Was Gershom Scholem A Kabbalist?

And what trying to answer that question can tell us about creativity within a religious tradition.

There is an anecdote a lot of people use to introduce the idea of Gershom Scholem to people and it goes like this:

R. Shaul Lieberman, about to introduce Scholem to speak at JTS, tells the crowd, “Gentlemen, nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. Here’s Gershom Scholem, who’s going to talk about the history of Jewish Mysticism”.

You get it? It’s funny because while people Rav Shaul Lieberman spent their whole lives mastering Real Things and doing Real Scholarship analyzing the intricacies of rabbinic law, talking about important stuff like cows goring cows and the degree to which Greek was spoken by the authors of the Mishnah, guys like Scholem spent their time studying nonsense like “the entirety of the Jewish mystical tradition”, which, when studied, we can now put a respectable label of “scholarship” on! It’s funny because all the people who spent their lives contemplating God and trying to articulate the numinous were just idiots wasting everyone’s time, as opposed to the rest of rabbinic Judaism! It’s funny, because some aspects of Jewish Tradition are worth taking seriously and other things are only worth taking seriously as something to gawk at, like a monkey in a zoo!

Let me say for the record, nothing against Rabbinic Judaism or cows goring cows. I hope that’s obvious, especially if you know me. Just pointing out the glass house from which that stone was lobbed.

I hate that anecdote. That anecdote sucks. It presents Scholem through the lens of everything he fought against, as a historian of “nonsense” rather than the first person from the academy to look at the phenomenon of Kabbalah¹ in Jewish tradition and go “hm, maybe this isn’t just nonsense we can dismiss or sweep under the rug. Maybe this is also a valid mode of expression in Jewish tradition that we ought to study on its own terms.” Scholem was not “studying nonsense” as much as he was arguing against dismissing the thought and expression of generations of Jews as nonsense.

There’s a much better anecdote to introduce Scholem with, from the book “Nine and Half Mystics” by Herbert Weiner, a guy who got into kabbalah and wrote a book talking to experts in the field and kabbalists about it. It’s great. You should read it. But he got to talk one on one with Scholem, who told him this:

Now that’s better.
“What might I become if I actually read the books?”

That sums up the guy better than anything. Someone who heard an authority figure refer to a whole shelf of books, a whole genre, a whole living tradition, as “nonsense” without even reading them, and went “I bet they’re wrong, and I’ll do the work to prove it”.

Gershom Scholem is one of my intellectual heroes.

But was he a kabbalist?
I say yes.
And I think showing you why I think that answer is “yes” will have some interesting implications about what scholarship, creativity, and what it means to be creative within an established tradition.
Granted, I’m not an academic and do not claim to be.
I’m just a fan of Torah in all of its forms.

So I’m just gonna ask some questions, and throw out some answers that make sense to me, and maybe you’ll agree with them maybe you won’t, but we’ll try to have fun.

Worse comes to worse, I’m wrong about stuff.

It’s not the end of the world.

It might even be crucial to my argument.