Gershom Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur and Betty Hirsch Scholem. Though raised in an assimilated Jewish and German nationalist household, Gerhard Scholem grew to espouse Zionism and, at the age of twenty-five, immigrated to Palestine in 1923, where he changed his name to Gershom. There, he became a librarian at the National Library, which would later become part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became the twentieth century’s greatest Jewish historian and scholar of Jewish mysticism, known as Kabbala, and a member of the prominent group of German-Jewish intellectuals living in Palestine between the World Wars.