The most interesting thing about the diary is its Jewish subtext. Benjamin notes that it’s Passover, and that the pension he’s staying in is owned by a Jewish man who “kept saying, ‘So, what do we make for Yontev?’ ” Benjamin parses the word in a way that suggests it is new to him: “One does not say ‘Good day’ but ‘Good Yontev.’ ”

Similarly, the proprietor subscribes to the Israelitisches Familienblatt (“Jewish Family Journal”), and Benjamin notes that the magazine contains advertisements for “dishes for the Seder.” It takes his traveling companion to explain to him what these Seder plates are: “The latter are used for the Passover feast and have different compartments for different foods. So says Steinfeld.” Later Benjamin complains, “with coffee there was matzoh, and that’s how it will be; for … we are in Pesach week.” But while the pension seems to keep kosher for Passover, there is no actual Seder, which seems to both relieve Benjamin and disappoint him: “Thank God they didn’t do Seder. It might well have been very interesting and might even have moved me, but it would have seemed to me like theater, nothing holy.”

Much can be gleaned about Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—more, ignorant of the basic details of Jewish practice—and he feels a nervous disinclination to be “claimed” in any way by Judaism; a 20th-century man, he could find “nothing holy” in organized religion. Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to notice that Benjamin is surrounded by Jewishness like a fish by water. His traveling companion is Jewish; the house he’s staying in is Jewish. As his friend Gershom Scholem, a product of a similar background, would note, it was quite normal for assimilated German Jews never to enter a Gentile home or invite a Gentile to theirs. Jewish identity was much more durable than Jewish belief.

This would be of merely sociological interest were it not for the complicated ways that Jewishness and Judaism informed Benjamin’s brilliant and vastly influential work. His best-known writings—on Proust and Kafka, 19th-century Paris, the movies, “the age of mechanical reproduction”—came after the period covered by Early Writings. But even in these seven years, from the ages of 18 to 25, it’s possible to see Benjamin develop from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker. The latest pieces in the book—in particular “The Life of Students,” “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” and “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”—lead directly to his most important insights into the nature of literature and history. In fact, the last of these, never published in Benjamin’s lifetime, can be seen as a kind of skeleton key to his mature work, full of overtly mystical beliefs that would go underground when Benjamin became a professed Communist.

Benjamin was not just young when he wrote the pieces in this book; as an activist in the German Youth Movement, he was, one might say, professionally young. The youth movement was a loosely organized phenomenon with many tendencies—its adherents were interested in curriculum reform, sexual liberation, and nationalist renewal, among other causes, and there is a definite flavor of the 1960s in its vague, tumultuous commitment to change. Benjamin was exposed to it starting at 13, when he began to attend the Free School Community—an experimental, progressive school founded by the prominent reformer Gustav Wyneken, who became his mentor. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin was active in youth organizations—he was president of the Berlin University chapter of the Independent Students’ Association, and several of the essays in the book first appeared in movement journals.

In these pieces, we sometimes find Benjamin writing as a muckraker, holding the German education system up to ridicule for its pedantry and mindless authoritarianism. In “Teaching and Valuation,” he complains of the “pious reiteration or regurgitation of unrelated or superficially related facts” and offers a “blacklist” of teacherly philistinism: “Apropos of Horace: ‘We have to read Horace in this class. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not; it’s on the syllabus.’ ” When Benjamin quotes a teacher at a classical Gymnasium telling a student, “Please don’t think that anyone believes this enthusiasm of yours for the ancient world,” it’s hard to avoid suspecting that he himself was the student.

In response, Benjamin calls, in fairly platitudinous terms, for “a classical secondary school we could love,” where teaching would be related “to living values of the present.” But at heart, he was much too utopian to be contented with any actually existing reform movement. The title of his dispatch from a major youth retreat in 1913 is “Youth Was Silent”: “Excursions, ceremonial attire, folk dances are nothing new and … still nothing spiritual … we will continue, in the name of youth, to weigh the Youth Congress against the demands of the spirit.” It didn’t help that German youth were just as prone to anti-Semitism as their parents: “When the prizes for sports were being awarded, the name Isaacsohn was announced. Laughter rang out from a minority,” Benjamin notes.

The further one reads, however, the clearer it becomes that what Benjamin was really seeking, in the guise of school reform, was spiritual and social rebirth. Thus, in an essay on “Moral Education,” he concludes that “all morality and religiosity originates in solitude with God”—a prescription that seems to leave little role for school reform, or for schools in general. The tension between Benjamin’s private and public agendas becomes even clearer in the unpublished pieces in Early Writings, the poems and stories and sketches he showed only to a few friends. There, the rhetoric of the youth-movement essays clouds over into the dense, tormented prose that would be so characteristic of the adult Benjamin.

In “The Metaphysics of Youth,” for instance, he writes: “Greatness is the eternal silence after conversation. It is to take the rhythm of one’s own words in the empty space.” There is also a good deal of unresolved sexual anguish at work; Benjamin writes portentously about “the prostitute,” as in, “The woman is the guardian of the conversations. She receives the silence, and the prostitute receives the creator of what has been.”

Benjamin’s disenchantment with the youth movement didn’t become official until the beginning of the First World War. He was disgusted by the way the allegedly progressive movement rallied around the kaiser. Personally, he wanted nothing to do with the war, and he went to great lengths to avoid the draft, finally moving to Switzerland. In terms of his intellectual development, however, this disillusionment was a blessing, allowing him to unyoke his true concerns from the official cause of “youth” (and by 1914, he wasn’t so young any more). “The Life of Students,” from 1915, shows Benjamin bidding farewell to the student movement, while drawing on his experiences to frame a new, radically utopian vision of progress:

History rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas. The historical task is to give shape to this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, make it visible and ascendant in the present.

Already in these lines, it’s possible to hear the messianic tones of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he would write in 1940, just before he committed suicide in the face of the Nazi onslaught:

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

When it came to his deepest political hopes, Benjamin seemed to fall instinctively into a Jewish vocabulary of messianism. So, too, with language and literature. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” has at its core a reading of Genesis and advances an idea of divine language that sounds amazingly like kabbalism: “Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. In God, name is creative because it is word, and God’s word is knowing because it is name.” One of the things that makes Benjamin so fascinating is the way he seems to translate Jewish ways of thinking into a post-Jewish intellectual culture. Early Writings shows that this fertile dualism was present from the very beginning.

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

It’s always been hard to pin Benjamin down. Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist, deconstructive spirit—he has been many things to many people. It is equally hard to describe what he did, in part because Americans don’t really make intellectuals like him. Benjamin, whose most important work was written in Berlin during the ’20s and then in Paris during the ’30s, wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one. To use a quaint expression, he was a man of letters. Even that does not do him justice.

Uwe Steiner’s new book on Benjamin—which attempts to put Benjamin in his historical place—doesn’t really do him justice either. Steiner traces Benjamin’s mature work to the thinker’s early days as a radical student before the First World War, when Nietzsche was all the rage. Fair enough. Steiner also has a larger goal: He wants us to stop trying to bend Benjamin to our intellectual will—be it Marxist, deconstructive, or religious. A laudable goal but also slightly perverse, because Benjamin had no trouble trying on others’ thoughts to see if they fit. Even worse, Steiner’s approach scants Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional allure.

Benjamin’s remarkable endurance derives as much from his style as from his ideas. Or rather, his brilliant, damnably esoteric critique of capitalist culture is one with the pathos and indirectness of his prose. His sentences suggest. They imply. At their best, they radiate. Hence the remarkable bursts of scholarship his work has seen over the last few decades. He reminds people of what they might think.

His most famous set piece comes from his last work, a series of aphorisms called “On the Concept of History.” Written in the short period before he killed himself while trying to flee from the Nazis, this paragraph gains some of its considerable melancholy from retrospect, from the fact that it has been taken as his last will and testament:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A beautiful piece of writing that gets an extra kick from its pessimistic counter-intuitive punch line. Progress doesn’t progress in the slightest. It is a steady march through disaster. And there is nothing, it seems, we can do about it.

Bleak stuff. But Benjamin’s ability to arrest you with the solidity of an abstraction can tempt you away from the thin thread of his argument. On its own, this paragraph presents us with a picture of fallen and unredeemable history. In the context of the other paragraphs of the essay in which it appears, we can see that the Angel of History does not have the last word. History, Benjamin maintains, is permanently, if elusively, susceptible to revolutionary change.

Benjamin claimed that his work was saturated with theology, even—or rather especially—when it appears to be at its most secular. In the piece that contains the Angel, the revolution fulfills a theological mandate by making “whole what has been smashed.” Benjamin imagines that it will enact tikkun olam in a very literal sense. Benjamin’s colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, once accused him of believing all too squarely in the Last Judgment. Though Benjamin tried to recast his thought into more acceptably materialist terms, Horkheimer had a point. Benjamin might have talked about redemption as the historical fulfillment of squandered hopes, but at heart he was always listening for the final trump. He was waiting for the glorious resurrection of the dead.

