Customer Reviews

Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah and Counter History

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This is a nice biography of Gershom Scholem who virtually single-handedly transformed Kabbalah into a legitimate field of academic study. This was not an easy task. It has been hotly debated whether Scholem actually cared about Kabbalah and the Kabbalists or whether he merely treated is as an objective area of scholarly interest. Either way, he made it his life's work and was eminently successful in his endeavors. Scholem knew the great psychologist/psychiatrist Carl Jung (though strangely Jung has very little reference to Kabbalah in his voluminous works). But, Scholem, at least to some degree, seems to have absorbed some of Jungian psychology. My favorite quotation from this volume is: "For the Kabbalists, symbols are not arbitrary or subjective, but have an essential inner connection with what they symbolize. Symbols are therefore the residue of divine names in human language. The great faith the Kabbalists had in language was a result of their belief in symbols as the bridge between human and divine language. In the modern, technological world...the disappearance of public symbols has become, according to Scholem, a 'great crisis of language'" on page 125. I think this is right on the money. I think it useful (as a Knowledge Manager) to get some context or background before trying to transform mere information into actionable knowledge. A book like this can help.