IT MAY WELL be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of evidence and sources, clarity of presentation. Other requisites are scarcer and more difficult to define. The truly great scholar has a truffle hound’s nose for the hidden but key document, for the concatenation of apparently disparate circumstances. He glimpses the purloined letter where others stare at wallpaper. Like a dowser, he senses the significant deeps underneath the long-trodden surface. He detects the flaw in the crystal, the false note in the archive, the covert pressure of that which has been falsified or gagged. He adheres obstinately to what Blake called “the holiness of the minute particular” but unfolds from it the application, the generalizing inference, that can alter the whole landscape of our historical, literary, and social perceptions.
But even these talents and their infrequent combination do not determine what is crucial to preeminent scholarship. No less than the master translator or actor or performer of music, the truly great scholar becomes as one with his material, however abstruse, however recondite. He melts the strength of his own personality and technical virtuosity into the historical epoch, the literary or philosophic text, the sociological fabric that he is analyzing and presenting to us. In turn, that fabric, that set of primary sources, will take on something of its interpreter’s voice and style. It will become his without ceasing to be itself. There is now an ancient China that is Joseph Needham’s, a Hellenistic civilization that speaks in the accents of the late Arnaldo Momigliano, a mapping of grammars which will for a long time to come carry the imprint of Roman Jakobson. Yet in each case the alchemy reinstates the strength of the material.
Gershom Scholem’s scholarship was of this rare, life-giving kind. Not only have his studies of the Cabala altered, albeit controversially, the image of Judaism—the understanding that even an agnostic Jew now has of his psychological and historical provenance—but his explorations, translations, and presentations of Cabalistic writings exercise a formidable influence on literary theory at large, on the ways in which non-Jewish and wholly agnostic critics and scholars read poetry. Scholem’s essays, many composed in a pellucid, classical German prose (bad writing is a symptom of poor scholarship), encompass concerns far beyond the Cabalistic. There has been no shrewder, more sombrely acute commentator on the drama of German Judaism, on the ambiguities in the condition of modern Israel, on the role of Biblical studies and translations in an increasingly secularized age. Scholem’s often strangely ironic, subversive addictions were manifold: like William James (and there are other analogies), he took the play of intellect and the pluralities of human feeling for his province. Every manifestation of religious consciousness, of mythical imagining, of creative illusion fascinated him. But so did mathematics, the anatomy of legal discourse, and anthropology. Much of Scholem’s voluminous production is esoteric not only in subject matter—the arcana of medieval and Chassidic mysticism, of Gnostic cosmology, of Renaissance hermeticism and magic—but also in its means of statement. Masterpieces of erudition, of problem-solving remain, unavoidably, enclosed in learned journals and in Hebrew. But Scholem’s major works, such as “Origins of the Kabbalah” and the spellbinding study of Sabbatai Sevi, the mystical pseudo-Messiah (both published by Princeton), are aimed at the literate public, as are those masterpieces in (relative) miniature: Scholem’s personal recollections, his monograph on mystical visions of creation, and his memoir of Walter Benjamin. And in some cases translations into English contain updated material and editorial help lacking in the Hebrew or German first versions. A great servant of insight has been handsomely served.
Scholem and Benjamin first met in 1915, when Benjamin was twenty-three and Scholem seventeen. Their friendship has become the stuff both of legend and of scholarly investigation. It manifests strong points of affinity. Benjamin and Scholem were German Jews uncannily alert to the marginal yet also creative ambience of their personal and social condition. They were men of the mind—of learning, of citation and commentary in an almost rabbinic vein. Each was, in his own quarter, an addict of ancient books, a systematic bibliophile and collector. They were virtuoso practitioners of German prose in very distinct registers but with a shared purity of expression, whose very mastery told of something not wholly native, not unconsciously inherited. There was in both Scholem and Benjamin a streak of anarchy, a radical distrust of established structures and conventions. (Both succeeded in slipping into Switzerland during the First World War, Scholem having feigned severe neurotic symptoms when summoned by his draft board.) Most important, both Benjamin and Scholem chose to approach central philosophic, historical, and psychological problems from an exotic edge. Scholem revolutionized the study of Judaism by his philological-editorial investigations of extreme esoterica—of sometimes crazed heresies, of pathologies of speculative reverie. Analysis of children’s books and toys; of nineteenth-century photographs; of the “lost” dramaturgy and emblem books of the German baroque; of the emporiums and department stores that sprang up in the Paris of the Second Empire led Benjamin to suggestions, to “illuminations” (his own designation, borrowed from Rimbaud), that are today at the heart of structuralism, of cultural sociology, and of semiotics.
