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The Journal o f Jewish Thought and Phi losopl?Y, Vol. 4, pp. 227-243Reprints available directly from the publisher.

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© 1995

"Die Zauberjuden": Walter Benjamin,

Gershom Scholem, and Other German-

Jewish Esoterics between the World Wars

Gary Smith

Einstein Forum) Potsdam

Walter Benjamin first coined the term "Zauberjuden" in a playful poetic

allusion to Scholem and company as "crafty Magic Jews." By the time Ben-

jamin reemployed the term thirteen years later, reporting to Scholem fromSan Remo on Oskar Goldberg and entourage, the term seems to have lost

all favorable connotation: "You will hesitate all the less," Benjamin writes,

"when I confide in you that I have landed here in the main camp of the

true Magic Jews."! The endurance of this term in Benjamin's and Scholem's

private vocabulary-resonant more of the fairy tale's "Zauberlehrling" than

Mann's "Zauberberg" (1924)- is not accidental; it serves as a figure of their

own participation in what I term the Jewish-German rhetoric of esotericism

between the World Wars.Despite Alfred Dablin's assertion in 1927 that Weimar signified, among

other phenomena, "the epoch of a ne\v, thriving esotericism of a special

breed,"2 this efflorescence of esoteric discourse remains a neglected theme

in the studies of German-Jewish intellectual life in Weimar society.3 As a

matter of fact, the modest interpenetration of philosophical and Kabbalistic

topoi from the late-fifteenth to nineteenth centuries chronicled by scholars

of Jewish mysticism intensified in the early-twentieth century as part of a

general revolutionization of western Jewish intellectual culture.

1 WalterBenjamin, B r ie je , 2 vols.,ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholemand Theodor W Adorno.

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966, p. 282 (November 9, 1921)& p. 637 (December 26,1934).

2 Alfred Dbblin, "Au~enseiter der Naturwissenschaft," Vossische Zeitung, No. 306 (Unterhaltungs-

blatt), 31 December 1927 [not included in Dbblin's collected writings].

3 Despite the many merits of Moshe Idel's ambitious conspectus, "From Jewish Esotericism to

European Philosophy: An Intellectual Profile of Kabbalah as a Cultural Factor," only cursory treat-

ment is given to the intermingling of philosophical and Kabbalistic topoi and no reference is madeto the early twentieth century. Cf. Moshe Ide!, Kabbalah: New Perspec tives . New Haven: YaleUniversity

Press, 1988, chap. 10.

227



228 GarySmith

"Esotericism was in the air." As the late scholar Arnaldo Momigliano

recalled in his book On Pagans, Jews, and Christians,4 "For someone like

myself who in the late twenties and early thirties read German books and

talked to German friends in Italy, it is less difficult to overhear in the prose

of Scholem and Benjamin the echoes of those German Romantics-

Hamann, Humboldt, and von Baader-who were coming back into fashion.

[ . . . ] Followers of Stefan George were multiplying among the younger

generation of German Jews." Art historians have long recognized that

untangling the traffic in esoteric ideas is crucial to constructing a history of

modern art.s This contrasts distinctly, however, with the arbiters of German

literary and philosophical history, who have typically confined treatment of

esoteric elements to their influence on single thinkers (relevant figures I will

not address include Ernst Bloch, Mynona, and Franz Rosenzweig). Even in

France, a sceptical Anatole France admitted that "a certain familiarity with

the occult sciences is necessary in order to comprehend a great number of

works of contemporary literature."6 None of these observations about the

esoteric symptoms of the Zeitgeist suffice, however, to diagnose what is

above all a rhetoric of esotericism in the writings of such independent think-

ers as Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, Erich Unger,

or Erich Gutkind. This rhetoric bears broad implications, furthermore, for

issues such as how early twentieth-century German literary, philosophical,

and social movements drew upon elements of Jewish esotericism; the for-

mation of Jewish identity in the Weimar period, especially with regards to

the de-secularization of the assimilated Jewish intellectual; and the discur-

sive development of key themes and terms in both Walter Benjamin's and

Gershom Scholem's work.

In employing the term "esotericism" in its broadest conceivable sense, Iam following both studies of the significance of esoteric literature on classi-

cal modernism and Schure's notion of "comparative esotericism," which

characterizes common features of how disparate spiritual trends are in-

formed by mythical images and religious traditions. Thus this encyclopaedic

sense of "esotericism" not only encompasses "forms of Platonism, Gnosis,

Kabbalah, and alchemy, but includes a profusion of contemporary trends

4 "Gershom Scholem's Autobiography," in: Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans)Jews, and Christians.

Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1987, pp. 258--60.

\ See, for example, the admirable synopsis by Friedrich Teja Bach, "Zur Bedeutung der Esoterik in

der klassischen Moderne." In F.T.B., Constantin Brancusi. Metamorphosen plastischer Form. Cologne:

Dumont, 1987, pp. 141-45.

It is also true of fin de siecle occultism that it was largely neglected by the foremost historians of

ideas while intriguing many significant writers, including Baudelaire and Breton. Cf. Mircea Eliade,

"The Occult in the Modern World," in: M. E., Occultism, W itchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. Essays in

Comparative Religion, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 47-68, here 51£.6 The passage continues: "Magic occupied a large place in the imagination of our poets and our

novelists." France, Revue Illustrie, 15 February 1890, Quoted in: Eliade, "The Occult in the Modern

World," ibid., p. 51, and in: Papus, Traiti ilimentaire de scienceocculte, (1926), p. 10.



Be njam in, Sc ho lem, an d Other German Jewish Es oten cs 229

taking up these traditions, various forms of magic, hermeticism, spiritual-

ism, occultism, and above all theosophy."7Each of the figures I named above-Benjamin, Scholem, Goldberg, Un-

ger, and Gutkind- is emblematic for a different feature of this commerce

of ideas and expression. It was no accident, for example, that the expres-

sionist Neue Club turned to two metaphysicians of myth, Oskar Goldberg

and Erich Unger, during its decline following the poet Georg Heym's death.8

The career of Erich Gutkind is exemplary for the politics of esotericism;

his sybillinic, theosophically-inspired SiderealBirth. Seraphic Wanderingfrom the

