Correspondence, 1939 - 1969 E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 985

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Notes

Correspondence 1939–1969

1 Adorno to Scholem New York, 19.4.1939

2 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 4.6.1939

3 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 15.4.1940

4 Adorno to Scholem New York, 16.7.1940*

5 Adorno to Scholem New York, 8.10.1940

6 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 11.11.1940

7 Adorno to Scholem New York, 19.11.1940

8 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 17.7.1941

9 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 25.1.1942*

10 Adorno to Scholem Los Angeles, 19.2.1942*

11 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 27.3.1942

12 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 30.9.1942

13 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 28.10.1943

14 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 4.7.1945

15 Adorno to Scholem Santa Monica, 9.5.1949

16 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 5.1.1951

17 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.1.1951

18 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.2.1951

19 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 20.2.1951

20 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 25.2.1951

21 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 4.3.1951

22 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 22.2.1952

23 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 13.4.1952

24 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 26.5.1952

25 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.7.1952

26 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 8.7.1952

27 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 11.7.1952

28 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 19.8.1952

29 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 11.10.1952

30 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 16.6.1953

31 Adorno to Scholem Santa Monica, 1.7.1953

32 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 9.7.1953

33 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.9.1953

34 Scholem to Adorno Zurich, 22.9.1953

35 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 18.12.1953

36 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 5.1.1954

37 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.1.1954

38 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, After 6 January 1954

39 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 24.1.1954

40 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 5.4.1955

41 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 1.5.1955

42 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 9.5.1955

43 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 14.5.1955

44 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 17.5.1955

45 Scholem to Adorno 11.6.1955

46 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.6.1955

47 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 3.7.1955

48 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 16.8.1955

49 Scholem to Adorno Ascona, 24.8.1955

50 Scholem to Adorno Ascona, Late August 1955

51 Scholem to Adorno London, 6.10.1955

52 Scholem to Adorno London, 14.10.1955

53 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt 9.3.1956

54 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 4.4.1956

55 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.4.1956

56 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.4.1956

57 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, After 18.4.1956

58 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 30.4.1956

59 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 21.5.1956

60 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 28.11.1956

61 Scholem to Adorno Providence, 17.12.1956

62 Scholem to Adorno Providence, 18.3.1957

63 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 26.3.1957

64 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.12.1957

65 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 26.1.1958

66 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 29.5.1958

67 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 17.7.1958

68 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 1.8.1958

69 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 25.9.1959

70 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 16.11.1959

71 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 23.11.1959

72 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.12.1959

73 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 17.12.1959

74 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 28.12.1959

75 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 8.2.1960

76 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 17. 2.1960

77 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.2.1960

78 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 2.3.1960

79 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.3.1960

80 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.3.1960

81 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 29.3.1960

82 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.4.1960

83 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.4.1960

84 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 21.4.1960

85 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 21.4.1960

86 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 8.5.1960

87 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.5.1960

88 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 19.5.1960

89 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 9.6.1960

90 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.6.1960

91 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 26.6.1960

92 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 4.7.1960

93 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 14.7.1960

94 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 7.11.1960

95 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 28.11.1960

96 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 2.12.1960

97 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.12.1960

98 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 14.12.1960

99 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 20.12.1960

100 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 9.1.1961

101 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 16.1.1961

102 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 7.3.1961

103 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 2.4.1961

104 Scholem to Adorno London, 9.5.1961

105 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.5.1961

106 Scholem to Adorno London, 14.6.1961

107 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.6.1961

108 Scholem to Adorno London, 4.10.61

109 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.10.1961

110 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 24.10.1961

111 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 5.11.1961

112 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 13.11.1961

113 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 19.11.1961

114 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 10.4.1962

115 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.4.1962

116 Adorno to Fania Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.9.1962

117 Fania Scholem to Gretel And Theodor Adorno Zurich, 12.9.1962

118 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 4.10.1962

119 Scholem to Adorno Zurich, 4.10.1962

120 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.10.1962

121 Scholem to Adorno Zurich, 11.10.1962

122 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.11.1962

123 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 12.11.1962

124 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 13.12.1962

125 Adorno to Scholem, Frankfurt Am Main, 18.12.1962

126 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 3.1.1963

127 Adorno to Scholem, Frankfurt Am Main, 17.4.1963

128 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 22.4.1963

129 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 18.6.1963

130 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 28.7.1963

131 Scholem to Adorno Copenhagen, 9.9.1963

132 Adorno to Scholem, Frankfurt Am Main, 23.9.1963

133 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 29.10.1963

134 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 1.11.1963

135 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 7.11.1963

136 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 17.11.1963

137 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 22.12.1963

138 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.1.1964

139 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 9.2.1964

140 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 17.2.1964

141 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 13.7.1964

142 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 20.7.1964

143 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 25.7.1964

144 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 28.7.1964

145 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 5.1.1965

146 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 1.3.1965

147 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 17.3.1965

148 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 23.3.1965

149 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.4.1965

150 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 2.5.1965

151 Scholem to Siegfried Unseld, Walter Boehlich and Adorno Jerusalem, 2.5.1965

152 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 12.5.1965

153 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 20.5.1965

154 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 28.5.1965

155 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.6.1965

156 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 20.6.1965

157 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.6.1965

158 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 5.7.1965

159 Elfriede Olbrich to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 8 July 1965

160 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 23.7.1965

161 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 26.12.1965

162 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 3.1.1966

163 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 3.2.1966

164 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 8.2.1966

165 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 25.2.1966

166 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 2.3.1966

167 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.4.1966

168 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Cincinnati, 22.4.1966

169 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Cincinnati, 12.5.1966

170 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 21.9.1966

171 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 1.11.1966

172 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 7.11.1966

173 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.11.1966

174 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 29.11.1966

175 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 1.12.1966

176 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 9.12.1966

177 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 16.12.1966

178 Adorno to Scholem Jerusalem, 4./5.1. 1967

179 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 10.1.1967

180 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 31.1.1967

181 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.2.1967

182 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 1.3.1967

183 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 14.3.1967

184 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 6.4.1967

185 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 14.4.1967

186 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.5.1967

187 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 27.5.1967

188 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.6.1967

189 Scholem to Adorno Zurich, 14.6.1967

190 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.6.1967

191 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.9.1967

192 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 21.9.1967

193 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 28.9.1967

194 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 13.10.1967

195 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 7.11.1967

196 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 10.11.1967

197 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 16.11.1967

198 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 5.12.1967

199 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 8.12.1967

200 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 31.1.1968

201 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 8.2.1968

202 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 20.2.1968

203 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 29.2.1968

204 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, After 7.3.1968

205 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 14.3.1968

206 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 29.3.1968

207 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 5.4.1968

208 Scholem to Adorno Zurich, 2.5.1968

209 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.5.1968

210 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem [?], 24.7.1968

211 Adorno to Scholem Zermatt, 9.8.1968

212 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 7.11.1968

213 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 18.11.1968

214 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 22.11.1968

215 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 25.11.1968

216 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 11.12.1968

217 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 6.2.1969

218 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 26.2.1969

219 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 7.3.1969

220 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 21.3.1969

221 Scholem to Adorno Jerusalem, 20.4.1969

222 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 29.4.1969

223 Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 14.5.1969

224 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 26.6.1969

225 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 9. August 1969

226 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 9.10.1969

227 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Jerusalem, 27.10.1969

228 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 11.11.1969

229 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.12.1969

230 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Jerusalem, 20.12.1969

231 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Jerusalem, 5.3.1970

232 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 12.3.1970

233 Scholem to Gretel Adorno Jerusalem, C. Late March 1970

234 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 15.7.1970

235 Scholem to Gretel Adorno New York [?], 14.10.1970

236 Gretel Adorno to Scholem Frankfurt Am Main, 19.10.1970

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Correspondence

1939–1969

Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem

Edited and with an Introduction byAsaf Angermann

Translated byPaula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski

polity

Originally published in German as “Der Liebe Gott wohnt im Detail” Theodor W. Adorno / Gershom Scholem Briefwechsel 1939–1969, herausgegeben von Asaf Angermann © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2015

This English edition © Polity Press, 2021

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1049-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969, author. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982, author. | Angermann, Asaf, 1978- editor. | Schwebel, Paula, 1981- translator. | Truskolaski, Sebastian, translator.Title: Correspondence : 1939 - 1969 / Theodore W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem ; edited by Asaf Angermann ; translated by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski.Description: Medford : Polity, [2020] | Originally published in German as “Der Liebe Gott wohnt im Detail”: Briefwechsel 1969-1969. Herausgegeben von Asaf Angermann © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Thirty years of epistolary friendship between two towering figures of the 20th century”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020005504 (print) | LCCN 2020005505 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509510450 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509510498 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. Correspondence Selections English. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982. Correspondence. | Authors, German--20th century--Correspondence. | Intellectuals--Germany--Correspondence. | Germany--Intellectual life--20th century.Classification: LCC B3199.A34 A4213 2020 (print) | LCC B3199.A34 (ebook) | DDC 193 [B]--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005504LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005505

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Introduction

“Overall, my memory of this might involve much retrospective fantasy,” Theodor W. Adorno reminisced about his first encounter with Gershom Scholem, which must have taken place sometime around 1923.

Anyway, the setting was the Frankfurt Civic Hospital; it seems to me that it was the garden. He was wearing a bathrobe, if I didn’t retroactively make that up, associating it with the impression of a Bedouin prince, which he invoked in me with his blazing eyes – at a time when I was blissfully ignorant of the situation in the Near East. It was this ignorance that made me irreverently say to him that I was envious of his imminent travel to Palestine – it was nothing other than the emigration itself. I imagined the Arab girls to be so appealing, wearing copper chains on their slender ankles. Scholem responded, in that truly down-to-earth Berlin dialect, which he kept through forty-five years of Zion and which the great Hebraist, as a rumor has it, faithfully preserved even in his Hebrew pronunciation: “Well, then you could readily get a knife stuck between your ribs.”1

This recollection, which may seem to be rather sexist and orientalist, filled, however, with fascination and admiration, featured in Adorno’s congratulatory article on Scholem’s seventieth birthday in December 1967. The concrete occasion for that first encounter was a visit to Siegfried Kracauer, the philosopher and cultural critic, who, as Scholem later recalled, had been hospitalized that day for a “minor malady.” Kracauer was a mutual friend of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and it was Benjamin who had brought Scholem along for the hospital visit. For his part, Scholem was hardly aware of Adorno’s presence at that visit and was only reminded of it by Adorno decades later.2 For Adorno, Scholem not only represented the Jewish sage – knowledgeable in all matters religious, especially regarding the mystical and esoteric – but he also seemed to be the conduit to a realm of cognition that transcends the given social reality, with its instrumental mores. Adorno’s nebulous memory of their first encounter includes such esoteric, mystical, and indeed orientalist elements, which he associated with Scholem’s life and work, as well as the latter’s harsh, pragmatic words of caution: getting carried away with such fantasies could result in being knifed between the ribs. Adorno, the rational critic of irrational society, sought an alternative to instrumental rationality in Scholem’s worldview, while Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, was himself never weary of warning of mysticism’s temptations and dangers.3 “It was my first information about the conflict that reverberates in the world today,” Adorno concluded his reminiscence, which he published in the widely read German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung six months after the Arab–Israeli “Six-Day War” of June 1967.