Benjamin’s thought was essentially religious. It clung to the twin promises of redemption and transcendence. The man worked from the clearly Jewish intuition that justice cannot be derived from the world as it is. Justice is precisely that small break from nature instituted by the Law. Our problem is not that nature is sinful. Our problem lies with the fact that on its own, nature just isn’t enough. It needs to be transcended, if only just a bit. As his friend T. W. Adorno was fond of reminding us, the Talmud says that the redeemed world will be like this one, but a little different. And that tiny shift means everything.

But what happens when we, as the children of modernity, have lost the Law? That is where Benjamin’s messianic politics slip in. Gershom Scholem, the magisterial historian of Kabbalah, always maintained that Benjamin was a Jewish thinker and not really a Marxist. For his part, Benjamin argued that he pursued a single goal—the radical transformation of the world, a utopian strike against suffering. His was not the tikkun olam of good deeds and incremental improvements, but of bold risks and decisive moves.

Sure, sure, there is a great deal of Romanticism in all this (as Steiner would be the first to point out) and a sentimentalizing anarchism that speaks of another era. Even so, Benjamin proposes a heresy we might want to consider: redemption without faith. He refuses to give up the rigors and promises of theology for a more amenable, even amiable ethical Judaism. He therefore cuts a different path for the post-religious. Just as Scholem, however unwittingly, presents us with a Kabbalah without halakhah, so Benjamin quite wittingly addresses a theology without God. An intractable contradiction? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is a historical conundrum that we have yet to overcome.

The most popular of these videos, however, and in a way the most extraordinary, are those that record the Rebbe’s farbrengens—the ceremonial gatherings in which his followers would eat, drink, and sing with him. What is striking about these scenes is their extreme ordinariness. Here is the Rebbe, an old, frail man, gingerly chewing pieces of bread and taking sips of wine. The setting, a large room in Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, is modest at best, wood-paneled like a basement rec room. There is none of the pomp with which religious leaders are ordinarily surrounded—no vestments, altars, or processions. Yet the way the Hasidim chant the niggun—“ve’samachta be’hagecha,” “you shall rejoice in your festival,” a line from the Book of Deuteronomy—and the way they are absorbed in the Rebbe’s every movement, leave no doubt that in this little corner of Crown Heights, if anywhere, holiness is taking place. For what else is holiness than the utter conviction that holiness exists?

To many Jews, this conviction is also the scandal of Lubavitch—or Chabad, as it is often called, using the Hebrew acronym for the school of Hasidic thought to which the sect belongs. To most people, Chabad means two things: its far-flung network of emissaries, or shluchim, greeting Jews in the most remote places and urging them to light holiday candles or wear tefillin; and its belief that Menahem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah. Both of these things give Chabad a prominence in the Jewish world far out of proportion to its actual membership. In The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton University Press), their much-debated new biography, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman estimate that the total number of Lubavitcher Hasidim is around 40,000—“about ten thousand in Crown Heights, five thousand in Kfar Chabad [the Lubavitch settlement in Israel], and perhaps another twenty-five thousand worldwide, including about three thousand shaliach families.”

In other words, Lubavitchers make up about one quarter of 1 percent of the world Jewish population. Yet it would be hard to find an engaged Jew, of any denomination or none, who does not have an opinion about Chabad, usually a strong one. Many admire Chabad for its institution-building, the devotion and selflessness of its emissaries, and its bold representation of Judaism in the public square—whenever a huge menorah is illuminated somewhere, from Washington to Moscow, it is usually a Lubavitcher who built it. That is why so many Jews who are not Orthodox, and sometimes not even particularly observant, praise Chabad and help to fund its activities.

Yet many of those same Jews are acutely embarrassed by the notion, which swept Lubavitch in the years before Schneerson’s death, that he was actually “Melech HaMoshiach,” King Messiah, sent by God to redeem the world and the Jewish people. Still more alien is the belief, clung to by a small but vocal minority of Lubavitchers to this day, that because the Rebbe was the Messiah, he could not actually die—that he is now simply hidden, waiting for the moment when he can return to earth. One of the illustrations in The Rebbe shows the wall of the synagogue adjacent to 770 Eastern Parkway, where a large cornerstone has been removed: It was defaced by Hasidim who objected to the inscription, which referred to the Rebbe as being “of blessed memory.”

You do not have to look very far, on websites and discussion boards, to find Lubavitchers who are sick of being associated with the delusions of the meshikhistn, as the Schneerson messianists are known. Yet it is impossible for Chabad to decisively repudiate them. The notion that the seventh Rebbe was the Messiah, or would be instrumental in bringing the Messiah, and that we are currently living in the period known as ikvot meshicha, “the footsteps of the Messiah”—that is, the end of days—is too deeply ingrained in Lubavitch thought and practice.

Messianism, of course, has always been one of the central concerns of Hasidism. In the 18th century, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, wrote that he had actually spoken with the Messiah face to face, during one his mystical ascents, and asked, “When will you come?” The answer, as the Besht recorded it, was that redemption would arrive “when your teachings are publicized and revealed to the world and your wellsprings will be spread to the outside.” But it was not until Lubavitch was transplanted to America, during the Second World War, that this metaphorical injunction became the basis for an extremely practical kind of Jewish missionizing.

Every time a Jew lit Shabbat candles or wrapped tefillin, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught, he was helping to spread the wellsprings, drawing closer to God and hastening the Redemption. It didn’t even matter if these symbolic Jewish acts sprang from, or led to, a deeper sense of commitment and observance, since the Rebbe’s “radical view,” as Heilman and Friedman write, was that “the deed itself is what counts not the motivation.” In this way, Lubavitch developed a uniquely American messianism, pragmatic and action-oriented, in which a secular Jew hurrying through Times Square could stop for a few moments at a Chabad “mitzvah tank” and make his contribution to the coming of the Messiah. “Getting Jews to perform these mitzvahs,” as Heilman and Friedman put it, “was a first step in cleansing the Jew of his non-Jewishness, releasing the spark of holiness from the captivity of impurity.”

As cloistered as Chabad seems to be, in its Crown Heights precincts, Heilman and Friedman argue that the movement, and the Rebbe in particular, had an acute sense of the needs and possibilities of American life for Judaism. The Rebbe was sending his shluchim to the most remote spots on earth, calling them to a life of service and sacrifice, at the same time that President Kennedy was launching the Peace Corps, in the early 1960s. Chabad focused its missionary activities on the universities just as the postwar baby boom brought millions of new students to campus and as the counterculture radically expanded the range of spiritual possibilities for young people. (It is no coincidence that charismatic, media-friendly Jewish figures like Shlomo Carlebach and Shmuley Boteach started out as Lubavitch emissaries to colleges.) And Chabad’s embrace of technology feels distinctively American, even when it uses high tech for surprisingly atavistic purposes. It is customary, for instance, for pilgrims to the grave of the Rebbe to leave written prayers, in the conviction that he can intercede with God to answer them; but if you can’t get to Queens, you can send your prayer by fax.

Lubavitch does not officially believe that the seventh Rebbe is still, somehow, alive; but 16 years after his death, there is still no eighth Rebbe. And Schneerson’s presence—on videos, in books, in the memories of his disciples—still dominates Lubavitch, both practically and theologically. Friedman and Heilman quote a Chabad video featuring a woman who had never met the Rebbe when he was alive, but saw footage of him after his death: “I was just at my first farbrengen,” she said, as though the Rebbe’s virtual presence was no different from his physical one.

The absolute centrality of Menachem Mendel Schneerson to Chabad helps to explain the hostility that Heilman and Friedman’s book has aroused among Lubavitchers. The latter half of The Rebbe is devoted mainly to the way Schneerson shaped Chabad’s public activities—the mitzvah campaigns, the high political profile (President Reagan once sent the Rebbe a birthday message), and of course the messianic activism. Starting in 1951, when he inherited his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe, Schneerson’s life was effectively dissolved in Chabad’s life. Childless, far from his few surviving relatives, surrounded by disciples who worshipped him, he had no one who could relate to him in an ordinary, personal way. The only exception was his wife, Chaya Moussia, the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe; but she was intensely private, and Heilman and Friedman give the sense that she more or less relinquished her husband to his followers.