Death0 /

the Worldto the Baptism0 /

theAct first brought him into contact withWassily Kandinsky, who would soon afterward work out the principles of

his influential tractate, On the Spiritual in Art.9 The small measure of fame

Gutkind achieved in these years also helped make the project plausible

which led to the forming of the utopian "Forte" or "Potsdam" Circle, [and

I am quoting Scholem now], "that small group of men," such as Frederik

van Eeden, Buber, Walther Rathenau, Theodor Diubler, [... ] Plarens Chris-

tian Rang and three or four others, [. . .] who would set up a community

devoted to intellectual and spiritual activity [... ] to engage without any res-ervations in a creative exchange of ideas [. . . and] perhaps, to put it clearly

but esoterically, to shake the world off its hinges."lo The terms and method

of Gershom Scholem's prodigious scholarship bear the freight of his read-

ing of the Romantic philosophers of language, his powerful dialogue with

Walter Benjamin on questions of myth, language, silence, tradition, and his-

tory, his rejection of the rationalist ethos of Hermann Cohen, and his severe

7 Edouard Schure, "'Les Grands Inities. Esquisse de l'Histoire secrete des Religions"'. Paris,

Perrin. 4th ed., 1899. German trans. by Marie Steiner-von-Sivers: 'Die Gro~en Eingeweihten

Geheimlehrender Religionen'. Preface by Rudolf Steiner. Bern, Miinchen, Wien: Scherz/Otto W

Barth. 16th ed., 1979. Consider Tiryakian's view that "esoteric" refers to those "religio-philosophic

belief systems which underlie occult techniques and practices; that is, it refers to the more compre-

hensive cognitive mappings of nature and the cosmos, the epistemological and ontological reflections

of ultimate reality, which mappings constitute a stock of knowledge that provides the ground for

occult procedures." Edward A. Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," American Journal

of Sociolog;y78 (November 1972): 491-512; Cited by Mircea Eliade, "The Occult and the Modern World,"

op. cit, p. 48.The emphasis on theosophy and anthroposophy must be worked out with relation to Madame

Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and Rudolph Otto, while remaining aware that it complements Jewish mys-

tical trends coming from the East. In addition, the thought of figures such as Berdachevsky, Bialik,

and Agnon must be entered into the socio-cultural equation.

8 C£ Die Schriftendes neuen Clubs, ed. Richard Sheppard. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980, 1983.

9 Cf. Erich Gutkind. Siderische Geburt. Seraphische IJ:7anderungvom Tode der welt zur Taufe der Tat. 2nd

ed. Berlin: Schuster &Loeffler, [1914]. (1st ed. under the pseudonym "Volker," 1910). See also welt-

eroberung durch Heldenliebe (1911, with Frederik van Eeden); "Bekenntnis," Zeit-Echo. Ein Kriegs-

Tagebuchder KUnstler, 1914-1915 (Munich, Berlin: Graphik, 1915); "Beyond Assimilation," The Menorah

Jour na l 17, 1 (October 1929), pp. 60-66; The Absolute Collective.A PhilosophicalAttempt to Overcome Our

Br oken State. London, 1933; Purpose 9, 3 and 9, 4 (1937); The Body of God. hrst Steps Toward an Anti-

Theolog;y.The Col/ected Papers of Eric Gutkind, ed. Lucie B. Gutkind and Henry Le Roy Finch. Intra.

Henry Le Roy Finch. New York: Horizon Press, 1969.

10 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1980, p. 81.



230 Gary Smith

scepticism of Martin Buber's valorization of an intersubjectively-shareable

Erlebnis as both a key to accessing a past experience and a legitimate means

of translating such traditions into a contemporary idiom. (The categorial

quality of this shared rejection, by the way, is nowhere more clearly docu-

mented than in Scholem's mostly unpublished journal of their Seeshaupt dis-

cussions in 1916, where, amidst a series of rather callow quips about Bu-

berians in general-such as "Have you had your Jewish Erlebnis

today?"-Scholem notes that "Benjamin wanted to persuade me to bring

the decisive dismissal of the Erlebnis vendors in my essay-Down with the

Erlebnis/" they agreed.!1) The subtext of their exchanges about the priority

of learning Hebrew; a discussion altogether misunderstood in the German

critical literature, concerns not just Benjamin's mystical-metaphysical concep-

tion of language but the notion articulated by Rosenzweig of Hebrew as

"the language that bears both God's revelation and prophetic promise of

redemption," or, to quote Paul Mendes-Flohr, "the vessel bearing the Jew-

ish soul."!2

These five figures-Benjamin, Gutkind, Scholem, Goldberg, and Unger-

constitute a disharmonious community, whose individual, seemingly eccen-

tric projects, map out a dense matrix of plausible positions on the concep-

tual and methodolical issues I wish to investigate. The lineaments of their

agreements and differences on these issues emerge in part through direct

contacts: Scholem circulated at least five versions of a programmatic letter

he wrote against the foundations of Goldberg's system and its assertion of

the Jewish people's dormant metaphysical-magical powers. And yet as late

as the 1960s, Scholem considered Goldberg's ideas to merit inclusion in the

Enryclopaedia Judaica. Erich Gutkind, who felt himself to be influenced by

Scholem in his radical reinterpretation of ritual and tradition in Judaism, also

became briefly involved with the "Philosophische Gruppe," organized by

Goldberg and his devotee Unger in Berlin, but ended all contact "after a

contre-temps with Erich Unger."!3 Unger, though Oskar Goldberg's philo-

sophical disciple, proved in many ways a more worthy opponent for Scholem

than Goldberg, the salon Kabbalist, at least in terms of intelligibility

and resourcefulness. Not only was it Unger who translated Goldberg's prose

into a contemporary philosophical idiom in a pamphlet on the Problem der

mythischen Realitdt [the Problem of Mythical Reality], but he composed a

11 Cf. Hans Puttnies and Gary Smith, Benjaminiana. Eine biograjischeRecherche. Gie~en: Anabas, 1991,

pp.58-59.

12 Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Hebrew as a Holy Tongue. Franz Rosenzweigand the Renewal of Hebrew,"

in: Lewis Glinert, ed., Hebrew in Ashkenaz. A Language in Exi le (New York: Oxford University Press,

1993), pp. 229, 228. Mendes-Flohr quotes the Rosenzweig passage from his lectures on the Hebrew

language delivered at the Ji idisc he s Le hrha us in 1921, entitled "Unsere Sprache" and later published as

''Vom Geist der hebrmschen Sprache," Franz Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein w.irk. Gesammelte Schriften,Vol. III ("Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken), ed. Reinhold Mayer und

Annemarie Mayer. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984, p. 721.

