“In the Grip of the Theologico-Political Predicament”:
Baroque and Weimar Marranism
Bruce Rosenstock
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
brsnstck@illinois.edu
Something both remarkable and strange in Jewish history took place in Germany in the early
decades of the twentieth century. The German-Jewish “generation of 1914” -- a diverse
group including, among many others, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig,
Gershom Scholem, and Martin Buber -- took it upon themselves to renew Judaism by
reinvigorating and reconfiguring its messianic traditions. Anson Rabinbach has described
this “modern Jewish messianism” as “radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric
intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamored of
apocalyptic vision – whether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense” (1985,
78-124: 80). This modern Jewish messianism is, as I have said, both remarkable and
strange. The intellectual and artistic output of this generation of modern Jewish messianists is
certainly remarkable by any measure. What makes it strange, I will argue in this paper, is the
kinship it bears with the much earlier outbreak of messianic fervor in baroque-era Europe.1
This paper seeks to explore the strange kinship between baroque-era and Weimar
messianism.
We may begin to understand the strange kinship between baroque and Weimar messianism
by relating both moments of Jewish messianism to what Leo Strauss, himself a younger
member of the Weimar generation, has called the “theologico-political predicament.”
Strauss argues, as I will explain in more detail shortly, that the theologico-political
predicament as it confronted the young messianic Jewish generation in Weimar Germany
resembled the theologico-political predicament that previously confronted many
seventeenth-century Jews of Marrano descent when they left Catholic Spain and re-entered
the Jewish world. The description of the Judaism of these Marranos offered by Strauss could
equally well apply to that of his Weimar contemporaries: “... the spiritual content of Judaism
had—after several generations of un-Jewish living—inevitably faded ...” (Spinoza's Critique:
53). The Marranos’ ambivalent relation to Jewish tradition led many of them them to
embrace the antinomian messianism centered around the figure of Sabbatai Zevi, the
“mystical messiah” whose conversion to Islam in 1666 was believed to be the first act in the
redemption of the Jewish people. It is also an antinomian messianism that attracted many
1
For a very fine collection of essays dealing with these baroque-era messianic movements
and their historical interconnection, see Goldish, Matt and Richard Popkin, eds. Jewish
Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht 2001. Perhaps the most relevant
essay for my purposes in this paper is Matt Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism”
(pp. 41-64).
young Weimar Jews. Although Gershom Scholem and Ersnt Bloch were particularly attracted
to antinomian Jewish messianism, I have chosen to focus in what follows on Walter Benjamin
as a representative figure of Weimar messianism. After first detailing the similar
theologico-political predicament that confonted both baroque Marranos and Weimar Jews, I
will turn to the exemplary case of Walter Benjamin and trace the trajectory of his messianism
in the 1920’s until the publication of Origin of German Tragic Drama in early 1928. This book
was published not long after several intense conversations he held in Paris with Gershom
Scholem about Scholem’s recent discovery of an important Sabbatian messianic text by the
Marrano Abraham Miguel Cardoso.2 That conversation, I will argue, left its trace in the final
page of the German Tragic Drama book. With Walter Benjamin, baroque-era Marrano
messianism is strangely, I might even say uncannily, resurrected.3
The strange kinship between baroque and Weimar Marrano messianism can, as I have said,
be explicated in terms of their similar relation to the Jewish “theologico-political predicament.”
Leo Strauss devoted two of his early works to the questions raised by this predicament: Die
Religionskritik Spinozas (Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 1930)4 and Philosophie und Gesetz
(Philosophy and Law, 1935).5 I will focus on the 1965 Preface to the English translation of
the Spinoza book. The Preface begins as follows: “This study on Spinoza’s
Theologico-Political Treatise was written during the years 1925-28 in Germany. The author
was a young Jew who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament”
(Spinoza's Critique: 1). It should not be at all surprising if Strauss’s characterization of his
own “theologico-political predicament” in the 1920s can help us in unraveling the connection
between the baroque Marrano messianists of the seventeenth century and the Weimer
messianists who were Strauss’s contemporaries. Strauss, we should remember, based his
understanding of his own theologico-political predicament upon a study of one the most
important figures of baroque-era Jewish life, Baruch Spinoza, who, as is well known, himself
For a discussion of Cardoso and his own messianic pretensions, see Bruce Rosenstock,
“Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Messianism: A Reappraisal.” Association of Jewish Studies
Review 32/1 (1998): 63-104. and Bruce Rosenstock, “Messianism, Machismo, and
‘Marranism’: The Case ofAbraham Miguel Cardoso.” in Boyarn, Daniel and Daniel
Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini, eds. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York,
2003): 199-227.
