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
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