From his perch on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) wrote pathbreaking studies of the Kabbalah and about the potent, dialectical role of messianism in the history of Judaism, from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 to the eighteenth century. He achieved international renown as a philologist of creative and bold erudition who examined both the constructive and destructive powers of myth, irrationalism, and messianic movements in the development of Judaism. Scholem was a complex intellectual, profoundly concerned about the political course of Zionism in Palestine under the British Mandate and in the State of Israel. In the 1960s, he promoted the opening a “new dialogue” between Jews and Germans based on an honest historical accounting by both sides. The strength and originality of Noam Zadoff's biography lie in his sensitive reading of the unpublished diaries and other sources in the Scholem Nachlass, and in his interweaving analysis of Scholem's complicated relationship to Zionism and return to the cultural world of Germany, a country in whose “atmosphere” he could not imagine a Jew breathing in 1946.Footnote ¹ Scholem was also a provocative figure in the discourse on the conceptualization of the history of German Jewry in the formative years of academic research on this subject after World War II.

Zadoff opens his narrative with Scholem's arrival at the age of twenty-six in Palestine in 1923, close to the time when Scholem ended Vom Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen (From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of Youth).Footnote ² He never intended to write a sequel to this memoir. He resisted a friendly plea to do so in 1977 by replying that it was “much easier … to write critically about the conditions in his youth than the difficult developments in the Land of Israel in the last fifty years.”Footnote ³

This biography challenges the perception of Scholem's life as a “one-way journey” to the Land of Israel, and in terms of a “single direction that defined his intellectual life: Zionism.”Footnote ⁴ Zadoff considers Scholem's disappointments with Zionism, going back to 1929–1931, to be a more significant experience in the course of his life than other biographical interpretations do, and he probes the source and historical circumstances of his disillusionment more thoroughly.Footnote ⁵ Scholem moved closer to the intellectual world of Germany, he contends, in the years after Israel won the Six-Day War of 1967, when he “fiercely opposed the annexation of the conquered territories” and the subsequent movement of nationalistic religious settlers, and he “distanced himself from the leaders of the country” (253). Scholem's sojourn at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 1981, he states, may be seen as “symbolizing the process of Scholem's return to the German world and to the German-Jewish dialogue after World War II [and] his departure from Jerusalem and from efforts to realize the Zionist dream, which had disappointed him for so many years” (249).

Zadoff provides substantial evidence showing that Scholem's apprehensions about the future of the Zionist project were evident as early as the 1920s, when his vision of Zion—formed in Germany in 1917–1923—encountered the social and political reality of the yishuv (the Jewish society in Palestine). Shaping his utopian expectations were the writings of Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginzberg), who envisioned Zion as the center of the Jewish world, illuminating for the Diaspora a model society of living Judaism and a flourishing Hebrew culture. In 1926, he joined a circle of intellectuals in the Brit Shalom association who supported a binational dispensation in Palestine to resolve the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs. What motivated him was the fear that the revival of Judaism and the building of a new Jewish society in the Land of Israel would be hindered by the Revisionists in the Zionist movement, who propagated an ideology of territorial nationalism and believed that a force of arms would be the only way to achieve a Jewish state. Scholem was highly engaged in the political debates in the yishuv in 1928–1930 over the relations of the Zionists with the Palestinian Arabs.

After the Arab riot of 1929, Scholem experienced an existential crisis in his relation to Zionism. The perception that the survival of the Jewish community was under threat affected Zionist attitudes toward the Arab population and the resort to armed force. When the World Zionist Congress adopted a vaguely worded resolution in 1931 defining a Jewish state and a Jewish majority in Palestine as the goals of the movement, Scholem was emotionally distressed and demoralized and saw no hope of reversing this momentous decision. His despair, Zadoff states, reflected “his acute realization that the Zionist movement had undergone a change that distanced the manner of its implementation from the utopia that had been its heritage” (57). Unlike Hans Kohn, another member of Brit Shalom who left Palestine in disillusionment in 1934, Scholem remained in the land of his choice and withdrew from political activities.Footnote ⁶ For the rest of his life, he was pessimistic about the effectiveness of dovish professors who expended time and energy to influence the thinking of politicians.Footnote ⁷ He adopted a “no-alternative Zionism” (58)—a position that enabled him to accept the end of his dream for Zion and to recognize that historical events had turned the Land of Israel into a refuge for Jews who needed a place to live.Footnote ⁸

Scholem is well-known for his harsh pronouncement in the 1960s that the dialogue between Germans and Jews in the decades before Adolf Hitler's rule had been a “myth” in the remembrance of the past and was, ”on the level of historical reality, never anything else than a fiction” for which Jews in Germany paid an exorbitant price.Footnote ⁹ Zadoff's thesis, that Scholem sought a role in the creation of a new dialogue, as well as a place and public esteem, in the German cultural world, provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at his life and to come to a new understanding of his complex personality. In a speech at the World Jewish Congress in 1966, Scholem declined to place himself within the group that did not want a relationship with the German people after the Holocaust, and he declared that it was important for “Jews, precisely as Jews, [to] speak to Germans in full consciousness of what has happened.”Footnote ¹⁰

