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Gershom Scholem A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 ;Hannah Arendt: “the banality of evil.”

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因為受到I. Berlin等人對於 Hannah Arendt的評價,我 對她的作品比較少涉獵。 不過其作品不少有漢譯了。
Gershom Scholem A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 , pp.393-98 有兩人對於 “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,”一書的許多不同的見解, 包括 “the banality of evil” 是否只是一口號。

The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil


Zeitgeist Films
Barbara Sukowa in “Hannah Arendt,” a film that follows the German-American philosophy professor as she covered Adolph Eichmann’s war-crimes trial in Jerusalem.


Fifty years ago, a small book called “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” by a New School philosophy professor named Hannah Arendt set off a storm like few books before or since. Among Upper West Side intellectuals it sparked, as the critic Irving Howe put it, “a civil war,” siring vicious debates and souring lifelong friendships. It also sold more than 100,000 copies and reshaped the way people have thought about the Holocaust, genocide and the puzzle of evil ever since.
Multimedia
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times
Hannah Arendt in 1972.
Zeitgeist Films
Margarethe von Trotta on the set of "Hannah Arendt."
Associated Press
Adolph Eichmann in the protective booth used for his trial in Jerusalem, which began in 1961. Hannah Arendt covered the case for The New Yorker and turned the articles into her 1963 book.
“The Controversy” — as people simply called the growing dispute — is largely forgotten now, and the intense rancor it inspired might seem improbable. But a new movie about the episode, “Hannah Arendt,” which opens Wednesday at Film Forum, revives the debates and the era.
Its director, Margarethe von Trotta, a veteran of the New German Cinema, was skeptical when a friend suggested she make this film 10 years ago. “My first reaction was, how can I make a film about a philosopher, someone who sits and thinks?” she recalled in a phone interview from her home in Paris.
She and her American screenwriter, Pamela Katz, wrote a treatment that covered Arendt’s whole life, but it was too long and diffuse. They decided to focus instead on the Eichmann affair. “It’s better for filmmakers to have a confrontation, not just abstraction,” Ms. von Trotta said.
In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann— the last surviving Nazi higher-up, who had fled to Argentina at the end of the war — was kidnapped by Mossad agents, flown to Jerusalem and tried for crimes against humanity.
Arendt, a Jewish-German refugee and author of a celebrated tome, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. (Her book originally ran as a five-part article.)
She made two particularly provocative points. The first was that Eichmann, a senior SS officer, was not the malicious organizer of the Nazi death camps, as Israeli prosecutors charged, but rather a mediocre bureaucrat, “a leaf in the whirlwind of time,” as Arendt put it; “not a monster” but “a clown.” Hence the enduring phrase from her book’s subtitle: “the banality of evil.”
Arendt’s second point was that the “Jewish Councils” in Germany and Poland were complicit in the mass murder of their own people. They helped the Nazis round up the victims, confiscate their property and send them off on trains to their doom. Without these Jewish leaders, Arendt wrote, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six million people.” She added, “To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders” was “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of this whole dark story.”
For these ideas, Arendt was pilloried as a self-hating Jew. The Anti-Defamation League sent out letters urging rabbis to denounce her on the High Holy Days. Jewish organizations paid researchers to peruse her book for errors. Some of her closest friends didn’t speak to her for years, if ever again.
At the time, Israel was just 15 years old: tiny, weak and impoverished. The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had ballyhooed the Eichmann trial — one of the first global media events — to build support for his fledgling state and to educate people about the Holocaust. In America, Jewish professionals, especially in academia, were just coming into their own, as blacklists and quotas withered away. And here was the great scholar Hannah Arendt downplaying their great catch and airing their dirty laundry.
Some of the attacks on Arendt — that she sympathized with Eichmann or demonized the Jewish victims more than their Nazi killers — were over the top. But some of Arendt’s views were over the top as well, not least her portrait of Eichmann. Her “banality of evil” thesis rests on the premise that Eichmann committed his deeds with no awareness of their evil, not even with virulent anti-Semitism. In fact, though, much evidence — some of it known at the time, some unearthed since — indicates that Eichmann very much knew what he was doing.
In 1957 in Argentina, a former SS officer named Willem Sassen interviewed Eichmann at length. The tapes, which were rediscovered only a few years ago, reveal Eichmann boasting that he had helped draft the letter ordering the Final Solution and that several times, he refused requests from fellow officers to free a favored Jew.
“I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire,” he says. “I was not just a recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist.”
David Cesarani, in his 2004 biography, “Becoming Eichmann,” unearthed a speech from as far back as 1937 in which the idealist was clearly “in the grip of a fantasy that there was a world Jewish conspiracy against Germany,” an enemy that must be destroyed.
At the time of the trial, much was made of Eichmann’s remark to a comrade toward the end of the war: “I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.” Arendt wrote that he had been merely “boasting” — which led Howe to comment, “That kind of boast was hardly the talk of a featureless cog in a bureaucratic machine.”
Amos Elon, a prominent Israeli journalist who generally defended Arendt, allowed in his introduction to her book’s paperback edition that Arendt “had a tendency to draw absolute conclusions on the basis of casual evidence.”
The casual evidence of Eichmann’s banality was his cliché-ridden testimony on the witness stand. “His inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” she wrote. He testified that he was just doing his job, unthinkingly, and Arendt believed him.
Even Arendt’s friends spoke of her snobbery. In this case, her snobbery toward Eichmann’s bad grammar blocked her from seeing what was obvious to everyone else, that he was lying in an attempt to save his skin.
Arendt misread Eichmann, but she did hit on something broader about how ordinary people become brutal killers. The postwar generation of young Germans took Arendt’s book as inspiration to rebel against their parents, who may not have personally killed Jews during the war but knew what was going on and did nothing.
In America, protesters invoked the “banality of evil” to rail against the outwardly decent family men who dropped bombs on North Vietnam or sat in nuclear-missile silos, ready to push the button — seeing them as the cold war’s version of Arendt’s “desk murderers.”
Ms. von Trotta has built a career making films about strong women who go their own way, at times alienating everyone around them. “Rosa Luxemburg” was about the Communist rebel who didn’t fit in with any party sect. “Vision” was about Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century nun-mystic who composed music that transcended all ages. (Both figures, as is Arendt, were played by Barbara Sukowa, who in the new film really seems to be a philosopher locked in deep thought.)
“I identify with these women,” Ms. von Trotta said. “Maybe it’s because I grew up stateless.”
(Her mother came from an aristocratic Russian family, fled after the revolution and settled in Berlin, where Margarethe was born — though, under German law, that didn’t make her a citizen).
“There’s a bit of this in Hannah,” she went on. “She left Germany when the Nazis took over. She was imprisoned in France for being German. She didn’t feel she had a home until she came to America. Then the attacks on the Eichmann book felt like a third exile.
“I’m not a missionary,” she added. “I don’t make films to have a message. I make films about people that I like or that interest me. But if there’s a message in this film, it’s that you should think for yourself, don’t follow an ideology or a fashion. Hannah called this ‘thinking without banisters.’ ”


