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Gershom Scholem's Research on Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld

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Gershom Scholem's Research on Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld Chapter 2 Adventurer, (Pseudo?)-Kabbalist, and Theosophist: Gershom Scholem’s Research on Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld Patrick Benjamin Koch Abstract In his kabbalistic studies, Gershom Scholem arguably showed special interest in bi- ographies of individuals who personify the so-called “anarchic potential” of what he termed “heretical kabbalah.” This tendency is also reflected in his research on Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld (ca. 1755–1820), one of the first Jews admitted to a Masonic order in a German-speaking country. The present article reconstructs Gershom Scholem’s inves- tigations of E.J. Hirschfeld based on the collection of materials that he acquired over a period of two decades. A careful analysis of Scholem’s copies of Masonic manuscripts and handwritten notes reveals that in the course of his work he eventually qualified his premature evaluation of Hirschfeld as a kabbalist and “forgotten Jewish mystic.” In a wider context, the analysis shows how Scholem’s dialectical understanding of the his- tory of Jewish mysticism profoundly influenced his understanding of Hirschfeld’s life. Keywords Asiatic Brethren – Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld – Enlightenment – esotericism – freemasonry – Jewish mysticism – kabbalah In the autumn of 1981, Gershom Scholem returned again to his birthplace of Berlin, where he planned to stay for a one-year residency at the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg in Weissensee. As was indicated in a letter that he had sent to his brother Reinhold on 31 August 1981 from Sils-Maria, Switzerland, he intended to write a German monograph on the Jewish freemason Ephraim Joseph (E.J.) Hirschfeld (ca. 1755–1820) during this period.1 1 Scholem, Briefe iii, 225, viii, and 241. Cf. Veltri, Necker, and Koch, “Die versuchte Wiederauf- nahme.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004387409_003 Patrick Benjamin Koch - 9789004387409 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:14PM via free access <UN> 18 Koch Hirschfeld’s checkered life had actually sparked Scholem’s interest two de- cades earlier. In “A Forgotten Jewish Mystic of the Enlightenment,” published in 1962, he had already presented an analysis of Hirschfeld’s eccentric character.2 On the basis of the sparse material available at that time, Scholem had posited two major theses on where to locate Hirschfeld in the framework of modern Jewish history: first, he had portrayed him as a Jewish mystic and, specifical- ly, as one of the last German kabbalists.3 In this fashion, he wrote in another study, also published in 1962, that “kabbalistic inclinations led [Hirschfeld] … into very different circles, namely the mystical secret societies of the theoso- phists and the theosophically oriented freemasons.”4 In other words, Scholem regarded Hirschfeld’s affinity with the Jewish mystical traditions as the main reason for his increasing interest in other contemporary non-Jewish esoteric movements, which themselves were deeply attracted to kabbalistic lore. Second, Scholem portrayed Hirschfeld as a somewhat alienated mystic who was at the epicenter of the Haskalah, a portrayal that substantiated his overall historical analysis of Jewish mysticism, particularly its gradual deterioration as a historical and social phenomenon during the modern period. Already in 1941, Scholem described Hasidism as “the latest phase” of Jewish mysticism.5 In 1962, he declared that the kabbalistic traditions in the German-speaking coun- tries had reached an end as a result of “Mendelssohn’s activities and school,” on the one hand, and as a result of the Sabbatian movement, particularly in the “aftermath of the fights between Jakob Emden and Jonathan Eybeschütz,” on the other.6 This upheaval eventually paved the way for the emergence of a “strange amalgamation of kabbalistic studies with the new world of ideas of 2 Scholem, “Ein verschollener jüdischer Mystiker.” It is likely that Scholem first encountered Hirschfeld while reading Peter Beer, Geschichte, 390f. Cf. Scholem, ibid., 248. 3 The same assessment can also be found in one of Scholem’s notes in his personal copy of Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld and Pascal Hirschfeld, Biblisches Organon, where he describes him as a “kabbalist-theosophist, who wrote in German.” Scholem’s copy of this very rare book is today housed at the Gershom Scholem Library of the National Library of Israel under the signature R8915. The note is to be found on the second blank page (recto). 4 Scholem, “Zur Literatur,” 362f. and see also the slightly revised version of Scholem, “Die letz- ten Kabbalisten.” 5 Scholem, Major Trends, 325. For Scholem’s thesis that Hasidism was the last phase of Jew- ish mysticism, see also Assaf and Liebes, Ha-shalav ha-akharon; and Meir, “Ginzei Shalom.” In recent years, this assessment has been criticized and proven incorrect. See, for example, Garb, The Chosen Will Become Herds; Garb, “The Modernization of Kabbalah”; Giller, Shalom Shar’abi; Magid, “‘The King is Dead’”; and Magid, “Mysticism, History, and a ‘New’ Kabbalah.” 