Quick Answer
How does a tradition change when it holds that its founding text cannot be altered by a single letter? Scholem's answer is that everything moves into interpretation, and that the more absolute the text the more radical the commentary has to become. Six essays, including the definitive treatment of the golem, and a better entry point to his work than the famous survey. He writes more clearly than almost anyone else on this material.
Key Takeaways
- An unchangeable text forces radical interpretation. That is the whole thesis.
- The Torah as organism, not a book about God but an unfolding of the name.
- The golem essay is the best thing written on the subject.
- Easier than Major Trends and a better place to begin.
- More practice-attentive than his reputation suggests, which narrows Idel's objection.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism was published in German in 1960 and in English in 1965. It runs around two hundred and twenty pages.
It collects six essays, most of them originating as lectures given at the Eranos conferences in Switzerland during the 1950s.
The essays cover the relation between religious authority and mysticism, the Kabbalistic understanding of the Torah, the meaning of ritual, the golem tradition, and the symbolism of the Kabbalah generally.
They are thematic rather than historical, which distinguishes the book from Scholem's famous survey and makes it considerably more approachable.
The Eranos setting. These were delivered to the same annual gathering that drew Jung, Eliade and Corbin. Scholem was the most rigorously historical of that circle and was privately sceptical of some of it, and the lectures are pitched to an audience of educated non-specialists as a result.
Who Gershom Scholem Was
Scholem was born Gerhard Scholem in Berlin in 1897 into an assimilated Jewish family that wanted nothing to do with religion.
His turn to Judaism was a break with that family, and it was thorough. He learned Hebrew, took up Zionism against his father's wishes, and emigrated to Palestine in 1923.
The decision that made his career was choosing to study Jewish mysticism, which at the time was regarded within Jewish scholarship as an embarrassment: superstition that respectable historians passed over quickly.
He spent decades in the manuscript collections, established the texts, dated them, sorted the pseudonymous attributions, and built a field where there had been a gap.
His friendship with Walter Benjamin, and his long correspondence with Hannah Arendt which ended in a famous quarrel, place him in the centre of twentieth-century German-Jewish intellectual life as well as in his own discipline.
The Problem of an Unchangeable Text
The question the whole book turns on, and it is a genuinely good one.
Judaism holds that the Torah was given, that it is complete, and that not a letter may be added or removed. The revelation is closed.
But religious life does not stand still. New circumstances arise, new needs, new experiences that demand expression, and a tradition that cannot revise its text has to find somewhere for all of it to go.
Scholem's answer is that it goes into commentary. The text is fixed and its meaning is not, and the tradition renews itself by discovering that scripture always contained what is now required.
The consequence he draws is counterintuitive and persuasive. The more absolutely a text is held to be unalterable, the more radical the interpretations it will generate, because interpretation is carrying the entire weight of change.
This is the mechanism that explains why the most conservative-sounding traditions produce the most startling ideas. A Kabbalist who says he is merely explaining what Moses received can propose a structure of divine emanations, a doctrine of cosmic repair, and a God with an inner life containing something like gender, and present all of it as reading. A tradition that permitted open innovation would have had no need to put any of that inside a commentary, and would probably never have generated it.
Tradition Against Revelation
The first essay, and the most theoretically ambitious.
Scholem examines the tension between a mystic's direct experience and the authority of an established tradition, and argues that the relation is more complicated than conflict.
The mystic does not usually present themselves as an innovator. They present themselves as recovering the original meaning, and the more radical the content the more emphatically it is attributed to the tradition.
Pseudonymity is the standard device. A thirteenth-century work is attributed to a second-century rabbi, and the attribution is not simply fraud. It is a claim about where the material belongs.
The Zohar is the great case: written in Castile in the late thirteenth century, presented as the teaching of Shimon bar Yochai, and accepted into the tradition so thoroughly that arguing about its date remained dangerous for centuries.
