xxx/ellauri157.html on line 343: Scholem’s first marriage to Escha Burchhardt was on the rocks by the early 1930s. Not only was he imagining himself in love with Kitty Steinschneider (there is no evidence that she reciprocated), but he was also pursuing a relationship with his student, Fania Freud (they married in 1936). His diaries betray a sense of emotional chaos, as he wrote to his friend, Walter Benjamin, explaining to Benjamin why he could not host him in Jerusalem. He also wrote to Benjamin that he was struggling with questions of good and evil and whether an evil person could also be just. While he doesn’t say whether these questions were purely theoretical or not, it is striking that such ruminations came at exactly the time when his personal life was in turmoil.
xxx/ellauri157.html on line 347: Could there possibly be a connection between Scholem’s own confession of moral confusion and his treatment of Frank. Did he see something of himself in Frank, who was accused of various sexual perversions, and recoil in horror? While there can be no definitive answer to this question, considering Scholem’s emotional life from the years in which he was writing this pathbreaking essay creates the possibility of a new reading.
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