The controversy comes mainly from the first half of the biography, where Heilman and Friedman suggest that, as a young man, Schneerson was tempted by the wider, secular world and resisted the call of Lubavitch. The evidence for this thesis is necessarily circumstantial. It took a surprisingly long time for Mendel, as the authors call him, to marry Yosef Yitzhak’s daughter, as if one or both of them were hesitant about the match. After the marriage, the couple did not live with the sixth Rebbe, in Latvia, but went to Berlin and then Paris, where Schneerson studied engineering. Heilman and Friedman make much of the idea that Schneerson’s short beard and (relatively) modern dress embarrassed his father-in-law, and imply that he lived too far from local synagogues in Berlin and Paris to pray regularly.

What emerges, not quite explicitly, from all these details is the portrait of a young man struggling against his destiny. Heilman and Friedman argue that not until Schneerson fled France for New York in 1941—rescued from the Nazis, along with most of the Lubavitcher elite, thanks to pressure put on the State Department by American Jewish leaders—did he finally give up his “dream” of living a less-cloistered life. It is this contention that many Lubavitchers have disputed, mainly on the grounds that throughout the 1930s, even as he lived away from the Lubavitch court, Schneerson was deeply immersed in Hasidic study. (See, for instance, the hostile but impressively knowledgeable critique by Chaim Rapoport, “The Afterlife of Scholarship.”)

There is a strong case to be made that, even when Schneerson was living farthest from the Lubavitcher world, his mental universe remained thoroughly Hasidic. What is undeniable is that as late as 1950, when Yosef Yitzhak died, Mendel seemed to resist becoming the next Rebbe. The sixth Rebbe’s other son-in-law, Shmaryahu Gourary, had been far more involved in the institutions of Chabad and looked like a more obvious successor. Not until Schneerson’s brilliance and charisma became undeniable did the Lubavitchers press him to become their leader.

Heilman and Friedman’s account of the day Schneerson finally agreed to become Rebbe is brilliantly dramatic. For a year after the sixth Rebbe’s death, quiet jockeying and lobbying among the Lubavitchers had pitted Schneerson against Gourary, with the former continually refusing to declare himself a candidate for the leadership. Finally, on the anniversary of Yosef Yitzhak’s death—the 10th of Shvat, on the Jewish calendar—Schneerson “arose to offer a Torah talk, sicha.” But a sicha was different from a ma’amar khsides, “a talk filled with Chabad philosophy and thought that is recited in a distinctive and unmistakable singsong … and which in Lubavitcher practice can only be offered by a rebbe.” Before the talk began, some Hasidim had privately asked Schneerson to give a ma’amar khsides, which would imply accepting the role of Rebbe, and he had refused, snapping, “stop this nonsense.” But as he spoke, “one of the oldest Hasidim present” called out “venimtso kheyn veseyhl tov, der rebe zol zogn khsides”: “may we find grace and good wisdom, and would the Rebbe offer khsides.”

At this cue, Schneerson paused, then resumed his talk “in the special singsong associated with such addresses,” Heilman and Friedman write, “at last offer[ing] the ma’amar khsides for which so many had been waiting and which he had undoubtedly prepared in advance. The drama of this vocal transition was unmistakable.” Indeed, the whole episode is like nothing so much as the moment in Julius Caesar when Caesar refuses the crown that the people keep begging him to accept. The comparison brings out the unselfconscious elevation and dignity of the scene at 770 Eastern Parkway. In the minds of those present, the selection of the new Rebbe was literally of cosmic importance, and it is nothing but this certainty of significance that makes history out of happenings. Without it, the grandest, most lavish spectacles—even coronations and inaugurations—feel self-conscious, stagy, insincere; with it, the affairs of a tiny sect in an old house in Brooklyn become the stuff of history.

***

One might say, then, that the Rebbe was always a virtual figure, just as much when he was physically present as now, when he can be seen only on a screen. Significance and holiness and power are, after all, virtual qualities: They cannot be touched or measured, but they can always be perceived by those who consent to their existence. The woman who spoke of viewing a video as being in the Rebbe’s presence was, perhaps, just speaking metaphorically. But the difficulty, when it comes to religion, has always been knowing when a metaphor stops being a metaphor.

Some people speak to the dead for guidance, even though they know they are really just speaking to themselves; others speak to the dead and believe the dead can hear, even if they can’t respond; some believe they are receiving messages from the dead, through signs or omens or the words of a medium. If you leave pidyones, written supplications, on the Rebbe’s grave, are you still acting metaphorically, or have you crossed the existential line that separates acting-as-if from genuine belief? Is it ever possible to cross that line, or does all belief carry with it suspicion of mere acting—and is that self-suspicion the reason why some people become fanatics, meshikhistn, to prove to themselves that they are finally, completely in earnest?

In this way, the scandal of messianism leads inexorably to the scandal of faith itself. If you believe in God—in an omnipotent and actual God, not the euphemistic God of rational and liberal theology—then you must believe that it is possible for God to speak to us, to intervene in our world, to change history. Indeed, if you are an Orthodox Jew or Christian or Muslim, you believe that God has already done these things, a long time ago, though he has inscrutably stopped speaking directly to mankind. It must therefore be possible, in principle, for God to redeem this world—to send the Messiah. And that means that it must be possible, in principle, for a man who claims to be the Messiah actually to be right—even though every previous Messiah, from Bar Kokhba to Jacob Frank, has turned out to be a false one.

To live messianically, then, is to live at a tremendously high tension, in the belief that the Eternal could always be just about to break into the temporal. In modern, secular Jewish literature, the great anatomists of this tension emerged in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—that is, at the historical moment when European Jewish life was at its breaking point, when it had to be either redeemed or destroyed. Out of this crisis came Franz Kafka, who wrote paradoxically that “the messiah will come on the day after he has arrived … not on the last day, but on the very last day”; and Walter Benjamin, who concluded his last essay, written shortly before his suicide in 1940, with the words: “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem became the greatest modern scholar of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism, including that of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi.

Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, was the philosopher-theologian of this crisis moment. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press), his densely brilliant new study of the Rebbe’s mystical thought, Elliot R. Wolfson aptly quotes Rosenzweig on the function of the false Messiah: “The false Messiah is as old as the hope of the genuine one. He is the changing form of the enduring hope. Every Jewish generation is divided by him into those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived. Those having faith are better, those having hope are stronger.” Those having faith are better: Rosenzweig outrages reason in that phrase, deliberately so. It takes strength to resist the temptation of believing in a false Messiah, but to risk belief, he suggests, takes something even rarer—the willingness to be wounded and disappointed, the willingness to be made a fool of. For if no one is willing to believe in this Messiah, false though he may be, how will anyone be found to believe in the Messiah, when he really comes? And “no one knows,” Rosenzweig writes, “whether this … will not happen even today.”

Menahem Mendel Schneerson grew up in a very different part of the Jewish world than Rosenzweig or Benjamin, but he was part of the same generation. Born in the Russian empire in 1902, to a family with an old Lubavitcher pedigree, he lived through the string of crises that devastated Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 20th century: Tsarist pogroms and persecutions, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and finally the Holocaust. If, as Gershom Scholem writes in “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” messianic predictions in Judaism are born in “an equal degree from revelation and from the suffering and desperation of those to whom they are addressed,” it is no wonder that the Jews of Schneerson’s generation should feel themselves to be living in “the footsteps of the Messiah”—a time, Scholem notes, in which “dread and peril of the End form an element of shock and of the shocking which induces extravagance.”

Given the magnitude of the catastrophe, in fact, one might wonder why Lubavitcher messianism—which was already taking shape, Heilman and Friedman show, in the 1920s, under the Sixth Rebbe—did not command a wider Jewish appeal. Why does the cult of Menahem Mendel Schneerson seem like a freak of Jewish history, when earlier messiahs, from Bar Kokhba to Shabbetai Zevi, convulsed the entire Jewish world? The answer, perhaps, is that by the time the “King Messiah” movement came into its own, in the early 1990s, Jewish messianic longings had long since been siphoned off into other channels. Communism, to which so many Jews looked for redemption in the early 20th century, had long since proved a dead end; but the creation of the State of Israel had given Jews, especially American Jews, a new focus for their love and longing.

No wonder, then, that Heilman and Friedman see the Rebbe’s relationship with the State of Israel as especially fraught and complex. On the one hand, Chabad built a large settlement in Israel—with the help of the state’s third president, Zalman Shazar, who had grown up in a Lubavitcher family—and Schneerson became an influential figure in Israeli politics (Rabin, Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu all made the pilgrimage to 770). He saw the reclamation of Eretz Yisrael—including the Occupied Territories—as a sign of divine providence and was dead-set against any move to give up land for peace (except for the Sinai desert, which had no covenantal significance).

Yet Heilman and Friedman also argue that Lubavitch was in competition with Zionism, which it saw as a “false Messiah [that] was going to steal the faith of the Jews that Lubavitchers had been worrking so hard to arouse.” In particular, they write, Schneerson envied the prestige of the Israeli army and used several rhetorical techniques to try to claim it. His “mitzvah tanks” were meant to be spiritual equivalents of the IDF’s conquering tanks, just as his mitzvah campaigns were versions of military campaigns. At times Lubavitch sought to missionize Israeli soldiers, promising that troops who wore tefillin would be divinely protected and strike terror into their enemies. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Heilman and Friedman write, Schneerson went so far as to advise Moshe Dayan to invade Syria and take Damascus, “based on mystical and Kabbalistic texts” that supported this step.

This kind of rivalrous grandiosity was a sign that, as Heilman and Friedman write, the Rebbe came to “see himself as controlling events not only in Israel but also in many other places in the world.” In 1990, the Rebbe’s followers claimed that he had predicted Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. He even advised Israeli Lubavitchers not to equip themselves with government-issued gas masks, since he was certain no Scud missile could harm them. The fall of Communism in 1989 was another vindication of the Rebbe, the destruction of Lubavitch’s oldest and bitterest enemy.

Such world-historical events served to raise the emotional temperature at 770, where the Rebbe was approaching his 90th birthday. In the natural order of things, he could not live much longer. Yet for almost half a century—since the very first talk he gave upon becoming Rebbe, in 1951—Schneerson had been insisting that the Messiah would come in his time. The theme of that inaugural speech had been the mystical power of sevens, a stock subject in Jewish mysticism. “All who are seventh are most beloved,” Schneerson quoted, and it was lost on no one that he himself was the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. Every year on the same date, the 10th of Shvat, he would repeat the talk, which Heilman and Friedman call “a key text in Lubavitcher mythology and messianic theology.” (You can hear a selection of it, with subtitles, here.)

How, then, could the blessed seventh generation possibly give way to an eighth? As Schneerson came closer to his end, his messianic proclamations took on a more urgent, even desperate tone. “Everything necessary for the redemption has been completed,” he said in August 1991. The Jewish year 5752, which began in 1992, was the year when “the world would become united under the flag of the Messiah.” His Hasidim took the cue, preparing the famous yellow flag with a crown that became the logo of the Moshiach movement. No one, perhaps, believed more trustingly than a man named David Nachshon, an Israeli Lubavitcher who visited 770 in 1991. As Heilman and Friedman describe the scene, on Shabbat, April 20, Nachshon held up a bottle of liquor “and, standing before the Rebbe, announced that with this drink they would all toast the Rebbe our righteous Messiah who would redeem them on the next Sabbath at the rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem.”

Here, if anywhere, was the man Rosenzweig described as having faith. Was he “better”? Should we not feel pity or contempt for him, imagining his plight on April 27, when the Temple was not restored and the Rebbe was not magically transported to Jerusalem? (A replica of 770 Eastern Parkway was built there, so that he would feel at home when the relocation happened.) Or should we, perhaps, feel anger at the Rebbe, the charismatic leader who encouraged his followers to believe of him what should never be believed of any human being? As the frenzy built among his Hasidim—as they displayed banners with his picture calling him Moshiach, and ran ads in the New York Times declaring “Moshiach Now,” and signed petitions begging him to declare himself the Messiah—Schneerson could have put a stop to it with a word. He never did.

But does this mean that the Rebbe actually believed he was the Messiah? On the evidence of his words and actions, as analyzed both by Heilman and Friedman and by Wolfson, it is hard to give a clear yes-or-no answer. It would be easier to understand Schneerson, and to judge him, if he were simply a pretender—if he told people he was the Messiah, knowing full well that he wasn’t—or simply deluded—if he straightforwardly knew that he was the Messiah, in the way that psychotics know they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. But he was too good and sincere to be the former and too realistic and intelligent to be the latter.

The truth seems to be that, like his humblest followers, the Rebbe himself was waiting, in a state of intolerable expectation, for the Messiah to be revealed—and he was unable to rule out the possibility that the Messiah would turn out to be himself. The genuine bewilderment this caused comes across in the harangue he delivered a few days after Passover in 1991, when once again the Messiah had failed to come—despite the tradition that the final Redemption would take place in the same month, Nisan, as the redemption from bondage in Egypt. “How can it be,” he asked his followers, “that you have not yet succeeded in this time of grace to actualize the coming of the righteous Messiah? What else can I do so that the Children of Israel will cry out and demand the Messiah come, after all else that was done until now has not helped since we are obviously still in exile.” He concluded, “I have to hand over the task to you: Do all you can to bring the righteous Moshiach, mamesh.”

The last word, which Heilman and Friedman leave untranslated, is Hebrew for “in fact,” “really,” “actually.” It became part of Schneerson’s standard refrain in calling for the Messiah, as Elliot Wolfson shows in greater detail. (In general, Wolfson has much more to say about the content of Schneerson’s thought and writing, while Heilman and Friedman focus on the events of his life and the organizational growth of Chabad.) Let the Messiah come “tekhef u-mi-yad mammash,” Schneerson said again and again—“immediately and without delay in actuality,” as Wolfson translates.

The redundancy and insistence of the phrase speak very movingly of the urgency of Schneerson’s desire and capture the feeling that Walter Benjamin also communicated—that any single instant could be the gateway for the Messiah. Wolfson quotes Schneerson’s words from February 1990: “Let it be your will that by means of all these things we will merit in all of Israel, immediately and without delay in actuality, immediately without delay in actuality, immediately and without delay in actuality, the true and complete redemption.” With each repetition of tekhef u-mi-yad mammash, the moment is bid to hold still, the gate to swing open. One can imagine the same words coming from the pilgrim in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” who spends his entire life sitting in front of an open door, waiting for the doorkeeper’s permission to enter.

The Kafkaesque turn in that story comes at the moment of the man’s death, when he is told that “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.” But it is left deliberately unclear whether this means that he should have seized the opportunity that was destined for him—say, by forcing his way through, despite the doorkeeper’s warnings. For isn’t forcing redemption the great temptation and sin of those who can’t wait patiently for God? Wolfson quotes Rosenzweig’s indulgent view of those who believe in false messiahs but in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig is sterner about those he calls “Tyrants of the Kingdom of Heaven”: “The fanatic, the sectarian … far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it. … The ground prematurely cultivated by the fanatic yields no fruit. It does that only when its time has come. And its time, too, will come. But then all the work of cultivation will have to be undertaken afresh.”

Mamesh means “in fact”; but it is also made up of the letters mem, mem, shin, which are the initials of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. By so insistently linking this word to the coming of the Messiah, Schneerson seemed to be confirming that he himself was the one the Lubavitchers were waiting for. Once, Heilman and Friedman write, he added “that he meant mamesh ‘with all its interpretations’ ”—a typically elusive confirmation. So elusive, in fact, that Wolfson bases his book on the hypothesis that Schneerson not only didn’t think he was the Messiah, he didn’t even believe the Messiah was coming at all.

Within the field of Jewish history, Yerushalmi was first recognized in the early 1970s for his groundbreaking work on the conversos, Jews who converted to Catholicism but kept some Jewish rituals alive in secret after the Spanish Inquisition. But it was his 1982 book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, that put him on the map for scholars in other fields as well, cementing his reputation as an unusually erudite and wide-ranging thinker who made the concerns of Jewish history universally interesting. His students, whom he taught first at Harvard and then, until his retirement last year, at Columbia, include many of the foremost figures in Jewish studies today.

“He was perhaps the only true humanist I ever met in the field of Jewish studies,” said Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic, and a one-time graduate student of Yerushalmi’s, in an interview. “He was a genuinely cosmopolitan man whose intellectual range in no way compromised the depth and scope of his Jewish learning. He hated the idea that Jewish history would be a provincial or merely ethnic pursuit.”

Zakhor, still Yerushalmi’s best-known book, contrasts the study of history—in which the historian first marshals the facts, then interprets what they mean—with collective memory, in which the meaning of the story precedes and determines the events related. Yerushalmi argued that before the modern era, memory structured the stories Jews told about themselves. A critical moment came in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, when communal identity and belief began to give way to a secular approach to Jewish life. The historian’s craft, with its focus on collecting and weighing facts, became, Yerushalmi famously wrote, “the faith of fallen Jews.”

This was a critique of Yerushalmi’s own field, and it was both debated and taken up by peers and students as a challenge to think more searchingly about their critical practices. For Yerushalmi’s reputation outside his discipline, meanwhile, the book could not have appeared at a more propitious moment. Scholars in a number of fields, influenced by poststructuralist thought and grappling with the challenges of Holocaust representation, were, first of all, in the midst of their own reconsiderations of historiography. But even more specifically, many of them had also newly become interested in Weimar Jewish thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem—and Yerushalmi, who had known Scholem personally, fit neatly into this new canon.