The psychological dimension of Scholem's return to Germany could have been explored more extensively in the biography. In his youth, Scholem constructed a self-identity based on a radical disengagement from German culture. In his diary, he boastfully recorded in 1918 that the writings of Goethe did not speak to him, and that “the Jewish genius in me demarcates itself somehow from the German world. Perhaps this is the reason I've grown up so completely and entirely outside the real German cultural network.”Footnote ¹¹ Scholem conceived of Germans and Jews as separate essences, and of Germanness and Jewishness as opposing substances. He adhered to “a form of simplistic essentialism” throughout his life.Footnote ¹² With such conceptual categories, he could not appreciate the extent to which the cultural hybridity of German-Jewish intellectuals in the past was a source of their creativity. It is not clear in the biography how his self-awareness regarding the significance of his German cultural background to his identity changed.

Zadoff's thesis about what motivated Scholem to relocate the center of his intellectual life from Jerusalem to Germany at an advanced age is nevertheless persuasively argued, and the author reconstructs Scholem's path back to his native country in rich detail. His return to the German cultural world started out in Switzerland, where he participated from 1949 to 1979 in the discussions and social life of the scholars and intellectuals who attended the Eranos conferences there. Zadoff stresses the “nostalgic” value of these meetings for Scholem, who gave lectures “in his mother tongue to an audience that belonged to his native culture” (185). Here he was able “to heal the rift that had opened up in his identity [and] to create an empathic connection with an important part of his life that had grown dim after his emigration to the Land of Israel and [had] been lost to him after the Holocaust: German culture and language” (187).

Scholem sought out partners for a personal dialogue in German academic circles by publishing his oeuvre on the history of Judaism in the German language, beginning with Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. In the introduction to the German edition in 1957, he stated that “‘a Jewish author … can provide tools and materials, and perhaps the insights, that can be important for the discourse that might, perhaps, begin anew’” (208). Thereafter, he chose the German language when writing newer works on his research, as well as a publishing house in Frankfurt am Main.

In Zadoff's view, “a turning point in Scholem's entry into the consciousness of the German reading public” (214) came in 1966, with the publication of the correspondence between Walter Benjamin and his friends and the role of the two coeditors, Scholem and Theodor Adorno, in the transformation of Benjamin from a relatively unknown writer to a literary icon. Another reading of the evidence in the biography related to the discussion of Scholem and his writings in the media of West Germany points, however, to the reception of his highly acclaimed memoirs, Walter Benjamin—die Geschichte einer Freundschaft in 1975, and Von Berlin nach Jerusalem in 1977, as the time when he secured a place in the cultural world there as a chronicler of the historical past of German Jews. The story of Scholem's reception is part of the history of cultural life in West Germany in the 1970s. The lively description of the milieu of assimilated German Jews in pre-1914 Berlin, and of his awakening to Judaism and his conversion to Zionism in the memoir of his youth, captivated German readers, who were beginning to show “a fascination for things Jewish.”Footnote ¹³ As one German declared, Scholem's earlier works “‘open a window onto Judaism for us,’” and the autobiography “‘gives us the key to those worlds’” (229). In German perceptions, he was an awe-inspiring authority in matters related to Judaism and Jewish history, “‘a man who embodies the figure of Jewish history like few other’” (228), and “‘evidence of the success of the renewal of dialogue between Jews and Germans’” (210).

The way that Scholem narrated the historical past may also explain his attraction for Germans not yet drawn into a national confrontation with the “unmastered past,” which came in 1986 as a result of the acrimonious controversy over historical interpretations of the Third Reich.Footnote ¹⁴ The crimes of National Socialism are recalled in the dedication of From Berlin to Jerusalem to his brother Werner, who was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940, but in the main text he wrote very little about antisemitism and Nazi racism.Footnote ¹⁵ Scholem could never bring himself to write about the Shoah. As Zadoff observes, “there was a paradox that accompanied him all his life: he saw the Holocaust both as a historical event that must be researched and as a living mystery … whose profound essence could not be grasped” (201).

Without detracting from the merits of this biography, it may be said that Scholem's writings on the “German-Jewish dialogue” in the 1960s should have been examined more extensively, beyond the observation that he “left an opening for a new beginning” (205). Scholem had long reflected on the historical-philosophical meaning of the fate of German Jews in modern times, and, in 1955, he participated in the conference that created the Leo Baeck Institute for the purpose of promoting scholarship on the history of German Jewry.Footnote ¹⁶ He brought strong emotions to the subject. During his trips to the Federal Republic of Germany, he was often irritated by articles on the achievements of German Jews that appeared in newspapers and magazines. He detested what was, in his view, the hypocrisy and “uncritical posthumous enthusiasm for the epoch of Jewish assimilation in Germany.”Footnote ¹⁷

