The newly translated diaries of the young Gershom Scholem offer a fascinating glimpse into his early intellectual and personal development in Berlin

For those seeking a portrait of Berlin during the First World War, the youthful diaries of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism - newly published in English as "Lamentations of Youth" - may prove confounding. His musings, recorded from ages 15 to 22, show a near neglect of the superficial world for its own sake. Scholem instead probes for symbols and obscure meaning, taking readers on detours that will leave many at a loss.

Consider a snowfall in January 1915. As the 17-year-old Scholem sees it, "Snow swirls down in front of my window in minutely small flakes. The smaller snowflakes put up resistance: they don't want to sink down, though they must... For snow, fate is an unknown, inexplicable, and 'terrestrial' power. I can apply this to humans. Snowflakes don't believe in eternal life. Nor is there any reason - besides megalomania, which is hardly a strong argument - why we should think differently. Yes, we're no better than snowflakes. We also put up resistance when we plunge into an unexpected abyss, and we also melt..."

The diaries have been translated and edited down extensively from the unabridged German edition (published in 2002) by historian Anthony David Skinner. Considering Scholem's restless mind, the selections flow together smoothly, with end notes giving background on scores of writers and thinkers, many of them all but forgotten today. By omitting hundreds of pages of likely arcane musings, Skinner spares non-scholarly readers headaches - even though the full content would have provided a useful record of Scholem's intellectual development.

Throughout the diaries, Scholem focuses on the books he reads and acquaintances he meets with singular intensity. But the entries reflect more than just the maneuverings of a precocious mind; they also give insight into a formidable personality. Scholem comes across as relentlessly principled, judgmental, with only a strained sense of humor, and alternately self-exalting and self-critical. The overall portrait is not entirely sympathetic. Scholem's intimate friend Walter Benjamin - who was engaged in his doctoral studies when Scholem, then still in gymnasium (high school), met him at a lecture in Berlin - once mocked his "outrageous wholesomeness."

At times Scholem's tendency toward self-rebuke rises to a frightening pitch: "I am such a liar that I may have to make believe I live a heroic life because I'm too dishonest to kill myself. Suicide requires completeness," he writes in a September 1917 entry. This threat of suicide, invariably tied to feelings of intellectual dishonesty, recurs throughout the volume, and may exemplify not only the writer's personal volatility but also the mood among certain idealistic peers. Benjamin's close companion, the poet Fritz Heinle, committed suicide along with his girlfriend, presumably in protest against the Great War. Scholem, too, vehemently opposed the war.

Yet Scholem's seriousness does not preclude him from experiencing the usual turmoil and thrills of youth. He writes after his first kiss: "I love Meta [Jahr] dearly, and yet I find myself in the same abyss as before. I kissed her and cuddled with her. Was I allowed to do this? She has blossomed like a flower in springtime." He later describes his feverish and unrequited attraction, nearing worship, to his friend Erich Brauer's older sister: "...I walked for an hour with Grete all the way to her hotel. I can't do a thing about it: Grete's stillness and greatness wield total power over me." Elsewhere, particularly in his earlier entries, Scholem's overblown prose reminds us that he is still young. "Oh, what a superior kind of rebellion Werther communicates!" he proclaims after reading Goethe.

The diarist's less-fraught remarks, sometimes unintentionally amusing, offer a glimpse into the historical period. "Because of the victory at Kutno (with 28,000 prisoners taken!)," he records on November 17, 1914, "there was no school today, only a celebration." He later expresses indifference to the bombast accompanying Kaiser Wilhelm's birthday celebration. "[It] doesn't cheer or move me in the slightest," he writes. "[He] can't do much more than repeat tired phrases and bore people with his eternal god, who he always has by his side."

If Scholem's diaries offer only a limited picture of daily life in the Germany of his adolescence, they do give a vibrant sense of the debates and decisions faced by young Jews of the era. That era included a legacy of Jewish conversions to Christianity. In his book covering two centuries of Jewish life in Germany, "The Pity of It All," Amos Elon writes that by the 1850s, "only four of [philosopher] Moses Mendelssohn's 56 descendants were still Jews." Around the time of World War I, about one in five young Jewish men in Germany were converting to Christianity, mainly to attain professional and academic advancement.

Scholem's father, Arthur - who ran a printing business - opposed the idea of conversion but nonetheless held strongly patriotic views toward his homeland, including support for the war. He also disdained religious observance, and was known to light his cigar from the flame of the Shabbat candles. Gershom (born Gerhard) rejected his father's petit bourgeois attitude and his assimilationist views (the Scholems celebrated Christmas as a "folk" holiday). Ultimately he would be kicked out of the house by his father following a row over whether the war was justified. (Scholem felt closer to his mother, Betty.)

