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Yeats and the Occult

Seamus Deane, 18 October 1984

The Mystery Religion of W.B. Yeats 
by Graham Hough.
Harvester, 129 pp., £15.95, May 1984, 0 7108 0603 5
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Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry 
by Cairns Craig.
Croom Helm, 323 pp., £14.95, January 1982, 9780856649974
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Yeats. Poems 1919-1935: A Selection of Critical Essays 
edited by Elizabeth Cullingford.
Macmillan, 238 pp., £14, July 1984, 0 333 27422 9
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The Poet and his Audience 
by Ian Jack.
Cambridge, 198 pp., £20, July 1984, 0 521 26034 5
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A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats 
by A. Norman Jeffares.
Macmillan, 543 pp., £35, May 1984, 0 333 35214 9
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Poems of W.B. Yeats 
by A. Norman Jeffares.
Macmillan, 428 pp., £17, August 1984, 0 333 36213 6
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... enriched by the contributions of modern scholars from Denis Saurat to Frances Yates and Gershom Scholem, there emerge the first outlines of Yeats’s spiritual biography. As Professor Hough rightly remarks, this remains to be written. Should it ever be completed, this short book will be among its most important harbingers. The various stages of ...

At Piano Nobile

John-Paul Stonard: On R.B. Kitaj, 14 December 2023

... drew it first to Kitaj’s attention.Kitaj discovered Walter Benjamin through reading an essay by Gershom Scholem, and more thoroughly in Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations. Montage and the disjunctures of photomontage are the structuring principles for the handful of paintings on which Kitaj’s reputation rests, many of which seem like ...

When it is advisable to put on a fez

Richard Popkin: Adventures of a Messiah, 23 May 2002

The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi 
by John Freely.
Viking, 275 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 670 88675 0
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... century has given us a much richer picture of Sabbatai’s background and career. In particular, Gershom Scholem, whose monumental biography appeared in Hebrew in 1957 and in English in 1973, found many new documents relating to Sabbatai and his followers and constructed a picture of a manic-depressive figure who had moments of wild excess. ...

An Unfinished Project

Fredric Jameson, 3 August 1995

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940 
edited by Theodor Adorno and Manfred Jacobson, translated by Evelyn Jacobson.
Chicago, 651 pp., £39.95, May 1994, 0 226 04237 5
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T.W. Adorno/Walter Benjamin: Briefwechsel 1928-40 
edited by Henri Lonitz.
Suhrkamp, 501 pp., DM 64, April 1994, 3 518 58174 0
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... and in the spaces between the lines of this correspondence we can read his attempts to ward off Scholem’s over-enthusiastic embraces, even though the final decision not to emigrate to Palestine (see letter to Scholem of 20 January 1930, written in French and translated into English without comment in the present ...

Productive Mischief

Michael Wood: Borges and Borges and I, 4 February 1999

Collected Fictions 
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley.
Allen Lane, 565 pp., £20, January 1999, 0 14 028680 2
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... are quite different. In an eerie anticipation of this story, Walter Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem conducted just this sort of argument over a metaphor Benjamin had used about Kafka’s work. Kafka’s characters are students who have lost the scripture, Benjamin said. Scholem suggested they were ...

The Marxist and the Messiah

Terry Eagleton: Snapshots of Benjamin, 9 September 2021

The Benjamin Files 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 262 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 1 78478 398 3
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... between the toughminded materialism of his comrade Brecht and the esoteric Judaism of his friend Gershom Scholem. Jameson knows hardly anything about theology, and understands very little of ethics, which he sees as a simplistic opposition between good and evil. It is an American Puritan view of morality, later to be transplanted into cowboy movies. He ...