The first brief encounter at the Frankfurt Hospital was followed by a decade and a half in which there was no communication whatsoever between Adorno and Scholem. However, each of them was virtually present in the other’s exchanges with their mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s continuous efforts to bring about an amicable relationship between his two close friends were often met with suspicion, skepticism, and presumably also some envy. Scholem – who had known Benjamin since 1915, when the two were eighteen and twenty-three years old, respectively – persistently resisted any closer bond with Adorno. Adorno, born in 1903, met Benjamin in 1923 in Frankfurt, either during a sociology seminar that both attended – Adorno as a student, Benjamin while pursuing his Habilitation (a second doctorate required in Germany for academic posts) – or else at a meeting arranged by Kracauer in a Frankfurt café. Adorno was not able to recall which of these occasions occurred first.4 Scholem had also lived for a short time in Frankfurt, before leaving for Palestine to pursue his Zionist political belief in a new Jewish national beginning. He had arrived in Frankfurt from Berlin in April 1923 and stayed until August of that year, before returning to Berlin, from which he left for Palestine in September.5 During that brief stay in Frankfurt, in which his fleeting first encounter with Adorno took place, there was ample opportunity for the two to develop a more substantial personal or scholarly relationship. Not only were Adorno and Scholem mutual friends of Benjamin’s, but they also socialized in intersecting intellectual circles. Both Benjamin and Kracauer, alongside, for example, Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal – all four would later belong to the wider circle around the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – attended the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (“Free Jewish House of Learning”), an institute for Jewish education established in 1920 by philosopher Franz Rosenzweig in Frankfurt. Among other attendees – who were at the same time instructors, as the Lehrhaus was based on communal learning rather than teacher-centered classes – were Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, as well as Scholem, who taught and studied Kabbalistic texts in Hebrew while there. Adorno kept his distance from the happenings at the Lehrhaus, however. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Adorno entertained no particular interest in Jewish matters, religious, cultural, or otherwise. In fact, he reportedly referred derisively to his friends Fromm and Löwenthal as “Berufsjuden” (“professional Jews”), on account of their involvement in the Lehrhaus.

Scholem, for his part, made no effort to conceal his disdain for Adorno. “A strange reluctance kept me from an encounter with Adorno, which was due at that time and which he probably expected,” he recalled almost half a century later.6 “I wrote Walter about this. He replied that my reserved remarks about Adorno could not keep him from drawing my attention to Adorno’s recently published first work on Kierkegaard.”7 Adorno’s first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, was published in 1933 – “on the very same day in which Hitler seized the dictatorship,” as Adorno himself noted.8 The book, based on Adorno’s Habilitation, which was written under the direction of the theologian Paul Tillich, was considerably indebted to the method that Benjamin had developed in his own work, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, based on his failed effort at a Habilitation. Benjamin’s method involved reading material and social phenomena allegorically so as to decipher their hidden “truth-content.”9 Both Benjamin and Scholem received the page proofs of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book before publication. Following months of Benjamin’s persistent attempts to persuade Scholem to read Adorno’s book, Scholem finally wrote to Benjamin, in October 1933: “to my mind the book combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah, and it will ultimately not mean much for a future, objective appraisal of Kierkegaard, in marked contrast to your analysis of the Trauerspiel. I regret that our opinions probably differ in this matter.”10 Whether Scholem’s scathing critique of the book was motivated by political aversion due to Adorno’s Marxist approach (which Scholem generally rejected, although he critically tolerated Benjamin’s own Marxist positions), because of Adorno’s detachment from Frankfurt’s Jewish circles and from Judaism altogether (which Scholem interpreted as assimilatory and opportunistic self-denial), or perhaps motivated by his envy of Adorno’s close friendship with Benjamin, the latter’s attempts to establish an amicable and productive relationship between these two great Jewish-German minds repeatedly led to a dead end. At least this was the case when both men lived in Frankfurt, surrounded by the same friends, arguably concerned with similar questions of identity, tradition, and prejudice.