3 Jeffrey Mehlman in his discussion of this conversation argued that it reinforced a
dangerous antinomian streak in Benjamin. See Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for
Children: An Essay on his Radio Years (Chicago, 1993). Mehlman overemphasizes the
antinomian aspect of the “voluntary Marranoism” that he says characterized the
Sabbatianism, failing to see that in the perspective of Abraham Miguel Cardoso, the
Sabbatian theologian that Scholem talked about with Benjanim, the antinomian aspect of
the messiah was not something to be imitated by the faithful (40-47). Mehlman is not
interested in the broad phenomenon of Weimar period Jewish fascination with Marranism
in the baroque era. He therefore fails to locate it within the context of theologico-political
problem of Jewish modernity. For a critique of Mehlman, see Martin Jay, Refractions of
Violence (London and New York, 2003): 22-4.
4 Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (New York, 1965).
5 Leo Strauss, Leo, Philosophy and Law : Contributions to the Understanding of
Uaimonides and his Predecessors. Albany, 1995).
2
had a Marrano background.6 That Spinoza was adamantly opposed to the messianic fervor
sweeping up many of his fellow Marranos with the spread of Sabbatianism in the year 1665
only made him all the more appealing to Strauss. Strauss was at first drawn towards but
ultimately grew deeply uncomfortable with the messianic fervor of many of his Jewish
contemporaries. This fact makes him a valuable witness to the powerful grip of
“theological-political predicament” in which, during the 1920s, he and his contemporaries
were held.
In his 1965 Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss makes it clear that the when he
refers to the “theologico-political predicament” he is describing the diasporic existence of the
Jewish people in moderntiy, their existence in Galut in the context of the secularized nation
state. Galut is the traditional name for the condition of the Jewish people in history until, as
Strauss puts it, “the arrival of the Messianic age, of the redemption of Israel and of all men”
(1965: 6). Of course, the category of Galut only makes sense within a theological framework,
but it is a framework that the Jewish people cannot jettison in favor of a secular existence
without jettisoning the foundation of Jewish existence as such, for that foundation, according
to Strauss, “presents itself as a divine gift, as divine revelation” (1965: 6). Thus, the Jewish
people in the modern world straddle two worlds, the world of divine revelation and Messianic
redemption and the world of human politics.
In the modern world, the passive and patient suffering of Galut by the Jewish people is
challenged by the modern confidence in scientific rationality that Strauss sometimes calls the
“positive mind” (1965: 180). “The positive mind,” Strauss writes, “is characterized precisely by
this: that it looks toward the future, not merely hoping for it, but rather using its own powers to
build the future, and that it does not suffer from the past” (1965: 191). The positive mind,
Strauss goes on to explain, “is incapable of suffering from the past, since it has not lost an
original perfection by a Fall, but has by its own effort worked itself out of the original
imperfection, barbarism and rudeness” (1965: 180). But Strauss declares that there is one
problem that the positive mind cannot solve, one form of suffering from the past it cannot be
rid of, and that is the “theologico-political problem.” The Jewish positive mind can define
Galut as “barbarism and rudeness,” but it cannot, according to Strauss, “build the future” of
the Jewish people apart from any connection to Jewish law. The Jewish theologico-political
problem of Galut is insoluble, that is, it is not amenable to human solutions: “Finite, relative
problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved,” he says in his typical
lapidary style (1965: 6). But Strauss is fully aware that modern Jewish history consists of one
attempt after another, on the part of both the Jewish people and the nations in which they find
themselves, at finding a final solution of the Jewish problem.
6
Benjamin Lazier (Lazier 2008: 67-72) has recently documented the broad interest in
Baruch Spinoza among Weimar intellectuals and has characterized this as part of the
period’s attempt to confront the apparent absence of God from the cataclysmic upheavals
of human history, a felt absence, I would add, that earlier drove many long-suffering
Marranos to embrace, even more intensely after his apostasy, an occluded messiah who
had come from an occluded God. See Benjamin Lazier, God interrupted : Heresy and the
European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, 2008). Lazier mentions how
Spinoza’s Marrano background attracted some intellectuals, not all of them Jewish, to a
figure who seemed thereby to be distanced from all religious traditions. This, I think, is
based upon a mistaken romanticization of both Spinoza and Marranos more generally, but
it does attest to the kinship many Weimar intellectuals felt to the Marranos of the
seventeenth century.
