The Sacred and the Unfamiliar: Gershom Scholem and the Anxieties of the New Hebrew

The question of Hebrew, the conditions and possibilities of its "renaissance" and its rebirth as a secular language and a source of modern national discourse, was one of the central concerns of the Zionist enterprise around 1900. In his famous letter of December 1926 dedicated to Franz Ros...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Germanic review Vol. 83; no. 4; pp. 299 - 320
Main Author Shahar, Galili
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Heldref 01.09.2008
Taylor & Francis Inc
Subjects
Anxiety
Chaim Nachman Bialik
Context
Derrida, Jacques
epistolary
Gershom Scholem
Hebrew language
Judaism
Kabbalah
Politics
Scholem, Gershom
Theology
theopolitics
Writing
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Summary:The question of Hebrew, the conditions and possibilities of its "renaissance" and its rebirth as a secular language and a source of modern national discourse, was one of the central concerns of the Zionist enterprise around 1900. In his famous letter of December 1926 dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig and titled "Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache," Gershom Scholem expressed his anxiety with the Zionist project and reveals his apocalyptic view of the future of the New Hebrew. The author of this essay attempts to reconstruct the historical, metaphysical, and philological context of Scholem's letter. The author discusses the letter's theological background (the Kabbalistic theory of God's names, the figure of the "demon") and its political implications and considers Scholem's dialogue with Rosenzweig and Bialik as an additional context for the understanding of its complexities. The author also provides a model of cultural criticism that explores the dialectic of Jewish secularization and exposes the paradoxes of theopolitics and modernism in Zionist thinking.
ISSN:0016-8890
1930-6962
DOI:10.3200/GERR.83.4.299-320