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Gershom Scholem's Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and CommentaryAuthor(s): David BialeReviewed work(s):Source: Modern Judaism, Vol. 5, No. 1, Gershom Scholem Memorial Issue (Feb., 1985), pp. 67-93

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GERSHOM SCHOLEM'STENUNHISTORICAL APHORISMS ONKABBALAH: TEXT AND COMMENTARY*In 1958,Gershom Scholem published a series of ten aphoristic statementsentitled "Zehn unhistorische Satze iiber Kabbala."'Although later re-published in the third volume of his collected German essays, Judaica,2these aphorisms have received little or no attention in the English-read-ing world, despite their considerable interest both for Scholem's ownthought and as philosophical reflections on some fundamental issues inthe Kabbalah.3The word "unhistorical"in the title immediately suggestsScholem's intention to take off the hat of historian and philologian whichhe wore in most of his writings and to look at his material from a dif-ferent perspective. Since Scholem's primary achievements lay in thehistory and philology of the Kabbalah,his more philosophical and theo-logical reflections have often been treated as occasional pieces, peripheralto his main contribution. I have argued elsewhere that an understandingof Scholem as an historian requires an examination of these writings andattention to his place in modern Jewish thought.4From the beginning ofhis career, when he planned to write a dissertation on the Kabbalah'sphilosophy of language, he was attracted to the Kabbalistic treatment ofphilosophical and theological issues which have contemporary resonance.While it would be a mistake to assert that he imposed these modern cate-gories on his historical studies, they did influence the themes which hechose to address and in many instances dictated the language in which hecast his writing.One of the main characteristics of these aphorisms is just such aninterplay between historical theses and modern philosophical language.Scholem boldly suggests parallels between modern schools of thought

*The original plan for this essay called for publication of a translation of the Germantext of Scholem's "Zehn unhistorische Satze fiber Kabbala."Due to copyright problems, Ihave only been able to obtain permission to reprintthe original text fromJudaica (Frankfurt,1973). I thank Suhrkamp Verlag for granting me this permission. I wish to thank HaroldBloom of Yale University, Gerald Kadish, Dennis Schmidt and Lawrence Wells of the StateUniversity of New York at Binghamton and my wife Rachel Biale for critical comments onthe manuscript.67

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and the Kabbalah: dialectical materialism and the Lurianic Kabbalah,phenomenology and Moses Cordovero, Franz Kafka and the eighteenth-century Frankist,Jonas Wehle. At the end of aphorism 4, he notes: "theconception of the Kabbalists as mystical materialists with a dialecticaltendency would certainly be thoroughly unhistorical, yet anything butmeaningless." At first blush, to impose modern categories on an histori-cal subject would certainly seem unhistorical. Yet, Scholem assumes thatthe philosophical issues treated by both the Kabbalah and modern phi-losophy are universal, even as they are addressed historically in differentterms by different movements. The seemingly "unhistorical"procedureof these aphorisms is therefore philosophically meaningful: modern phi-losophy and the Kabbalah illuminate and explicate the same problemsand can therefore shed light on each other. But it is also historicallymeaningful because it allows the modern sensibility to grasp a system ofthought that appears initially alien and remote.This telescoping of historical ideas by viewing them through modernprisms is not, however, a subjectonly for "unhistorical"aphorisms. It liesat the heart of one of the classic problems of all historical work: whatchanges do ideas necessarily undergo as they are refracted through theeyes of an historian whose categoriesof thought arehistoricallydifferent?5The very ability of the historian to reconstruct the past lies in his findinga common ground or common language between himself and his sources:if the past is utterly alien, it cannot be reconstructed.Hence, the historianmust engage in a delicate balancing act between past and present, main-taining the bridge between them without collapsing one into the other.The fact that Scholem gives explicit consideration to this issue in theseaphorisms does not mean that he ignored it in his historical work. On thecontrary, one can find repeated instances where he consciously usedmodern categories to illuminate and explicate problems in the Kabbalah.Indeed, one of the keys to Scholem's success as an historian of theKabbalah was in turning an ostensibly alien system of ideas into one witha contemporary resonance and urgency. Yet, unlike Martin Buber, whoalso found striking parallels between modern thought and the Kabbalah,Scholem was largely able to maintain the distinction between them.6

That Scholem chose to express these ideas in the form of aphorismsand in language which is much more opaque than his normal Germanstyle deserves some comment. The tradition of aphoristic writing inGerman goes back to Lichtenberg in the eighteenth century and Feuer-bach in the nineteenth. But it was Nietzsche who exploited the aphoristicform as a vehicle for his attack on systematic philosophy. What betterway to destroy the idea of systems than by writing in a deliberately frag-mentary and elusive style which hid as much as it revealed? Theaphoristic style was particularly effective in conveying paradoxes, whichalso suited Nietzsche's anti-rationalist intent.

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Scholem's Unhistorical AphorismsNietzsche's influence can be detected in a variety of German writersin the twentieth century, and particularly starting in the 1920s.TheodorAdorno, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, among others, all composedsome of their best writing in aphorisms. Scholem was close to all of theseGerman Jewish thinkers, although, as is well known, was not at all sympa-thetic to their neo-Marxism. Yet, it is quite likely that his own attempt at

aphoristic writing may have owed much to their influence. In particular,Walter Benjamin's "Ten Theses on the Philosophy of History,"7writtenin 1940,must have evoked in Scholem the desire to set down some of hisideas in the same style as that adopted by his martyred friend. Althoughthe aphorisms presented below lack the literary flair of Benjamin'stheses,it seems to me that Scholem was attempting to imitate Benjamin's latework.An additional influence which Scholem suggests in the tenth Satz sthat of Franz Kafka.Scholem saw in Kafka'swritings, and particularly inhis parables, a modern form of Kabbalah.8 Like Nietzsche's aphorisms,Kafka's parables are characterized by ironic twists and reversals. The

expulsion from Paradise turns out to have been "a stroke of luck, for hadwe not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed." Bymaking daring use of counter-factual conditionals, Kafka explored al-ternative interpretations of biblical and other classical stories, a pro-cedure that might well be termed "midrashic." It was this ability toexplode the conventional reading of well-known texts and reveal theirsecrets that must have reminded Scholem of the Kabbalah and made himsee in Kafkaa kind of neo-Kabbalist.For Scholem's own purposes, the aphoristic style clearly held par-ticular attraction. Although these aphorisms are "on" or "about"(uber)Kabbalah, they are, in their own way, Kabbalistic in both style andcontent. In order to convey the parallels between the intellectual prob-lems of the modern historian and those of the Kabbalists,Scholem adoptsKabbalistic formulations which he, of course, avoided in his more histori-cal essays. The aphorism conveys a sense of mystery and impenetrability:opaqueness is almost part of its definition. The sense of secrets hiddenbehind the explicit text in an aphorism is thus reminiscent of the Kabbalahfor which truth is by nature secret(sod).Aphorisms mirror the Kabbalisticconcept of esoteric truths. That which is hidden cannot be expressedwithout altering its meaning and, therefore, the aphorism, which suggestsmore than it expresses, is a better vehicle for these reflections than directexposition. Hence, Scholem's choice of aphorisms is itself proof of therelationship between the historian of the Kabbalahand his subjectmatter.Indeed, the very number of aphorisms- ten--hints at a Kabbalistic"subtext,"for that is the number of sefirot divine emanations).9And justlike the sefirot hemselves, these aphorisms are at once discrete and seem-ingly unlinked to one another, yet, at the same time, unified by a common

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David Bialetheme which is treated in each from a different angle. That theme, towhich we have already alluded, is the fundamental tension or even para-dox of communicating a truth which is by definition secret or hidden.What is the definition of a "secret" Geheimnis)?On the one hand, it maybe something which is known but deliberately hidden, or, it may be thatwhich is essentially inaccessible (hidden by nature ratherthan by design).It is this latter sense of a secret which Scholem has in mind here. Kab-balistic truth is inaccessible because God is transcendent. Historical truthis inaccessible because the past cannot be known in the same way weknow the perceptual world. Both Kabbalist and historian face the sameproblem of how to convey a truth which is hidden.The subtle influence of the Kabbalah on Scholem as an historianbecomes particularly apparent in deciphering the language of the aphor-isms. Scholem writes in German but often thinks in the technical languageof the Kabbalah (either Hebrew or Zoharic Aramaic). Thus, a correctunderstanding of the text requires sensitivity to the Kabbalisticlanguagelurking behind it. For instance, in discussing the epistemology of theKabbalah, he uses the term Erkenntnis("knowledge"). Yet, it becomesclear in the context that he has in mind the Kabbalah'sunderstanding ofknowledge in the form of the sefirah divine emanation) called hokhmah("wisdom").One is thus faced with the problem of grasping both thephilosophical vocabulary and its Kabbalisticbackground in reading thetext. The function of the commentary to each aphorism will be in part topoint out the Kabbalistic dimension which is concealed behind the text.