For Strauss, then, the theologico-political dilemma that held him in its grip as a young Jew in
Weimar Germany was an infinite problem which ceaselessly elicits false, and sometimes
dangerously false, finite solutions. I want now to offer a more detailed account of why,
according to Strauss, the theologico-political problem becomes particularly gripping in the
modern period. The rise of scientific rationality (the “positive mind”) is only one enabling
factor in the effort to find human solutions to this infinite problem. The root causes have to do
with transformations internal to Jewish history. Strauss’s analysis of the theologico-political
problem identifies a fundamental contradiction between the political reality of Galut and the
theological basis upon which Jewish national identity in Galut was traditionally forged,
namely, the Torah. Jewish national identity in Galut was traditionally sustained by the belief
that the Jewish way of life was not “a product of the human mind” but rather, as we have
already seen, “a divine gift, ... a divine revelation” (Spinoza's Critique 6). In the modern
period, there are two great changes in the Jewish people's relation to the revealed law. First,
the belief in the divine origin of biblical law is subjected to historical criticism. Second, the
liberal nation state relegates religious identity to the privatized sphere of society, making it a
matter of individual discretion exercised outside the public and religiously neutral sphere of
the state. Both changes – the historical critique of revealed law and the privatization of
religious identity in the liberal state – are, for Strauss, the two key factors in creating the
theologico-political problem of modern Jewish existence. Both changes turn the revealed law
into a de-theologized object in so far as it becomes, first, an object of historical study and,
second, an object of preferential choice. As Strauss puts it, the revealed law had become
understood as one aspect of Jewish “culture,” a “product of the national mind” (Spinoza’s
Critique 6). As an object of historical study or of a private “cultural” preference, the Torah
had ceased to be the living matrix of Jewish national identity.
Strauss credits Spinoza with being among the first Jews for whom Jewish law became a mere
object. Spinoza’s critique of biblical law, Strauss argues, cannot be understood apart from “his
fundamental alienation from Judaism” (Spinoza’s Critique 169). According to Strauss,
Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Tractatus signaled a radical shift in modern Jewish national
identity. Spinoza offered the Jewish people a place in the modern nation state if they
accepted the terms of membership it offered, namely, obedience to a law of human origin.
Spinoza rejected the possibility that Galut -- exile and loss of full self-governance and
autonomy -- could be a proper part of any nation’s political life. Law, for Spinoza, was
designed to foster the physical and emotional flourishing of the people, and exile was clearly
a condition of suffering. The revealed law of the Jewish people, therefore, had ceased to be
obligatory as the law of the nation in precisely the situation – Galut -- in which it was
traditionally thought to be most obligatory, that is, most necessary for the preservation of the
Jewish people. The revealed law had become the lifeless shell of a nation whose continued
existence in Galut, Spinoza concludes, cannot be explained from within, but only from
without: “it is the resentment of the gentiles that to a large extent preserves them.”7 Spinoza
de-theologizes Galut, leaving it only as a political problem, a problem potentially amenable to
a human solution. The human solution to the theologico-political problem of Galut is,
according to Spinoza, either to accept the terms of existence offered to all citizens in a
confessionally neutral sovereign state or to regain the courage needed to live a national life in
one’s own sovereign state, a possibility Spinoza does not rule out. If the Jewish people can
regain their courage after having been effeminized, as he puts it, through centuries of passive
7
Bendedictus de Spinoza, and Jonathan I. Israel, ed., Theological-Political Treatise
(Cambridge; New York, 2007): 55.
suffering, they might once again forge a national identity in their own territory on a politically
secure basis. Should this happen, “God will choose them again” (Theological-Political
Treatise 55). Of course, for Spinoza to say that God “will choose” the Jewish people again
does not mean that God will act to intervene in history. Spinoza says that God “chooses” -i.e, is the causative power expressing itself in -- every people who create the conditions of
their lasting self-preservation through the laws of their state. Spinoza thus shows the way
towards the two forms of what Strauss calls the Jewish people’s “secular redemption”: either
individual integration into the liberal nation state as “citizens of the Mosaic creed” or collective
integration into the community of sovereign nations.
Spinoza thus is the exponent of two possible human solutions to the Jewish
theologico-political predicament: the privatization of Judaism as one personally chosen creed
among others in the liberal state or the nationalization of Judaism as the law of a Jewish
state. Strauss denies that either path offers a complete solution to the theologico-political
problem of the Jewish people because both paths sidestep the theological dilemma that
Jewish law is, or claims to be, revealed. To the extent that he rejects purely secular
solutions of the “Jewish Question,” Strauss is in full agreement with those of his
contemporaries – Ernst Bloch, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most
notable -- who also rejected the secularization of Jewish identity. Bloch, Rosenzweig, and
Benjamin looked for a revival of Jewish messianism to restore life to the body of the nation.
