‘Theocratic Anarchism’? Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem in Switzerland: Anarchism, Messianism and the Avant-Garde

In Walter Benjamin. The Story of a Friendship (1975) Gershom Scholem recalls how he and Benjamin used to have intense discussions about politics and religion during and after the First World War which both spent in Switzerland. During a 1919 night-walk they talked about what they claimed to be ‘the most sensible response to politics’. Both agreed that it could be traced back to a notion of ‘theocratic anarchism’ − undoubtedly a highly ambiguous definition. The meaning of this paradoxical subsuming of anarchism, politics and theocracy doesn’t seem easy to grasp. Starting from the anecdote above, this essay aims to shed light on a concept of Jewish politics grounded in an intersection of anarchic will, religious longing (that is, a theocratic, i.e. a romantic, moment within Jewish self-consciousness), and an intellectual affinity connected to the arts, which has its background in German romantic conceptions of politics and religion. Yet, it doesn’t refer to the original significance of these concepts. In fact, Benjamin’s and Scholem’s life and work link, in a mutually beneficial way, many areas of culture, in which paradox seems the architrave of their thinking: they didn’t aim for an organic system of political and religious ideas, but rather for a reciprocal illumination of both areas, balancing the external and internal contradictions. This essay will reconstruct these religious and political notions of Benjamin and Scholem in the 1920s. It was in these years that intellectual history, the history of religion, of political ideas, and of the arts flowed into each other to redefine a concept of Jewish politics that lay somewhere between anarchism, religion, and the arts. As such, it preceded Benjamin’s systematic theory of the avant-garde in which romanticism, messianism, and an ‘anarchic’ will are intermingled.