This state of affairs had dramatically changed a few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as the world was sinking into murderous chaos. Adorno and Scholem encountered each other again in New York in 1938. Adorno had just arrived in the city, joining Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research’s new incarnation in exile at Columbia University, and also working on the Princeton Radio Research Project directed by an Austrian-Jewish émigré, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Scholem traveled to New York from Jerusalem – via Paris, where he saw Benjamin for the last time – to deliver the Hilda Stich Stroock Lectures on Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Institute of Religion. On the ship from France, Scholem met Paul Tillich. It was Tillich who succeeded in initiating the contact between Adorno and Scholem, despite the difficult premises. Scholem reported to Benjamin on March 25, 1938: “Wiesengrund wasn’t aboard the ship, and he hasn’t been in touch with me either. However, I did meet with Tillich and his wife, who are resolutely determined to bring me together with Horkheimer and Wiesengrund, with whom, they said, they are very close, which placed me in a somewhat embarrassing position.”11

But, as soon as the meeting took place, both sides readily overcame their predispositions. Scholem’s disdain and mistrust of Adorno was transformed into a careful appreciation motivated by the discovery of mutual interests (although he retained an unrelenting aversion toward Horkheimer). Adorno’s animadversion toward Scholem’s demonstrative Jewish-theological approach, while not overcome, was softened by the latter’s enthusiasm for those radical, heretical dimensions of Judaism which might have resonated, to some extent, with the drives behind the project of critical theory. Both eagerly conveyed their impressions of that meeting, and of each other, to Benjamin. Their accounts shed much light on the origins and foundations of the long-lasting and wide-ranging dialogue that ensued. On May 6, just a few weeks after his arrival in New York, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that he:

was able to establish a very sympathetic relationship [with Wiesengrund-Adorno]. 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 quite vigorously. Talking with him is pleasant and engaging, and I find it possible to reach agreement on many things. You shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we spend a great deal of time mulling over your situation.12

Benjamin responded from Paris two months later: “I was pleased to see that some things go smoothly as soon as my back is turned. How many complaints have I heard de part et d’autre about you and Wiesengrund! And now it all turns out to have been much ado about nothing. Nobody is more pleased about that than I am.”13

Decades later, Scholem explained his sudden change of heart at these meetings, further elucidating his perspective on the beginning of his friendship with Adorno:

The good spirit that prevailed in the meetings between Adorno and me was due not so much to the cordiality of the reception as to my considerable surprise at Adorno’s appreciation of the continuing theological element in Benjamin. I had expected a Marxist who would insist on the liquidation of what were in my opinion the most valuable furnishings in Benjamin’s intellectual household. Instead I encountered here a man who definitely had an open mind and even a positive attitude toward these traits, although he viewed them from his own dialectical perspective.14

Adorno reported to Benjamin on this remarkable meeting in a letter from March 1938:

You may find this hard to believe, but the first time we got to meet him [Scholem] was at the Tillichs…. Not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich’s relationship to the Kabbala seems to resemble that of a terrified teenager [Backfisch: also, literally, fried fish] to pornography. The antinomian Maggid was extremely reserved towards me at first, and clearly regarded me as some sort of dangerous arch-seducer…. Needless to say, nothing of the kind was actually said, and Scholem contrived to sustain the fiction, with considerable brash grace, that he knew nothing at all about me except that a book of mine had been published by the blessed Siebeck [publisher of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard]. Nevertheless, I somehow succeeded in breaking the spell and he began to show some kind of trust in me, something which I think will continue to grow.

We have spent a couple of evenings together, as the ringing in your ears has presumably already told you by now; once on our own, in a discussion which touched in part upon our own last conversation in San Remo concerning theology, and in part upon my Husserl piece, which Scholem read with great care, as if it were some intelligence test. We spent the second evening in the company of Max, and Scholem, who was in great form, regaled us in detail with the most astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism; a number of which, however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of Rosenberg’s notions about “the people,” that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print. It is not altogether easy for me to convey my own impression of Scholem. This is indeed a classic case of the conflict between duty and inclination. My personal inclination comes into play most strongly when he makes himself the advocate [Anwalt] of the theological moment of your, and perhaps I might also say of my own, philosophy.15

It is remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, that in this letter Adorno critically and presciently diagnoses exactly what Scholem would write years after his death, namely of the theological element not only in Benjamin’s but also in his – Adorno’s – own thought. Already during their first conversations, Adorno and Scholem discovered that they shared much more with each other than they had initially themselves presumed. Scholem displayed what seems to be a genuine and profound interest in Adorno’s work. Although he dismissed the main thesis of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book and accused its author of plagiarism, Scholem was indeed intrigued by the materialist, dialectical reading of a theological thinker. Adorno’s work on Husserl, which began as his dissertation and continued – with various versions of papers published along the way – until the publication in 1956 of his book on Husserl, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [trans. as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique], seems to have sparked Scholem’s own philosophical interest. Scholem’s initially critical and often dismissive approach toward Adorno’s work (in letters to Benjamin and others) was increasingly overturned, and he ultimately came to discover a common language with the dialectical social philosopher. His interest in Adorno’s work, although motivated at first by Benjamin and the proximity to his work, largely transcends their shared interest in all things Benjamin. Adorno and Scholem’s correspondence reveals, for the first time, the full scope of the thematic resonance that they found with each other.

Adorno, for his part, was – cautiously – fascinated by Scholem’s work on religious mysticism and its heretical, transgressive offshoots. Baptized as a Catholic and raised in an assimilated Jewish family, which kept its distance from anything “professionally Jewish,” Adorno was never a religious thinker, and even less so a Jewish thinker – at least not conspicuously. His interest in Kierkegaard’s theological thought was philosophical and predominantly aesthetic. Furthermore, as a harsh critic of irrationality and the occult, Adorno had an attitude toward Kabbalah and the mystical dimensions of life that could not, at first glance, have been more apprehensive. But in Scholem’s writings he did not perceive an irrational relapse into mythical thinking of the sort he critically diagnoses, for example, in Minima Moralia, as occultism. “The tendency to occultism,” he notes there, “is a symptom of regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional.”16 On the contrary, Scholem’s work on mysticism represented for Adorno an alternative to the all-consuming power of instrumental reason, a realm of possibilities beyond the given social order and the limitations that this social order imposed on thought and the imagination. As Adorno understood Scholem’s project, mysticism does not necessarily seek to transcend the given reality in order to escape to an imaginary realm outside of it. Rather than fleeing the conditional into a regressive and escapist form of metaphysical surrogate for this world, it translated concrete, material, earthly life into mystical categories, thereby allowing for a critical perspective on this life.