SATZ 1Die Philologie einer mystischen Disziplin wie der Kabbala hat etwasIronisches an sich. Sie beschaftigt sich mit einem Nebelschleier, der alsGeschichte der mystischen Tradition das Korpus, den Raum der Sacheselbst umhangt, ein Nebel freilich, der aus ihr selber dringt.Bleibt in ihm, dem Philologen sichtbar,etwas vom Gesetz der Sacheselbst oder verschwindet gerade das Wesentliche in dieser Projektion desHistorischen? Die Ungewissheit in der Beantwortung dieser Frage gehortzur Natur der philologischen Fragestellung selbst, und so behalt dieHoffnung, von der diese Arbeit lebt, etwas Ironisches, das von ihr nichtabgelost werden kann. Aber liegt solch Element der Ironie nicht viel-mehr schon im Gegenstand dieser Kabbalaselber, und nicht nur in ihrerGeschichte?Der Kabbalistbehauptet, es gabe eine Tradition iiber die Wahrheit,die tradierbar sei. Eine ironische Behauptung, da ja die Wahrheit, umdie es hier geht, alles andere is als tradierbar. Sie kann erkannt werden,aber nicht tiberliefert werden, und gerade das in ihr, was tiberlieferbar

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Scholem's nhistorical phorismswird, enthalt sie nicht mehr. Echte Tradition bleibt verborgen; erst dieverfallende Tradition verfiillt auf einen Gegenstand und wird im Verfallerst in ihrer Grosse sichtbar.

CommentaryThe "philologist" of this aphorism is equivalent to the "historian" of amystical discipline, although Scholem often liked to call himself a philolo-gist, by which he indicated the importance of establishing the textual andlinguistic tradition of the Kabbalah as the key to its history. The problemsuggested in the aphorism is, however, common to all the historical dis-ciplines and is the question of what of the essence of the past remainsaccessible to the historian:

Does there remainfor the philologistsomethingvisible in this fog ofthe lawof the subject tselfor doesthe essentialdisappear n thispro-jectionof the historical?The uncertaintyn answeringhis question sinherent n the natureof the philologicalenterprise tself andthus thehope, from which this work draws its life, retainssomethingironicwhichcannotbe severedfrom it.

History is concerned with the sources that have been produced by thepastevent and the historian can only reach thatevent through the sources.To what extent, then, can such an indirect procedure yield knowledge ofthe truth?

But this is the very problem which also confronts the Kabbalist; the"element of irony resides rather in the subjectof this Kabbalahitself andnot only in its history." The truth of the Kabbalah is, by definition, asecret truth. It can be known, but not in the same sense that one "knows"the perceptual world. The very "hiddenness" of Kabbalistictruth, whichis an essential part of its definition, makes it impossible to transmit, forany act of transmission or communication would immediately violate itssecret character. Yet, the very word Kabbalah means tradition, or thatwhich has been handed down. The authenticity of Kabbalistic truth isbased on the claim that the Kabbalist posseses an authentic traditionwhich has been handed down to him and which reveals the secrets of theTorah.10 The Kabbalist is therefore caught in a tension between thesecret nature of his truth and his claim that he has received it by a processwhich would violate that secret: "Authentic tradition remains hidden;only the fallen tradition (verfallendeTradition) alls upon (verfilltauf) anobject and only when it is fallen (im Verfall)does its greatness becomevisible."

Yet, on a deeper level, this problem of the accessibility of the sourceof a mystical tradition lies in Kabbalistic theology itself. The Kabbalah

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David Bialeholds that the source of all creation is the hidden God, Ein-sof(the "In-finite"). The hidden God, by definition, cannot be known, yet the Kab-balah, through its theory of sefirot,attempts to comprehend something ofthis God. Thus, Kabbalistic theology is caught in the same tensionbetween the knowability and hiddenness of its subject.Scholem alludes to this last level in his metaphor of the "veil of fog"which surrounds the subjectmatter studied by the philologist. The fog ispresumably the texts which are available to the scholar, but which do notpermit actual access to the truths which they describe. But exactly thesame metaphor canbe found in that passage in the Zoharwhich describesthe first steps of creation with the Ein-sof:"'In the beginning'- when thewill of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenlysphere. Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from themystery of the Infinite, like a fog forming in the unformed (kutra' be-gulma) .. ."' In his translation of this passage into German,12 Scholemrendered the "fog" as Nebel, the same term he uses in this aphorism.Thus, the epistemological problem of both historian and Kabbalist isrepresented by the metaphor which hints at the theological problem ofknowing the hidden God.On the other hand, the problem of the historiandiffersfundamentallyfrom that of the Kabbalist.Although both confront truths which are inac-cessible to ordinary sense perception, the secrecy of Kabbalistic truth is aresult of the transcendence f God, while the historian deals with eventswhich are part of the world. Historical truth is only "secret" n the sensethat what lies beyond the temporal horizon of the historian is unknowablein the perceptual sense of the word, while Kabbalisticknowledge is secretbecause God is essentially absent.Thus, only by metaphorically conceiv-ing of the past as somehow parallel to the hiddenness of God does theanalogy between historian and Kabbalist make sense.

SATZ 2

Die Offentlichkeit der Hauptwerke der alten kabbalistischen Literaturist die wichtigste Garantie ihres Geheimnisses. Denn wir sehen nichtmehr, und wann werden wir schon angesprochen? Kein kabbalistischesWerk ist wegen seiner popularisierenden Tendenzen, wegen des an-geblich in ihm begangenen Verrats an den Geheimnissen der Tora soangegriffen worden wie das Buch 'EmekHa-Melechdes Jakob ElchananBacharach13aus Frankfurt am Main, das 1648 herauskam. Aber manOffnediesen Folianten heute, und es zeigt sich, dassunsere Wahrnehmungfur diesen Mysterienverrat geschwunden sein muss. Kaum ein unver-standlicheres Buch als dieses "KOnigstal".Haben wir es also wieder mit

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismsjener mystisch-anarchischen Politik zu tun, die die Geheimnisse durchAussprechen besser schutzt als durch Verschweigen? Und welche unteralien ausgesprochenen Welten ware wohl versunkener in ihrer ratsel-haften Aussprechlichkeit als die Welt der Lurianischen Kabbala?

CommentaryIn this aphorism, Scholem seemingly turns the conclusion of the previousaphorism on its head. Where in Aphorism 1, the greatness of a hiddentradition only becomes visible in a "fallen"or publicized state, the verypublic character of the Kabbalahin Aphorism 2 guarantees that the mys-teries will remain hidden. Yet, the paradoxical fact that publicizing ahidden tradition protects it better than hiding it must stem from the sameepistemological principle Scholem develops in Aphorism 1: since thehidden truth cannot, by definition, be expressed, the more one attempts toexpress it, the more one leads one's audience away from the truth. Here,once again, the issue concerns the meaning of a secret. The Germanword Geheimnis s related to Heim (home), suggesting that a secret is thatwhich is not public. The very act of publicizing a secret turns it intosomething it is not. Once a mystical truth is given public expression, itbecomes divorced from the original insight which gave it birth. Thereader "no longer sees" and cannot experience what the mystic himselfexperienced. In this aphorism and in the previous one, Scholem chal-lenges the claim of Martin Buber and others that the reading of mysticaltexts can cause the reader himself to have a mystical experience.14The issue of the public dissemination of Kabbalistic secrets becamean acute one in the century following the Lurianic Kabbalah. While theSpanish Kabbalahof the thirteenth century remained largely an esotericdiscipline limited to small circles of cognoscenti, he Lurianic Kabbalahwas popularized by a number of writers, among them, the author ofEmek ha-Melekh.Only today, in historical perspective, does it becomeapparent how misleading these popularizing texts are and how far fromconveying the essential truth of Luria's teaching: "But open these foliostoday, and we realize that our sense that mysteries have been betrayedmust have disappeared." But, if such texts are misleading, then the his-torian, who is both temporally and temperamentally outside the smallcircle of Kabbalisticadepts, has a paradoxical relationship to the originaltruths: he is able to leapfrog over the popularizing texts and recoverwhat contemporaries of Bacharach, who were much closer in time andspirit to Luria, could not understand. The very incomprehensibility ofsupposedly popular texts can only be detected by the historian, whilethose to whom the texts were directed lived under the "illusion" that they