Scholem's point is that this device permits change while denying that change is occurring, and that the denial is sincere rather than cynical.
The Torah as a Living Organism
The central essay and the one most worth the book.
The Kabbalists did not read the Torah as a narrative with religious content. They read it as an organism whose every element carries meaning at multiple levels simultaneously.
The stories are the outermost layer. Beneath them are legal and ethical meanings, beneath those allegorical ones, and beneath those a level that cannot be paraphrased.
What is distinctive is the treatment of the material text itself. The shapes of the letters, their numerical values, the crowns drawn above certain characters, the unusual spellings, the arrangement on the page: all of it is significant, because none of it is accidental in a text that God composed.
The consequence is that the Torah is inexhaustible by design. There is no reading that completes it, and every generation finds what it needs because the text was made to contain everything.
The Text as a Divine Name
The most radical version of the doctrine, and Scholem traces it carefully.
Some Kabbalists held that the entire Torah is one continuous name of God, and that the division into words and verses is a secondary arrangement of a text that is really an unbroken sequence of letters.
This has an extraordinary implication and the tradition drew it. On this view the narrative content is not the point. The stories of the patriarchs are one way of dividing a string of characters that is fundamentally something else.
Scholem notes that this position pushes to a limit where the text becomes almost meaningless in the ordinary sense, and that the tradition generally stopped short of that while keeping the doctrine.
It also explains the letter techniques. If the text is a name, then permuting its letters is operating on the name, and the practices Idel later documented follow directly from this understanding rather than being an eccentric side branch.
Black Fire on White Fire
An image Scholem draws out that has travelled well beyond his field.
A midrashic tradition describes the Torah as written in black fire upon white fire. The Kabbalists took this literally enough to ask what the white fire is.
One answer developed in the tradition: the black fire is the written letters, and the white fire is the parchment between and around them, which is also text, in a script not yet legible.
The consequence is that the Torah we have is the visible portion of something larger, and that the invisible portion will become readable in the messianic age.
Scholem treats this as the tradition's most elegant solution to its own problem. The revelation is complete and closed, and it is also not yet fully disclosed, and both can be true because part of it has not yet been read.
What Happened to the Commandments
The essay on ritual, and the one with the most practical content.
Jewish law prescribes a very large number of obligations, and by the medieval period the question of their purpose was live. Philosophers such as Maimonides offered rational explanations: the commandments train character, or correct false beliefs, or served historical purposes.
The Kabbalists rejected this and offered something else. The commandments are operations. Performing one correctly affects the relations among the sefirot, restores a flow that has been interrupted, or repairs a break in the divine order.
Scholem argues that this transformed observance without changing a single practice. The same acts, performed the same way, now carried cosmic significance, and the effect on a tradition where the routine had become merely routine was considerable.
He also notes the cost. A system where every act has cosmic consequence is a system where error is catastrophic, and the anxiety this produced is visible in the literature.
The Golem
The essay most readers come for, and it is the definitive treatment.
The golem is an artificial human made from earth and animated by the use of letters or a divine name. The idea appears in the Talmud, is developed in medieval mystical circles, and reaches popular culture through the Prague legend.
Scholem traces the whole line. The earliest material treats the creation of a golem as a demonstration of mastery over the creative letters described in the Sefer Yetzirah, performed by scholars as a way of confirming that they had understood the text.
The medieval practices he documents are specific: the formation of a figure from virgin soil, the recitation of letter combinations in a prescribed order, and the walking around it in a particular direction to animate or to reverse.
Crucially, the early golem is not a servant and not a danger. It is a proof. The making is the point and the thing made is generally destroyed immediately.
Why the Prague Story Is Late
The historical finding within the golem essay, and it surprises most readers.
The famous story attaches to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, the Maharal, a real and important sixteenth-century figure, who is said to have made a golem to protect the Jewish community and to have deactivated it when it became uncontrollable.
