Recovering the past, renewing the present: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and the history of historical consciousness in German-Jewish thought

After a century-long struggle, the German-Jewish community achieved emancipation in 1871 only to face new polemics: racial antisemitism from without and charges of "assimilationism" from within. Polemicists from within condemned their fellow Jews for abandoning Judaism on the altar of social-political expedience. And many charged Wissenschaft des Judentums (the scholarly study of Judaism)---the idiom of nineteenth century German-Jewish intellectual life---with facilitating the abandonment: scholars had proved Judaism's congruence with German values and Jews' fitness for citizenship by squandering their rich and vital Jewish heritage. In addition, many critics of Wissenschaft suspected that historical consciousness may be inherently destructive---that taking critical distance from inherited tradition and reconstructing what actually happened in the past may necessarily undermine allegiance to Judaism.;Martin Buber (1878--1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897--1982) came of age during this crisis in rebellion against "assimilationist" scholarship. While Buber eschewed historical criticism, pursuing renewal by ahistorically retrieving the essential truths of Hasidism from the past, Scholem eschewed merely the "assimilationism" of Wissenschaft ; binding historical scholarship to Zionism, Scholem studied Jewish mysticism in order to reveal the secret of Judaism's historical vitality. Yet, both had misgivings about their approaches to Jewish renewal. Buber did not pursue ahistorical retrieval exclusively; in fact, in his biblical writings, he bases his retrieval of biblical faith on historical reconstruction. And although Scholem never strayed from his historical-critical path, he worried that scholarship might be incapable of illuminating religious truth and meaning. Also, he often suppressed his constructive interests in and beliefs about Kabbalah, suggesting that he found it difficult to hold these together with his historical-critical approach.;Buber and Scholem thus continued to work in the shadow of the crisis of their youth; both continued to struggle with the suspicion that historical consciousness may be inherently destructive. Yet neither could escape historical consciousness. Their different paths were sustained by the same paradox: historical-critical knowledge of the past threatened present-day renewal yet seemed unavoidable. Scholem's and Buber's writings reflect their overlapping and unresolved struggles to negotiate between critical knowledge of the past and retrieval of the past as the basis for present-day renewal.