Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem was born into an assimilated family in Berlin. As a student, he joined the Zionist movement and devoted himself to a complete absorption of Jewish history, religion and culture. Scholem discovered and interpreted "lost" mystical texts and overcame rationalist contempt that once eclipsed the Kabbalah, which means, "that which is received" in Hebrew. In particular, his historiography opposes that of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which had tried to present Judaism as a religion based purely on reason, free of mysticism and superstition. Before his work, only small religious fragments studied Jewish mysticism, and that study was limited to its spiritual significance rather than its history. Scholem argued that mysticism was at the center of Jewish history and nearly every scholar in the field has worked in his shadow.

In 1922, Gershom Scholem left Germany for Israel, where he would remain for the next 60 years until his passing in 1982. During his years in Israel he became head of the Department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library and Professor Emeriti at Hebrew University.