Scholem shows that the connection to Loew is not attested in his own period or for a long time afterward. It appears in print in the nineteenth century, in a collection presenting itself as an old manuscript tradition.
Loew himself, whose substantial writings survive, does not mention golems.
The story that everybody knows is therefore roughly two hundred years old rather than four hundred, and it belongs to the same nineteenth-century moment as a great deal of other invented tradition.
What the older sources contain is stranger and less cinematic: not a protector but a demonstration, and not a golem that runs amok but one that is unmade as soon as it has proved the point.
The Danger Built Into the Method
A theme Scholem returns to across the essays, and the one that gave his life's work its edge.
If a fixed text can be made to yield radically new meaning, there is no principled limit to what it can be made to yield. The same mechanism that renews a tradition can be used to dissolve it.
Scholem's example is the seventeenth-century messianic movement around Sabbatai Sevi, which he spent decades on and treats here in passing. When the claimed messiah converted to Islam, the movement did not collapse. Its theologians produced a reading in which the conversion was the necessary descent of the redeemer into impurity, and the apostasy became the proof.
From there some followers drew the further conclusion that the law itself belonged to an order now superseded, and that violating it deliberately was the higher observance.
What Scholem shows is that this was not a departure from Kabbalistic method. It was the method applied without a brake, by people using exactly the interpretive tools the tradition had developed.
The observation gives the book a seriousness that its lecture format might otherwise disguise. A system for finding unlimited meaning in a fixed text is powerful and it has no internal safeguard, and the tradition's authorities were right to be nervous about who was permitted to use it.
What He Means by Symbol
A definitional point running through the book that is worth extracting.
Scholem distinguishes allegory from symbol, and the distinction governs how he reads.
An allegory is translatable. A figure stands for a concept, and once the equivalence is known the figure can be discarded and the concept stated directly.
A symbol, in his usage, is not translatable. It makes present something that cannot be expressed another way, and paraphrasing it destroys what it does. A symbol is a way of holding what will not go into propositions.
His claim is that Kabbalistic language is symbolic in this sense rather than allegorical, and that the standard mistake is to treat the sefirot as a code with a key, so that a reader who learns the correspondences thinks they have understood.
This bears directly on how the Tree of Life circulates in modern occult literature, where it functions largely as a filing system, which is the allegorical reading Scholem says the sources do not support.
Where Idel's Critique Lands
Worth addressing, since the two names travel together.
Moshe Idel's argument against Scholem is that he emphasised theosophical speculation at the expense of practice, and that a substantial body of manuscript material describing techniques was left unexamined.
That criticism lands hardest on Major Trends, which is organised around doctrinal development.
It lands more lightly here. The ritual essay is precisely about what Kabbalists did rather than what they held, the golem essay documents a practice in detail, and the treatment of the Torah as a name is directly connected to the letter techniques.
Reading this book alongside Idel produces a fairer picture of Scholem than reading the survey alone, and the disagreement between them turns out to be narrower than the polemics suggest.
The Objections
Three, and they are the standard ones.
Coherence. It is a collection of lectures rather than a designed book, and the essays repeat each other in places while leaving connections between them unmade.
The mysticism-versus-authority frame. Scholem's tendency to see mysticism as a disruptive force straining against institutional religion has been argued to reflect his own preoccupations more than the sources, many of which show mystics as pillars of the establishment.
Selection. The material chosen is the material that fits his account of the tradition, and the manuscript work done since has widened the field considerably.
Which Scholem to Read First
A practical recommendation, since his output is large and the usual advice is wrong.
The standard recommendation is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and it is his most important book. It is also nine long lectures of dense historical narrative, and a great many readers do not finish it.
This book is the better entry. The essays are short enough to hold, each states its problem before working it, and the golem essay in particular is enjoyable in a way historical survey rarely is.
Read this, then Major Trends for the historical spine, then Idel for the correction, and the field is legible in a way it is not from any one of the three.
What It Gives You
Three things worth the reading time.
The mechanism of traditional change. How a tradition transforms itself while insisting it has not is a general question, and this is one of the clearest worked cases available.
The reading practice. The Kabbalistic approach to a text, in which nothing is accidental and every level operates at once, is worth understanding whatever you apply it to.
The golem, properly. Everything else written on the subject either draws on this essay or would have been improved by doing so.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in Kabbalah and want a way in that does not require finishing a nine-lecture survey first.
Read it if you use the Tree of Life in a Hermetic context and want to know what the symbols meant to the tradition that produced them.
Read the golem essay even if you read nothing else, because the standard story is wrong and the real one is better.
Do not read it for the Lurianic system in detail, which is covered properly in the survey rather than here.
Scholem's mechanism is worth holding beyond his subject. A tradition that cannot admit to changing will change through interpretation, and the interpretations will become more inventive the more firmly the source is held fixed. This is visible in constitutional law, in scientific paradigms defended past their evidence, and in the way people revise their account of their own past while insisting they have always thought this. Nobody involved is lying. The pressure has to go somewhere, and when the text cannot move, the reading does.
Six essays on how an unchangeable book keeps changing.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the objections to Scholem's framing is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism about?
Six essays by Gershom Scholem on how the Kabbalists reinterpreted an unchangeable scripture, on the Torah understood as a living organism, on ritual, and on the golem tradition.
Who was Gershom Scholem?
A German-born Israeli scholar, 1897 to 1982, who effectively created the academic study of Jewish mysticism and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for most of his career.
How does it differ from Major Trends?
Major Trends is a historical survey covering the whole tradition period by period. This is a set of thematic essays that go deeper on particular problems and can be read in any order.
What is the central argument?
That a tradition holding a text to be unalterable and divinely given must generate radical new meaning through interpretation, and that mysticism in such a tradition is therefore always commentary.
What does the living organism idea mean?
The Kabbalistic view that the Torah is not a book about God but an unfolding of the divine name, so that every letter and even the spaces between letters carry meaning independent of the narrative.
What is the golem essay about?
The history of the tradition of the artificial man made from earth and animated by letters, traced from early sources through medieval practice to the Prague legend, which Scholem shows is late.
Is it a good place to start with Scholem?
It is a better entry than Major Trends for many readers. The essays are shorter, self-contained, and each one states its problem clearly before working through the sources.
How difficult is it?
Scholarly but approachable. Scholem writes with unusual clarity for the subject, though he quotes Hebrew and Aramaic and assumes some familiarity with Jewish tradition.
What does he say about ritual?
That the Kabbalists transformed the meaning of the commandments by treating them as operations affecting the divine, rather than as obligations owed, which reanimated practices that had become routine.
Does Idel's critique apply here?
Partly. Moshe Idel challenged Scholem's emphasis on theosophy over practice, and these essays are more attentive to what Kabbalists did than Major Trends is, which narrows the disagreement.
Is it about Christian Kabbalah?
No. The subject is Jewish Kabbalah in its own context, and readers arriving from the Hermetic tradition should know the later Christian adaptation is a separate development.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in Jewish mysticism, in how traditions change while claiming not to, or in the golem tradition, which is treated here better than anywhere else.
Find out when your tradition was invented
The golem of Prague feels immemorial. It is about as old as the railway. Scholem did not discover this by being clever; he did it by asking when the story first appears in a source anyone can check, which is a question available to anybody about anything they have inherited. Most of what feels ancient in any tradition can be dated, and a surprising amount of it lands in the nineteenth century, when a great deal of European culture was busy giving itself a past. Knowing the date does not spoil the story. It tells you what the story was for.
Sources & References
- Scholem, Gershom (1965). On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim.
- Scholem, G. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the historical survey.
- The Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, the primary sources discussed.
- Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives, the later revision of Scholem's account.
- Eranos conference proceedings, where most of these essays were delivered.
- Scholarship on the Maharal of Prague and the dating of the golem legend.