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,
