Among the great innovators in Jewish thought in the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem stands on the highest level.  After fifty years of scholarship, he offers a memoir that is at once a portrait of his life and the story of an intellectual odyssey.

From Berlin to Jerusalem describes the life that begins in an assimilated German-Jewish family before the First World War.  It is a book peopled with such notable figures as S. D. Goitein, S. Y. Agnon, Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, S. H. Bergman, Zalman Shazar, and Walter Benjamin.  Scholem carries his memoir from his student days in Germany and his rediscovery of Jewish mysticism, through his decision to emigrate to Palestine and his career as one of the greatest modern Hebrew scholars.


From the Hardcover edition.