Please or Register to create posts and topics.

Communism was born of God, according to Kabbalist rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov; 'divine sparks hidden in dialectical materialism'

Kabbalist and mystic Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov

All the life of R. Shmuel Aleksandrov (1865–1941) lived in Bobruisk and perished along with thousands of other Jews in the Holocaust in November 1941. His writings were an original combination of Kabbalah, Orthodox Judaism, modern philosophy and secular literature.

R. Shmuel Alexandrov

Being the deepest connoisseur of the Talmud and Jewish religious literature, the rabbi eagerly absorbed modern philosophy, including Russian religious philosophy, about which he corresponded with r. Cook. His favorite philosophers were Schelling and Vladimir Solovyov. The last r. Alexandrov called him a sage and a "righteous man." He considered Marxism a prelude to revealing faith in the Creator: "The time is coming when people's eyes will be opened and they will see the divine sparks hidden in dialectical materialism." Communism, the rabbi believed, was born of God, who “clothed himself in materialism and thus gave life to the world.”

R. Shmuel Alexandrov was in correspondence with the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, a thinker and ideologist of religious Zionism r. Avraham-Yitzhak a-Cohen Kook, as well as with famous Jewish writers and public figures Miha Berdichevsky, Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg), Moshe-Leib Lilienblum and others.

In 1932, a book by R. Alexandrov "Mikhtavey mehkar u-bikoret" ("Critical Letters"). Most of this collection was made up of letters sent to r. Alexandrov to a young colleague r. Abraham Yosef Gutman. The manuscript was sent to America, where the brother of the Bobruisk rabbi lived, who took care of its publication.

Source https://lechaim.ru/academy/hraniteli-ognya-evreyskie-religioznie-misliteli-i-ih-trudi-v-sovetskom-soyuze/