這幅畫在1921年由舒勒姆購得,家境富裕與年輕的舒勒姆將這幅畫送給班傑明做為生日禮物。舒勒姆〈Gershom Scholem, 1897-1982〉後來成為猶太史學家,班傑明〈Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940〉則為當代重要的思想家,與國人較為熟悉的漢娜鄂蘭有姻親關係。如同那時歐陸的猶太人,班傑明痛苦地活在兩次世界大戰之間,一戰後的德國猶太人更是風聲鶴唳。納粹掌權前夕班傑明逃離德國來到巴黎,1940年巴黎淪陷後再度逃亡,卻在越過法境後被占領加泰隆尼亞的佛朗哥政權查獲。彼時血腥的西班牙內戰剛結束,法西斯佛朗哥與希特勒一個鼻孔出氣,班傑明面臨遣返與送往集中營的命運,最後自殺身亡。班傑明的自殺是思想界重大的損失,不是班傑明不敢面對納粹的集中營,而是他以死來表達他對歷史的絕望。
美好樂園裡的集體遺忘|李中志
融合表現主義與超寫實畫派的瑞士裔德籍畫家克利〈Paul Klee,…
THINKINGTAIWAN.COM





Perhaps the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) once said of himself, "I have no biography, only a bibliography." Yet, in thousands of letters written over his lifetime, his biography does unfold, inscribing a life that epitomized the intellectual ferment and political drama of an era. This selection of the best and most representative letters—drawn from the 3000 page German edition—gives readers an intimate view of this remarkable man, from his troubled family life in Germany to his emergence as one of the leading lights of Israel during its founding and formative years.
In the letters, we witness the travails and vicissitudes of the Scholem family, a drama in which Gershom is banished by his father for his anti-kaiser Zionist sentiments; his antiwar, socialist brother is hounded and murdered; and his mother and remaining brothers are forced to emigrate. We see Scholem’s friendships with some of the most intriguing intellectuals of the twentieth century—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno—blossom and, on occasion, wither. And we learn firsthand about his Zionist commitment and his scholarly career, from his move to Palestine in the 1920s to his work as Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University. Over the course of seven decades that comprised the most significant events of the twentieth century, these letters reveal how Scholem’s scholarship is informed by the experiences he so eloquently described.



