The image shown here reproduces the title page of the 1933 edition of Gershom Scholem's translation of and commentary on Sefer Ha-Bahir—the oldest book of Jewish Kabbalah in Europe. Scholem's translation, which was submitted as part of his Ph.D. project to the University of Berlin, was first published in 1923. Scholem's translation was not only a milestone in his early career as a Kabbalah researcher, but also marked the beginning of a new field of research in Jewish Studies. However, the translation of Sefer Ha-Bahir into German carries additional implications: it marks the "return of the sacred" and the dialectic of secularism in German-Jewish modernism. Scholem's translation, besides its academic significance, hints also at the paradox of the German-Jewish "dialogue"—namely, the acknowledgment of the ambivalent aspects of Jewish being and creation in German culture. Efforts by Jews to engage in this dialogue were significant and essentially productive and original, but also became associated with self-denial, anti-Semitic rejection and finally with political violence. Scholem himself later argued against these efforts. The date and the place of this later publication of Scholem's translation by Schocken Verlag—Berlin/1933, the same year and place that Hitler came to power—mark the impossibility, the uncanny prospect of the German-Jewish cultural project, the modernist creation of German Jews in the fields of philosophy, art, literature and politics, which carries the signature of progress and horror.