13 Henry Le Roy Finch, unpublished typescript.



Beqam in , Sc holem, and Other German -Jew ishE so terics 231

lengthy (72-page), recendy published reply to Scholem's pathbreaking 1928

Cardozo essay, which includes a scarcely-coded attack on Goldberg's views

in the essay's closing lines.14(In his questioning of Scholem's transvaluation

of the traditional notion of "antinomianism," Unger does in fact put his

finger on a crucial question, which, as far as I know the literature, has not

been raised in this form.) In the early 1920s, before both Benjamin and

Scholem would unequivocally reject the philosophical results of Unger's dis-

cipleship to Goldberg (whose "impure aura" so repelled Benjamin that he

found it impossible to even shake Goldberg's hand 15), Benjamin invited

Unger to join the inner circle of that quintessentially Benjaminian expres-

sion of Jewish sensibilities, the journal Angelus NOVUS.16 After the first issue,

which was to feature contributions by Agnon, Scholem, Benjamin, Plorens

Christian Rang, and others, Benjamin was planning to publish an essay by

Erich Unger entided "Die Gewalt des Rahmens" [The Power of the Frame],

in which he argues against the unboundedness of our conception that "the

responsibility for what happens always becomes, must always become

the burden of the future, the coming: the idea, that we always live in the

middle of the day-has its precise counterpart in the thought of the ancients,

and nothing is perhaps so urgent as to demonstrate the strength of the mid-

dle, to release the creative forces through the power of the frame."17This

notion undeniably has its analogue in that conception of history which

Stephane Moses recendy argued marks the crossroads of the conceptions of

Benjamin, Scholem, and Rosenzweig, especially in the Jewish notion of the

14 Scholem's essay on Abraham Cardozo appeared in the special issue of Der Jude celebrating

Buber's fiftieth birthday, and begins its penultimate paragraph with the lines: "So wurde, noch bevor

die Machte der Weltgeschichte das Judentum im 19. Jahrhundert aufwiihlten, seine Wirklichkeit von

innen her mit Zerfall bedroht. Schon damals drohte die "Wirklichkeit der Hebraer", der Raum des

Judenturns, zu jener Chimare zu werden, als die sie seitdem immer wieder in gro~en Augenblicken

der ji.idischen Geschichte zu zerflie~en droht, den unbereiten Pathos nicht anders als der unpathe-

tischen Selbstversunkenheit des Geschwatzes." (p. 139). Scholem confirms the polemical intent in his

annotation of Benjamin's Brieje, p. 481, note 6. Cf. Erich Unger, "Der Universalismus des Hebraer-

turns, Philosophie und Kabbalah. Dargestellt aus dem Gesichtspunkt der Goldbergsche Schrift 'Die

Wirklichkeit der Hebraer'. Eine Entgegnung auf G. Scholems 'Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus in

Lichte Abraham Cardozos'" (ca. 1929), in: Erich Unger, Vom b'xpressionismus zum Mythos des Hebraer-

tums. Schriften 1909 bis 1931, ed. Manfred Voigts. Wi.irzburg: Kbnigshausen & Neumann, 1992, pp.

97-143. [Hereafter: VOm Expressionismus]

15 I heard similar characterizations of Goldberg's physical repugnance several times from persons

who occasionally attended the group's so-called "langweilige Abende" (boring evenings).

16 The particulars of Benjamin's plans for the journal as well as the history of its failure in the face

of delinquent manuscripts not keeping pace with spiralling inflation are documented in the unpub-

lished correspondence with his publisher Richard Wei~bach preserved in the Deutsehes Literaturar-

chiv in Marbach a.N. See also his precis of the journal's aims printed in GS II, pp. 241-46: ''Anki.indi-

gung der Zeitschrift: Angelus Novus."

17 Either Unger did not complete the essay or it has been lost; the only allusion to his thinkingon this notion of the "power" or "violence" of the "frame" is a letter to Kurt Breysig from February

7, 1915-thus six years prior to the scheduled (non)publication of the essay in Angelus Novus-pub-

lished in the posthumous collection VOm Expressionismus, ibid., pp. 40-43, specifically p. 43.



232 GarySmith

eternal present.18 Indeed, direct confirmation can be found in the line

Scholem repeats in his journal as well as the marvelous, unpublished "95

Theses on Judaism and Zionism": "The eternal present is the concept of

time in Judaism."19 Scholem's non-Lutherian theses, which he presented to

Benjamin on the latter's 26th birthday "with a discussion deadline of 15

years," not only provide a map of their long-term dialogic project but help

refute the widely-held notion of Scholem's philosophical apprenticeship to

Benjamin. Theirs was an exchange between two Zauberer, two sorcerers, nei-

ther of whom succeeded in apprenticing the other.20

These biographical desiderata merely allude to what was a broad conflu-

ence of interests within an otherwise entirely incongruous group. If there

was consensus among these figures at all, it could be found in their reserva-

tions about the project of the "Science of Judaism," the meliorist ethos of

Hermann Cohen's attempt to vindicate Judaism as the prototypical "religion

of reason," and the necessity of rethinking fundamental categories such as

myth, tradition, prophecy, ritual, revelation, language, silence, and law; In the

remainder of this paper, I shall provide the outlines of a map which will

represent the intersection of this biographical and categorial terrain.

Oskar Goldberg's metaphysical magicians

When Scholem remarks that "the three most remarkable 'Jewish sects' that

German Jewry produced" included the Warburg School, the Institute for

Social Research, and the "metaphysical magicians around Oskar Goldberg,"

then he is intimating a programmatic association with projects he and Ben- jamin shared. Whereas the details of the Institute's relations to Benjamin are

fairly well-known, and the scholarly nexus of Benjaminian and Warburgian

18 Cf. Stephane Moses, L A nge de f 'H istoire . Rose niJ Ve ig , Be nj amin, S chole m. Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1992.

19 "Der Zeitbegriff des Judentums ist ewige Gegenwart." In: "95 Thesen liber Judentum und

Zionismus. teils aus alten teils aus ungeschriebenen Blichern, ausgezogen und aufgestellt durch Ger-

hard Scholem. angeschlagen am 15. Juli 1918 mit 15jahriger Diskussionsfrist." To be published in

Gershom Scholem iJVischen den Disziplinen, ed. Michael Brocke, Peter Schafer, & Gary Smith. Frankfurt

a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995.

20 I shall treat the specificity of Scholem's employment of 'magic' and its appropriateness as a

category for rethinking both the relationship between Benjamin and Scholem as well as the pride of

place usually given to categories such as the irrational and experience in explicating the trials of Ger-

man-Jewish culture in those years. Gershom Scholem not only operates with an internal as opposed

to an external notion of the natural place of magic; he thus asserts that the proper place of magic is

in the "ascent of the soul" or the heavenly journey of the mystic. Furthermore, it seems that Scholem

psychologizes the place of magic; his equation of Martin Buber with a magician (see my section on

the Benjamin-Scholem relationship) is far more than a quip on the Erlebnismystiker. The title of this paper, however, also alludes to a programmatic recognition of the difficulty of achieving a clear

demarcation of the boundary between magic and religion in the historical and logical discourse on

religion, a difficulty of which all of the authors I address were clearly aware.



