Among the great innovators in Jewish thought in the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem stands on the highest level. After fifty years of scholarship, he offers a memoir that is at once a portrait of his life and the story of an intellectual odyssey. From Berlin to Jerusalem describes the life that begins in an assimilated German-Jewish family before the First World War. It is a book peopled with such notable figures as S. D. Goitein, S. Y. Agnon, Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, S. H. Bergman, Zalman Shazar, and Walter Benjamin. Scholem carries his memoir from his student days in Germany and his rediscovery of Jewish mysticism, through his decision to emigrate to Palestine and his career as one of the greatest modern Hebrew scholars.
Author
Gerhard Scholem who, after his immigration from Germany to Israel, changed his name to Gershom Scholem (Hebrew: גרשם שלום), was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern, academic study of Kabbalah, becoming the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His close friends included Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss, and selected letters from his correspondence with those philosophers have been published. Scholem is best known for his collection of lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and for his biography Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah (1973). His collected speeches and essays, published as On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1965), helped to spread knowledge of Jewish mysticism among non-Jews.
