This Spring, the New York Times Book Review ran this piece about George Prochnik’s Stranger In A Strange Land: Searching For Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem – a look at the emergence of concepts of Jewish identity intertwined with the tale of the “religious anarchist” who introduced Qabala to the goyyim. Since O.T.O. is pretty much filled with Gentiles obsessed with Qabala studies, I think this could be of interest. In part the review states:
“…Gershom Scholem, the Jewish philosopher credited with establishing the modern academic study of kabbalah. Raised in Berlin in the early 1900s, the son of a nominally Jewish father whose bourgeois values he loathed, Scholem became what he called a ‘religious anarchist’ — seeing in Jewish mysticism an answer to the political quandaries of his time. To this direct end, he also considered himself a Zionist; to him, the land did not signify ‘the Jews’ withdrawal from the world and its great problems, but rather the establishment of a unique laboratory in which experiments for redeeming both could be conducted.’”
Read the entire article here:
