Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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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Jewish tradition as ‘a giant … an un-bourgeois (unbürgerlich) and explosive being’.50 However, in a second phase that superseded the first without cancelling it, Scholem parted with Buber and became resolutely historicist in his thinking.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, the Zohar and the Book of Daniel from a new perspective; foreseeing the coming of the Messiah during the year 1530–1, Halevi contributed to the rapid development of the messianic movement around Solomon Molcho.
Other articles in the Encyclopaedia Judaica testify 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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