Gershom Scholem 1897 – 1982

Gerhard, later Gershom, Scholem was a German-Israeli philosopher, historian, and the founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism. Born in Berlin and committed from his teens to a rigorous Zionist and Jewish intellectual life, he emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1923 and founded the chair of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Sabbatai Sevi, and Origins of the Kabbalah recovered an enormous body of suppressed and forgotten Jewish religious literature, while his long correspondence with Walter Benjamin and his essays on tradition, messianism, and modernity made him one of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.