the believer in the Kingdom [of God] uses the term “progress” only in order to employ the language of his time; in reality he means the Kingdom. This is the veritable shibboleth that distinguishes him from the authentic devotee of progress: does he or does he not resist the prospect and duty of anticipating the “goal” at the very next moment? … Without this anticipation and the inner compulsion for it, without this “wish to bring about the Messiah before his time” and the temptation to “coerce the Kingdom of God into being”,… the future is no future … but only a past distended endlessly and projected forward. For without such anticipation, the moment is not eternal; it is something that drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time.34
It was over this issue that Rosenzweig clashed with his teacher, the Jewish neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, questioning his Enlightenment belief in uninterrupted (‘eternal’) progress and his adherence to German nationalism. In a violent altercation, Rosenzweig accused Cohen of having ‘betrayed the messianic idea’.35 In a text that he wrote in 1927 on Jehuda Halevi, Rosenzweig emphasized that ‘the hope in the coming of the Messiah’ was the aspiration ‘through which and for which Judaism lives’; he viewed the coming of the messianic era as a break in historical continuity, ‘a complete change, the complete change … that would put an end to the hell of world history’.36 His correspondence at the time gives us some further clues about his vision of the messianic future: it was to be not a celestial but an earthly (irdischen) coming of the New Jerusalem, which would bring eternal peace between peoples through its complete – and from today’s perspective, even miraculous – recasting (Umschaffung) of human nature.37
The few strictly political works that Rosenzweig wrote reveal a passionately romantic, anti-capitalist world-view. For example, in an article from 1919, he sees in capitalism ‘as cursed a system as slavery’, which had to be done away with in order to return to ‘the artisan and his golden land’. The path to freedom was therefore a ‘relinquishing of the free and unrestricted market and a return to a production linked to and ordered in advance by a client’.38 His anti-capitalism went hand in hand with a profound hostility to the State. In The Star of Redemption, he wrote that coercion and not law constituted the true face of the State; moreover, he insisted on the essential opposition between the Jewish people, which is in itself eternal, and the false eternity of the State; it followed that ‘the true eternity of the eternal people must always be alien and vexing to the state’.39 Commenting on these and similar reflections, some researchers speak of Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘anarchism’.40
What is most interesting is that the author of Der Stern der Erlösung explicitly links the emancipatory revolution to the coming of the Messiah, in terms that are surprisingly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s ‘theology of the revolution’:
After all, it is no coincidence that the demands of the Kingdom of God begin only now to be genuinely transformed into temporal demands. The great deeds of liberation, as little as they constitute in themselves the Kingdom of God, nevertheless are the indispensable preconditions of its advent. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, the canons of faith, now become the slogans of the age; in blood and tears, in hatred and zeal they fight their way into the apathetic world in unending battles.41
According to Günther Henning, this passage, entitled ‘Revolution’, refers to the Revolution of 1917:
Rosenzweig interpreted the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, in the light of Dostoevsky’s hopes, as an upheaval realizing the ultimate teachings of Christianity; consequently, he attributed to this revolution a redemptive meaning that was linked to the coming of the messianic kingdom.42
This hypothesis remains to be proven. Rosenzweig did write that ‘a renewal of the forces of faith and love accrued to … the Russia of Alyosha Karamazov’,43 but it is not clear that he is referring to the Russian Revolution. In any event, revolutionary concerns were very marginal in Rosenzweig’s work, which was primarily devoted to philosophy and religion. His writings are significant mainly for their probable influence on Walter Benjamin, and because of their analogy with the works of other contemporary Jewish thinkers.
Unlike Rosenzweig, Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem was not a theologian but a historian. His works were not only an unrivalled monument of modern historiography; they also shed new light on the Jewish religious tradition by restoring that messianic and apocalyptic dimension which had been conjured away by the narrow rationalist interpretation characteristic of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Graetz, Zunz, Steinschneider) and of German sociology. Max Weber and Werner Sombart saw only rationalist calculation in Jewish spirituality: Scholem brought to the fore the subterranean mystical, heretical, eschatological and anarchist religious movements in the history of Judaism.
Born into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Berlin, Scholem was initially brought up on German culture. In his youth, Romantic or neo-romantic writers were among his favourites: Jean Paul, Novalis, Eduard Mörike, Stefan George, Paul Scheerbart. According to David Biale (author of the first work on Scholem’s thought),
like many other Germans in the 1920s, Scholem and Buber found in a certain strain in German Romanticism a unique Weltanschauung which inspired their own thinking. … In philosophy as in historiography, Scholem’s sympathy for a particular strand of German Romanticism played a crucial role in his intellectual makeup.44
It is in fact quite significant that the first book on the cabbala that Scholem studied – and it had a major impact on him – was the work by the German Christian and Romantic theosophist, Franz Joseph Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition [Philosophy of History, or On Tradition].45 In an interview that he granted me, Scholem remembered having read with much interest Novalis’s Fragmente in 1915, one of the most characteristic works of the Romantic world-view at its peak. Nevertheless, he thought that the role of German sources in his thinking should not be exaggerated, for his main inspiration as a young man came from Hebrew texts, beginning with the Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash, which were the first books he read. In fact, he soon revolted against his family’s assimilationist ideology (his father expelled him from home during the First World War because of his ‘anti-patriotic’ attitude!); and he resolutely turned to the sources of Judaism, to the search for the ‘lost tradition of my social circle, which attracted me with a great magic’.46
This search led him – initially under the influence of Martin Buber – to study Jewish mysticism, and then to join Zionism.47 Scholem’s (non-orthodox) religious attitude was close to Buber’s, but his Zionism was more radical: he passionately rejected the Judeo-Germanic cultural synthesis, and this made him drift away both from Buber (notably because of the latter’s support for Germany in 1914) and from Franz Rosenzweig, with whom he had a stormy discussion in 1922 over this issue.48 However, jealous affirmation of his Jewish identity did not lead him to nationalism in the political sense: after his departure for Palestine, he joined (as Buber did later) the Brit Shalom (Alliance for Peace), a Zionist-pacifist movement for Jewish-Arab fraternization that was opposed to ‘political’, State-centred Zionism. During the 1920s, he came out several times for Jewish recognition of the national aspirations of the Arab population in Palestine and its right to self-determination. In an article published in 1931 in Sheifotenu [Our Aspirations], the magazine of the Brit Shalom, he wrote: ‘The Zionist movement has not yet freed itself from the reactionary imperialist image given to it not only by the Revisionists but also by all those who refuse to consider the real