All this and more—lectures, teaching, travel to America, a second marriage, to Fanya Freud—Scholem accomplished during times of tumult and violence. In Germany, the crisis of postwar currency inflation was followed by the rise of Nazism, which harnessed and heightened a pervasive anti-Semitism. Scholem's brother Werner, against whom the earlier charge of treason had been ameliorated, was again arrested, both as a Communist and as a Jew; he was deported to Dachau, and was finally murdered in Buchenwald in 1940. In 1938, Scholem's widowed mother and his brothers Reinhold and Erich escaped to Australia. During these same years, Palestine was troubled by periodic Arab attacks on Jews, notably in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939. "For the past three months," Scholem wrote to Benjamin in August, 1936, "we in Jerusalem have been living under a state of siege.... There's a considerable amount of terrorism.... A few days ago a colleague of mine who teaches Arabic literature was murdered in his study while reading the Bible.... No one knows whether someone will toss a bomb his way or around the next corner." In June, 1939, he again told Benjamin, "We live in terror," and spoke of the "capitulation of the English"—the Mandate power—"in the face of violence." And in 1947 there was outright war when the surrounding Arab nations, rejecting the United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine, sent five invading armies to converge on the newborn Jewish state. Whole sections of Jerusalem were destroyed or overrun. Before Scholem's death, in 1982, he had lived through the terror incursions of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur attacks of 1973.
Scholem defined his Zionism as metaphysically and historically rooted rather than political. "I don't give a rap about the problem of the state," he said, and styled himself an anarchist. Nevertheless he joined colleagues at Hebrew University, in 1925, in the formation of Brit Shalom (Peace Covenant), a political group favoring a binational state, which was to include both Arabs and Jews on equal terms—but since few Arabs were attracted to the idea, and of these some were assassinated by other Arabs, it failed. He had once affirmed that by leaving Europe behind he was stepping out of world history in order to re-enter Jewish history; yet world history, it seemed, had an uncanny habit of following the Jews wherever they were. Scholem was compelled to endure intermittent chaos even as he probed into Kabbalistic theories of exile and redemption.
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He also wrote letters. His father, toward whom he was never cordial, had died some months after Scholem's emigration. But he wrote often to his mother, who replied copiously, and now and then shipped him the familiar delicacies he requested—marzipan and sausage. He wrote to old friends still in Germany, to new friends in America; to his students; to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, George Lichtheim, George Steiner, Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Elias Canetti, Daniel Bell, Emil Fackenheim, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig (the author of The Star of Redemption, an ingenious and startling theological work that particularly drew Scholem's admiration), and scores of others. The letters comprise thousands of pages, unified by the force and striking crescendos of Scholem's uncompromising voice, and reverberating with the subterranean fires of a tumultuous intellect haunted by the enigmas of history, and by the accumulations of its own magisterial knowledge. In their unstinting energy they show a man exactly where he wanted to be, and conscious of exactly why.
His correspondents who were fleeing Germany were not so sure. Scholem repeatedly offered refuge to Benjamin, holding out the hope for a post at Hebrew University; Benjamin repeatedly vacillated, finally admitting to a procrastination "which is second nature to me when it comes to the most important situations in my life." To Scholem's exasperation, Benjamin was contemplating the feasibility of an island off Spain. "You could of course do your literary work here," Scholem countered. "Jerusalem offers more than Ibiza: first of all, there are people like us here; second, there are books.... But it seems to me doubtful that you'd feel comfortable in a land in which you took no direct part.... The only people who can survive all of the difficulties here are those who are fully devoted to this land and to Judaism." Benjamin, Scholem had come to recognize long before, had refused any such devotion; he had turned to Marxism. It was Hannah Arendt (then Hannah Stern), writing as a refugee in the south of France, who informed Scholem of Benjamin's suicide.
But for Scholem the most commanding chronicler of the growing Nazi harassment of Jews was Betty Scholem, his despairing mother. In a flood of anguished letters from Berlin (reminiscent of Victor Klemperer's diaries of gradual engulfment), she was recording a week-by-week tightening of the German noose. "I cannot digest what is happening," she wailed. "I'm completely speechless. I simply can't imagine that there are not 10,000 or 1,000 upright Christians who refuse to go along by raising their voice in protest." Her accounts of her futile trips to the offices of the Gestapo to appeal for information about the imprisoned Werner have the resonance of an atrocity foretold. In March, 1933, commenting on the Jewish lawyers, teachers, and physicians who were being barred from their professions, she wrote:
It's a real stroke of luck that you're out of harm's way! Now, suddenly, I want to see everyone in Palestine! When I only think of the outcry heard among German Jews when Zionism began! Your father and grandfather Herman L. and the entire Central Verein beat themselves on the breast and said with absolute conviction, "We are Germans!" And now we're being told that we are not Germans after all!