At the time of their first encounter in 1938, Scholem had already published a significant body of work on various aspects of Jewish mysticism. His Munich dissertation, a German translation of the Bahir, the first book of the Kabbalah, was published in 1922. His annotated German translation of a chapter from the Zohar, the most central book of the Kabbalah, furnished with his detailed introduction on the book’s historical and conceptual aspects, was published in 1935. In his lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, held at the time of his first conversations with Adorno, Scholem elaborated on this topic, which was the subject, in part, of their discussion. But at that time Scholem was enthusiastically pursuing pioneering research into another dimension of Jewish mysticism, namely heretical messianism. In 1937, he published a text that would become a signpost of modern scholarship on Sabbatianism and Frankism, the Jewish heretical movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that followed the self-proclaimed messiahs Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791), respectively. “Mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba’averah” – literally: a commandment fulfilled by transgression – initially published only in Hebrew, was translated into English only decades later, in 1971, as “Redemption through Sin.”17 Aware of the subject’s delicate, controversial dimensions and its inflammatory potential, Scholem insisted on keeping a discussion of its topic within the boundaries of Jewish communities. He published an abbreviated, expurgated German version of the text, excluding all the transgressive and contentious elements.18 The Sabbatian and Frankist movements, Scholem explained, drew from Kabbalistic cosmogonic theories, especially Lurianic Kabbalah – the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed in the sixteenth century – on the notions of good and evil, and concluded that, in order to achieve redemption in times of exile and catastrophe, the messiah and his followers are commanded to transgress prevailing norms and laws, to commit evil deeds, overturning divine law and religious commandments. The original Hebrew text discusses such transgressions in detail – from moral crimes to forbidden sexual acts and religious blasphemies, culminating in apostasy: Sabbatai Sevi converted to Islam, Jacob Frank to Christianity. The followers of both, however, retained their Jewish faith beneath the ostensive practice of their newly acquired religions as crypto-Jews, forever the subject of suspicion and aversion. But the need to transgress the given law, to challenge predominant morality for the sake of true redemption and liberation, was the main motif of Scholem’s own modern rendering of the Sabbatian and Frankist doctrines. This was the subject of Scholem’s conversations in New York with Theodor and Gretel Adorno, attended by Max Horkheimer, who, as noted above, feared that such scholarship might only affirm certain anti-Semitic prejudices (the year was 1938), and he was “seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print.” Adorno himself, however, must have been better able to relate to Scholem’s theory, in particular to its disobedient, anti-normative, and anti-authoritarian – one might also suggest: anarchist – elements. Additionally, Scholem’s historical reading of heretical messianism emphasized the materialistic, social, and psychological aspects of such soteriological theories. Rather than explaining them from a merely theological point of view, Scholem offered an interpretation that analyzed the heretical mysticism of the Sabbatian and Frankist movements – as well as Lurianic Kabbalah in which they originated – as giving expression to the material, social, and psychological needs of the exiled Jewish communities. Later on, in his autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem, he in fact referred to Adorno and the Frankfurt School as a latter-day incarnation of such heretical sects.19

Nevertheless, whereas the personal meetings transformed Scholem’s perception of Adorno, enabling him to transcend his initially skeptical premises and suspicions, Adorno, for his part, experienced this encounter as more complex. Along with his fascination for Scholem’s anarchist mystical theories and his respect for the latter’s erudition in both German philosophy and Jewish history, Adorno was also somewhat perplexed by his theological – one might add, arguably, political-theological – worldview. Specifically, as he noted in his report to Benjamin, Adorno was definitely uneasy about Scholem’s heavyhanded effort to advance the theological element in Benjamin’s – and in his own – thought. Scholem, Adorno suspected, claimed authority not only over Benjamin’s thought, which conspicuously merged theology with materialism, but also over Adorno’s own philosophy, in which – despite numerous theological references and metaphors – theology ultimately plays a rather marginal role.

Such proximities of interest and differences of perspective did, however, allow Adorno and Scholem to establish a fruitful and profound dialogue. At the same time, it is important to note that their differences and dissensions were initially expressed only covertly, mainly in letters to Benjamin. After Benjamin’s death, they were transmuted into a less tangible, underlying tenor of the exchange. As the correspondence shows, these differences were not detrimental to their relationship but contributed, rather, to the sensitive and nuanced communication. They added an underlying facet of irony that continuously conceals but never eliminates the discrepancies. Precisely because of these proximities and differences, much is left unsaid in the correspondence. What the authors agree on is assumed as a given; what they disagree about is softened in order to avoid confrontations. Although continuously kept at bay, however, the tensions – interpersonal and, more substantially, theoretical, conceptual, and perspectival – are hard to overlook. The correspondence therefore requires a form of active reading between the lines, of filling in the gaps with information available through other sources. What the authors write to each other gains an additional dimension once it is read in the light of their exchanges with Benjamin and others, as well as their published and unpublished writings.