The day the golem went berserk

David Katz, 10 January 1983

Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague 
by Byron Sherwin.
Associated University Presses, 253 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 8386 3028 6
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Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages 
by Hyam Maccoby.
Associated University Presses, 245 pp., £15, August 1982, 0 8386 3053 7
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... of Rabbi Loew’s theology, which Dr Sherwin claims (somewhat unfairly) has been ignored by Gershom Scholem and others because of a basic prejudice against Ostjuden. Indeed, Dr Sherwin makes the astonishing assertion that ‘Jewish life and thought in Central and Eastern Europe have been neglected by modern Jewish scholarship.’ But ...

Children of the State

Yitzhak Laor: The Zionist manipulation of history, 26 January 2006

Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood 
by Idith Zertal.
Cambridge, 236 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 85096 7
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... in full. In Israel the book was not available, even in English, until recently. Few read it. Gershom Scholem wrote a fierce attack on Arendt. She wrote him a letter. He promised to publish his attack only with her response, but he didn’t keep his promise, not in Israel, in Hebrew, not even in his later collections of articles and letters. When ...

Phut-Phut

James Wood: The ‘TLS’, 27 June 2002

Critical Times: The History of the ‘Times Literary Supplement’ 
by Derwent May.
HarperCollins, 606 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 00 711449 4
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... There is a story that Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, was being introduced at a lecture in New York. Mysticism, the introducer said sarcastically, is nothing; but a history of nothing – well, that is science. The same can be said, multipliedly, of Derwent May’s book, which is essentially a history of the book review, a genre of such tiny dignity that its life might better be left unexamined ...

Double Game

David Nirenberg: Maimonides, 23 September 2010

Maimonides in His World 
by Sarah Stroumsa.
Princeton, 222 pp., £27.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 13763 6
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... openness’ of the liberal German world whose collapse drove Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem into exile. ‘Relative’ is a problematic term. Christian Europe seems to be Stroumsa’s (implicit) measure of comparison, and again the judgment makes some sense. Maimonides’ family’s decision to seek exile in North Africa and the ...

Diary

Thomas Laqueur: My Dead Fathers, 7 September 2006

... Germanness. He laments that ‘people’ – Germans, I assume – ‘don’t understand this.’ Gershom Scholem famously argued with his colleagues as early as 1923, when he emigrated to Palestine, that the German Jewish love affair with Germany would be, and was, unrequited. But as late as 1935 there was hope that the Jewish body – now clearly ...

Weimar in Partibus

Norman Stone, 1 July 1982

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World 
by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.
Yale, 563 pp., £12.95, May 1982, 0 300 02660 9
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Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy 
by Bhikhu Parekh.
Macmillan, 198 pp., £20, October 1981, 0 333 30474 8
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... and with an insensitivity to the issue that was tantamount to cruelty. Her old acquaintance Gershom Scholem attacked her for this, and never forgave her; some old friends in New York did much the same, and at the University of Chicago she was virtually ‘cut’ in the Faculty Club. She also failed utterly to take any account of the Jewish ...

Invisible Walls

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Revolutionary Left, 3 August 2006

On the Border 
by Michel Warschawski, translated by Levi Laub.
Pluto, 228 pp., £14.99, May 2005, 0 7453 2325 1
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... French-Jewish Trotskyist (he isn’t named, but it might have been Ernst Mandel), who was reading Gershom Scholem: Astonished, I asked him why the Jewish Cabbala interested him more than Zen Buddhism. He replied that it was part of his personal culture . . . Back in my compartment I thought to myself that the French Trotskyists still had a long way to ...

Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
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... in the United States for many years, but unlike Mosse he had gone to Palestine in the late 1930s. Gershom Scholem, one of the 20th century’s great scholars of Judaism, ‘forgot’ to hand Stern the Einstein medal he was to receive when he visited Israel to help celebrate the physicist’s centenary. Stern wonders whether ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... to the Nazis, discipline collapsed, and she just walked out. ‘By chance,’ she later wrote to Gershom Scholem, she ran into Benjamin at Lourdes, where he was waiting for visa papers, and spent ‘a few weeks’ with him, playing chess, before leaving for Montauban, where she was reunited with her husband. Arendt and Blücher last saw Benjamin in ...

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