One could almost say that however shifting and idiosyncratic were the political postures of the formidable Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem, he was never a Marxist or conventional leftist. Yet, as his turbulent, precocious youthful diaries indicate, even that assertion does not ring entirely true. In 1914 (at the age of sixteen), already opposed to the impending war and rebelling against his bourgeois Jewish father, he announced that he had left Jewish 0rthodoxy, that he was finding his way to Martin Buber (from whom shortly thereafter he turned away), and that “I've also become a socialist.” Moreover, as the war unfolded, there were (fleeting) moments when, in his dramatically portentous mode he declared: “To the devil! I have developed myself into a Marxist! The other side has nothing and only Marxism guarantees enduring renewal … Two types: Revisionism and Marxism! He is a villain who does not totally, un-divided, insensibly place himself on the side of Marxism.” To be sure, this occurred in a very specific context, a function of his delight, when in June 1915 the revisionist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein – “the most honorable man in Juda” – turned against his own original August 1914 support for war credits.

Indeed, to the qualified degree that they existed, Scholem's Marxist sympathies were almost entirely a function of his opposition to the Great War. Thus, when on November 28, 1917, the new Soviet government issued its peace offer, Scholem wrote to his friend Werner Kraft: