Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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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 of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and its Jewish equivalent, the Haskala, as in Hermann Cohen. Why was it precisely the apocalyptic interpretation, at once restorative and utopian, which was ‘selected’ by a certain group of thinkers? The opposite explanation, according to which the utopian tendency of these authors accounts for their interest in the messianic tradition, is as limited and narrow as the first. One of the great merits of the concept of Wahlverwandtschaft is precisely that it allows us to go beyond these two unilateral approaches, and to move towards a dialectical understanding of the relationship.
Another explanatory model that seems unsatisfactory centres on the concept of secularization, which is frequently used to account for the link between religion and social or political ideologies. Its significance for the phenomenon under study here is limited, because the religious messianic dimension is never absent from the writings of the majority of these authors; it remains (explicitly) a central aspect of their world-view. In fact, in this German-Jewish thought, there is as much ‘making sacred’ of the profane as there is secularization of the religious: the relationship between religion and utopia is not here, as in the case of secularization, a one-way movement, an absorption of the sacred by the profane, but rather a mutual relationship that links the two spheres without suppressing either one.
It seems more useful to start from the larger socio-cultural context, the general framework common to the two tendencies which grew organically, so to speak, out of the Central European societies in crisis. I am referring to the development of neo-romanticism from the late nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1930s. In this context, the term romanticism denotes not a literary or artistic style but a much broader and deeper current that emerged both in the field of art and literature and in economic, sociological and political thought. Essentially it involved nostalgia for pre-capitalist cultures and cultural critique of industrial/bourgeois society.
Anti-capitalist romanticism – to use Lukács’s expression – is a specific political and cultural phenomenon which, in eluding all the usual classifications, has not so far received the attention it deserves. It is not captured within the traditional division of the political field into left/centre/right – or conservatives/liberals/revolutionaries or even regression/status quo/progress; it slips between the cracks of that classical grid and appears not to fall within the categories that have defined the major political options since the French Revolution.