This Pathless Hour | 253same year that eighty-three-year-old Buber was elected the first president of the
newly founded Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Scholem claimed
that although Buber was largely responsible for introducing Hasidism to the
West, and thus that in some sense “we are all his disciples,” nonetheless “the spir-
itual message he has read into these writings is far too closely tied to assumptions
that derive from his own philosophy of religious anarchism and existentialism
and have no roots in the texts themselves.”^12 Buber had known for some time of
Scholem’s private, unpublished reservations about his approach.^13 In 1943 he had
heard Scholem explain some of his reservations in person. In Scholem’s recollec-
tion of this encounter twenty years later, Buber had responded: “If what you are
now saying were right, my dear Scholem, then I would have worked on Hasidism
for forty years absolutely in vain, because in that case, Hasidism does not interest
me at all.”^14 Scholem’s student, Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, had voiced a critique
of Buber’s conception of Hasidism clearly reflecting the views of her teacher, but
the article of 1961 was the first time they appeared under Scholem’s name.^15 Bu-
ber replied briefly, but ill health prevented a fuller response. Between Buber’s
death in 1965 and his own passing in 1982, Scholem’s position came to dominate
the field.^16 Since then, scholars have continued the controversy, reexamining the
claim of Scholem and his students to a more accurate, historical picture of Ha-
sidism over Buber’s forcing the movement into his preconceived world picture.^17
The persistence of the controversy indicates the centrality of its basic themes to
the study of Jewish thought.^18
The debate takes place on two levels: methodology and content. Method-
ologically, Scholem accuses Buber of failing to be a historian; Buber responds
that his presentation is not intended to be history. On the level of content, the
debate concerns the nature of the Hasidic attitude toward the world. Buber con-
tends that Hasidism affirms the world through hallowing and sanctification,
whereas Scholem argues that Buber overlooks the connections between Hasi-
dism and previous, otherworldly forms of Jewish mysticism: “The Hasidic au-
thors obviously did not believe that they had in any way broken with the gnostic
tradition of the Kabbalah and, little as Buber wants to admit it, they wrote clearly
and plainly as Gnostics.”^19 Scholem’s use of the term “gnostic” here is central to
the debate. As Benjamin Lazier has observed, the terms “gnostic” and “Gnos-
ticism” had special connotations in European thought of the interwar period:
“Alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from
himself, from an absent, transcendent God, and above all from the material, sen-
suous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demi-
urge.”^20 This understanding of Gnosticism, which Buber and Scholem shared,
stemmed from certain religious movements of antiquity, anathematized by the
Church Fathers as “knowledge [gnosis] falsely so-called” and categorized vari-
ously by modern scholars as a sect of Christianity, as a Christian or Jewish heresy,
as a proto-Christian religion, or as an independent syncretic tradition drawing