Speaker 1: Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the Podcast of Jewish Ideas,
a Torah in motion production. I'm jj Kimbrie. On today's episode,
we will turn to one of the most enigmatic and
influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin. Living between philosophy,
literary criticism, theology, and political theory, Benjamin produced a body
of work that resists easy classification but continues to shape
the way we think about history, modernity, and culture itself.
We will be paying particular attention to the Jewish and
Jewish inflected dimensions of Benjamin's thoughts, including his engagement with
themes such as Messianism, translation, and exile, and how these
themes inform his distinctive philosophy, joining us to discuss the
fascinating thoughts of all the Benjamin is a leading scholar
of modern German Jewish thought. Doctor Vivian Liska, who is
a Professor of German Literature and director of the Institute
of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp and also
a distinguished visiting professor at the Hebrew University. Professor Lisker's
extensive work in the field of modern Jewish thoughts written
in several languages, includes her twenty seventeen work German Jewish
Thought and Its Afterlife, A Tenuous Legacy, published by Indiana
University Press. It is a pleasure to welcome her to
the Podcast of Jewish Ideas Today, Professor Lisker, thank you
for joining us.
Speaker 2: JJ, Thank you for having me. So, writer Benjiam.
Speaker 1: Lewis a Yes, Walter Bejumin. We are very excited to
jump at him. So let's start off because not so
many of our listeners may be all that familiar with him.
His life is circumstances. Let's start off with just the background,
the biography. Who was he, when did he live, and
how did his life play out?
Speaker 2: So Writer Benjamin was one of the most challenging, magnetic,
and enduring figures in modern Jewish intellectual history. Unlike other
important German Jewish thinkers such as Franz Rosensweig or Gashum Scholem,
and more like Kafka hana Are, he became one of
the major thinkers of and about modernity, way beyond the
German or the Jewish fear so one could practically call
him a universal figure. Benjamin lived from eighteen ninety two
to nineteen forty, and his life in many ways reads
like a condensed history of European Jewish modernity and its crises.
He was born in Berlin into an assimilated, upper middle
class Jewish family, secure cultured, deeply invested in German civilization.
Like many German Jews of his generations, his parents believed
the Jewish life in Germany was stable and secure, that
emancipation and cultural integration were irreversible achievements. Benjamin grew up
surrounded by books, music, and the ideals of build Ung.
It's one of those words that are how to translate
and that I think have entered the English vocabulary, so
the Enlightenment ideal of cultural self formation. In that sense,
he grew up in the German humanist bourgeois world before
Judaism became an explicit theme in his thinking. Some scholars,
like George Mosser is a prominent example, have described build
Ung and liberalism as the defining features of modern German
Jewish intellectual life. Benjamin, however, belongs to a generation that
increasingly rebelled against precisely this idea, and the scholar Stephen
Asheim has argued this against his teacher Mosser alongside other
German Jewish thinkers, Benjamin diagnosed the ills of his time
as a form of enlightenment or modernity gone awry that
contributed rather to the actual and looming political and cultural
catastrophes of the twentieth century, rather than wanting that off.
So that critical stance forms an important background to how
he later engages with the Jewish tradition. Even early on,
Benjamin felt out of place in his bourgeois surroundings. He
never quite fit the established institutions of or expected life path.
He completed a brilliant doctoral dissertation, but his attempt to
pursue an academic career failed decisively when his habilitatsion on
the German So That's a higher doctorate on the German
Broke Towerspiel or Morning Play was rejected. Some say it
was because of anti Semitism, but certainly it was also
because Benjamin didn't write in a conventional academic idiom. He
was already thinking across philosophy, theology, literature, and politics in
ways universities at that time and maybe even today simply
could not accommodate. This failure was devastating for him, but
it was also formative because it forced him out of
the academy, and although he lived the rest of his
life as an itinerant intellectual, writing essays, translating literature, producing
radio broadcasts, reviewing books, and relying heavily on friends for support,
he never held a stable position. He lived in constant
financial insecurity. Yes, it was precisely this life outside of
institutions that enabled him to develop one of the most
original and unsettling bodies of thought in the twentieth century.
He married Dora Pollard, but that marriage failed and his
relationship to women in generals was rather problematic. His later
infatuation with the communist Asia Latis, who was very important
for him, came to nothing. Benjamin's adulthood unfolded under the
shadow of catastrophe. World War One shattered the belief in
progress that had sustained the European culture. Unlike many contemporaries,
Benjamin did not see the war as a tragic exception,
but as a revelation of modernity's destructive core. From the
twenties onwards, he became increasingly convinced that European civilization was
moving toward disaster. His writing from this period on language, art, history,
and violence attempts to think within this crisis rather than
explain it away. Benjamin was forced to leave Germany and
lived in France for many years. Actually, Benjamin contemplated leaving
Europe in his youth. Later he spoke repeatedly of emigrating.
But maybe we'll still talk about this later, urged by
his close friend Gasham Scholem, and yet he never left Europe.
It was not just a place for Benjamin. It was
his whole intellectual home. Its languages, libraries, archives, and cultural
sediments were the very material of his thinking. By nineteen thirty,
Benjamin was living in Paris, increasingly isolated, stateless, and vulnerable.
