Читать книгу Redemption and Utopia - Michael Löwy - Страница 10

Within the turn-of-the-century generation of Jewish rebel romantics, the trend of religious semi-anarchism was one whose works were dominated by the Jewish dimension, both national-cultural and religious. This current had no common attitude to Zionism: Rosenzweig never accepted it, Löwenthal gave it up quite soon, and Buber and Scholem joined the movement but found themselves marginalized because of their hostility to the principle of the State. Their religious feeling ran deep and was charged with messianism, but it had little in common with orthodox ritual and traditional rules. Their aim of Jewish national revival did not lead them into political nationalism, and their conception of Judaism was still marked by German culture. In varying degrees, they all supported libertarian socialism as their utopian goal – a goal close to anarchism which they linked (directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly) with their messianic religious faith. With the exception of Leo Löwenthal, they criticized Marxism as being too centralist or too closely identified with industrial civilization. They were sympathetic to the revolutionary movements that shook Europe between 1917 and 1923, but they did not take an active part in them. Their primary centre of cultural influence was the magazine Der Jude, which Martin Buber edited between 1916 and 1924.

In addition to these four authors, many other intellectuals can be considered as belonging to this current: Hans Kohn, Rudolf Kayser, Erich Unger, to name but a few. The young Erich Fromm of the years 1921–26 could also be added, but his published work after 1927 falls into the opposite pole of religious atheism and libertarian Marxism. This example demonstrates that within the messianic/revolutionary domain it was quite possible to move from one category to another: there were frontiers, but they were far from being hermetically sealed.

Martin Buber was probably the most important and representative author of religious socialism within German-Jewish culture. His rediscovery of the Hasidic legends (1906–8), and his famous lectures on Judaism at the Bar-Kochba Club of Prague (1909–11), brought about a profound renewal of modern Jewish spirituality. His political and religious ideas left their mark on an entire generation of Jewish intellectuals, from Prague to Vienna and from Budapest to Berlin. Buber’s image of Judaism was as different from assimilationist liberalism (and the Wissenschaft des Judentums) as it was from rabbinical orthodoxy: his was a romantic and mystical religiosity, permeated with social critique and a longing for community. Buber was a close friend of both Franz Rosenzweig (with whom he collaborated on a German translation of the Bible) and of the libertarian philosopher Gustav Landauer (who made him the executor of his will); Buber also played a role in the spiritual development of Gershom Scholem and of many other young Zionists associated with the Hapoel Hatzair movement. Few indeed were the German-speaking Jewish thinkers of that era who were not touched, at some point in their life, by Buber’s writings.

Raised by a grandfather who spoke Hebrew and was a follower of the Haskala, Buber moved away from the Jewish religion in his youth. As a student in Vienna, Leipzig and Berlin (where he studied under Simmel and Dilthey), he was attracted by neo-romantic movements and by the rebirth of religious spirituality. His first works were not on Jewish themes; they focused instead on Viennese writers (Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl); on Jakob Böhme (Wiener Rundschau, vol. v, no. 12, 1901); on ‘Kultur und Zivilisation’ (Kunstwart, vol. XIV, 1901). Buber soon became involved in the Zionist movement, but his ideas rapidly came into conflict with Theodor Herzl’s State-centred diplomacy and, around 1902, he withdrew from political activity and devoted himself to the study of religion. Typically for this entire generation, Buber was at first interested in Christian mysticism: his doctoral thesis, which he presented in 1904, was written on ‘The History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme’. It was not until later that Buber took an interest in Jewish mysticism: he wrote his first book on Hasidism (Die Geschichte des Rabbi Nachmann) in 1906.

Buber’s writings (until 1920 in particular) were permeated with references to German Romantic thought (Görres, Novalis, Hölderlin, Franz von Baader, among others). But he established particularly close ties to neo-romantic philosophy (Nietzsche) and sociology; not only because in his Die Gesellschaft collection he published the writings of Tönnies, Simmel and Sombart (from 1906 to 1912), but also because Buber’s concept of the interhuman (Zwischenmenschliche) was directly influenced by their concerns, most notably by their longing for a Gemeinschaft.

In 1900, Martin Buber joined Die neue Gemeinschaft [The New Community], a neo-romantic circle in Berlin where he met Gustav Landauer. He gave a lecture before the circle entitled ‘Alte und neue Gemeinschaft’ [The New and the Old Community], which, though unpublished until ten years after his death, contained the seeds of several of the key ideas that guided him throughout his life. Right from this first lecture, Buber’s originality is evident as one of the great renewers of communitarian thought in the twentieth century. In Buber’s opinion, it was neither possible nor desirable to return to the traditional community. Rather, he spoke of the struggle for a new community, not pre-social (like the one described by Tönnies) but post-social. The most crucial difference between the old and the new community organization was that the former was based upon blood relations (Blutverwandtschaft), while the latter was the outcome of elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaft) – in other words, it expressed a free choice. This community was not to be bound by religious, regional or national borders: to use Gustav Landauer’s cosmopolitan and mystical formulation, which Buber quoted, the community leaned towards ‘the oldest and most universal community: that of the human species and the cosmos’. In spite of the fact that he rejected all ‘retrogressive’ utopias, neo-romantic references to the traditional community remained alive in Buber’s mind: first, in his dream of deserting ‘the swarming of the cities’ in order to build the new world on the ‘powerful and virginal soil’ of the countryside, closer to nature and the land; and second, in the idea that the new community meant the return (Wiederkehren), albeit in a different form and on a higher level, of ‘the vital unity of primeval man’ (Lebenseinheit des Urmenschen) – shattered and torn by the serfdom of modern ‘society’ (Gesellschaft).¹

Buber took up and developed these themes again in ‘Gemein-schaft’, an article published in 1919. Like Tönnies, to whom he directly referred, Buber contrasted the organic, natural community of the past with the modern, artificial and mechanical Gesellschaft. However, he did not advocate a restoration of the past: ‘Certainly we cannot turn back the clock on our mechanized society, but we can go beyond, towards a new organicity (einer neuen Organik).’ By that he meant a community that resulted not from primal growth but rather from conscious action (bewussten Wirkens) to establish the principle of community; the goal of such action would be to construct a socialist society through an alliance of autonomous communes (Gemeinden).² Buber no longer believed that a return to the land was an alternative to modern industrial cities; in a lecture he gave in Zurich in 1923, he said:

We cannot leave the city to take refuge in the village. The village is still close to the primitive community. The city is the form that corresponds to differentiation. We can no longer turn back the clock on the city, we must overcome (überwinden) the city itself.

The solution would be a third form of communal life, as distinct from the rural village as it was from the big city, which could arise from a new organization of labour.³

It was in this context that Buber rediscovered the tradition of Hasidism as a Jewish mystical current equivalent to a Böhme or a Meister Eckhart, and as the religious manifestation of an organic community, united and welded by its spirituality and culture. As he wrote several years later, what gave Hasidism its particularity and its grandeur was not a doctrine but an attitude of life (Lebenshaltung), a mode of behaviour, that was ‘community-forming’ (gemeindebildend) in its very essence.⁴

According to Gershom Scholem, Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism was inspired by his ‘religious anarchism’ – that is, by his refusal to grant a place to restrictive commandments in the world of the living relationship between the I and the Thou.⁵ In fact, in his famous Ich und Du (1923), Buber used the paradigm of dialogue and encounter (Begegnung) to define the true relationship between man and man, and between man and God – a model as deeply subversive of the rigid and ritualistic forms of institutional religion (which Hasidism questioned) as it was of political and state institutions.

The success of Buber’s books on the masters of Hasidism (Baal Schem and Rabbi Nachmann) was due to the fact that they expressed the subterranean current of religious rebirth flowing within the Jewish intelligentsia of romantic cultural origins. Like himself, the members of that intelligentsia re-discovered, in the eighteenth-century Jewish-Polish legends, something ancient (Uraltes) and original (Urkünftiges), a lost past (Verlorenes), an object of longing (Ersehntes).⁶ The interpretation of Judaism as an essentially rationalist religion was common to the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jewish liberalism and academic sociology (Max Weber, Sombart). For example, according to Sombart, ‘Jewish mysticism along the lines of Jakob Böhme is very hard for us to imagine’; as for the cabbala, there was

nothing more foreign to romanticism than that purely discursive way of conceiving and understanding the world; romanticism assumes, in fact, the fusion of man with the world, with nature, and with his fellow man, all things that the Jew, the extreme intellectual, is totally incapable of doing.⁷

By presenting a mystical romantic reading of the Jewish religion in his works, Buber broke this consensus and created a new image of Judaism, with which the rebellious generation at odds with bourgeois liberalism could identify.

