was Gustav Landauer, the Jewish anarchist writer.2 It is a well-known fact that Landauer was one of the leaders of the Munich Commune in 1919; and it is interesting to note that, according to the German sociologist Paul Honigsheim (a former member of the Max Weber circle in Heidelberg and a friend of Lukács and Bloch), some of the participants in the Republics of Workers’ Councils in Munich and Budapest were instilled with the sense of a mission to achieve world redemption and with the belief that they belonged to a collective Messiah.3 In fact, apart from Gustav Landauer, other Jewish intellectuals such as Kurt Eisner, Eugen Leviné, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam played an important role in the Councils Republic in Bavaria; and in 1919, Georg Lukács and other members of the Jewish intelligentsia of Budapest were among the leaders of the Hungarian Councils.
Are there aspects of Jewish messianism, then, which can be linked to a revolutionary (and particularly anarchist) world-view? Gershom Scholem’s remarkable analyses may serve as a starting-point for closer examination of this question. In his essay ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism’, Scholem was not afraid to state that ‘for popular apocalypticism … there is an anarchic element in the very nature of Messianic utopianism: the dissolution of old ties which lose their meaning in the new context of Messianic freedom’.4 This is a very profound remark, but it seems to me that the analogy (or ‘correspondence’) between messianic and libertarian utopia stretches much further and emerges in several other decisive ‘moments’ of the two cultural configurations. Let us consider this correspondence by referring to the theoretical paradigm – the ideal type, one might say – of Jewish messianism, as constructed by Gershom Scholem, and to several remarks made by Karl Mannheim on radical anarchism.
(1) Jewish messianism embodies two tendencies that are at once intimately linked and contradictory: a restorative current focusing on the re-establishment of a past ideal state, a lost Golden Age, a shattered Edenic harmony; and a utopian current which aspires to a radically new future, to a state of things that has never existed before. The proportion between the two tendencies may vary, but the messianic idea crystallizes only on the basis of their combination. They are inseparable within a dialectical relationship that Scholem draws out so admirably:
Even the restorative force has a utopian factor, and in utopianism restorative factors are at work. … The completely new order has elements of the completely old, but even this old order does not consist of the actual past; rather, it is a past transformed and transfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism.5
According to the felicitous expression of the great historian of Messianism, Sigmund Mowinckel, in the Jewish tradition ‘eschatology is a reinterpretation of the mythology of primordial time’.6
The Hebraic concept of Tikkun is the supreme expression of this duality in Jewish messianism. For the cabbalists – notably Isaac Luria and the Safed school – the Tikkun re-establishes the great harmony that was disturbed by the Breaking of the Vessels (‘Shevirat Ha-Kelim’) and later by the fall of Adam. As Scholem notes, ‘the Tikkun, the path to the end of all things, is also the path to the beginning’. The Tikkun implies ‘restoration of the original harmony’; in other words, ‘the re-institution, the re-integration of every original thing’. The coming of the Messiah is the accomplishment of Tikkun, the Redemption is the ‘return of all things to their original contact with God’. This ‘World of Tikkun’ (‘Olam Ha-Tikkun’) is, therefore, the utopian world of messianic reform, of the removal of the blemish, the disappearance of evil.7
In libertarian thought, there is clearly an analogous duality between restoration and utopia, which was noted by Mannheim.8 For Mikhail Bakunin, Georges Sorel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Gustav Landauer, revolutionary utopia was always accompanied by a deep nostalgia for aspects of the pre-capitalist past, the traditional peasant community, or the artisan economy. Landauer went so far as to offer an explicit apology for the Middle Ages. In reality, the majority of the great anarchist thinkers integrated a romantic attitude towards the past into the core of their thinking.
The parallel can be drawn even further. In an article written in 1904, the anti-militarist writer Georges Darien complained about the ‘religious nature of Anarchism’, whose doctrine he defined in the following terms: (i) There was once a Golden Age, which disappeared with the birth of authority, (ii) We must return to that Golden Age, and for that a revolution is desirable, (iii) Once the revolution has been carried out, there will be a general interruption in life on earth, (iv) After that, the Golden Age will return.9 This is, of course, a caricature, yet it does relate to an aspect of anarchist prophecy. For his part, in Economy and Society, Max Weber argued that anarcho-syndicalism was the sole form of socialism in Western Europe that could claim to be ‘the real equivalent to a religious faith’.10
Contrary to what is generally thought, a romantic-nostalgic dimension has been present in all anti-capitalist revolutionary thought – including Marxism. In the case of Marx and his disciples, this dimension was tempered by their admiration for industry and for the economic progress that capital brings. But in the anarchists, who in no way shared that industrialism, the same dimension manifested itself with a particular, even unique, intensity and fire. Of all the modern revolutionary movements, anarchism (along with Russian populism) was undoubtedly the one in which utopia had the most powerful romantic and restorative charge. In this respect, Gustav Landauer’s work was the supreme expression of the romantic spirit of libertarian utopia.
It is perhaps here that the analogy between Jewish messianism and anarchism is the most significant, fundamental and decisive; it alone would suffice to create the possibility of a privileged spiritual link between the two. We shall return to this idea later in the text.
(2) According to Gershom Scholem, for Jewish (as opposed to Christian) messianism, redemption is an event which necessarily takes place on the historical stage, ‘publicly’ so to speak, in the visible world; redemption is not conceivable as a purely spiritual process, within the soul of each individual, which results in an essentially inward transformation. What type of ‘visible’ event is it? In the Jewish religious tradition, the arrival of the Messiah is a catastrophic eruption: ‘Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the Messianic future.’11
There is an abyss between the present and the future, between current decline and redemption: moreover, in many talmudic texts there appears the idea that the Messiah will come only in an era of total corruption and guilt. This abyss cannot be overcome by just any ‘progress’ or ‘development’: only revolutionary catastrophe, with colossal uprooting and total destruction of the existing order, opens the way to messianic redemption. The secularized messianism of nineteenth-century liberal Jewish thought (the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, for example), with its idea of uninterrupted progress and gradual perfection of humanity, has nothing to do with the tradition of the prophets and the Haggadists, for whom the advent of the Messiah always implies a general upheaval and a universal revolutionary tempest. As Scholem so aptly puts it: ‘The Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to redemption … it is rather transcendence breaking in upon history, […] struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.’12 Along the same line, Max Weber had already noted in Economy and Society that the Jewish people always lived in ‘mute, faithful and questioning expectation’ for the Great Day on which Yahveh ‘by an act that might come suddenly at any time but that no one could accelerate … would transform the social structure of the world, creating a messianic realm’.13
Scholem himself suggested the analogy between that structure of meaning and modern revolutionary doctrines: ‘Messianism in our age proves its immense force precisely in this form of the revolutionary apocalypse, and no longer in that of the rational utopia (if one may call it that) of eternal
