On the "Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue": Scholem and Benjamin

by
Alexander Gelley
University of California--Irvine

Copyright 1999 by Alexander Gelley, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in
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1. It is not surprising that modern German-Jewish cultural history has attracted an abundance
of scholarly work in recent years. Here were two cultural traditions that had evolved over
centuries and come to a high level of sophistication and self-awareness by the end of the
nineteenth century. Many of the leading figures in the arts and other intellectual spheres
born at this time were Jews who worked within a German linguistic and cultural context. In
spite of the emergence of a new, virulent type of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria at
the end of the nineteenth century, the powerful trends of emancipation and assimilation
throughout Europe had resulted in the entry of a large number of Jews into the professions
and intellectual careers. The emergence of Zionism in this period brought a new type of
quasi-secular self-consciousness into Jewish circles, and, coming largely from eastern
Europe, it served both to intensify and trouble the newfound status of the Jewish middleclass in central and western Europe. While German Jews were thus drawn to new, hitherto
unavailable opportunities, they were also forced to come to terms with heterogeneous, often
conflicting cultural models.[1] This phenomenon has been extensively studied at a collective
level, in historical and sociological terms, but for artists and thinkers the issue of national
and religious identity cannot be treated adequately at a collective level since it is so closely
tied to an individual's most deep-seated creative and intellectual processes.
2. Walter Benjamin's link to Judaism is generally acknowledged as fundamental to his work,
but it is by no means clear how to engage this issue. As I have suggested above, "Judaism"
cannot be assigned a consistent or unitary sense in the context of modern European
intellectual history. Any study of this field necessarily involves distinct, often competing,
claims based on cultural, religious, or political considerations. In the case of Benjamin other
factors complicate the picture, one of which is the role that his friend Gershom Scholem
played, both as a kind of alter ego for Benjamin's religious consciousness during the latter's
lifetime and as a custodian of his reputation afterward. It is from the vantage of this double
role on the part of Scholem that I want to approach, in a somewhat oblique manner, the issue
of Benjamin's Judaism.
3. "The Jewish side [das Jdische] goes without saying," the young Benjamin wrote in 1912 to
a correspondent who had challenged him to define his Jewish side. This retort on Benjamin's
part (to which I will return) is more evasive than defining. He was later to be challenged in a
1

4.

5.

6.

7.

