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.