After Hitler's rise to power, his situation grew desperate in
nineteen forty as the Nazis advanced through France, Benjamin attempted
to flee across the Pyrenees into Spain. When he was
denied entry and faced the prospect of being handed back
to the authorities, he took his own life in the
border town of Poppu. Benjamin died at forty eight on
the literal and symbolic threshold between countries, languages, Europe and Judaism,
exile and the hope of rescue. His death is tragic,
but it is not merely biographically. It crystallizes the core
of his life, a thinker who never arrived, never settled,
never reconciled himself to the world as it is. And yet,
and this is crucial, after his Benyamin's work began its
extraordinary after life and is not only stilly but mainly
particularly relevant today but maybe every generation since. Benjamin, who
participated in his reception, believes that excellent.
Speaker 1: So, firstly, I'm glad you touched on a few things
which we do want to expand on later, such as
his restlessness and his constant traveling and unwillingness to settle anywhere,
as well as the extraordinary afterlife of Benjamin's works, which
will get you intwo course. But before we do, I mean,
let's do a little bit of a bird's eye view
on what were the kinds of topics and ideas that
Benjamin wrote about to a great extent. Again, you know,
he was a very prolific and important European intellectual of
of those early twenty century decades. So what sort of
things was he was he broaching? What was he writing?
And then we'll go into the Jewish aspects.
Speaker 2: If I had to summ up Benjamin's intellectual life, I'd
probably say that he spent his entire career trying to
understand how meaning, justice, even redemption are still possible in
a world that seems to be falling apart. No matter
what he was writing about language, art, history, politics, this
question was somehow always in the background. But striking about
Benjamin is how wide his interests were. He moved effortlessly
between philosophy, literature, theology, politics, esthetics, and also importantly everyday culture.
But this wasn't really eclecticism. He refuses the usual borders
between disciplines and becomes a master in linking microscopic phenomena
to the big metaphysical picture of things. Benjamin was never
a system builder. Instead, he thought in fragments, images, constellations,
moments where insights flash up, rather than unfolding them step
by step. One of his earliest and most decisive interests
was language, and it was the time of the linguistic
turn with sinkers like Wittgenstein and Smautner. It's all and
in a remarkable essay from nineteen sixteen, one of his
early important essays called on Language as Such and on
the Language of Men. Benjamin rejects the idea that language
is mainly a tool for communication and goes way beyond
that towards and that's where his first steps into the
Jewish tradition are manifest into a certain way of understanding
language that has resonances with the Kabbalah and even with Bashi,
with the idea of God telling man to name the world,
to name the animals. So there is that transcendent moment
that appears already in this early essay. Then there is,
But maybe we'll talk about that later as well, because
that is a major way of understanding how Venine relates
to the Jewish tradition. Are questions of language and translation,
and there too one can already detect some elements of Jewish,
of the Jewish textual world. Another major strand of his
work is literary criticism, especially his engagement and with German literature.
His book on the Baroque Tawerspield The Morning Play already
draws a world that sees history as a landscape of ruins,
and that also will become a motive for him later
on in the twenties and thirties, Beny I mean turns
increasingly toward modern culture and everyday life. So there are
certain aspects of modern culture, especially his reflections on the
new media. What were new media at the time became
very important, and one of his famous essays is the
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where
he examines how new technologies destroyed the aura of artworks. Now,
sometimes in these speculations about the new media, he also
got it wrong, for example, when he celebrates film, the
new medium of film as something that can improve vigilance
because images flash by so quickly that you have to adapt,
and that somehow Benjamin believed could have even a political effect.
Now as we know later under national socialism, film was
used for Nazi propaganda. And this is just one point
where I thought that, okay, that as we speculate about
our new media today, we wouldn't be the first ones
to get it wrong. At the same time, Benjamin developed
philosophy of history, became deeply engaged with Marxism, especially with
historical materialism, but always at arm's length. He never becomes
an orthodox Marxist, and his Messianism, which we will certainly
talk about in the context of his references to the
Jewish addition, will be in an important and illuminating tension
with his Marxism. So this constellation of Messianism and Marxism
will be very important. This this tension accompanies him throughout
his work. Even in the Major Study, if one can
call it that, it's really a collection of a whole
archive that he creates with the Arcades Project, and that
which was something he would do until the end of
his life. But at the very end he writes the
thesis on the philosophy of History that are for many
his testament. So Benjamin's intellectual biography cannot be separated from
his method of thinking and his primary concern with finding
a form and a mode of thinking that would correspond
to what he perceived as the catastrophic period of history
that he is living in.
Speaker 1: That again, a splendid overview of quite difficult and often
we'll actually we'll get to Benjamin the form of Benjamin's
right consumed, because that's also I think plays important role
in the story. Before we do, I want to jump
a little bit into the into his Jewish background. So
you know, this is a man, as you mentioned, he
was seculary his whole life. He was a Marxist, he
did not seem to, you know, he certainly didn't write
anything which can be let's say, tradition, be called Jewish
or at least sort of in some some sort of
recognizable Jeish cannon. But nonetheless, there are many who have
claimed Benjamin within the Jewish cannon. So let me ask
at least the first question, a sort of more biographical one,
which was what kind of Jewish background, or sympathies or
education did the man have? I mean, did he how
much did he know? What did he know? And from
there let's jump into the bigger question of well, what
Jewish themes influences et cetera week and we have so,
I mean, in his life? How Jewish was Benjamin's life?
