Master of Judaism's 'Secret Tradition'

...If Scholem is, in Herbert Weiner's apt phrase, the "accountant" of Kabbalah, what needs to be elucidated is the uniqueness of his relationship to Judaism's mystical wealth...

...As long as the Kabbalah remained limited to meditative speculation, it could continue to function as an "anarchic breeze" rein-vigorating Jewish theology...

...And Scholem has done precisely that, arguing that Zionism "neutralized" the Sabbatian movement's apocalyptic messianism...

...Zionists have little use for messianic visions, apocalyptic or otherwise...

...It is the virtue of Biale's book that it enables the general reader to better appreciate the nature and extent of this achievement...

...Yet Scholem stresses that the Kabbalah itself is not myth but rather "myth refracted through the prism of philosophy...

...Scholem's own anarchistic leanings are apparent in his evaluation of the Sabbatians...

...they have sought to "harness the messianic energies released at the dawn of the modern era and redirect them toward constructive purposes...

...How the dualistic conception of an evil creator God and a beneficent hidden God was transformed into the Kabbalah's "monotheistic myth" is an extremely complicated matter...

...In the Kabbalah, "mythical images become mystical symbols" that point to a divine reality...

...Moreover, is it possible to comprehend mystical phenomena from the outside, something that Kabbalists would vigorously deny...

...Whereas the Sabbatians longed to abrogate Jewish history, the Zionists have attempted to fulfill it by directing their efforts toward the practical tasks of nation-building...

...Only one more dialectical twist is required to validate modern secular Zionism's Jewish credentials—namely, to depict Zionism as a response to Sabbatianism...

...From the very beginning, Scholem maintains, Jewish mysticism possessed a powerful anarchic potential because it was harnessed to a Gnostic myth...

...This statement, as Biale demonstrates, reflects a philosophy of history that believes change—deemed necessary if peoples and traditions are to survive—comes through violent ruptures...

...This has led his most severe critic, Baruch Kurzweil, to argue that Scholem is a secular Zionist ideologue posing as an objective historian...

...It is myth that best expresses the dark side of life, i.e., man's sense of homelessness in the universe and his awareness of the reality of evil...

...It is a tribute to Scholem's remarkable interpretive ingenuity as a historian that he has been able to present these two trends, which have been so corrosive of traditional Jewish belief, as natural outgrowths of the Kabbalah...

...But when the 17th-century Sabbatian movement began directing mysticism toward messianic action, a spiritual whirlwind ensued...

...Jewish mysticism transformed Gnosticism into an orthodox myth, but the threat of its lapsing into heretical antinomianism never disappeared...

...Thus, Biale argues, Scholem affirms the existence of a mainstream history of the Jews, but believes that its "vital force . . . lies in a secret tradition...

...The author is less concerned with setting forth his subject's research on Jewish mysticism than in defining his place in the pantheon of modern Jewish thought...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" Judaism, the late Abraham Joshua Heschel once argued, is the least known of the world's great religions...

...As Scholem explains it, mysticism prevented the petrification of religious belief into empty abstraction or sterile spiritualism by "expanding the philosophical concept of monotheism to include myth...

...Through the Kabbalah these issues were repeatedly placed at the center of Jewish theological discourse...

...Suffice it to say that in appropriating Gnosticism for their own theological purposes, the mystics were playing with heretical fire: "Gnosticism . . . was prone to antinomianism and nihilism because it believed that all law originated with the evil creator God...

...From the Kabbalah to Zionism, by way of Gnosticism and the Sabbatians, Scholem's historiography is an intellectual tour de force...

...According to Biale, counter-history has become in Scholem's hands a "powerful tool of protest against both the normative orthodox tradition and the rationalist Judaism of the Enlightenment...

...It is in the context of these questions that David Biale's erudite study takes on its significance for the general reader...

...In exactly the same manner, Scholem, who rejected the bourgeois assim-ilationist milieu of his childhood in Berlin and emigrated to Palestine in 1923, views modern Zionism as a revitalizing counter-historical force that has transformed the nature of Jewish-gentile relationships and established a new secular basis for Jewish cultural expression...

...That this is so, that the Kabbalah has not remained "hidden," is due almost exclusively to the labors of one man—Gershom Scholem, emeritus professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University...

...Where other scholars have regarded them—and their doctrine of "the holiness of sin"—as demented, Scholem has seen them as agents of progress...

...Biale finds the key to Scholem's work in the concept of "counter-history," a type of revisionist historiography that, rather than uncovering new facts or propounding new theories, transvalues old ones...

...Nevertheless, they draw on messianism's eJan in calling for Jewish activism and in refusing to acquiesce to exile...

...The mystics would have appreciated that...

...Scholem is most certainly not a Kabbalist, but is he merely an objective historian...

...Scholem may not be a Kabbalist, but his studies of the Kabbalah constitute a dynamic Jewish quest for meaning...

...At the same time, Biale makes it clear that there is much more involved in Scholem's research on Jewish mysticism in its various permutations than straight academic scholarship...

...Ironically, however, the Kabbalah, Judaism's "hidden" mystical tradition, is relatively well known and has had an impact on the thinking of a number of contemporary intellectuals, including the writer Jorge Luis Borges and the literary critic Harold Bloom...

...on the contrary, beneath the surface of lawlessness, anti-nomianism and catastrophic negation, powerful constructive impulses were at work...

...it is a "conscious reinterpreta-tion of myth...

...that Scholem's research on the Kabbalah is a "grandiose and dangerous attempt to bestow on the secular interpretation of Judaism—and especially . . . Zionism—the force of continuity which is immanent to religious Judaism itself...

...There is, in short, a complete correspondence between Scholem's approach to Jewish history and his perspective on the issues affecting modern Jewish life...

...As he puts it: "The desire for total liberation which played so tragic a role in the development of Sabbatian nihilism was by no means a purely self-destructive force...

...He also has presented the fruits of that discipline—the scientific study of the Kabbalah—to a wide audience in a series of seminal works, that number among them Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, and Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah...

...That tradition, of course, is the Kabbalah, which has, in Scholem's words, repeatedly sent an "anarchic breeze" through the "well-ordered house" of establishment Judaism...

...In short, Zionism, as Scholem has interpreted it, is a "product of the Jewish tradition even as it revolts against parts of it...

...As Martin Buber remarked: "All of us have students, some of us have even created schools, but only Scholem has created a whole academic discipline...

...How has the Kabbalah—a theo-sophical system of speculation about the nature of God and His relation to the cosmos—revitalized Judaism...

...Biale rejects this claim as being exaggerated, but his book contains a mass of evidence that makes Kurzweil's thesis seem an intriguingly plausible one...

...Specifically, Scholem argues that the Sabbatians ushered in secularism and rationalism, the hallmarks of modernity, thereby decisively undermining traditional Jewish society...

...Although Biale is convinced that Scholem has indeed unraveled the mysteries of the Kabbalah, he regards Scholem's scholarly agenda as part and parcel of his more general Jewish agenda...