Despite intervals of relative quiet, the Jewish population of Palestine was never entirely out of harm's way; but his mother's terrified response to the danger in Germany, years after his own prescient repudiations, left a bitter imprint on many of Scholem's later exchanges. In 1978 he declined to meet with Heidegger (as Buber had done) because Heidegger had been an unabashed Nazi. He was impatient with tendentious distortions of Jewish history. When an editor of the New York Review of Books asked him to review Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, Scholem's reply—"sensationalist humbug"—was scathing:
Sigmund Freud told the Jews their religion was foisted upon them by an Egyptian, so that there was nothing for the Jews to be proud of. The Jews found it baseless but rather amusing. Some Gentiles loved it because it would teach those supercilious Jews a lesson. Arthur Koestler wants to give them the rest by telling them they were not even Jews and that those damned Ashkenazim from Russia, Romania, and Hungary who had invented Zionism had not even the right to ask for Israel as their homeland—which their Khazaric forefathers had never seen.... There is nothing more to be said about Koestler's scholarship.
Some time earlier, in 1962, as part of a postwar, post-Holocaust effort toward official public remorse in Germany, Scholem was invited to contribute to a volume intended as homage to "the indestructible German-Jewish dialogue." He answered with a trenchant polemic:
There is no question that Jews tried to enter into a dialogue with Germans, and from all possible perspectives and standpoints: now demanding, now pleading and imploring; now crawling on their hands and knees, now defiant; now with all possible compelling tones of dignity, now with a godforsaken lack of self-respect.... No one, not even someone who has long understood the hopelessness of this cry into the void, would belittle its passionate intensity and the notes of hope and sadness resonating from it.... No one responded to this cry.... The boundless ecstasy of Jewish enthusiasm never earned a reply in any tone that could count as a productive response to Jews as Jews—that is, a tone that would have addressed what the Jews had to give and not only what they had to give up. To whom, then, did the Jews speak in this famous German-Jewish dialogue? They spoke only to themselves.... In the final analysis, it's true that Germans now acknowledge there was an enormous amount of Jewish creativity. This does not change the fact that you can't have a dialogue with the dead.
This was not Scholem's most acerbic riposte, though it touched on one of the central passions of his historical thinking. One year later, in 1963, Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a polemic
al account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking SS officer who had ordered the deportation of Jews to the death camps, and whom Israeli agents had captured in his Argentine hideout. Scholem's rebuttal ignited an intellectual conflagration that tore beyond the boundaries of their private exchange into a ferocious public quarrel. Arendt and Scholem had been warm correspondents, with admiration on both sides, for two decades. But as early as 1946 a fault line—not yet a crevasse—opened in their friendship. Arendt had sent Scholem "Zionism Revisited," an essay he dismissed as a "patently anti-Zionist, warmed-over version of Communist criticism" and "an act of political balderdash." He accused her of attacking the Jews of Palestine "for maintaining an otherworldly separation from the rest of mankind, but," he contended, "when these same Jews make an effort to fend for themselves, in a world whose evil you yourself never cease to emphasize, you react with a derision that itself stems from some otherworldly source." He set out his credo, both personal and political:
I am a nationalist and am wholly unmoved by ostensibly "progressive" denunciations of a viewpoint that people repeatedly, even in my earliest youth, deemed obsolete.... I am a "sectarian" and have never been ashamed of expressing in print my conviction that sectarianism can offer us something decisive and positive.... I cannot blame the Jews if they ignore so-called progressive theories which no one else in the world has ever practiced.... The Arabs have not agreed to a single solution that includes Jewish immigration, whether it be federal, national, or binational.... [They] are primarily interested not in the morality of our political convictions but in whether or not we are here in Palestine at all. ...I consider it abundantly obvious (and I hardly need emphasize this to you) that the political career of Zionism ... has created a situation full of despair, doubt, and compromise—precisely because it takes place on earth, not on the moon.... The Zionist movement shares this dialectical experience of the Real (and all its catastrophic possibilities) with all other movements that have taken it upon themselves to change something in the real world.
He concluded by charging Arendt with cynical rhetoric aimed "against something that is for the Jewish people of life-and-death importance." Her view, he believed, was motivated by a fear of being classed as a reactionary, "one of the most depressing phenomena to be seen among clever Jews." He knew this, he said, from reading Partisan Review.
Vitriol ebbed and affection resumed. In the long run it was a friendship that could not be sustained, and with the appearance of Eichmann in Jerusalem Scholem's regard for Arendt dissolved; in old age he felt their dispute to have been "one of the most bitter controversies of my life." He disposed of "the banality of evil" as no better than a slogan: it contradicted and undermined the "radical evil" Arendt had testified to in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her earlier study. He argued against her merciless condemnation of the Jewish Councils whom the Germans had forced to run the ghettos: "I don't presume to judge. I wasn't there." He disagreed that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, even while he asserted his opposition to hanging Eichmann: "We should not make it easier for the Germans to confront the past ... He now stands as a representative for everyone." He did not altogether quarrel with Arendt's criticism of the weaker elements of a people in extremis, but "to the degree that there really was weakness," he protested, "your emphasis is, so far as I can tell, completely one-sided and leaves the reader with a feeling of rage and fury." Rage and fury boiled up from a still deeper source:
It is the heartless, downright malicious tone you employ in dealing with a topic that so profoundly concerns our life. There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete—what Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left, there is no trace of it.... In treating such a theme, isn't there a place for the humble German expression "tact of the heart"?
