are those he calls ‘the most important ideologists of revolutionary messianism’ of our century: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.14
None the less, without denying the more general scope of that comparison, it seems to me that the most striking parallel is with libertarian thought (including that of Walter Benjamin and the young Ernst Bloch). Indeed, the revolutionary/catastrophic aspect of emancipation is most obvious in the anarchists: ‘Destructive passion is a creative passion’, wrote Bakunin. On the other hand, as Mannheim again noted with reference to Gustav Landauer, the abyss between every existing order (‘Topie’) and Utopia was most sharply defined in the anarchists. A qualitative differentiation of time contrasted epochs pregnant with meaning and epochs devoid of meaning: any possibility of progress or evolution was denied, and revolution was conceived as an eruption into the world.15
(3) In the Jewish (notably biblical) tradition, the Et Ketz, the Time of the End, brings general, universal and radical change. Et Ketz does not mean an improvement of everything hitherto experienced on earth, but rather the creation of a wholly other world.16 The advent of the Messiah, ba’akharit hayyamim, at the end of days, will establish (or re-establish) an age of harmony between man and God, between man and nature, and among men. These are the well-known images of Isaiah 11:8, which show the child playing with the asp, or of Isaiah 2:4, which proclaim eternal peace: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (‘lo essa goy el goy cherev ve lo ilmedu od milchama’).17
Here the correspondence with revolutionary utopias relates both to the absolute, radical nature of the transformation and to the actual content of the new (or restored) world. However, of all the socialist movements, the one that most sharply rejects any idea of improvement in the established order is, in fact, anarchism.
(4) One of the main aspects of generalized eschatological subversion is the overthrow of the powers of this world. To restate the famous words of the prophet Isaiah (13:11, 14:5–6), when the day of the Lord comes, the Everlasting will overthrow the pride of the arrogant (‘geut aritzim’) and will break the rulers’ sceptre (‘shevet moshlim’) that smote the peoples in wrath with an incessant stroke, that ruled the nations in anger with a persecution that none restrained.18
However, certain biblical and apocalyptic texts go further still. They suggest the abolition of all power or human authority – to the benefit of theocracy, in the strictest sense of rule by God himself, directly, without intermediaries or ‘vicars’. As Mowinckel noted, Yahweh himself was the king of the future messianic kingdom:19 God was both King of Israel ‘Melekh Israel’ and its redeemer ‘ve-Goalo’ (Isaiah 44:6). Jakob Taubes, an eminent historian of eschatological systems, wrote the following on this aspect of Jewish messianism: ‘Theocracy is built on the anarchist spiritual foundation (Seelengrund) of Israel. Mankind’s tendency to free itself from all earthly constraints and to establish a pact (Bund) with God is found in theocracy.’20
That is, of course, very far from modern anarchism, whose motto, ‘Neither God nor master’, demonstrates its rejection of all authority, divine as well as secular. Yet the negation of all human power ‘in flesh and blood’ is a significant analogy-correspondence, which by itself makes it possible to understand why certain twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin and Scholem, among others) display this astonishing spiritual combination: theocratic anarchism.
(5) Finally, there is the aspect of Jewish messianism that Scholem referred to as intrinsically ‘anarchist’: namely, the idea to be found in several talmudic or cabbalistic texts that the advent of the Messiah implies an abolition of the restrictions that the Torah has until then imposed on the Jews. In the messianic age, the former Torah will lose its validity and be replaced by a new law, the ‘Torah of the Redemption’, in which bans and prohibitions will disappear. In this new, paradisiacal world, dominated by the light of the Tree of Life, the force of evil will be broken and the restrictions imposed by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will lose their significance. As Scholem aptly demonstrates, this ‘anarchist’ element is also present in certain interpretations of Psalms 146:7 which offer a new reading of the Hebrew text: in place of the traditional version, according to which in the messianic age, ‘The Lord releases the prisoners’ (mattir asurim), we should read, ‘The Lord allows the forbidden’ (mattir isurim).21 Scholem is not wrong to qualify this as an ‘anarchist’ theme. We need think only of Bakunin’s famous expression, which Mannheim quotes as a characteristic example of the chiliastic stance of radical anarchy: ‘I do not believe in constitutions or in laws… We need something different: storm and vitality and a new lawless and consequently free world.’22
The above analysis, which treats the five aspects in turn, must nevertheless be considered as a single whole. It then reveals a remarkable structural homology, an undeniable spiritual isomorphism, between two cultural universes, apparently set in completely distinct spheres: namely, the Jewish messianic tradition and modern revolutionary, especially libertarian, utopias. By ‘libertarian utopia’, I mean not only anarchist (or anarcho-syndicalist) doctrines in the strictest sense, but also the revolutionary trends of socialist thought – including some that claim allegiance to Marxism – which have been characterized by a strongly anti-authoritarian and anti-statist orientation.
So far, we have only defined the field of correspondences (in the Baudelairean sense): that is, a subterranean network of analogies, similitudes or equivalences among several elements of the two cultural configurations. These correspondences in themselves do not constitute an effectual link: the anarchism of a Proudhon or a Bakunin (both anti-Semites, incidentally) bears no relation to the Jewish religious tradition. It was only during a given historical era – the first half of the twentieth century – and in the precise social and cultural arena of the Central European Jewish intelligentsia that the homology or connection became dynamic and, in the works of some thinkers, took the form of a true elective affinity. In other words, to use a concept that Mannheim very successfully transplanted from astrology to the sociology of knowledge, there had to appear a certain constellation of historical, social and cultural factors. Only then could a process of attractio electiva or ‘cultural symbiosis’ develop between messianism and revolutionary utopia within the Weltanschauung of a large group of German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, involving mutual stimulation and nourishment and, in certain cases, even combination or fusion of the two spiritual figures. The concrete form of the articulation or alloy and of its component elements – one or several of the correspondences we have discussed – varied according to the authors in question.
The simplest explanation for this relationship, appearing to the mind as immediately self-evident, is to consider the messianic tradition as the more or less direct source for the development of libertarian utopianism in Jewish writers and thinkers. Without rejecting that hypothesis completely, as it probably holds some element of truth, one must recognize that it creates more problems than it solves:
(a) Influence alone is not a sufficient explanatory factor. The influence itself needs to be explained. Why does a particular doctrine and not another influence a particular author? This is all the more pertinent in that nearly all the authors in question, like the great majority of Jewish intellectuals of German cultural background, were far removed through their upbringing from Jewish religious traditions (which remained much more alive in Eastern Europe). The milieu of their origins was largely assimilated: the Jewish intelligentsia of Central Europe drew its cultural references from German literature and philosophy. Goethe, Schiller, Kant and Hegel were the recognized and respected sources, and not the Talmud or the cabbala, which, for the most part, were considered atavistic and obscurantist vestiges of the past.
(b) The Jewish messianic tradition lends itself to multiple interpretations: purely conservative, as in some rabbinical texts, or purely rationalist (Maimonides), or even influenced by the liberal-progressive spirit
