Visualizing a Zionist Abyss: Gershom Scholem and the Messianic Threat

Gershom Scholem manifests a tension between Jewish Messianism and the establishment of a Zionist sovereign entity. In his work, Scholem shed light on Messianic history and figures such as Sabbtai Sevi. However, as a Zionist, Scholem rejected any involvement of Messianic considerations within the decision making process of the Zionist movement. How are these approaches to be reconciled? I wish to show that Scholem’s work implicitly described a political procedure which contains a duality of awareness and restraint: the Zionist universities should enable a boundless research of Messianic history. The awareness of the price which Jews paid for Messianic belief is what should convince them to restrain Messianism from daily politics.

The paper will demonstrate one strategy which enables to reconstruct this political procedure. I will examine a set of rhetorical devices which Scholem used throughout his writings, in order to visualize a "Messianic threat." Scholem used constantly the metaphor of the abyss, and described scholarly activity as the attempt to see and to visualize that abyss. The visualization of the scholar is opposed to the blindness from which the Zionist movement supposedly suffered: "we live within that language above an abyss, most of us with the steadiness of blind men."[1]

In addition, I intend to show how Scholem`s usage of spatial metaphors corresponds with the writings of Nathan of Gaza and Friedrich Nietzsche. The similarities between Scholem and these writers, who used the term “abyss,” demonstrates the inherent duality in his approach.

[1] Scholem, “On Our Language: A Confession"