One of the most significant aspects of Buber’s neo-romantic interpretation was the importance he attached to messianism. In the lectures he gave in Prague, Buber proclaimed that messianism was ‘Judaism’s most profoundly original idea’. It meant the yearning for ‘an absolute future that transcends all reality of past and present as the true and perfect life’, and the coming of the ‘world of unity’, in which the separation between good and evil would be overcome, as sin would forever be destroyed.⁸ As Gershom Scholem had showed so well, the theme of the messianic era as a world delivered from evil was potentially one of the religious foundations of anarchist utopia: the absence of evil makes restriction, coercion and sanctions superfluous. In Buber’s mind, the coming of the Messiah would take place not in the other world but in the world here below: it would not be a historical event, but it was ‘being prepared in history’. Seen from a utopian-restorative perspective, the arrival of the Messiah was a mystery ‘in which the past and future, the end of time and history are linked. … It takes the form of the absolute past and carries the seed of the absolute future.’⁹

It was from a romantic/messianic vision of history that Buber (like Rosenzweig, Landauer and Benjamin) questioned the concept of evolution, progress or improvement (Verbesserung): ‘For by “renewal”, I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor changes. I mean something sudden and immense (Ungeheures) by no means a continuation or an improvement, but a return and transformation.’ Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one should ‘desire the impossible’ (das Unmögliche). Buber found the paradigm for this complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition: ‘The last part of Isaiah has God say: “I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17)… This was not a metaphor but a direct experience.’¹⁰

Martin Buber, more than any other modern religious Jewish thinker, placed the active participation of men in redemption – as God’s partners – at the heart of his idea of messianism: ‘The central Jewish Theologumenon, which remains unformulated and undogmatic, but which forms the background and cohesion of all doctrine and prophecy, is the belief that human action will actively participate in the task of world redemption.’¹¹ The message of Hasidism, according to Buber, was that man was not condemned to waiting and contemplation: redemption was his to act upon, by collecting and releasing the sparks of holy light dispersed throughout the world.¹² Does this mean that God is not omnipotent – that He cannot save the world without man’s help? No, Buber responds, it means only that He does not will redemption without the participation of man: generations of men had been granted a ‘collaborative force’ (mitwirkende Kraft), an active messianic force (messianische Kraft).¹³

It was for this reason that Buber contrasted more and more categorically, messianic prophetism (Jewish eschatology proper) and Apocalyptics (an eschatological conception that originated in Iran): the former accorded the preparation of redemption to humanity, to the decision-making power of each human being so called upon; while the latter conceived redemption as an immutable future, predetermined in the smallest detail, which used human beings only as instruments.¹⁴ For Buber this active messianic hope, turned towards an open eschatological future, set Jewish religious thought apart from Christianity. In a letter he wrote in 1926, Buber formulated the thesis in terms that are not too dissimilar from Ernst Bloch’s utopia of Not-yet Being:

According to my belief, the Messiah did not come at a determinate point in history: his arrival can only be the end of history. According to my belief, world redemption did not take place nineteen centuries ago; we are living in an unsaved (unerlösten) world, and we are waiting for redemption, in which we have been called upon to participate in a most unfathomable way. Israel is the human community that bears this purely messianic expectation … this belief in the still-to-be-accomplished and must-be-accomplished Being (Noch-nicht-geschehn-sein und Geschehn-sollen) of world redemption.¹⁵

How did Buber articulate his messianic faith with his socialist/libertarian utopia? In 1914 he, like many German-Jewish intellectuals, was carried away by the ‘patriotic’ drive to war; but little by little, under the influence of events and the harsh criticisms of his friend, Gustav Landauer, he changed his position.

It was through a polemic in 1916–1917 with Hermann Cohen – the champion of ‘state consciousness’ (Staatsbewusstsein) – that Buber crystallized his own political-religious views. After having supported imperialist Germany at the beginning of the First World War (as Cohen himself had done), Buber now rejected the cult of German nation-statehood advocated by the neo-Kantian philosopher from Marburg: ‘Humanity – and to say that, Professor Cohen, is now more than ever the duty of every man living in God – is greater than the state.’ Buber summed up his differences in a biting sentence: ‘Cohen,… whether he is aware of it or not, wants the State to subjugate the Spirit; as for me, I want the Spirit to subjugate the State.’ This subjugation would be completed in the messianic era, which would ultimately make it possible for a higher form of society to supersede the state dialectically: the separation between the people (principle of creativity) and the state (principle of order) would be maintained only ‘until the Kingdom, the Malkhut Shamayim, is established on earth; until, through a messianic form of the human world, creativity and order, people and State, merge in a new unity, in the Gemeinschaft of salvation’.¹⁶

