Journey to the heart of the matter

Stoddard Martin admires a profoundly Jewish interrogation; David J Goldberg celebrates the lure of return Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem

Granta, £25

Reviewed by Stoddard Martin

THIS HEARTFELT book seems at first glance a mysterious hybrid. Expecting a biography of the great modern scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, one encounters also a history of the progress of Zionism from its origins in Central Europe to fruition in the state of Israel. Paralleling both is a memoir of the author, memorialising years in which he and his wife struggled to make a life in Jerusalem. The book becomes a paean to and lament for that city, a reflection on politics and on the struggle involved in trying honestly to discover what it means to be Jewish.

George Prochnik is an American scholar who has written, among other works, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World. Here, as in that book, a focal Central European writer provides entry into a condition apocalyptically affecting his era — exile in Zweig’s case, Zionism in Scholem’s.

Scholem styled himself a Zionist from early years in Berlin, but his Zion seems unfamiliar in our day. Friend to Walter Benjamin, he imagined it as a citadel of thought and values to be renovated or built anew from within. Political Zionism came later, with the eclipsing of Weizmann by Jabotinsky, the 1930s and “the horror, the horror”.

The impact of reality on the ideal is a leitmotif of Prochnik’s tale, as of Zionism, and Kabbalah, which in Scholem’s view is the mystical tradition shadowing George Prochnik: in an intense intellectual and spiritual tradition. Top right: Gershom Scholem

it. Kabbalah is not explained directly — very likely it can’t be — but in subtle ways it forms a grid on which Prochnik weaves disparate strands of his narrative. We are told of Moses de Léon, Isaac Luria, Shabbetai Zevi, Kafka and others whom Scholem saw as extricating, explicating, and/or making up this body of mystical apprehensions. We are reminded that it is a dynamic, developing discipline.

Implications emerge. Scholem’s Zion is one to which Jews must return; Kabbalah conceals answers to the mysteries of fate; individual agony — in this case, the author’s — is essential to discovery. Understanding the micro precedes comprehending the macro.

Antinomian reversal and plunges into the abyss — even shocking voltefaces such as the “false Messiah” Zevi’s embrace of Islam —may be necessary to the ultimate goal.

But a goal reached is never an end, as non-ideal aspects of return to Jerusalem show. Kabbalah is about connection and relationship, transmission and alteration of currents. Everything is absorbed in it, nothing finalised.

This book may be a struggle to read. One suspects Prochnik found it a struggle to write. “Anything less than the all-embracing might be a pretension,” Mallarmé allegedly said; “I only want what is written in blood,” proclaimed Nietzsche, “because blood turns to spirit.”

Such was the feverish conceptual milieu in which cultivated European Jews like Scholem and Benjamin grew up. Neither recoiled from the most challenging undertakings of mind, nor has Prochnik.

Excruciating quandaries of his own existence as well as ardours of his analytical sense are added to a tradition. What more can one ask of a writer?

From a work of manifold, scintillating reflections, it may seem otiose to isolate one. However, this sentence regarding an ex-German Israeli’s response to Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the “banality of evil” indicates Prochnik’s implicit revelation about Zionism and the vicissitudes of experience:

“Scholem’s lifelong immersion in the Kabbalah’s mythology had given him a vivid conception of evil as a positive presence rather than a mere deficit of the good — as a presence, moreover, that was profoundly enmeshed in the overall workings of Creation.”

A harsh truth. A brave individual who confronts it.

Stoddard Martin is a writer, critic and cultural commentator