Greetings from Angelus
by Gershom Scholem
(translated by Richard Sieburth).
Archipelago Books, 2018,
$14.00 paper.
In 1648—the year, according to the Zohar, destined to usher in the messianic era—a Smyrnan Jew by the name of Shabbatai Tzvi received a miraculous heavenly vision: as the patriarchs anointed him with the perfume of Eden, the voice of God announced that he was destined to redeem the children of Israel. In the years that followed, Tzvi drew masses of zealous devotees as reports of his heretical behavior seemed to betoken a radical new order for the age to come: the pronunciation of God’s name (forbidden in orthodox Judaism), the conversion of fasts into feasts, the formulation of an antinomian doctrine known as “sacred sin.” But in 1666, threatened with execution by the Ottoman sultan, Tvzi renounced his claims of messiahdom and converted to Islam, shattering the millenarian fever-dreams of believers across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Later Jewish historians looked back on Sabbateanism, along with the broader kabbalistic tradition out of which it grew, with profound embarrassment; the outlandish practices of Tzvi’s followers were anathema to their assimilationist project of wedding Judaism’s intellectual heritage to Enlightenment notions of rationalism. According to an oft-repeated anecdote, Gershom Scholem—widely cited as the father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism—visited the house of a famous rabbi as a young man and inquired about a stack of Kabbalistic texts, only to receive a dismissive reply: “This trash? Why would I waste my time reading nonsense like this?” For Scholem, however, mysticism represented the vital lifeblood of a tradition that earlier scholars, with their narrowly scientific bent, had bled dry. Scholem, then, was a kind of Freud of the religious mind, drawing back the curtain of Plato-inflected piety to reveal a hidden dreamworld that was much more knotted, much more riddled with contradiction, much less accommodating of the tidy mental constraints of rationalism, but also, he alleged, much closer to the beating heart of Judaism’s lived experience. The epigraph to his biography of Tzvi—which is almost 1,000 pages long, bristling with footnotes and yet as compelling as a well-paced thriller—is illuminating: “Paradox is characteristic of truth. What communis opinio has of truth is surely no more than an elementary deposit of generalizing partial understanding, related to truth even as sulphurous fumes are to lightning.”
An important vein of inquiry for Scholem and the mystics he studied was the magical, even cosmogonic power of language and writing. As he notes in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, “Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding language as something more precious than an inadequate instrument for contact between human beings.” Greetings from Angelus, which is largely a re-issue of 2003’s The Fullness of Time, offers an aspect of Scholem’s own communing with the spirit of language that will be new even to those quite familiar with his works in philology and history of religion: that is, Scholem as poet. The slim bilingual German-English edition provides a survey of verse from his teen years through to old age (the latest poem in the volume, which appears only in the notes at the back of the book, was composed while Scholem was recovering from a kidney surgery, ten years before his death). Virtually all of his poems were intended to be private, written down in a personal notebook or presented as tokens of friendship; he published only two pieces during his lifetime. As Steven Wasserstrom’s introductory essay puts it, the works gathered here are “strictly purposive,” often feeling less like the fruits of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings than like functional objects, whether that function was to commemorate a wedding, respond to current events, or channel an in-joke with a friend.
Arguably the largest departure from Scholem’s more familiar writing is the directness and certitude that characterizes so much of the poetry in the volume. Scholem’s best-known works deal elegantly in the twilight shades of paradox: How is it possible for a mystic to preserve a religion by negating its most basic tenets? How can one distinguish licit mysticism from illicit magic? How can one express authentic, freely given love for God by means of prayers and rituals that are prescribed and doctrinally mandated? Like a chess game, the rhetorical moves of his essays are legible as a logical progression in retrospect but experienced as a series of bold surprises in real time. But his poems frequently state rather than intimate, as in the opening lines of “Media in Vita”: “I have lost the faith / that brought me to this place.” This is due at least in part, no doubt, to the diaristic or epistolary mode in which so many of them were conceived. His poems are not investigations of ideas or images as much as they are records of a completed train of thought.
Also immediately striking to readers acquainted with the author’s broader oeuvre is the deep formal conservatism of his verse. Scholem devoted his academic life to holy men whose radical interpretation of scripture often led them to cast tradition into the fire; by contrast, however, his own poetic writing hews dutifully to rhyme and rhythm in a way that would have seemed frowsy even at the time. Like-wise, excepting some pun-saturated doggerel verse (which, granted, can be quite clever), there is little play or innovation in the language, which is especially surprising given Scholem’s demonstrated strength as a prose stylist. The Kabbalistic imagery—sparks, broken vessels, groves of nuts—that so occupied him in his scholarly work is almost entirely absent here, but Scholem himself was not a practitioner of mysticism, so it should perhaps not be expected that his private writings would draw from this particular well for inspiration.
Translator Richard Sieburth wavers in his approach to capturing the feel of Scholem’s verses in English. At times, the pursuit of a stubbornly elusive rhyme produces awkward phrasings or wooden rhythms (from “To Ingeborg Bachmann”: “It is the oldest of those ancient tidings / which we read in the prophets’ words. / We Jews have always remembered this news / though the price we paid has been absurd.”). Elsewhere, Sieburth creates the expectation of regularity only to falter dissatisfyingly. The clenched embrace of form, though true to the source material, appears largely an impediment to clarity and flow; the German originals, after all, are conservative but always competent. Given that Sieburth’s translations often tweak Scholem’s rhyme scheme, it is worth asking why he did not go one step further and dispense with rhyme entirely; such a move, at any rate, would have avoided forced phraseologies like “another path to undergo” (“Encounter with Zion and the World”) or “let the ban on presents be deleted” (“For July 15”). As it stands, a rather one-dimensional notion of artistic faithfulness preserves structure at the expense of style.
Greater value can perhaps be gleaned from Angelus in its capacity to add color to Scholem’s biography. Coming as many of these poems do from the body of Scholem’s correspondence, they testify to his relationship with figures like Kitty Marx, S. Y. Agnon, and, most significantly, Walter Benjamin—whose importance to Scholem is lovingly expressed at book length in his Walter Benjamin: Story of a Friendship—as well as his philosophical engagement with Theodor Herzl, Chaim Nahman Bialik, and Franz Kafka. Here, extensive notes at the back help fill in context elided by the poems themselves. The collection skews youthful, with many pieces charting his increasingly conflicted attitude towards the realities of Zionism. That the poems are not, ultimately, of remarkable literary quality is both true and in some larger sense irrelevant. The verses collected here were acts of private devotion, meant for lovers, friends, and often enough no one’s eyes at all. The fact that they are now arrayed before us for public scrutiny is the result of their author’s well-earned prominence in an unrelated field—a status that will go undiminished by the occasional awkward rhyme.
Erica X Eisen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, Hazlitt, The New Inquiry, The Harvard Review, Little Star, and elsewhere.
