Description: A new biography of the seminal twentieth-century historian and thinker who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism and profoundly influenced the Zionist movement
Review Quotes: "Biale's book is a fresh, often surprising depiction of Scholem. He shows us the vulnerable man behind the sovereign scholar without reducing the one to the other or relinquishing his admiration"--Steven E. Aschheim, Jewish Review of Books
"In this latest addition to Yale University Press' fine Jewish Lives series of short biographies, Biale shows that for all of his immersion into the mythic and irrational, Scholem remained a modern bourgeois intellectual."--Washington Jewish Week "Biale . . . not only captures Scholem's scholarship, but also his personal involvement in the major issues, conflicts, tragedies, and triumphs of Jewish life during the last century. . . . [An] excellent new book."--Reform Judaism "David Biale, in Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah, has produced precisely what Yale's Jewish Lives series was intended to produce: an accessible, digestible, yet still capacious, volume introducing an educated lay readership to a major figure of Jewish history. . . . Biale, by digging into the vast, dense corpus of writings this man of letters left behind has yielded a true treasure trove of wisdom."--Reading Religion "David Biale has produced. . . an accessible, digestible, yet still capacious, volume introducing an educated lay readership to a major figure of Jewish history. . . . A true treasure trove of wisdom."--Joshua Schwartz, Reading Religion "Lucidly written"--Michael Berkowitz, Tel Aviv Review of Books "David Biale's ability to capture and illuminate a 'life' in its full and manifold aspects for so complex and multi-faceted a man is a major achievement. A superb, much-awaited biography."--Steven Aschheim, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem