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Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah
Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah
By David Biale
Published June 19, 2018
256 pages
"A superb, much-awaited biography.”—Steven Aschheim, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
A new biography of the seminal twentieth-century historian and thinker who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism and profoundly influenced the Zionist movement
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of Jewish mysticism as a legitimate academic discipline, he overturned the rationalist bias of his predecessors and revealed an extraordinary world of myth and messianism. In his youth, he rebelled against the assimilationist culture of his parents and embraced Zionism as the vehicle for the renewal of Judaism in a secular age. He moved to Palestine in 1923 and participated in the creation of the Hebrew University, where he was a towering figure for nearly seventy years.
David Biale traces Scholem’s tumultuous life of political activism and cultural criticism, including his falling-out with Hannah Arendt over the Eichmann trial. Mining a rich trove of diaries, letters, and other writings, Biale shows that his subject’s inner life illuminates his most important writings. Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times—a period that encompassed two world wars, the rise of Nazism, and the Holocaust.
About the Author
David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, the co-author of Hasidism: A New History, and a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
Reviews
“David Biale’s ability to capture and illuminate a 'life' in its full and manifold aspects for so complex and multi-faceted a man is a major achievement. A superb, much-awaited biography.” —Steven Aschheim, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"David Biale, in Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah, has produced precisely what Yale’s Jewish Lives series was intended to produce: an accessible, digestible, yet still capacious, volume introducing an educated lay readership to a major figure of Jewish history . . . Biale, by digging into the vast, dense corpus of writings this man of letters left behind has yielded a true treasure trove of wisdom." —Reading Religion
