Why Gershom Scholem, the Great Scholar of Jewish Mysticism, Continues to Fascinate

In the past two years, four new biographies of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), the pioneering historian of the Kabbalah, have appeared in English. Born to a middle-class German-Jewish family, Scholem rebelled against his assimilated upbringing, embraced Zionism, studied Judaism and Hebrew, and in 1923 left Europe for the Land of Israel. He went on to revolutionize the study of Jewish history through his extensive analyses of mystical texts. In his review of these books, Steven Aschheim considers their subject’s complex attitudes toward Zionism and his enduring appeal: