Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem (Hebrew: גֵרְשׁׂם שָׁלוֹם) (5 December 1897 – 21 February 1982), was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Scholem is acknowledged as the single most significant figure in the recovery, collection, annotation, and registration into rigorous Jewish scholarship of the canonical bibliography of mysticism and scriptural commentary that runs through its primordial phase in the Sefer Yetzirah, its inauguration in the Bahir, its exegesis in the Pardes and the Zohar to its cosmogonic, apocalyptic climax in Isaac Luria's Ein Sof that is known collectively as Kabbalah.After generations of demoralization and assimilation in the European enlightenment, the disappointment of messianic hopes, the famine of 1916 in Palestine, and the catastrophe of the Final Solution in Europe Scholem gathered and reassembled these sacred texts from many of the archives that had been disarranged, orphaned, confiscated under Nazi rule or otherwise washed up in Genizah cataloging the flood of fragments and disordered, decontextualized manuscripts into an annotated and relatively organized sequence of texts available to scholars and seekers within the reception of this tradition. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Gershom Scholem has received more than 394,264 page views. His biography is available in 27 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 24 in 2019). Gershom Scholem is the 378th most popular philosopher (down from 376th in 2019), the 896th most popular biography from Germany (down from 876th in 2019) and the 51st most popular German Philosopher.

Gershom Scholem is most famous for his work in the field of Jewish mysticism.