Benjamin’s suicide in 1940 – which took place when he was attempting to escape the Nazi occupation of France but was turned back at the French border in Port-Bou, Spain – deeply affected his two close friends. Their correspondence, which began a year before Benjamin’s death, grew more intense as they shared reports about his precarious situation, and their concerns about his fate became grave. After his death, their recently forged friendship was strengthened by their mutual efforts to preserve Benjamin’s legacy. Adorno and Scholem joined forces in the project of editing and publishing Benjamin’s writings and letters. Although not completely unknown, Benjamin’s work eluded widespread public attention during his lifetime. His numerous newspaper articles and literary reviews, along with the four books he published between 1920 and 1928 (with an annotated edition of letters written by German intellectuals, entitled Deutsche Menschen [German men and women], in 1936), could not have guaranteed him the reputation he enjoyed in the succeeding decades. This reputation is entirely indebted to his friends’ efforts – against all odds and in the face of countless obstacles. The correspondence provides extensive evidence of the struggles Adorno and Scholem undertook to establish Walter Benjamin as the outstanding seminal figure of modern European thought that he has meanwhile become. Readers familiar with Benjamin’s work may find it surprising to discover in the correspondence that, without Adorno and Scholem’s monumental efforts and harsh struggles, Benjamin’s writings – and his status as an intellectual figure – would most likely have been doomed to oblivion. It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that Walter Benjamin as we know him today, as a writer, philosopher, and cultural critic, is, to a certain degree, a “product,” a “creation” fashioned by his two close friends. Not only did Adorno and Scholem struggle to bring Benjamin’s writing into the light of the public, they were also concerned with each and every detail of the way Benjamin – both the man and his work – would be received and perceived. As editors of the first publication of his collected writings, they made careful choices as to which texts to include and how to present them, bringing to the fore those writings that they considered significant and representative of his thought and omitting those that they would rather not have seen published. In any event, this was the harsh critique leveled at the two editors following the publications of Benjamin’s collected writings and correspondence. They were charged with manipulating the content and the reception of his work, reclaiming his thought as either too Marxist or too theological. Wherever one falls with respect to these accusations, the correspondence between Adorno and Scholem shows that their editorial work, and their efforts to establish Benjamin’s intellectual legacy, involved substantial theoretical and practical debates on how to decipher, interpret, and present his thought.

In 1950, Adorno published Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, a collection of literary, autobiographical aphorisms, which Benjamin intended, without success, to publish in book form. (Some of these aphorisms were published in journals, most of them pseudonymously).20 Adorno edited the book based on the manuscript he had previously received from Benjamin and on their earlier conversations. He also wrote an afterword, which he did not sign. The volume was published by the newly established Suhrkamp Verlag, as the second title in its prestigious series Bibliothek Suhrkamp. It was a colossal commercial failure.21 A first collection of Benjamin’s writings, under the modest title Schriften [Writings], was published a few years later, edited by Gretel and Theodor Adorno, together with Friedrich Podszus, the editor for Suhrkamp. They were substantially assisted by Scholem, who, as Adorno writes in the introduction (this time signed with his name), “provided the manuscripts of the early writings and altogether contributed to the realization of the project with his advisory participation.”22 The two-volume edition was published in 1955, making Benjamin’s work available to a broader audience for the first time. In the following years, Adorno collaborated with Scholem on an edited collection of Benjamin’s letters. Published in 1966, the collection received significant attention and led to a wide-ranging discussion of Benjamin’s life and work. Whereas Benjamin’s early writings had received hardly any attention, and the publisher – reluctant to avoid another unmarketable Benjamin volume – balked even at the idea of a volume collecting his letters, the response to this publication was spectacular. In fact, the debates on Benjamin’s legacy were so intense – especially among the German student movements, which were overwhelmingly inspired by his thought – that Adorno actually felt compelled to lock Benjamin’s manuscripts away inside a vault – far from the madding crowd. It was at this point that Adorno and Scholem were accused – by the political student movements in Berlin and West Germany, and by literary scholars and journalists, even in East Germany – of manipulating the reception of Benjamin’s work according to their own views. The main concern of these critics was that Adorno and Scholem had overemphasized the theological moment in Benjamin’s thought at the expense of his Marxism. Whatever the historical truth in the case might be, if it is at all determinable, the correspondence testifies to its authors’ unwavering commitment to establish Benjamin’s legacy, against all odds, while defending their own authority, as editors and self-appointed estate managers, against attacks from a multiplicity of sides.