As the European revolution gathered momentum between 1917 and 1920, Buber clarified, radicalized and developed his vision. In ‘Die Revolution und Wir’, an article published in 1919 in his magazine Der Jude, he insisted on the necessity for Jews to contribute to the revolution of Mankind – that is, to the rebirth of society through a spirit of community. He voiced his solidarity with the revolutionary tide that was rising in Central Europe: ‘Situated in its camp … not as profiteers but as comrades in the struggle, we salute the revolution.’¹⁷ More than ever, there was an anti-State dimension in Buber’s writings: in the previously mentioned article ‘Gemeinschaft’, written in 1919, he appealed to Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Landauer in condemning State tyranny, that ‘homonculus which drinks blood from the veins of communities’, that clockwork puppet which seeks to replace organic life.¹⁸ In a homage to Gustav Landauer, published shortly after his assassination in April 1919, Buber wrote: ‘He rejected mechanical, centralist pseudo-socialism, because he longed for a communitarian, organic and federalist socialism.’¹⁹ From this perspective, Buber criticized Bolshevism and instead showed a sympathy for the neo-romantic ‘guild socialism’ developing in England at that time, and for the kibbutzim that were starting to be formed in Palestine.²⁰

In a major essay published in 1919, ‘Der heilige Weg’ (‘The Holy Way’), which he dedicated to the memory of Landauer, the central axis was the unity between messianism and communitarian utopia. In Buber’s mind, community with God and community among human beings were inseparable from each other, so that ‘its [Judaism’s] waiting for the Messiah is a wait in expectation of the true community’. Their achievement would depend upon men:

So long as the Kingdom of God has not come, Judaism will not recognize any man as the true Messiah, yet it will never cease to expect redemption to come from man, for it is man’s task to lay the foundation for (begründen) God’s power on earth.

He called this task active messianism, which did not wait passively for the arrival of the Messiah but sought to ‘prepare the world to be God’s kingdom’. Buber did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, but regarded him as a true Jewish prophet for whom the future Kingdom of God was identical to ‘the perfection of men’s life together’; in other words, ‘the true community, and as such, God’s immediate realm, His basileia, His earthly kingdom. … The Kingdom of God is the community to come in which all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied.’²¹ In a lecture that he gave in Frankfurt in 1924 (minutes of which can be found at the Buber Archives in Jerusalem), Buber set out in a particularly striking way this relationship between community and messianism: ‘Gemeinschaft is a messianic, non-historical category. To the extent that it is historical, its messianic character shows through.’ Analysing the Russian Revolution, he argued that the soviets were true communes (Gemeinden) on which ‘revolutionary community-being’ should have been constructed; but the course of events had led to their weakening, with the centralizing tendency of the state gaining as a result. State action, even if revolutionary, cannot bring messianic redemption (Erlösung); only the community is the genuine precursor and annunciator of the Kingdom of God, whose essence is ‘the fulfilment of creation in a Gemeinschaft’.²²

Buber’s concept of the Kingdom of God is also charged with libertarian meaning. In the major work he wrote in 1932, Königtum Gottes [The Kingdom of God], he spoke like Scholem and Benjamin of anarchist theocracy: biblical theocracy, as the direct power of God, rejected all human domination and found its spiritual foundation in anarchism.²³ Thus, Buber’s political philosophy can be defined (in the words of a recent essay by Avraham Yassour) as ‘a communitarian religious socialism tinged with anarchism’.²⁴ His ideas were very close to those of Gustav Landauer, although, unlike his friend, he was not actively involved in revolutionary politics. He outlined his goal of libertarian socialism in various articles between 1917 and 1923, and later, more systematically, in Paths in Utopia (1945).

In this latter work, Buber presented a highly original formulation of the communitarian paradigm, reinterpreting the whole of the socialist tradition – utopian (Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen) as well as anarchist (Proudhon, Kropotkin, Landauer) and Marxist (Marx, Engels, Lenin) – and assessing the various attempts to put it into practice, from isolated commune experiments through the Russian Revolution and the soviets to the ‘exemplary non-failure’ of the kibbutzim.

Buber’s point of departure was a radical critique of the modern capitalist State, which had ‘broken the structure of society’. The new, advanced capitalist centralism succeeded in what the former despotic state had failed to accomplish: the atomization of society. Capital wanted to have nothing but individuals facing it, and the modern state was placing itself in the service of capital by gradually stripping group life of its autonomy. Medieval society had been richly structured, with an interlocking network of local and work communities. But the essence of the community was ‘gradually emptied by the constraints of the capitalist economy and state’, which disintegrated organic forms and atomized individuals. However, ‘we cannot, nor do we want to, return to primitive agrarian communism or to the corporate state of the Christian Middle Ages’. Our task is to build the communitarian socialism of the future ‘with the materials we have today, whatever their resistance’.²⁵