These thinkers recognize that Judaism’s problem is not merely a political problem, but is also
a theological one. Their return to Jewish theology is not a return to Jewish orthodoxy,
however, but to what Strauss in Philosophy and Law calls a “modified, ‘internalized’ form” of
the tradition. Although Strauss dedicated his book on Spinoza to the memory of Franz
Rosenzweig, he cannot accept Rosenzweig’s internalized categories of creation, revelation,
and redemption: “The ‘internalizing’ of concepts like creation, miracles, and revelation robs
these concepts of their whole meaning,” Strauss declares in the Introduction to Philosophy
and Law (24). What Strauss fails to recognize is that when the theologico-political problem
colors every aspect of Judaism, the “external” meaning of the Torah as revelation is also
problematized. To one extant or another, for many Jews in the modern period “the spiritual
content of Judaism ... had faded,” leaving only a profound sense of the gap between the
memory of being God’s “first-born son” and the reality of being orphaned and homeless in
history. Any renewal of Jewish theology once all the “external” meanings of the traditional
theology are problematized must, therefore, be based upon an “internalized” meaning of
revelation. The baroque-era Marranos who were attracted to the “internal” faith of
Sabbatianism exemplify this fact, just as do the Weimar Jewish intellectuals who were their
spiritual kin.
Having now grasped, with Strauss’s assistance, the lineaments of the theologico-political
problem of Jewish modernity, I want now to consider why this problem seems to have its
first expression among Marranos. This fact is not lost on Leo Strauss who notes that,
except for Thomas Hobbes, all of the figures whose Bible criticism he will explore in the
Spinoza book – Uriel da Costa, Isaac de la Peyrère, and Baruch Spinoza – were all of
Marrano background. Strauss is aware that the Marranos’ Judaism was “no longer the
concrete and unquestioning Judaism of earlier times” (1965: 53). But Strauss denies that
“Marranism” is a helpful explanatory category in the case of the three Marrano figures he
studies. Strauss rejects the possibility that one putative phenomenon – Marranism – could
account for three such distinct attitudes towards Judaism: Uriel da Costa’s “Sadducean”
Judaism, Isaac de la Peyrère’s proto-Zionist messianism, and Spinoza’s full-fledged
rejection of Judaism. Strauss grants a role to Marranism only in the case of Isaac de la
Peyrère whose “expectation of the coming of the Messiah springs from the affection felt by a
man for the people of his own race, and not for a traditional faith” (1965: 84). But I think that
Strauss’s judgment needs to be revised. I think that we do in fact see something that all three
thinkers share in common in virtue of their Marrano background: a relationship to the Mosaic
law figured as a relationship to a temporally anomalous, half-living and half-dead, being, as if
the revealed law were a sort of mummy that might perhaps be unrwrapped and revived. They
all also display a common attitude to the Jewish people as a whole, as a people similarly
caught in a temporal limbo. Augustine had long before identified Judaism and the the Jewish
people as a sort of living corpse, a “dead letter” preserved in a spiritually blind limbo state in
order to witness to the prophetic texts that spoke of the coming of Jesus. These three
Marranos’ felt relationship to their Judaism was partly shaped by this widespread Christian
attitude to the Jews and also by their continuing memory of their Jewish past. That this
memory was kept alive in part by the persecutorial society in which they or their parents had
lived did not diminish the sense that the ghost of their past had not been laid to rest. 8
Strauss mistakenly casts Marranism in an almost entirely psychological light when he speaks
of it as responsible only for Isaac de la Peyrère’s “affection ... for the people of his own race”
but discounts its role in shaping the thought of da Costa and Spinoza in any significant way.
Strauss downplays Marranism because he is interested in situating the biblical critique of da
Costa, Isaac de la Peyrère, and Spinoza within the framework of modernity’s attempt to
neutralize theology – the source of interconfessional wars during the sixteenth century – in
the name of a purely humanly constructed peace, the peace of a future built by the “positive
mind.”9 But Strauss’s analysis of the theologico-political problem of Jewish modernity
offers another light in which to view Marranism. In what follows I will offer an alternative to
Strauss’s dismissive attitude about the significance of Marranism in the formation of modern
Jewish responses to the “theologico-political predicament.”
In the 1965 Preface to the Spinoza book Strauss speaks about the exemplary place of the
Jewish people in modernity: “From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were
the chosen people in the sense, at least, that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol
of the human problem as a social or political problem” (1965: 6). What he means is that the
Jewish people, in straddling the divide between divine revelation and human politics,
exemplify the human problem itself on the collective level. The “human problem as a social or
political problem” can perhaps be phrased as follows: how can a people live its finite life in
history in relation to an infinite obligation that transcends time, an obligation that lifts finite life
into the sphere of the sacred. This problem, posed as a challenge to a nation’s continuing
For a discussion of how this Marrono sensibility expressed itself in the fifteenth-century
writings of converso theologians who battled against the charge that Jewish blood was so
“impure” that it could not be saved through baptism, see Bruce Rosenstock, New Men:
Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (London, 2002).