Whereas, at the outset of their correspondence, Benjamin was the connecting link between Adorno and Scholem, after his death he becomes the missing – yet ever present – link. Likewise, the correspondence between Adorno and Scholem is the hitherto missing angle in a triangle. It completes a triangle that began in 1980, when Scholem edited for publication his own exchange with Benjamin from the years 1933 to 1940. The impetus behind this publication was the unearthing of his own correspondence with Benjamin, previously considered lost. Scholem learned in 1966 that large portions of this correspondence with Benjamin had survived in Paris and were stored in the East German archives. As it turned out, Scholem’s earlier letters to Benjamin, left in the latter’s Berlin apartment, were confiscated by the Gestapo, but the letters sent to Benjamin in Paris were discovered – in boxes related to the Pariser Tageszeitung, a journal of German émigrés in Paris – by the Red Army. They were transferred to Moscow from Paris, and from there they were sent to the East German Central Archives in Potsdam. Later on, they were moved to the Literary Archives in East Berlin, which Scholem visited in 1966. More than ten years elapsed before Scholem received copies of these letters, in 1977, which made possible the publication – edited and annotated by Scholem – of his own correspondence with Benjamin. The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin constituted the next angle of the triangle. It includes letters from 1928, when Benjamin lived in Berlin and Adorno in Frankfurt, until Benjamin’s death in 1940. From the years preceding Benjamin’s escape to Paris, only Benjamin’s letters survived. Adorno’s pre-1934 letters, like Scholem’s – presumably left behind in Benjamin’s Berlin apartment – are irretrievably missing. The correspondence, edited by Henri Lonitz from the Frankfurt Adorno archive, was published by Suhrkamp in 1994, as the first volume of Adorno’s correspondences with friends, colleagues, and his parents.

The present volume, which formally completes the triangle, was originally published in 2015 as the eighth volume in the series of Adorno’s collected correspondence. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in his review of the German volume, the correspondence is “documentation of one of the finest hours of German-Jewish intellectual history – after the Holocaust … a reminder of the widely ramified network of relationships between a grand generation of German-Jewish intellectuals – including rivalries and viciousness in this small academic-literary world in which Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Martin Buber and Siegfried Kracauer, Helmuth Plessner, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse lived next-door to one another” (Die Zeit, April 2015). The volume virtually begins where the two others end. Already in the second letter of the correspondence, Scholem writes: “I am extremely worried about the fate of Walter Benjamin, from whom I have received very troubling news from Paris.”23 The following letters discuss possibilities for saving Benjamin’s life, until in the fifth letter, from October 1940, Adorno conveys that “Walter Benjamin has taken his life.”24 From there, efforts are made to understand the exact circumstances of Benjamin’s death and to rescue his work and legacy. Despite the authors’ diverging viewpoints of Benjamin’s thought, they succeed in overcoming their differences to unfold a comprehensive – critical, but constructive – conversation regarding the substance, meaning, and power of Benjamin’s work.

Nevertheless, the intellectual relationship between Adorno and Scholem encompasses far more than their joint efforts to establish and sustain their mutual friend’s legacy. The present correspondence documents their substantial, wide-ranging, and far-reaching dialogue. In particular, it shows that Adorno and Scholem read each other’s work with serious interest and enthusiastically reported to each other of their reading experiences. Adorno, the Marxist social philosopher and cultural critic, emerges as a dedicated reader and admirer of Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism. As he reported to Scholem, Adorno read the latter’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (based on Scholem’s 1938 New York lectures and published in 1941) “repeatedly [and] internalized it as well as anyone can who does not speak Hebrew. In substance, I was most powerfully moved by the chapter on Lurianic mysticism, the basic concepts of which appear infinitely productive to me.”25 It is not surprising, therefore, that Kabbalistic motifs found their way into Adorno’s own writings. Scholem, the anti-Marxist historian of religion, read Adorno’s various writings with great care, often critically – but respectfully and constructively – pointing out problems and difficulties and not hesitating to suggest his own interpretations of his friend’s work. Having read Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, Adorno’s first book to be published in post-war Germany, a collection of social and cultural critical aphorisms on life in late capitalism, Scholem was inclined to assign the book to the long tradition of esoteric writings of negative theology: “I am not sure,” he wrote, “whether I always fully grasped your intentions, which, in keeping with a great esoteric tradition, lie hidden within the dialectic; nonetheless, your treatise appears to me to be one of the most a remarkable documents of negative theology.”26 Adorno, for his part, responded that, “as for [the] reading of my book of aphorisms in terms of a negative theology, I have no objections, provided that this reading remains as esoteric as the subject itself. If, however, one translates the book straightforwardly into theological categories … then neither the book nor, presumably, the categories feel quite at ease.”27 Instead of rejecting each other’s work from their divergent and, arguably, opposed perspectives on life, philosophy, and scholarship, Adorno and Scholem both chose to make each other’s work applicable to their own. Accordingly, the correspondence sheds light on Adorno’s hitherto unknown interest in Kabbalah and its impact on his own thought and writings. It also reveals Scholem’s interest in critical theory, as well as the dialectical-materialist dimensions of his own scholarship on Jewish mysticism.

The letters comprising this volume provide a rare insight into a relationship that spans thirty years in a most turbulent time in history. The correspondence begins in 1939, only a year after Adorno’s arrival in the US from England, where, having escaped Nazi Germany, he had spent the years between 1934 and 1938 unsuccessfully attempting to establish a scholarly career at the University of Oxford. It ends in 1969, with Adorno’s death during a summer vacation in Switzerland. The underlying tone of the letters is implicitly shaped by the protagonists’ divergent portentous life decisions and responses to the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany. Scholem’s wish for a new life of Zionist self-determination motivated him as a young man, as early as 1923, to emigrate from his native Germany to the unknown shores of Palestine. This decision remains constantly at odds with Adorno’s preference to remain in his hostile homeland for as long as possible, temporarily relocating when no alternative was at hand, first to England, and then to the United States, and returning to his home city of Frankfurt in 1949, only four years after the war ended.28

