Spirit and Folk

A study of the twentieth-century construction of a Jewish mystical tradition by German Jewish intellectuals. For most of European history, the notion of Jewish spirituality was unthinkable—buried beneath a pervasive desire to understand Judaism as uniquely material and Christianity as uniquely spiritual. In Spirit and Folk, Amir Engel tells the story of how a group of Jewish intellectuals, seeking greater involvement in political life, worked to invent a mystical tradition for Judaism amid the existential crises of twentieth-century Germany. Beginning with Martin Buber in 1900 and ending with Gershom Scholem in 1942, Engel traces the rich debate among thinkers both well-known and forgotten about the need to imagine and construct a uniquely Jewish mystical tradition from historical religious sources. This quest and the tradition that emerged, Engel argues, developed in response to one of the most volatile questions of the last century: can Jews be Germans? The invention of Jewish spirituality, Engel shows, was not only a religious innovation but also a political gambit—a demand to be accepted as equal contributors to the German national project.