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DavidBiale

comprehended them. Because of his very distance from the material, thehistorian ironically has an insight into the Kabbalah that may be close tothat of the original Kabbalists themselves.Here, too, one may discern an echo of the Kabbalah itself behind theaphorism. Luria argued that the initial step in creation was the self-con-traction of God and the creation of an empty space (halalha-panui).Thelate eighteenth-century Hasidic master, Nachman of Bratslav, suggestedthat the empty space could only be comprehended through silence.15Public treatment of these mysteries or, for thatmatter,any verbal expres-sion would therefore contradict their essence. If one accepts Nachman'smysticism of silence, then the Lurianic Kabbalahsuffered a paradoxicalfate: precisely that Kabbalistic system whose mysteries could only beapproached through silence was the subject of a public campaign. Thepopularization of this quintessentially secret doctrine succeeded to thepoint where it became virtually the sole "public" Jewish theology of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps in this spirit thatScholem concludes the aphorism with the paradoxical question: "Andwhich among all of the worlds might indeed be more submerged in itsenigmatic expressibility than the world of the Lurianic Kabbalah?"Thatthis fate of the Lurianic Kabbalah was a case of "mystical-anarchisticpolitics" may be an allusion to the nihilistic outgrowth of Luria'ssystem:the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. For, the very publiccampaign that spread Luria's teachings made possible, at least inScholem'sinterpretation, the phenomenon of a mass messianic movementwith an antinomian Kabbalistictheology.

SATZ 3

Charakter der Erkenntnis in der Kabbala:die Tora ist das Medium, indem alle Wesen erkennen. Die Symbolik des "leuchtenden Spiegels", dievon den Kabbalisten auf die Tora tibertragenwurde, ist dafiir aufschluss-reich. Die Tora ist das Medium, in dem sich die Erkenntnis spiegelt;verdunkelt, wie es das Wesen der Tradition mit sich bringt, strahlend imreinen Bezirk d-r "schriftlichen",das heisst aber unanwendbaren Lehre.Denn anwendbarwird sie nur, wo sie "mundlich",das heisst aber tradier-bar wird. Die Erkenntnis ist der Strahl, in dem die Kreatur von ihremMedium aus zu ihrer Quelle vorzudringen sucht-unabwendbar imMedium bleibend, denn noch Gott selbst ist ja Tora, und die Erkenntniskann nicht herausfuhren. Es ist etwas unendlich Trostloses um die Auf-stellung der Gegenstandslosigkeit der hochsten Erkenntnis, die auf denersten Seiten des Buches Sohargelehrt wird. Die mediale Natur der Er-kenntnis enthiillt sich in der klassischen Form der Frage: Erkenntnis alseine in Gott gegriindete Frage,die keiner Antwortentspricht. Das"Wer"

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ist das letzte Wort aller Theorie, und erstaunlich genug, dass sie so weitfuhrt, von dem "Was"hinwegzukommen, an dem ihr Anfang haftet.

CommentaryThe Kabbalisticbackground to this aphorism is perhaps more importantthan to any of the other aphorisms in the series. Many of the termsScholem uses are translations of technical Kabbalistic termsrelated to thesefirotsymbolism and can only be understood in that context. Knowledgeis represented by the sefirahhokhmahwhich is the highest sefirah hat canbe known. Beyond hokhmahies the realm of the hidden God and His will(keter).The sefirahtiferet s designated as an "illuminating mirror" (DieSymbolikdes 'leuchtendenSpiegels')which stands in the middle of thesystem and which transmits light from the sefirotabove to the sefirotbelow. In Kabbalisticsymbolism, tefiretalso stands for the written Torah,while the sefirahmalkhut,which mediates between the world of emanationand the lower worlds, is called the "oral Torah." The light from hokhmahdarkens as it emanates into the lower sefirot, rom tiferet o malkhutand,ultimately, into the lower worlds. This is what Scholem means when hewrites: "darkened, as the essence of the tradition requires, [knowledge]emanates into the pure realm of the "written,"that is, of unusable teach-ing." This "knowledge"only becomes "usable"where it is "oral,"meaningthat it can only be transmitted and understood in our world where it haspassed through the "refractingmirror,"which is the Kabbalisticdesigna-tion of malkhut.16

What, then, does Scholem mean when he says that "the Torah is themedium in which knowledge is reflected" and "knowledge is the emana-tion through which man seeks to penetrate from its medium to its source-remaining inescapably in the medium . . . ?" On the literal level, theTorah is regarded as the medium through which all knowledge fromGod is conveyed, but since God Himself remains forever hidden andinaccessible, one can never attain the source of this knowledge. Here wehave a restatement of the same issue raised in Aphorisms 1 and 2 of thehidden nature of the source of revelation. But on a symbolic, mysticallevel, the Torah is also the system of the sefirotas a whole through whichthe light from Ein-sofemanates. This system can be known, but the sourceof the emanation-the hidden God-cannot. Yet, the sefirotare not ema-nations outsideof God; they are part of God's substance. Therefore, onewho attains knowledge of the sefirot(the mystical Torah), attains directknowledge of God. The ambiguous or equivocal nature of this knowledgeis that it is both of God and not of God: it is knowledge up to the sefirahhokhmahbut not of the hidden aspect of God. He who posesses the"highest knowledge" (viz. hokhmah)seemingly possesses everything, but

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also nothing at all. Hence, Scholem'sconcluding lines to the aphorism:There is something nfinitelydespairingaboutthe lack of an objectofthishighest knowledgewhich s conveyed n the firstpagesof thebookZohar.The fundamentalnatureof this knowledge s revealedin theclassical ormof thequestion:knowledges a questionrooted n Godtowhichno answer orresponds.The "who"s the finalwordofall theory,which,surprisingly nough,leads so faraway romthe "what"o whichitsbeginning s bound.

If our earlier analysis of the relationship of historical to Kabbalisticknowledge is correct, then might this aphorism also allude to the ambigu-ous nature of the historian's quest for the whole truth?

SATZ 4

Die materialistische Sprache der Lurianischen Kabbala, besonders inihrer Deduktion des Zimzum der SelbstverschrankungGottes), legt denGedanken nahe, ob die Symbolik, die sich solcher Bildern und Redenbedient, nicht etwa auch die Sache selbst sein konnte. Solch material-istischerAspektder Kabbalawarim Grunde in dem Moment mitgegeben,als das Gesetz des lebendigen Organismus als Grundanschauung in ihreTheosophie eingefiigt wurde. Es verschlagt dabei wenig, ob man nunsagt, wir seien diesem Gesetz unterworfen, weil es das Gesetz des Lebensder Gottheit selber sei, oder ob man es nur "gleichsam" auch auf dieGottheit "iibertrigt". Der Wirkungskreis des Gesetzes umfasst eben, wieimmer man es drehen mag, alles unterschiedslos. Es lasst sich argu-mentieren, dass die Ausfuhrungen der Kabbalisten iiber den Zimzumnurdann widerspruchlos und sinnvoll sind, wenn sie von einem materiellenSubstrathandeln, sei dies nun En-sofselber, sei es sein "Licht".Die Vor-wiirfe an die haretischen Theologen der sabbatianischen Kabbala, siehatten die geistigen Mysterien materialistisch missverstanden, zeigen,wohin die Reise gehen konnte, wenn man einmal versuchte, nach derinneren Logik der Bilder zu denken. Von Anfang an ist ein dialektischesMoment in diesem Materialismus der Lehre vom Zimzumund vom Bruchder Gefasse mitgegeben. Die Vorstellung der sabbatianischen Kabbalades Nathan von Gaza,wonach in En-sofselber ein "gedankenvolles"undein "gedankenloses" Licht sich auseinandersetzen, aber ineinanderstrahlen, ist nur die radikalste Art, diesen Prozess eines dialektischenMaterialismus an Gott selber durchzuexerzieren. Die Auffassung derKabbalisten als mystische Materialisten dialektischer Tendenz warezwardurchaus unhistorisch, aber alles andere als sinnlos.

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CommentaryThe problem of this aphorism is stated at the outset: "The materialisticlanguage of the Lurianic Kabbalah, especially in its theory of tzimtzum(the self-contractionof God), raises the question of whether the symbolismwhich avails itself of such images and expressions might not also be thething itself." Does a mystical, symbolic language merely "represent" itssubject or is the language an essential part of the "thing itself?" We shallsee how Scholem returns to this issue of the theory of mystical languagein later aphorisms. The specific problem of whether the Lurianic Kab-balah should be understood literally or metaphorically plagued all thedisciples of Luria and continued to be a crucial issue in eighteenth-century Hasidic theology.17 If Luria had meant that God literally con-tracted Himself, then there would be a place where there is no God-aheretical proposition! But if Luria had meant such statements meta-phorically, the whole system loses much of its originality and meaning.Scholem points out that the problem of "materialism"(that is, of whetherstatements concerning God should be understood as pertaining literallyand physically to God), originated not with Luria, but even earlier, inthe thirteenth-century Kabbalah, when "it adopted the law of the livingorganism as a basic conception in its theosophy." This "law"must refer tothe notion that the sefirotconstitute the "body" of God. Once the Kab-balists began to use such language, they opened themselves up to thecharge that they meant the body of God not in a spiritual but a materialsense.

