Books by Jewish writers on Jewish topics usually carry a heavy personal subtext. Whether the author is writing about Yiddish folktales or medieval theology, he is also asking a question: what does it mean to be a Jew—for me to be a Jew? In premodern times, this would have appeared a meaningless inquiry. A Jew was a Jew because he prayed like a Jew, lived like a Jew, and lived in a community of Jews. But what if you are a rationalist, and so you don’t pray; culturally assimilated, so you don’t follow Jewish customs; and a devoted citizen of a non-Jewish country– like Germany in the 20th century or the United States today? What does being born into Judaism mean for such a person? For many modern intellectuals, a good answer has been that Jewish identity involves thinking about Jewish identity. A Jew is someone who wonders what it means to be a Jew.
The genius of George Prochnik, in his new book Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, is that he surfaces this subtext and makes it his explicit subject. The result is an immersive, passionate work that is really two books spliced together. The first is a quasi-biography of Gershom Scholem, the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose life encompassed the greatest Jewish quandaries of the twentieth century. The second is a personal memoir, in which Prochnik describes his own experience of moving from America to Israel, where he lived and raised a family for more than a decade, and then moving back again.
Sections of these two tales alternate, creating a meaningful counterpoint, for they are really variations on the same story. Prochnik loves Scholem—and this is clearly a book written out of love, not mere interest or duty—because he offers a role model for a soul in quest of an authentic way to be Jewish. “Scholem’s work effectively substituted for the Bible … I was one of those for who Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet,” Prochnik writes.
Stranger in a Strange Land is not a full biography of Scholem. It covers only the first half of a long life (he lived from 1897 to 1982), draws only on English-language sources (Scholem’s languages were German and Hebrew), and concentrates on certain themes and relationships, especially his friendship with another major Jewish thinker, Walter Benjamin. At the same time, it explores some of the dense thickets of Scholem’s thought, which took the form of commentary on the ancient tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah.
Getting to know Scholem involves a difficult feat of triangulation. To understand why he is important, you have to understand the essentials of Kabbalah, in order to make sense of his revolutionary interpretation of it. You have to be familiar with the social and political context of German Jews in the early twentieth century, where Scholem grew up in Berlin as a highly discontented member of an assimilated family. And you have to know about the history of Zionism, a movement Scholem joined as a teenager, leading him to move to Jerusalem in 1923. (A working knowledge of the writings of Walter Benjamin is also useful.)
These are all complex and controversial subjects, which helps to explain why Scholem is a figure of such fascination. Prochnik performs impressive feats of concise elucidation, taking the reader through Scholem’s life, times, and work in under 500 pages. He offers outlines of Scholem’s major books and close readings of some important essays, such as “Redemption by Sin,” in which Scholem analyzes the antinomian impulse in Jewish mysticism. Still, it is impossible to fully capture Scholem’s significance in a single book for a lay reader, and anyone who comes to Stranger in a Strange Land without some prior knowledge of Judaism and Jewish history is likely to find it challenging.
The title of Stranger in a Strange Land itself has multiple meanings. In the Bible, Moses names his son Gershom–which in Hebrew is related to the word ger, “foreigner” or “sojourner”–because “I was a stranger in a strange land.” That is, Moses was an exile from both Egypt, where he was born, and Israel, where he was destined to go. Scholem was born with the fine German name Gerhard, but when he arrived in Palestine at the age of 25, he exchanged it for Gershom. This was a standard Zionist gesture, trading in a foreign, Diasporic name for a native, Hebrew one; and the name Scholem chose suggested that his life in Germany had been a kind of exile. Yet in fact, it was Palestine that was the “strange land” for him, where he had to make a new life in a new language. What does it mean to leave home in order to go home?
This is the question at the heart of Zionism, and one of the central subjects of Prochnik’s book is what Zionism really means. Scholem was exactly the same age as the Zionist movement—the first Zionist Congress, under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, was held in Basel in 1897—and as he grew up he saw it split into several strands. There was the mainstream Zionism that wanted the gradual building of a Jewish population and institutions in Palestine; the more aggressive Revisionist Zionism that favored confrontation with the Arab population and a maximalist territorial claim; and a less worldly cultural Zionism, which saw settlement in Palestine as the key to a spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people.
Scholem was most drawn to this last definition of Zionism. As a young man, Prochnik shows, he was a kind of spiritual anarchist, against just about every organized society—a feeling heightened by the experience of living through the First World War. This meant that every concrete form of politics felt to Scholem like a letdown. What he wanted was a messianic transformation of the Jewish essence, compared to which building a Jewish state looked like a sordid compromise. In the 1930s, Scholem joined a small group of Jewish intellectuals who agitated for a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would coexist. But as Prochnik acknowledges, Scholem’s highly theoretical Zionism bore little relation to political reality.
When Prochnik himself lived in Israel, in the 1990s, his hopes for such coexistence were first raised by the Oslo Accords, then dashed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and Israel’s turn to the right. As he tells the story, personal, economic, and political motives combined to drive Prochnik’s family out of the country. Unlike Scholem, he ultimately found that the place where he was born felt more like home than the Jewish homeland–which is in part a testimony to the difference between Germany and the United States. Yet he retains a love for Jerusalem, and the book concludes with a vision of the city’s pulsating life, in which “the spell of hopelessness is broken.” This book is worthy of the rich, ambivalent, complex, and compelling stories it has to tell; more than a work of history, it is a document of the living spirit of Judaism.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2oj4cyd
Sig Nordal 