Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem

by George Prochnik

Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem--the 20th century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah--Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel.

In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life and work of Gershom Scholem, whose once prominent reputation, as a Freud-like interpreter of the inner world of the Cosmos, has been in eclipse in the United States. He vividly conjures Scholem's upbringing in Berlin, and compellingly brings to life Scholem's transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so, he reveals how Scholem's frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during the First World War led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally Zionism, as potent counter-forces to Europe's suicidal nationalism.

Prochnik's own years in the Holy Land in the 1990s brings him to question the stereotypical intellectual and theological constructs of Jerusalem, and to rediscover the city as a physical place, rife with the unruliness and fecundity of nature. Prochnik ultimately suggests that a new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically energizing role once played by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Religion, Judaism, Jewish, Israel

544 pages, Hardcover

Published March 21, 2017

About the author

George Prochnik’s essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[T J · Rating 4 out of 5]

My spouse and I both read Stranger in a Strange Land... and he felt that Prochnik's technique of using his own life as a lens for viewing Scholem's was intrusive, and I felt that it made a good window into the early 20th century. (I have an affinity for "immersive journalism," and my spouse doesn't.)
The biographical details of Scholem's life become acute in the light of Prochnik's experiences with Judaism and Israel, and Prochnik's ambivalent relationship with kabbalah helped me understand Scholem's fascination with it. If anything, I'd ask Prochnik to use a little more of his knowledge of Scholem and his peers to examine Scholem's theories about kabbalah in greater detail. It's a lovely book, and it gives the reader a historical look at pre-Israel Palestine and the current complexity of Israel. Scholem was one of the many pro-Palestine Israelis who founded the state of Israel.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem were one of the great bromances in history. Scholem met Walter Benjamin in Munich in 1915, when the former was seventeen years old and the latter was twenty-three. They began a lifelong friendship that ended when Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in the wake of Nazi persecution. Scholem immigrated to Israel and became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the University of Jerusalem. He responsible for collecting many Jewish texts on the Kabbalah that would otherwise would have perished. Benjamin was unable to obtain the exit visa to escape the Nazi invasion and committed suicide on the Spanish French border. Posthumously he has become a cult figure in literature, including being remembered in the title of the Larry McMurtry book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.

[A B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prochnik is clearly a very smart guy, but his longwinded autobiographical ramblings are an intrusion into this otherwise fascinating history of Gershom Scholem. I didn't care for Prochnik's self-flagellation at having taken social security money from the Israeli government, nor for his arduous orientalist asides about walking past cigarette-smoking Palestinian workers in East Jerusalem. These moments in the text seemed like an attempt to establish his own politically-correct credentials in what is, in all other respects, a study of Gershom Scholem that strikes a nice balance between academic erudition and popular accessibility.

While Prochnik's own story seemed labored at best and arrogant at worst, I was deeply impressed at the theoretical scaffolds he establishes as a way of understanding the characters in his story. The way he contrasted Scholem with Stefan Zweig, for instance, was masterfully done and really provided a way of appreciating the national and cosmopolitan anxieties that history presented to the great mitteleuropäische Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century. At first I found Prochnik's descriptions of Scholem's inner emotions a little contrived, but then I decided they were an interesting artistic adaptation of the scholar's diaries.

Prochnik's prose is clear. As noted, he has a teacher's gift for rendering subtle nuances and ideas accessible and comprehensible. At one point in the book, Prochnik takes a poke at George Steiner's arrogance. This was the most ironic moment in the whole text. I felt myself thinking, "says he who's written a whole book interweaving his own story with that of one of the great intellectual giants of the past century!"

I didn't hate the book though. "Stranger in a Strange Land" shines a light on the political confusion of interwar Germany, it provides a way of classifying and understanding the thoughts of influential theorists, scholars, and writers. There's a lot to learn from this book and I'm glad I didn't give up at the moments when Prochnik's own political posturing (yes, we all know Israel has problems) made me want to throw it out the window.

[Mads Kjær · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book about Gershom Scholem's relationship to Walter Benjamin, kabbalah, zionism, Germany and Israel.
Whenever Prochnik focuses his attention on Scholem as a subject, he comes up with consistently enlightening findings. But he tends to write almost as much about his own relation to Israel and zionism, his own Bildungsgeschichte, if you will. And this is rather unnecessary (if occasionally interesting).
I've noticed this approach in a lot of American academics' handling of books that are meant to be read outside the seclustered world of academia. It's infotainment, basically. But you can be infotainment-friendly without putting yourself into the narrative at hand! There are other ways to make the reading public engage with the subject than to insert your own life story to the pages of the book. Protchnik maybe should have trusted the readers' willingness to pick up a book about Scholem because they want to know something about Scholem, not about the author (after all, I assume, that Scholem - rather than Protchnik - is the main draw for a majority of readers!)