He ended with a familiar reproof: she was "filled with ressentiment for everything connected with Zionism"; her book did "nothing but mock Zionism—which is, I fear, the main point for you."
Arendt's response was unrelievedly hostile. She denied coming from the German left; she had come from German philosophy. She had no love for any nation or collective. As for her opinion of Zionism, the Jews no longer believed in God; they believed only in themselves. "In this sense," she told him, "I don't love the Jews."
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Always deliberate in his language, Scholem initiated the term "the Catastrophe" for what is commonly known as the Holocaust. In his masterly scholarship the word hardly appears. But it is clear from his letters that the Catastrophe was one of the overriding preoccupations of his life, and a clandestine presence in his books. A goodly number of his correspondents were refugees; a few, among them his most treasured friend, were suicides. At the close of the war he roamed Europe, rescuing the surviving remnants of Judaica libraries and transporting them to Palestine. Together with Theodor Adorno, he succeeded in preserving another endangered archive: Walter Benjamin's papers, which he edited and guided into print. (Along the way he was delighted to learn that Benjamin was a direct descendant of Heinrich Heine.)
In the public arena—exemplified by the obsessions evident in his private writing—he pursued two prominent themes: the historical imperatives of modern Zionism; and German culpability and its subset, the delusions of German Jews in their unrequited love affair. As for the Germans themselves, "I can and would speak to individuals," but he withdrew from addressing the nation collectively. "We should allow time to do its work," he advised in 1952, noting that his visits to Germany on behalf of Jewish institutions "were among the most difficult and bitter I have ever experienced." These forays into biting polemics were never alien to Scholem; he had been oppositional since his teens. World-upheaval had buffeted his generation and cut down its most productive minds. "It's pointless to entertain any illusions: we have suffered a loss of blood," he wrote, "whose effects on the spirit and on scholarly achievement are simply unimaginable." Doubtless he had Benjamin in mind—but also the loss to intellectual history, especially in the form of advanced Jewish historiography. So it was left to Scholem to accomplish, single-hand-edly, the new historiography he envisioned, until the time when his students might take up his work and his legacy. In order to understand Kabbalah, he slyly told them, they must first read Kafka.
He formulated Kabbalah as myth—he was, after all, a modern. And as a modern transfixed by the unorthodox and the symbolic, he cast a seductive influence over realms far from his own demanding skills. Over the years the tincture of his mind colored the work of Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Patrick White, and every contemporary novelist lured by the figure of the golem (an artificial being whose occult genesis Scholem traced). These vagrant literary spores bemused him—"It's a free country," he once remarked—but he knew them to be distant from his powers and his mission. The uses of Kabbalah were not the enchantments of art or the ingenuities of criticism. For Scholem, Kabbalah was a fierce necessity, "the vengeance of myth against its conquerors." To classical Judaism, and its judgment of Kabbalah as heresy, he retorted:
From the start this resurgence of the mythical conceptions in the thinking of the Jewish mystics provided a bond with certain impulses in the popular faith, fundamental impulses springing from the simple man's fear of life and death, to which Jewish philosophy had no satisfactory response. Jewish philosophy paid a heavy price for its disdain of the primitive levels of human life. It ignored the terrors from which myths are made.... Nothing so sharply distinguishes philosophers and Kabbalists as their attitude toward the problem of evil and the demonic.
For centuries, through persecutions and expulsions, forced conversions and torchings, to the abyss of the Catastrophe, Jews had suffered terror. Responding to these repeated crises, the mystical imagination had devised a cosmogony that incorporated Jewish historical experience. In Kabbalistic symbolism, with its tragic intuition that the world is broken
, that all things are not in their proper places, that God too is in exile, Scholem saw both a confirmation of the long travail of Jewish dispersion, and its consolation: the hope of redemption. In short, he saw Zionism.
And God Saw Literature, That It Was Good: Robert Alter's Version
IN THE THIRD CENTURY B.C.E., Ptolemy Philadelphia, ruler of Alexandria, Egypt's most Hellenized and sophisticated city, determined that a Greek rendering of the Torah should be included in the Great Library of that famed metropolis. To that end, he sent lavish gifts to Eleazar, the high priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, who reciprocated by dispatching to Alexandria seventy-two sages, six from each of the twelve biblical tribes, to begin the work of translation. Ptolemy greeted the visitors with a banquet lasting seven days, after which they were taken to the island of Pharos. Here each man was shut up in his own cell, in strictest seclusion, each toiling separately over the Hebrew original, in order to perfect its transcription into the lingua franca of the age. Seventy days later, when the scribes emerged from their labors, it was revealed that the seventy-two individually calculated translations were identical, each to the other, varying not by a jot or a tittle. Hence the name Septuagint (meaning seventy), immemorially given to the miraculous Greek text: a book divine in its essence, and thereby divine in its production. When heaven has a hand in translation, it is bound to be immaculate. God, who is One, sees to the oneness—the indivisibility—of His word. Many scribes, but one authentic Voice.
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