But the differences between the two men were trenchant. Paradoxically, Scholem’s immersion in religious mysticism originated in a deeply ironical, skeptical world view. I had the testing privilege of knowing Scholem in his later years, of seeing him in Jerusalem, Zurich, and New York. I cannot even begin to venture an informed guess as to whether this inspired expositor of the Cabalistic meditation on the self-divisions of the Divine Oneness, on the emanations of light from the Godhead, on the “breaking of the vessels” at the moment of creation believed or did not believe in God. The quizzicalities in Scholem’s smile and the hints of a deep-lying Voltairean merriment were legion. Benjamin, on the other hand, was that rare creature a modern mystic: an initiate of occult realms of foresight, of hermetic symbolism, of white magic. Benjamin, who gave to the sociological-economic context of our consciousness a new precision, who was swiftly responsive to the media revolution in photography, film, and radio, who made a more or less private, heretical Marxism a vital component of his outlook, was the real Cabalist. (He also experimented with drugs—a foray into unreason from which Scholem recoiled.)
An interest in Zionism was a powerful bond between the two men, though the ways they were to put it into practice were to prove from the outset irreconcilable. With astringent clairvoyance, Scholem sensed the potential for catastrophe in the German-Jewish amalgam. It became blindingly plain to him that a serious commitment to Jewish identity must entail knowledge of the Hebrew language and life in Israel. There is in Scholem’s reconquest of the Cabalistic past for Jewish cognition and for the general history of religious thought a vehement “Zionism,” a return to a Holy Land. Benjamin flirted ardently with the notion of emigration to what was then Palestine. Time and again, he eagerly informed Scholem of his intended study of Hebrew. In 1929, and again in the mid-nineteen-thirties, under the aegis of an impatient Scholem, Benjamin declared himself to be on the verge of departure from a doomed Europe. Nothing came of these urgent, troubled impulses. Scholem went to Jerusalem in 1923. He died, honored, his great work done, in 1982. Benjamin, worn to utter despair, hunted, his writings dispersed or fragmentary, committed suicide in a sordid hole on the French-Spanish frontier in 1940. (Rumor had it that the straggling refugees who had made it across the border would be returned to the French police and thus to Nazi mercies.)
But it could not have been otherwise. Walter Benjamin was among the last and most inspired of Central Europeans, where centrality implies both a geographical notion—that of the spaces defined for emancipated Judaism by Frankfurt-Vienna-Prague-Paris—and the concept of the European historical genius as it is articulated in French and in German. Like Adorno, like Ernst Bloch and other founders of and witnesses to the so-called Frankfurt School of critical theory and of cultural philosophy, Benjamin could not sever his own polyglot identity, his role in the intelligentsia, his very physique—that of the coffeehouse sage par excellence—from the fatality of Europe. And he left for too late the chance of escape to America—a chance that his peers and friends (Adorno, Bloch, Horkheimer, Brecht) seized upon with varying degrees of insightful opportunism.