[Chris Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gershom Scholem made aliyah to Jerusalem in the Palestine Mandate in the fall of 1923, leaving his liberal German roots, shedding his given name Gerhard and, for a few moments of his life, realizing the physical and spiritual awakening that was his vision for Zionism. A vision that was to bring about a rebirth of the Jewish people. Perhaps the genesis for this came from his studies of Kabbalah, studies which saw him become the great re-discoverer of this mystic theme in Judaism. The ensuing tension between the spiritual and political coupled with his consummate scholarship placed him at the center of the early intellectual foment leading to the founding of modern Eretz Israel. But much of the politics - the structural work needed to build the state and all of the military work, including the campaigns to drive the British out and to gain land from the Arabs/Palestinians - became exclusively based on the physical aspects of Zionism, the goal to create a land of refuge for the Jewish people.

As Scholem put it later, “It turned out th the historical task of Zionism simply was quite different from the one it posed itself,” lamenting, I think the loss of purity of spirituality that he and others from his early, liberal Jewish days in Germany had posited as the means to reawaken and revitalize Judaism.

This strangeness then - and the strange land that was the foundation for the ideas as well as the movement, both secular and religious - are at the heart of Prochnik’s book. Along with his own search for meaning as a Jew and as a Jerusalemite for ten or so years. Prochnik structured the book between a description and discussion of Scholem’s life and ideas and his own search across the current political and spiritual landscape of the city and Israel. I thought the parts about Scholem excellent, compelling, challenging. The personal not as much, particularly when it devolved to the breakup of his marriage shortly after his return from Israel to New York. My sense was his personal focus was on the emotional structures of his personal world rather than the intellectual and historical components of Scholem. One (Scholem’s life and related intellectual history) is not more valid than the other (Prochnik’s years as a student and young father and husband, including his years in Israel) - it is just the intellectual history seemed to me to be the more profound.

There was one chilling personal description from the New York time when the World Trade Center was destroyed. At that time Prochnik and his family were living in Lower Manhattan and their four sons were in school on that crystal clear day in September. The story of the panic, the search and finding the children was only capped by the story of one, who didn’t want to have the ashes and dust washed from his body and clothes. He was adamant. It became clear after a time he did so as he understood the ash to include parts from the thousands who were killed that day.

At first, I was struck by the memories that it brought back to me. And then a slight discomfort at the personalization of the event on the part of this child. What part of this was learned? And what was the teaching?

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Books like this irritate me to a point. I wanted to learn about Scholem, which I did, but I learned more than I wanted about Prochnik as well. Scholem was an expert of the Kabbalah who had immigrated to Israel from Germany before WWII. He also was a life time friend of the philosopher Walter Benjamin. I learned that Prochnik moved from the U.S. to Israel. It would have made sense if he was interested in the Kabbalah but I think he wanted to make a parallel between him and Scholem which was sketchy at best. Scholem fretted about truth and future of Israel. Prochnik fretted about money and his family's safety. At the Prochik's wife leaves him, this after the romantic picture he portrays of his marriage.

[Nina Rose Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun with this book - particularly the bits from Scholem's early diaries and correspondences were framed in a particularly interesting way. Also the sort of weird academic gossip about his love for Walter Benjamin and their slightly tumultuous relationship was SO enjoyable to read. Halfway through the book this concise biographical account kind of broke down though, and I didn't feel like it really fleshed out Scholem's relationship to zionism or his kabbalistic work as well as it could have done. The autobiographical bits were *nice* but didn't really resonate with or add depth to Scholem's biography. I think a much more thorough exploration of the complex relationship Scholem had with zionism could have been written without the personal bits, and would be a book i'd love to read. But either way, it was thought provoking, fun and I felt like it allowed me to approach thinking about kabbalistic thought from a perspective based in intellectual history rather than metaphysics, so that was helpful.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read . A combination biography and personal account . The biography is a very detailed account of the early life of Gershon Scholem along with the authors account of his struggles living in Jerusalem. The common thread is an ideal of what the Jewish state could be and the contrast with reality. Of course another common thread is an interest in Jewish mysticism and Jewish texts. I found the account of Gershon (in Germany Gerhart) Scholem's early intellectual life fascinating. If you have not read any of Scholem's books or essays or are not interested in Jewish mysticism stay away. And if you are interested in the above be prepared for a bit of work. but worth the effort. I learned quite a bit of detailed history that is of interest to me today..

[Daniel Headrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part memoir of the author, part biography of Gershom Scholem, it is a beautiful book.

[Leah Y. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not very good as the writer suddenly writes about himself here and there in the book. I wanted to read about the life of Gerschom Scholem not the other way around.

[Colin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm trying to be generous about this undergraduate romp through early Scholem, mainly because the author is so desperate to be liked by his intended American readers.

I'm guessing the academic material is highly derivative simply because the last chapter of the book contains what can only be an original thesis given how laughably silly & flimsy it is.

As intellectual history it is immature and unconvincing. Read Biale instead.

The memoir component sits usefully alongside House of Windows, Adina Hoffman's superior account of life as an American expatriate in Jerusulam at a comparable time.

[Nasus]

This is one of many good books about Gershom Sholem. But GS's own letters and writings are probably better in order to get an understanding of him. Prochnik is a good writer and this is an interesting read.