David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.
“Biale’s book is a fresh, often surprising depiction of Scholem. He shows us the vulnerable man behind the sovereign scholar without reducing the one to the other or relinquishing his admiration”- Steven E. Aschheim, Fall 2018, Jewish Review of Books
Ofri Ilany, Haaretz, November 2019