the setting was the Frankfurt Civic Hospital; it seems to me that it was the garden. He was wearing a bathrobe, if I didn’t retroactively make that up, associating it with the impression of a Bedouin prince, which he invoked in me with his blazing eyes – at a time when I was blissfully ignorant of the situation in the Near East. It was this ignorance that made me irreverently say to him that I was envious of his imminent travel to Palestine – it was nothing other than the emigration itself. I imagined the Arab girls to be so appealing, wearing copper chains on their slender ankles. Scholem responded, in that truly down-to-earth Berlin dialect, which he kept through forty-five years of Zion and which the great Hebraist, as a rumor has it, faithfully preserved even in his Hebrew pronunciation: “Well, then you could readily get a knife stuck between your ribs.”1
This recollection, which may seem to be rather sexist and orientalist, filled, however, with fascination and admiration, featured in Adorno’s congratulatory article on Scholem’s seventieth birthday in December 1967. The concrete occasion for that first encounter was a visit to Siegfried Kracauer, the philosopher and cultural critic, who, as Scholem later recalled, had been hospitalized that day for a “minor malady.” Kracauer was a mutual friend of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and it was Benjamin who had brought Scholem along for the hospital visit. For his part, Scholem was hardly aware of Adorno’s presence at that visit and was only reminded of it by Adorno decades later.2 For Adorno, Scholem not only represented the Jewish sage – knowledgeable in all matters religious, especially regarding the mystical and esoteric – but he also seemed to be the conduit to a realm of cognition that transcends the given social reality, with its instrumental mores. Adorno’s nebulous memory of their first encounter includes such esoteric, mystical, and indeed orientalist elements, which he associated with Scholem’s life and work, as well as the latter’s harsh, pragmatic words of caution: getting carried away with such fantasies could result in being knifed between the ribs. Adorno, the rational critic of irrational society, sought an alternative to instrumental rationality in Scholem’s worldview, while Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, was himself never weary of warning of mysticism’s temptations and dangers.3 “It was my first information about the conflict that reverberates in the world today,” Adorno concluded his reminiscence, which he published in the widely read German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung six months after the Arab–Israeli “Six-Day War” of June 1967.
The first brief encounter at the Frankfurt Hospital was followed by a decade and a half in which there was no communication whatsoever between Adorno and Scholem. However, each of them was virtually present in the other’s exchanges with their mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s continuous efforts to bring about an amicable relationship between his two close friends were often met with suspicion, skepticism, and presumably also some envy. Scholem – who had known Benjamin since 1915, when the two were eighteen and twenty-three years old, respectively – persistently resisted any closer bond with Adorno. Adorno, born in 1903, met Benjamin in 1923 in Frankfurt, either during a sociology seminar that both attended – Adorno as a student, Benjamin while pursuing his Habilitation (a second doctorate required in Germany for academic posts) – or else at a meeting arranged by Kracauer in a Frankfurt café. Adorno was not able to recall which of these occasions occurred first.4 Scholem had also lived for a short time in Frankfurt, before leaving for Palestine to pursue his Zionist political belief in a new Jewish national beginning. He had arrived in Frankfurt from Berlin in April 1923 and stayed until August of that year, before returning to Berlin, from which he left for Palestine in September.5 During that brief stay in Frankfurt, in which his fleeting first encounter with Adorno took place, there was ample opportunity for the two to develop a more substantial personal or scholarly relationship. Not only were Adorno and Scholem mutual friends of Benjamin’s, but they also socialized in intersecting intellectual circles. Both Benjamin and Kracauer, alongside, for example, Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal – all four would later belong to the wider circle around the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – attended the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (“Free Jewish House of Learning”), an institute for Jewish education established in 1920 by philosopher Franz Rosenzweig in Frankfurt. Among other attendees – who were at the same time instructors, as the Lehrhaus was based on communal learning rather than teacher-centered classes – were Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, as well as Scholem, who taught and studied Kabbalistic texts in Hebrew while there. Adorno kept his distance from the happenings at the Lehrhaus, however. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Adorno entertained no particular interest in Jewish matters, religious, cultural, or otherwise. In fact, he reportedly referred derisively to his friends Fromm and Löwenthal as “Berufsjuden” (“professional Jews”), on account of their involvement in the Lehrhaus.
Scholem, for his part, made no effort to conceal his disdain for Adorno. “A strange reluctance kept me from an encounter with Adorno, which was due at that time and which he probably expected,” he recalled almost half a century later.6 “I wrote Walter about this. He replied that my reserved remarks about Adorno could not keep him from drawing my attention to Adorno’s recently published first work on Kierkegaard.”7 Adorno’s first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, was published in 1933 – “on the very same day in which Hitler seized the dictatorship,” as Adorno himself noted.8 The book, based on Adorno’s Habilitation, which was written under the direction of the theologian Paul Tillich, was considerably indebted to the method that Benjamin had developed in his own work, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, based on his failed effort at a Habilitation. Benjamin’s method involved reading material and social phenomena allegorically so as to decipher their hidden “truth-content.”9 Both Benjamin and Scholem received the page proofs of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book before publication. Following months of Benjamin’s persistent attempts to persuade Scholem to read Adorno’s book, Scholem finally wrote to Benjamin, in October 1933: “to my mind the book combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah, and it will ultimately not mean much for a future, objective appraisal of Kierkegaard, in marked contrast to your analysis of the Trauerspiel. I regret that our opinions probably differ in this matter.”10 Whether Scholem’s scathing critique of the book was motivated by political aversion due to Adorno’s Marxist approach (which Scholem generally rejected, although he critically tolerated Benjamin’s own Marxist positions), because of Adorno’s detachment from Frankfurt’s Jewish circles and from Judaism altogether (which Scholem interpreted as assimilatory and opportunistic self-denial), or perhaps motivated by his envy of Adorno’s close friendship with Benjamin, the latter’s attempts to establish an amicable and productive relationship between these two great Jewish-German minds repeatedly led to a dead end. At least this was the case when both men lived in Frankfurt, surrounded by the same friends, arguably concerned with similar questions of identity, tradition, and prejudice.
This state of affairs had dramatically changed a few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as the world was sinking into murderous chaos. Adorno and Scholem encountered each other again in New York in 1938. Adorno had just arrived in the city, joining Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research’s new incarnation in exile at Columbia University, and also working on the Princeton Radio Research Project directed by an Austrian-Jewish émigré, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Scholem traveled to New York from Jerusalem – via Paris, where he saw Benjamin for the last time – to deliver the Hilda Stich Stroock Lectures on Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Institute of Religion. On the ship from France, Scholem met Paul Tillich. It was Tillich who succeeded in initiating the contact between Adorno and Scholem, despite the difficult premises. Scholem reported to Benjamin on March 25, 1938: “Wiesengrund wasn’t aboard the ship, and he hasn’t been in touch with me either. However, I did meet with Tillich and his wife, who are resolutely determined to bring me together with Horkheimer and Wiesengrund, with whom, they said, they are very close, which placed me in a somewhat embarrassing position.”11
But, as soon as the meeting took place, both sides readily overcame their predispositions. Scholem’s disdain and mistrust of Adorno was transformed into a careful appreciation motivated by the discovery of mutual interests (although he retained an unrelenting aversion toward
