The MagicianThere follows a very useful capsule summary of Scholem's life.
A review by Anthony Grafton
I.
When the Baal Shem Tov had to do something very hard, he went out into the woods, lit a fire, and said a prayer, and the task was done. In the next generation, when his disciple had to do a difficult thing, he also went out into the woods. He could no longer light the fire, but he said the prayer, and that was enough. The next disciple could no longer light the fire or say the prayer, but he could go into the woods, and the thing was done. But in the last generation, the rabbi sat down on his golden throne in his castle and said, "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place; but we can tell the story of how it was done."
S.Y. Agnon told this tale of traditions, colorful and multi-layered as a Russian doll, to Gershom Scholem. The real subject of the story is the slow metamorphosis of rituals and beliefs. The Baal Shem Tov and his followers were Hasidic wonder-workers in two senses. Exemplary figures in the great East European renewal of Judaism, they were also shrewd men who earned their livings by selling amulets that protected against illness and injury. As the generations passed, the rituals that they used for protection in a world of dangers turned into something else: not weapons stored for use in an armory, but treasures displayed under glass in a museum. Words with which magi had torn Promethean fire from the skies turned over time into glowing stories that could be re-told, but not re-enacted. Yet meaning somehow still resided in the commemoration, as well as in the performance, of these rituals of power.
The tale reads like a parable of Scholem's life. ...
On the collection of letters:
How, then, to tell Scholem's story, and tease out its meanings, for readers who do not know the worlds he inhabited — worlds almost as alien to the modern reader as the lost ones that Scholem explored? Anthony David Skinner has adopted a traditional, even old-fashioned solution to the problem of preserving a tradition. He has produced a biography in the form of an anthology of letters, with commentary. A knowledgeable and fluent writer, Skinner divides his subject's life into segments. His introductions to these segments show how well he understands Scholem's personal situations and intellectual enterprises. Skinner writes eloquently of what philology meant for Scholem. His translations are clear and generally accurate, and many of the letters that he has selected deal with matters of the highest interest.That's just a taste. It's a very long review and well worth reading.
Skinner's selections inform us about Scholem's early life in Berlin and allow us to follow his rebellion against his bourgeois family and his turn to Zionism. They also record, in detail, his encounters with two transforming powers: Walter Benjamin, with whom he carried on one of history's most complex, creative, and torturous friendships; and the Kabbalah, to which he devoted his lifetime of research. We watch Gerhard become Gershom. We marvel at Scholem's unwavering sense of vocation — the sense of mastery that enabled him to reject his parents' authority, and that of bourgeois culture and society, years before he had produced anything solid to show that he was more than an angry young man. Anyone interested in Scholem's contacts with American intellectual life, especially Jewish intellectual life, will learn a good deal here about his correspondence with writers, scholars, publishers, and rabbis.
For the work of a learned editor and a great university press, however, this volume is oddly unsatisfactory. It suffers, first of all, from a surprising number of technical flaws. Source indications are scarce. Skinner tells the reader when he has used an existing translation, but when he offers his own versions he does not tell the reader whether the Hebrew or German original can be found in Itta Shedletzky's edition of Scholem's correspondence, in the standard editions of his correspondence with other individuals, or only in the archives. He claims that he has "added brief footnotes wherever letters allude to obscure people, events, or literary texts" in order to guide readers unfamiliar with the submerged German-Jewish world that Scholem and his correspondents inhabited, but he shows no clear sense of what such readers are likely to know.
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Flaws like these appear in any large-scale edition or translation. More problematic are the criteria that guided Skinner's choice of letters to translate. He draws heavily on Scholem's extraordinary correspondence with his mother. Skinner's book includes not only many of Scholem's letters home, but dozens of Betty's descriptions of the difficulties, and then the horrors, of life in Nazi Berlin. These vivid letters — and Scholem's sometimes distant-sounding replies — are gripping, full of human and historical interest. Yet they shed only a limited amount of light on Scholem himself, and virtually none on the scholarly and technical work that formed the central concern of his life.
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