As David Myers, once Yerushalmi’s doctoral student and now a professor of Jewish studies at UCLA, explained, the historian’s new admirers read their way back from Zakhor to his earlier work on the medieval and Renaissance Jews of the Iberian peninsula. Despite the relative specialization of the topic, Myers said, these scholars appreciated Yerushalmi’s “exploring the converso as a kind of adumbration of the modern Jew, possessed of multiple and sometimes conflicting identities”—much like Benjamin, Rosenzweig, or Yerushalmi himself.

One of Yerushalmi’s emergent fans during this period was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who discussed Zakhor and another influential Yerushalmi work, Freud’s Moses, in his own writing. The two became friends and interlocutors, but their relationship also testified to another aspect of Yerushalmi’s character, Myers said: ego. “In the end, Yerushalmi feared that Derrida the literary critic didn’t fully grasp him, the historian,” he said. “For Yerushalmi, the slightest criticism could dissolve even the most fulsome praise.”

Indeed, both Yerushalmi’s most accomplished former students and his most recent ones describe a brilliant teacher who could be difficult and intimidating but also completely engaged with mentorship. “He’s a very captivating figure, an old-style professor, always wears a suit, always stands up and orates, has kind of a fake British accent,” said David Berman, a recent Columbia graduate who took every class Yerushalmi offered and served as his research assistant, which involved buying packs of cigarettes (Yerushalmi was a heavy smoker) and listening to him muse aloud for hours on end. “He had a bust of [his mentor, the historian] Salo Baron in his office,” Berman said. “Who the hell has busts?”

Born in New York in 1932, Yerushalmi attended yeshiva and grew up in a home where Hebrew, Yiddish, and English were spoken. After receiving a rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, he studied history at Columbia under Baron. He is survived by his wife, Ophra, and son, Ariel.

West, not to be outdone, introduced himself as a “bluesman,” delivered his discussion of prophetic religion with the cadences of slam poetry, credited the Jews with the “breakthrough” philosophy that one should “treat the Other as thyself,” and alluded to Hillel: “The rest,” he said, “is just footnotes.”

Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere [Cooper Union]

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

I didn’t, however, think about the beliefs of these disciplines, but about their similar writings—their literatures. Indeed, while the theological differences between Zen and Hasidism appear irresolvably stark—Hasidism believes that the self is effaced by approaching God, whereas Zen holds that a denial of self also must mean a denial of God; Hasidism’s belief in Messianism appears to nullify Zen’s transmigration—the literary relationship between the two seems undeniable.

****

“The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful. Until I have spoken I am ruler and master over my speech, but after I have spoken, the words master me.”

The above transgression of silence was not transcribed on a scroll by a monk, or delivered to an acolyte by a Zen Master from atop a Himalaya. It is, instead, the 86th section of the Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, known as Judah the Pious, founder of Ashkenazi Hasidism in the late 12th and 13th centuries. That collection of folk wisdom is also responsible for instructing its readers not to write notes in the margins of books—a proscription that covers, one would think, the margins of the Sefer Hasidim—and for forbidding the killing of lice at a table where meals are to be served.

Not just style and subject, however. Zen and Hasidic stories also share a handful of forms: a question-and-answer format reaching its highest expression in the Zen koan, which is a senseful question given an answer whose seemingly nonsensical aptitude confirms the student’s capacity to apprehend a Zen principle; a type of anecdote pertaining to a famous personage—in Zen a Master, in Hasidism a rabbi, known in Yiddish as a rebbe—often related after that person’s death by a student, or relative-disciple; and, most literarily, the miniature tale whose miracles can be taken either at face value, or in a spirit of allegory.

A monk asked, “What is the depth of the deep?” The master said, “What depth of the deep should I talk about, the seven or seven or the eight of eight?”—attributed to Zen Master Zhaozhou, 778-897, China

The Baal Shem said: “What does it mean, when people say that Truth goes all over the world? It means that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on.”—attributed to Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Russian Hasidism, 1698-1760, Polish Russia

Tellingly, in Zen, most questions are asked by one person to another, by Master to disciple or the other way around, whereas in Hasidism the rebbe tends to ask his own questions to and of himself; this rhetoric should give a sense of the explicit didacticism of Hasidic literature. This is absent from the writing of Zen, which, neither poetry nor prose or catechism, reads as rawer, more naturalistic, or less mediated—and this despite the linguistic distance between Chinese and Japanese and the translations read by the rest of the world.

Another attribute uniting these literatures might be called authority: literature gains authority from its authors, and from the publishing houses and outlets that publish them. But in an oral tradition, authority derives directly from the Master or rebbe. The text is what the text is because the Master or rebbe said it was that; it is up to the disciple to interpret the meaning. Then, when the disciple himself becomes the Master or rebbe, those interpretations will become simplified into primary texts whose meanings must be decrypted by subsequent disciples, and this is the way a tradition works—a tradition, which is continual, as opposed to a culture, which is reactionary.

A disciple told: whenever we rode to our teacher — the moment we were within the limits of the town — all our desires were fulfilled. And if anyone happened to have a wish left, this was satisfied as soon as he entered the house of the maggid [Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, 1710-1772, Poland]. But if there was one among us whose soul was still churned up with wanting — he was at peace when he looked into the face of the maggid.

The Master [Ryōkan Daigu, 1758-1831, Japan] never displayed excessive joy or anger. One never heard him speaking in a hurried manner, and in all his daily activities, in the way he would eat and drink, rise and retire, his movements were slow and easy, as if he were an idiot.

****

While noting aesthetic affinities between the two literatures, it should be remembered that the two languages of Zen’s codification, Chinese and Japanese, have no relation to Hasidism’s Yiddish and Hebrew; and, as if to disorient with obviousness, between them confounds the entire continent of Asia. However, Zen and Hasidic writings were separated not only linguistically and geographically, but also by centuries, nearly a millennium: Zen distinguished itself as a separate Buddhist school in sixth century China, before disseminating to Japan five hundred years later, just as European Jewry was afflicted with the first of the Crusades; while Eastern Hasidism arose in pogrom-ridden Polish Russia in the early part of the 18th century, by which time Zen literature had been widely anthologized.

But their origins bear many similarities. They both began as oral literatures of the peasantry, of the village and town as opposed to the city; they are literatures of the poor and uneducated (Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, was an indifferent Talmudist; Zen’s Sixth and last Patriarch, Huineng, was an illiterate woodcutter when he began studying under the Fifth Patriarch, Hungjen); they both grew out of a revolt against intellectualism, Zen as a meditative response to the increasingly elaborate tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, Hasidism as an ecstatic rejoinder to the rote primacy of scriptural interpretation; they are the oral musings of wandering peoples, or of peoples whose leaderships developed a habit of itinerancy, in order not just to attract adherents but also for the sheer sake of experience. They are both literatures of functional hierarchies: transmitted to novices from teachers serving as intermediaries between a public and the ineffable; and, they are both literatures of peoples politically compelled to withdraw from the world or, better, to create an ideally ascetic world within their own communities, in monasteries and rabbinic courts, and then, failing that, within private cenacles — within their own selves.

About their codifications. The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity (also known as The Book of Serenity) were collated in 12th-century China, while The Gateless Gate was compiled a century later toward the decline of the empire’s hyperliterate Song Dynasty—at the time of the fragments of Kalonymos ben Isaac the Elder, Samuel the Pious, his son Judah the Pious, and the latter’s apostle Eliezer ben Judah of Worms, whose Ashkenazi Hasidism, centuries before that of the Russian Pale, was a consequence of the destruction of the Crusades, and the tragic conduct, commerce, and sumptuary laws that followed.

Hasidism’s canonical stories were assembled from their diverse sects for translation only at the turn of the 20th century, however, when the German-speaking Jews of Berlin and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s three cities, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, became involved with, because more alienated from, the ethnicities of their ancestors, and were negotiating their returns to the wilds of a modernized Hebrew, and Yiddish. Coincidentally, perhaps, this Jewish dream of a comprehensible patrimony emerged just at the apex of Europe’s interest in the Orient—in the folkways, literature, and esoteric philosophies of that other East.

European artistic penchant for the Orientalistik grew out of the design style known as “chinoiserie,” whose motifs were brought to the continent by emissaries of the Dutch East India Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its manifestations included the decoration of porcelain vases with ostensibly Asian tableaux, and the erection, on British and French and German noble estates, of pagodas of a theoretically Buddhist architecture. In literature, this vogue culminated with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the bildungsroman of a boy’s spiritual progress in India during the reign of the Buddha, though its elements resound throughout all of the arts and are evident in the background patterning of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt, and in the use of that imported percussion instrument, the gong, in the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

At the same time, Jews of the great European cities who’d become changed by what they considered to be the more authentic lives lived by their Pale coreligionists included not only Buber, amassing his landmark Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim, from which the selections in this essay are excerpted), but also friends Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, who immersed themselves in the contradictory doctrines of Messianic redemption (which early Hasidism was fascinated with) and Zionism (with which later Hasidism has maintained a skeptical relationship).

