Volume 24, Number 5 · March 31, 1977
The Revolt of Gershom Scholem
By Leon Wieseltier
On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
by Gershom Scholem, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser
Schocken Books, 306 pp., $16.50
Thus did a desperate Walter Benjamin, not long before he took his own life in 1940, plead for the urgency of the historian's calling. Benjamin's target this time—he always had one—was historicism and its easy aristocratic detachment. He was arguing in the name of historical materialism (though his own had just been shaken by the Hitler-Stalin pact), and for a Marxist view that truth could be won only within a commitment. But his misgivings are worth more than their ideological sources. More generally they caution about the betrayal of history by a smug or timid objectivity. Of course precision remains the first duty of the conscientious historian. But there are times, Benjamin warns, when precision can be guaranteed best by passion. His own, he feared, was such a time. Afraid that tradition was being fatally traduced—he used mordantly to wonder if he would be 'the last European'—Benjamin looked to historians to resist the disfiguring pressures of the present 'enemy.'
Review, 4070 words
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