A key thread in “The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932–40,” translated by Gary Smith and André Lefevere (Schocken; $27.95), is the fascinating difference between Scholem’s Messiah and Benjamin’s. For Scholem, the messianic—whose immensely rich, diverse forms he had diagnosed in monographs, in his magisterial “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” and, above all, in his epic of Sabbatai Sevi—was inseparable from a material, historically grounded homecoming to Israel. It was with arch delight that Scholem insinuated into the Cabalistic repertoire a parable he himself had invented: that of a coming of the Messiah which would leave all things very slightly altered and would therefore be unnoticed—except in Israel, the establishment of which state would itself be the best available evidence of the messianic. Benjamin’s vision, which centered on Paul Klee’s depiction of the “Angelus Novus”—the angel of history, whom a stormwind always backs away from us—was altogether other. The messianic did not signify Zionism. It implied the recovery of the voices of the humbled and the defeated, plowed under by history and historians. It would restore the lost Adamic tongue that secretly underlay all human languages, and whose generative presence made both possible and impossible the act of translation. For Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah would reveal itself via a transparency to truth, to social justice, to loving rationality extending beyond Judaism and the rebirth of Israel (miraculous as he sensed that to be).
“The translation of this correspondence has the virtue of clarity. (There are a hundred and twenty-eight letters in all; some letters prior to 1932 seem to have perished, and there is a touch of wizardry to Scholem’s discovery of his own side of the exchange in East Germany in October, 1966.) It does not (it cannot) convincingly echo the differences in the tonality of the two writers—differences that reveal persistent dissonances in their tempers. Beneath even the most affectionate—at moments, teasing—manner of Scholem runs a thread of authority, of exasperation in the face of illusion and of what he takes to be breaches of logic. Benjamin’s tonality is one of flickering subtlety, of a seemingly evasive yet finely inward attempt to give expression to intangibles, to necessary ambiguities, to a vibrato of perceptions and intentions which he himself characterized by the word “aura.”
In the early spring of 1934, for example, Scholem’s harried clearsightedness as to the European situation and Benjamin’s incapacity to don the indispensable life belt brought the relationship near to breaking. Benjamin on the third of March:
My existence is about as precarious as it could be and depends each day anew on the good Lord himself—to say the same thing in a more prudent way. And by that I do not mean just the help I get from time to time, but also my own initiative, which is more or less aimed at a miracle.
Benjamin’s waiting for the miraculous had a tenor at once therapeutic—it kept him alive—and disabling, in that it further diminished the utility, the moral and metaphysical status, of mere rational action. Scholem’s view of possible divine aid was pragmatic. He strove to find a professional berth for Benjamin in Israel; he labored to get Benjamin’s works published or noticed. But his vexation is unmistakable. “How your situation will really develop is becoming increasingly uncertain to me,” he wrote, and “Many facts of our correspondence must have escaped your memory, as you no longer remember what seemed to draw you to an explanation of your situation. . . . We are debating with feigned positions, and I do not view this with pleasure.”
Moreover, it wasn’t only Benjamin’s vacillations with regard to refuge in Palestine which provoked Scholem but, from 1924 onward, his exceedingly complicated involvement with Marxism. Scholem knew of Benjamin’s personal, erotic relationship with a woman of Communist persuasion. He knew of his friend’s trip to Moscow in 1926. Scholem’s older brother had played a prominent, tragic role in the German Communist Party. Scholem bitterly resented the growing influence of Brecht’s work and person over Benjamin (who spent crucial weeks with Brecht in the latter’s Danish exile). Scholem’s politics, if any, were those of disenchantment, of fastidious irony, even sarcasm, at the inveterate spectacle of human folly and barbarism.
But Scholem misread Benjamin’s heretical, profoundly inventive resort to Marxist theories of history and to the rhetorical instruments of dialectical materialism. Certain friendships from within Communism helped Benjamin to lighten the dark of his almost unnatural solitude. At numerous points in the political awfulness of the nineteen-thirties, Communism, even Stalinism, seemed to offer the only effective resistance to the triumphant tide of Fascism and Nazism. Scholem had no access to Benjamin’s posthumously published Moscow diary. In it he would have found clear evidence of Benjamin’s skepticism, of his aversion to the actual climate of Soviet society. Yet that aversion did not negate the suggestive strength of Marx’s analyses of nineteenth-century capitalism or the instigations to an economic-materialist understanding of the creation and dissemination of intellectual and artistic works which we find in Marxist aesthetics. Benjamin’s pioneering studies of the mass reproducibility of an works through photography and color facsimile, his probing insights into the interface between high culture and the market, his preliminary analyses for an intended magnum opus—an anatomy of “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”—were underwritten by a personal struggle with Marxist principles. Hence the affinities with the strategically astute, personalized Marxism of Brecht’s plays and critical tracts.