Benjamin, Scholem, and Other GermanJewish Esoterics 233

concerns has hardly been seriously treated,21 our unfamiliarity today with

the circle around Oskar Goldberg is no measure of its contribution to the

discursive recharting of the margins of Jewish identity then and now: If we

are familiar with Goldberg at all-and until very recendy there were only a

handful of scholarly articles to consult, by Scholem, Moses, and few oth-

ers22-then it is in the rather unflattering guise of Chaim Breisacher in Tho-

mas Mann's Dr. Faustus, which I shall return to later.

Benjamin's biographical imbrications with members of the Goldberg cir-

cle are intermittent, fascinating, and too minute to dwell upon here at length.

Before adumbrating certain features of this association, however, I would

like to briefly impart a sense of Goldberg's work. In his first book publica-

tion-a slim pamphlet in 1908 entided The Five Books if Moses, an Edifice if

Num bers23-he sets forth a numerological system for reading the Pentateuch,

whose significance, he claims in an unpublished letter, "is not only philolog-

ical-historical but natural-scientific" insofar as "the numerological system

could not have been constructed by conventional arithmetical means."24

From this point Goldberg infers "that the author or authors of the numeri-

cal combinations" could hardly have known as much, which thus demon-

strates "the incidence of unconscious i.e. inborn and involuntarily arising

psychic abilities."25

In Goldberg's magnum opus of 1924, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer,26 a book

of profound if sometimes spurious distinction(s), he demonstrates this

exceptional metaphysical character of the Hebrews and deciphers the decline

of their ability to activate their magical powers in the stasis of ritual and

21 Besides their intermittent personal contacts, which were more significant in the case of Scholem

than Benjamin, however, both Benjamin and Warburg transformed our thinking about the transmis-

sion of culture.

22 Stephane Moses drew attention to Goldberg quite early through his study "Thomas Mann et

Oskar Goldberg: Un example de >Montage< dans Ie Doktor Faustus," in: Et ud es Ger ma n iq u es (paris),

January-February 1976, pp. 8-24. The first significant monograph devoted to Goldberg has recendy

been published by Manfred Voigts under the tide Oskar Goldberg . Der myth ische Exper imenta lwi ssen-schaf t ler . Ein verdrangtes Kapi tel judischer Geschichte. Berlin: Agora, 1992.

23 Die ft in f Bucher Mos i s -e in Zah lengebaude. Die Fes t st e llung e iner e inheit li ch durchgef iihr ten Zah lenschri ft .

Berlin: no pub!., 1908, 44 pp.

24 ALS, Oskar Goldberg to N.L. von Luschan, 30 August 1922, ALS, 14 pp. Staatsbibliothek

Preul3ischer Kulturbesitz, Manuscript Department.

25 Goldberg's numerological speculations were fairly well-known in Berlin and reported on exten-

sively in 1908 by the Viennese scholar Wolfgang Schultz in an article preserved in the Gershom

Scholem archive at the Jewish National &University Library in Jerusalem. Cf. "Der gegenwartige

Stand der Zahlenforschung," Memnon. Ze i tschr if t f ti r Kans t - und Kal turgesch ich te des a /t en Or ien ts 1908, pp.

240---49.26 Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirk li chkei t der Hebraer . Ein le itung in das Sys tem des Pen ta teuch . [The Reality of

the Hebrews. Introduction to the System of the Pentateuch.] Volume One. German text to the

Hebrew edition [never published]. Berlin: Verlag David, 1925.



234 GarySmith

order.27 (fhe association between myth, ritual, and the supernatural preoc-

cupied Benjamin in 1921, in the context of his exploration of the mythical

powers of marriage at the outset of his study of "Goethe's Elective Affini-

ties."28) The breadth of implication for Goldberg's weltanschauung is vast; in

the first chapter, for example, he is able to establish a singular concept of

prophecy by asserting a number of striking cosmological and philosophical

distinctions. The book opens with the same resounding conviction as

Wittgenstein's first line of the Tractatus: "The world is all that is the case." In

Goldberg's somewhat more convoluted, but equally apodictic prose, we read:

"The world is the quintessence of everything that is," and furthermore, that

it "consists of a finite and an infinite part." What follows are a series of

truly dazzling distinctions (similarly) formulated as theses, most of which

should not be rejected out of hand. Fundamental to the Goldbergian ontol-

ogy is his discrimination between the finite) defined as that which is real, and

the infinite) construed as that which is possible. Possibility is not merely a

formal category, however, the possible is present: possibility, despite being

beyond space and time, is just as real, as existent [. . .] as the so-called

reality existing in space and time." The difference between reality and possi-

bility then becomes that "while the former is manifest [ I! ffinbar] , [... ] the

latter is latent." If the possible is present, then an important question

becomes: what prevents possible worlds becoming actual ones? For Gold-

berg, the answer is the laws of causality, which quite literally block the

totality of possibilities from being realized, from emerging from infinitude

onto the surface of reality, and from consequently making the concept of

time untenable. What is time? In Goldberg's words, it is defined as:

Nothing other than the form for the entrance of possibilities from infinity into finitude. Every mo-

ment of time corresponds to a moment of the world [... J which presents itself as a singular constel-

lation i.e. possiblity.29

Infinity is a [discontinuous] condition, and not merely a form which can be

found in the finite world; it is the "reservoir of lapses of time" and of both

spirit and matter. "Space, time, and causality are not forms of intuition but

the constitutive forms of finite reality." Moreover, for every concept, there

exists a corresponding reality, intact, self-enclosed worlds whose "relation-

27Just how implausible and yet familiar Benjamin found such conceptions can be adduced from a

passage in his Elective Affinities essay (see next note): "Only the strict binding to a ritual, which may

be called superstition only when, torn out of its context, it survives in rudimentary fashion, can

promise to these human beings a stay against the nature in which we live. Charged, as only mythical

nature is, with superhuman powers, it comes threateningly into play." [German text in GS I, 132:

"Nur die strenge Bindung an ein Ritual, die Aberglaube einzig hei~en darf, wo sie ihrem Zusammen-

hange entrissen rudimentar iiberdauert, kann jeden Menschen Halt gegen die Natur versprechen.

Geladen, wie nur mytthischen Natur es ist, tritt sie drohend ins Spiel.'l28 "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," GJ I, 123-201. Forthcoming in a remarkable English version

by Stanley Corngold, to be published in 1995 by Harvard University Press.

29 Cf. Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebrder, op. cit., pp. 2f.



Ben jam in, Sc ho lem, an d Oth er Ger man -Jew ish Eso terics 23 5

ship cannot be determined physically" but only spoken of as interstices,

which are only penetrable transcendentally.

Prophecy then becomes possible because in the sphere of infinite reality

all possibilities are present which in the finite world can only emerge suc-

cessively.Thus the grammar of Goldberg's conception of prophecy is strik-

ingly analogous to the notion Scholem articulates of a revelation in which

the oral tradition is inscribed from the beginning.3DYet the task of prophecy

on Goldberg's view becomes a toiling with infinity, ultimately through meta-

physical methods and the mythical-magical capabilities of a people biologi-

cally-defined.

By specificallygrounding a notion of prophecy, Goldberg's elaborate mys-

tical-philosophical view of worlds unbound gives us a metaphysical scaffold-

ing for those very kinds of experience Benjamin criticized Kant for not

allowing in that famous line "A philosophy cannot be true which does

not allow for and cannot explicate the possibility of divination from coffee

grounds."31This very preoccupation with the possibility of prophecy repre-

sents a common concern within the disparate projects of all the thinkers I

am discussing. As early as 1918, Scholem expresses frustration in his journal

that: "It is the fault of the Jews that they have not developed their own

view of the prophets up to now."32And Benjamin, in his late work, builds

the prohibition of the Jews to investigate the future into his conception of

history.33

The power of Unger's reflections as well as the confluence of speculation

about myth and violence in Unger's political and theological thinking

explains Benjamin's attraction to his ideas, despite the proximity of Gold-

berg's less intuitively plausible positions and Scholem's open antipathy for

30 Cf. Gershom Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism," The Messi-

anic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971, pp.

282-303.

31 Scholem, JJ7alterBe'!Jamin. The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society, 1981, p. 59 (trans. emended).

32 The context is an unpublished note of July 23, 1918 on the Christian conception of prophecy:

"Schon Grotius hat den beriihmten Vers, den man mit Unrecht durch falsche Ubersetzung zum Eck-

stein der christlichen Auffassung der Prophetie gemacht hat: Glaubt ihr nicht so bleibt ihr nicht, so

iibersetzt: Wollet ihr denn nicht glauben, wenn ihr nicht beglaubigt werdet. Er mu~ also auch schon

ein Haar in der Suppe gefunden haben. Vielleicht hei~t es auch als Schwur, und vielleicht kann

<man> im zweiten Teil start [Teamehnu] lesen [Teemaheynu] <:> ihr werdet nicht verworfen wer-

den. "Wahrlich, ihr k6nnt Vertrauen haben, denn (oder da~) ihr werdet nicht verworfen werden."

Dann haben die Gojim das Nachsehen! Das pa~t auch in den Zusammenhang ganz hinein. Der

jiidische Prophet hat und hat nun einmal keine christlichen Unordnungen gepredigt und die "Emu-

nah" kann nicht mit Paulus verwechselt werden."

Earlier, in the gloss on Agnon's story, he notes: "The comprehensibility of all revelation is a prob-

lem. Just how genuine prophecy embodies the orders of language, was not felt to be suspect in the

skeptical generation preceding ours."

33 At stake here is moreover the entire post-Kantian notion of the Grenzbegriff, a crucial concept for Benjamin, Goldberg, and Unger. Benjamin was a studied thinker of extremes, as testified to by his

reflections on the 'Grenzform' or 'Grenznatur' [G S I, 366, 263] in his magnum opus on the German

mourning play, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [GS I, 203-430].



236 Gary Smith

the entire clique. The immediate impetus for Benjamin's interest was a pair

of lectures Unger held on "Philosophy and Politics" in January 1921, in con-

nection with his first book publication, a slim and densely-constructed bro-

chure entitled Politik und Metaphysik.34 In the manuscript of the second of

these lectures, Unger reflects upon the age-old abyss between the theory

and practice of politics. Both theory and practice fail in traditional political

philosophy: Practice, which only employs theory for purposive-rational

ends, and theory, whose sole ambition is the characterization of a certain

catastrophic, political reality without respect to actual political conditions or

consequences. "Political philosophy," Unger writes, "stands between theory

and practice and foregoes the fundamental law of every success: Only themost radical theoretical construction courses serviceably into praxis-[ and]

praxis only becomes tangible for theory, when one unfurls the entire alter-

native of which it is one pole." The political philospher is always at a disad-

vantage with respect to the actual politics, which either makes use of or

moves away from the use of the "de facto powers" [faktischen Gewalten] avail-

able to it.

These kinds of passages make the remarkable fact less surprising that two

of the very few footnotes to Benjamin's most important statement on mythand violence prior to his magisterial essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities--

"The Critique of Violence"35-are in fact references to Erich Unger's cri-

tique of the idea of compromise in Politik und Metaphysik. This idea is cen-

tral to Benjamin's critique of parliamentarism's repression of how it operates

with violence. Compromise can only be affected through "the latent pres-

ence of violence" (Benjamin), or, as Benjamin quotes Unger, as a "product

situated within the mentality of violence, no matter how it may disdain all

open violence, because the effort toward compromise is motivated not in-ternally but from outside, by the opposing effort, because no compromise,

however freely accepted, is conceivable without a compulsive character."36A

second footnote is also devoted to Unger, referring to the case of conflict

between nations or classes, and the concealed "higher orders" threatening

to regulate both.37("Higher orders" were also a point of speculation for the

young Scholem; I assume that his antipathy for Goldberg deterred Scholem

from considering this point of intersection of their projects.)

Benjamin would in fact develop his own thoughts on the notion of this

34 The lecture "Philosophie und Politik" has meanwhile been published in Unger's Vom Express ion-

ismus, ibid., pp. 61-75. The brochure Phi losoph ie und Po l i ti k , originally published in 1921 by Verlag

David in Berlin, has been recently reprinted by Manfred Voigts (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neu-

mann, 1989).

35 Cf. Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," Refl ection s. Essq ys , Aphoris m s, Au to b io gra p h ic a l W rit in g s,

ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978,

pp . 277-303.36 Ibid., p. 288.

37 Ibid., p. 290. This notion is worked out in Goldberg's Wirk lichkei t der Hebraer , op . c it ., pp. 5ff.,

passim.



