18012541 Gershom Scholem How I Came to the Kabbalah

8/3/2019 18012541 Gershom Scholem How I Came to the Kabbalah

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How I Came to the KabbalahGershom Scholem

MY INTEREST in the Kabbalah-JewishM mysticism-manifested itself earlyon, while I was still living in Germany, my nativecountry. Perhaps it was because I was endowedwith an affinity for this area from the "root of mysoul," as the Kabbalists would have put it, or per-haps it was my desire to understand the enigma ofJewish history that was involved-and the exist-ence of the Jews over the millennia is an enigma,no matter what all the "explanations," in suchprofuse supply, may have to say about it.The great historian Heinrich Graetz, whose His-tory of the Jews had entranced me as a youngman, displayed the greatest aversion to everythingconnected with religious mysticism, as did almostall the founders of the school of German Jewishscholarship known as Wissenschaft des Judentumsin the last century. Graetz calls the Zohar, the clas-sic work of the Spanish Kabbalah, a book of lies,and employs a whole dictionary of invectiveswhenever he speaks of the Kabbalists. Yet itseemed improbable to me-I could not say why-that Kabbalists could have been such charlatans,buffoons, and masters of tomfoolery as he madethem out to be. Something seemed to me to behidden there, and it was this that attracted me.The lasting impression made on me by MartinBuber's first tw o volumes on Hasidism-written inGerman and drenched in the romanticism andflowery metaphors of the Vienna School and theJugendstil-must also have played a part in thisattraction.GERSHOM SCHOLEM, the foremost Jewish scholar of our age,was born in Berlin in 1897, the son of an assimilated middle-class Jewish family. In his adolescence he became a con-vinced Zionist and began learning Hebrew. He later studiedmathematics and physics, then Semitic philology, in Berlin,Jena, and Berne, completing a doctorate at the University ofMunich in 1922. The following year he emigrated to Pales-tine. Mr. Scholem is professor emeritus of mysticism at theHebrew University, Jerusalem, and the author of numerousworks, including Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On theKabbalah and Its Symbolism, Sabbatai Sevi: The MysticalMessiah, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and On Jews andJudaism in Crisis. The present article, describing his earlystudies in the Kabbalah and his first years in Jerusalem, isadapted from an autobiographical memoir, From Berlin toJerusalem:Memories of My Youth, which Schocken is bring-ing out in September. Copyright 1977 by Suhrkamp Ver-lag. English translation copyright 1980 by'Schocken BooksInc.

In any case, from 1915 on I timidly began read-ing literature about the Kabbalah, and later triedmy hand at original texts of kabbalistic and has-idic literature. This was fraught with difficulties inGermany at that time, for though it was alwayspossible to find Talmud scholars, there was no oneto serve as a guide in this area. Once I tried topersuade my teacher, Dr. Bleichrode, to read onesuch text, a famous treatise on kabbalistic ethicsfrom the 16th century, with a number of us . Aftera few hours he said, "Kinderlach, we have to giveup. I don't understand the quotations from theZohar and can't explain things to you properly."So I had to try and familiarize myself with thesesources on my own. After all, though the Zoharwas written in Aramaic, it was no more intricatethan, say, the writings of Johann Georg Hamann,several volumes of which I had in my room. Ibought myself an edition of the Zohar as well asthe four volumes of Molitor's work, The Philoso-phy of History, or On Tradition, which was ac-tually about the Kabbalah and could still be ob-tained from the publisher for a song. It becameclear to me that the Christological reinterpreta-tions of this author, a pupil of Schelling andBaader, were completely wrongheaded, but thathe did know more about the subject than the Jew-ish authorities of his day. I also read S. A. Horo-dezky's writings, which at that time were almostthe only works in modern Hebrew literature onthe great holy men of Hasidism. I had found outthat Horodezky was living in Berne, and went tosee him. Though he was twenty-five years olderthan I was, he received me in a very friendly fash-ion, and immediately suggested that I translateseveral chapters from his Hebrew manuscript (hecould not write German) which was to be a majorstudy of this subject. While I was working on thetranslation, I realized there was something wrongwith Horodezky's writings, and that their authorwas a rather unperceptive enthusiast.

Between 1915 and 1918 I filled quite a few note-books with excerpts, translations, and reflectionson the Kabbalah, though they were still far fromscholarly efforts or insights. But the fever hadtaken hold, and in the spring of 1919 I decided toshift the focus of my academic work from mathe-matics to Jewish studies and to begin a scholarlyinvestigation of the Kabbalah, at least for a few

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40/COMMENTARY MAY 1980years. I had no idea at the time that these fewyears would turn into a lifetime's occupation. Ialso had many other projects in mind at the time,such as a book about the literature, the function,and the metaphysics of the elegy in Hebrew litera-ture. I had already done a series of studies on thatsubject, and had published a translation in Bub-er's magazine Der Jude ("The Jew") of a movingmedieval elegy about the burning of the Talmudin Paris in 1240.My decision determined my choice of a univer-sity. Earlier, I had thought of completing mymathematical studies at Gottingen, the mathema-ticians' mecca, but no w the only choice was Mu-nich, which had (and still has) Germany's greatestcollection of Hebrew manuscripts, including kab-balistic writings.To be sure, the universities did not encourageJewish studies in those days. Today, when thereare hardly any Jews remaining in Germany, all theGerman universities are eager to establish chairsin Judaica. But in those days, when Germany hada lively Jewish population in great ferment, not asingle university or provincial ministry wouldhear of Jewish studies. (What Heine wrote isquite true: if there were only one Jew in theworld, everyone would come running to have alook at him, but no w that there are too many,people try to look away.) Nonetheless, I wanted totry and unlock these mysterious texts, written inpeculiar symbols, and make them comprehensible-to myself and to others.

In the summer of 1918, 1 thought of a subjectwhich seemed to me both fruitful and philosophi-cally relevant: the linguistic theory of the Kabba-lah. This was an example of youthful exuberance,if not arrogance, for when I tackled the project inearnest, I soon came to realize that I did not knownearly enough and had better start more systemat-ically, and, above all, more modestly. I did, infact, write that study on the linguistic theory ofthe Kabbalah-which I abandoned in 1920-ex-actly fifty years later.

N SEPTEMBER 1919 1 returned to Ger-many from Switzerland. Thanks to ex-

treme frugality I had been able to save a fewhundred francs from the monthly allowance I re-ceived from my parents. To be sure, I overdidthings somewhat-for weeks on end I ate nothingbut fried eggs and potatoes at a cheap restaurant-and the price I paid for those excesses was a vi-tamin deficiency. My medical guardian angel, Dr.Meyer, took me aside at his niece's wedding, toldme he didn't like my looks, and ordered me tocome and see him the following morning. After-ward, he wrote my parents in Berlin saying I hadto eat better, and from then on I received an addi-tional fifty francs a month.In the fall I took the money I had saved to mytw o second-hand book dealers in Berlin andbought kabbalistic writings, among them a French

translation of the Zohar which had appeared inParis between 1906 and 1912 in six thick volumes.It wa s the work of a mysterious individual whocalled himself Jean de Pauly, and it had beenprinted by France's biggest paper manufacturer,Emile Lafuna-Giraud, on wonderful paper (withthe Hebrew name of God as a watermark) thathad been made especially for this one work. Thereason I tell this story is to indicate the state ofKabbalah scholarship at that time, for this univer-sally praised chef-d'oeuvre, which was quoted every-where and served as the basis for whole books,was actually a blatant fraud. Written by a half-educated swindler from Eastern Galicia, it was fullof brazen fabrications which included, amongother things, a separate 450-page volume of notesmade up from beginning to end of fictitious quo-tations and citations of nonexistent books or non-existent chapters in well-known kabbalistic clas-sics. The work had simply never been checked,and when I said all this in Munich at the time, noone would believe me. How did I know, I wasasked, that these books did not even exist? Suchwere my beginnings in the field of kabbalisticstudies.In Munich I managed to find a large room inan apartment at 98 Tiirkenstrasse (near the Vic-tory Arch and directly opposite the Academy ofArts), and another one in the same apartment formy cousin Heinz Pflaum, who had just begun hisstudies in Romance languages and literatures. Athird room in the place was already occupied bythe artist "Tom" Freud (Sigmund's niece), so thethree of us made up a small Zionist colony. At theuniversity, I took one last course in mathematicswith the famous Alfred Pringsheim, but reallyconcentrated on philosophy and Semitics, which Iwas considering as a second minor. Instead of myoriginal dissertation on the "Linguistic Philosophyof the Kabbalah," I now decided to undertake amore modest project: a translation and commen-tary on the Book of Bahir, which was the oldestextant kabbalistic text and extremely difficult.I proposed this to Clemens Baiimker, a distin-guished historian of medieval philosophy at theuniversity who was interested in medieval Jewishthought and had been very encouraging to me inmy studies. Baiimker agreed to accept the projectas my dissertation, calling the kabbalistic field aterra incognita, but told me that in order to getthe doctorate in philosophy, I would have tominor in psychology, a subject I heartily detested.He assured me he could arrange the matter with acolleague of his in the psychology department-one Herr Becher.The problem was, I could not stand this col-league, who specialized in brain weights. My gen-eral dislike of the subject was only intensified bywhat I had seen of the phenomenological analysisof psychological problems which was very much invogue at the time. After some years of sympathyfor phenomenology, based on my admiration for