Introduction
I. A Jewish Zarathustra, 1914-1918

II. Unlocking the Gates, 1919-1932

III. Redemption through Sin, 1933-1947

IV. Master Magician Emeritus, 1948-1982
Notes

Selected Bibliography

Chronology

Index





A biography of Gershom Scholem lies in these well selected and edited letters. Reading biographically between the letters’ lines, in the manner of Gershom Scholem, Master Scholar, you can learn how he found his own story between the lines of the Kabbalah’s texts he almost signlehandedly restored to life; and how he wrote his autobiography out so intensely, with such vast erudition and brilliance, in all his commentaries on the Kaballah that it became, over his lifetime, a biography of the whole endlessly resilient, culturally prolific Jewish people, a 20th century national epic.—Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

Scholem was a giant in the scholarly study of Jewish mysticism, responsible for bringing Kabbalah in particular to the attention of academia. However, the letters Skinner presents here reveal more of Scholem as a person than as a scholar. Scholem saw the two as intimately connected and would likely argue that these documents do aid in understanding his work. The decision to focus on the personal has the benefit of unearthing several firsthand accounts of critical events in 20th-century Jewish and European history.—Stephen Joseph, Library Journal

[Anthony David Skinner] has ably translated and edited a wide-ranging selection of letters from the life of this master scholar of Jewish mysticism. Most of the letters...appear here in English for the first time. [Skinner’s] selection illuminates a question that has always haunted readers of Scholem: How did the personality of this overly dignified and self-confident academic relate to the unbridled otherworldliness in the texts he analyzed with such seeming detachment?Publishers Weekly

Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters offers a fascinating sample of the 16,000 letters he exchanged with members of his family...His correspondences with brilliant intellectuals of his time make for fascinating reading and provide a close look at the thoughts, beliefs and passions of a man discovering Judaism in a time and place when it seemed to be disappearing...Anthony David Skinner had chosen the letters wisely and offers excellent overviews of the periods in which they were written.—Sylvia Rothchild, Jewish Advocate
A lively...collection, which follows Scholem from his fevered adolescence to the sovereign authority of his final years. The editor’s illuminating biographical summaries set out useful links from decade to decade, but it is Scholem’s uncompromising voice that gives this volume its unified force and striking crescendos. In their unstinting energy, the letters show a man exactly where he wanted to be, and conscious of exactly why.—Cynthia Ozick, New Yorker

Over seven decades, Scholem sent and received 16,000 letters. The Hebrew University’s Anthony David Skinner has lovingly translated and edited a selection of these...The replies--from such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt--create an engrossing dialogue. Skinner’s artful annotations render Scholem’s most esoteric notions accessible to the lay reader. And he shows how the adolescent maverick evolved from a "Jewish Zarathustra to Master Magician Emeritus of the post-war years"...It will whet readers’ appetites to read Scholem’s own books. In an age of emails and faxes, Scholem is truly a man of letters--in both senses of the term.—Lawrence Joffe, Jewish Chronicle

Anthony David Skinner has done a useful and meticulous job. This is the most readable history of German destruction and Israeli construction I know. And it describes Jewish habits of thought leading to this day and trailing back into the darkness over thousands of hidden years.—Atar Hadari, Jewish Quarterly

What can this lucky bookworm say to readers who are not especially curious about the kabbalah or about the history of universities in Israel? A great deal, as this selection of letters to and from Scholem makes clear. Some of its pleasures are simple ones: the spell-binding story of the Scholem clan...But this narrative also asks difficult questions: one is whether cleaving to a particular people and its tradition constitutes a self-imposed exile from a realm of more-universal concerns...[Skinner’s] translations, thankfully, let the correspondents speak in voices that sound like their own.The Economist






From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 部分

Gerhard Scholem who, after his immigration from Germany to Palestine, changed his name to Gershom Scholem (Hebrew: גרשם שלום) (December 5, 1897 — February 21, 1982), was a German-born Israeli Jewish philosopher and historian, born and raised in Germany. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern, academic study of Kabbalah, becoming the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [1] His close friends included Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss, and selected letters from his correspondence with those philosophers have been published.
Scholem is best known for his collection of lectures, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and for his biography Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah (1973). His collected speeches and essays, published as On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1965), helped to spread knowledge of Jewish mysticism among non-Jews.

