Jewish Texts and History • Re: Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraeer (1925)

The same skepticism about various types of religious spirituality can be found already in the 1920s, particularly in Scholem’s vehement attacks on Oskar Goldberg (1887–1952).19 Goldberg, who came from an Orthodox background, developed a bizarre theology focused on the five books of Moses interpreted in terms of numerological magic. Following the Kabbalah, Goldberg held that the Pentateuch is based on the letters of the tetragrammaton. According to this theory, because all of the laws and rituals of the Torah are, in effect, the name of God, the Hebrews activated the metaphysical reality at their “center” by means of observing these rituals. Through this magical procedure the Hebrews became a metaphysical people and, indeed, the most metaphysical of all peoples. All subsequent biblical and Jewish history represented a fall from this “reality of the Hebrews” (the title of Goldberg’s 1925 magnum opus). As opposed to polytheistic religions, whose gods were rooted in material reality, only the God of the Hebrews enjoyed a pure metaphysical reality. Goldberg’s goal was to recapture this magical reality in the modern world, which had become mired in polytheistic materialism. Interestingly, Thomas Mann based the metaphysical ideas in the first part of his Joseph and His Brothers on Goldberg, but he later satirized Goldberg as “Dr. Chaim Breisacher,” the purveyor of a Nazi-like magical racial theory in his Dr. Faustus.20

In the 1920s, the Goldberg circle tried to entice Scholem to join their ranks because they were fascinated by Kabbalah but had little access to its texts. Scholem rebuffed these advances, in part in reaction to Goldberg’s hostility to Zionism but also because he rejected Goldberg’s ahistorical metaphysics that sought to recreate the primordial “reality” of the Hebrews. This kind of re-enchantment was utterly foreign to his sensibility. When Goldberg’s Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer appeared in 1925, Scholem attacked it as “Jewish Satanism.”21 The impact that Goldberg’s definition of the role of magic and mysticism had on Scholem’s version of modernity cannot be overestimated. Scholem’s resistance to Goldberg seems to have arisen from his rejection of the possibility of a true mysticism “in our time.” Goldberg’s odd synthesis of magical metaphysics with a biological (even racial) definition of the Jews was almost the complete diametric opposite of what can be seen as Scholem’s far less mythic understanding of the Jewish people in the modern era. Moreover, Scholem considered Goldberg’s transplantation of the Kabbalah into modernity to have something in common with the nihilistic vestiges of Sabbateanism.

After 'Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer' had appeared (1925), I wrote a long, critical letter {in 1928} about the book ; (Walter) Benjamin and Leo Strauss disseminated copies of it {1929} in Berlin, and it won me no friends among Goldberg's adherents {c.1929/30}. That others were impressed, indeed entranced, by the imaginative verve of Goldberg's interpretations of the Torah... is evidenced not only by {paleontologist Edgar Dacque but especially the German novelist Thomas Mann}