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Husserl's Logical Investigations, I was on the vergeof breaking with it in any case, but it was the lec-tures of Husserl's disciple, Wilhelm PfAnder,which alienated me from this mode of thinkingonce and for all. At one of these lectures Pfanderaccomplished the feat of making visible the exist-ence of God (which I had never doubted) byphenomenological means. This was too much forme. Pfinder's seminar, too, where a discussionwent on in dead earnest, lasting many hours andwith the assistance of some very penetratingminds, over the question of whether a fried fishwas or was not a fish contributed further to driv-ing me out of this circle.Thus, on Baiimker's advice I changed my majorto Semitics, where I received a very friendly recep-tion from Fritz Hommel (in whose Arabic discus-sion group and seminar I was already enrolled),though Hommel had accepted a dissertation in thefield of Judaica only once in his long career. BothBaiimker and Hommel were already over sixty-five-the one a devout Catholic, the other an equallydevout Protestant. Hommel was primarily an Assyr-iologist, but he was generous enough to exemptme from this particular area of Semitics and askedonly that my major include Arabic and Ethiopianin addition to Hebrew and Aramaic with which Iwas already conversant.One course I did not take in the Semitics de-partment was "Readings in the Babylonian Tal-mud," which was given by the Catholic Old Testa-ment scholar, Gbttesbeyer. Two other Jewish stu-dents and I (the rest were Catholic seminarians)went to the first session to have a look and theprofessor made a bad blunder right from the start.The Talmud has no punctuation, of course, soone of the difficulties in studying it is to determinewhether one is dealing with the declarative or in-terrogative mode. The professor got it wrong, andone of us raised his hand to correct him: "Profes-sor, that is not a statement but a question." "Howdo you know?" "It says so in Rashi." "Rabbinicalsophistry!" the professor replied, and with that thediscussion was closed. So we realized to our amuse-ment that nothing was to be learned from thatparticular gentleman.

There was, however, one excellent Talmudistin Munich-Heinrich Ehrentreu-with whom westudied the tractate on marriage contracts for anhour a day. (It may sound strange, but this partic-ular tractate is actually one of the most interestingand contains, so to speak, everything-which iswhy it is known as "the Little Talmud.") Likemany rablbis in Germany, Dr. Ehrentreu had comefrom Hungary. He was a first-rate scribe, lookedjust the way one imagines a talmudic sage, andwas an even-tempered, peaceable man. In this, hewas quite different from the younger generation ofOrthodox Jews who were very combative. Many ofthem were just beginning to go off to study in theharshly anti-Zionist yeshivahs of Hungary andLithuania, and they often returned home after a

year or tw o very much changed. Ehrentreu knew Iwas not Orthodox but liked me nonetheless. Oneof his sons, however, home on vacation from theyeshivah at Galenta, refused to shake hands withme and asked his father how he could toleratesuch a heretic in his Talmud course. "The light inthe Torah will lead him to what is good," said hisfather, quoting from the Talmud. Bleichrode andEhrentreu were the two teachers of my youthwhom I remember with the warmest gratitude.That year, I read Maimonides's Guide for thePerplexed in Hebrew. Luckily, I was studying Ara-bic syntax at the time, so I could cope more easilywith the Arabic sentence structure, which is pre-served literally in the Hebrew and often causesgreat hardship in understanding the text. Most ofmy time, however, I spent in the manuscript roomof the Bavarian State Library where my table wasstrewn with Hebrew codices and printed works. Atthe next table sat an unusually slender man, per-haps ten years older than I, with the unmistakablysharp and intense features of a Jewish intellectual.His table was piled high with German manu-scripts, and he generally took his seat, as I did,shortly after the reading room opened. My neigh-bor turned out to be Eduard Berend, the out-standing Jean Paul scholar, who was working onhis definitive edition of this, my favorite amongGerman classical writers. When I confessed mylove for Jean Paul, Berend asked me for informa-tion on his many rabbinical stories. (Jean Pauland Paul Scheerbart were the only German au-thors whose works I took along with me when Iemigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1923.)

N MUNICH I met Gustav Steinschneider,with whom I had been in the same pla-toon in the army in 1917. He was the grandson of

Moritz Steinschneider, the greatest Hebrew bib-liographer and manuscript expert of the last cen-tury, who at a ripe old age made no bones aboutthe fact that the function of the Science of Juda-ism, as he saw it, was to provide a decent burialfor Judaism, an important but declining phenom-enon. Surely Steinschneider, a stupendous scholarand a man I greatly admired, was the first author-ity in this field who was admittedly an agnosticand possibly even an atheist! In those days I gavea lot of thought to this group of scholarly liquida-tors, and planned to write an article for my friendWalter Benjamin's projected magazine, AngelusNovus, showing that the so-called Science of Juda-ism was really the suicide of Judaism. But themagazine never appeared.

Gustav came from a family that was rather simi-lar to mine. His father was a monist, and one ofthe leading members of the Berlin Monistenbund,which at that time was probably the best-knownorganization of leftist atheists. His older brotherbecame a Communist and his younger brother anardent Zionist and one of the first German hal-utzirn. Gustav himself, a very quiet and thought-


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ful man, vacillated between the tw o camps. Likehis younger brother, Karl, he had a kind of naturalnobility and great musical talent, but was utterlyunworldly and incapable of doing anything"practical." He spoke very slowly and with a melo-dious drawl, pronouncing even the word, Scheisse("shit")-which as everyone knows is the mostfrequent word in any soldier's vocabulary-in aninimitable way, as though it were a German lin-guistic treasure, perhaps part of the cultic lan-guage of Stefan George and his circle.Gustav inclined to hypochondria, and his thin,somewhat weary face betrayed unmistakable signsof the potential philosopher. In the four years be-fore my emigration we were on the friendliestterms-perhaps it was the total opposition of ourcharacters that attracted us to one another. Gustavspent the first year in Munich with my fianceeEscha Burckhardt and me, and we both tried-un-successfully, of course-to persuade him to enrollin some systematic course of studies. After 1933 ittook all the "pull" I could muster-the interces-sion of my friend Zalman Rubashov with themayor of Tel Aviv-to find Gustav (and otherPh.D.'s and artists in every imaginable field) a jobas a street cleaner in Palestine. This nocturnal em-ployment allowed him to philosophize by day orto play four-handed duets with my aunt. (As astreet cleaner, incidentally, Gustav was highly re-spected and popular among his colleagues, thisbeing one of the occupations which did not re-quire a knowledge of Hebrew.)

AER my cousin had left Munich forAHeidelberg, Escha moved into hisroom on Tiiurkenstrasse. At the end of the cor-ridor lived, as I have mentioned, "Tom" Freud,one of the unforgettable figures of those years. Incontrast to her older sister, Lilly, who was marriedto the actor Arnold Marle and was a great beauty,"Tom" was of an almost picturesque ugliness. Asan illustrator (and occasional writer) of children'sbooks she bordered on genius, and had been en-gaged to do the drawings for a children's book bythe Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon (who had takenup permanent residence in Palestine but was no wtemporarily living in Munich), in which every let-ter of the Hebrew alphabet was described and ex-tolled in verse. "Tom," who seemed to live only oncigarettes and whose room was usually filled withsmoke, was an authentic bohemian who had myr-iad contacts with artists and writers of all sorts. Itwas in her room, for example, that I had a vehe-ment discussion about Zionism with the writerOtto Flake, who was well-known at the time.Flake was a member of the liberal Left and an ad-vocate of total assimilation for German Jewry,which he expected would produce great benefitsfor the Germans. I was certainly the wrong personto express such views to, and our conversation re-flected it. Unless I am mistaken, from then on heno longer regarded the matter as quite so simple.