According to Buber, socialist utopia seeks above all to replace the state with society. But this requires that society should no longer be, as it is today, an aggregate of individuals without any internal cohesion between them, ‘because such an aggregate could be maintained again only through a “political” principle, a principle of domination and coercion’. The true society capable of replacing the state must be rich – that is, it must be structured by the free association of communities. The advent of such a society implies not only ‘external’ change – the elimination of capital and the State as the economic and political obstacles to the realization of socialism – but also an ‘internal’ transformation of social life through the communitarian restructuring of human relations. The new organic whole, based on regeneration of the ‘cells’ of the social fabric, will be the rebirth (not the return) of the organic commune, under the form of a decentralized federation of small communities.²⁶ This concept of socialism presents obvious affinities with anarchist thinking, but Buber also discovered it in certain writings of Marx – on the Paris Commune and on the Russian rural communes – and even of Lenin (on the soviets).

As Emmanuel Levinas correctly notes in his introduction to the French edition of Paths in Utopia, Buber’s utopian socialism is, in the final analysis, based upon his philosophical anthropology: man’s future relationship with his fellow human beings is defined according to the model of the ‘I and Thou’, which makes it possible to conceive a collectivity without ‘powers’.²⁷

In spite of its secular and realistic form, Buber’s libertarian utopia is no less charged with messianic energy. His introduction to the book draws a distinction between two forms of nostalgia for justice: messianic eschatology, as the image of a perfect time, the culmination of creation; and utopia, as the image of a perfect space, a living-together based on justice. For utopia, everything is subject to man’s conscious will; for eschatology – insofar as it is prophetic and not apocalyptic – man plays an active role in redemption: a convergence between the two is, therefore, possible. The age of the Enlightenment and modern culture gradually stripped religious eschatology of its influence, but it did not disappear altogether: ‘The whole force of discarded messianism is now making its way into the “utopian” social system.’ Imbued with a hidden eschatological spirit, true utopia could gain a prophetic dimension, a ‘character of proclamation and appeal’.²⁸

As a religious Jew, Buber was radically opposed to the orthodox rabbinical establishment and invoked Jesus or Spinoza as much as he did Jeremiah. His source of inspiration was what he called subterranean Judaism (to set it apart from official Judaism): the prophetic, the Essenic-early Christian, and the cabbalist-Hasidic.²⁹ As a Zionist, Buber was from the beginning critical of the politics of the movement’s leadership, and after his arrival in Palestine in 1938 he became one of the main organizers of Ihud (Union), a Jewish-Arab fraternization movement which advocated the establishment of a bi-national state in Palestine. As a cultural nationalist, Buber always maintained a humanistic-universal utopian goal. In an (unpublished) lecture from April 1925, he said of the messianic prophecy of the Old Testament: ‘Its aim is not emancipation of a people, but the redemption of the world; the emancipation of a people is but a sign and a pathway to the emancipation of the world.’³⁰ Finally, while being inspired by mysticism and messianism, Buber still sought to implement his spiritual ideal on earth, within the concrete life of society.

Franz Rosenzweig, founder of the Frankfurt-based Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Free House for Jewish Studies) – where Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Erich Fromm, Ernst Simon and Leo Löwenthal all taught during the 1920s – was the author of one of the most important modern attempts at a philosophical renewal of Jewish theology: Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), which was first published in 1921. The roots of this book are undeniably romantic, as Günther Henning so accurately perceived: ‘Rosenzweig, more than any other, translated the objectives of romanticism into a systematic philosophy of religion.’³¹ Paul Honigsheim mentioned Rosenzweig and his cousin Hans Ehrenberg (a Jew who converted to Protestantism) – together with Lukács and Bloch – as typical examples of the neo-romantic, anti-bourgeois German intelligentsia craving for religion.³² Born into a culturally assimilated milieu, Rosenzweig began by questioning the world-view of the Aufklärung. At first, his religious aspirations made him consider following the example of his cousin and converting to Christianity (1909–13); ultimately, he turned to Judaism, but his hesitation between the Synagogue and the Church gives clear testimony to the fact that his spiritual itinerary was linked to the more general movement of religious restoration within the German culture of the time.

Before the war, Rosenzweig had written a work on Hegel and the state, under the direction of Friedrich Meinecke. The First World War brought on a deep crisis in Rosenzweig, and he broke completely with rationalist philosophy, historicism and Hegelianism.³³ It was in the trenches of the Balkan front that he began to write Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), which was completed in 1919.

