Gershom Scholem was born Gerhard Scholem on 5 December 1897 in Berlin, into an assimilated German Jewish family. As a young man he turned toward Zionism and traditional Jewish study against his family's more secular assimilationist leanings, and he began studying mathematics, philosophy and Semitic languages at German universities, completing a doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on an early Kabbalistic text. He counted the philosopher Walter Benjamin among his closest friends during these Berlin years, a friendship that continued by correspondence for the rest of Benjamin's life.
In 1923 Scholem emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settling in Jerusalem, where he became a librarian at the newly founded Hebrew University before being appointed, in 1933, its first professor of Jewish mysticism, a position created essentially around his own emerging scholarship. He remained at the Hebrew University for the rest of his career, training the first generation of academically credentialed scholars of Kabbalah and building the archive and methodology the field still relies on. He died in Jerusalem on 21 February 1982.
His friendship with Walter Benjamin, formed in their Berlin youth, continued through decades of correspondence after Scholem's emigration, and Scholem became, after Benjamin's death in 1940, one of the principal custodians and early editors of his friend's scattered papers and unfinished work, a role that placed him at the center of Benjamin's posthumous reception as well as his own separate scholarly career. Scholem also helped establish the Hebrew University's wider institutional culture of rigorous textual scholarship, serving for a time as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.