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,