If one can legitimately call those Kabbalists who understood theLurianic theory of creation literally as "materialists,"then it would benecessary to extend such unhistorical language and call them additionally"dialectical materialists." If God literally absented Himself from theempty space He had created, creation would have a dialectical logic: theBecoming of the world would be the result of a movement of Beingthrough Nothing.Such thinking could lead to heretical positions as it did in the radicalthought of the Sabbatian theologians of the seventeenth century: "Theconception of the Sabbatian Kabbalah of Nathan of Gaza according towhich a light 'full of thought' and a light 'devoid of thought' confronteach other in Ein-sof tself, even as they radiate into one another, is onlythe most radical way of imparting this process of dialectical materialismto God Himself." By understanding the process of divine contractionliterally, Nathan of Gaza had to posit two kinds of light within the hiddenGod Himself: a light full of thought and a light devoid of thought.18TheEin-sofcould not contain only a light full of thought since "thought" is

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DavidBialeidentified with one of the emanated sefirot.Such a light would be limitedand would place limitations on the infinitude of the hidden God. Theconcept of a light devoid of thought was therefore necessary to preservethe unlimited characterof the Ein-sof,but Nathan understood this light asthe source of the "roots of evil" (shorsheiha-dinim).Thus, in Nathan'stheology, the Ein-sof tself is caught in a dialectical conflict between twocontradictory principles. The unknowable, hidden God loses both Hisunknowability and His inner harmony.

SATZ 5In der Auffassung der alten Kabbala uber das Verhaltnis von En-sofunddem Nichts hat sich letzten Endes dasselbe Gefiihl fur die Dialektik imSchopfungsbegriff Ausdruck geschaffen wie nachher in der Idee desZimzum.Wasbesagt denn im Grunde die Scheidung zwischenEn-sofundder ersten Sefira?Doch eben dies, dass die Wesensfulle des verborgenenGottes, die jeder Erkenntnis (auch der intuitiven) transzendent bleibt, imUrakt der Emanation, in der reinen Wendung zur SchOpfung iiberhaupt,zum Nichts wird. Das ist jenes Nichts Gottes, das in der Perspektive ihresWeges den Mystikern notwendig als die letzte Stufe des "Entwerdens"erscheinen musste. Aber hier bleibt den Kabbalisten das Bewusstseineines letzten Abgrunds, des Abgrunds im Willen, der sich als das Nichtsdarstellt. Von diesem Akt an, im Abgrund dieses Willens, ist in der Tatnun schon alles gegeben. Denn Gottes Wendung zur SchOpfung ist jaeben die Schopfung selbst, wenn sie auch uns sich nur in unendlichenAbstufungen und Prozessen darbietet. Aber in Gott ist dies alles ein ein-heitlicher Akt. In diesem Sinn steht allerdings die prinzipielle Unter-scheidung zwischen En-sof und der ersten Sefira in Verbindung zurpantheistischen Problematik: in dieser Unterscheidung wird sie weit-gehend eingeschrankt,und zwaraus dem bei Moses Cordovero besondersdeutlichen Bewusstsein heraus, dass der Ubergang von En-sofzur erstenSefira, der Urakt, einen unendlich bedeutungsvolleren Schritt darstelltals alle von da an erfolgenden Schritte zusammen. Unter diesem Gesichts-punkt darf man auch die entschiedene Ablehnung der Identifikationvon En-sofmit dem Nichts ('ajin) bei allen Kabbalisten von etwa 1530 ansehen. Hier scheint ein Gefiihl dafiir mitzuwirken, was mit dieser Thesevon der Identifikation der zwei Begriffe gefahrdet wird: ihr fehlt dasdialektische Moment im SchOpfungsbegriff.Es ist dieser Mangel an Dia-lektik, der diese These dem Pantheismus gegeniiber hilflos macht. OhneTranszendenz reicht hier das Nichts ins Etwasherab. Man konnte sagen,dass jene Kabbalistender Friihzeit, die zwischen En-sofund 'ajinnur eineDifferenz der Namen, nicht aber des Wesens statuieren wollten, damit inder Tat den ersten Akt aus dem Weltendrama gestrichen haben, der die

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismsdialektische Exposition des Ganzen enthalt. So erhielt dann jene Theorievon der Identitat ihre pantheistischeWendung: die Schopfung aus Nichtsist nur noch eine Chiffre fiir die Wesenseinheit aller Dinge mit Gott. Das"Erlebnis"konnte ja nie weiterdringen als bis zum Nichts, und aus diesemrealen Erlebnisgrund mag sich auch jene pantheistische Identifikationdes En-sof und des Nichts bei den alten Kabbalisten oft genug her-schreiben. Der Mystiker, der seine Erlebnisse undialektisch verarbeitet,muss beim Pantheismus anlangen.

CommentaryIn this aphorism, Scholem enlarges upon the dialectical logic of theKabbalah to which he alluded in Aphorism 4. The dialectics of the Kab-balah begin with the relationship between the Ein-sofand the first sefirah,frequently referred to as 'ayin(Nothingness). Scholem formulates thisfundamental relationship as follows:

the essentialplenitudeof the hiddenGod,whichremains ranscendentwith respect to all knowledge(even intuitive knowledge),becomesNothingnessn theprimalactofemanation, nactwhich saboveall thepure turningtowardcreation.This is thatNothingnessof Godwhichnecessarilyhad to seem to the mystics,fromthe basicperspectiveoftheirpath,to be the ultimatestagein the processof 'profanation'desEntwerdens).Some of the early Kabbalistssaw no essential difference between the firstsefirah sometimes also called the divine "will")and Ein-sofitself,while forthe others, the emanation of the "abyssof the will" (or Nothingness) wasin fact the first act of creation. According to traditional monotheistictheology, the world was created by God ex nihilo,meaning that God andthe world are fundamentally different. Such a theology is the very anti-thesis of pantheism. But those who conceived of God as identical toNothingness radically reinterpreted creatio ex nihilo to mean that theworld emanated directly out of God. This doctrine therefore borderedon pantheism since it held that the world shared in the divine substance.On the other hand, those who held that Nothingness was an emanation ofEin-sofand not identical with it were able to maintain the absolute tran-scendence of the hidden God by erecting a dialectical barrier betweenHim and all subsequent emanations. This second theory of the status ofthe divine Nothingness was therefore closer to the traditional antipathyto pantheism.It was this anti-pantheistic understanding of Nothingness that tookhold in the later Kabbalistic tradition and was given new expression inthe sixteenth-century. Moses Cordovero argued that all of subsequent

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emanation and creation was already contained in the movement fromEin-softo the first sefirah.He posited an infinite number of dialecticalsteps in this first movement such that the "will" of God approaches, but isnever quite identical to the Infinite. In Isaac Luria's theory later in thecentury, the hidden God must first create an empty space-a Nothing-ness-in order to make a place for the world. This was the radical theoryof tzimtzum r the self-contraction of God. Thus, centuries before Hegel'sLogik,the Kabbalists understood the importance of a dialectical logic ofcreation. It was not so much that they anticipated Hegel as that thetheological necessity of avoiding pantheism and maintaining God'stranscendence ed to dialecticalthinking:"without ranscendence,Nothing-ness extends down into Somethingness." In this way, mystical and ra-tional modes of thought converged in a remarkably similar logic.19The conclusion of the aphorism deals with the reason why the earlyKabbalistsmight have inadvertently ended up in pantheism:

'Experience'Erlebnis)as neverable to attainmore thanNothingnessandonemightwellascribe heearlyKabbalists'pantheisticdentificationofEin-sofndNothingnesso theirown realexperience.Themysticwhotreatshis experiencesundialecticallymustendup in pantheism.The mystical experiences of the early Kabbalists (of which we possesslittle direct information) could never yield knowledge of the hiddenGod, but only of a mystical Nothingness. The mystic who relies on hisexperience rather than on theoretical reflection might confuse Ein-sofwith Nothingness, a mistake that the theoretical or theosophical Kab-balist presumably would never make. On what basis Scholem believesthat experience might only attain a perception of Nothingness is unclear.But what may explain this passage is the word Scholem uses for experi-ence: Erlebnis.We have here an allusion to his youthful polemic againstMartin Buber's Erlebnismystik, hich Buber propounded until approxi-mately 1917when he began to evolve his dialogic philosophy of Ich undDu.20Buber's "mysticismof experience" led to a sense of unification withthe cosmos, which could be understood as pantheism. Scholem not onlyrejected Buber's mystical philosophy but also argued that Jewish mysti-cism was essentially different: it was not a mysticism of experience butrather a theosophy in which the individual identities of God and themystic are maintained. As opposed to Buber's mysticism, and, indeed, tomuch other historical mysticism, Scholem insisted that there is littleevidence of a pantheistic unio mystica n the Jewish sources.21The earlyconfusion of Ein-sofwith 'ayin,with its pantheistic and experiential over-tones, was soon corrected in the mainstream of the Kabbalah.