Agnon was about to marry Esther Marx, thebeautiful daughter of one of the most aristocraticOrthodox Jewish families in Germany. She hadtw o qualities I considered especially memorable inthose days: she was as confirmed an atheist as shewa s an admirer and master of the Hebrew lan-guage-a rare combination among German Jews.Esther was spending the winter in Starnberg, andAgnon proudly showed me his postcards from her,which were written in flawless calligraphy and al-most flawless Hebrew. At that time I translated agood number of Agnon's shorter stories into Ger-man, some of them from manuscript, including afew perfect writings of his which later appeared inDer Jude. We frequently took walks together inthe city, along the Isar River or in Munich's fa-Imous English Gardens, and Agnon, a tireless con-versationalist, held forth about his particular likesand dislikes among Hebrew writers-especially onthe contemporary scene. (I probably did my shareof talking too.) We also spoke a lot about GermanJewry, each of us displaying his own form of criti-cal detachment from it. In those days Agnon hadbefriended a number of German intellectuals, andhe was always singing their praises to me. Havingcome from abroad, he seemed to have a deeper in-tuitive understanding of many Germans than Idid. ON MY way back from Switzerland IO had visited Martin Buber at Heppen-heim, and he greeted the news of my decision toaddress myself to the Kabbalah with great interest.When I told him I was going to Munich, he pro-duced an eight-page booklet from among his pa-pers containing the rules and regulations of a neworganization that had just been founded in Mu-nich-the "Johann Albert Widmanstetter Societyfor Kabbalah Research, Inc." Along with the pam-phlet-and this came as a real surprise-was hisow n membership card in the group dated Novem-ber 5, 1918. The purpose of the Society, as statedin Paragraph 1 of its bylaws (I still have the pros-pectus which may be the only extant copy), was"to promote research in the Kabbalah and its lit-erary documents, long neglected as a result of prej-udice and external circumstances of a non-scien-tific nature." Nor was that all: the chairman andvice-chairman of the proposed board of directorswere none other than my tw o future thesis super-visors, Fritz Hommel and Clemens Bumker,who had never breathed a word to me about thegroup.Buber filled me in on the background, explainingthat the WViImanstetter Society owed its existenceto one Robert Eisler, who was its "Secretary" andactually its only active member. The name meantnothing to me, stripling that I was, but Buber en-lightened me. Eisler, the son of a Viennese mil-lionaire, was an incredibly gifted man in his mid-dle thirties, as agile as he was ambitious, with far-ranging scholarly interests as well as considerable


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dramatic ability. Buber said he had published avery interesting two-volume work with the intri-guing title, Cosmic Cloak and Heavenly Canopy,which stamped him as an original if hypothesis-happy historian of religion, but which had beenreceived by authorities in the field with great res-ervations. Eisler had also performed the uniquefeat of earning tw o doctorates from the sameschool at the University of Vienna-one as a veryyoung man in economics, and another one yearslater in art history-since it had never occurred toanyone that the two Eislers could be one and thesame person. He had had himself baptized for loveof the daughter of a well-known Austrian painter,but despite the gesture, his various attempts to se-cure a teaching position had always beenthwarted. The Gentiles were made uneasy by hismarkedly Jewish appearance, and the Jews by hisapostasy.The idea of founding a society for Kabbalah re-search had been Eisler's idea, and Buber describedhow, through letters and personal visits, he hadpersuaded ten well-known scholars to lend theirnames to the society's sponsoring committee(whose aims, after all, made a lot of sense). Eislerhad visited Buber early in 1918 and shown himthe testimonials he had received from all theseprofessors (among them the son of HeinrichGraetz, the historian, who was a professor of phys-ics in Munich). At the same time he had submit-ted an essay to DerJude outlining the importanceof kabbalistic research for the history of religionin general and the understanding of Judaism inparticular.Buber showed me the proofs of this essay(which are still in my possession), saying he hadtold Eisler that though he published essays bynon-Jews in his magazine, he could not very wellinclude contributions by Jewish converts, no mat-ter what their motives for baptism might havebeen. Eisler had replied that he had long since de-cided to return to Judaism and was just about totake this step under the aegis of the Jewish Com-munity Council in Munich. Buber had thenagreed to have the article set in type, but said hecould not publish it until Eisler notified him thathis "reconversion" has been accomplished. Sincethen, Buber had heard nothing further from Eis-ler, except for the prospectus which had arrived,adorned by his own name. A year and a half hav-ing now gone by , Buber assumed that Eisler hadreverted to his former status, and was thereforemaking me a present of the article which was notgoing to appear but might interest me. At anyrate, he suggested that I look in on this Eisler,who was living at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg.I took Buber's advice, having first obtained acopy of Eisler's book. This inspired me to add hisname to the catalogue of the imaginary universityWalter Benjamin and I had founded the year be-fore in Switzerland, with a course called "Wom-en's Coats and Beach Cabanas in the Light of the

History of Religion." There followed one of themost bizarre encounters of my life when Eisler in-vited me to visit him in his little villa on LakeStarnberg which dated from his days as a million-aire's son. (During the inflation, Eisler, like al-most everyone else, had lost everything, except forthat house, and lived by taking in "paying guests"from England.)

I was taken first to Eisler's library, crammed tothe ceiling with scholarly works about everythingunder the sun. A set of ten quarto volumes boundin green morocco and bearing the title Erotica etCuriosacaught my eye. Ever industrious, I pulledout one of the volumes to have a look, and itturned out to be a dummy, with cognac glassesand bottles of whiskey concealed behind it.

ISLER received me with open arms.After all, I was, so to speak, the angelsent from heaven to breathe kabbalistic life into

his paper society. Since many of the Hebrew man-uscripts in Munich, including the kabbalistic oneswith which I was going to spend the next tw oyears, derived originally from the collection of Jo-hann Albert Widmanstetter (d. 1557)-fromwhom the Society had taken its name-what bet-ter person than I could have come his way? Eis-ler's own research in this field, as he described it(particularly his "discovery" of the true author ofthe Book of Yetzirah, which the Kabbalists hadappropriated as their basic text), was so frivolousthat it drew from me only a skeptical shudder-the more so since I was now subjecting myself toserious philological discipline.In general, Eisler's eloquence, as fantastic as hiseducation, was somehow not quite serious. I at anyrate had never before come across such a compel-ling ye t at the same time suspiciously glitteringkind of erudition. He was, incidentally, quitewithout rancor at being challenged, a trait Ifound particularly endearing, especially since Iwas bound to detect the regrettable gaps in hisHebrew sooner or later. He once said to me, "Isuppose you think I'm a nebbish philologist," buthe really did not seem to take offense at my judg-ment of him. His fanciful syntheses overcame allthe hurdles of historical criticism, and the onething that could truly not be said of him was thathe was lacking in ideas, and ideas, moreover, insuch diverse areas as the proto-Semitic inscriptionsin the Sinai Peninsula, the Greek mysteries, the or-igin of the Gypsies, the history of money, the ori-gins of Christianity, and many others which hadone thing in common: they were all rich enoughin unsolved problems to allow the widest possiblescope to his particular genius for synthesizing.

Hearing him lecture, one could not help but beoverwhelmed by his rhetorical gifts; reading hiswritings, one was left speechless by the sheerwealth of quotations and references-frequentlyto the most obscure and far-fetched sources imagi-nable. I have never again seen a comparable Ras-


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telli* of scholarship. Eisler's opponents (and hedid not have many defenders, though a few ofthem were quite influential) called him, withslightly veiled anti-Semitic innuendo, a speculatorwho had accidentally strayed onto the field. ofscholarship. In short, Eisler was unique in his way.Unfortunately, no publisher who had everbrought out a book of his would have any furtherdealings with him, for in the course of readingproofs he would invariably rewrite the book andmake it at least twice as long, so that every publi-cation ended with a quarrel.Through Eisler I first learned about the circlethat was forming in Hamburg around Aby War-burg and his library of cultural history. This li-brary had been the scene, in the early 20's, of acelebrated lecture by Warburg which was greetedwith great enthusiasm and took up no less than400 pages (in small print) when it was eventuallypublished. Eisler's description of the new perspec-tives being explored by this group-which were tohave far-reaching consequences-aroused my live-liest interest, just as my own studies aroused acorresponding interest in Hamburg from 1926 on.After two visits to the city in 1927 and 1932, I wasin close scholarly contact with this circle and onfriendly terms with a number of its members. (Forthe twenty-five years of its existence, the grouphad consisted almost exclusively of Jews whoseJewish commitment ranged from lukewarm tosub-zero. I used to define the three groups around,respectively, the Warburg library, Max Horkhei-mer's Institute for Social Research, and the meta-physical magicians around Oskar Goldberg as thethree most remarkable "Jewish sects" that GermanJewry had produced. Not all of them liked to hearthis.)

In his dealings with me, Eisler was completelyJewish. His store of Jewish jokes and anecdoteswas virtually inexhaustible, and he felt free whenhe was with me to pour out that Jewish heartwhich he kept carefully under wraps when dealingwith non-Jews. I remained in touch with himuntil 1938, when, after some terrible weeks in aconcentration camp, he managed to ge t to Eng-land. Then in 1946, out of the blue, I suddenly re-ceived a 250-page manuscript ("with cordial re-gards") containing Eisler's definitive solution ofthe Palestine question, for which he was seeking apublisher (he never found one).

