Gershom Scholem and the left

Steven E. Aschheim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

What is the philosophy of history? It is the attempt to capture the flow of life in an iron box … we have been dragging too much history around with us … Here’s to life! … One doesn’t need historical materialism to justify socialism: personal experience suffices. That one cannot prove Zionism is clear to anyone who has ever felt it. Gershom Scholem, diary entry, November 1914 One could almost say that however shifting and idiosyncratic were the political postures of the formidable Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem, he was never a Marxist or conventional leftist. Yet, as his turbulent, precocious youthful diaries indicate, even that assertion does not ring entirely true. In 1914 (at the age of sixteen), already opposed to the impending war and rebelling against his bourgeois Jewish father, he announced that he had left Jewish 0rthodoxy, that he was finding his way to Martin Buber (from whom shortly thereafter he turned away), and that “I’ve also become a socialist.” Moreover, as the war unfolded, there were (fleeting) moments when, in his dramatically portentous mode he declared: “To the devil! I have developed myself into a Marxist! The other side has nothing and only Marxism guarantees enduring renewal … Two types: Revisionism and Marxism! He is a villain who does not totally, un-divided, insensibly place himself on the side of Marxism.” To be sure, this occurred in a very specific context, a function of his delight, when in June 1915 the revisionist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein - “the most honorable man in Juda” - turned against his own original August 1914 support for war credits. Indeed, to the qualified degree that they existed, Scholem’s Marxist sympathies were almost entirely a function of his opposition to the Great War. Thus, when on November 28, 1917, the new Soviet government issued its peace offer, Scholem wrote to his friend Werner Kraft: Something entirely new and unimaginable has appeared on the scene. You can only imagine how much I set my heart on the offer made by the Russian revolutionaries. If their efforts meet with success, the kind of blessings that will be heaped upon these men (whose best comrades in Germany sit in prison) will be simply unfathomable. I’ve never read such a humanly moving and authentic political tract as the document on the Bolshevik Revolution.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationJews and Leftist Politics
Subtitle of host publicationJudaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender
PublisherCambridge University Press
Pages233-251
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9781107256521
ISBN (Print)9781107047860
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2017.

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