One of the twentieth century’s most maverick scholars of religion, Gershom Scholem introduced the study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism into the academy—and into modern Jewish literature, philosophy, and the arts as a whole. This annotated, bilingual volume contains the German poetry that he wrote for the most part in private or addressed to a few selected friends, such as Walter Benjamin. His verse registers his lifelong disappointment with the eventualities of Zion, caught as it is at every point in a fraught dialectic of messianic hope and despair.