Eisler had been pro-Zionist for years, and hadwritten to me that he intended to leave his libraryto the University of Jerusalem. Now in 1946 hecame up with a proposal that was truly original,and all the more so amid the anti-Zionist out-bursts of the period (Ernest Bevin was in White-hall at the time, and doing his best to liquidateZionism): a committee consisting of three Angli-can theologians and three strictly Orthodox rabbisto rule on the credentials of all Jews living in Pal-estine. Those who were not deemed kosherenough to be allowed to remain in the country as

pious worshippers were to be given the choice ofreturning to their countries of origin or (if thenwanted a Jewish state) of taking possession of thesecond district of Vienna (the Leopoldstadt) aswell as the entire city of Frankfurt am Main; theseterritories were to be evacuated by the Germansand placed under international guarantees as aJewish state. After all, the Germans-consideringeverything they had perpetrated-had now for-feited the right to complain if Frankfurt am Main,home of the most famous of all Jewish communi-ties in Germany, were taken from them and de-clared a Jewish state. Eisler proposed further thatthe British fleet be utilized for transport purposesI sent back the manuscript with a slip on whichI had written just one word: "Enough." Neverthe-less, my first tw o books, which were published inGermany in 1923 and 1927, did actually appear asvolumes I and 2 in the series Sources and Studiesin the History of Jewish Mysticism, edited for theJohann Albert Widmanstetter Society by RobertEisler. These were the only signs of life evershown by this fictitious society.ONE day Eisler informed me that he

had told the writer Gustav Meyrinkabout my kabbalistic studies and that Meyrinkwanted to invite me to Starnberg to explain cer-tain passages in his own writings to him. Natu-rally this seemed a bit strange to me. In those daysMeyrink was a famous author who combined anextraordinary talent for anti-bourgeois satire (TheGerman Philistine's Magic Horn) with a no lessdistinctive talent for mystical sensationalism. Thelatter quality was reflected primarily in his shortstories, some of them very impressive but not quiteserious, whose literary quality has been surpassedin our time only by Jorge Luis Borges. At thatpoint Meyrink had also published two widely readmystical novels, The Golem and The Green Face,both of which I myself had read with a good dealof head-shaking over their pseudo-Kabbalism.Thus it was with a certain amount of curiositythat I went out to Starnberg one afternoon in1921 to make the acquaintance of a man in whomdeep-rooted mystical convictions and literary char-latanism were almost inextricably combined. Heshowed me a few passages in his novels which heclaimed not to understand and asked me to ex-plain them to him. For someone like myself whonot only knew something about the Kabbalah butalso knew of its distortions and misuse in the oc-cult writings of the Madame Blavatsky circle, thiswas not very hard to do. But it also opened myeyes to how an author can score points with pseudo-mysticism. I will give only one example here.In on e profoundly "mystical" chapter in TheGolem the hero experiences a kabbalistic vision. Afigure appears to him whose chest is covered with

*The legendary Italian juggler. Enrico Rastelli (1896-1931).-ED.


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HOW I CAME TO THE KABBALAH/45

luminous hieroglyphs in some foreign script. Thefigure asks the hero whether he can read them.The chapter continues: "And when I . . . an-swered in the negative, he stretched the palms ofhis hands toward me and the inscription appearedon my chest in luminous letters which were at firstin the Latin alphabet, CHABRAT SEREH AU RBOCHER, and gradually changed into letters thatwere unknown to me." I explained to Meyrinkthat the inscription must simply be the mysticalname of some sort of lodge retranslated into He-brew-something like "Lodge of Aurora's Seed,"though I could not say whether or not such alodge had ever actually existed. Not until fiftyyears later did I find out that the inscription wasnothing but a retranslation of the name of the so-called Frankfurt Jewish lodge of the Napoleonicera, famous in the history of Freemasonry, whichhad been known as the Aurora Lodge of the Ris-ing Dawn. It had simply been transcribed incor-rectly by some ignoramus in one of the books inMeyrink's library.

Later, when we were drinking coffee together,Meyrink-whose undistinguished appearance (helooked like the very model of a petty bourgeois)contrasted with the fantastic stories he wrote-told me about some of his own experiences. Heclaimed, for example, to have cured himself bymagic of tuberculosis of the spinal-cord marrow,an invariably fatal disease. Suddenly, without pre-liminaries, Meyrink asked me: "Do you knowwhere God lives?" It was hardly possible to answersuch a question precisely-except perhaps byquoting Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk: Wherever onelets Him in-but Meyrink answered it himself. Hegave me a penetrating look and said: "In thespinal cord." This was new to me and marked myfirst acquaintance with the famous Yoga work, TheSerpent Power, by Sir John Woodroffe, alias Rich-ard Avalon, of which Meyrink probably ownedthe only copy in Germany at the time.I visited Meyrink on one or tw o other occasions,and he never failed to astonish me. He had theidea, for instance, of publishing fictional biogra-phies of great occultists and mystagogues and askedme whether I would be willing to write one aboutthe most famous of all Kabbalists, Isaac Luria. Hehimself planned to write something of this natureabout Eliphas Levi who, unlike Luria, an authen-tic mystic, certainly did belong in such a series.The number of writers, as we all know, who havehidden their good Jewish names behind pseudo-nyms is legion. But there is one rare, if not unique,case of an author who took the opposite path,namely Alphonse Louis Constant, who under theHebrew pseudonym of Eliphas Levi publishedworks of imaginative quackery as a grand kabbal-iste, and by no means without success. Meyrink'slast book, The Angel from the Western Window,was based on the same idea, describing in a pro-foundly mystical novel the life of Dr. John Dee, afamous scholar and occultist of Elizabethan times.

IN MUNICH I had a chance to see bur-geoning Nazism at the university. Theatmosphere in the city was unbearable, thoughthis is often disregarded today or considerably

played down. But there was no disregarding thegiant, blood-red posters with their equally blood-thirsty slogans inviting the public tQ attend Hit-ler's rallies: "Fellow Germans are welcome. Jewswill not be admitted." I was not much affected byall this, for I had long since made my decision toleave Germany, but it was frightening to observethe blindness of the Jews and their refusal to ac-knowledge what was going on. This attitude hurtmy relations with Munich Jews who became ex-tremely jumpy and angry when the subject wasbroached.I finished my dissertation at the end of January1923 and prepared for my oral examination. Hom-mel advised me not to open a book for the lasttw o weeks before the exam, but instead to go forwalks in the English Garden or do anything else Ienjoyed doing, and forget about the exam alto-gether. This, he assured me, would be more valua-ble than any amount of cramming. A perceptivemanl I followed his advice, and as it turned outdid well enough in my orals to be offered Habili-tation* at the University of Munich with the pros-pect of a teaching appointment-provided that Ipresent an appropriate piece of research. As I havealready mentioned, research in the field I had cho-sen would have been a novelty at a German uni-versity. But though I did not seriously considerthe offer, I was able to use it as a trump card indealing with my father and his objections to myplanned emigration to Eretz Yisrael.As it happened, my father became gravely ill onthe very next day, which was his birthday. A tele-gram called me to Berlin, and for a few days thedoctors held out hardly any hope. Eventually herecovered, though very slowly, and from that timeon had to take very good care of himself, so thatmy tw o elder brothers, who had gone into theprinting business with him, took over most of theresponsibilities. When my father was out of dan-ger, I returned to Munich to ship my books andother things to Berlin.

From there I went to Frankfurt for a few days,hoping to see Franz Rosenzweig. I had been therefor a short time the year before and we had metseveral times. I had first heard about Rosenzweigthrough Rudolf Hallo, a fellow student in Mu-nich, who came from Kassel, like Rosenweig, andhad been deeply influenced by him. From Hallo Ilearned much about Rosenzweig's developmentand his turn to Judaism and it was he who earlyin 1920 introduced me to Rosenzweig's recentlypublished The Star of Redemption, undoubtedlyone of the central creations of Jewish religiousthought in this century. Rosenzweig had also heard*A post-doctoral research project required in order tosecure a teaching appointment at a university.-ED.


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about me from various sources, and the two of usbegan corresponding. (A t that time Rosenzweigstill had his health and was studying Talmud withthe famous Rabbi Nobel in Frankfurt.)Every encounter with Rosenzweig furnished evi-dence that he was a man of genius (I regard as al-together foolish the tendency, so popular today, toabolish this category), but also that he had markeddictatorial inclinations. The decisions we hadmade took us in entirely different directions. Hesought to reform (or perhaps I should say revolu-tionize) German Jewry from within. I, on theother hand, no longer had any hopes for the amal-gam known as German Jewry and expected a re-newal of Jewry to come about only through its re-birth in Eretz Yisrael. Nonetheless, we were cer-tainly interested in one another. Never before (orsince) had I met a person of such intense Jewishcommitment as Rosenzweig, who was midway inage between Buber and me. What I did not knowwas that he regarded me as a nihilist.My second visit to Frankfurt, which involved anightlong discussion about the very German Jewrythat I rejected, was the occasion for a completebreak between us. I would never have broachedthis delicate topic, which inflamed both of us somuch, if I had known that Rosenzweig was bythen already in the first stages of his fatal disease,lateral sclerosis. He had had an attack which hadnot yet been definitely diagnosed, but I had beentold he was on the mend, except for a certain dif-ficulty in speaking which still remained. In anycase, there occurred that night one of the stormiestand most irreparable arguments of my youth.Years later, Buber and Ernst Simon asked me tocontribute to a portfolio of essays which was to bepresented to Rosenzweig on his fortieth birthday,and I did so. By then, he was already paralyzedand unable to speak. When I was in Frankfurt inAugust 1927, Ernst Simon said to me: "Rosen-zweig would be very pleased if you visited him." Iwent, and gave an account of my work to this mor-tally ill man, who could move only one finger andcommunicated by pushing a specially constructedneedle over an alphabet field which his wifespelled out into sentences. It was an unforgettablehour, one that cut me to the quick. Yet even dur-ing those years Rosenzweig produced some veryimpressive work, took part in the Bible translationproject inaugurated by Buber, and carried on anoverabundant correspondence.

PON my return to Berlin, I reportedfor my Staatsexamen in mathematicsand also bought mathematical textbooks in He-

brew to familiarize myself with the terminology Iwould have to know as a teacher in Eretz Yisrael.My father, who had been impressed by my docto-rate after all and who thought the offer of a Ha-bilitation would cure me of my "youthful follies,"had my dissertation printed in his shop whenevera typesetter had a free hour or two. In those days,

at the height of the inflation, this was no smallmatter-for a long time it had been impossible tohave dissertations published, because no one wasable to raise the money. At any rate, Das BuchBahir ("The Book of Bahir") was ready in a yearand appeared in the Eisler series I mentioned ear-lier under the imprint of Drugulin, the housewhich was bringing out all the expressioni.Jlitera-ture being published by Kurt Wolff in those days.In the meantime, I continued my preparationsin the field of Kabbalah. To deepen my knowl-edge of Hebrew literature I spent countless hoursin the library of Moses Marx, Agnon's brother-in-law, with whom I had become friends after my re-turn from Switzerland. This curious individualwas the co-owner of a textile firm on Spittelmarkt,but his heart belonged to Hebrew typography andbibliography, though he scarcely understood thecontents of the books he tended so lovingly andhad so wonderfully bound by Berlin's most out-standing craftsmen. He was one of the many vic-tims of the illusion-caused by the inflation-ofbeing very rich, when in reality he had nothingleft. A sensitive and vulnerable man, Marx com-bined intense Jewish feeling (he had embracedZionism as soon as he abandoned Orthodoxy)with more than a trace of the typical Prussian per-sonality. Later on I met a number of other peopleof this type, but Marx remained the most vivid ex-ample. We would often take the long ride to-gether on top of the double-decker bus from theSpittelmarkt to Helmstedter Strasse at the Bayr-ischer Platz, where he lived. Several times I stayedat his house from seven at night to seven in themorning, browsing with fascination among thethousands of volumes in his library.

Among the books he owned was a complete setof Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata,the most important Latin work on the Kabbalah,published between 1677 and 1684. To buy thesevolumes, which totalled 2,500 pages, was beyondmy means, but one day Marx came to call at ourhouse on Neue Griinstrasse to have a look at mykabbalistic collection in the making. "Well, andwhat are you tw o going to admire each other outof this time?" asked my mother, who had a gift forvivid expression. And in fact Marx did find an ex-tremely rare little cabbalisticum which had ap-peared at Saloniki in 1546 and still had its won-derful original Turkish binding with leather tool-ing. I had bought it a short time before on myvisit to Frankfurt for a hundred marks (then ahalf-dollar). "What do you want for it?" Marxasked me. "Kabbalistic books I can't swap." "Tellme anyway." "Well, if yo u insist, I'll make you anoffer you certainly won't accept. I'll trade it fo ryour KabbalahDenudata." Marx winced and saidnothing. But the next time I came to see him hesuddenly blurted out angrily: "Go ahead and takeit . The Kabbalah Denudata can always be had formoney, but your old book isn't to be had for anyamount." So that is ho w I came to own those valu-


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HO W I CAME TO TH E KABBALAH/47

able volumes, though it really did take fifteenyears before I was able to get hold of the little Sa-loniki book again at an auction in Amsterdar.ETWEEN 1921 and 1923 I had manyB dealings, albeit indirect ones, with thegroup around Oskar Goldberg. The Kabbalah washighly regarded by this group-not so much for itsreligious and philosophical aspects as for itsmagical implications about which Goldberg (theonly one in the circle who really knew Hebrew)had the most extravagant notions.Short pieces by members of this group hadbegun appearing in print while I was still in Mu-nich; and some of them, particularly by ErichHunger, Ernst Fraenkel, an d Joachim Caspary, dis-played a high degree of intelligence. In 1922,Unger published a metaphysical diatribe againstZionism with the pretty title, "The StatelessFounding of a Jewish People," which was really

quite something. It censured practical Zionism,which the author rejected, for being deficient in"metaphysics," but what Unger meant was not somuch metaphysics as magical power (not intendedmetaphorically) which, according to Goldberg'sdoctrine, should be possessed by metaphysicallycharged "biological entities." Instead of learninghow to work magic, the Zionists-according to theauthor-were wasting their energies on the build-ing of villages, settlements, and similar nonsensethat could not promote that Jewish "magicalfaculty" which needed renewal. All this was some-what obscured by the elegant language in whichthe lecture was couched, but intelligent readerscould not help noticing that it was the salientpoint of this remarkable essay. Later on, in Gold-berg's own writings, the point was expressedrather more bluntly and with appropriate invec-tive.Strangely enough, Buber knew nothing aboutthe activities of these new magico-metaphysicians,but when I told him about them on one of. his vis-its to Munich, he was reminded of an incident inwhich both Unger and Goldberg had figured. Dur-ing the war, it seems, around 1916 or 1917, a Mr.Unger had shown up in Heppenheim to discuss anurgent matter with him. He had explained toBuber how important it was to en d the war, andpointed out that there was really only one way ofdoing it: to establish contact with the "higherpowers" guiding humanity and to persuade themto act. These forces were the Mahatmas in distantTibet, the famous sages of the "White Lodge" in-vented by Madame Blavatsky, an d there was onlyone person who could make contact with them. Itwas therefore urgent to get this person ou t ofGermany so he could travel to India via Switzer-land.Buber told me he had been greatly astonishedand had asked Unger what his own function wasin all this. To his even greater astonishment,Unger had replied that Buber should use his ex-

cellent connections to secure an exit permit forDr. Goldberg. "Those people really seemed to be-lieve I had some sort of connection with the For-eign Office," Buber told me, "but I had to disillu-sion them on that score." As proof of Goldberg'suncanny abilities (Buber had never heard of him)Unger presented a pamphlet entitled "The Penta-teuch, an Edifice of Numbers," in which Goldberg"proved" through numerological calculations thatthe Torah must have been written by a superhu-man intellect-let us say an Elohim. Years later Ilearned from Ernst David, who before his "defec-tion" to the Zionists had belonged to the sect'sinner circle and financed Goldberg's main work,The Reality of the Hebrews, that his mentor hadlong been one of Madame Blavatsky's disciples.URING my sojourns in Berlin between

1D 1919 and 1923 I also came in contactwith a number of young scholars, somewhat olderthan I, who were doing research for an organiza-tion whose goal-never achieved-was the foundingof an academy for the Science of Judaism. Whatwas important about this project was that it didno t entail the training of rabbis, and hence did notinvolve any commitment to a particular ideology orparty within Judaism; rather, it was to be a pureresearch center at which believers, unbelievers, andatheists alike who cared about furthering theknowledge of Judaism could work peacefully side-by side. Some were Zionists, some were not, bu tnearly all were highly gifted scholars whose namesand achievements still live in Jewish studies-people like Fritz Yitzhak Baer, Hartwig DavidBaneth, Leo Strauss, Selma Stern, an d ChanochAlbeck.With Baer, in particular, one of the most out-standing-if not the outstanding-historian of mygeneration, I quickly established relations, as wellas with Baneth, a first-rate Arabist. Baneth toldme that Philip Bloch, the former rabbi of Posenand one of the last surviving pupils of Graetz,had moved to Berlin and donated his substantiallibrary (which Baneth was then helping to cata-logue) to the proposed academy. He suggestedthat I go to visit Bloch, who at eighty-one was stillvery spry and domiciled together with his library.Bloch, after all, had been the authority on theKabbalah in the generation preceding mine, albeitan authority in Graetz's own disapproving spirit,and he was the only Jewish scholar in Germanywho ha d assembled a rich collection of kabbalisticworks an d manuscripts. Bloch received me verywarmly-as a young colleague, so to speak-say-ing: "After all, we're both meshugga." He thenshowed me his kabbalistic collection, and in thecourse of admiring the manuscripts, I remarked,rather naively: "How nice, Herr Professor, thatyou've studied all thisl" Whereupon the old gen-tleman replied: "Whatl Am I supposed to readthis rubbish tool" It was one of the great momentsof my life.