SATZ6Die Kabbalisten haben die volkstiimliche Ausbreitung tiefmystischer

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismsLehren erstrebt. Die Rechnung fiir solch verwegenes Unterfangen hatnicht auf sich warten lassen. Sie wollten eine mystische Verklarung desjudischen Volkes und des jiidischen Lebens. Die kabbalistische Folkloreist die Antwort aus dem Volk, und-wie man nicht ohne Schaudern fest-stellen muss-sie ist auch danach. Aber dass es eben zu einer Antwortuberhaupt kam, das ist doch bemerkenswert. Wie die Nature, kab-balistisch gesehen, nichts ist als der Schatten des gottlichen Namens, sokann man auch von einem Schatten des Gesetzes, den es immer langerund langer auf die Lebenshaltung des Juden wirft, sprechen. Aber diesteinerne Mauer des Gesetzes wird in der Kabbalaallmahlich transparent,ein Schimmer der von ihm umschlossenen und indizierten Wirklichkeitbricht hindurch. Diese Alchimie des Gesetzes, seine Transmutation insDurchsichtige, ist eines der tiefsten Paradoxe der Kabbala,denn was imGrunde konnte undurchsichtiger sein als dieser Schimmer, diese Aurades Symbolischen,die nun erscheint. Aber im Masse der immer steigenden,wenn auch immer unbestimmter werdenden Transparenz des Gesetzes16sen sich auch die Schatten auf, die es auf das jiidische Leben wirft. Somusste am Ende dieses Prozesses logischerweise die judische "Reform"stehen: die schattenlose, unhintergrundige, aber auch nicht mehr un-vernunftige, rein abstrakte Humanitat des Gesetzes als ein Rudimentseiner mystischen Zersetzung.

CommentaryThe historical context of this aphorism is the process by which the Kab-balah, following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, gradually becameaccepted by most Jews to the point where it substantially influenced thecourse of Jewish history. One of Scholem's most famous, if not mostcontroversial, theses was that the Lurianic Kabbalah,once popularized inthe seventeenth century, became the impetus for the Sabbatianmovementwhich, in turn, so revolutionized the Jewish world that it laid the ground-work for the secularization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22Jewish secularization meant the dissolution of the authority of Jewishlaw, represented here by Reform Judaism, which rejected the halakhah snormative and prescriptive for daily life. Scholem "logically speaking"(if not historically) claims that the roots of this abrogation of the law layin the immanent dialectic of Jewish history, and, specifically, in theKabbalah:

Just as nature, Kabbalisticallyeen, is nothing but a shadow of thedivine name,so one can alsospeakof a shadowof the law,which s castever longerover the Jews'wayof life. But in the Kabbalah,he stony

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DavidBialewallof the lawgraduallybecomes ransparent; shimmerof therealitysurrounded ndcircumscribedy it breaks hrough.... Butalongwiththis everincreasing,f alsoever more ndistincttransparencyf thelaw,the shadowswhichthe law castsoverJewish ife dissolve. The end ofthisprocessmust, ogically peaking, eJewishReform:'heshadowless,backgroundless,ut no longerirrational,purelyabstracthumanityofthe law as a remnantof itsmysticaldissolution.The Kabbalah treated the law as symbolic, just as it treated nature asa "shadowof the divine name." One must follow the law not for its own

sake or because it was commanded, but for the sake of the divine secretswhich it symbolizes. Where the rabbis had seen the law as a "hedge"protecting Jewish life (what Scholem calls here the "stony wall of thelaw"),the Kabbalists transmuted the law into transparency by renderingit symbolic. What made this procedure paradoxical is that the realitysymbolized by the law is the divine mysteries. That which is revealed bythis "alchemy of the law"is that which is most obscure and secret. Onceagain, the Kabbalistis involved in a paradox of revealing what is by de-finition hidden. If in Aphorism 2 Scholem argued that the very act ofpublicizing Kabbalistic secrets protected them, here he seems to suggestthat dissemination of the Kabbalah subverted the very legal traditionthat gave mysticism a social framework.

Although Scholem does not mention the Sabbatian movement in thispassage, he surely has it in mind when he refers to the "mysticaldissolu-tion"of the law. The logical consequence of turning the law into a symbolwas the antinomianism of the Sabbatians.From mystical antinomianism,it was but a small dialectical step to the rational antinomianism of theReformers: rationalism and irrationalism are not polar opposites but areinstead intimately interconnected. In this way, the dialectical logic of theKabbalah led to the dissolution of the very tradition of which it was anintimate part. Making a secret public transforms it into a force for de-struction.

One cannot read this aphorism without noticing the ambivalentlanguage which Scholem uses with respect to both the Kabbalah and thelaw. The popularization of Kabbalistic ideas gave birth to the demon ofSabbatianism. The Kabbalah created its opposite: Jewish Reform forwhich the symbolic irrationality of the Kabbalah was anathema. Givenhis fundamental hostility to Reform Judaism, Scholem would surelyhave to regard the Kabbalah in an ambivalent light: the Kabbalahwasultimately responsible for the sterile rationalism of the nineteenth cen-tury. At the same time, the language he applies to the law is even moreuneasy. The law is a "stony wall" which casts "ever longer" shadowsaround the life of the Jews. This language comes close to the Enlighten-ment critique of medieval Judaism as enmired in obscurantist legalism.Indeed, Scholem elsewhere asserts that the halakhah s "a well-ordered

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismshouse" in need of an "anarchicbreeze" to give it vitality.23For Scholem,the Kabbalah was this anarchic breeze and it was due to the Kabbalah thatthe Jewish legal tradition did not become a sterile fossil. As opposed tothe adherents of the Enlightenment, Scholem holds that it was the Kab-balah rather than modern rationalism that allowed light into this gloomyworld. But it was a light that, in Sabbatianism, ignited into a fire thatconsumed traditional Judaism and left in its wake the sterile rationalityof the nineteenth century.

SATZ7Als das eigentliche Ungliick der Kabbala darf man vielleicht (wie beivielen nicht nach Hause gekommenen Formen der Mystik) die Emana-tionslehre betrachten. Die Einsichten der Kabbalisten betrafen Struk-turen des Seienden. Nichts verhangnisvoller, als den Zusammenhangdieser Strukturen mit der Emanationslehre zu konfundieren. Diese Kon-fusion. pervertiert ihre aussichtsreichsten Ansatze zugunsten der be-quemsten und denkfaulsten aller Theorien. Cordovero ware als Pha-nomenologe eher nach Hause gekommen denn als Schuler Plotins. DerVersuch, das Denken der Kabbalisten ohne Benutzung der Emanations-lehre aufzubauen (und zu Ende zu denken), ware die Begleichung derSchuld, die ein echter Schuler Cordoveros auf sich zu nehmen hatte,wenn es einmal einen geben sollte. In der Form der theosophischenTopographie, die die kabbalistischen Lehren in der Literatur ange-nommen haben, bleibt ihr sachlicher Gehalt unzuganglich. Der Wider-streit des mystischen Nominalismus und der Lichtsymbolik in den kab-balistischen Schriften stammt aus dieser unausgetragenen Spannungzwischen ihren bedeutendsten Intentionen und ihrer Unfahigkeit, ihnenzu reinem Ausdruck zu verhelfen.

CommentaryThis is probably the most obscure of all the aphorisms. Scholem usesterms like "phenomenology" and "nominalism"whose meanings are lessthan clear, even in the best of circumstances. The core idea of theaphorism is that the neoplatonic theory of emanation, which is typicallyassociated with the Kabbalah, is actually misleading. The neoplatonistsasserted that the emanations were outside of the One, the source of theemanations, while in the Kabbalah, the sefirotare within God. The Kab-balah therefore attempted to describe activity within God Himself thatled to the creation of the world while neoplatonism did not account forhow the process of emanation began in the first place. Because the neo-

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platonic theory of emanation failed to confront this most difficult ofquestions, Scholem considers it "intellectually lazy."The Kabbalah, onthe other hand, attempted to reconcile the tension between the One andthe Many within the divine sphere itself. Moreover, the God of neo-platonism was utterly impersonal, while the Kabbalahsought to preserveboth the personal God of the Bible and the impersonal God of the phi-losophers by the relationship between the attributeless Ein-sofand thesefirot.24The Kabbalah was therefore led to a dialectical theology which isnotably absent in neoplatonism. As we have seen in earlier aphorisms,lack of a dialectic leads to the danger of pantheism: without a dialecticalmoment-a moment of non-Being-the One would "swallow up" theMany. Indeed, the direct connection between the One and the Many inneoplatonism would seem susceptible to the pantheistic interpretation itreceived from such medieval Jewish philosophers as Abraham ibn Ezra.The light symbolism of neoplatonism conveys this sense of a directemanation from the One to the Many and it is probably due to the factthat the Kabbalah adopted this symbolism from neoplatonism that itsemanational theory has been mistaken for that of the neoplatonists.How this distinction between neoplatonism and the Kabbalah can beconnected to twentieth-century phenomenology is unclear. Husserl'sphe-nomenology eschewed a discussion of Being or Essence in favor of indi-vidual beings or essences. Scholem claims that the Kabbalah was alsoconcerned with the "structuresof beings"(Strukturen esSeienden),a termthat he borrowed from this school of philosophy. Yet, what does it meanthat the Kabbalahwas concerned with individual essences rather than auniversal Essence? Perhaps what he has in mind is that the dialecticaltheology of the Kabbalahestablished the principle of individuation withinGod Himself, thus giving legitimacy to the essential distinctions betweenindividuals in the lower worlds. This emphasis on singular individuals,based on the distinctions between the sefirot,was perhaps the result of thedesire to avoid any pantheistic formulations. Where neoplatonism failedto solve the problem of individuation and thus was threatened by pan-theism, the Kabbalahpostulated the movement from the impersonal Oneto the many attributes of the biblical God within the divine itself.Similarly, the reference to "mystical nominalism" may be connectedto the tendency in medieval nominalism to cast doubt on universal es-sences and to emphasize instead the singularity of individual beings. Butmore importantly, the Kabbalah might be called a school of "mysticalnominalism" as a consequence of its notion that only names (or signs)signify essences although, as opposed to the philosophical nominalism ofWilliam Ockham, the Kabbalah took the divine names to be essentialattributes of God rather than merely subjective significations.25In what sense, then, might Moses Cordovero be considered a "phe-

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Scholem's nhistoricalphorismsnomenologist?" Although there are statements that look pantheistic inCordovero's Kabbalah,asJoseph Ben Shlomo has shown, Cordovero wasa fundamentally theistic thinker.26 In order to preserve God's tran-scendence, Cordovero postulated an infinity of "divine wills" (the firstsefirah)which approach the Ein-sofdialectically but never actually mergewith it. With this theory, Cordovero gave the most rigorous expressionto the dialectical relationship between the hidden God and His revealedattributes.Thus, if neoplatonism had failed to hypothesize any movementwithin the One, Cordovero searched farther within Ein-sof han any pre-vious Kabbalist for the dialectical turn from the One to the Many.

Finally, the obscure final phrase of the aphorism concerning the "ir-reconciled tension" between the "most important intentions" of the Kab-balists and their inability to bring them to pure expression" is also de-liberately evocative of phenomenology which made "intentional acts"animportant part of its thought. But what exactly Scholem may have had inmind here is unclear. In any event, the aphorism closes by pointing out afundamental tension between the Kabbalah and phenomenology. Phe-nomenology claims to be able to makecoherent and intelligible statementsabout the "structuresof beings." But the Kabbalah,as we have repeatedlyseen in these aphorisms, is trapped by the essential inexpressibility of itstruths. Perhaps the adoption of neoplatonic language to describe a the-osophy radically different from neoplatonism guaranteed that the Kab-balah would reach a linguistic dead end: it attempted to express an in-expressible truth in language that could only be misleading. If this is thecase, then perhaps neoplatonic language safeguarded its essential secrets.

SATZ 8Es gibt in der Kabbala etwas wie einen verwandelnden Blick, von demzweifelhaft bleibt, ob man ihn besser als einen magischen oder als einenutopischen Blick bezeichnen sollte. Dieser Blick enthullt alle Welten, jadas Geheimnis von En-sof selber, an dem Ort, an dem ich stehe. Manbraucht nicht uiberdas zu verhandeln, was "oben"oder "unten"ist, manbraucht nur (nur!) den Punkt zu durchschauen, wo man selber steht.Diesem verwandelnden Blick sind alle Welten, wie einer der grossenKabbalisten gesagt hat,27nichts als die "Namen, die auf dem Papier vonGottes Wesen aufgezeichnet werden".

CommentaryScholem seems to be referring here to the Kabbalah's doctrine of micro-cosm-macrocosm. All the worlds, from upper to lower, are parallel: the

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DavidBiale

sefirotare symbolically the body of God which has the same anatomy asthe human body. Thus, by examining oneself, one can arrive at the mys-teries of the divine. The "transformingview"of the Kabbalah"reveals allworlds, even the mystery of Ein-sof tself, at that place where I stand. Oneneed not argue what is 'above' and what 'below.' One need only (only!)see through one's own vantage point." From this point of view, the Kab-balah appears much closer to modern humanism as a philosophy than itdoes to traditional God-centered theology. To be sure, such a "human-istic" formulation of the Kabbalahwould have been alien to the Kabbalistsfor whom the focus was God rather than man. But it is surely a legitimate,if unhistorical, development of Kabbalisticthought: by turning Kabbal-istic images upside down, man as the image of God becomes the measureof all things.The relationship between the lower worlds and God can also beunderstood as the relationship between names (human language) and theName (divine language):28"Forthis transformingview, all worlds are ...nothing more than 'names recorded on the scroll of God's essence."TheKabbalistsregarded the name of God (or the names of God) asequivalentto God Himself. Since all worlds proceed from God, the lower worldsmay be thought of as linguistic derivations from the divine name. Therelationship between human language and divine language, which is thesubject of the next aphorism, makes it possible to comprehend the divineessence: since our language derives from God, we can grasp divine truthsby examining our own language. Otherwise, God would remain irre-trievably transcendent and unknowable.Although a "theoretical"Kabbalistwould not regard these insights ashaving "magical"properties, there is a sense in which the interconnected-ness of all worlds is "transforming."Because this world is a mirror of theworld of emanations, the actions of human beings directly influence thedivine realm. The mystical importance of human activity took on a spe-cifically messianic or utopian dimension in the Kabbalahof Isaac Luriain the sixteenth century and ultimately led to the messianic activism ofseventeenth-century Sabbatianism.Thus, the Kabbalahdeveloped a mys-tical form of utopian humanism foreshadowing dialectically the secularutopian movements of a later era.

SATZ 9

Ganzheiten sind nur okkult tradierbar. Der Name Gottes ist ansprechbar,aber nicht aussprechbar. Denn nur das Fragmentarische an ihr machtdie Sprache sprechbar. Die "wahre" Sprache kann nicht gesprochenwerden, sowenig wie das absolut Konkrete vollzogen werden kann.

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Scholem's nhistoricalphorismsCommentary

This aphorism is a commentary on the relationship between divine andhuman language alluded to in the previous passage. The divine languagewhich is also the name of God "can be pronounced but cannot be ex-pressed, for only that which is fragmentary makes language expressible.The 'true' language cannot be spoken, just as the absolutely concretecannot be realized." As Scholem puts it elsewhere, the name of God is"absolute, meaning-bestowing, but itself meaningless .. ." The name ofGod is the source of all human language, but it is not itself meaningful inthe sense that human language has meaning (that is, signifies something).The divine language only acquires meaning (becomes "expressible")as itis "translated" into human terms. But this act of translation only com-municates part of the divine truth since human language is necessarilyfragmentary or limited while God's language is infinite. Yet, becausehuman language has its source in the divine, it is not arbitrary;rather, itis the legitimate, if the only, vehicle we have for expressing ultimatetruths. Thus, the Kabbalistic attempt to transmit divine mysteries iscaught, once again, in a paradox: it uses human language to speak of thatwhich is, by definition, inexpressible. But its enterprise is not doomed,because its language is guaranteed by the divine origin of language. Be-cause language has this equivocal meaning, it is capableof communicatingthe divine truths, but not in a direct, unmediated fashion. The dialecticalrelationship between divine and human language requires that the divinetruths (which Scholem here calls Ganzheiten r "totalities")be communi-cated "in an occult fashion." Only that which is cloaked in mystery cantruly communicate a mystery; only when the linguistic form fits thetheological content can language escape its merely human limitationsand signify that which is infinite.This aphorism is directed against the existentialist theology of KarlBarth and his Jewish interpreter, Hans Joachim Schoeps. In a 1932reviewof a work by Schoeps, Scholem wrote: "The word of God in its absolutesymbolic fullness would be destructive if it were at the same time mean-ingful in an unmediated way. Nothing in historical time requires concre-tization more than the 'absolute concreteness'of the word of revelation."2The absolutely concrete word of God cannot be comprehended by humanbeings directly, as existentialists such as Barth, Schoeps and Martin Buberthought. Instead, this word must undergo a process of mediation, oftranslation into human terms, which is the historical tradition. Thus, thecommentator on the tradition rather than the ecstatic, who claims directcommunication from God, is the true homo religiosus.In this sense, thehistorian, who deals with the sources of tradition, is a secular manifesta-tion of the religious personality, for both translate the inexpressible

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DavidBialetruths of their subjects into the fragmentary language of human beings.