6 Scholem, “Zur Literatur,” 359. Patrick Benjamin Koch - 9789004387409 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:14PM via free access <UN> Adventurer, (Pseudo?)-Kabbalist, and Theosophist 19 the Enlightenment.”7 With Hirschfeld, he seemed to have found a protagonist who exemplified such a fusion between “old” and “new.” It was these initial assumptions that probably impelled Scholem to meticu- lously accumulate a considerable amount of source material, most of which consisted of manuscripts from the Asiatic Brethren, one of the first Masonic orders to admit Jews into their ranks. With the assistance of Rafael Edelmann, then head of the Judaica Collection of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Scho- lem was granted permission by the Grand Lodge of Denmark to access the ar- chives of the Danish Order of Freemasons (Den Danske Frimurerorden), which contain many of the Asiatic Brethren’s writings.8 In the autumn of 1963, he traveled to Copenhagen and made copies of the material that he considered relevant to his research.9 Jacob Katz, who began to investigate the relationship between freemasons and Jews almost simultaneously with Scholem, provided him with additional documents that he discovered during a 1964 visit to the Cultural Masonic Centre “Prins Frederik” in The Hague.10 In 1981, Scholem sent the collected documents, including more copies of manuscript sources, excerpts from printed masonic literature, and his per- sonal notes, to the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin with the intention of finally preparing them for publication.11 Due to his sudden death on 21 February 1982, Scholem was unable to implement his project. “A Forgotten Jewish Mystic” therefore remains his only comprehensive study on Hirschfeld.12 Unlike other aspects of Scholem’s archive that have been systematically edited and made accessible to a wider public in the past three decades, his collection on Hirschfeld has remained almost untouched to this day.13 Here, I offer the first attempt to reconstruct Scholem’s scholarship on E.J. Hirschfeld 7 Ibid., 360. 8 In a letter to Rafael Edelmann, Scholem wrote that he was planning to visit the archives in Copenhagen and that, depending on his findings, he would consider publishing the outcome of his research with the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem (Letter of Scholem Ad- dressed to Rafael Edelmann from 24 July 1962, Scholem Archive of the National Library of Israel, [hereafter abbreviated as nli], 4*1599 06, 194/2). 9 In a letter to Theodor W. Adorno from 22 April 1963, Scholem mentions that he will pre- sumably stay in Copenhagen during the entire month of September (Scholem, Briefe ii, 93). On 19 October 1963, he sent a letter to Hannah Arendt from Copenhagen (ibid., 110f.). 10 See Katz, “Moses Mendelssohn,” 295; and Scholem, “Ein Frankist,” 81, n. 15. 11 In a letter addressed to his brother Reinhold, he wrote: “I have sent 10 kilos of docu- ments(!) to Berlin that need to be exploited from three archives” (Scholem, Briefe iii, 241). 12 In addition to his German article, Scholem published a short English encyclopedia entry on E.J. Hirschfeld in 1972 (see Scholem, “Hirschfeld,” 136f.). 13 The few studies that dealt with E.J. Hirschfeld after Scholem’s death drew their informa- tion almost exclusively from the publications of Scholem and Jacob Katz. See, for ex- ample, Davidowicz, “Zwischen Aufklärung und Mystik”; Kilcher, “Franz Joseph Molitors Patrick Benjamin Koch - 9789004387409 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:14PM via free access <UN> 20 Koch based on this hitherto unpublished material.14 My focus will be on one of the most essential questions that Scholem posed time and again when he inves- tigated Hirschfeld’s life: to what extent can we consider E.J. Hirschfeld as the source of kabbalistic ideas that can be found in the Asiatic Brethren’s writings in general and as the author of its “degree of craft system”15 in particular? By further examining Scholem’s motivation to study Hirschfeld, I will show, based on this newly acquired data, how he came to qualify his initial evaluation of the freemason as a kabbalist.16 More broadly, my analysis will also reveal how Scholem’s dialectical understanding of the history of Jewish mysticism pro- foundly influenced his reading of Hirschfeld’s life and work.17 1 E.J. Hirschfeld: From Kabbalah to the Enlightenment? In their research, both Scholem and Katz postulated that Hirschfeld must have enjoyed an extensive Jewish education as a child.18 At first glance, this assump- tion seems plausible, as Hirschfeld’s father, Me’ir Tzevi Darmstadt (also known as Joseph Hirschel Darmstadt) was a rabbi and was known as the author of a commentary on the talmudic tractates Berakhot, Beitzah, and Megillah, as well as a Yiddish translation of Moshe Alsheikh’s (1520–1593) Torat Moshe, a com- mentary on Genesis.19 But in fact, we have no evidence that Hirschfeld had any significant knowl- edge of—or that he received special training in—the Jewish tradition.
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