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N THOSE years the Zionists were a smallbut articulate minority in Germany.Of the Jewish population of 600,000, no fewerthan 20,000 took part in the election of delegatesto the German Zionist convention of 1920, a figurewhich-considering the voting age-indicated amarked increase in the movement's influence sincethe pre-war years. The overwhelming majority ofGerman Zionists were of middle-class orientation.My own sympathies, however, lay with the radicalcircles espousing the social ideals of the buddingkibbutz movement. The anarchist element withincertain groups in Palestine came very close to myown position of that time. I can still rememberthe responsive chord struck in me by an article Iread in 1921, by a leading figure in these circleswhich defined the Zionist social ideal as "the freebanding together of anarchistic associations."(The author of this article later became one ofthe most influential would-be Stalinists, havingmolted in pure Marxist fashion.)In any case, it is safe to say that the over-whelming majority of those who went to EretzYisrael from Germany in the early 20's were moti-vated by moral rather than political considera-tions. Emigration was a decision against a life thatwa s perceived as a dishonest and frequently undig-nified game of hide-and-seek. It was a decision infavor of a new beginning which, whether moti-vated by religious or secular considerations, hadmore to do with social ethics than with politics,strange though that may seem today. In those dayswe did not know, of course, that Hitler was in theoffing, but we did know that, in light of the taskbefore us-the radical renewal of Judaism andJewish society-Germany was a vacuum in whichwe would choke. This is what drove people likeme and my friends to Altneuland.*Before I took that step there were a few inter-ludes. Under the auspices of the Jiidisches Volks-hochschule in Berlin, I gave a course on the "His-tory of Jewish Mysticism" in the winter of 1922which was astonishingly well attended. It was myfirst attempt to present myself as a teacher in thisfield, and I can only shudder today when I thinkback on those extremely immature lectures. Mystudents, however, included some unusual "seek-ers," like one of Berlin's best-known violin makers,who went on to become the abbott of a Buddhistmonastery and propaganda center in Ceylon.(Thirty-five years later, he sent me a comprehen-sive series of Buddhist texts and analyses in Eng-lish, assembled over a long period.)The same year I became involved in a stormypolemic against the Jewish hiking club, Blau-Weiss, which led to my friendship with ErnstSimon. We met at the end of December 1922and liked each other almost immediately. Simoncame from an even more de-Judaized home thanI, and the road he had taken was not unlikemine, although it had been determined by alto-gether different factors, specifically his experi-

ences in the German army during the war. Inthose years Simon was not only wonderful lookingbut also incredibly witty, quick on his feet, and abrilliant speaker; he had written a brilliant disser-tation on Ranke and Hegel. Without being reallyOrthodox, he had decided to live in accordancewith Jewish law. He too told me about the circlethat was then forming around the FreiesJiidischesLehrhaus in Frankfurt which had been foundedby Franz Rosenzweig.A great deal has been written about this Lehr-haus, whose leadership had been taken over, afterRosenzweig himself became incapacitated, by hisdisciple Rudolf Hallo. The true star of the enter-prise was not, as one might expect, Martin Buber,no matter how crowded his courses were at first.Rather, it was Rosenzweig's great new discovery,the chemist Eduard Strauss, whose like is less fre.quently to be found in Jewish circles than it isamong Christian revival movements. Strauss's lec-tures at his packed Bible sessions were the utter-ances of one newly awakened and moved by thespirit to speak. They can best be described, if onemay be permitted the language of Christian sects,as "pneumatic" exegeses, and to this day I do notknow whether any record was kept of them, forStrauss himself spoke quite spontaneously. His lis-teners sat as though spellbound in a magic circle.Anyone not susceptible to this kind of spellbind-ing simply stopped coming-which is what hap-pened with me. With no previous Jewish back-ground, and without any ties to Jewish tradition,Strauss was nevertheless a pure example of a Jew-ish pietist. Judaism as he saw it was a spiritualchurch, and it was precisely this aspect which Ihad not been able to stomach in his then widelyread book against Zionism, and which drove meaway from Strauss's Judaism when it was servedup to me personally.My own courses were something like the exactopposite of his. With a limited group of studentswho already had some knowledge of Hebrew, Iread important texts in the original, keeping toprecise interpretation. These were mystical, apoca-lyptic, and narrative sources-the very kind mostlikely to inspire "pneumatic" exegeses. Everymorning, for example, from eight to nine, beforethe doctor at whose place we were studying beganhis consultations, I read the Zohar's explication ofthe Book of Ruth to a group of students which in-cluded such interesting men as Erich Fromm,Ernst Simon, and Nahum Glatzer. With a fewother students I read the biblical Book of Daniel,the first apocalyptic text in Jewish literature, anda few stories by Agnon. (This gave a great deal ofpleasure both to my pupils and to Agnon himself,fo r in those days he was not yet used to having hiswork read in schools.)Besides the Jewish Lehrhaus there was another

*The reference is to Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902),a utopian novel in which the author delineates the creationby the Jews of a model society in the Holy Land.-ED.


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remarkable institution which created a stir amongyoung academicians in those days. This was the"torapeutic" sanatorium, as the wags called it, lo-cated in Heidelberg where the strictly Orthodoxpsychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann (a cousin ofMoses Marx and Esther Agnon) was attemptingto combine Torah and Freudian therapy. Some ofmy best students and acquaintances from Zionistyouth groups, such as Ernst Simon, Fromm, andLeo L6wenthal, were being treated at this sanato-rium on an outpatient basis. All of them, with theexception of one, had their Orthodox Judaism an-alyzed away. When I next saw Erich Fromm,Frieda Reichmann's most famous analysand andmy Zohar pupil, in Berlin about four years later,he had become an enthusiastic Trotskyite andpitied me for what he called my petty-bourgeoisprovincialism.

At this time Agnon was living outside Frankfurtat Homburg vor der H6he, a place that attractedhim not only for its scenic beauty but also, as heliked to claim, because of the old Hebrew bookswhich had been published there over 200 yearsearlier. In fact, Homburg was one of the great cen-ters of Hebrew literature. Thanks to the inflation,living in Germany was extremely cheap for peoplewho were paid in foreign currency, so that many ofthe most important Jewish writers, poets, andthinkers had congregated there. There was ChaimNachman Bialik, for example, indisputably thebrightest star of Hebrew poetry and a true geniusof conversation, as well as Ahad Ha'am and NathanBirnbaum, around whom there gathered some ofthe outstanding minds of Russian Jewry. Such anillustrious group could hardly have been foundoutside of Russia or-later-of Israel.

Agnon often came in to Frankfurt, where themain second-hand Hebrew book dealers were lo-cated, and just as often I would go out to Hom-burg on the Number 24 streetcar which travels thesame route to this day. Agnon introduced me toall these people, and Bialik accorded me a veryfriendly reception. A German Jew who couldspeak Hebrew and read kabbalistic books-Bialikhad never encountered anything like it, and hemaintained his friendly interest in me up until hisdeath. Agnon frequently took me along on hiswalks with Bialik, and their conversations werememorable (the members of this circle spoke He-brew almost exclusively). Agnon, who alwayspronounced my name in the Galician manner,used to say: "Schulem, don't forget to write downwhat you hear in your notebook." Well, I hadopen ears but no notebook, and didn't write any-thing down.

FTER I had put my Berlin affairs inOrder, I arranged a joint passagefrom Trieste with a very knowledgeable, some-what younger member of the Frankfurt circle.This was the now famous medieval scholar Fritz(Shlomo Dov) Goitein, the scion of a distin-

guished Moravian-Hungarian family of rabbiswith whom I had stayed on my earlier visits toFrankfurt and with whom I got along very well.He had had an excellent Jewish education-his fa-ther had been a rural rabbi in a Lower Fran-conian district-and had just taken his doctorateunder the direction of Joseph Horovitz, a first-rateArabist. Goitein was a rare blend of the artistic-even the poetic-and the scholarly. A born school-master, he was immediately recognized as such bythe director of the Haifa secondary school, one ofthe most highly regarded pedagogical institutionsin the country, when the latter came to Germanyin 1922 to recruit qualified teachers for his school.He gave Goitein a firm contract for the fall of1923, by which time he would have received hisdoctorate, and also interviewed me for a possibleteaching position in mathematics. But he and I, asthe expression goes, were just not on the samewavelength.

In those days, it was by no means a simple mat-ter to secure an immigration visa to Palestine. TheBritish mandatory government, which operatedvery timidly, gave the Zionist Organization a fixedannual number of "certificates," whose recipientsthen got a visa from the British consul. Since thesecertificates, understandably enough, were given al-most exclusively to halutzim who were going towork in the agricultural settlements, to avoid cut-ting down on the number of such immigrants asfar as possible, quite a few people procured ficti-tious (or, in Goitein's case, genuine) offers of em-ployment. On the basis of these offers, they wouldthen receive visas as specialists outside the quota.(There were also capitalist visas for persons withsufficient money who were interested in invest-ment possibilities, but people like us did not fallinto that category.)