SATZ 10

Hundert Jahre vor Kafka schrieb in Prag Jonas Wehle30 durchs Mediumseines Schwiegersohns Low von Honigsberg) seine nie gedruckten undvon seinen frankistischen Schulern dann vorsichtig wieder eingesam-melten Briefe und Schriften. Er shrieb fur die letzten Adepten einer insHaretische umgeschlagenen Kabbala,eines nihilistischen Messianismus,der die Sprache der Aufklarung zu sprechen suchte. Er ist der erste, dersich die Frage vorgelegt (und bejaht) hat, ob das Paradies mit der Ver-treibung des Menschen nicht mehr verloren hat als der Mensch selber.Diese Seite der Sache ist bisher entschieden zu kurz gekommen. Ist esnun Sympathie der Seelen, die hundert Jahre spater Kafkaauf damit tiefkommunizierende Gedanken gebracht hat? Vielleicht weil wir nichtwissen, was mit dem Paradies geschehen ist, hat er jene Erwagungendaruber angestellt, warum das Gute "in gewissem Sinne trostlos" sei.Erwagungen, die fiirwahr einer haretischen Kabbalaentsprungen zu seinscheinen. Denn uniibertroffen hat er die Grenze zwischen Religion undNihilismus zum Ausdruck gebracht. Darum haben seine Schriften, diesakularisierte Darstellung des (ihm selber unbekannten) kabbalistischenWeltgefiihls fur manchen heutigen Leser etwas von dem strengen Glanzedes Kanonischen-des Volkommenen, das zerbricht.

CommentaryScholem's relationship to Franz Kafka as an unwitting product of a"heretical Kabbalah"deserves an essay in its own right for what it tells usabout Scholem himself. In a letter written in 1937 to Zalman Schocken inwhich he discusses his reasons for choosing to study the Kabbalah,Scholem anticipated almost verbatim what he says in this aphorism:"... many exciting thoughts had led me (in the years 1916-1918) ... tointuitive affirmationof mystical theses which walked the fine line betweenreligion and nihilism. I later (found in Kafka) the most perfect and un-surpassed expression of this fine line, an expression which, as a secularstatement of the Kabbalisticworld-feeling in a modern spirit, seemed tome to wrap Kafka'swritings in the halo of the canonical."31For Scholem,Kafkaexpressed the conflict of the secularJew still bound to his tradition:on the one hand, he believed deeply in the existence of"the Law,"but, onthe other, he regarded the Lawas fundamentally inaccessible. The notionof the hiddenness of the source of revelation was surely Kabbalistic,butwhere the Kabbalists claimed to be able to penetrate these secrets, the

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Scholem's Unhistorical Aphorismssecular Jew remained impotently paralyzed outside the first gate of theLaw. Thus, Kafkarepresented the nihilistic (or antinomian) secular con-sequence inherent in the Kabbalah,a theme which Scholem developed inhis historical studies of eighteenth-century Frankism.The radical theology of the Frankists led to speculations in which theliteral message of the Bible might be inverted altogether such as thenotion that paradise had "lost more with the expulsion of man than hadman himself." This type of inversion was already one of the character-istics of the way some of the Christian Gnostics of late antiquity read theBible, and the similarity which Scholem pointed out between the Gnosticsand the Frankists in terms of theology can therefore be found also intheir similar biblical exegesis.32But Kafka,perhaps moved by some deep"kinship of souls,"also employed such inversions in his parables on clas-sical stories. These parables may be understood as Kafka'sattempts topenetrate those religious texts by reading them, in Walter Benjamin'sexpression, "against the grain." For the secular Jew, as for the radicalKabbalist, the truth is now alien and hidden; the texts handed down bytradition do not reveal this truth if read literally. Only by reading thetexts against their literal intent can the reader reveal what is hidden.This interpretation of Kafka as a heretical neo-Kabbalist appearsfirst in letters which Scholem wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1934 inresponse to Benjamin's essay on Kafka, published in the JudischeRund-schau.33 cholem took strong exception to Benjamin's denial of the theo-logical element in Kafka,and particularly the theological problem of theinaccessible Law (halakhah)which Scholem held was the key to under-standing Kafka's Trialand the parable "Before the Law." He wrote toBenjamin: "Kafka'sworld is the world of revelation, yet from that per-spective in which revelation is reduced to its Nothingness (Nichts)."34heKabbalistic overtones to this remark are evident in the word "Nothing-ness,"the divine abyss that standsbetween the mystic and comprehensionof the hidden God. Unlike the Kabbalist who claims to be able to pene-trate,if only partially, the mysteryof the 'ayin,Kafkaremained confoundedby the utterly incomprehensible nature of revelation. Here the paradoxof comprehending the incomprehensible, which characterized the his-torical Kabbalah, as we have seen in these aphorisms, became fully ap-parent, as it only could from a secular viewpoint. No wonder, then, thatKafka ended up in an abyss of despair and regarded his writings asfailures deserving only to be burnt.A correct understanding of Kafkatherefore required a correct under-standing of theology. Here Scholem's polemic against Hans JoachimSchoeps, mentioned in the commentary on the previous aphorism, be-comes relevant once again. In his essay on Kafka, Benjamin had men-tioned Schoeps as one of those who incorrectly found in Kafka a positionsimilar to his own theology. Scholem agrees with Benjamin, but for the

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DavidBialereason that Schoeps's theology was wrong. It is the theological positionwhich Scholem found in the Kabbalahand which he himself adopted thatshould be identified in Kafka: "The unrealizabilityUnvollziehbarkeit)fthat which is revealed is the point at which, in the most precise way, acorrectlyunderstood theology (as I, immersed in my Kabbalah,imagine itand as you can find it given rather responsible expression in that openletter against Schoeps which you know) and the key to Kafka'sworldcome together. Not, dear Walter, the absence of this theology) in a pre-animistic world, but its unrealizabilitys its problem."35Thus, the problemfor theology is how to realize and comprehend in the finite world ofhuman beings the infinite revelation of God. The realizationof revelationin the medium of the historical tradition is necessarily inadequate andeven paradoxical, as these aphorisms repeatedly assert. This was theproblem for the Kabbalistsand it was also the problem, in its most acuteform, for Kafka.Interestingly enough, Benjamin came to this conclusionhimself several years later in a formulation which seemingly anticipatesAphorism 1: "Kafka'sreal genius was that... he sacrificed truth for thesake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kafka'swritings... do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadahlies at the feet of the Halakhah. Though apparently reduced to submis-sion, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it. This is why, inregard to Kafka,we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products ofits decay remain."3For Scholem, the historian, the "products of decay," the traditionproduced by vanished wisdom, were equally all that remained. Thehistorian works in the deepest darkness, always striving like Kafka forsome communication from the Castle,for some revelation from the moun-tain which was the site of the primordial revelation. As he wrote toSchocken: "For today's man, that mystical totality of systematic 'truth'whose existence disappears especially when it is projected into historicaltime, can only become visible in the purest way in the legitimate disci-pline of commentary and in the singular mirror of philological criticism.Today, as at the very beginning, my work lives in this paradox, in thehope of a true communication from the mountain, of that most invisible,smallest fluctuation of history which causes truth to break forth from theillusions of 'development.'" Like the Kabbalist,the historian works withthe fragments left by tradition, but he nourishes the hope that throughimmersion in these fragments, he, too, may have a revelation of the"secret"truth. Yet, by the very nature of his enterprise, his experience ofthe past (and of God, if that is what he seeks) must be indirect and neverimmediate.