Foremost among those artistically converted by experience with Judaism’s East was Franz Kafka, who befriended Yitzchak Löwy, an actor of the traveling Yiddish theater, and the writer and dilettante Hasid Jiří Langer, an assimilated Jew but an occasional disciple of the third and fourth rebbeim of the dynasty of Belz. Kafka recounts in his diaries numerous tales told to him by both Löwy and Langer, Talmudic anecdotes and folk midrashim—and he manages to get many wrong, or confused—but aphorizes in a letter: “Langer tries to find or thinks he finds a deeper meaning in all this; I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough.” (Kafka also admixed the Oriental. His The Great Wall of China is a kabbalistic parable in Asian guise—its wall could just as well be Jerusalem’s Kotel, with each reader sharding together the meaning of the text made his own reduced Herod.)

By the time a warring Europe had become thoroughly existentialist – which is a philosophy that complicates the tenets of Zen with nihilism – West’s codification of East was so influential that it itself had become a kind of original: not an authentic thing to be sanctified, but a quality of hybridism to be emulated. Writers, after all, are readers, too, and though they might be cut off from an oral tradition, they do have recourse to regretting that estate by misrepresenting the oral in books. After Kafka there derives a host of Jewish, and especially Israeli, writers occupied with such conscious rewrites and blunt manipulations, with the free excavation of the overtly antiquarian in the hopes of finding whatever style next—and style has always stood as a proxy for life; the search for it being, at depth, the search for a meaningful future.

****

Which brings us back to Yoel Hoffmann and his Curriculum Vitae, gracefully translated by the American-born poet Peter Cole. Hoffmann’s story begins at the end of Jewish Europe with its twilit escapes into other forms of being an Other; his is the tale of a life lived globally not in imagination but in actuality, his globalism a product of both historical circumstance and his own affinity and will.

Born in 1937 in Hungarian Romania, an infant immigrant to Palestine, Hoffmann is considered Israel’s most accomplished Nipponist, having translated a score of works from the Japanese: scholarly texts, and collections of poetry, including an important anthology of Zen Buddhist Death Poetry, or jisei, comprising the tanka and haiku Zen Masters write before dying naturally, or committing ritual suicide. Already in his forties, evidently obsessed with his family—who’d been dispersed if not murdered in the very fields and thickets in which Hasidism arose—Hofmann began writing a kind of poetic novel that is sentimentally affecting by way of memoir or confessional verse, yet recklessly fragmented in structure.

No such interpretations or even facts are to be found in this memoir-as-résumé, however—this Life of Hoffmann as Hoffmannesque fiction.

Instead, in Curriculum Vitae we find only quicksilver, gnomic glimpses of the author’s studenthood, love, and marriage; of his growth as an Israeli son, husband, and father whose nostalgia for a Judaism lost is satisfied only outside the borders of Israel—in an irresistible attraction to the foreign, and to the foreign’s conversion into intimate terms: “We’re reading Buddhist texts with master Hirano,” he writes. “The sound of one hand (he says) when there is nothing to strike. Everything strikes itself. If you see a flower—you don’t think of eyes. If you hear a sound—you don’t think of ears. It’s like a man who comes to Kiev and at the train station has his wallet stolen. Now he’s in Kiev and has no wallet. He wants to call the police, but there is no phone.”

This is the style of all Hoffmann’s books: They are composed of brief, joking remembrances that take the sorrows of origins’ Judaism, and offer them, in reparation, as hope, the detachment of Zen. The result is a fusion that doesn’t even need to take the Buddhistic as its deliberate subject to attain a sort of trancelike transcendence—a zazen whose silence still speaks with the accent of the shtetl.

Take this, from the novel The Shunra and the Schmetterling (Shunra is Aramaic for “cat,” Schmetterling German for “butterfly”; in this book, each vignette stands lonely on the page, as if in contemplation of the white that surrounds):

“At night the moon stands over the head of Andreas my father. He wants to depart from what he is and meanwhile writes “Y-H-V-H” on the display windows of a store for electric appliances.”

While Hoffmann’s father graffities the Tetragrammaton—a name of God that Hasidim spell in their minds in order to address the presence of God and so, to forget their own names—he does so not in any sacred context, but on the dingy plateglass of a Tel-Aviv shop. In Kyoto we still long for Kyoto; while in Israel, we are in Zion and yet still we crave Zion, and will for as ever long as Israeli literature is written.

Hoffmann’s is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-conscious, and humorously historicized, yet with none of its homage preserved obviously. In his pages, the oldest of folkish tropes are wryly revivified into a third literature, that of a new and Third East—an undiscovered continent of exotically compelling fictions.

In a real sense, then, the “Theses” are the work of a man who is on the brink of the abyss, and knows it. The ninth thesis, especially, has called out to later writers as an unforgettable emblem of a world that could not save itself. In it, Benjamin meditates on a Paul Klee painting he owned, Angelus Novus, which “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

It is not just poetic license that made Stephane Moses, the Franco-Israeli scholar who died in 2007, use the title “The Angel of History” for his study of Benjamin and his contemporaries, Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig. For in Benjamin’s little parable or midrash, we can find all the major themes that, Moses shows, obsessed these three German-Jewish thinkers. There is the savage rejection of progress, the old 19th-century liberal dream, which the First World War and its aftermath turned into a hideous joke. There is the sense that History, which German thinkers since Hegel had seen as the deliberate unfolding of Absolute Spirit, is actually a meaningless chaos. Above all, there is the inverted sense of the sacred, in which God and the angels still exist but no longer seem able to function or help humankind.

The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, which first appeared in France in 1992 but has just been published in English by Stanford University Press (in a translation by Barbara Harshav), is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the work of these three figures. They are writers who definitely need an introduction, because their originality, and their deep involvement in the tradition of German philosophy, make them very challenging to read. So, too, does their creative reinvention of Jewish traditions and concepts. All three are profoundly, unmistakably Jewish thinkers, yet none was raised with any knowledge of Judaism. Products of assimilated German-Jewish families, they had to struggle to reacquaint themselves with their Jewish origins; as a result, they thought about Judaism in ways that no traditional Jew ever would.

In fact, Moses writes, the rupture in the transmission of Judaism—in the chain of generations, “l’dor va’dor”—is at the heart of their work. In a chapter on “Kafka, Freud, and the Crisis of Tradition,” Moses uses Kafka’s Letter to His Father to illuminate the situation in which Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Scholem found themselves. One of the bitter complaints Kafka makes against his father is his failure to provide him with a living connection to Judaism: his father’s Jewishness was “a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke.” In his longing to assimilate into German culture and leave behind his shtetl origins, Kafka’s father reduced Jewishness to a few flimsy gestures,” absurd residues.” Yet, crucially, Kafka felt that this empty faith still had an iron grip on him, that he could not be free of a Judaism that had become meaningless.

To Scholem, who came from a similarly Germanized family, the only solution to this dilemma was to return wholeheartedly to Judaism, by becoming a Zionist. For this sin against assimilation, he was expelled from his family home. He moved to Palestine in the 1920s, and spent the rest of his long life trying to unearth the buried tradition of Jewish mysticism, writing about the Kabbalah and the radical heretic Sabbatai Zevi. Yet as Moses shows, he continued to view the Jewish past through the lens of Kafka: Scholem would tell his students that “to understand the Kabala today, we must read the works of Kafka, mainly The Trial.” That novel, in which Joseph K. is at the mercy of a law he cannot recognize or understand, seemed to Scholem a parable of the modern Jewish fate. As Scholem wrote in a long poem that Moses analyzes, Kafka captured a world where God is both present and absent:

Only so does revelation
Shine in the time that rejected you.
Only your nothingness is the experience
It is entitled to have of you.

Benjamin, who was Scholem’s closest friend, followed a different route to Judaism. Benjamin often mused about joining Scholem in Palestine, and repeatedly resolved to start learning Hebrew. But he was not truly interested in making the leap to a strictly Jewish vocation that Scholem had made. Instead, Moses shows in the densest and most interesting section of The Angel of History, Benjamin preserved his Jewish-theological ways of thinking even as he became a critic of secular German literature, and finally a Marxist revolutionary.

For Benjamin, a Jewish perspective on language and history meant challenging the prevailing scientific view of each. Language, according to linguists then and now, is a purely conventional system—words stand for objects arbitrarily, which is why French “pain” and German “Brot” can both mean the same thing as English “bread.” For Benjamin, however, language had to be envisioned mystically, as the decayed remnants of the divine language that God used to create the world, and that Adam used to name the animals. Literature, in this view, has a kind of sacred obligation of tikkun olam, repairing the world: as Moses writes, “The progress or decadence of humanity will no longer be measured by the distance separating it from an original Good but by its lapse from an original state of language.” In a similar way, Benjamin came to believe, the revolutionary should not try to abolish the past, but to redeem it—to recapture the lost potential for goodness that exists in every moment, even if it is mostly wasted and forgotten.