These personal and political choices were arguably related to – influenced by and influencing – the philosophical, historical, social, and political questions addressed in Adorno’s and Scholem’s scholarships. Scholem’s decision to leave his native Germany behind and begin a new life in what he considered to be the promised land of the Jewish people was a political decision supported by and anchored in his scholarly work. For his part, Adorno continuously reflected philosophically on the meaning of life in exile, as well as on the meaning of a life in Germany in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. During his years in exile, he made collaborative efforts with Max Horkheimer to understand – from the perspective of a philosophy of history – the Urgeschichte – that is, the primordial, underlying conception of history that could give an account of the relapse from progress to regression, from Enlightenment to destructive irrationality, as was elaborated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947).29 After his return to Germany, Adorno sought to elucidate not only the mechanisms that lead to fascism and authoritarianism but also the methods for educating the masses, in particular the younger generations, to resist and combat prejudice and oppression.30

Thematically, the correspondence begins with an in-depth textual analysis, namely, Adorno’s own interpretation of the Zohar, the Kabbalistic “Book of Splendor.”31 Adorno refers to Scholem’s own translation, which the two discussed during their first conversations in New York, a copy of which Scholem sent to Adorno after his return to Jerusalem. The chapter translated by Scholem is entitled “Sitrei Torah” [The secrets of the Torah]. It provides a mystical interpretation of the biblical story of the world’s creation in Genesis.32 Now it was Adorno’s turn to suggest his own interpretation – and this interpretation is not only illuminating in itself, it also provides a lens for understanding some of Adorno’s most central concepts. In his reading of Scholem’s translation, Adorno presents two substantial remarks: one concerns, as he writes, the history of philosophy, while the other concerns epistemology. Although the relation to Adorno’s own work is not conspicuous at first glance, a close examination will reveal the intrinsic relation between his reading of the text and his own work from the same time: the “philosophical fragments” that will comprise his seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer just a few years later. The proximity raises the question as to whether Adorno “ha[s] not read out of it anything other than what [he has] read into it,” as he is willing to admit, or whether these ideas found their way – directly or indirectly – into the reflections that constitute the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s main theses.

Firstly, Adorno detects in the Zohar chapter a proximity between Jewish mysticism and the Neoplatonic gnostic tradition. He aligns the Zohar with the Western tradition of gnostic metaphysics, in which knowledge of the unknowable is sought in a negative way, through a search for the “remainders” of a presumed original experience, without presupposing such an experience. Adorno calls this a process of disintegration and emphasizes that, for him, the concept of disintegration carries no pejorative implications. On the contrary, understanding the process of disintegration is a most valuable method for a philosophy of history that seeks to detect historical truth by examining its demise. Although not explicitly stated in the letter, Benjamin’s theories of truth and allegory – as presented in Origin of the German Trauerspiel are most decisive here: both Adorno and Scholem were familiar with it (Adorno, in fact, held seminars on the book in the early 1930s in Frankfurt), and it arguably shaped their views on the concept of historical truth. For Adorno, such disintegration of experience and truth is the process that generates myth. When truth and experience can no longer be recognized or communicated in their immediacy, they tend to be translated into myth. These are the historical origins of myth and of mythical thinking. These are, at the same time, the very mystical truths and experiences that the Enlightenment sought to annihilate, but failed to do so, since it could revert back to myth only by creating ever newer mythologies. Adorno describes this process here as “the transformation of spiritualism into myth.” This, in a nutshell, is the argument that will be unfolded in the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s diagnosis, namely that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”33

Secondly, Adorno asks about the nature of symbolic representation in Jewish mysticism – namely, whether the symbols conceal a hidden reality which can become tangible through a process of deciphering that would allow us to see reality as it is, or whether we can only face an endless chain of symbols: as he puts it, “whether there is any ground in this hierarchy of symbols or whether it represents a bottomless fall.”34 The latter case raises the question of what Adorno calls “the context of delusion” [Verblendungszusammenhang]. This concept, which will become ever more central and decisive in Adorno’s work, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and in subsequent writings, is introduced here for the first time. It concerns the epistemological question as to the possibility of seeing beyond social and ideological delusion. If we are continuously being deceived by the mechanisms of power and domination, and if these mechanisms affect, first and foremost, our consciousness and our ability to see clearly and critically, then how is it possible to “see through the delusion”? This epistemological but, at the same time, social and political question is one of the most essential questions both in Adorno’s work and in the Frankfurt School’s critical theory overall. It is noteworthy that it is developed here, probably for the first time, by means of an interpretation of the Zohar.

It is fair to suggest that, while Adorno has never truly delved into the depths of Kabbalistic mysticism – or, for that matter, of any theological doctrine as such – he was indeed interested in its content and familiar with its ideas to the extent that he could reappropriate them for his own philosophical purposes. As noted above, having read Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Adorno acknowledged the significance and productive potential of Lurianic Kabbalah. Initially developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572) in the community of Safed, located in the Galilee region of Palestine, and further articulated by his disciples (Luria himself produced no written texts; his teachings were transcribed by his disciples), Lurianic Kabbalah is a mystical theory of redemption. It provides a cosmogonic theory of the world’s creation, as formed by an omnipotent God and shattered by His very omnipotence. Such shattering is deemed a crisis of destruction, which places the potential of mending and restitution in the hands of human beings. Metaphysical redemption depends, accordingly, on human agency. Luria calls it “Tikkun,” mending. Although it is impossible to assert with absolute evidence, there is good reason to consider Adorno’s final aphorism of