In Search of Scholem

Over the last twenty years, digitization efforts have transformed research and the writing of German-Jewish biographies. Using the example of my research on the German-born Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, I survey some advantages of the digitization of archival holdings, including the facilitation of transnational research with increased access to many documents (and many different types of documents), the possibility of new types of data analysis, and the eased ability to subject sources to Quellenkritik – including Scholem’s famous memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem. Significant limitations also are discussed. Digitization has not reached a point where it has fully supplanted onsite, hands-on archival research on figures like Scholem. However, digitization has radically expanded opportunities for historians to bring their scholarship and expertise to a wider public through a variety of media.