In this work, which drew its inspiration as much from Schelling’s theory of world ages as from the mysticism of the cabbala, Rosenzweig contrasted the temporality of nations and states with the messianic temporality of Judaism. Rejecting ‘the specifically modern concept of “progress” in history’ – that is, the idea of ‘eternal’ progress – he sought to replace it with the Jewish idea that ‘each moment must be ready to inherit the fullness of eternity’. (This phrase calls almost literally to mind Benjamin’s notion that, for Jews, ‘each second was the narrow door through which the Messiah could enter’ (the 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History). For messianic temporality, the ideal goal ‘could and should be reached, perhaps in the next moment, or even this very moment’. According to Rosenzweig’s view of the religious concept of time,

the believer in the Kingdom [of God] uses the term “progress” only in order to employ the language of his time; in reality he means the Kingdom. This is the veritable shibboleth that distinguishes him from the authentic devotee of progress: does he or does he not resist the prospect and duty of anticipating the “goal” at the very next moment? … Without this anticipation and the inner compulsion for it, without this “wish to bring about the Messiah before his time” and the temptation to “coerce the Kingdom of God into being”,… the future is no future … but only a past distended endlessly and projected forward. For without such anticipation, the moment is not eternal; it is something that drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time.³⁴

It was over this issue that Rosenzweig clashed with his teacher, the Jewish neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, questioning his Enlightenment belief in uninterrupted (‘eternal’) progress and his adherence to German nationalism. In a violent altercation, Rosenzweig accused Cohen of having ‘betrayed the messianic idea’.³⁵ In a text that he wrote in 1927 on Jehuda Halevi, Rosenzweig emphasized that ‘the hope in the coming of the Messiah’ was the aspiration ‘through which and for which Judaism lives’; he viewed the coming of the messianic era as a break in historical continuity, ‘a complete change, the complete change … that would put an end to the hell of world history’.³⁶ His correspondence at the time gives us some further clues about his vision of the messianic future: it was to be not a celestial but an earthly (irdischen) coming of the New Jerusalem, which would bring eternal peace between peoples through its complete – and from today’s perspective, even miraculous – recasting (Umschaffung) of human nature.³⁷

The few strictly political works that Rosenzweig wrote reveal a passionately romantic, anti-capitalist world-view. For example, in an article from 1919, he sees in capitalism ‘as cursed a system as slavery’, which had to be done away with in order to return to ‘the artisan and his golden land’. The path to freedom was therefore a ‘relinquishing of the free and unrestricted market and a return to a production linked to and ordered in advance by a client’.³⁸ His anti-capitalism went hand in hand with a profound hostility to the State. In The Star of Redemption, he wrote that coercion and not law constituted the true face of the State; moreover, he insisted on the essential opposition between the Jewish people, which is in itself eternal, and the false eternity of the State; it followed that ‘the true eternity of the eternal people must always be alien and vexing to the state’.³⁹ Commenting on these and similar reflections, some researchers speak of Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘anarchism’.⁴⁰

What is most interesting is that the author of Der Stern der Erlösung explicitly links the emancipatory revolution to the coming of the Messiah, in terms that are surprisingly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s ‘theology of the revolution’:

After all, it is no coincidence that the demands of the Kingdom of God begin only now to be genuinely transformed into temporal demands. The great deeds of liberation, as little as they constitute in themselves the Kingdom of God, nevertheless are the indispensable preconditions of its advent. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, the canons of faith, now become the slogans of the age; in blood and tears, in hatred and zeal they fight their way into the apathetic world in unending battles.⁴¹

According to Günther Henning, this passage, entitled ‘Revolution’, refers to the Revolution of 1917:

Rosenzweig interpreted the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, in the light of Dostoevsky’s hopes, as an upheaval realizing the ultimate teachings of Christianity; consequently, he attributed to this revolution a redemptive meaning that was linked to the coming of the messianic kingdom.⁴²

This hypothesis remains to be proven. Rosenzweig did write that ‘a renewal of the forces of faith and love accrued to … the Russia of Alyosha Karamazov’,⁴³ but it is not clear that he is referring to the Russian Revolution. In any event, revolutionary concerns were very marginal in Rosenzweig’s work, which was primarily devoted to philosophy and religion. His writings are significant mainly for their probable influence on Walter Benjamin, and because of their analogy with the works of other contemporary Jewish thinkers.

