Gershom Scholem e Auschwitz

The article offers a new look on Gershom Scholem's position on the significance of the Shoah, analysing his complex relationship wtih Hannah Arendt, his public stance in the affaire Eichmann, his correspondence with Walter Benjamin and, especially, his autobiography. In a very peculiar passage, Scholem seems to say that as a child in Wilhelmine Berlin he could not know that Oswiecim was Auschwitz. What he actually meant, since at face value his sentence is less than credible, is that he could not know what would have become of this remote place at the border between the Austrian Empire and Czarist Russia. I question even that revised meaning, since, in his speculations about the destiny of the Jews in Europe, he had anticipated their tragic end. What is left is the peculiar shame of the survivor, who chose emigration in order to save himself a decade before Hitler, but could not save his brother, nor his friends, from deadly persecution.