On the Construction of Jewishness and the Inescapable Jewish Fate: The Cases of Werner and Gershom Scholem

Abstract

The two youngest brothers of the Scholem family, Werner and Gerhard (later Gershom), became prominent personalities, each in his field. Werner was one of the leaders of the KPD, the German Communist Party, and Gershom became the founder of the field of Kabbalah research at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As a result of this prominence, both brothers were confronted throughout their lives with reactions to their physical appearance, which was perceived by the people they met as typically Jewish. These reactions came to reflect their exceptional position as political, philosophical and scholarly vanguards. Both Werner and Gershom were well aware of the reactions that their faces evoked, and each of them dealt with these ascriptions in different ways at different times: by either ignoring or employing them as they pursued their social and political goals, the brothers defined—and redefined—their relationship to Germany and developed a performative level of Jewishness. This article explores the questions: in what sense did their physical appearance in the eyes of others shape the self-perception of the two youngest Scholem brothers? And to what extent did this perception influence their complex relationship to Germany and Germans during the height of their public fame in Germany—in Werner's case the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and for Gershom the post-war period? Although both of them were proponents of utopian ideas that offered a kind of salvation to the Jewish condition in turn-of-the-century Europe, this article argues that their looks and habitus determined their German-Jewish fate.