Mystical systems
Gershom Scholem
Direct answer
Gershom Scholem (1897 to 1982) was the German-born Israeli historian who founded the academic study of Kabbalah and wrote its first critical history from the manuscripts.
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At a glance
- Also called
- scholem major trends in jewish mysticism, gerhard scholem, scholem jewish mysticism
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Kabbalah, Zohar, Moses de León, Sabbatai Zevi
Gershom Scholem (1897 to 1982) was the German-born Israeli historian who founded the academic study of Kabbalah and wrote its first critical history from the manuscripts.
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Who was Gershom Scholem?
Before Scholem, most Jewish historians treated Kabbalah as an embarrassment, a tangle of superstition best passed over. He took the opposite view: that mysticism had been a living force in Judaism, and that it could be studied like any other body of texts. He spent sixty years reading manuscripts, dating them, establishing who wrote what, and setting the movements in order.
Much of the standard account comes from him: that the Zohar was written in thirteenth-century Spain, that Luria's teaching answered to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, that Sabbatianism grew out of Lurianic Kabbalah. The first of these has held up well and the other two are now debated. He wrote as a historian and philologist, not as a practitioner or a teacher of mystical technique.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The Tree of Life.
What sets Gershom Scholem apart
Scholem's method was to treat mystical books as documents with dates. He hunted manuscripts in the libraries of Europe, compared their wording, and refused any claim of antiquity that the language could not bear. He joined to this a large thesis: that myth, which the rabbis and philosophers had pushed out, returned to Judaism through Kabbalah and gave it vitality. He wrote in German, Hebrew and English, and kept up the work for sixty years.
- Lived: Berlin, 1897, to Jerusalem, 1982
- Emigrated: to Jerusalem in 1923
- Chair: Jewish mysticism, Hebrew University, from 1933
- Doctoral thesis: a German translation of the Bahir, with commentary
- Landmark book: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1941
- Chief reviser: Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 1988
Often mistaken for something else: Martin Buber retold Hasidic tales to convey their spirit to modern readers; Scholem, who criticised him for it, insisted on reading the mystical sources historically and in full.
The story behind Gershom Scholem
He was born Gerhard Scholem in Berlin in 1897, to an assimilated family, and taught himself Hebrew as a youth. His doctorate at Munich was on the Bahir. In 1923 he emigrated to Jerusalem, where he worked as a librarian and from 1933 held the first chair of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University. He was a close friend of the critic Walter Benjamin. From the 1980s Moshe Idel and others revised his picture, giving more weight to ecstatic practice.
Why Gershom Scholem matters
Almost every reliable statement about the history of Kabbalah goes back to his work or to arguments with it.
How to read Gershom Scholem
Readers use his name as a mark of the historical approach, and his Major Trends remains the usual first serious book on the subject.
Gershom Scholem in practice: an example
A book on Kabbalah that gives dates, names manuscripts and separates legend from record is working in the manner Scholem established.
Where readings of Gershom Scholem go wrong
He was a historian with theses of his own, and several of his larger claims are disputed by the scholars who followed him.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- gershom scholem kabbalah, scholem major trends in jewish mysticism, who was gershom scholem, gerhard scholem, scholem jewish mysticism
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Who was Gershom Scholem?
He was a historian of Jewish mysticism, born in Berlin in 1897 and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he died in 1982. He is regarded as the founder of the modern scholarly study of Kabbalah.
What is Scholem's most important book?
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941, which surveys the subject from the early chariot mystics to Hasidism. His long study of Sabbatai Zevi is often counted his greatest single work.
Was Gershom Scholem a kabbalist?
No. He studied Kabbalah as a historian and did not teach or claim to practise it. He held that it deserved to be understood accurately, whatever one made of its truth.
