Correspondence, 1939 - 1969

Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, Asaf Angermann, Sebastian Truskolaski, Paula Schwebel

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509510498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia moderna

At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno's critical social theory and Gershom Scholem's scholarship of Jewish mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. To begin with, they also harbored a mutual hostility. But their first conversations in 1938 New York were the impetus for a profound intellectual friendship that lasted thirty years and produced more than 220 letters. These letters discuss the broadest range of topics in philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts – as well as the life and the work of Adorno and Scholem's mutual friend Walter Benjamin.

Unfolding with the dramatic tension of a historic novel, the correspondence tells the story of these two intellectuals who faced tragedy, destruction, and loss, but also participated in the efforts to reestablish a just and dignified society after World War II. Scholem immigrated to Palestine before the war and developed his pioneering scholarship of Jewish mysticism before and during the problematic establishment of a Jewish state. Adorno escaped Germany to England, and then to America, returning to Germany in 1949 to participate in the efforts to rebuild and democratize German society. Despite the differences in the lifepaths and worldviews of Adorno and Scholem, their letters are evidence of mutual concern for intellectual truth and hope for a more just society in the wake of historical disaster.

The letters reveal for the first time the close philosophical proximity between Adorno's critical theory and Scholem's scholarship of mysticism and messianism. Their correspondence touches on questions of reason and myth, progress and regression, heresy and authority, and the social dimensions of redemption. Above all, their dialogue sheds light on the power of critical, materialistic analysis of history to bring about social change and prevent repetition of the disasters of the past.

1 ADORNO TO SCHOLEM NEW YORK, 19.4.1939

290 Riverside Drive 13D

N.Y. City

19 April 1939

Dear Mr. Scholem:

It isn’t just rhetoric if I tell you that the translation of the Zohar section that you sent me has brought me the greatest pleasure that a gift has given me in quite some time. Please don’t take this claim to be presumptuous – far be it from me to pretend that I could seriously rise to the task of reading this text. But it is of such a kind that its very indecipherability is a part of the pleasure that it gave me. I think I can say, in any case, that with the help of your afterword, I have at least attained a clearer topological idea of it. It is something like when you go up into the high mountains in the hopes of glimpsing chamois and, as a nearsighted city dweller, you fail to spot them. But then an experienced guide gives you a precise description of the places where the chamois roam, and you are at last so familiarized with their true habitat that you think you must be able to discover the rare creature in the flesh at any moment. Indeed, the summer vacationer can’t presume to extract anything more from a landscape, the authentic experience of which yields to nothing less than the risk of one’s life.

Still, I would like to say two things, even if they’re completely foolish. The first concerns my astonishment at the relation between this text and the Neoplatonic–gnostic tradition. This connection was the last thing I had expected to see. I had imagined the Zohar to be the most inward and hermetic product of the Jewish spirit, as it were. But I now find that, in its very foreignness, it is most enigmatically intertwined with Western thought. If the Zohar indeed represents the Jewish document in an eminent sense, then, at any rate, it does so in the mediated sense in which the Galut constitutes the Jewish fate. This seems to me to have far-reaching implications, because the work thus enters into philosophical-historical connections that the uninitiated would not dream of when hearing the word Kabbalah. And perhaps it is not too bold to ask whether the metaphysical intuitions, the sediment of which this text presents, are not better grasped under the philosophical-historical aspect of a “disintegration” of Western gnosis – and you know perfectly well that, for me, the concept of disintegration entails nothing in the least bit pejorative – rather than that of of religious “Ur-experience.” As the trustee of the great commentaries, you are probably as skeptical as I am of “Ur-experiences,” which I cannot believe in for philosophical reasons, any more than I can imagine the life of truth as anything other than mediated. It often seemed to me as though the force of this text was due to disintegration itself; and perhaps such a dialectic could contribute something to the understanding of that moment which you so forcefully emphasize: the transformation of spiritualism – I almost want to say acosmism, in keeping with your interpretation – into mythology. This would bring us very close to what our talks in the summer were about, namely, the question of mystical nihilism. The spirit, which, out of the act of creation, expels the world, calls up the demons, against whom the world was set as a limit.

