Jewish Thought

This course introduces Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892-1940), Gershom Scholem (Berlin, 1897-1982), and Franz Kafka (Prague, 1883-1924) in the context of the spiritual crisis of bourgeois European and Jewish cultures circa 1900. As writers, all three display a clear proclivity for rebellion against the social world given them; only Scholem develops an alternate vision to rival his parents’ generation and lives long enough to put it to the test; a young Kafka succumbs to tuberculosis; a hardly middle-aged Benjamin dies by his own hand. Scholem, by contrast, immigrated to Jerusalem and pioneered the field of Jewish mysticism, along the way cultivating himself as a political dissenter, spiritual gadfly, and literary critic for whom Benjamin and Kafka were his two most important touchstones, bar none. This course will ask what Kafka and Benjamin meant to Scholem, and what Scholem, secular Kabbalist, Zionist critic, and Jewish nationalist, should mean to us.

This course introduces Martin Buber (Vienna, 1878-1965), Franz Rosenzweig (Kassel, 1886-1929), and Gershom Scholem (Berlin, 1897-1982), each having reinvented themselves during their adolescence and early twenties, eventually becoming preeminent representatives of distinct pathways into and through Jewish life. Buber became a modern-day mystic, biblical humanist, and social revolutionary; Rosenzweig, a path-breaking educator, religious visionary, and enthusiast for observance; and Scholem, a pioneering scholar of Kabbalah, Jewish nationalist, and religious anarchist. Intriguingly, they knew each other well: We will listen in on their conversations, as it were, and decide who is most persuasive.