In this emphasis on redemption, Benjamin echoed Franz Rosenzweig, whose theological work The Star of Redemption both he and Scholem praised very highly. Rosenzweig, Moses explains, nearly converted to Christianity before deciding to reclaim his Jewishness, by redefining Judaism’s purpose on earth. “I as an individual,” he wrote, “take upon myself the metaphysical destiny, the ‘yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’ to which I have been called from my birth.”

A crucial stage on this journey, Moses shows, was the correspondence between Rosenzweig and his friend Eugen Rosenstock, a Protestant of Jewish origins who urged him to abandon Judaism altogether. In responding to this challenge, Rosenzweig began to understand Judaism as a religion in some sense outside of history. Where Christianity, and its secular philosophical heirs, believed that history was progressing to a utopian future, Judaism stands for a different kind of salvation—not progress but redemption, which interrupts history instead of completing it. The Jewish calendar, Rosenzweig believed, lifted the Jews outside of Christian time; cyclical rather than linear, it allowed the Jews to live symbolically in union with God. In this sense, Judaism has already achieved what Christianity still hopes for: the Jewish people, Rosenzweig wrote, “is separated from the march of those who draw near to it (redemption) in the course of centuries.”

As even a brief summary shows, The Angel of History offers an introduction to some of the most brilliant and influential Jewish thinkers of the last century. Anyone who is interested in how German Judaism responded, at the highest and most passionate levels, to its imminent destruction should start by reading Stephane Moses.

Should Jewish history be considered a unitary story—so that what happens to Jews in Spain is somehow integrally related to what happens to Jews in Poland? Or should the Jewish communities of each European country be studied separately? Or perhaps, as Moshe Rosman, one of the volume’s co-editors, suggests in “Jewish History across Borders,” we should look for distinctively Jewish geographies that cut across conventional political divisions. Rosman points out that, in the seventeenth century, Jews “could easily travel between Holland, Denmark, the various Germanic states, Hungary, and Poland without the feeling of alienness that travelers to ‘foreign’ countries often feel. They barely noted the political and legal regime they happened to be under.” This was because, Rosman argues, Jews across Europe “acted as ‘citizens’ of a Jewish ‘country,’ called Ashkenaz, with its own language, Yiddish, its own laws and customs … and tacit assumptions as to how to interpret reality and what constituted meaningfulness in life.”

At first glance, how to draw the map of 17th-century Jewry might seem like a purely technical question. Whether you call it Europe or Ashkenaz, after all, what really matters is how the individual human beings who lived there thought and acted. Likewise, when David B. Ruderman calls for historians to recognize the 16th and 17th centuries as the “early modern period” in Jewish history—distinct from both the medieval and modern eras—it may seem that, as Ruderman himself writes, “one might question the need for the historian to offer elaborate schemes of periodization in the first place.”

Yet while the papers in Rethinking European Jewish History are not addressed to a general readership—they are full of technical jargon and professorial conventions, as one would expect from a book that grew out of an academic conference in Tel Aviv—the methodological questions they raise have serious implications for the way we understand ourselves as Jews today. As Jeremy Cohen, the volume’s other co-editor, writes in the first sentence of his introduction, “the field of Jewish studies has always developed in relation to the experiences of the Jews: not only their past experiences, which determine the matter that historians study, but also their present experiences, which determine the manner in which they study it.”

The origin of academic Jewish studies lies in the Wissenschaft des Judentums of the nineteenth century, when German Jewish scholars sought to prove that Jewish history could be written as rigorously and dispassionately as secular history—that Jews could be “emancipated” as scholars, just as they were meant to be emancipated citizens. In the 20th-century, Gershom Scholem revolutionized the field by discovering in the Sabbatai Zevi movement the same kind of political and spiritual crisis that wracked European Jewry between the wars. It follows that, by taking the temperature of Jewish historiography today, we can learn something about the way Jews currently conceive their identity and its challenges.

Read in this way, the most striking thing about Rethinking European Jewish History is its deep discomfort with all kinds of definitions and boundaries. Rosman defies geographical borders and Ruderman chronological ones. David Engel, in “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism,” argues that the common practice of grouping all kinds of anti-Jewish hostility, from the ancient world to the present day, under the rubric of anti-Semitism is deeply ahistorical. The term anti-Semitism, Engel shows, began as a self-description by anti-Jewish political activists in Germany in the late nineteenth century. It was Bernard Lazare, the French Jewish polemicist and author of the pioneering book L’Antisemitisme, son histoire et ses causes, who first insisted that this ultra-modern ideology could be found “in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in Rome during the lifetime of Cicero, in the Greek cities of Ionia, in Antioch, in Cyrenaica, in feudal Europe, and in the modern state whose soul is the spirit of nationality.”

This was a polemical move, Engel explains, designed to tar 19th-century anti-Semites, who “insisted upon the fundamentally rational and empirical foundations of their doctrines…with the same brush as those who had spread blood libels during the Middle Ages or depicted Jews with horns and tails.” Yet Engel concludes that this strategy, however useful it may have been for Jewish “communal and political ends,” is intellectually muddled: “no necessary relation among particular instances of [anti-Jewish] violence, hostile depiction, agitation, discrimination, and private unfriendly feeling across time and space can be assumed. Indeed, none has ever been demonstrated.”

In a similarly revisionist vein, Hundert’s essay “Re(de)fining Modernity in Jewish History”—the sharpest and most entertaining piece in the book—assails modern Jewish historians for focusing on the story of Western European assimilation. Rather than this “Germanocentric definition of modernity,” Hundert writes, scholars should focus on the much larger Jewish population of Poland-Lithuania, which he claims was “armored against trauma and…psychological reversals of loyalty” by longstanding communal bonds. “Self-affirmation and a feeing of Jewish superiority and solidarity dominated the spectrum of self-evaluation of east European Jews,” he argues. And since most American Jews today are descended from this east European population, Hundert suggests, they inherit this “continuing positive self-evaluation as Jews”—what he calls the “magmatic” level of Jewish identity, which lives on beneath the surface of modern Jewish life.

As even this quick survey makes clear, the issues of terminology these scholars are debating have profound “real-world” applications. If Rosman is correct, for example, that Jews in Europe inhabited something like their own country, then European Jewish history has Zionism inscribed in its DNA: the actual Jewish state in Israel is a descendant of the virtual Jewish state of Ashkenaz. Conversely, as Rosman combatively writes, if Jewish history is really just the history of the different European countries where Jews lived, this would give a certain comfort to “post-Zionist Jews seeking to dissociate themselves from what they regard as the embarrassment, mistake, or tragedy that is Israel,” by “relieving them of responsibility for or loyalty to Israel.”

Again, if Hundert is correct that the “real” history of European Jewry is not the dismal trajectory of French and German Jews—from emancipation to discrimination to annihilation—but the cohesive and enduring community of Polish Jews—enduring, at least, until wiped out by a Western European ideology, Nazism—there is an obvious lesson for American Jewry. In America, too, it would follow, Jews are not destined to assimilate away from their community, but to retain a “magmatic” Jewishness, and perhaps even a sense of chosenness. Significantly, Hundert begins his essay with a quotation from Philip Roth about how, for his American parents, Jewishness was “as fundamental as having arteries and veins.” The debates in Rethinking European Jewish History are just as fundamental, and just as vital.

Each of these young men knew that Berlin would not be their home forever. They had their sights set on Palestine, where in fact they all ended up after the war. Yet none of these friends could have imagined that their future lives would demonstrate so vividly the dreamlike course of Jewish history in the twentieth century. In 1917, there was no Jewish state and barely any modern Hebrew literature, and the history of Jewish mysticism was a closed book. Yet Zalman Rubashov, under his new name of Zalman Shazar, would become the third president of the State of Israel; Shmuel Czaczkes, writing in Hebrew as S.Y. Agnon, would win the Nobel Prize for his fiction; and

Gerhard Scholem, after changing his first name to the Hebrew “Gershom,” would become famous as one of the greatest scholars of the century, thanks to his pioneering studies of Jewish mysticism.

Ordinarily, the fame of a scholar could not hope to rival that of a leading statesman or a great artist. Yet today it is Scholem, who spent his entire adult life on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who remains the most influential and fascinating of these three figures. That is because scholarship, in Scholem’s hands, was something more than abstract theorizing or dry research. In books like Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah, and in the essays he published in Hebrew, German, and English, Scholem resurrected a whole dimension of Jewish thought and history that had been lost in a secular, “enlightened” age.

