Gershom Scholem: Modern Mystic

Little wonder that the figure of Gershom Scholem has inspired younger generations, especially among those yearning to find a religious center in their lives. Enter George Prochnik, born in 1961, the author of “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” (2014) and himself something of a specialist in exile. “When I moved to Jerusalem, at the age of twenty-seven, in the summer of 1988,” he writes, “I brought with me an old, battered paperback edition of Scholem's On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. . . . I was one of those for whom Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet. I found in his work if not faith, yet something closer to revelation than anything I could discover in normative Judaism.”