Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem—writer, philosopher, scholar, poet—was born in Berlin in 1897 and settled in Jerusalem in 1923. One of the twentieth century's maverick scholars of religion, Scholem introduced the stud of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism into the academy and into modern Jewish literature, philosophy, and the arts as a whole. For years he was Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University. His poems, written for the most part in private or addressed to a few selected friends, register his lifelong disappointment with the eventualities of Zion, caught as it is at every point in a fraught dialectic of messianic hope and despair.