Self-deception and the dark side of history: Gershom Scholem’s mythology of Counter-Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Gershom Scholem was always skeptical about the promises of Enlightenment, which did not necessarily accompany the emancipation of the Jews and all too often implied the negation of their collective identity. To counter the myth of Enlightenment that drove Jewish assimilation, he developed a counter-narrative that can be conceived of as a critical mythology. To do so, he refered to Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as different as the cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche, the Catholic kabbalist Franz Joseph Molitor, and the Neo-Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. His historiography sketches a genealogy of Jewish Enlightenment that is not driven by abstract reason, but a result of an internal dialectics of the Jewish tradtion that culminates in antinomian sabbatinism. By depicting main protagonists of this genealogy, namely Sabbatai Sevi, Jakob Frank, and Moses Dobrushka, less as heroes than as ambivalent and obscure personalities, Scholem’s narrative becomes even more complex and gives a fascinating account of how Jewish thinking can learn from Counter-Enlightenment thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Gershom Scholem
• Counter-Enlightenment
• myth
• modernity
• Sabbatianism
• nihilism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 45–6.

2 I generally follow the interpretation of David Biale, who describes Scholem’s intellectual undertaking as counter-history (see Biale, Gershom Scholem, esp. 6–8); for a conceptualization of a “work on myth” as a continuum between myth and reason and the notion of counter-myth, see Blumenberg, Work on Myth, esp. Part IV.

3 Cf. Stegmaier and Krochmalnik, Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus; Aschheim, Nietzsche und die Deutschen.

4 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 43; cf. Lazier, “Writing the Judenzarathustra.”

5 Cf. Biale, Gershom Scholem, 36ff; Engel, Gershom Scholem, 26ff.

6 Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 59.

7 Cf. Schulte, “Die Buchstaben haben … ”

8 Scholem, Briefe 1, 471. My translation. See also the long reference to Molitor in Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 285.

9 Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte, 6.

10 On this theory of tradition and Scholem’s reception of it, see Weidner, Gershom Scholem, 180ff.

11 Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte, 201.

12 Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters, 242. Cf. on Hirsch, Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition; on Scholem’s study, cf. Weidner, Gershom Scholem, 243ff.

13 Scholem, Tagebücher 1, 414.

14 Scholem, Tagebücher 2, 316.

15 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 89.

16 Scholem, “Politik der Mystik,” 1.

17 See Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 345.

18 Ibid., 346. Italics in original.

19 Cf. Zadoff, Gershom Scholem, 3ff; Weidner, Gershom Scholem, 104ff.

20 Scholem, Judaica I, 131–132. My translation.

21 Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” 85. Italics in original.

22 Ibid., 82.

23 Ibid., 84.

24 Ibid., 90.

25 Cf. Joas, Die Sakralität der Person.

26 Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” 140.

27 Ibid., 141.

28 Cf. Weidner, “The Rhetoric of Secularization.”

29 Cf. Scholem’s essay “Nihilism as a Religious Phenomenon” (1974) in Scholem, Judaica IV.

30 Engel, Gershom Scholem, 155–6.

31 Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” 126. On the historical Frank cf. Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude.

32 Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” 127.

33 Ibid., 130.

34 Scholem, Judaica III, 202.

35 Ibid., 211–12.

36 Scholem, Du Frankisme au Jacobinisme, 67.

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Notes on contributors

Daniel Weidner

Daniel Weidner is Professor for Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. He is head of the project “Walter Benjamin’s journalistic networks.” Weidner has been a visiting professor at Yale, Chicago, Stanford, and several other universities. Among his numerous publications are Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben, (Fink, 2003) and Bibel und Literatur um 1800 (Fink, 2011).