Scholem’s messianism makes the Messiah descend into exile and Islam to redeem divine sparks

Evidence

It is Gershom Scholem who has explained in the most laborious and detailed manner the significance of the “divine spark,” the “forces of holiness, sparks of divine light,” “sparks of the holy which are scattered among all people” and “must be brought home.” With these divine sparks, Scholem accounted for the “tragic dialectic” whereby it became “contingent upon the Messiah himself … to fulfill a mystical mission: to liberate and ‘elevate’ the sparks of holiness and the holy souls.” What Scholem refers to as a “Jewish variation of the ancient conception of the descensus ad inferos’ is the catastrophic event whereby the Jew becomes Muslim, whereby “the Messiah must live with ‘the Turk,’ for as the exile draws to a dose the Messiah himself must be exiled.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 773

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Establishes Scholem’s concept of the divine spark and descensus ad inferos as a Jewish messianic category.

Related

• Kabbalistic divine-spark doctrine makes the Messiah descend into Islam (similarity 0.93)
• Levi’s lost divine spark mirror Scholem’s messianic descent into Islam (similarity 0.85)
• Scholarship has consistently evacuated the theological significance of Islam from messianism (similarity 0.82)
• Levi reads the Auschwitz Muslim as a messianic figure who lost the divine spark (similarity 0.78)