David Biale

Gershom Scholem on nihilism and anarchism

Gershom Scholem, the pioneering historian of Jewish mysticism, was fascinated throughout his career by the mystical sources of nihilism in the Jewish tradition, sources which ultimately produced the antinomian Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in his own political philosophy, he eschewed nihilism for a more moderate religious anarchism, identifying the right-wing Revisionists with the Sabbatians. The relationship between Scholems history of the Kabbalah, his anarchistic religious philosophy and his political activism can be traced in his published writings as well as his letters and other private writings.

The Many Secularisms Within the Jewish Tradition

larized to the point where their theological origins were obscured. J. Israel devoted sections of Radical Enlightenment to enlightenment polemics against oracles and miracles, but began his account of these polemics more than a century too late, which is what allowed him to divorce them from their theological origins. What remained in his account, as in Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment,’ was the claim of a radical rupture with the past—a past associated earlier by Christians with Judaism and paganism. Pace Weber and Israel, secularization (disenchantment, enlightenment) was firstly an idea, and only secondarily an historical event, or perhaps better an idea that achieved some reality as a collectively narrated experience of modernity. Ironically, it is not the fact of ‘rupture’ but rather the continuity of this supersessionist narrative that affords the best evidence for option 3 above. This is my main criticism of the delicate balancing act attempted by Myers with his proposal for a ‘neo-secularism’ as a third way between continuity (the atavistic perspective, which views the secular as an extension of religion) and rupture (the supersessionist perspective, which views the secular as a radical break with religion). Not only have foundational narratives of secularization from Weber onward to J. Israel etc. not escaped the gravity of Christian anti-Judaism: secularization itself arguably ‘is’ just such a narrative. This is the real reason why, as Myers notes, ‘the Weberian legacy points toward... a supersessionist perspective’ (p. 265).

Ehud Luz. Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality and Jewish Identity , trans. Michael Swirsky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 350 pp.

Perhaps no subject is more actual than the relationship of Zionism and the State of Israel to the exercise of military power. Ehud Luzs passionate cri de coeur appears, at first glance, to cover much the same ground as Anita Shapiras earlier Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948: both books analyze comprehensively the way Zionist thinkers, writers, and activists struggled with the moral limitations on the use of force and violence in the acquisition of Jewish sovereignty. But Shapiras focus is more on political history, while Luz treats primarily writers and rabbis, ranging from the ultra-Orthodox pacifist Aharon Shmuel Tamares, the Labor Zionist poet Natan Alterman, the messianic Zionist Zvi Yehuda Kook, and the secular apocalyptic Uri Zvi Greenberg. Where Shapira ends her story with what she describes as the emergence of a new Israeli mentality in the wake of the 1948 war, Luz brings the debates up to virtually the present day. Shapira leaves readers—perhaps unwittingly—with the impression that the values of havlagah (self-restraint) which characterized Labor Zionism in the 1930s were largely replaced by a more ruthless ethos of retaliation: after 1948, Labor Zionism came to adopt the position of its Revisionist archrival. Yet, as Luz demonstrates, the debates of the prewar period continued, if in a new key, in the half-century after Israeli sovereignty.

Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History

Introduction 1. From Berlin to Jerusalem 2. Mysticism 3. Myth 4. Messianism 5. The Politics of Historiography 6. Theology, Language, and History Epilogue: Between Mysticism and Modernity A Birthday Letter from Gershom Scholem to Zalman Schocken Selected Bibliography Notes Index