The other question is of an epistemological nature, so to speak – although it is of course related, in subject matter, to the mythical form of absolute spiritualism. The section that you have translated is an interpretation of the story of Creation as a “symbol.” The language into which the symbol is translated, however, is itself a mere language of symbols – a point which calls to mind Kafka’s remark that all of his writings are symbolic, but only in the sense that they should be interpreted through ever new symbols in an endless series of steps. The question that I want to put to you is whether there is any ground in this hierarchy of symbols or whether it represents a bottomless fall. Bottomless because, in a world which knows nothing but spirit, and in which even alterity is determined as spirit’s mere self-externalization, the hierarchy of intentions knows no end. One might also say: there is nothing other than intentions. If I may refer to Benjamin’s old theorem of the intentionless character of truth, which does not represent a final intention but rather calls a halt to the flight of intentions, then, in face of the Zohar text, the question of myth’s context of delusion [Verblendungszusammenhang] imposes itself in turn. As much as the totality of the symbolic may seem to be the expression of the expressionless, does it not succumb to nature precisely because it knows nothing of the expressionless – or nature, I would almost say, in an authentic sense?

As you can see, and as is probably not otherwise possible with a text like this, I have not read out of it anything other than what I have read into it, and perhaps I’m even more captivated by the spell of the writing than my comments make it seem. But what is beyond doubt for me is that the force emanating from this text only becomes productive in the moment when it is transposed into the force of critique; and I would have understood very little of your intentions unless the faithfulness of your insistence led of its own accord to critique. Perhaps in this context I might ask you how you view the positions laid out in my little Kierkegaard book, which are, after all, inseparable from the questions discussed here.

I would also like to add that I was deeply and strangely moved by the idea of the immediately transient angels. And one last thing: the connection between your concerns and Benjamin’s has never been as present to me as it has been on this reading. If, in the Ur-Arcades, Benjamin had the intention of presenting a certain historical state of the world as a “symbol” of a process in which this world, in the flesh, as it were, traverses the space of hell in time, then this is not so far removed from the gist of your text. I must confess that I am still, to this day, extremely moved by this thought. But I am also still entirely in the dark about how it might be sustained in the face of that critique of spiritualism on which, if I’m not mistaken, you, Benjamin and I concur. I hardly see any other option but to postpone such questions ad Kalendas graecas.

Gretel sends her kindest regards.

In heartfelt affinity

always yours

Teddie Wiesengrund

Original: typescript with Scholem’s handwritten note: “Adorno-Wiesengrund / 290 Riverside Drive, 13 D / NY City”; Gershom Scholem Archive, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. First published in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurter Adorno Blätter V (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1998), pp. 144–8. An excerpt of this letter appears in translation in Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 298-299.

the translation of the Zohar section that you sent me: Subsequent to their initial meetings in New Year the previous year – during which Scholem spoke to Theodor and Gretel Adorno about his work on the Zohar, one of the most important works of Jewish mysticism, and its translation into German – Scholem sent Adorno a copy of the second, private bibliophilic edition, put out by Schocken, of Die Geheimnisse der Tora: Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar [The secrets of the Torah: a chapter from the Zohar] (Berlin, 1936). The first edition had been published in 1935 as volume 40 of the “Bücherei des Schocken Verlags” with the different title, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung: Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar [The secrets of creation: a chapter from the Zohar]. Remarks about the New York conversations appear in Adorno and Scholem’s letters to Benjamin. On the 6th of May 1938, Scholem wrote from New York: “In the meantime, I saw Wiesengrund on three occasions and Horkheimer once, at Wiesengrund’s insistence, just a few days ago. H. seemed to be bored stiff by me (but he put on a good show), which I couldn’t say about Wiesengrund, with whom I was able to establish a very sympathetic relationship. I like him immensely, and we found quite a lot to say to one another. I intend to cultivate relations with him and his wife qui...