Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
Schocken, 1976
Recently I’ve read works that deal with Jews and Judaism in crisis—those in the Yiddish-speaking world in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholem’s journey was from Germany to Palestine some time before the khurbn. I find the interview and essays in this volume thoroughly stimulating, provocative, and moving. To wit—-
What interested me then was to find a way to the Jewish primary sources. I was not content with reading about things. This has characterized my whole life.
There was not a single observant Jew in my family circle.
Judaism interested me very much, but not the practice of observances.
After four or five years of intensive study I found that it was possible to master Hebrew.
As you know, it isn’t popular to say that Zionism has fascists, too. But I think it does, even in Israel.
A direct nondialectical return to traditional Judaism, is impossible, historically speaking, and even I myself have not accomplished it.
It is noteworthy that the only great Hebrew writer with whom Agnon felt perfectly at ease was the poet Haim Nahman Bialik, who in this respect had the same inclination for creative anthologizing.
I wanted to learn. That is how the awakening of my Jewish interest expressed itself. I wanted to know who the Jews were. I didn’t know exactly, but neither did the Zionists.
As for the old life, notwithstanding all its past glory, there is, in our time, no way back. To the extent that Agnon’s stories and novels take place in our time, they move between these two impossibilities. Nostalgia is no solution, To be conscious of the greatness of our past is still to be far from having a key to our own problems. A key may exist somewhere, but it is not ready for use, and the locksmith who could forge a proper fit has yet to be found.
That trauma of which I have just spoken assumed in Israel the form of the slogan: Never again! We would never again live under conditions in which our existence, its affirmation or negation, is determined by others and we are the passive recipients of our fate.
It is to our interest that the great historical and moral question, the question probing the depths which this [Eichmann] trial has forced all to face—How could this happen?—that this question should retain all its weight, all its stark nakedness, all its horror.
But tradition is something else as well. There are domains of it that are hidden under the debris of centuries and lie there waiting to be discovered and turned to good use. There is such a thing as renewed contact with that which has been forgotten or has not yet come to the fore. There is such a thing as a treasure hunt within tradition, which creates a living relationship to which much of what is best in current Jewish self-awareness is indebted, even where it was—and is—accomplished outside the framework of orthodoxy.
In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahavat Yisrael: “love of the Jewish people ….” In you, dear Hannah, as is so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this…. and I regard you wholly as a daughter of our people, and as nothing else.
The list of Jewish losses to the Germans is infinitely long, a list of great and frequently astounding Jewish talents and accomplishments that were offered up to the Germans.
Jews to a great extent lost their own elite through baptism and mixed marriages.
To say that [Walter] Benjamin is a difficult author would be an understatement. His major works demand an unusual degree of concentration from the reader. His thought was greatly compressed and inexorable in the often excessive brevity of exposition.
[Benjamin] was at his most impressive when he felt the appeal to a kindred impulse or an inspiration close to his own—nowhere more so than in the cases of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka to whose world he devoted years of intense exploration, of impassioned reliving and detached rethinking.
Almost all the most important critical interpretations of Goethe were written by Jews!
The rapidly growing It-world, continually spreading itself out in the course of history, therewith also turns into the tyranny of rules and laws, against which the breakthrough of a new religion, a new dialogue, is directed in protest and in revolution.
Buber’s principal work in the grasp and interpretation of the great phenomena of Judaism concentrated on the Bible and Hasidism, which in his view coincided completely and in different forms proclaimed the same message of authentic Judaism, the realization of the genuine—maintained by him to be unmediated—relation of I and Thou in the lived movement, the relation lending life and meaning to all times and forms.
I don’t think that the Talmud or the kabbalah will provide us with the answers to the fateful questions which Zionism has posed and which we have to struggle to find the answers to.
Decisive will be the personal and most intimate factor. What matters is whether we are involved personally, whether we discover a connection transcending everything institutional, which is to say whether we discover the unity in our difference, even where this unity of feeling and hope cannot yet be formulated in adequate concepts.
No less true, however, remains the old saying that all Jews have to stand up for each other: we are all in the same boat, and the most palpable experience of even the most recent times teaches us that again and again.
There is nothing Jewish that is alien to me.
Gershom Scholem Learning the Zohar
