Although Gershom Scholem presented his life in his autobiography as a one way movement from Berlin to Jerusalem, a closer look in mainly unpublished documents reveals a different picture. Since the moment of his arrival in Palestine in 1923 and until his death in 1982, he remained in close contact to the German speaking cultural and intellectual worlds. In the 1920ies and 1930ies he contributed to the Hebrew and Jewish cultural circles in Berlin, and even after the shock of the Holocaust he gradually returned to shorter and longer visits in Germany. In the postwar Federal Republic Scholem...

The German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897-1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. During his lifetime, he published over forty volumes and close to seven hundred articles and trained at least three generations of scholars of Jewish thought, many of whom still teach in Israel, Europe, and...