Unlike Rosenzweig, Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem was not a theologian but a historian. His works were not only an unrivalled monument of modern historiography; they also shed new light on the Jewish religious tradition by restoring that messianic and apocalyptic dimension which had been conjured away by the narrow rationalist interpretation characteristic of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Graetz, Zunz, Steinschneider) and of German sociology. Max Weber and Werner Sombart saw only rationalist calculation in Jewish spirituality: Scholem brought to the fore the subterranean mystical, heretical, eschatological and anarchist religious movements in the history of Judaism.

Born into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Berlin, Scholem was initially brought up on German culture. In his youth, Romantic or neo-romantic writers were among his favourites: Jean Paul, Novalis, Eduard Mörike, Stefan George, Paul Scheerbart. According to David Biale (author of the first work on Scholem’s thought),

like many other Germans in the 1920s, Scholem and Buber found in a certain strain in German Romanticism a unique Weltanschauung which inspired their own thinking. … In philosophy as in historiography, Scholem’s sympathy for a particular strand of German Romanticism played a crucial role in his intellectual makeup.⁴⁴

It is in fact quite significant that the first book on the cabbala that Scholem studied – and it had a major impact on him – was the work by the German Christian and Romantic theosophist, Franz Joseph Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition [Philosophy of History, or On Tradition].⁴⁵ In an interview that he granted me, Scholem remembered having read with much interest Novalis’s Fragmente in 1915, one of the most characteristic works of the Romantic world-view at its peak. Nevertheless, he thought that the role of German sources in his thinking should not be exaggerated, for his main inspiration as a young man came from Hebrew texts, beginning with the Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash, which were the first books he read. In fact, he soon revolted against his family’s assimilationist ideology (his father expelled him from home during the First World War because of his ‘anti-patriotic’ attitude!); and he resolutely turned to the sources of Judaism, to the search for the ‘lost tradition of my social circle, which attracted me with a great magic’.⁴⁶

This search led him – initially under the influence of Martin Buber – to study Jewish mysticism, and then to join Zionism.⁴⁷ Scholem’s (non-orthodox) religious attitude was close to Buber’s, but his Zionism was more radical: he passionately rejected the Judeo-Germanic cultural synthesis, and this made him drift away both from Buber (notably because of the latter’s support for Germany in 1914) and from Franz Rosenzweig, with whom he had a stormy discussion in 1922 over this issue.⁴⁸ However, jealous affirmation of his Jewish identity did not lead him to nationalism in the political sense: after his departure for Palestine, he joined (as Buber did later) the Brit Shalom (Alliance for Peace), a Zionist-pacifist movement for Jewish-Arab fraternization that was opposed to ‘political’, State-centred Zionism. During the 1920s, he came out several times for Jewish recognition of the national aspirations of the Arab population in Palestine and its right to self-determination. In an article published in 1931 in Sheifotenu [Our Aspirations], the magazine of the Brit Shalom, he wrote: ‘The Zionist movement has not yet freed itself from the reactionary imperialist image given to it not only by the Revisionists but also by all those who refuse to consider the real situation of our movement in the awakening East.’⁴⁹

Scholem’s great originality probably lay in his discovery, or rather re-discovery, of an almost completely forgotten realm within the Jewish religious tradition. This realm, which was dismissed as obscurantist by the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums [Science of Judaism], was the one of mystical doctrines, from the cabbala to the heretical messianism of Sabbatai Sevi. Scholem, like Buber, was initially attracted by the magical, irrational and ‘anti-bourgeois’ aspect of Jewish mysticism. In the first piece he wrote on the cabbala in 1921, he referred to the Jewish tradition as ‘a giant … an un-bourgeois (unbürgerlich) and explosive being’.⁵⁰ However, in a second phase that superseded the first without cancelling it, Scholem parted with Buber and became resolutely historicist in his thinking. Now it was in history that he, like a number of German romantics, found the appropriate cultural response to the cold, abstract rationalism of the bourgeois world.⁵¹ It was typical of this new position that he defined history as religio, in the etymological sense of link (to the past).⁵²

Scholem’s studies of cabbalistic sources began around 1915, and on his first contact with the Hebrew texts, he was deeply attracted by the eschatological vision that permeated them. At that time, he wrote numerous speculative texts on messianism – of which he would later say that he was very glad they were never published!⁵³ In his article from 1921 on the cabbala, Scholem expressed an interest in the prophetic conception that ‘messianic humanity will speak in hymns’ (a theme that will be found also in Benjamin’s writings on language). Scholem, at least implicitly, drew a contrast between messianic and historical temporality when he argued that the verdict on the positive or negative value of tradition ‘does not rest with world history but with the World Tribunal’ – in other words, the Last Judgement – a phrase that directly targeted Hegelian historicism and its conflation of the two.⁵⁴