9 Strauss’s understanding of the modern “neutralization” of a theological view of history in
favor of a purely human and humanly masterable history is indebted to Carl Schmitt,
evidenced by the fact that his Spinoza book includes his essay on Schmitt’s Concept of the
Political. Strauss was pushing Schmitt to admit the irreducibly theological dimension of
history, the “infinite” problem of the theologico-political predicament that is not amenable to
finite human solutions. Schmitt took this step, but in contrast with Strauss he argued that
an “authentic” politics could be part of a historical process under God’s sovereign rule.
8
existence, emerges for the first time in modernity, and the Jews are the people who,
because their historic existence is so intimately tied up with their obedience to revealed law,
become “the most manifest symbol” of modernity’s theologico-political problem. But the
Marranos are the first Jews to collectively experience their finite life in history as a sphere
divorced from the transcendent obligations of sacred law. Let me explain in more detail how it
is possible to view the Marranos as perhaps the “chosen people” in Strauss’s terms, the
people who are “the most manifest symbol” of modernity’s theologico-political problem.
The relation of the Maranos to the revealed law was forced to become a single part of their
otherwise finite life in history, a part that was radically distinct from their public lives, a part
that was felt to be maintained at the risk of finite life itself. The numberless, daily practices
that stitched together the people’s finite lives to the realm of the infinite ceased to hold the two
sides of Jewish existence together for the Marranos. Finite life seemed nearly entirely
severed from the infinite and absolute realm; the horizontal bonds among the people and the
vertical bond between the people and God are, for the Marranos, withdrawn to a single point,
the self-consciousness of the individual Marrano. Marrano consciousness is burdened with a
haunting memory of a lost wholeness and a hope (one of the key words in Marrano literature
is esperanza) for its restoration. Marrano consciousness is a limbo consciousness. To put
it in Strauss’s words, they continue to “suffer from the past,” perhaps feeling this suffering
more acutely for being unable to live fully in the law by which, for traditional Jews, past and
present were tied together. Spinoza pursued a path leading away from the burden of the
past, but many other Marranos sought other remedies. To anticipate the direction of my
argument, one could say, using Benjamin’s characterization of the baroque era, that the
Marranos were the first Jews to experience the Torah no longer as the living symbol of the
divine presence in history, but as an allegory whose disjointed elements lay scattered across
the face of a godforsaken world. The shattered fragments of the revealed law needed to be
reassembled in a new and living whole. Many Marranos had lived with intense messianic
expectations and in the seventeenth century it was among the descendants of the Marranos
that the apostate Messiah Sabbatai Zevi found his most fervent believers. Besides Nathan
of Gaza, the most important theologian of the “mystical Messiah” was of Marrano background,
Abraham Miguel Cardoso. I will have more to say about Cardoso in what follows, but let me
now indicate how significant he is as a figure straddling the baroque and Weimar worlds of
Jewish messianism: it is only in 1928, in Gerhard Scholem’s essay for Der Jude “Über die
Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardozos” that Cardoso first appears on
the world stage as a major messianic Jewish theologian, a sort of latter-day Paul. Scholem
describes him as “one of the most important authors” in the history of Jewish literature.10 With
Scholem’s discovery of Cardoso and his subsequent conversations with Benjamin about
Sabbatian antinomian messianism, we may see the closing of a circuit linking two critical
epochs in Jewish history.
In what remains, I will explore -- all too briefly -- Benjamin’s version of what Rabinbach
speaks of as the “modern Jewish messianism” of the Weimar generation. I hope to show
how Benjamin’s version of messiansim, even before he learns about Sabbatai Zevi, is already
Sabbatian in form. Scholem, too, shared this messianic perspective with Benjamin, and both
men, therefore, were drawn to Cardoso’s portrait of a messiah who redeems by descending
into the abyss of a fallen world in order to draw out from it the hidden sparks of a fragmented
divine light.
10
Scholem, Gershom Gerhard, “Über die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham
Cardozos.” Der Jude (1928): 123-39. Quotation is taken from page 125.
I have said that Benjamin’s messianism is Sabbatian in form. The form of the Sabbatian
messiology is, as Scholem was quite to recognize, gnostic. Benjamin was early on drawn to
the gnostic redeemer myth, first discovering it in the works of Franz von Baader and then in
Christian mystical texts of the baroque era, and especially in Jacob Boehme.11 The gnostic
redeemer myth traces the descent of the redeemer into the depths of a fallen, material world
in order to awaken and recover the trapped emanations of the highest Godhead. It happens
that this myth’s structure is shared by the messianic theology developed by Abraham
Cardoso to explain Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy as his descent into the realm of kelipot, the
material shards holding the shattered light of the divine realm according to Lurianic Kabbalah.
