Greetings from angelus, Scholem, Gershom Gerhard

With this volume, Scholems work reaches beyond the confines of the academy and enters a literary dialogue with writers and philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hans Jonas.

Gershom Scholems Greetings From Angelus contains dark, lucid political poems about Zionism and assimilation, parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to writers and friends such as Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Ingeborg Bachmann, S. Y. Agnon, among others. The earliest poems in this volume begin in 1915 and extend to 1967, revealing how poetry played a formative role in Scholems early life and career. This collection is translated by Richard Sieburth, who comments, Scholems acts of poetry still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, simultaneously grounded as they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional. The volume is edited and introduced by Steven M. Wasserstrom, who carefully situates the poems in Scholems historical, biographical, and theological landscape.

One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem virtually created the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Literature played a crucial role in his life, especially in his formative years. This bilingual volume contains his dark, shockingly prescient poems about Zionism, his parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to other writers, notably a series of powerful lyrics addressed over the course of years to his closest and oldest friend, Walter Benjamin.