Here is a summary of his ambitions, as written by Cynthia Ozick. She describes the youthful Scholem as
"leaping with scholarly ferocity into the hitherto untouchable cauldron of Jewish mysticism.
It was untouchable because it was far out of the mainstream of Judaism, excluded by rabbinic consensus. Normative Judaism saw itself as given over to moral rationalism: to codes of ethics, including the primacy of charity, and a coherent set of personal and societal practices; to the illuminations of midrash, the charms of ethical lore—but mythologies and esoteric mysteries were cast out. The Zohar, a mystical treatise, was grudgingly admitted for study, but only in maturity, lest it dazzle the student into irrationality. For normative Judaism, ripe sobriety was all; or, if not all, then a significant social ideal.
"Scholem saw something else, and he saw it from an early age. Unlike Freud, who dismissed religion as illusion, Scholem more ambitiously believed it to be as crucial for the structure of the human mind as language itself. At twenty, he wrote to Escha Burchhardt (whom he later married and divorced), "Philology is truly a secret science and the only legitimate form of historical science that has existed until now. It is the greatest confirmation of my view of the central importance of Tradition, though of course in a new sense of the word." He named his idea "the philosophy of the Hebrew language" and exclaimed, prophetically, "Oh, if only someday these things could be the focus of my worthy labors!"
"Two years on, he was a doctoral student who described his dissertation as "a vast foundational philological-philosophical monograph on an early kabbalistic text from around the year 1230. . . . Nothing worthwhile that's any longer than four pages has been written about it." His work on the text, "Sefer ha-Bahir," was pioneering scholarship, but it was far more than that. In the framework of conventional Jewish historiography, it signalled a revolution. Scholem was divulging a tradition hidden underneath, and parallel to, normative Jewish religious expression. Below the ocean of interpretive commentary lay another ocean, also of interpretive commentary, but in imagistic and esoteric guise. Scholem's encyclopedic research took him through the centuries; no one before him had ever systematically ordered and investigated the manifold varieties of Jewish mysticism. The position of classical Judaism was that the essence of God is unknowable: "Thou canst not see My Face." The Kabbalists sought not only to define and characterize the Godhead—through a kind of spiritualized cosmogonic physics—but to experience it. Kabbalah had been shunned for its claims of ecstatic ascent to the hidden sublime; it had been scorned for its connection to folk religion and magic.
"Scholem was determined to uncover the more exalted strata of a suppressed tradition, partly to complete and clarify the historical record, and partly to disclose arcane and majestic imaginative constructs, themselves marvels of the human intellect. It was a kind of literary archeology."
"Scholem saw something else, and he saw it from an early age. Unlike Freud, who dismissed religion as illusion, Scholem more ambitiously believed it to be as crucial for the structure of the human mind as language itself. At twenty, he wrote to Escha Burchhardt (whom he later married and divorced), "Philology is truly a secret science and the only legitimate form of historical science that has existed until now. It is the greatest confirmation of my view of the central importance of Tradition, though of course in a new sense of the word." He named his idea "the philosophy of the Hebrew language" and exclaimed, prophetically, "Oh, if only someday these things could be the focus of my worthy labors!"
"Two years on, he was a doctoral student who described his dissertation as "a vast foundational philological-philosophical monograph on an early kabbalistic text from around the year 1230. . . . Nothing worthwhile that's any longer than four pages has been written about it." His work on the text, "Sefer ha-Bahir," was pioneering scholarship, but it was far more than that. In the framework of conventional Jewish historiography, it signalled a revolution. Scholem was divulging a tradition hidden underneath, and parallel to, normative Jewish religious expression. Below the ocean of interpretive commentary lay another ocean, also of interpretive commentary, but in imagistic and esoteric guise. Scholem's encyclopedic research took him through the centuries; no one before him had ever systematically ordered and investigated the manifold varieties of Jewish mysticism. The position of classical Judaism was that the essence of God is unknowable: "Thou canst not see My Face." The Kabbalists sought not only to define and characterize the Godhead—through a kind of spiritualized cosmogonic physics—but to experience it. Kabbalah had been shunned for its claims of ecstatic ascent to the hidden sublime; it had been scorned for its connection to folk religion and magic.
"Scholem was determined to uncover the more exalted strata of a suppressed tradition, partly to complete and clarify the historical record, and partly to disclose arcane and majestic imaginative constructs, themselves marvels of the human intellect. It was a kind of literary archeology."
We learn from his letters some domestic details. In A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 (2002) he mentions his first wife Escha, "In terms of the heart we have each other, not to mention the cats, those genuinely enchanting creatures."
They had two cats.
They had two cats.
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