Speaker 2: I'm always fascinated with the way in which one asks
this question, you know, what is Jewish about which? And
how Jewish was Benjamin? Well, it is interesting that is
how Jewish almost implies a quantitative element. Was it very Jewish?
A little bit Jewish? And I mean it is striking
that it's precisely in Judaism that you're either Jewish or
you're not, but that the rabbis have made sure that
one shouldn't be a little bit more or less Jewish.
But of course I understand what you mean when you
ask the question. Benjamin wasn't educated in a traditional Jewish way,
he wasn't observant, he never joined the Jewish movement in
any straightforward sense, and yet Judaism becomes one of the
most powerful and persistent forces shaping his thinking. Now, I
resist this distinction between Jewishness and Judaism. And this is
relevant here because for many Benjamin is. You know, one
can think of Benjamin's Jewishness, but it would be wrong
to think of him in terms of any significant contribution
to the Jewish tradition as Judaism, with the exception of
a few motives. But I think that there is much
more to it than that. I think that there is
another distinction that is much more interesting, a distinction that
is made by Stefan Moses. Moses makes the distinction between
what he callsed normative and critical Jewish modernity. He formulates
the question is it's in a text where he formulates
the question is the thread of tradition broken? And then
he considers two groups of thinkers. For me, that was
a crucial moment because I realized that all the figures
I've been dealing with in my own research fell into
one of these groups, and that explained something to me.
So what are these two? What is the distinction between
the normative and the Jewish modern thinkers. Moses explains that
normative modernity tries to preserve continuity by translating the Jewish
tradition into modern terms, often in the service of renewal
or identity. Benjamin belongs firmly to the other group, which
Mosaes caused critic, Jewish modern thinkers. These do not modernize Judaism,
but they think about modernity in Jewish categories. And it
is not the aim to renew you know, like Bubba's
Jewish Renaissance. That was not the idea. And Mosases makes
a very interesting remark after he introduces this distinction in
this essay, it seems like Mosaes, who was a professor
of German he actually was the first chair of the
German department at Ibrew University, he seems like a normative
thinker himself, who is all about renewing Jewish thought in
the modern world. And yet at the end he says,
there's a lot of continuity among the normative thinkers, but
it is among the critical ones that there is actual
hope because they, although it is not their goal, they
allow us to look at the Jewish tradition with new
eyes and discover the unexpected in the tradition itself, not
projecting it, but actually discovering that it is already there.
And this could be a framework to understand how Benjamin
operates in terms of the Jewish tradition. So there there
are certain contemporary scholars who say that all these German
Jewish thinkers are barely Jewish. So an answer to your question,
how Jewish was Benjamin because they didn't read their primary literature.
And with the argument, you know, you wouldn't call somebody
in the tradition of Greek philosophy if he hasn't read
his he or she hasn't read the you know, the
basic works of Plato an Aristole, And if they haven't
read The Tumult and its commentaries in any depths, one
can call them Jewish. And I've really think that this
is not the right approach for me. It became it
became clear that all these thinkers, So who are the normatives?
I didn't mention this, but who are the normatives? From
Osesse there are Rosensweig, Buber and Levinas man Coin, and
the critical ones are Kafka, Ceylan are Benjamin, and then
there is Sholem, where he doesn't quite know where to
place him. But that's another story. So for me, it
became obvious that I was particularly interested in what remains
in what remains of the Jewish tradition, precisely in thinkers
that are not primarily concerned with reviving it. That is
the one thing, and the other. A moment when I
became really interested and even convinced of the of the
deep jewishness of Benjamin and these other critical modernists was
when I read interpretations that deny their Jewish aspect, be
it from Jews who would consider a Jewish thinker only
one who is actually deeply in the tradition, but also
by those who who christianize Benjamin, for example, and that's
another story within his reception. At my Institute of Jewish Studies,
twenty years ago, we organized a Benjamin conference, and we
had together with the German Institution. We organized this. There
were one hundred speakers who spoke about Benjamin, and the
only place where the word Jewish came up was at
the top of the poster where it said insttitude of
Jewish studies so.
Speaker 1: Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Jewish. So so then
I'm afraid you've opened yourself up to the to the
natural following question, which is well also elaborate. I mean, what,
when reading Benjamin's you know, works on these various topics,
what discernibly Jewish? Because, as you noted correctly, he isn't
writing we didn't receive a Jewish education, not writing in
the classical text tra tradition. But but what can be deduced? What,
in your opinion of his ideas and of his writings
bear a Jewish imprint?