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismsNOTES

1. In Geistund Werk:Festschriftum75.Gerburtstagon Dr.DanielBrody(Zurich,1958),pp. 209-15.2. Scholem, Judaica3:Studienzurjidischen Mystik Frankfurt, 1973),pp. 264-71.The tenth aphorism was expanded in this version.3. Two writers in other languages who treat Scholem's aphoristic writings areErnst Simon, "Das dunkle Licht, Gershom Scholems JudaicaIII,"MitteilungsblattdesIrgun OlejMarkazEuropa,(5 April 1974),pp. 5-6 and Jirgen Habermas, "Dieverkleidete Tora. Rede zum 80. Geburtstag von Gershom Scholem," Merkur,(January 1978), pp. 96-104. See also Simon, "Uber einige theologische SatzevonGershom Scholem,"Mitteilungsblatt8 December 1972),pp. 3 ff. and (15 December1972),pp. 4ff.4. See my GershomScholem:Kabbalah nd Counter-HistoryCambridge, Mass.,1979),esp. chapter 4.5. An excellent recent treatment of this theme is by Leon Goldstein, HistoricalKnowing(Austin, 1976). Goldstein argues against the view that historians knowthe past in the same way as natural scientists claim to know nature. Since the pastcan never be recovered perceptually, historical knowing must be an act of re-construction based on interpretation of sources. Goldstein therefore gives amodern philosophical expression to the "crisis of historicism" of the earlytwentieth century.6. I have developed this argument at greater length in GershomScholem,chapters 4 and 9. In his review of the book (KiryatSefer,1979,Vol. 52, pp. 358-62),Joseph Dan argued that I had reduced Scholem as an historian to a subjectivistposition like that of Buber: to suggest that Scholem's contemporary concerns haddirected his work as an historian is to argue, according to Dan, that he was notobjective. A correct evaluation of Scholem would require examination of thehistorical sources he treated to decide whether he read them correctly. In essence,Dan wants to claim that historical research is equivalent to that of the naturalsciences in that the object of research can be known independently of the re-searcher (a proposition that natural scientists, since the development of quantumphysics, have come to realize is problematic for not only physics but perhaps forscience as a whole). Such a positivist approach to historical work seems to meboth dated and wrong. As Leon Goldstein has shown (see note 5 above), historianscannot know the past in this way: there is a necessary interaction between thehistorian's contemporary philosophical position and his research. Scholem him-self never denied this connection and, indeed, wrote at the beginning of SabbataiSevi that his work was directed by a "particular dialectical view of Jewish historyand the forces acting within it"(pp. x-xi). That it is possible to be faithful to one'ssources even as one exercises interpretive judgments is the mark of a good his-torian, something that Buber, who used historical texts to butress philosophicalpositions, never claimed to be.7. First published in Neue Rundschau,Vol. 61, no. 3 (1950) and translated intoEnglish in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,rans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969),pp. 253-64.

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8. First published in German by Schocken Verlag in 1935and available in abilingual edition, Parables nd Paradoxes New York, 1958).

9. I wish to thank Harold Bloom for suggesting this observation.10. See Moses Nachmanides, "Introduction"to his Commentary n the Torah.11. Zohar,I, 15a.12. Die Geheimnisse der Schopfung (Berlin, 1935), p. 45.13. Bacharach'sname was actually Naphtali ben Jacob Elchanan Bacharach.He lived in the first half of the seventeenth century and his Emek Ha-Melek,which wasbased largely on the writings of Israel Sarug, brought together some ofthe variant interpretations of Lurianic Kabbalah. It was one of the most widelydistributed of the post-Lurianic texts and drew considerable criticism from those

who regarded its interpretation of Luria as faulty. See Scholem's article onBacharach in the Encyclopedia Judaica and in his Sabbatai Sevi (Princeton, 1973),pp. 68-73.14. For Buber's view in relation to Jewish texts, see his Geschichten es RabbiNachman Frankfurt, 1906).15. Nachman of Bratslav, Likuteha-Moharan(Jerusalem, 1969),sec. 64.16. Interestingly enough, Scholem derives this notion of the necessity of theoral law to make the written law "usable"not from a Jewish source but from thenineteenth-century Christian Kabbalist, FranzJosef Molitor who wrote: "Everywritten formulation is only an abstracted general picture of a reality whichtotally lacks all concreteness and individual dimension of real life . . . Thespoken word ... must therefore be the constant companion and interpreter of thewritten word, which otherwise remains a dead and abstractconcept in the mind."See his Philosophie der Geschichte oder iber die Tradition (Miinster, 1834-1857),Vol. I, p. 4. Scholem quotes Molitor to this effect in TheMessianicdea inJudaism(New York, 1971),p. 285.17. See Isaiah Tishby, Torat ha-Ra' ve-ha-Klippah be-Kabbalat ha-Ari (Jerusalem,1942).18. Nathan's ideas can be found in his penitential devotions and in his Derushha-Taninim "Treatiseon the Dragons").See Tishby's analysis of the devotions inTarbiz, Vol. 15(1944),pp. 161-80 and Scholem in Sabbatai evi,pp. 300-11.19. Scholem has treated this issue in a number of places. Perhaps his mostphilosophical presentation is his "Schopfung aus Nichts und die Selbstverschran-kung Gottes," in Uber einige Grundbegriffe desJudentums (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 53-90. On the various treatments of the relationship of Ein-sofand 'ayin,see IsaiahTishby, Mishnatha-Zohar(Jerusalem, 1971),Vol. I, pp. 107-11.

20. See my GershomScholem,chapters 3 and 4.21. See particularly Major Trends inJewish Mysticism, 3rd ed. (New York, 1961),ch. 1.22. For Scholem's theory of the influence of Lurianic Kabbalah, see SabbataiSevi, pp. 22-93; for his views on the impact of Sabbatianism, see MajorTrends,chapter 8 and "Redemption Through Sin" in The Messianic dea, pp. 78-141.23. Messianic Idea, p. 21.24. See in particular "Das Ringen zwischen dem biblischen Gott und demGott Plotinus in der alten Kabbala,"Uber einige Grundbegriffe, p. 9-52.25. For Scholem's treatment of this question in the Kabbalah,see "The Nameof God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,"Diogenes, Vol. 79 (1972),

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Scholem'sUnhistoricalAphorismspp. 59-80, and Vol. 80 (1972), pp. 164-94. See, for instance, the text he quotes atlength from Jacobben Jacob Kohen of Soria: "the divine names ... are the being(or essence) itself . . . But if one wants to make some precise relation with theproper names of men, one will find that they and the beings (or essences) (whichthey denote) are one, with the result that the name cannot be separated and dif-ferentiated from the being (or essence)." (pp. 176-7).26. Moses Cordovero (1522-1570).Cordovero attempted a systematic summaryof the Kabbalahin his PardesRimonim(Cracow,1592,reprinted Jerusalem, 1962).For a brief biography and summary of his thought in English, see "Moses Cordo-vero,"Encyclopediaudaica;or a comprehensive treatmentof Cordovero'stheologyand particularly the question of pantheism in his system, see Joseph Ben Shlomo,Torathe-Elohut hel RabbiMosheCordovero(Jerusalem, 1965).27. I have not been able to identify the author of this quotation but it seemsmost likely to be a reference to Abraham Abulafia in his Or ha-Sekhel.This notionwas, however, a common one among thirteenth-century Kabbalists such as Nach-manides, Gikatilla and others. See Scholem's article "The Name of God."28. See "The Name of God" and, further, my GershomScholem,chapter 4.29. "Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift 'Judischer Glaube in dieserZeit,"' Bayerische sraelitischeGemeindezeitung,15 August 1932), pp. 241-44. Theessay is perhaps the best statement of Scholem's own theological position. See myGershomScholem,pp. 94-100.30. Jonas Wehle (1752-1823)was the leader of the Frankist circle in Prague.See Scholem's article, "JacobFrank and the Frankists,"Encyclopediaudaica.31. Scholem wrote the letter in 1937. It was published for the first time in myGershomScholem,pp. 74-76 (German, 215-16).32. See "Redemption Through Sin,"Messianic dea.33. The Benjamin essay appears in translation in Illuminations,pp. 111-40.The letters between Scholem and Benjamin on Kafkaappear in Walter Benjamin,Gershom Scholem, BriefwechselFrankfurt, 1980), starting from 6 May 1934 andcontinuing through the summer of that year.34. 17July 1934,Briefwechsel, p. 157-8.35. Ibid.

36. Letter to Scholem of 12 June 1938. Published in English translation inIlluminations,pp. 141-5(quotation from p. 144).

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