Gershom Scholem on the Occult Use of Kabbalah

Gershom Scholem spent his career insisting that Kabbalah be studied as history, not as occult décor. Born in Berlin in 1897 and later a professor in Jerusalem, he built modern academic research into Jewish mysticism almost single-handedly, and he had little patience for the Western occult current this series has been tracing since Kabbalah and Christian Cabala: Two Different Traditions. This article looks at what Scholem actually argued about that current, and why his view still matters for anyone reading tarot symbolism today.

From assimilated Berlin to scholarly Jerusalem

Scholem grew up in a thoroughly assimilated, German-speaking Jewish family that had little connection to religious practice. As a young man he turned deliberately toward Hebrew, Zionism, and Jewish textual tradition, a choice that estranged him from much of his own family. He emigrated to Palestine in 1923 and spent the following decades at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reading manuscripts that earlier scholars had mostly dismissed as embarrassing superstition unworthy of serious study. His major book, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941, reshaped the field and remains a starting point for anyone studying the Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah, or the Sabbatean movement.

Gershom Scholem on occult borrowing

Gershom Scholem did not write primarily about the tarot, but his broader argument applies directly to it. He treated Kabbalah as a historically specific body of Jewish text and practice, shaped by particular communities responding to particular crises — expulsion, messianic hope, catastrophe, exile. He was openly skeptical of Christian Cabala and of the later occult systems built on top of it, viewing them as projections that borrowed Kabbalistic vocabulary while discarding the historical and religious context that gave it meaning. Where Pico and Reuchlin had read Hebrew letters as universal keys, Scholem insisted on reading them inside the specific texts, languages, and communities that produced them.

Why historians draw this line

A historian's caution here is not pedantry. Johannes Reuchlin's De Arte Cabalistica and the Western Occultists showed how a Christian Hebraist's synthesis, built for a theological purpose, later supplied raw material for occultists with no training in the sources at all. Scholem's method — close philology, attention to manuscript transmission, skepticism toward grand universal claims — offers a corrective. It does not forbid anyone from finding meaning in the Tree of Life as a tarot study tool. It does ask that such a reader know the difference between a scholarly account of a Jewish tradition and a Western esoteric adaptation several removes away from it.

A rare point of contact with the occult world

Scholem's own writing occasionally crossed paths with the Western occult milieu almost by accident. He corresponded for years with Walter Benjamin, and he moved in European intellectual circles where Kabbalah's occult afterlife was a live topic, even as his own scholarship worked to separate serious Jewish studies from it. He also wrote with care about Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbatean movement, showing how messianic Kabbalistic ideas could move through Jewish communities with real historical consequences, distinct from any later Western reuse of similar vocabulary. That distinction between an idea's life inside its originating tradition and its afterlife outside it runs through nearly everything Scholem published.

What this means for tarot study

Readers drawn to the Tree of Life or to Hebrew letter correspondences on the trumps can treat Scholem as a useful check. The Priestess and other trumps carry centuries of accumulated occult interpretation, much of it traceable to specific, nameable authors rather than to Jewish tradition itself. Reading Scholem's work, even briefly, helps separate those threads. His Gershom Scholem biography on Wikipedia is a good starting point, and it leads naturally into his major books for anyone wanting the primary material rather than a summary. The next article in this series turns to the Hebrew letters themselves, asking plainly whether the tarot's use of them is borrowing or genuine dialogue.