Thus, the philosopher Hugo Bergmann, thenthe director of the Jewish National Library of Je-rusalem (which was to serve as the library of theplanned, though as yet nonexistent, Hebrew Uni-versity), gave me a fictitious appointment as headof the library's Hebrew section. This had been ar-ranged by my fiancee Escha, who had gone over asthe equally fictitious fiancee of Abba Khoushi,later the mayor of Haifa. Escha and I had decidedto get married in Eretz Yisrael.

Hugo Bergmann had met both of us in Berne inMarch of 1919, and we had been mutually im -pressed with one another. I had not particularlyliked his essays in Der Jude or his writings in theBuber spirit, but I was surprised to find him to-tally devoid of sentimentality, open to all intellec-tual and social matters, and inclining to a view ofZionism that was closely akin to my own. When Iwrote him early in 1923 about my intention ofcoming over, he sent me a very encouraging re-sponse, and Escha did the rest.

In Berlin I informed my father that I plannedto emigrate at the beginning of September andthat this move would dispose of the chimera of my


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academic future in Germany. All my father saidwas: "M y son, I assume you realize that you can-not expect any financial support for your un-dertaking from me." I replied that I fully realizedthis, and we did not discuss the subject further.But he did send over the shipping clerk from ourprint shop to help me pack my library, which al-ready consisted of 2,000 volumes and was shippedby freighter via Hamburg. For reasons never quiteclear to me, I had to send customs a typewrittenlist of my books, and I still have a copy of it.

IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1923 Goitein and Imet in Trieste. At that time there wereno boats sailing directly to Palestine. The LloydTriestino line sent ships only as far as Alexandria,and from there, those who did not want to takethe railroad via El Arish and Gaza (built by theBritish during the war), took a small coastalsteamer. This boat called at the various Levantineports, including Jaffa, where Escha was waiting forme at the harbor.I arrived in Jerusalem on September 30 and waspromptly faced with a far-reaching decision, forwithin a short time I was offered tw o positions.The mathematician of the teachers' college, a Dr.Chermoni, had just received a scholarship for ad-vanced study abroad and an immediate replace-ment was needed. Dr. Lurie, the head of the He-brew school system in the Jerusalem Zionist Exec-utive, wanted to know whether I had really stud-ied mathematics, could present a diploma or itsequivalent, and would be able to teach mathemat-ics in Hebrew. I could answer yes to all these ques-tions in good conscience, and Dr. Lurie offered methe job, provided I could start in a week. "Youwould be entitled to a salary of fifteen pounds amonth," he told me, "but of course we cannot payyou, because, as you know, the Zionist Executivehas no money." Instead of wages, I, like all otherteachers and officials during that period, would re-ceive a credit voucher for a consumer cooperativewhere I could get all the food I needed. In thosedays salaries were paid seven months late and itnever occurred to anyone to go on strike. Everyoneknew that the Zionists had no money, and if theydid, they needed it for purposes of settlement. Ipromised to think it over.At the same time Hugo Bergmann, who had cer-tified the earlier, fictitious job for me, now offeredme a real one as librarian of the Hebrew sectionof the National Library. "You're just what weneed," he told me. "You know everything aboutHebrew books, you're a disciplined person, andyou're knowledgeable in Jewish matters. I canoffer you ten pounds a month, which of coursewon't be paid . . ." (and so on, as above). Berg-mann told me I could start right away. The work-ing hours were from seven-thirty in the morningto two in the afternoon, which would leave metime for my kabbalistic studies. "I'll write the Zi-

onist Executive and tell them to put you on thepayroll," he concluded. "The Executive never an-swers mail, so everything will be all right."I weighed the tw o proposals; teacher of mathe-matics or librarian for Hebrew literature? Eschaand I wanted to get married, and she was earningsix pounds a month-a livable salary at the time.As a teacher I would have papers to grade in theafternoon, and who could say whether the stu-dents might not laugh at my Berlin-accented He-brew? (The Russian accent was the predominantone in Jerusalem during those years.) In the li-brary, on the other hand, I would be dealing withbooks all day, and I was interested in almost every-thing about them; then, too, I would have my af-ternoons and evenings free for my own work. Soin the end I chose the position that paid less,which meant the end of my mathematics, though Ikept my mathematical books on my shelves for afew more years.

Bergmann did write that letter to the ZionistExecutive, and-wonder of wondersl-a reply ac-tually came three days later. "Please dismiss Dr.Scholem immediately," it said. "Are you not awareof the fact that the Zionist Executive has nomoney to pay an additional librarian?" Bergmannshowed me the letter. "Nu?" said I. "We'll writeanother letter," said he . "And in the meantime?""In the meantime, we'll pay you out of the schnor-ring fund." The schnorring fund was a supply ofcash that had been left behind as a good-willtoken by tourists from England, America, SouthAfrica, and other countries with hard currencyafter Bergmann had described to them the plightof the National Library which had no budget forthe acquisition of books. Thanks to this fund, Iwas one of the few people who received their sal-ary in cash.There were other signs and wonders in the Zi-onist Executive as well, though in the Londonheadquarters rather than Jerusalem. Five monthslater a letter came from Chaim Weizmann's secre-tary for university affairs, Le o Kohn, with thegood news that the Executive had decided to ac-quire the famous library of the even more famousIslamist, Professor Ignaz Goldziher of Budapest,for a future Arabic Institute at the university.They would therefore need a librarian trained asan Arabist, and wanted Bergmann to recommendone. Bergmann showed me the letter and I in-stantly recommended my friend Baneth from Ber-lin who met all the requirements. Bergmannwrote to London, and Baneth was enthusiasticallyapproved-moreover, at a salary of 25 pounds amonth. Bergmann was jubilant: "Now we've gotthemI In Jerusalem they can't spare ten poundsfor you, and the Londoners ask whether twenty-five pounds would be enough for Banethl I'll givethem a piece of my mind and demand parity: fif-teen pounds a month for each." Thus did I cometo be legalized.In 1924 I began publishing in Hebrew, and I


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also edited the first three volumes of a quarterlyon Hebrew bibliography which was published bythe library. Since then I have written a large shareof my work in that language, which was not al-ways easy for me in the early years. Although Ihad had intensive instruction in Hebrew, I stillhad a long way to go before achieving that con-versance with Hebrew thought patterns and theimagery of the Hebrew sources which makeseffective expression possible. I would say that thenumber of German Jews of my generation whotraveled this road with some success has remainedbelow ten. But I was fortunate.

HE time of my arrival in Eretz Yisrael-the beginning of the 20's-was ahigh point in the Zionist movement. A segment of

youth I can only characterize as glowing in its ex-pectation of the great things that lay ahead hadcome to Eretz Yisrael to exert enormous efforts atfounding a Jewish society that would have a pro-ductive life of its own. Despite the shadows visiblygathering on the horizon, those were importantand wonderful years. People lived in a rather nar-row circle, for there were not yet very many Jewsin the country-when I came, for example, therewere fewer than 100,000. Ye t one felt a kind ofgreat surge emanating from these young peoplewho had made the Zionist cause their own.

What these young people possessed quite natu-rally-and it should never be forgotten that Zion-ism was essentially a youth movement-was histor-ical consciousness, something destructively lackingin the youth movements that came into being fiftyyears later, for whom indeed it even became akind of dirty idea. There was, to be sure, a dialec-tic concealed in this historical consciousness of theZionists-a consciousness which I shared with allmy heart and all my soul-a dialectic of continu-ity and revolt. But it would not have occurred toany of us to deny the history of our people oncewe had recognized or rediscovered it. Whatever wemight have been striving for now, it was in ourbones. With our return to our own history we, orat least most of us, wanted to transform it, but wedid not want to deny it. Without this religion, this"tie to the past," the enterprise was (and is) hope-less and doomed to failure from the start.

In the years ahead, other problems would cometo light: were we a sect or a vanguard? Would theJews take possession of their own history or wouldthey not? What form should their existence takein this historical environment which they hadreentered? Could their life here be established onfirm foundations without the Arabs? With theArabs? In conflict with the Arabs? On questionslike these, opinions began to diverge when I cameto Eretz Yisrael, but on the central question, therewas no dispute.My friends went to the new kibbutzim to putinto practice the socialist way of life and socialist

methods of production. Other people remained inthe cities as teachers, officials, merchants, and insome cases real-estate speculators-an almost sure-fire business venture and the inveterate subject ofstrife between the land reformers and the capital-ists in the country. Among all these sectors, therewas vital communication and also enormous hos-pitality. Everyone was always dropping in oneveryone else, and wherever you went, you founda place to sleep-it was years before I got used tothe idea of staying in a hotel occasionally. Therewas a time, quite literally, when hardly a housewas ever locked in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Whenyou went out, you left the door open and it neveroccurred to anyone that there might be a burglary.And in fact, there never was any stealing, butwhen we got home we were likely to find someoneasleep in our bed-the friend of a friend who hadbeen given our address and wanted to spend thenight.

