Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF JUDAISM
- PART TWO ANTISEMITISM AND THE LEFT
- PART THREE ISRAEL, ZIONISM, AND THE LEFT
- PART FOUR JEWS AND COMMUNISM
- PART FIVE GENDERED PERSPECTIVES
- PART SIX CANONICAL FIGURES
- 12 Gershom Scholem and the Left
- 13 The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer
- 14 Martin Buber between Left and Right
- PART SEVEN CASE STUDIES
- Glossary
- Index
12 - Gershom Scholem and the Left
from PART SIX - CANONICAL FIGURES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF JUDAISM
- PART TWO ANTISEMITISM AND THE LEFT
- PART THREE ISRAEL, ZIONISM, AND THE LEFT
- PART FOUR JEWS AND COMMUNISM
- PART FIVE GENDERED PERSPECTIVES
- PART SIX CANONICAL FIGURES
- 12 Gershom Scholem and the Left
- 13 The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer
- 14 Martin Buber between Left and Right
- PART SEVEN CASE STUDIES
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
What is the philosophy of history? It is the attempt to capture the flow of life in an iron box … we have been dragging too much history around with us … Here's to life! … One doesn't need historical materialism to justify socialism: personal experience suffices. That one cannot prove Zionism is clear to anyone who has ever felt it.
Gershom Scholem, diary entry, November 1914One could almost say that however shifting and idiosyncratic were the political postures of the formidable Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem, he was never a Marxist or conventional leftist. Yet, as his turbulent, precocious youthful diaries indicate, even that assertion does not ring entirely true. In 1914 (at the age of sixteen), already opposed to the impending war and rebelling against his bourgeois Jewish father, he announced that he had left Jewish 0rthodoxy, that he was finding his way to Martin Buber (from whom shortly thereafter he turned away), and that “I've also become a socialist.” Moreover, as the war unfolded, there were (fleeting) moments when, in his dramatically portentous mode he declared: “To the devil! I have developed myself into a Marxist! The other side has nothing and only Marxism guarantees enduring renewal … Two types: Revisionism and Marxism! He is a villain who does not totally, un-divided, insensibly place himself on the side of Marxism.” To be sure, this occurred in a very specific context, a function of his delight, when in June 1915 the revisionist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein – “the most honorable man in Juda” – turned against his own original August 1914 support for war credits.
Indeed, to the qualified degree that they existed, Scholem's Marxist sympathies were almost entirely a function of his opposition to the Great War. Thus, when on November 28, 1917, the new Soviet government issued its peace offer, Scholem wrote to his friend Werner Kraft:
Something entirely new and unimaginable has appeared on the scene. You can only imagine how much I set my heart on the offer made by the Russian revolutionaries. If their efforts meet with success, the kind of blessings that will be heaped upon these men (whose best comrades in Germany sit in prison) will be simply unfathomable. I've never read such a humanly moving and authentic political tract as the document on the Bolshevik Revolution.
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- Jews and Leftist PoliticsJudaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender, pp. 233 - 251Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017