In 1923, shortly before he left for Palestine, Scholem gave a series of lectures in Frankfurt on the Book of Daniel, the first apocalypse of Jewish religious literature; among those in his audience were Erich Fromm, Ernst Simon (religious socialist, philosopher, and friend of Martin Buber) and Nahum Glatzer (the future biographer of Franz Rosenzweig).⁵⁵

The centre of gravity for most of Scholem’s works on the cabbala in the 1920s and early 1930s was its messianic/apocalyptic dimension. One of his first writings in Hebrew (in 1925), dedicated to the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century cabbalist Abraham Ben Eliezer Halevi, is quite rare in that it openly displays the intensity of his personal rapport with the ethos of his research topic. He refers to the Mashre Kitrin, the book of apocalyptic prophecies that Halevi wrote in 1508, as a work without equal in cabbalistic literature

because of the force of its language and the way it stirs feelings. Its long introduction, written in the tongue of the Zohar, truly touched the soul of this reader; neither before nor after have I seen pages as beautiful in this language. It announced the coming of the Just Redeemer (Ha-Goël Tzedek): after the fall of Constantinople and the expulsion of the Jews in Spain came the arrival of The Time of the End (Et Ketz).⁵⁶

Three years later, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica of Berlin, Scholem wrote a shorter article showing how, after the tragedy of the Spanish Jews, Halevi interpreted the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar and the Book of Daniel from a new perspective; foreseeing the coming of the Messiah during the year 1530–1, Halevi contributed to the rapid development of the messianic movement around Solomon Molcho.

Other articles in the Encyclopaedia Judaica testify to Scholem’s interest in cabbalistic messianism – for example, the piece on Abraham Ben Samuel Abulafia, the eighteenth-century Spanish cabbalist who tried to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism and was condemned to burn at the stake; he owed the sparing of his life only to the pontiff’s sudden death. After that incident, Abulafia announced that the messianic era was imminent and stirred considerable emotion among the Jews of Sicily.⁵⁷

Around the same time (1928), Scholem published his first article on seventeenth-century heretical messianism, dealing with the theology of Sabbatianism in the writings of Abraham Cardozo.⁵⁸ The first comprehensive summary of Scholem’s interpretation of cabbalistic messianism is also found in the Encyclopaedia (vol. 9, 1932): namely, his remarkable article, ‘Kabbala’. According to Scholem, original sin and the means for restitution of the fallen creature were at the centre of cabbalist anthropology. This restitution – Tikkun in Hebrew – implies the collapse of the forces of evil and a catastrophic end to historical order, which are nothing but the reverse side of messianic redemption. The re-establishment of cosmic order foreseen by divine providence is at the same time the Redemption, and the ‘World of the Tikkun’ is also the messianic Kingdom. Adam’s original sin can be erased only through messianic Redemption, in which things will return to their initial place – apokatastasis is the Church’s equivalent theological concept, literally taken from the cabbala (Ha-Shavat Kol ha-Dvarim le-Havaiatam). Thus, the Tikkun is both restitution of an original state and the establishment of an entirely new world (Olam ha-Tikkun).⁵⁹

It was much later, during the 1950s, that Scholem systematized his theory of Jewish messianism as a restorative/utopian doctrine (notably in his famous essay from 1959, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism’), but the roots of his analysis go back to his writings of the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, this theme runs through all of Scholem’s writings, and his position was not merely that of an erudite historian: one need but read his works to perceive the researcher’s sym-pathy (in the Greek etymology of the word) with his subject.

In Scholem’s opinion, the messianic utopia par excellence was not Zionism, but rather anarchism. An ardent Zionist, Scholem nevertheless categorically rejected all links between messianism and Zionism. Thus in 1929, in a polemical article defending Brit Shalom, he wrote: ‘The Zionist ideal is one thing, and the messianic ideal is another; the two do not come into contact with one another except in the pompous phraseology of mass meetings.’⁶⁰ Scholem’s interest in anarchist ideas dated back to his youth: starting in 1914–15, he read Nettlau’s biography of Bakunin, and the writings of Kropotkin, Proudhon and Elisée Reclus. However, Gustav Landauer’s works – Die Revolution and Aufruf zum Sozialismus [Summons to Socialism] – were especially fascinating to him, and he tried to communicate this feeling to his friend Walter Benjamin.⁶¹ Scholem met with Landauer between 1915 and 1916, when the anarchist philosopher was lecturing to Zionist circles in Berlin; the subject of their conversations was their common opposition to the war and their criticism of Martin Buber’s positions on it.⁶²