Speaker 2: I want to I want to start with two quotes
to reply, please, two quotes by by Benjamin. One is
from an early letter to a friend, Ludwig House, where
he writes everything Jewish is self understood, and everything that
goes beyond that is dangerous. I think that what is
behind this rather enigmatic sentence is the fear of a
kind of parochialism, nationalism, Jewish centeredness that he certainly wanted
to avoid when he talks about you know, everything that
goes beyond that which is self understood when you look
closely at the way he dealt with Jewish motifs. They
are everything but self understood. They're even sometimes how to understand.
But my second quote, and that was that cheme as
a surprise. It is in a letter he writes to
Cholem in nineteen thirty five, one year after Hitters rise
to power, where he reflects on Kafka. They had a
very intense exchange about Kafka, and Benjamin talks about the
world of Kafka's novels as a swamp world. And then
he writes, the world that Kafka depicts is a world
in which the work of the Torah has been thwarted.
And he says Torah doesn't write the Bible. He says
the Torah he adds in pencil, and that one can
in the book. It's a footnote introduced by Sholemb that
everything Moses once accomplished would now have to be accomplished again.
Now this is a quote from the footnote, from Scholem's
footnote saying that this is what Benjamin is it in
his letter. Now this raises a big question. Does Benjamin
mean that one would have to revive the Torah in
our time? Does it mean that one would have to
reread the Torah in different ways and new or even
create a new one. He leaves that open, but the
critique that it is a world. So for him, Kafka
depicts the modern world and everything that's wrong with it
and and diagnoses this in terms of the work of
the Torah that has been thwarted. Now you asked me
more concretely about what it is that interested. I mean,
I can maybe start saying yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, my question was more sort of your position
on this, because as you mentioned, there's there's a wider
ray of interpretation of how to position Benjamin in returns
in terms of the Jewish question. My question you as
you know, what what do you see when reading his
books is essay, et cetera. What Jewish characteristics that that
are unmistakably Jewish if any, if any sort of exists
in his more general work. It's because you know, as
you mentioned, that there's such a wide array of readings
of Benjamin. Everyone has been arguing about this now for
so many decades. But but you seem to really you've
placed him within this umbrella of German Jewish thought, and
you know you've seen him as part of this tradition.
So so let's let's, as you say, nail it down
a bit more concretely, like what what what is Jewy
about about Benjamin?
Speaker 2: I think that Benja means Jewish commitments were intellectual, ethical, political,
and in some big way metaphysical, and the way he
combines these is fascinating often hard to grasp. But personally
I'm a I'm a very close reader of texts, so
to make grand general statements is dangerous for me. It's
easier for me to actually draw evidence from texts, and
in Benjamin's case, because of the subtlety of his writing,
this is very important. The most obvious motif that really
does run throughout his work is Messianism. No one has
to see exactly what that is what it is for him,
and that opens up a whole world. I mean, I
personally went through a development in my relationship to Benjamin
and to the way he deals with the Jewish motives.
At first, I was fascinated by the radicalism of his thinking,
and Messianism in many ways seemed to me like a
demand put on the world that was total, and I
gradually understood that this was neither something I would particularly
admire nor was it actually there and Benjamin. Now, whether
my idea of Benjamin has changed because my expectations changed,
or whether I just read them more closely and found
another dimension in him is hard for me to tell.
We could ask the question why wouldn't Marxism be enough?
If as a kind of critique of his situation, Marxism
or utopia, why would it have to be Messianism? Now,
in some ways Messianism is much more radical. It demands
a much more total idea of redemption then Marxism that
is merely class struggle and equality, and Messianism actually speaks
of total redemption.
Speaker 1: So I ask, if if I can interjects, because this
is actually an important point, what did Benjamin mean by Messianism?
Speaker 2: How do he?
Speaker 1: Because of course Messianism in the very religious context is
readily understandable. It means a messiah, you know, someone coming
to redeem the world, like a person literally or yeah,
there are other explanations, but that's classically it's understood. For
a secularist or secular thinking like Benjamin, what does he
mean when he writes about Messianism and how does he
see it come about?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What what does that mean? Within his within his world
of ideas, I can.
Speaker 2: Maybe give you a little moments where his Messianism is expressed,
and always a bit in a bit different way. For example,
in his language essay, Benjamin speaks of a language of
an us primal language, a pure language, that is, the
language that or a damic it's also called the Adamic language,
a language where the where word and thing coincide completely,
where things were named in the in their true way
and guaranteed by God in a way like you know,
like God's own language. And with the fall from Paradise,
this language got lost and language became arbitrary, just conventional.
In Benjamin's Messianic idea, eventually language will be restored. Now
that language that you know, language where word and thing
will perfectly coincide again, will be restored. Now. Benjamin, as
in the Jewish tradition, does not go into any length
as to what this world would look like, right, and
so that in itself, you know, would not correspond to
the Jewish tradition if he were actually to say what
is happening in what the Messianic world would look like.