Contents

Life

Gerhard Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur Scholem and Betty Hirsch Scholem. His interest in Judaica was strongly opposed by his father, a printer, but, thanks to his mother's intervention, he was allowed to study Hebrew and the Talmud with an Orthodox rabbi.
Gerhard Scholem met Walter Benjamin in Munich in 1915, when the former was seventeen years old and the latter was twenty-three. They began a lifelong friendship that ended only with Benjamin's suicide in 1940. In 1915 Scholem enrolled at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew, and where he came into contact with Martin Buber, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am, and Zalman Shazar. In Berlin, he first befriended and became an admirer of Leo Strauss (their correspondence would continue throughout his life).[2] He subsequently studied mathematical logic at the University of Jena under Gottlob Frege. He was in Bern in 1918 with Benjamin when he met Elsa Burckhardt, who became his first wife. He returned to Germany in 1919, where he received a degree in semitic languages at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Less notable in his academic career was his establishment of the fictive University of Muri with Benjamin.
He wrote his doctoral thesis on the oldest known kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. Drawn to Zionism, and influenced by Buber, he emigrated in 1923 to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he devoted his time to studying Jewish mysticism and became a librarian, and eventually head of the Department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library. He later became a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view and became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965, when he became an emeritus professor. In 1936, he married his second wife, Fania Freud.
Scholem's brother Werner was a member of the ultra-left "Fischer-Maslow Group" and the youngest ever member of the Reichstag, representing the Communist Party (KPD) in the German parliament. He was expelled from the party and later murdered by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Gershom Scholem, unlike his brother, was vehemently opposed to both Communism and Marxism.
Scholem died in Jerusalem, where he is buried next to his wife in Sanhedria. Jürgen Habermas delivered the eulogy.


Selected works in English

  • Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1941
  • Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition, 1960
  • Arendt and Scholem, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt", in Encounter, 22/1, 1964
  • The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. 1971
  • Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1973
  • From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn, 1980.
  • Kabbalah, Meridian 1974, Plume Books 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-452-01007-1
  • Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
  • Origins of the Kabbalah, JPS, 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-691-02047-7
  • On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, 1997
  • The Fullness of Time: Poems, trans. Richard Sieburth
  • On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
  • On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
  • Tselem: The Representation of the Astral Body, trans. Scott J. Thompson 1987
  • Zohar — The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed.

ゲルショム・ゲルハルト・ショーレムגרשם גרהרד שלוםGershom Gerhard Scholem1897年12月5日 - 1982年2月21日)はドイツ生まれのイスラエル思想家。ユダヤ神秘主義(カバラ)の世界的権威で、ヘブライ大学教授を務めた。1958年イスラエル賞を受賞。1968年にはイスラエル文理学士院の院長に選ばれた。
彼はベルリンでユダヤ人の家庭に生まれ育った。父はアルトゥール・ショーレム、母はベティ・ヒルシュ・ショーレム。画家だった父は同化主義者で、息子がユダヤ教に興味を持つのを喜ばなかったが、ショーレムは母のとりなしにより正統派のラビのもとでヘブライ語タルムードを学ぶことを許された。
ベルリン大学数学哲学ヘブライ語を専攻。大学では、マルティーン・ブーバーヴァルター・ベンヤミンシュムエル・ヨセフ・アグノンハイム・ナフマン・ビアーリクアハッド・ハーアムザルマン・シャザールといった面々と知り合った。1918年にはベンヤミンと共にスイスベルンにいたが、ここで最初の妻エルザ・ブルクハルトを識った。1919年にドイツへ戻り、ミュンヘン大学からセム語研究で学位を受けた。
博士論文のテーマは、最古のカバラ文献סֵפֶר הַבָּהִיר(セフェル・ハ=バヒール; "光輝の書")だった。シオニズムに傾倒し、友人ブーバーの影響もあって、1923年に英領パレスチナへ移住。ここで彼はユダヤ神秘主義の研究に没頭し、司書の職を得た。最終的にはイスラエル国会図書館のヘブライ・ユダヤ文献部門の責任者となった。のちにエルサレムヘブライ大学で、講師として教え始めた。
彼の特色は、自然科学の素養を活かして、カバラを科学的に教えた点にある。1933年にはヘブライ大学のユダヤ神秘主義講座の初代教授に就任、1965年名誉教授となるまでこの地位にあった。ユング等が関わった「エラノス会議」にも参加
1936年、ファニア・フロイトと再婚。
兄のヴェルナー・ショーレムはドイツの極左組織<フィッシャー=マスロフ団>の一員で、ドイツ帝国議会ではドイツ共産党選出の議員だったが、のちに議会から追放され、ナチによって暗殺された。

邦訳著書[編集]

  • 『ユダヤ主義の本質』 河出書房新社, 1972年
  • 『ユダヤ主義と西欧』 河出書房新社, 1973年
  • 『ユダヤ教神秘主義』 河出書房新社, 1975年
  • 『わが友ベンヤミン』 晶文社, 1978年
  • 『ユダヤ神秘主義』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1985年 別訳
  • 『カバラとその象徴的表現』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1985年
  • 『ベンヤミンーショーレム往復書簡』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1990年
  • 『ベルリンからエルサレムへ 青春の思い出』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1991年
  • 『錬金術とカバラ』 作品社, 2001年
  • サバタイ・ツヴィ伝 神秘のメシア』 2冊組 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版, 2009年
  • 『エラノス叢書』 平凡社全9巻別冊1、1994-95年、数編の論文が所収。

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