Gershom Scholem - Correspondence, 1939 - 1969

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Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem

Edited and with an Introduction by Asaf Angermann

Translated by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski

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Originally published in German as “Der Liebe Gott wohnt im Detail” Theodor W. Adorno / Gershom Scholem Briefwechsel 1939–1969 , herausgegeben von Asaf Angermann © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2015

This English edition © Polity Press, 2021

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1049-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969, author. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982, author. | Angermann, Asaf, 1978- editor. | Schwebel, Paula, 1981- translator. | Truskolaski, Sebastian, translator.

Title: Correspondence : 1939 - 1969 / Theodore W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem ; edited by Asaf Angermann ; translated by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski.

Description: Medford : Polity, [2020] | Originally published in German as “Der Liebe Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel 1969-1969. Herausgegeben von Asaf Angermann © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Thirty years of epistolary friendship between two towering figures of the 20th century”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020005504 (print) | LCCN 2020005505 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509510450 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509510498 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. Correspondence Selections English. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982. Correspondence. | Authors, German--20th century--Correspondence. | Intellectuals--Germany--Correspondence. | Germany--Intellectual life--20th century.

Classification: LCC B3199.A34 A4213 2020 (print) | LCC B3199.A34 (ebook) | DDC 193 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005504LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005505

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“Overall, my memory of this might involve much retrospective fantasy,” Theodor W. Adorno reminisced about his first encounter with Gershom Scholem, which must have taken place sometime around 1923.

Anyway, the setting was the Frankfurt Civic Hospital; it seems to me that it was the garden. He was wearing a bathrobe, if I didn’t retroactively make that up, associating it with the impression of a Bedouin prince, which he invoked in me with his blazing eyes – at a time when I was blissfully ignorant of the situation in the Near East. It was this ignorance that made me irreverently say to him that I was envious of his imminent travel to Palestine – it was nothing other than the emigration itself. I imagined the Arab girls to be so appealing, wearing copper chains on their slender ankles. Scholem responded, in that truly down-to-earth Berlin dialect, which he kept through forty-five years of Zion and which the great Hebraist, as a rumor has it, faithfully preserved even in his Hebrew pronunciation: “Well, then you could readily get a knife stuck between your ribs.” 1

This recollection, which may seem to be rather sexist and orientalist, filled, however, with fascination and admiration, featured in Adorno’s congratulatory article on Scholem’s seventieth birthday in December 1967. The concrete occasion for that first encounter was a visit to Siegfried Kracauer, the philosopher and cultural critic, who, as Scholem later recalled, had been hospitalized that day for a “minor malady.” Kracauer was a mutual friend of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and it was Benjamin who had brought Scholem along for the hospital visit. For his part, Scholem was hardly aware of Adorno’s presence at that visit and was only reminded of it by Adorno decades later. 2For Adorno, Scholem not only represented the Jewish sage – knowledgeable in all matters religious, especially regarding the mystical and esoteric – but he also seemed to be the conduit to a realm of cognition that transcends the given social reality, with its instrumental mores. Adorno’s nebulous memory of their first encounter includes such esoteric, mystical, and indeed orientalist elements, which he associated with Scholem’s life and work, as well as the latter’s harsh, pragmatic words of caution: getting carried away with such fantasies could result in being knifed between the ribs. Adorno, the rational critic of irrational society, sought an alternative to instrumental rationality in Scholem’s worldview, while Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, was himself never weary of warning of mysticism’s temptations and dangers. 3“It was my first information about the conflict that reverberates in the world today,” Adorno concluded his reminiscence, which he published in the widely read German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung six months after the Arab–Israeli “Six-Day War” of June 1967.