But he wrote somewhere that as long as there is
a single beggar still in the world. The world is
not redeemed, so from that one can extrapolate what redeemed
world would be like. And one of the best places,
although that too is a very complex text, but one
of the best places to go to is his in
German theologist politicians fragmented, theological political fragment. And there he
so he draws a fascinating sketch in which he has
the divine redeemed world and there is the profane world,
and the two are separate. And Benjamin insists that one
cannot reach a messianic world in any straight way. So
let's say, as in the religious idea, that with good
deeds and prayer, if all the Jews would keeps about,
for example, then the Messiah would come. But he has this, uh,
this dialectic motion where the more you strive for happiness
in the in the here and now, and with happiness
what is implied is justice, and so social justice and
so on. The more you strive for happiness in this world,
the more you are you are bringing the Messiah or
the Messianic world closer. And there he has this no
of two errors that pass by each other and that
reinforce each other. Now we talked about plausibility before there
is a You know, for many this is just a
kind of phantasm of a post Enlightenment, post rational worldview.
Another another instance where he invokes Messianism is in the
context of translation. So for him, translation is much more
than just passing from one language to the other. But
for him, the very act of the experience of translation
points to the loss of that primal, divine, pure language
and thereby participates in it. Not in its rest storation,
because it is not for humans to restore the pure language,
but by experiencing that we do not have that, by
experiencing that when you pass from languag one language to
the other, it is not it doesn't coincide perfectly. So
by experiencing the lack of this perfection, you somehow participate
in bringing yeah, in bringing it about. Bringing it about
is even too much pen I mean speaks of sparks
and splinters, of Messianic sparks and Messianic splinters that exist
in every generation. Every generation has a weak Messianic force.
So there are these these tiny elements that consist of
the most diverse phenomenon, and they are usually they are profane,
but somehow by activating them, there is something of this
Messianic force that comes alive.
Speaker 1: So this is fascinating, especially the part about translation. And
there are many who have rightly seen his essay on
the Task of the Translator and other such works as
having these sort of Jewish points of origin. Let's say,
so let me ask him, do you see his is
writings on translation and on this is kind of a
Damic language as being consistent? Well, are two parts of
this question actually? A do you see it as somewhat
rooted in Jewish ideas? I mean, within certainly within Jewish
mystical traditions, there are some that there are some that
say parallel ideas of a kind of a pristine language
that that suffered some kind of fall and has to
be piece back together. And also, of course the fact
that as a Jew, and as perhaps you know, if
one might want, a stereotype of sort of wondering cosmopolitan
of the early twentieth century, who you know, had no
specific home, but found his home in various European capitals
and various civilizations and various places in the world, and
he therefore had to be a translator in and of himself.
I mean, of course, if you were born in very
first place in Europe, you live sometimes in Berlin, you
live sometimes in Paris, you do sometime here and there,
and you're sort of wondering between cultures. You have to,
in a way constantly be translating. You have to constantly
be a sort of cultural courier, a bridge, as it were.
And so do you think that Benjamin's writing on translation,
which are extremely a valuable do they have these would
you say that these stem from some kind of Jewish background?
Speaker 2: You see, we hear just listening to the way you
put the question. There is a part of it that
is Jewish nest that has to do with moving from
one place to the other, with being cosmopolitan. And then
you also mentioned the Kabbalah, and certain the sacredness of
language and the immense impact of every letter that you have.
And so these two realms, the way they interact. It
is certainly not not conscious that you know that Benjamin,
confronted with the multiplicity of cultures and languages, would therefore
give language such a such a way. But the way
he does it is specific. So the way he brings
this together. So, for example, he opposed very strongly these
artificial universal languages Esperanto for example, that was, you know,
there was a kind of hope that this would contribute
to peace and to understanding between humans, and Benjamin rejected
that completely because that two wouldn't be nothing but a
convention between between humans. So there is an insistence on
something that actually has a transcendent dimension.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's fair enough, in which case, let me let's
attack this question from a different angle, which is something
I've been wanting to bring up the entire conversation, which is,
of course his friendship with Gersham Shalam, because of course,
one thing that you know, students of George still do
know about what's Benjamin is that he was very close
friends with with Gersham Charalam, who saw in him both
a very close personal friend also a close intellectual collaborator
as it were, So could you and I think this
directly touches upon the themes that we've been broaching now
Messianism and translation and other sort of things, because it
could and has been argued. I think that if if
Benjamin had any portal into Judaism or Jurishnis, it would
have been his close friend Gersham Charalam, who of course
would would go on to become the sort of founder
of modern studies of Pabala. We've had, you know, conversations
on this podcast about Shlom before, So could you perhaps
give us firstly that kind of biographically their friendship and
secondly intellectually what did they gain from each other? What
were they talking about, who influenced whom and how? And yeah,
could you sort of give us a window into that
particular world.
