The appeal of mysticism

This extraordinary book has two main characters: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), an early Zionist and the founder of the modern study of traditional Jewish mysticism, and the author George Prochnik, who was 28 when he first moved with his then wife to make a new life in Israel. Stranger in a Strange Land has as subtitle ‘Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem’; but it also tells the story of Prochnik’s search for his own identity. If this sounds complicated, it is. The reader needs to pay attention to the shifts from one period and place to another.

Scholem went to Palestine in 1923 when hardly anybody from the German bourgeoisie made that move. The famous Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was tied by close friendship to the impossible young Scholem — whose wife, Fanya Freud, remarked that Benjamin was the only person her husband had ever truly loved. Benjamin’s Marx-inflected universalism against Scholem’s Judeo-centric particularism created a permanent intellectual and emotional tension.