Gershom Scholem's Kabbalah and the German-Jewish Myth

The objective of this essay is to explore Gershom Scholem's intellectual appropriation of certain key elements of the German Romantic tradition in his conceptualization of the history of Jewish mysticism. I will show that Scholem is especially indebted to the Romantic concept of the "symbol" and to its powerful impulse to create "a new mythology." I will also show that Scholem developed his principle of historical interpretation about the role of the kabbalah in Jewish history within a matrix of ideas that were typical among Romantic thinkers. In conclusion, I will argue that these intellectual debts made Scholem a fascinating example of a postwar and post-Holocaust German- Jewish thinker.