Speaker 2: The friendship between Benjamin and Scholem is one of the
most intense, productive, and ultimately tragic intellectual relationships of the
twentieth century. It begins in nineteen fifteen, when both men
are still very young Benjamins twenty three and Sholem was
only nineteen, and it lasts in one form or another
until Benjamin's death in nineteen forty and beyond. In Schorlem's writings,
Charlem edited Benjamin's text after his death and wrote about
their friend wrote the whole book about their friendship, and
published letters so he was he actually would say it
faithful to this friendship beyond Benjamin's death. What makes this
friendships are extraordinary It is not just its emotional depths
with mainly came from Chorlem, who at times in his
diaries in his youth diaries, sounds like he's in love
with Benjamin, but the way it stages the central tensions
of modern Jewish thought between them and for me, it
was particularly interesting to see what they disagreed. From the
very beginning. Sholem sense that Benjamin was an exceptional thinker
and also a precarious figure. Chorlem was already on quite
a clear path as a young man. He was turning
decisively to Jewish theology, to Hebrew, to Kabbalah, studied tunneled,
and obviously to Zionism, convinced that the Jewish tradition had
to be reclaimed with full intensity after the collapse of
you assimilation. Benjamin by the collapse and the danger of
the attraction of European assmilition. Benjamin, by contrast, was immersed
in German philosophy, literature, esthetics, deeply skeptical of any straightforward
return to religion. And yet Lem immediately recognized that Benjamin's
thinking was already structured by Jewish categories, especially language, redemption, revelation, messianism,
that these were already there latently, and that he only
had to actually bring them out, and that he only
yeah that Benjamin resisted them precisely for the reasoners that before,
because he was afraid that it would be parochial. But
for Scholem that that was not an argument. Their correspondence
with stretches over decades is one of the great documents
of German Jewish intellectual history. So I wrote a long
essay in which I go through all these letters, and
in which Scholem tells Benjamin to come to Palestine, and
Benjamin hesitates, is tempted, promises, withdraws, and one can see
that there is there is just so much going on
between them that involves much larger questions, even larger questions
than Palestine or Europe. There are questions of yeah, of
what would give meaning and what means survival. And so
Charlem presses Benjamin to learn Hebrew. Okay, but that also
had something to do with his engagement he had. He
wanted to get him position here in Jerusalem, and so
the for this year to learn Hebrew. And this never
came about a controversy between you know, those who think
that Scholem didn't really try hard enough and the others
who think that that it was Benjamin who didn't live
up to this promise, so that was an important moment.
One of their main debates later was between Marxism and Messianism,
and Sholem always wanted to pull Benjamin a way and
said he doesn't really believe it himself, and that he's
for some reason denying his allegiance to Judaism because he's
being pulled away to the Marxist ideology. I became particularly
interested in their debate on Kafka, and there you can
see how their differences play out, because Schorlem reads Kafka
from with Kabalistic vocabulary, so he speaks of Kafka as
the nothing of revelation. What one can see in Solem's
writings about Kafka is his negative theology. So God is absent,
he is unreachable. But that is where God manifests himself
in modernity. And Benjamin uses another vocabulary, even where he
refers to the Jewish tradition. And Benjamin, at some point,
although he knew this distinction from Chorlem, the distinction between
halaha and agada in the time mould between the legal
and the narrative parts in the time, and he calls
Kafka stories a kind of agada to Alaja and this
difference between the Kabbalistic notions that Shortlam brings in and
the Talmudic category that Benjamin brings in. You can see
how there are two different paths that Jewish modernity can
go in its reference to the older Jewish textual tradition.
And it becomes clear that for Benjamin the time, because
it is concerned with everyday life, has more potential to
be even politically relevant than short Lim's kabbalistic notions. And
for me that was a moment when although Benjamin got
most of his Jewish education from Cholem, where if I
felt that Benjamin was more Jewish, although I resist you
how Jewish? More Jewish?
Speaker 1: Can I point out to the listeners of this podcast
that the professor is using her fingers for air quotes
when she says more Jewish here, that I can see
her on the video, but the listeners will not be.
That's an important thing to point out that you are
practicing this with the air quotes when you say more Jewish.
Speaker 2: But yes, God, Yes, because that in this debate Charlem,
at some point he talks about the law as the
law with a big L, as something that is unfulfillable,
and there is so this resistance or maybe this is
something that probably resonates with the idea of redemption through sin,
so of transgression. And for me, partly because I worked
on I mentioned this before indirectly, this Christian Christianizing reception
of Benjamine, of Kafka, of all these figures that I've
been working on in the book you mentioned when you
introduced me, and I felt that that approach to Alaja
that one finds in Scholem, in this Kafka text this
is it's not Paulinian, but it is let's say, it
betrays sympathies with a certain side of that idea of
you know, the underpaid, unattainability. This is actually what Paul said.
It says the Jewish law has to be suspended because
it turns us all into signos, because it cannot be fulfilled.
And Benjamine has no problem with Jewish law. He has
a problem with state law because there was a certain
narkist leading in him. But yeah, I found that moment
between Charlem and Benjamine particularly revealing interesting.
Speaker 1: Okay, fine, fair enough that there's a lot that I mean,
let me ask you sort of one biographical detail, because
this is also a point of controversy with Benjamin's life,
which is that, as you mentioned several times, there was
a possibility of him joining Charalam in Ersustrael and Israel,
and Charlam maybe would have found a position there, and
several times he did not. He sort of demurred, he
delayed until unfortunately his his tragic ended in nineteen forty.
