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(p. 69) Scholem to the Bavarian Academy of Arts: In substantial portions of his writing there is a
kind of canonicity, that is to say, they are open to infinite interpretation, and many of them,
especially the most impressive of them, constitute in themselves acts of interpretation.
Why did Scholem choose these three instances: (pp. 69-70. Alter told us Michael Morgan helped
him in finding these reasons): The Bible of course is the set of texts that stands at the moment of
spiritual origins; it is the ultimate, overflowing source, the writings intensely interpreted by all
subsequent generations as authoritative revelation. The Zohar, of all the major texts of postbiblical
tradition, is the one that pushes interpretation to its most daring extremes, that constitutes the most
radical possibility of reinterpretation in the midst of devout confirmation of the authority of the first
revelation. Kafka, the exemplary Jewish modernist, raises fundamental questions about the validity
of interpretation, conjures with the vertiginous possibility that we may be at the end of the line of
interpretation, revelation now forever receding from us. Scholem needed all three of these instances
of canonicity to define the limits of his own spiritual world.
See note from Kakfas diaries, dated 16 January 1922.
Kafkas reading of Genesis XXII (aqedah). Cfr. Parables and paradoxes (English edition)!
(p. 77) In all three of Kafkas novels, event is ancillary to interpretation: this is why these books
are so disquieting. As some critics noted, in The Trial the narrative begins not with the first
event of the plot but with the first interpretation of the event.
Referring to Biales interpretation of Scholem. Scholem read throughout the speculum of
Benjamins philosophy of history. (p. 84) Alter writes: What is at issue is whether tradition is
intrinsically stable, even inert, and hence inevitably constraining, or whether it might not itself be a
dynamic process, a wrestling with the limitations of its own origins, a kinetic crystallization of
changing moments of danger.
(pp. 89-90) Alter argues against the postmodern interpretation of Benjamin-Scholem-Kafka. See, as
regards Scholem, what Harold Bloom wrote interpreting Scholem as a gnostic. Alter writes: Latter
day intellectuals express a pronounced tendency to convert all three writers into prophets of our
own postmodernist dilemmas. I hardly want to dismiss their contemporary relevance, but it is
important to keep in mind that especially in regard to one crucial consideration the three men were
deeply rooted in the spiritual concerns of the German-Jewish sphere of the early twentieth century.
Revelation and Memory
About the discussions between Brecht and Benjamin on Kafka. (p. 95): It is recorded in the
notebook entry for August 31st, which begins with the report of one of Brechts most outrageous
statements that Benjamins essay on Kafka advanced Jewish fascism because it multiplied the
obscurity around Kafka instead of reducing him to clarity and formulating practicable proposals
that can be derived from his stories.
(p. 99: On Benjamins messianism) His Marxism, building on his earlier reflections on the Jewish
messianic idea, logically should have pointed him toward a future horizon of utopian fulfillment,
but there is scant evidence in his writing that he ever imagined such a prospect of historical
redemption in any concrete way. On the contrary, like Scholem and Kafka he was mesmerized by
the past, not only as it dynamically evolved into the present (although this, too, was an urgent
concern) but also as it led back on a sinuous path to archaic origins. The last piece of writing he did,
the Theses on the Philosophy of History, is a last desperate attempt, still far from any satisfying
resolution, to reconcile some idea of futurity with the fixation on the past.
Benjamin and Scholem interpreting Kafka. This is the most remarkable note from Scholem, dated
20 September 1934: I certainly cannot share your opinion that it doesnt matter whether the
disciples have lost the Scriptures or whether they cant decipher them, and I view this as one of the
greatest mistakes you could have made.
Important aphorism (who is the author?), content in Benjamins letter of 28 February 1933: The
absolutely concrete can never be fulfilled at all (p. 109).
(p. 110) Scholem repeatedly linked Job with Kafka not only because of the themes of judgment
and inscrutable justice but also, I suspect, because of Jobs heterodox version of revelation. It is
revelation, after all, that resolves Jobs quandary. When the Lord thunders his poetry from the
whirlwind, we are drawn into a dazzling vision of sheer cosmic power, and of the uncanny beauty
of power, that shatters human frameworks, including the Bibles own picture of a hierarchical,
anthropocentric creation.
(p. 111) Alter reports what already written by Moshe Idel in Kabbalah. New Perspectives: Scholem
devoted his life to the study of religious texts, at least at one juncture, he actually experimented with
kabbalistic techniques of trance-inducing meditation, the powerful interpretation of Jewish history
that he developed argued implicitly for the abiding validity of the encounter with transcendence that
Judaism claimed as its ultimate ground. At the same time, he was an academic student of mysticism
[].
Kafka and the Angel: See his diary entry for June 25, 1914!
(p. 119): All three feared there could be no real return to origins, that where God once stood there
was now only Melancholy.
Bibliography
Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred the Truths, Cambridge 1989
Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, New York 1977
Johannes Urzidil, There Goes Kafka, Detroit 1968
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, New York 1973
Gary Smith, (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago 1989
Walter Benjamin, Reflections, New York 1986
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, New York 1961
Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, Cambridge 1986