Volume 27, Number 20 · December 18, 1980
The Master of Mysticism
By Arnaldo Momigliano
From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth
by Gershom Scholem, translated by Harry Zohn
Schocken, 178 pp., $12.95
In September 1923 two young German Jews embarked together at Trieste on their way to settle in Palestine. One, Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem, born in 1897, was soon to become the greatest Jewish historian of our century. The other, Fritz (Shlomo Dov) Goitein, born in 1900, was perhaps slower in developing, from a conventional Arabist into a student of the Jewish-Arabic symbiosis of the Middle Ages and beyond. Yet the volumes of A Mediterranean Society, which Goitein started to publish in 1967, amount to a revolutionary picture founded upon new sources (mainly from the repository of documents of the old synagogue of Cairo) that bears comparison with Scholem's achievements.
Review, 3642 words
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