Scholem

Just finished reading a fascinating memoir by one Gershom Scholem, a pick-me-up from the library at the Tooting Wetherspoon's. 150 pages or so of it. No idea how it came to be there, but, like the platform library at Raynes Park, the standard is a lot higher than one might expect.

Scholem came from a family of Berlin Jews, originally from Silesia. He was clearly a very able chap, pursuing both mathematical and Jewish studies at various German and Swiss universities, rather than going into the family printing business, and who emigrated to Palestine in 1923. Meeting along the way all kinds of people who were, or who became, eminent. And spending most of his subsequent career in the study of Jewish mysticism, picking up Yiddish, Hebrew and Arabic along the way. And I dare say other languages.

I did not give him more than a quick read, but I was struck by the fervour with which a lot of European Jews studied their roots, a reaction in some cases from the enthusiastic assimilation pursued by others in the face of a lot of institutional hostility. I associated to the fervour with which, at roughly the same time, a lot of Irish studied their Gaelic roots. Or, more recently, the fervour with which the Welsh and the Scots have dug up their Gaelic roots. A Gaelic fervour which probably had little if any of the intellectual firepower which European Jews brought to their quest.

While I can see the pull of a continuing tradition which is more than two thousand years' old, more than us Christians and a lot more than the Moslems, I don't think I could have devoted a good part of my adult life to it, even had I had any talent for languages. I think, if I had had to chose, I would have settled for mathematics.

This book was written in 1977, when Scholem was an old man. I was disappointed by his almost total lack of recognition of the problems which mass immigration into a land which was by no means empty was going to cause, mass immigration which started well before the horrors of the second world war.

But I was pleased to be able to turn out my FlexiMap of Berlin to help me along with all the Berlin street names. Bought in the margins of a very important conference, a gift from my manager during my time at the Home Office. Largely funded by Sun Microsystems, a then proud corporation, subsequently swallowed up by Oracle. Also to be found in the margins, was a rather strange bar in the vicinity of the Pankow underground station. Probably not a good place to have been in late at night.

PS: it seems that the aforesaid family printing business did very well out of printing some of the millions of forms needed to oil the bureaucratic wheels of the first world war. Scholem senior certainly spotted an opportunity there.