Ben ja min , Sc ho lem, an d Oth er Ger man -Jew ish Eso te rics 23 7

"higher order" in the programmatic text he wrote announcing the journal

Ang elus Novus .There Benjamin speaks of "religious orders,"38 alluding toMessianic expectations, whereas Unger and Goldberg are referring to the

grounding of a metaphysical people [T/olk], which manifests its metaphysical-

magical capabilities.

Recontextualizing the Benjamin-Scholem relationship

The resistance in Germany to reading Benjamin as a Jewish thinker emerged in part from the restrictive concerns of the German student movement and

in part from a general unfamiliarity, if not discomfort, with Benjamin's fore-

grounding of categories with non-secular potential. This phenomenon,

although it has somewhat subsided, led until recently to an obstinate dis-

missiveness of Scholem's subtle and informed readings of Benjamin's early

works. As Scholem's diaries reveal better than any other extant document,

theirs was the exemplary symbiotic exchange, the search for a common

idiom.39Every diary is full of shared grammars and concerns: In a set of unpub-

lished "Short Notes on Judaism" from the Winter of 1917/18, a text kept

with his diaries whose substance Benjamin certainly kne"\v,we find Scholem's

sometimes callow, sometimes virtuoso mind struggling with a vast scope of

issues and ramifications. (It is here that Scholem initiates Buber into the

circle of Zaube1juden) for, as he notes, "Experience and Magic are ultimately

identical. Who does not, when thinking of Buber, imagine a magician?")

Several lines following the remark on Buber just quoted we find some of Scholem's numerous meditations on language and silence: "The Jewish con-

cept of the word (and which does not) includes silence." (This alludes to

the rich tradition that conceives of silence as the word's hidden face, a view-

38 GS II, p. 244.

39 The excavation of influence has often impeded our readings of Benjamin's writings. It would be

mistaken to read these diaries as a yet more detailed cartographic guide to sources and influences.

Scholem and Benjamin were engaged in a common project at many levels, theirs was the struggle

over a common idiom, an intellectual symbiotic compact. Thus I unequivocally reject the linear view

unanimously expressed of the younger Scholem's philosophical apprenticeship or indebtedness to Ben-

jamin, exemplified by the both false and innocuous assertion that Scholem's "own project of recover-

ing the Jewish mystical tradition had received a decisive impetus from the young Benjamin's philoso-

phies of language and history." Cf. John McCole, walter Benjamin's Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 11. Scholem's scholarly historical project-i.e. his philological

agenda of recovery-certainly never received such impetus. More significant is the implication of an

imbalance of influence between these two scholars. McCole follows Michael Jennings in claiming that

"Scholem's own appreciation of (the Jewish mystical tradition) was still only dawning in the years

before he left Germany for Palestine in 1923," concluding that "The direction of influence between

Benjamin and Scholem more likely runs in the reverse direction: Scholem's own appreciation of the

submerged traditions of Judaism owed a decisive impetus to Benjamin." (McCole, p. 66). The over-

due publication of Scholem's early diaries from 1915-1923 and various sets of theses, propositions,

and notes from this time will ultimately demonstrate the falseness of this view.



238 Gary Smith

point that significantly combines visual and auditory categories.) After a

series of reflections on the differences between German and Jewish silences,

Scholem records a number of unpolished intuitions on the imbrications of speech, silence, the symbol, and Torah. "Being silent in Hebrew I under-

stand as the following: that in silence as well, the doctrine soars forth

l fOrtschwing~. Torah is in pa~t silence, but not silence beyond the name. It is

mute in the symbol, it speaks in the essence. [... ] "'Torah is to be found in

every thing.' Precisely so with speech and silence." The language of Zionism

must be metaphysically silent;40this incipient thought alludes to the princi-

pal hazard of admitting the holy language into secular life, a point which

Scholem elaborated upon a decade later in the "Confession about our Lan-guage" he presented to Rosenzweig. Even the most cursory treatment of

this terse and troubled statement, which has found at least a dozen com-

mentators since Stephane Moses first brought it to our attention only eight

years ago, reveals stark parallelisms to Benjamin's early philosophy of lan-

guage. Here, too, the pitfalls of secularization are accompanied by false

metaphysics.

Scholem's strategy of address becomes one of disruption and hence quin-

tessentially modern. "Pauses," he writes, "are necessary if speech is to be possible-and in their silence they speak." In these same pages, composed

while Benjamin was entirely consumed by dissertatorial efforts and prior to

his working on the Elective Af fini ties essay, Scholem records a series of

remarkable thoughts on myth, ethical life, and justice, which presage the

position Benjamin develops on the mythical basis of marriage as construed

by Kant in that very essay.

"The loftiest task of Judaism," Scholem observes, "is perhaps to structure

life, in its absolute totality, into an ethical phenomenon. Until now myth-which was the world-did so, and it has only yielded that narrow province

which we call the moral [or sittiiche] world. Justice cannot govern in the

world as long as people can relate their lives [... ] to mythical grounds."41

Given the efflorescence of writing on Walter Benjamin's thought, it is sur-

prising how many of his crucial themes have not yet received consequential

treatment. One such topic is the rhetoric of silence in Benjamin's magisterial

essay on Goethe's Elective Aff inities) a text replete with Jewish themes, appro-

priately masked, since the very category of concealment comprises one cruxof the essay.The silence of Ottilie-whose beauty is only symbolic and schein-

htift-both conceals her nature and cues us to its nonnatural and nonmoral

40 "Das zionistische Leben mu~ ganz still sein. Es mu~ von einer Kraft gelenkt werden die mm

eine metaphysisch stille Sprache gibt, und nur in Doppelpunkten dieses Lebens kann der Schrei ver-

nommen werden." !Ms., unpag.]

41 "[ ••• ] in seinen meisten Ausstrahlungen auf mythis chen Grundlagcn bezichcn." Scholem con-

tinues: "Tradition must also not be allowed to be mythical and here is another unending task, [unendliche

Au fg ab e, the Kantian notion around which Benjamin originally planned to center his doctoral thesis]

which a Judaism, spiritually renewed to its very core, would have to complete." [Ms., unpag.]