To enter a new dialogue, Scholem insisted that Germans and Jews alike would have to make a critical historical accounting of their behavior in the past. In his first statement on the subject in 1962, he wrote that the “complete self-abnegation” of the Jews was a “significant phenomenon” in the history of the modern relations of Germans and Jews, and the analysis of it in “adequate categories” had not yet been done.Footnote ¹⁸ Three years later, he clarified his thinking in the Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts in Israel: “It is very difficult to advance to a level on which not only a critique of the conduct of the Germans but also of that of the Jews would be possible and capable of formulation. [It is] my conviction that the liquidation of the Jewish substance by the Jews themselves must in large part be held responsible for the fact that this dialogue did not come to take place as a historical phenomenon. This liquidation certainly has deep and far-reaching reasons, only a part of which have hitherto been expressed, but the dialectical connection between this liquidation and the fate of the Jews in Germany, for good and for evil, seems evident to me.”Footnote ¹⁹

A substantial part of Scholem's address at the World Jewish Congress was, in fact, devoted to his critique of assimilated German Jews and to his dialectical interpretation. His reading of the history of German Jewry quickly reached a wider public when the text of his speech was published in the Neue Rundschau and a translation appeared in Commentary.Footnote ²⁰ Scholem contended that the willingness of the Jews to disavow Jewish nationality, the price that the Germans demanded for Emancipation, was a faulty and fateful beginning for their relations in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²¹ He characterized the assimilation of the Jews into German society in the following decades as the “sacrifice of their Jewish existence” and as “self-abnegation.”Footnote ²² There was “a sinister and dangerous dialectic” in the process of assimilation, he argued, as Germans reacted to the swiftness of this process with defensiveness and animosity and viewed the readiness of Jews “to give up their heritage” as evidence of a “lack of moral substance.” Scholem added his own moral judgement, stating that “the emotional confusion of German Jews between 1820 and 1920 is of considerable importance if one wishes to understand them as a group characterized by that ‘German-Jewishness’ many of us encountered in our own youth and which stimulated us to resistance.”Footnote ²³ Self-deception and the “illusion of being at home” in Germany, he claimed, prevented assimilated German Jews from grasping the dangerous dialectic in their situation and from heeding the warning signals in the decades before the catastrophe.Footnote ²⁴

Scholem's writings on the relations of Germans and Jews, published once again in a volume of his essays in Germany in 1970 (and in an English translation in 1976), came at a time when the study of the history of German Jewry was no longer confined to the older generation of refugees and was becoming a subject of rigorous research in academic institutions.Footnote ²⁵ He was a scholar of impressive authority and international renown, and historians doing research in the 1970s on German Jewry in the post-Emancipation decades could not ignore his paradigmatic interpretation. Historians whose study of the sources did not validate his contentions expressed their dissent in various ways. Critical of Scholem's representation of German Jewry as “the epitome of craven assimilation and submission,” Fritz Stern stated, “The term ‘German Jew,’ long since emptied of much specific historic meaning, has become synonymous with meek surrender, self-immolation, cravenness, with victims digging their own graves. This memory as the indictment of victims is a terrible simplification, unfaithful to the past.”Footnote ²⁶

Especially noteworthy, in this respect, are the reactions of Peter Gay and George Mosse, two historians of Jewish descent who, like Fritz Stern, were forced to leave Nazi Germany in their youth. In an essay of considerable length, Gay discussed the cultural activities of Jews in Wilhelmine Germany (1890–1914) and disputed Scholem's contentions without identifying him by name. “The Germanness of Jewish high culture,” he wrote, “was not craven self-denial, but a proprietary feeling for a civilization that had produced decent cosmopolitans like Schiller and Kant.”Footnote ²⁷ In the concluding paragraphs, he reproachfully contested the claim that German Jews had been blind to the portents of catastrophe.Footnote ²⁸ George Mosse heard Scholem's views during conversations at his home in Jerusalem, but he kept his “disagreement” to himself because he was “always awed by Scholem's strong personality and erudition.”Footnote ²⁹ His interest in the subject was nonetheless intense in the 1970s, especially when he discovered a nearly forgotten German-Jewish “legacy” that was based on the ideal of Bildung and had been produced from the interactions of Jews with Germans and German culture.Footnote ³⁰ At the opening of his lecture on German-Jewish dialogue at the University of Munich in February 1983, he announced that he disagreed with Scholem and wanted to add another voice to the debate by tracing and illuminating its heritage.Footnote ³¹ His lectures in Munich and shortly thereafter at the Hebrew Union College were a preliminary draft of German Jews Beyond Judaism. Mosse argued that a “true dialogue” did take place and that the redefinition of Jewish identity after the Emancipation “did not mean a rejection of that identity, as is often asserted in retrospect.”Footnote ³² As these observations suggest, Scholem's problematic interpretation of Jewish assimilation spurred both refugees from Nazi Germany to write classic historical accounts that affirmed the value of German culture in the lives and thought of German Jews.