apart, scattering the godly sparks. Some fell among the shards of the sundered vessels and were held captive, themselves damaged and given over to darkness. Because of this breakage, called shevirah, the ideal processes of Creation have been thwarted, and, ever since, nothing is in its right place; all is exile. In Lurianic Safed there arose, finally, the concept of tikkun, the reintegration of what has been fragmented, the correction of confusion, the return of harmony. In this way, the Kabbalists of Galilee, through a cosmological myth of exile and redemption, were able to map a people's shattered experience and adumbrate a vision of restoration.

  It may have been in the early 1940s (there are no living witnesses, and no one of the current generation is certain just when) that Scholem was invited to New York to deliver a lecture on Kabbalah at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was introduced by Saul Lieberman, a leading Talmudic eminence, and thereby an adherent of Jewish philosophical rationalism. "Nonsense is nonsense," said Professor Lieberman, "but the history of nonsense is scholarship." Whether Scholem responded to this now legendary maxim is not known. But the intensity, and the passion, of his scholarship intimate that he did not include visionary symbolism among the artifacts of nonsense.

  ***

  In 1923, at twenty-six, Scholem set off for Palestine, as he had promised ten years before. He had completed his dissertation summa cum laude, and a post in a German university lay easily before him. Instead, he arrived in Jerusalem with six hundred volumes of Kabbalistic literature and no academic prospects. In Germany there were many universities; in Palestine there was none. But there were plenty of secondhand bookshops: Jerusalem, Scholem noted, "was saturated with old Hebrew books the way a sponge is saturated with water." By 1925 the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was inaugurated (it had been in the planning stage since 1913), and before long Scholem became its first professor of Jewish mysticism. And now began those torrents of innovative historical and literary scholarship, the voluminous output of a mind propelled by inquisitive desire, that quickly marked him as a twentieth-century luminary. He was not a man penetrating a field of learning; he was a field of learning penetrating the world. He wrote in a Hebrew that rivaled his native German in literary quality. He read Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Aramaic. His English was fluent and polished. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, lectures composed chiefly in English and first published in 1941, has become the standard introductory work: the dedication is "to the memory of Walter Benjamin, a friend of a lifetime." Scholem's magnum opus, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, which appeared in English translation in 1973, is a consummate history of a seventeenth-century messiah figure who aroused, among the scattered Jewish masses, the hope of a return to Jerusalem; it is a book enormously suggestive of the origins of Christianity.