From an early age Scholem was obsessed with Judaism, although he only dabbled in strict religious observance before dispensing with the idea while still a teenager. Later, his studies in philosophy and the history of religion, along with forays into mathematics, would lead him to almost singlehandedly resurrect and codify the study of the kabbala, or Jewish mysticism. His work "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism," originally given as a series of lectures and published in 1946, remains the authoritative source on the topic. As early as age 17, Scholem mentioned the possibility of writing such a book.

None of Scholem's endeavors, however, can be understood outside the context of his Zionism, which was largely informed by the views of Martin Buber. Though the signs of his ultimate rift with Buber appear in these writings - over such issues as the role of theoretical literature versus the creative impulse in the rise of hasidism - the two shared an emphasis on Zionism as a vehicle for Jewish spiritual renewal. Neither found comfort in the nation-state as an end goal. For his part, Scholem imagined, "Out of a true Jewish longing there must spring forth a true devotion, an act of entering into and up to Judaism." Scholem viewed "longing" as the prime mover behind Jewish historical experience, believing that the concept found clearest expression in an assortment of biblical and post-biblical passages that he called "lamentations."

In the late 1910s, Scholem translated a series of these lamentations as an exercise in truth-seeking, as well as to urge fellow Jewish idealists to relocate to Palestine, where they could engage Jewish texts with full-minded attention. Scholem's father printed and bound his translation of Song of Songs as a gift for Gershom's 19th birthday.

Scholem's relationship with Walter Benjamin offers little relief from the weighty, abstruse content found elsewhere in these pages. Most of the action centers on discussion of the day's philosophers, critics, as well as Scholem's feverish commentary on the evolution of the friendship itself. Only on occasion do we see the two young men engaged in ordinary activities: meeting by chance at a greengrocer near the train station in Munich and retiring to a nearby caf?; walking through the old section of Bern, Switzerland. Yet these scenes, brief as they are, tell us something about Scholem's life outside the boundaries of his overactive mind. Readers will be refreshed. The scenes also show the evocative power of the diary form; how raw records of an event provide a sense of immediacy that a memoir could never muster.

The experience of befriending Benjamin was so central to Scholem's life that he devoted a memoir to the subject, "Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship," published in German in 1975 (seven years before Scholem's death). Toward the close of the war, the two lived for more than a year - along with Benjamin's wife, Dora - as self-exiled neighbors in and around Bern, where they spent hours a day discussing philosophy and playing chess. Conflict flared during those months, though, with perhaps the main disappointment for Scholem - who could be na?ve in his idealism - Benjamin's reluctance to embrace Zionism and a Jewish worldview. Benjamin associated with Jews and non-Jews alike, whereas Scholem interacted almost solely with Jews.

Increasing friction ultimately forced Scholem to distance himself from his friend and mentor. The separation, if temporary, caused him immense anguish. Scholem had viewed Benjamin not only as a role model but, as he notes in his diaries, a "prophet [who] has purified and refined my spirit the way only a prophet can purify and refine." He once gushed, "The only relationship that always and unconditionally holds firm is to Walter. I love Walter..." Such effusive language suggests an erotic strain in certain male friendships of that era, as well as affirming Scholem's avidity.

Over the course of his academic career, Scholem sought to explore the concealed meanings in Jewish liturgy and history, and the Hebrew language, but he also - according to Skinner, the editor - furtively inserted himself in his work. How exactly? His reference to Benjamin as a "prophet" - a term Scholem cited interchangeably with a "critic" and "mystic" - offers a clue. This is apt because, after immigrating to Palestine in 1923, Scholem studied an array of religious eccentrics who were also considered to have prophetic abilities.

Principal among those eccentrics was Shabbtai Zvi, the 17th century false messiah. Scholem wrote a biography of Zvi, whose "[p]eriods of profound depression and melancholia constantly alternated ... with spasms of maniacal exaltation, enthusiasm, and euphoria, separated by intervals of a more normal state of mind." (This account comes from "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.") Psychologists today would diagnose this as manic-depression, as did Scholem. For followers of Zvi, these manic episodes represented evidence of a connection to the divine, a relationship Scholem would explore in his later work.

Readers may note comparable vacillations between mania and despair in Scholem, who admitted in his diary that, for a time, he suspected that he himself might be the messiah. While ultimately abandoning such a lofty claim, Scholem may never have stopped believing that, in the search for a messianic age, he would remain the leading light.

Jason Warshof is a writer living in Massachusetts.

Copyright (c) 2008. The Jerusalem Report)