And the question is, you know, do you see this
as I simply like a coincidence in his biography, is
something that you know was just just happened to be
the case that Benjamin dride a few times comes to
Israeld that it didn't work out. What do you see
this as very symbolic of Benjamin himself and his sympathies,
because this is a man very rooted, let's say, in
European culture, and also very committed to moving from place
to place and being mobile, sort of being able to
cross back, and of course settling in the land of
Israel like Shalam did. Is firstly a move away from
Europe and European culture, which was considered the cultural center
of the world at the time, but also seen as
sort of a step away from from the itinerant life
from and a step into rootedness and Jewishness, writ Large
Island House to put it a commitment to stay in,
a commitment to be ground. And as Charlom was fine.
Charlom was a very committed Zionis, and he was fine
and doing the un the constrious. His dreamed to do that,
and he did it very well. So you know, do
you think do you agree with that sort of reading
of Benjamin's hesitancy and ultimate decision not to go until
it was far too late.
Speaker 2: So this is what the passages in the letters to
show Lem revealed over twenty years. Benjamin considers leaving Europe.
He writes very early on, in one of his early
letters to Ludwig Schaus, he writes, I have to leave
you and I can't. I have to do it, and
I can't bring myself to it already. Then he doesn't
say leaving it for what, But there was a sense
that it was doomed. Europe was doomed, and at the
same time he was deeply, deeply tied to it. But
he was also ambivalent about Palestine, and surprisingly it was
not at least if one takes what he writes at
face value, not because it was too Jewish, because and
I have a So there is an incredible quote where
he talks about Zionists as it's a pretty terrible term.
I've mentioned half humans who And then he says, have
they ever thought about schools, about running a state in
Jewish terms? He says, they call themselves Zionists, and they
booze in German. So he says that they wouln't that
they would lose their Jewishness. Not they would. They do
lose their Jewishness because they import into Palestine they are
German ways, and he didn't believe that Palestine could actually
sustain the spiritual dimension of sholemns of what made come
to Palestine at the time. You know, he turns it
in these letters into something almost positive, the hesitation itself.
At some point he writes, you get passages like, dear Gohard,
everything's ready. I'm coming in November. I'm in Jerusalem. Everything's ready.
All my affairs are settled now. Actually my mother is
sick and I'm expecting guests, and I don't have any money. Now.
I forgot to tell you that I just bought the
complete volumes of good in some antique shop. Right after
saying that he has no and there is a self
undermining that goes on, and at one point even himself
talks about his patrological hesitation. And yet in one of
those letters he talks about the glorious spill rowmleeway that
happens in hesitation, because he said, he writes, at the
actual moment, when the catastrophe is here, there is no
more lieveway, there is no more spill roun to hesitate.
So Benjamin was not only a man full of tensions,
but he embraced tension itself as a mode of thinking
and as a source of inspiration.
Speaker 1: Right, And I suppose it's one of these tragic, tragic
instances where life kind of mirrors philosophy in a way.
Was after all those hesitations, after all those you know,
after all those series of decisions to stay within Europe,
he stayed there forever, essentially because his tragic absolute So
one sort of final important question regards Benjamin's afterlife, because
obviously his I mean or not obviously, but it is
the case that his works have been subject to a
great deal of interpretation and argumentation, review, and especially his
work within the broader context of the Frankfurt scho which
we haven't really talked about, but he was a collaborator
and interlocutor with I don't know and hr time Man,
and you know, a series of very important figures who
later on in post war and the United States, became
very important cultural critics of their own in their own rights.
But there has also been arguments after Benjamin's death as
to the question. We've been discussing that, and I wonder
if you could maybe guide us a little through this
quagmire of kind of debate and discussion regarding Benumin, especially
his his Jewish or otherwise roots or sort of aspects
of him, and also just the sort of the stakes
of it. You know, why would it be important either
to to bring Benjamin closer or to distance him from
Jewishness or Judaism. What are the sort of underlying motivations
within such a debate that that occurred in the decades
after Benyamin's death.
Speaker 2: Maybe the best place to start to answer this is
to pick up the idea of a man of many tensions,
this tension between Marxism and Messianism, between politics and theology,
between Europe and Palestine, between an affirmation of modernity and
a radical critique of modernity. Benjamine does touch on some
of the fundamental questions that any intellectual in the twenties
and still in the twenty first century has to find
an answer for. And these replies are so complex and
subtle that they invite multiple viewpoints on the and this
to this day. So, for example, the question of you know,
with the agreement among intellectuals that the system was was
catastrophic and that one had to so a certain idea
of revolution, of the revolution, And the question to what
extent violence is justified when you are in a tyrannical
system a question that leads us right into our days.
But Benjamin answers this. So there is for example, in
his in his essay Critique of Violence that has a
very strong Jewish dimension. It is fascinating to see how
some people read this completely without the Jewish dimension and
read it as an affirmation of the right to violence
in the revolutionary context, and others do the opposite. And
I've I've written on this text recently, and it became
clear to me that one of the the aspects of
especially German, of the German intellectual landscape, was the question
of myth. Benjamin rejects myths radically and at very different levels.
And in this text he talks about mythical violence, and
mythical violence is the violence that a state or anyone
in power. So the powers that we exert in order
to create their position of power and sovereignty or to
maintain it both are mysical. There he calls that mythical
violence and opposes that to a mysterious notion of divine violence.
