Gershom Scholem - Correspondence, 1939 - 1969

An opportunity for Adorno to learn more about these matters presented itself in 1963. Scholem, who was probably inclined to make Adorno aware of the proximity between heretical messianism and the latter’s own project of critical theory, suggested that he could contribute an article to the Festschrift celebrating Adorno’s sixtieth birthday. The title of his initial suggestion was “Heretical Messianism and Jewish Society,” implying a connection between his research on Sabbatianism and Adorno’s social philosophy. The paper, included in the volume Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag [Testimonials: for Theodor W. Adorno’s 60th birthday], edited by Max Horkheimer, was eventually entitled “Die Metamorphose des häretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer in religiösen Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert” [The metamorphosis of the Sabbatians’ heretical messianism into religious nihilism in the 18th century]. 37This is a remarkable but underexplored text. In it, Scholem seems to be conducting historical research into the formation of Frankism and its radical doctrine of unlawfulness and transgression as a means to redemption; however, under the guise of historical scholarship, he brings to light some remarkable affinities between this heretical doctrine and Adorno’s own philosophy. For example, Scholem emphasizes the Frankists’ understanding of the existing social order as governed by unjustified, oppressive laws. Therefore, Frank and his followers believed it to be the task of the individual to question, challenge, and transgress these laws. In this text, Scholem conjoins heretical theology with the critique of unjust laws and oppressive social normativity. The Frankist anti-authoritarian movement, Scholem surmises, resonates with some aspects of Adorno’s philosophy – those aspects, one may assume, to which Scholem could relate positively, namely the anarchist dimensions of critical theory, which, by contesting the existing social order, aspired to a certain vision of utopian life.

In most cases, Adorno and Scholem maintained an amicable, gentle tone in their replies to each other, often suppressing and concealing dissensions and disagreements. But such dissensions and disagreements belong to the overall conversation, both on personal and on scholarly matters. Scholem, in particular, did not spare his critique of Adorno’s writings, especially when they touched upon two matters about which he had profound views: Marxism and Zionism. The latter was particularly important to Scholem. The Dialectic of Enlightenment ’s analyses of myth, culture, and human history conclude with a chapter entitled “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” Overall, the book’s topics largely converge with Scholem’s various scholarly and historical-political interests. However, while Scholem generally accepted the premises and the arguments of the first historical-philosophical chapters on the dialectics of progress and regression and on the relation between myth and enlightenment, he was infuriated by the analysis of modern anti-Semitism in the book’s final chapter. He left Adorno’s queries about his response to the book unanswered, but he did study the text thoroughly, as the notes that he wrote in his own copy of the book and on the back of one of Adorno’s letters attest.

In the sixth thesis of the “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” Adorno and Horkheimer contend that 38

Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one. 39

“Awful in his Marxist mendacity,” Scholem commented. “So in Zion the Jew cannot be a human being?” Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence on the essential separation between thinking and power as the foundation of emancipation and the abolition of violence appears opposed to Scholem’s understanding of Zionism as a recoupling of thought and power. Instead of liberating thought from its entanglement with power, thereby redeeming Jews from their continual subjection to those in power, as Adorno and Horkheimer demand, Scholem views Zionism as itself a reclamation of power, placing it in the hands of a Jewish political sovereignty. Scholem never expresses his critique explicitly in his letters to Adorno (and one may presume that it never became a subject of personal conversations either). Nonetheless, the matter continues to haunt their exchanges in a subterranean fashion. At the same time, Scholem was pleased to detect what he considered to be his own influence on Adorno’s writings. When, in the chapter on anti-Semitism, Adorno and Horkheimer explain that “Reconciliation is Judaism’s highest concept, and expectation its whole meaning,” 40Scholem notes on the page margin: “Das hat er von mir” – “this he got from me.”

To be sure, it is uncertain whether Adorno and Horkheimer – particularly Horkheimer, with whom Scholem shared a deep mutual antipathy – gained this knowledge from Scholem. However, Scholem’s influence cannot be overlooked in Adorno’s later writings. While it is debatable whether ideas such as in the aphorism from Minima Moralia cited above do indeed allude to Kabbalistic texts, Adorno’s late magnum opus of 1966, Negative Dialectics , unquestionably draws on Scholem’s scholarship to explicate some of the main tenets of Adorno’s central question on the possibility of philosophy after the Holocaust. At the beginning of the book’s final part, under the title “Meditations on Metaphysics” and its opening section “After Auschwitz,” Adorno writes:

One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as transcendence – or at least, less gnostically and radically put, that it is relevant to the position taken by human consciousness on the questions which the canon of philosophy assigned to metaphysics. 41

Scholem, who had also thoroughly read and extensively annotated Negative Dialectics , noted in the margin next to these lines: “Kabbalah.” Indeed, it was a central characteristic of mystical theories, including – but not limited to – Jewish Kabbalistic theories (Christian mysticism, and even the Christian reception of Kabbalah may be counted in this view), 42to emphasize that actions and events that take place on earth, committed by human beings, effect and shape transcendence – that is, they have an impact on the divine. The intersection and interaction between worldly and transcendent entities play central roles in Kabbalah. Adorno introduces this mystical idea into his own re-evaluation of metaphysics: the catastrophe of the Holocaust makes it evidently clear, for Adorno, that worldly events shape the structure of metaphysics, of any realm beyond the here and now, and of any possible understanding of this realm. Understanding this context and the allusion to mystical impulses that connect the worldly with the transcendent sheds special light on Adorno’s unique concept of metaphysics. Against Scholem’s anti-Marxist view, such an intersection between concrete-material and abstract-metaphysical (or theological) elements conspicuously corresponds to Marx’s historical dialectics, on which Adorno elaborates here. Adorno’s concept of metaphysics, in its substantive difference from the long tradition of metaphysical thought in the Western canon, does not exclude the temporal, historical, material elements – the “intramundane” – from metaphysics. Metaphysics, for Adorno, is the study not of immediate and absolute essences and categories but, rather, of contingencies, eventualities, and possibilities.

Furthermore, in Adorno’s emphasis on the mediated character of metaphysics – that is, on the fact that no metaphysics can ever claim to be immediate, unrelated to given, contingent historical and material matters – he draws again from theories of Jewish mysticism. “It has been observed,” he argues, “that mysticism … establishes social traditions and comes from tradition, across the lines of demarcation drawn by religions that regard each other as heretical. Cabbala, the name of the body of Jewish mysticism, means tradition. In its farthest ventures, metaphysical immediacy did not deny how much of it is not immediate.” 43In his own copy of the book, Scholem noted in the margin next to these lines “Scholem.” Indeed, it was Scholem who explained – in his first letter to Adorno, in response to the latter’s own remark on the Zohar – that the literal meaning of Kabbalah is tradition, emphasizing its historically mediated character over any understanding of primordial immediacy. Kabbalah, similar to Adorno’s philosophy, seeks not to understand any absolute proto-historical or meta-historical essence or experience but, rather, to draw an idea of transcendence – of material and utopian possibilities – from given historical experience, handed down over times and generations. Against this backdrop, Adorno’s social philosophy and metaphysics, as a theory of political redemption and emancipation, may indeed appear to follow in the footsteps of the mystical heretics whom Scholem explored in his scholarship.