Ben jamin , Sc holem ,an d Other German -Jew ishE so terics 23 9

essence.42 Goethe, according to Benjamin, is not passing judgement on the

actions of Eduard and Ottilie but on their language. "For they go their way

feeling but numb, seeing but mute. Deaf against God and mute against the

world. Their failure to prove accountable is not through their actions but

through their being. They fall silent." The absence of a moral dimension to

Ottilie's decision to die also derives from her silence, the want of its expres-

sion in language. "Thus," Benjamin asserts, "through Ottilie's perfect silence,

the morality of the death wish which fills her comes into question." [GS I,

176] Nearing the end, Ottilie's life takes place only in her diary: "her lin-

guistically gifted being is to be sought more and more in these mute

entries." [GS I, 177]

'Progress' and its pitfalls

One quintessentially Benjaminian topos, the problematization of the idea of

progress, not only has established precursors in Jewish thinking on the phi-

losophy of history, but in the earliest writings of all four of the other Zaub-etjuden. Recall Thomas Mann's portrait of Goldberg as Chaim Breisacher,

which begins:

He was a polyhistor, who knew how to talk about anything and everything; he was concerned with

the philosophy of culture, but his views were anti-cultural, insofar as he gave out to see in the whole

history of culture nothing but a process of decline. The most contemptuous word on his lips was the

word "progress"; [and] he had an annihilating way of pronouncing it'"

Just as Benjamin associated the notions of progress and catastrophe in thatfamous line from the ''Arcades Project": "The idea of progress must be

founded in the idea of catastrophe," Erich Unger was also engaged in think-

ing these categories together, in his exploration of the threshold of politics

and metaphysics: on the very first page of Politik und Metapf?ysik, his attempt

to delineate the convergence of these two domains, Unger asserts the

impossibility of "every uncatastrophic politics" without metaphysics.

In the case of Gershom Scholem, his unpublished diaries reveal a preoc-

cupation with the pitfalls of progress in the context of a severe critique of arationalism of time shared by the Marburg School of neo-Kantians with

Enlightenment thinkers. Scholem's notes reveal striking analogies between his

linking of this notion to different conceptions of time, when he writes that:

The Messianic realm and the mechanical time placed the ignominious bastardly idea of progress in

the heads of the Enlightenment thinkers. For once one becomes a rationalist [an Aujklarer], that is,

overcomes the consequence through brutality, and holds to the dogma of the single time, then the

42 "Fur das Schickliche lie~en sie ihnen GefUhl, fUr das Sittliche haben sie es verloren." [GS I, 134]

4' Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German C omposerAdrian Leverkiihn as Told l?Ya Friend,

trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 [Vintage Books edition, 1971], p. 279.



240 Gary Smith

perspective of Messianic time must become distorted to progress. That is the sole form, in which the

rationalist can still grasp this fact of religion. Here resides the most fundamental errors of the Mar-

burg School: the lawlike, deduced deformation of all things to the unending task in the interest [S in n ]of progress. This is the most pitiful interpretation which prophetism has had to bear.44

These notes were already recorded in 1918, during the period of Scholem

and Benjamin's joint reading of Hermann Cohen's Religion if R ea s on fr om th e

Sources if Judaism, a collaborative effort which was clearly the gestative

grounds for the formation of their views on this notion as well as that of

myth.

The figure whose writings most bluntly expressed this anti-progress men-

tality among Jewish esotericists, however, was the writer Erich Gutkind, who

offered the fifteen-year younger Benjamin and his wife haven from the pres-

sures of parental disagreement in his house outside Berlin, designed by

Bruno Taut, in 1920, and who instructed Benjamin intermittently in Hebre\v,

antiquarian anecdotes, and other utopian subjects. Erich Gutkind had fasci-

nated strong personalities like Landauer, Buber, and Kandinsky, and his

eccentric plans for a social-religious utopia-the Potsdam "Forte circle"-

won him an international following, until the first world war revealed irrec-

oncilable political differences between its members. Gutkind's writings are

characterized by elements that are poetic, mystical, and visionary. In his

eclectic magnum opus, Sidereal B i r th , he anticipates some of the century's

more fashionable themes, including the (re)discovery of the body, "the pri-

macy of language, the meaning of anti-religion and anti-politics, the over-

coming of alienation," all of which he embeds in a rhapsodic, apodictic style.

The following passage exemplifies both the originality of his style and argu-

mentative strategy, especially vis-a-vis the idea of progress:

Not complacent living, but wandering and divine, unbounded soaring is now our elixir. The doctrine

of ceaseless progress no longer wants to satisfy us, for we will recognize, that the World can no

longer endlessly progress, but rather rushes to its peak, and if we do not wish to suffocate at the

world's peak, something of unheard-of newness must be thrust upon us, which is more than all that

has been before. No worldview can satisfy us any longer, only the end of the world, and that end can

no longer terrify us, to the end we speak the lustful: You, You!'

Despite the rather unorthodox contemporary resonance of these lines, they

evoke both a historico-philosophical and political outlook which motivated Benjamin to participate in plans to emigrate-with Gutkind and others-

from Germany in the early 1920s. This project was in part peculiar, in part

premonitory. Dozens of mostly unpublished letters between Gutkind and

Plorens Christian Rang detail the considerations, which were intended to

lead to the creation of a Hebrew-speaking, utopian Eretz Yisroel, not in

44 All passages from Scholem's diaries are quoted with the generous permission of his widow,Fania Scholem, as well as that of Suhrkamp Verlag, which plans to publish the edition of these texts

being prepared by Karlfried Grunder and Friedrich Niew6hner.

45 Volker [i.e. Erich GutkindJ, Siderische Geburt, op. cit ., p. 7.



Ben ja min , Sc ho le m, an d Oth er Ger man -J ew ish Eso terics 24 1

Palestine, however, but on the inexpensive island of Capri. The project's

political motivation, at least, was explicitly shared by Benjamin-at one point

Gutkind writes to Rang that "The question of our departure (as, by the

way, it is for Walter) is now only one of technical details." The letters, more-

over, testify to striking prescience on the part of Gutkind, who wrote to

Rang in 1922, in the most unsettling lines of the entire exchange: "No, we

are no longer willing to take part. Neither do I want that our bodies shrivel

up and are contaminated by this ridiculously unworthy nourishment, nor do

I wish that our souls so vainly, so senselessly, be trampled to death beneath

the soldier's boots of the swastika mob."46

If there is one preeminently crucial theme at this nexus of Jewish opposi-

tionalism, then it is the rethinking of the category of myth. The conceptual

entanglements of this theme-even just in the writings of Benjamin,

Scholem, and Unger-are simply too dense to present in the space allotted

for this paper. But suffice it to say, that in the wake of Scholem's study of

Hermann Cohen's Religion if Reason with Benjamin in Berne, his journals are

saturated with ideas about myth, on the order of his thesis that "Myth binds

the individual magically, Judaism historically." This thesis, as many of the

others, demonstrates Scholem's profound preoccupation with the aporias of

the Kabbalistic treatment of these categories: the power of magic to manip-

ulate fate and thus both influence God and call God's absolute sovereignty

into question is a tension acted out in Kabbalistic myth. Scholem, of course,

develops an extremely positive notion of the category of myth in his semi-

nal essay on "Kabbalah and Myth,"47whereas Benjamin's notion is deeply

ambivalent, sometimes unequivocally negative, sometimes fraught with posi-

tive moments. His concept of myth certainly remains as much at stake in

his philosophical grammar as other key terms such as symbol, allegory,

appearance, and truth.

