One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem virtually created the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as a serious area of study. His influence, however, has been felt far beyond the confines of the academy and to this day extends into the realm of literature and the arts. (Borges, for one, rhymed “Golem” with “Scholem.”) Literature played a critical part in Scholem’s own life, especially in his formative years, and he wrote poems from his teens on.

This bilingual volume gathers together the best of them for the first time in any language. It contains dark, shockingly prescient political poems about Zionism and assimilation, parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, religious lyrics of a gnostic bent, and poems to other writers and friends such as Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Ingeborg Bachmann, S. Y. Agnon, and others.

Richard Sieburth, among the very finest contemporary American translators, takes on the challenge of translating the verse of a man who was not primarily a poet, but who possessed both a superior mind and a strong, informed feel for poetry: the results are startling, and strangely moving. The collection is edited and introduced by Steven M. Wasserstrom, whose latest book, Religion after Religion, is a fascinating study of the great makers of the modern myth of religion: Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin. Wasserstrom has selected the poems and places them in the context of Scholem’s scholarly work, in the process giving readers a sense of the intellectual and social atmosphere surrounding these poems in Scholem’s charged Jerusalem circles of scholarship.

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