Gershom Scholem and Christian Kabbalah: A Reappraisal

This paper tries to shed light on the value and limitations of the label ‘Christian Kabbalah’ for our knowledge of the historical phenomenon it describes. It works out how Christian scholars approached Kabbalah for a variety of reasons, be they instrumental, polemicizing or glorifying approaches, or for further motives. In addition, the article examines how the basic lines of the field of research around the Kabbalah in general were established and which impulses emanated from Gershom Scholem in particular. It concludes with an examination of Scholem’s religious philosophy with regard to his own research interest in the Kabbalah, which goes, in Scholem’s words, beyond historiography in some cases. Scholem described academic research on Kabbalah as ‘ironic’ and this irony affects his own ambivalent attitude towards the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance and the early modern epoch.