Teaching History against the grain : Scholem’s use of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History in Israeli’s cultural debate

Today everyone agrees that in writing his last Theses on the Philosophy of History Walter Benjamin have been inspired, among others, by the work of his friend Gershom Scholem. Scholem’s decisive and pivotal scholarship on Jewish mysticism represents exactly the source through which Benjamin was able to get back to his Jewish roots. Mixing up Judaism and Marxism, Theology and Dialectical Materialism, Benjamin ended up developing such an original interpretation of History that explains why these Theses today are probably the most commented contemporary philosophical work worldwide. In the same way, Scholem himself was deeply influenced by Benjamin, particularly by what he wrote on the nature of language, which arguably stands at the center of some of the most important essays Scholem composed, such as The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala. The aim of my talk will be to outline a particular episode in the «Rezeptionsgeschichte» of Benjamin’s Thesen. Focusing on Scholem’s work, a larger number of critics have already noticed how he adopted the notion of counter-history, which of course he owes heavily to what Benjamin wrote in his last text. As the dedication of Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism reveals clearly, Benjamin could be considered one of the thinkers at the base of the development of Scholem’s historical method. My contribution is intended to demonstrate how Benjamin’s conception of History influenced not only Scholem’s reading of kabbalistic phenomena, but also his personal «political» convictions. Looking back at Scholem’s endorsement for Zionism, I will try to find evidences of this debt in some speeches he gave in Israel starting from the 1940s. In particular, I will analyze two texts collected in the volume On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in our Time & Other Essays: Memory and Utopia in Jewish History, a lecture Scholem delivered in March 1946 at a gathering of youth movement leaders and teachers, and On Education for Judaism, a text based upon a transcription of an open discussion with Israeli educators in 1971. The first speech is actually very important because it was given right after the Holocaust and only two years before the birth of the State of Israel. Here Scholem dealt with the notions of History and Memory as two of the fundamental pillars of Judaism. I will try to demonstrate how Scholem makes a huge use of categories, which evidently (although he never said it clearly in the text) came from Benjamin’s Thesen. In the second essay, Scholem presented his conception of Judaism. According to his anarchic perspective, the essence of Judaism cannot be defined and every generation interprets Judaism for itself. Scholem perceived Judaism as a living phenomenon, and, consequently, he came to see the course of Jewish history as the result of different dialectical moments not necessarily linked up together. Hence, according to Scholem’s view, Judaism cannot be defined in any dogmatic way, being but an enduring and evolving force that goes through continuous and protean transformations. Even in this case, I will argue that Scholem in his attempt to create a new and vital Jewish society in Eretz Israel found very helpful to refer to a Benjaminian, and so anti-positivistic and anti-deterministic, vision of History.