As far as the occult and esoteric contexts in Benjamin's work are con-

cerned, there is much to be explored beyond these specifically Jewish-

inspired contexts. There is the drastically underresearched resonance of the

philosophies of language of Valery and Mallarme, both of whom were fur-

thermore concerned to define the psychology of poetic effects. Recall

Mallarme's profound conviction that "There must be something occult in

the depths of all men, decidedly I believe there to be something recondite-signifying closed or hidden-that inhabits the crowd. . . ."48This assertion

leads to opposed strategies of reading, either a dismissal of the incompre-

46 "Nein, wir magen nich mehr mittun. Weder mag ich, da~ unsere Karper welken und aus-

gewuchert werden mit dieser Hicherlichen wiirdelosen Ernahrung, noch mag ich, da~ unsere Seelen

so nutzlos, so sinnlos, unter dem Soldatenstiefel des Hakenkreuzgesindels zertreten werden." Puttnies

and Smith, Benjaminiana, op. cit., p. 71.47 Cf. Gershom Scholem, "Kabbalah and Myth," On the Kabbalah and i ts Symbolism, trans. Ralph

Manheim. New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 87-117.

48 Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvres compUtes. Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 383.



242 Gary Smith

hensible or a delight in the deferral of a revelation which may never arrive.

Each thought becomes an "intimate gulf" to be reached by penetrating the

"precious cloud floating above"; these and other abysses did not evoke fear but instead provided incentives for thinkers like Scholem or Benjamin.49

This is not to rule out a critical perspective of esoterisicm on the part of

Benjamin. In his own study of the German Traluerspie~ Benjamin defines

the price of esotericism as follows: "The weakness which esotericism invari-

ably imparts to philosophy is nowhere more overwhelmingly apparent than

in that particular way of looking at things which is the philosophical

approach required of the adepts of all the theories of neo-Platonic pagan-

ism."50But in this very work Benjamin, who from the very beginning wasengaged in a lifelong search for forms of representation, turns explicitly to

the esoteric form of the tractatus. The problem inherent in the very notion

of esoteric tradition-the tension between the esoteric and exoteric-is a

very early preoccupation of Benjamin's, related to the semantics of revela-

tion and concealment, the title of one of Bialik's seminal essays, and more

significantly,connected with the crucial figures of his Elective Affinities essay:in

one formulation, how to "penetrate the husk without destroying its secret."

Methodological conclusion

In conclusion, my principal concern in this unsentimental journey into mod-

ern German-Jewish esotericism was to consider its rhetoric as a socio-

cultural phenomenon on the threshold between ideas and mentalities51and

not merely as a component of the work of the five scholars I have referred

to. Far more is at issue for these Zauberjuden than merely the establishmentof membership in an "occult scene," itself a well-established phenomenon. 52

In setting my sights beyond the specificity of single issues or thinkers, how-

ever, towards the sum of an oppositional Jewish discourse, I hope to enable

the writing of a subterranean and yet crucial chapter of Weimar Jewish

history.

49 [Ibid., 834]. The logic of Mallarme's own progression towards the occult is tied with his relation

to Baudelaire and the Fl eu r d e Ma L At the same time he broke with the Baudelairean sonnet, "heconceived the project of expressing in one long poem the mystery of a secret beauty, whereby

he drew closest to his master."

50 Walter Benjamin, T h e O r ig in o f G e rm a n T r ag ic D r am a , trans. John Osborne. London: New Left

Books, 1977, p. 35.

51 As Arnaldo Momigliano reminds us, sibyllinic form has always been especially atrtactive to Jew-

ish scholars. "Prophetie und Geschichtsschreibung," in: Prophet ie und Geschichtsschreibung.Ehrenpromotion

Arna ld o M om ig li ano , ed. Jiirgen Petersohn (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek Marberg, 1986), p. 15.

52 Hence my difference with Manfred Voigts over the significance of the "Zauberjude" epithet

(4.6), whose connotation is not entirely negative. Thus an allusion to Rudolf Olden's collection D ie

Propheten in deu t scher Kr i se . Das WUnderbare oder d ie Verzauber ten (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932] is in fact appro- priate if we extend Leo Straul3's diagnosis "that esoteric attitudes and double meanings [are] integral

to the art of writing in an age of persecution" to an age of crisis and pluralism--or just the crisis

inherent in a wide range of attempts to regenerate.



Be,!/am in , Sc holem , an d Other German-Jew ishE so terics 243

Benjamin's immense achievement, moreover, did not emerge ex nihilo. The

choice of three relatively unknown and only seemingly marginal thinkers

next to Benjamin and Scholem, moreover, is methodologically as well as

biographically motivated. 53 The pitfalls of constructing historical narratives

based on the lives of well-known figures-the "victors," to follow Ben-

jamin-have meanwhile been conceded by theoreticians of history. The

questions arising from the margins of the discourse between these five fig-

ures54 should reveal both an unwritten history and metaphysics of Jewish

intellectual culture between the world wars and furthermore confirm the

extent of a revitalized Judaism's debt to the spirit of esotericism during this

period.55

53 To be sure, Scholem's project was more well-defined and focussed than those of the others. He

was also successful in creating the satisfactory conditions for pursuing his studies, whereas none of

the others held a permanent academic position and all were forced to escape from Germany once

Hider seized power.

54 Exchanges with other thinkers bearing on this discourse will of course be taken into account.

Two important examples are Scholem's oft-cited "Bekenntnis iiber unsere Sprache," dedicated to

Franz Rosenzweig on the occasion of his fourtieth birthday, and Scholem's unpublished epistolary

reaction to the publication of Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie. Cf. Gershom Scholem, "On Our Lan-

guage. A Confession," History & M emory 2,2 (Winter 1990), 97-99.

55 This paper was written for a conference on "Walter Benjamin's Jewish Constellations," hosted in

July 1992 at the Israel Academy of Sciences by the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-JewishLiterature and Culture of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The author is also grateful to the Univer-

it f Chi Hill l d th P i t U i it G D t t f t iti t t

smith-gary-“die-zauberjuden”

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