ESCHA and I were married in November1923 and moved into two rooms in anArab house whose walls, believe it or not, were al-most four feet thick-consisting of two stone parti-tions separated by a space filled with bricks andthe like. This served as excellent insulation, keep-ing the house cool in the summer and relativelywarm in winter. There was no running water, noelectricity, and no telephone, and so we receivedno bills for such services. The water came from abig cistern. In times of drought we filled it with ahundred donkey-loads of water bought from anArab. Our house was located on the AbyssinianRoad which still looked exactly as it had duringthe Turkish period. It started at Mea She'arimand, winding around the Abyssinian church,ended at the Street of the Prophets, a wide thor-oughfare which was even paved in some placesand lined with hospitals, various Christian institu-tions, and foreign consulates. Only beyond thisstreet did the new Jewish district begin, thoughour sandy path, which was settled almost entirelyby citizens already prominent, or destined to beso, was already something like a Zionist center.(The real-estate agent was a Jew who had beenbaptized by the Christian mission.)Our house lay directly beyond the wall, still in-tact, which separated the utlra-Orthodox MeaShe'arim ("One Hundred Gates") district fromthe quarters of the not-so-pious. (Originally therehad been only four-not a hundred-gates facingin all four directions; the district had been builtin 1871 like a fortress in the middle of the rockydesert one kilometer outside the Old City of Jeru-salem.) Outside the walls of this Orthodox para-dise we lived, one might say, in almost allegoricalfashion. The National Library was at that timejust tw o minutes up the street, and two minutesdown the street was a cluster of second-handbookstores whose owners, thank God, knew littleabout the treasures they guarded, having acquired


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52/COMMENTARY MA Y 1980

them for next to nothing from the widows of de-ceased immigrants. (True, they could read, butHebrew bibliography was unknown to them.) Ifmy place of work was up the street, down thestreet was my playground.

In the years following World War I Jerusalemwas saturated with old Hebrew books the way asponge is saturated with water. Jerusalem had al-ways been the destination of Jews from all parts ofthe world: thev came there-most of them withtheir books-to pray, to study, and to die. Therehad been a terrible famine during the war years inwhich a great many people had died, but theirbooks remained, and great masses of them layaround in the Jewish district of the Old City andin the Mea She'arim quarter.Many books were being bought, but there washardly an y market for kabbalistic ones. To besure, there were still the last Kabbalists in Jerusa-lem, gathered around the venerable center of mys-tic tradition and meditative prayer that had ex-isted in the Old City for almost two centuries, butthey acknowledged only one approach to Kabba-lah as truly authentic, and they had no use forkabbalistic literature which did not conform tothis approach, let alone fo r hasidic literature,which was a kind of popular Kabbalah. Thus, Iwas one of the few buyers on this market, and if Ihad had enough money I might have cornered itentirely before other collectors began to offer com-petition. At any rate, my growing passion fo r col-lecting was developing powerfully, limited only bymy meager purse. What a great day it was for mewhen one of the noblest rabbis of Mea She'arim, aman who disdained all fanaticism, sold his marvel-ous library to provide his daughter with a decentdowry!

When I came from Germany in 1923, I broughtwith me 600 volumes in the field; since then Ihave accumulated a total of more than 7,000, andonce, in my youthful folly, I even had a negativecatalogue printed up, listing the books I didn'town. (The title of this catalogue was a biblicalquotation which in the original means "G o inpeace" [Judges 18:6] but could also be under-stood to mean "Come to Scholem." In Hebrew atitle with a dual meaning has always been prized.)Of course I did pay a certain price for my insist-ence on negotiating with the book dealers only inHebrew, for if I had spoken Yiddish with them asmy most successful competitors did (includingAgnon), I would have been able to acquire thebooks much more cheaply. I was paying for whatmight be called my Hebraistic fanaticism.

THOUGH the institution I worked inwas called the National and Univer-sity Library, the university itself was not yet inevidence, except fo r one building which was underconstruction, the Institute of Biochemistry, forwhich Chaim Weizmann, himself a biochemist,had raised the funds. A committee consisting of a

few Jerusalem notables carried on fruitless discus-sions about the coming university and its profes-sorships, but no one else in the country believedthat the project, which had been decided upon in1913, and fo r which a symbolic cornerstone hadbeen laid in 1918, would come to fruition in theforeseeable future. Nor was there an y lack of skep-tics and opponents. After all, there was already asizable Jewish academic proletariat in the countryin those days-was the number of unemployedJewish intellectuals to be augmented still furtherby opening an institution that would issue diplo-mas? Many people shuddered at the prospect. Fur-thermore, as I have already said, the Zionists hadno money, though the idea of a Hebrew Univer-sity in Jerusalem was useful for propaganda pur-poses. Suddenly, however, events took an unex-pectedly favorable turn.In the fall of 1922 Judah Magnes settled in Je-rusalem with his family. Magnes was one of theoutstanding figures of Jewish public life in theUnited States, who at forty-five already had an ex-tremely varied and dramatic career behind him.This extraordinary individual, whom I wouldcome to know for twenty-five years, was a complexand very charming personality who combined theelements of an American radical, a Zionist of theAhad Ha'am type, and a defector from Reform toConservative Judaism with the unmistakable ele-ments of a popular leader.Though at first Magnes had probably plannedto work in the socialist labor movement withinZionism, he soon began taking an interest in theprojected university, and it was evidently he whointerested the wealthy banker Felix Warburg andhis wife, both of whom respected him greatly, inthe idea of a Hebrew University when they visitedJewish Palestine in April 1924. At that time, War-burg was one of the most influential Jews inAmerica, and was concerned with Jewish interestswithout being a Zionist. When he left the countryhe gave Magnes a sealed envelope containing-though Magnes did not know it yet-a substantialcheck for the establishment of a Jewish Instituteat the university. Others followed suit, and thedream began to assume concrete form. Late in1924 the Institute was opened, and in April 1925the Hebrew University itself was inaugurated withgreat ceremony, and Magnes was named its Chan-cellor.

Lord Balfour, the author of the Balfour Decla-ration, as well as the greats of the Zionist move-ment from Weizmann and Rabbi Kook to Bialikand Ahad Ha'am, sat on the tribune of the amphi-theater which had been carved out of the rock ofMount Scopus only a short time before. I wasamong the thousands who excitedly followed thisceremony, and I can still picture Lord Balfour,old and magnificent-looking, standing against thesetting sun, delivering his eulogy of the Jewishpeople, its achievements in the past, and its hopesfor the future.


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HOW I C A M E TO THE KABBALAH/53INHE meantime, a specially appointedcommittee of Jewish scholars began asearch for the right people to grace an institutefor research into all aspects of Judaism and its his-tory. There was no thought of diplomas yet, Godforbid. Rather, the search was under way fo rscholars who would devote themselves wholeheart-

edly to these studies for their own sake and not fo rthe training of teachers, let alone rabbis. Since themost eminent scholars of the older generation,though highly sympathetic, were not willing tocome to Jerusalem for more than a semester or ayear, younger men were afforded an unprece-dented chance to help build the new institute.As the Jewish world was being scoured,Magnes's attention lit on me as well. Kabbalah? Avery peculiar subject! But wonderfully suited tothis particular institute, which was more of anacademy than anything else. Though it wouldnever occur to anyone to choose it as a branch ofstudy, the Kabbalah fitted beautifully into thegeneral scheme as a pure object of research and anarea in which, according to the general consensus,much remained to be done. And to think that thevery same young man who had really delved intothis field on his own was already living in Jerusa-lem and would not have to be paid to relocate!But how could his scholarly qualifications be as-certained? I did, of course, have three advocates

on the committee: Bialik, Martin Buber, andAron Freimann, but Bialik was, after all, a poet;Buber's name at that time was not exactly consid-ered the best of recommendations, though he couldnot very well be disregarded; and Freimann,though an important bibliographer, was neither aphilosopher nor a historian of religion.Magnes then wrote to two universally recog-nized authorities-not in Kabbalah, since therewere none, but in Jewish philosophy and Jewishstudies generally. One was Julius Guttmann, thehead of the Academy Institute in Berlin, who rec-ommended me warmly on the strength of my phil-osophical education and previous work. The otherwas Immanual L6w in Szegedin, at that time oneof the "grand old men" of the Science of Judaism.L6w was a scholar with an encyclopedic educa-tion, but his specialty was the field of botany inrabbinic literature, and he was enthusiastic aboutall studies combining Judaism and the exact sci-ences. To this day he is widely known as the au-thor of the five-volume work, The Flora of theJews; I think I am the only one who ever laughedat this strange title. L6 w wrote that I should defi-nitely be appointed. He had read my book andfound tw o excellent pages in it on the hermaphro-ditism of the palm tree in kabbalistic literature.He added that the man who had written themcould be relied upon.

Documents

18012541 Gershom Scholem How I Came to the Kabbalah