Arthur Scholem had made his preparations he waited. On that February morning in 1917, the family table was less heated than quietly tense. But by then Gerhard had long since been transmuted into Gershom. No wonder "the discussions at our family table became heated," as Scholem wryly points out in "From Berlin to Jerusalem," his concise little memoir of 1977. Arthur Scholem believed himself to be an established and accepted member of a stable society. The faith might be tepidly Jewish the primary allegiance-the unquestioned identity, both social and personal-was German. Martin Buber's romanticized work and Heinrich Graetz's panoramic "History of the Jews" (both of which Scholem eventually took issue with) were the initial stimuli, but he went on to search out the Zionist theoreticians of the time, and anything in Judaica that a bibliomaniacal teen-age boy haunting secondhand bookshops could afford.Īll this was too much for the elder Scholem, who paid dues, after all, to the vehemently anti-Zionist Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith.
Every element of these ancient canonical texts attracted him: their ethical and jurisprudential preoccupations the vitality, in equal measure, of their rational and imaginative insights their famous dialogic and often dissenting discourse across the generations. Gerhard had not only hurled himself into the study of Hebrew he was entering, with the identical zeal he gave to Latin and German literature, the capacious universe of the Talmud, an oceanic compilation of interpretive Biblical commentaries. This interest, in Arthur Scholem's view, had increasingly turned excessive and unreasonable. ("From then on," Scholem commented decades later, "I left the house at Christmastime.") "We selected this picture for you because you are so interested in Zionism," his mother explained. When Gerhard was fourteen, he found under the tree a framed portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. At Christmas, there was an elaborately decorated tree, surrounded by heaps of presents. A businessman, he was demanding, authoritarian, uncompromising, practical above all he presided over a successful printing enterprise and a household that could keep both a cook and a maid. But Gerhard was near enough to feel his father's rage, and Arthur Scholem had devised a punishment of Prussian thoroughness. Arthur Scholem, the paterfamilias of this opinionated crew (half of them mutinous), could do nothing about Werner, who was in the hands of the military. Two years earlier, exposed as the author of an antiwar flyer circulated by a Zionist youth group, he had been expelled from high school. Gerhard had declared himself to be a Zionist, and was openly preparing for emigration to Palestine. Over the uneaten pastries, yet another brand of treason was brewing. He was arrested and charged with treason. Limping, wearing his uniform, he abandoned his bed and made his way to an antiwar demonstration. He had been wounded in the foot in the Serbian campaign and was recuperating in an Army hospital. Werner, Gerhard's senior by two years, was a hothead and a leftist-he later became a committed Communist. Reinhold and Erich were sold German patriots like their father Reinhold went so far as to call himself, in right-wing lingo, a Deutschnationaler-a German nationalist. The three others had all been conscripted for the Kaiser's war. Gerhard, the youngest of four sons, was the only one still living at home. One morning early in February, 1917, Gerhard Scholem, a tall, jug-eared, acutely bookish young man of nineteen, sat at breakfast with his parents in their comfortable Berlin apartment.
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