An exciting piece of history unfolds in this book. The reader gets an idea about what it was like to be a Jew in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century (in the 1900s and 1910s), and a Zionist Jew in Gershom Scholem's case. What kinds of movements were there, which ideas did they have, and which were the factors that made Scholem leave Germany very early and head for the land which was later to be known as Israel? Additionally this is the story of Scholem's maturing as a scholar of Jewish Studies, a kind of "coming of age" story. ( )