And in explaining what divine violence is, that is so
that is justified violence, and the way he describes it
is almost frightening because it is a kind of unjustified,
non negotiated momentum. And then it brings in the story
of Korrah from the Bible, Korrahus swallowed up to the
earth after rebelling against the authority of Moses and our
own And you can see that, you can you could
discuss even our contemporary actuality in terms of where Benjamin
actually situated. Is this justified or is it not? And
I had the feeling that there is something there that
Benjamin leaves purposely inaccessible, that one can discern the dimensions
and the cultures of what he is describing there, but
it is not readily accessible so that one could define
what is this divine violence and what makes it legitimate.
But what one does sense is that in this inaccessibility
of this concept, he points to the fact that this
kind of violence itself is not accessible to humans. So
there is he does, at the same time introduce this radical,
total dimension and words off the dangers of it. And
I think that that's is true for Messianism as well.
Today Messianism has a very bad press, especially relating to Israel.
This is precisely so when one talks about Benjamin's Messianism.
This is maybe the most interesting thing that he at
the same time does invoke such the idea of redemption
and at the same time takes it out of human
hands because of the dangers that this could bring about.
And the same thing with there's a little sentence of
in the context of where he talks about divine violence,
where he says where this actually applies is not available
to humans. So and with Messianism, where you it radically rejects.
Benjamin's reflections of Messianism radically reject any kind of theocracy
and any kind of you know, claiming that for any
political action.
Speaker 1: Well that is now I was very thorough answer to
that question.
Speaker 2: The question the question about the reception. Maybe what I
tried to do is show you asked me. I think
I answered to one part of your question, which is
what is at stake in the way one reads Benjamins.
So I think that maybe I've given some idea of
what is at stake. I experienced too in in my research.
Two areas of the reception of Benjamin's reception that I
found particularly significant. And the one, and this I did
mention before briefly was when I dealt with a group
of contemporary philosophers who read Benjamin in a Christian way
that as a as a kind of Christian anarchist, where
associating Benjamin with the apostle Paul that brings Benjamin to
a radically anti Judaic position that I think is very
dangerous and wrong, not only because it would lose Benjamin
would lose the Jewish dimension, but because of the kind
of Benjamin that comes out of this. It is a
he would then be a radically Antinomian figure, rejecting not
only state law but all law, and driving into some
kind of an apocalyptic abyss. And I, yeah, I see
a completely different Benjamin. There a key moment that illuminated
me about this is when the contemporary philosopher, and that
is at the heart of my of my book on
the Tenuous Legacy of the German Jewish afterlife, it is
a Gamben, Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher who who many consider
the most important era of Benjamin. He writes about Kafka's
text before the Law. This the following is a reading
of Kafka's story in Beniaminian light. So this is in
the Benyaminian spirit. And then you know, it's the story.
I'm not going into it in detail, but it's the
story where a man comes to the law, it has
no access to it, and waits his whole life in
front of the entrance to the law. There's a doorkeeper
who doesn't let him in, and the man whaits all
his life is negotiating with the doorkeeper. And at the end,
after seeing a glimmer of light coming through the door,
he says, how come nobody else passed by here, and
the doorkeeper says, well, it was meant for you and
shuts the door. Slams the door shut. A gun Ben
is the only one who and he says this in
a Benaminian spirit, this would read as follows and then
always this had This story has been written mainly as
the inaccessibility of the law, especially if considered as divine
law for a modern man and a gun. Ben writes, No, No,
the key mood moment is when the doorkeeper slams the
door shut, because finally we are rid of the law,
and that would be a kind of fulfillment the suspension
of the law, as Paul did to Jewish law. So
the law is suspended now, and that would be Benjamini,
just to give you an idea of how this kind
of reading really shows how precarious the reception of Viter
Benjamin and of this Jewish tradition is.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, We've covered an enormous amount of ground, and
I wish to cover more. How we're gonna have to
stop it. We're going to draw the cut down in
a moment. Before we do, I would like to ask
a question that I asked many of my guests, which
goes as follows. If you could sit down tonight for
dinner with Walter Benjamin, what would you want to ask him?
What would you be talking to him about? First it
do you think would be a pleasant experience? And what
would you what would be chatting to Benjamin about tonight.
Speaker 2: I would ask him the question that he asks of
the afterlife of a work, that it be torn away
from the conventions and not be regarded in terms of
what it meant in its time, but what it would
do in hours. And I would ask Benjamin whether he
would agree with me that it is not the radicalism,
but the simultaneity of the intensity and the subtlety of
his thinking that would matter today.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a very it's a very would be very
interesting thing. And you know, if you ever get an
answer from him, please do let us know on this
particular point. Professor Vivian Liska, thank you so very much
for Johnny yesterday on the podcast Jewish Ideas to talk
about what Benjamin. This has been a great pleasure, and
thank you for illuminating this particularly complex and difficult thinker.
We hope to see you again soon.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: This has been the podcast of Jewish Ideas by Tora
in Motion, produced by Alisha Kellman and myself Jjkimbri, edited
and mixed by Alisha Kelman. You can stay up to
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