Benjamin in his early reflections on the Romantic concept of the art work reworked the gnostic
redeemer myth into his conception of a messianic practice of aesthetic criticism. It is
interesting that in his turn to the Romantic concept of criticism he finds significance precisely
in the Romantic effort to overcome the division between finitude and infinitude through critical
reflection. He says in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism that with their concept
of critical reflection, tied intimately to irony, “the Romantics penetrate into the absolute.”12
Whatever Benjamin may mean by this phrase, it is clear that he sees in Romantic art criticism
a vehicle for relinking the finite realm of history with some transcendent and infinite realm,
and that this relinking required not the escape from finitude, but its penetration and its
expansion outward toward infinity through an act of ironizing reflection. This is the very
gesture of the Sabbatian theology of redemption through sin.
Benjamin’s early work on aesthetic criticism conceives of the work of art as opening a path by
which to penetrate through finitude into “the absolute.” Benjamin sees the art work as
divided between its material and historically contingent content and the form by which it
reflects the transhistorical absolute. The absolute cannot be grasped apart from any material
embodiment whatsoever; it must always be incarnated. The difficulty for the critic is to
discover a way of releasing the absolute so that it can be resurrected in a new content. The
critic undertakes the task of freeing the art work from its fossilization into a dead “classic.” “In
order for criticism ... to be the supension of all limitation,” Benjamin writes in The Concept of
Criticism, “the work must rest on limitation.” In other words, the art work must be a limited
incarnation of the absolute. But the critic must find hidden within this limitation a formal
organization that connects the material parts to an inward “reflection.” “Criticism fulfills its
task,” Benjamin declares, “insofar as ... it ... dissolves the original reflection in one higher, and
so continues” (Concept of Criticism 156). In this text from 1919 we can already hear the more
well-known description of “the task of translator” in the 1921 essay of that title: “to liberate the
language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (Concept of Criticism 261). The
messianic import of Benjamin’s concept of liberatory criticism or translation is suggested by
One must also mention the powerful influence of Ernst Bloch’s thoroughly gnostic Spirit of
Utopia on Benjamin. Near the end of his book Bloch expresses the essence of the gnostic
myth: “There is in God, as our depth, this double self, at first confused, unclear,
unseparated, but then awakened with complete clarity, and set apart, and indeed in such
measure as humans have started on the path of wanting-to-know-better, as the serpent
who returned within Christ and made the true Revelation more nearly audible against the
wrath of the demiurge—as in other words our Luciferan nature rebelled in real terms ...
against the principle of an errant, depopulated, physical beginning of the world ...” (Bloch
2000: 374-75).
12 Walter Benjamin and Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael W. Jennings, eds., Selected
Writings. Vol.1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996): 130.
11
Benjamin’s insistence that “in Holy Writ alone” has the historical contingency of material
content and the formal “reflection” of the absolute found their perfect unification, with the
result that the “Holy Writ” is the endless source of re-creation in every historical epoch and in
every language. The translator of the scriptures fulfills a messianic task: “to release in his own
language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues” (Concept of Criticism 261).
Further evidence of the messianic task of the critic/translator can be found in Benjamin’s
essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities13 Explaining why Goethe’s characters lack individuality
and seem “typical.” Benjamin describes the world of the novel as one that has fallen into a
condition of radical separation from God. In characterizing this radical separation, Benjamin
says that the novel’s characters inhabit “an order whose members live out their lives under a
nameless law, a fatality that fills their world with the pallid light of a solar eclipse” (“Elective
Affinities” 305). The sense that the world is under the weight of a lifeless law not only fills the
novel. It also informs the experience of all those who are caught in the “grip of the
theologico-political dilemma.” They all experience a gulf between God and the world, between
the infinite and the finite. What once had stitched God and the world together – the revealed
law – has become a dead weight, more like Greek Fate than the living symbol of God’s
presence in the world. Benjamin speaks of this in his Goethe essay as the apparent triumph
of the “mythic powers” over the living power of God. Benjamin devotes a great deal of his
writing to finding a way to burst the bonds of Fate and release the power of revelation – the
“pure language which is exiled among alien tongues” as he says in his “Task of the
Translator” essay -- into the world once more. Benjamin felt that this effort to burst the bonds
of Fate had something to do with Jewish messianism and the Kabbalah, but he had no idea
how he was reliving the messianic yearnings that came to the fore in the baroque era among
many Jews of Marrano descent.14
In a conversation with Scholem in 1927 after a four year interval during which Scholem had
been teaching in Jerusalem, Benjamin heard for the first time about Sabbatian theology and
about Scholem’s discovery of an important manuscript of Abraham Miguel Cardoso. During
the preceding four years, Benjamin had been working on his Tragic Drama book, which was
in 1927 very nearly completed. In his memoir about his friendship with Benjamin, Scholem
writes about the “memorable evening” in which he talked to Benjamin about the Cardoso
manuscript: “In Cardoso’s writings in defense of Sabbatian heresy ... smoldered a flame that
leaped from me to my first audience.”15 The discussion of Cardoso, Scholem goes on to
explain, was part of a larger question that engaged the two men at that time: “Was Judaism
still alive as a heritage or an experience, even as something evolving, or did it exist only as an
object of cognition?” (Story of a Friendship 136). This question, with which, Scholem
The essay was written from 1919 to 1922 and published a few years later; English
translation in Benjamin Selected Writings, Vol. I: 297-360 (see fn. 12).