Fighting against what he called the “censorship of the Jewish past,” Scholem demonstrated that the most questionable elements in Jewish mysticism—messianism, apocalypticism, antinomianism—could also be the most fruitful and creative. Even a traditionally execrated figure like Zevi, who in the seventeenth century managed to convince much of the Jewish world that he was the messiah, appeared to Scholem as the bearer of a crucial strain in Judaism, “the Messianic activism in which utopianism becomes the lever by which to establish the Messianic kingdom.” Scholem’s fascination with such subversive figures and ideas stemmed from his conviction that “the Jewish people as a whole was very much alive; it was more than some fixed structure, let alone something defined or definable by a theological formula.”

By this definition, everything produced by Jews is Judaism, including Scholem’s own scholarship. For more than a few nonobservant or nonbelieving Jews, reading Scholem offers a more authentic way of experiencing Judaism than going to synagogue. No wonder his influence can be seen everywhere in contemporary Jewish literature, to the point that golems and gematria have become standard props in Jewish American fiction.

Because Scholem’s writing, for all its objective rigor, feels so personally engaged, his life has always been a source of fascination. What enabled this product of a thoroughly assimilated German Jewish family to remake himself as a devoted Zionist? And what spiritual experiences lay behind his impassioned study of Jewish messianism? For there is clearly something more than detached analysis at work when Scholem defines the messianic urge as “transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.” Such poetic writing, in which it is never quite clear where metaphor ends and metaphysics begins, underlines Scholem’s deep intellectual affinity with the critic Walter Benjamin, his youthful mentor and his closest friend. Benjamin and Scholem each infused a secular genre of writing with obscurely religious passions. As a result, each of them seems to belong as much to the history of Judaism as to the history of literature.

Scholem told the story of his early life in his short memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem, and that of his relationship with Benjamin in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Yet these books, which shed so much light on Scholem’s intellectual development and his Zionist milieu, are at the same time unmistakably guarded. Written in a cool, concise style, deliberately antisentimental in their treatment of intimate relationships, Scholem’s memoirs are the products of a mind holding itself at a careful distance. Typically, when he writes about the way his father expelled him from the family, Scholem does not describe any feelings of anger, resentment, or betrayal. Instead, he dismisses the episode in one curt sentence: “There was a great uproar.”

That is why the publication of Scholem’s youthful diaries by Harvard University Press, under the apt title Lamentations of Youth, comes as such a revelation. These passionate, tumultuous, deeply moving journals document the most important phase of Scholem’s life—the years 1913 to 1919, as he grew from a fifteen-year-old boy into a twenty-one-year-old man. This was the period when Scholem first discovered the subjects and ideas that would consume his adult life; it is also when he first became acquainted with Benjamin, and established the cult of friendship that would last until his death. To look on as Scholem evolves his highly personal understanding of Judaism and Zionism is like watching a painter lay down the first tentative strokes of what will become a masterpiece.

Yet if that metaphor suggests a preternaturally confident young man, following a definite plan in life or thought, it is misleading. For the strongest impression left by Lamentations of Youth is of Scholem’s great confusion about the path he should follow, in life and in thought. His ultimate destination was never in doubt: By the time he started these journals, Scholem was already a committed Zionist, absolutely certain that his destiny lay in Palestine. This conviction came to him so early, and remained so unwavering, that it seems like a religious vocation. Already in November 1914, a month before his seventeenth birthday, we find Scholem issuing Zionist ultimatums to the world: “Give us the earth back, ye gods and men! You’ve taken it away from us long enough. We want our property back!”

The uncertainty lay, rather, in the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that lay between Scholem’s actual life and the authentically Jewish life he yearned for. Everything in his immediate environment was against him. He had virtually no Jewish education: The journals show him painstakingly teaching himself Hebrew, finding a rabbi to study the Talmud with, and finally combing libraries for books on Kabbalism. At home, of course, Scholem got no support for these efforts. On the contrary, his father looked on his Zionism as scarcely better than his brother Werner’s Communism. Writing to Gerhard in 1921, when his doctoral studies were already well advanced, Arthur Scholem sneered, “Three cheers for Hebraica and Jewish studies—but not as a career! Take my word for it: if you don’t change course you will experience a bitter shipwreck.”

Scholem returned this contempt with interest, and the journals are full of bitter attacks on his parents and relatives. “My parents’ way of life is unbearable,” he writes in 1918, “and there can be no return to living in their house.” We can hear in such passages a standard teenage rebellion, but with Scholem, this grew into something much more—a virtually ideological hatred of the German Jewish bourgeoisie and everything it stood for. “With irrevocable lucidity, truth, and clarity,” he writes at the age of eighteen, “I’ve gradually come to the realization that I don’t fit in with these people here, these German Jews. .&nbsp. . One mustn’t speak to the bourgeoisie about God. There shall be no peace with them, says the Lord.”

What made Scholem’s isolation even more extreme was that he was living in a Germany whose traditional chauvinism had just been sent into overdrive by the First World War. Scholem’s refusal to mention the war in these journals—his insistence that the cataclysm had nothing to do with his own life—is an indirect testament to its power. For most of the period documented in Lamentations of Youth, Scholem lived under the threat of conscription into the German army, where he would at least lose several years of study, and very possibly get killed. That was the fate of his close friend Edgar Blum, whose death in combat was a terrible blow to Scholem, not least because Blum was a fellow Zionist: “In him we had someone who carried around inside an inner formation of the strongest potential…I have no question in my mind that the source of his inner calm…was that he was a Zionist in the true sense of the word (to the extent that one can be in Zion before it’s built).”

The paradox hinted at in this entry—how to be a Zionist in a world where Zion remains, in the eyes of most people, a mere fantasy?—suggests the other, subtler challenge facing Scholem during wartime. All around him, German Jews were volunteering for army service as a way of proving their patriotism. To his profound disgust, even the Zionists succumbed to war fever: In 1915, the Judische Rundschau, a Zionist newspaper, declared, “We went off to war not in spite of being Jews, but because we were Zionists.” In such a climate, it took a rare kind of courage for Scholem to decide, as he put it, to “avoid suffering the fate of dying a hero’s death for the German fatherland.” When he was finally conscripted, in 1917, he decided to feign mental illness in order to win a discharge. It was an ordeal he hated to remember or write about: “I will not leave any written account of my time in the military,” he writes in his diary in August 1917. “This, the central test of my Zionism, has proven that Zion is stronger than violence.”

The psychological consequences of this episode were profound. At a time when almost every man his age was in the army, it was imperative for Scholem to prove, to himself and the world, that it was Zionism and not cowardice that led him to such apparently ignoble actions. This is one reason why, as the journals go on, Scholem’s conception of Zionism becomes ever more passionate and demanding, until it finally approaches the plane of mysticism. His Zionism was not just a political principle, and it was only incidentally related to the building of Palestine: “If I didn’t want to go to Zion,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t go to the land of Israel.” For Scholem, Zionism was a spiritual commitment to Jewish renewal, a totalizing ambition with decidedly messianic overtones: “because I know that Zion is the absolute truth. .&nbsp. . I measure all things against it. My credo is that Zion is the measure of all things.”

Lamentations of Youth is a record of what that credo cost Scholem. No one he knew could live up to the purity and intensity of his Zionism—“Only entirely pure people can develop this unity,” he wrote—and one by one he cast them out. His family was the first casualty, but even many of the friends he made through Jewish youth groups and Zionist organizations disappointed him: None of them loved Zion the way he did. By July 1919, near the end of the diaries, Scholem’s Zionism has become a monkish discipline, not a link to his fellow Jews but a wall shutting them out: “Thinking about it correctly, we Zionists live in a state of silent renunciation incapable of articulation… People become impure from living outside of this renunciation and not wanting to live within it. Our hearts are being ripped apart by our shameless epoch in which people throng around us, screaming out their mindless freedoms. We are victims, and a person is sadly misguided if he thinks he’s not.”

Yet if the Scholem of the diaries was a victim in many ways—lonely, painfully self-conscious, and afflicted with sexual neuroses of a kind scarcely imaginable in our more liberated age—he was also in training to be a victor. If he hadn’t passed through the emotional cauldron so vividly evoked in Lamentations of Youth, he could not have given Judaism and the Jews so much to sustain them through the ruptures of the twentieth century. “Jewish scholarship,” he writes in 1919, as though in prophecy of his own future career, “is in an especially paradoxical and indeed extremely enviable position. It is not that it invokes spirits that refuse to come. Quite the opposite: Jewish scholarship expends its full efforts at turning away the invoked spirits, just as it denies that they’re there. But the spirits come anyway. They are always there. Always. And they want to be redeemed through the work of insightful scholars.”