INTRODUCTION

THE twenty letters that Joseph Weiss sent to me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over the years 1949 to 1968, published here for the first time in English translation, 1 offer an insight into Weiss's spiritual constitution and into the extraordinary friendship that developed between him and Professor Gershom Scholem, its vicissitudes notwithstanding.

The letters date back to the years when Weiss was an ardent student of Scholem's at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and continue through the years he spent in England-in Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford, and finally in London, where he became a professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.

The letters are of value not only for the personal and biographical details they contain, but also because they contribute to a deeper understanding of Weiss's scholarly work, while at the same time enriching our knowledge of intellectual life in Jerusalem and in the Jewish academic community of the 1950s. Undoubtedly, however, their greatest importance is that they afford us a new perspective on Weiss's complex personality and add a unique and personal dimension to his scholarly bequest.

Joseph Weiss's letters are unusually frank. They speak of the changing circumstances of his life-his torments, deliberations, despair, fears, guilt, scepticism, disappointments, and changing moods; his poverty and alienation, particularly during his unsettled period in England in the early 1950S. There are hints of his ambivalence towards Diaspora Jews in England and towards the State of Israel, and we see his response, wounded and sarcastic, to the criticism of his bold new approach to the study of hasidism.

But what Weiss's letters reveal most clearly is his life-long love for Scholem, and his anguish at the schism that divided them in the early 195os. The complexity of the relationship echoes through the letters, even in apparently minor details. For example, Weiss generally refers to Scholem not by name but by a variety of other appellations’ Rabbenu Gershom’, ‘our master’, ‘our teacher’ ‘the teacher’, and ‘my teacher’. By contrast, Professor Julius Guttmann, whom Weiss respected and liked simply as a teacher, is fondly referred to throughout as guttmannenu (‘our Guttmarin’).