14 One can find a similar sense of the world as under mythic powers of Fate that will be
overcome in the messianic age in the writing of Ernst Bloch. See, for example, The Spirit of
Utopia in which he writes that “in the Apocalypse heaven will depart like a rolled-up cloth,
and the Kabbalah teaches, not without reason, how it was out of precisely the debris of
nature that the hostile demons emerged who wanted to destroy the human realm. The
mere physical world is still an impediment in itself; it is the collapsed house in which no one
lived, is a rubbish heap of cheated, deceased, degraded, misled and ruined life, is the
kingdom of Edom as it was, as it still is outside of Israel ....” Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of
Utopia (Stanford, 2000): 271.
15 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin : The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia, 1981): 136.
13
confesses, he “grappled with for years,” is not different from what Leo Strauss has called the
“theologico-political predicament.” Where Strauss thought he might find an answer to this
question by taking on the challenge of Spinoza, Scholem thought he would find the answer by
studying the Sabbatian heresy, and Cardoso in particular. I have already pointed to how
Strauss considers the possibility of explaining Uriel da Costa, Isaac de la Peyrere, and
Spinoza within the context of Marranism, only to abandon this explanatory model. Scholem,
however, places Cardoso and Sabbatianism squarely in the context of Marranism. Scholem
was far more sensitive than was Strauss—he himself felt it intensely but Strauss was
completely cold it--to the powerful yearning for a messianic renewal of the smoldering embers
of Jewish tradition that still burned within the breasts of both baroque-era Marranos and his
own generation of alienated Jews. This is what drew him to the messianic Marrano Cardoso
while Strauss turned to anti-messianic Marrano Spinoza.
In the 1928 Der Jude essay in which Scholem published the results of his study of the
Cardoso manuscript, we quickly see the centrality of Cardoso’s Marrano background for
Scholem, and how he connects it with his and Benjamin’s own situation. “The theology of
Sabbatianism,” Scholem explains in a sentence that is italicized as the essay’s central thesis,
“proves to be the construction of a virtually gnostic antinomianism within the world of Judaism
and its ordering of life, conceived out of a dialectical disintegration of the ground concepts of
Lurianic Kabbalah within a Marrano mentality. It proves to be the reaction of Marranism upon
the Kabbalah.”16 Perhaps as a nod to his friend who had been the first person to hear from
Scholem about this gnostic Jewish messianism and whose own German Tragic Drama had
recently been published, Scholem adds this line: “Hier is die wahre Schauplatz dieses
Trauerspiels” (“Here is the true stage of this tragic drama”).
In the remainder of his essay on Cardoso, Scholem explains that the Marrano alienation from
an organic connection to the law led to a strange gnostic antinomianism in which the law,
insofar as it was transgressed, acquired a messianic force. Scholem explains how Cardoso
believed the Jewish law had become a mere shell in which the people lived in exile without
real connection to God. Finally, in Cardoso’s generation, and especially among the
Marranos, the deadness of the Jewish law was perceived in all its clarity. Cardoso says
that the people lost their living connection to God after the destruction of the second Temple.
In place of this living connection, the rabbis constructed a theology taken from the Greek
philosophers in which an abstract First Cause was worshipped as the creator of the world.
The scriptures in which the Jewish people had been able to recognize a personal God, whom
Cardoso identifies with “the Holy One, Blessed be He, and His Schekhinah,” the Kabbalistic
names for the Sephirot of Tipheret and Malkhut respectively. These configurations of the
divine pleroma are the male and female “faces” (partsufim) of the God of Israel, the God of
revelation. The male and female aspects of God have been severed during the exile, and the
female side must be “raised from the dust” and restored to her husband. This remarriage can
only be consummated through messianic action. Cardoso explains that there are two
Messiahs, each corresponding to one “face” of the God of Israel. The task of the messiah who
is from the female side is to go as far as possible into the dust, to descend into the kelipot or
shards of materiality holding the fragments of the divine light, and to begin the process of
16
“Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus erweist sich als die Konstrukction eines virtuellen
gnostischen Antinomismus innerhald der Welt des Judentums und seiner Lebensordnung,
aus einem dialektischen Zerfall der Grundbegriffe der lurjanischen Kabbala im
marranischen Geiste konzipiert. Sie erweist sich als die Reaktion des Marranentums auf
die Kabbala. ” Scholem, “Theologie ... Abraham Cardozos,” 125. See fn. 10.
reassembling them. The messiah from the female side must overturn the Jewish law so that
it can be remade in its proper form, as the expression of the personal God and not the cold
and impersonal commands of a distant, abstract God as the rabbis had made it out to be. The
task of the messiah who is from the male side – and Cardoso believes himself to be this
figure -- is to penetrate with his intellect and then disseminate publicly the secret mystery at
the heart of the Hebrew Bible, the mystery of God’s androgynous personhood, and to show
how Israel can help to reunite the male and female aspects of God. The reunion of the two
sides of God demands, according to Cardoso, that all Jews relate to the Jewish law as if they
were Marranos within Judaism, that is, they must fulfill the law as an outward obligation
imposed upon them as a form of suffering in sympathy with the Shekhinah who has not yet
been lifted from the dust. When Sabbatai Zevi is restored to life and crowned in glory, the
Shekhinah will be reunited with the Holy One and the law will cease to be obligatory. But until
that time, Jews must continue to perform the commandments, but always with an inward
focus upon the Holy One and his still suffering Shekhinah, and also with a faith in Sabbatai
Zevi as the messiah who has left Israel to redeem the Shekhinah from her imprisonment in
the material shards of a broken cosmos. Cardoso has created a Marrano messianism and a
Marrano theology.
We cannot know what Scholem said to Benjamin in his conversations with him about the
manuscript of Cardoso he had found in the Bodleian in which this Marrano theology is
articulated. What is likely, however, is that he and Benjamin sensed a kinship with Cardoso
that went quite deep. They sensed the pathos of a man who chose to be a Marrano within
Judaism itself, to deliberately assume the identity that once had been thrust upon him within
Spain. He refused to accept Galut as the fate of the Jewish people, but he also refused to
deny the reality of Galut. Rather, he saw Galut as already in process of being reversed
through the action of a messiah who took it upon himself to leap into the abyss of Galut in
order to reassemble the fragments of the divine light. Cardoso would follow in his footsteps
as an intellectual venture, penetrating into the secrets of the language of the Hebrew Bible
and translating them into words that would let the light shine forth once again from the
revelation of the Holy One. The messianic task of finding the symbolic significance within the
material literality of the scriptures was already one that both Benjamin had seen as his own.
In the concluding pages of the German Tragic Drama book, Benjamin offers a description of a
descent into the seemingly godforsaken world of a fallen creation, the “the arbitrary rule in the
realm of dead objects, supposed infinity of a world without hope.” This descent is taken by
one who, like Benjamin, wants to grasp hold of something solid within this lost world, even if it
is entirely evil. “And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in
which it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these
allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the
intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to
the idea of resurrection.”17 In this dialectic in which faith becomes faithlessness we may hear
an echo of the Sabbatian theology that Scholem had discovered. The faith – in the sense of
religious creed -- that Sabbatai Zevi takes upon himself is his way of keeping faith with the
God of Israel, in apparent faithlessness. And his real faithlessness to Islam will be his real
faithfulness to the God of Israel, a faithful faithlessness that will open a path to his
resurrection and the redemption of Israel. Faithful faithlessness is the condition of the
Marrano messiah who has taken it upon himself to live in the tension of the
theologico-political dilemma. The Sabbatians who remained outward Jews called
17
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London, 2003): 232-33.
themselves “the faithful.” Marranos within Judaism itself, they are “held in the grip of the
theologico-politcal dilemma,” divided in their identity between an outer conformity to a law that
no was directly linked to God, but was rather only a shell with which to hide an entirely
internalizsed faith. Galut was soon to come to an end.
I could, had I time, return to Leo Strauss himself and his “faithful faithless” identity as a Jew. I
hope I have shown how Strauss, despite his rejection of the messianic impulse of his fellow
Weimar Jews, has, with his description of himself as “held in the grip of the theologico-political
predicament,” offered us a valuable insight into the strange kinship that linked him and his
generation of Weimar Jews to the baroque-era Marranos who sought to reconnect to an
occluded God by descending into the depths of the godforsaken world in order to regather the
embers of a shattered history.
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