Above all, Scholem bridled at what he intuited, uneasily, to be Benjamin’s imaging of Marxism as a natural variant of Judaic messianic eschatology—of the central Judaic investment in millenarian hope. Grimly informed, Scholem saw the political oppression, the human misery to which Marxism-Leninism and its fellow-travellers were heading. He did not choose to perceive the tragic dimensions of that degeneration from messianic ideals, from the Utopian but incessant call for social justice as it is already eloquent in the Prophets. Benjamin’s partly mystical annunciation of a “recuperation of history”—of the imposition on history of moral criteria—had arisen precisely from a Moscow-Jerusalem dream. Without this doomed hybrid, he could not have produced much of his finest work—in particular, his terse, terminal masterpiece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Much later, reflecting on Benjamin’s genius and on the series of miracles which had made possible the survival of the “lost” texts, Scholem would concede (I heard him do so) that his friend’s intricate dance with and around Marxism had had its uses. At the time, it struck him as a vulgar waste and betrayal of rare gifts.
“What kept the dialogue going through thick and thin, what gives it enduring stature, is the successive discussions of Kafka. Subconsciously, perhaps, Benjamin and Scholem reverted to Kafka each time their mutual relations were under stress. The result is a series of readings—of critical delineations—of a penetrative originality. By comparison, the self-serving juggleries of current deconstruction or post-structuralism are embarrassing. Over and over, Scholem and Benjamin bring to bear on Kafka’s elusive inexhaustibility an imaginative reach very nearly equal to its object. One would like to quote page after page. I limit myself to two examples. Here is Scholem to Benjamin on September 20, 1934 (in reference to “The Castle”):
And yet Kafka’s women bear the signs of other things to which you pay too little attention. The castle or officialdom with which they have such a horribly undefinable but precise relationship is clearly not just your primal world, if it is that at all. If it were the primal world, then what need would there have been to make the women’s relationship to it into a riddle? Everything would have been clear, whereas in reality everything is not clear and their relationship to officialdom is very exciting, especially since officialdom itself even warns against them (for instance, through the mouth of the chaplain). Rather, the castle or officialdom is something the “primal world” must first be related to.
You ask what I understand by the “nothingness of revelation”? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content.
The discrimination between “validity” and “significance” is of the utmost pertinence to all of Kafka’s works.
Or take Benjamin’s great letter—an essay of extreme density—dated June 12, 1938. Even extended quotation would do little justice to its depth:
Kafka eavesdropped on tradition, and he who listens hard does not see.
The main reason why this eavesdropping demands such effort is that only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener. There is no doctrine that one could learn and no knowledge that one could preserve. The things one wishes to catch as they rush by are not meant for anyone’s ears. This implies a state of affairs that negatively characterizes Kafka’s works with great precision. . . . Kafka’s work represents tradition falling ill. . . .
This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: First, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is: Can such help still do a human being any good? . . . Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.
Note—and this is characteristic of Benjamin’s allegories of reading—how the analysis itself becomes a parable in Kafka’s manner.
An immense sadness shadows even the more informal and momentarily optimistic of these letters. They were sent as Europe went into nightmare. In Palestine, moreover, Scholem not only experienced directly the violence of early dashes between Arabs and Jewish settlers but had unflinching intuitions of the intractable enmities that lay ahead. And yet this is, in its own way, a book of rejoicing. It celebrates the elixir of intellectual passion—the capacity of the human mind and nervous system to plunge into abstract, speculative interests even in, or most particularly in, the face of personal adversity and sorrow. It bears unstinting witness to the strength within outward weakness which has often been the password to survival of humanism and of the hunted. Here, at last, and not on the laconic plaque in a grim cemetery wall, Walter Benjamin has his in memoriam. And it is one wholly inseparable from the wonder, perhaps deeper than love, that is friendship.