comparable manner by Scholem, and though a tactic of evasion on Benjamin's part remains,
the issue of just what constitutes the Jewish side takes on ever greater urgency and
complexity in later years.
Benjamin, as we know, spent the last years of his life in exile in Paris, and committed
suicide in 1940 as he attempted to flee France across the Spanish border. It is noteworthy
that even during those years of exile after 1933, as he saw his native Germany come
increasingly under the sway of the Nazi regime, he continued working on a collection of
letters by diverse individuals called Deutsche Menschen, a work that created a kind of
textual gallery meant to exemplify the spirit of bourgeois humanism from the end of the
18th to the end of the 19th centuries. Benjamin's aim in this book may be deduced from the
title--to evoke, in that dark moment in Germany's history, what Germanity ("Deutschtum")
once was, and what kind of men were once designated in a positive sense as "Deutsche
Menschen."
Scholem, five years younger than Benjamin, came from the same milieu as his friend, that of
a prosperous bourgeois, highly assimilated household.[2] Already as a teen-ager, he allied
himself with the Jung Juda, a radical, activist Zionist group of high school students who, as
a historian of the movement writes, refused "to conform to the conventional Zionism of the
time . . . in their serious study of Hebrew and in their commitment to the spiritual heritage of
the Jewish people. They were taught modern Hebrew by Palestinian students . . . [and,
when] fifteen or sixteen years old, Scholem and three of his friends took part in the Talmud
lessons of Rabbi Bleichrode and in other Jewish studies . . . ." (Weiner 30)
Scholem demonstrated his independence of mind in a double sense: first by rejecting the
hollow assimilationist culture of his family and then, at the end of the high-school period, by
refusing to follow his fellow Jung Juda members into the more nationalist and politically
oriented Zionism of the Blau-Weiss movement, but instead pursuing studies in Hebrew and
Talmud without, however, being motivated by a turn to orthodox observance. He emigrated
to Palestine in 1923 and eventually pioneered a new type of research of Jewish theological,
and especially mystical, traditions. This approach, virtually created by Scholem, applied the
methods of modern, objective scholarship to writings which had been treated by observant
Jews as holy and esoteric. Yet Scholem's motivation was far removed from an
Enlightenment impulse of exposure and rationalist simplification. He was strongly
conscious of contributing to the recovery and preservation of an endangered cultural
remnant. His achievement as a scholar and philosopher of theology has, of course, given
him an eminence quite independent of his friendship with Benjamin.
In the period after the war Scholem, like other Jews of German origin, felt impelled to
reflect on the enigma of the German-Jewish phenomenon: the fact that after more than a
century of apparent rapprochement, a period when a large number of Jews had been
apparently absorbed within German society and thought themselves securely established, the
Shoah could occur. His judgment was unequivocal. It is summed up in the title of an open
letter written in 1964 to the editor of a Festschrift for Margarete Susman. This editor had
requested a contribution from Scholem for the volume, which he described "not only as
homage but also as a testimony to a German-Jewish dialogue, the core of which is
indestructible." This phrase, surely a clich at the time that was probably intended to give
expression to a new phase of German self-understanding and reconciliation after the war,
clearly struck a nerve in Scholem, and he titled his contribution, "Against the Myth of the
German-Jewish Dialogue." Let me quote the gist of the argument:
I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any
genuine sense whatsoever, i.e., as a historical phenomenon. It takes two to
have a dialogue. . . . Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a
concept to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200
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years. . . . To be sure, the Jews attempted a dialogue with the Germans,

starting from all possible points of view and situations, demandingly,
imploringly, and entreatingly, servile and defiant . . . and today, when the
symphony is over, the time may be ripe for studying their motifs and for
attempting a critique of their tones. (61)
Scholem reiterates this position in other essays and interviews, and also in his second
memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem, Memories of My Youth. Here he underscores the element
of self-deception that characterized not only the Jews who remained in Germany too long to
escape in the 30s but, reaching back far earlier, also the assimilated intelligentsia of the
Wilhelminian era through the Weimar Republic. There is nothing surprising or uncommon in
this judgment, and certainly Scholem, whose resistance to the ethos of German-Jewish
"Kulturbrgertum" began in his teens, had every right to express it. But it is noteworthy that
he never uses Walter Benjamin as an instance of a Jew who was deluded regarding a
German-Jewish symbiosis. Nor, in his extensive writings about Benjamin does he, to my
knowledge, speculate at any length, much less express any judgment, regarding Benjamin's
complex and divided loyalties in matters of nationality and religion.
8. This is not to say that he never addressed the issue, for he did so in letters and, as he
recounts in the memoirs, repeatedly in their conversation. But his personal position vis--vis
Benjamin clearly involved quite different presuppositions than those he assumed in his later
life. In the period of his friendship with Benjamin (1915-1940) he had to do with an
individual whom he found so complex and overpowering that ultimate grounds of belief
could not be broached. This attitude survives, in a sense, even after the war, when Benjamin
is dead and Scholem pursues the demanding task of preserving his oeuvre and his memory.
This is all understandable and admirable, but it gives one pause, nonetheless, to read
Scholem's outspoken condemnation of those who, in the pre-Nazi period, had assumed a
kind of spiritual or intellectual brotherhood between Germans and Jews and yet never
include Benjamin in this category. If we were to ask where Benjamin stood on this issue we
would be unable to find an unequivocal answer. Benjamin's thinking does not lend itself to
determinate positions for or against. Nonetheless, this is a topic that deserves further
treatment, both in the context of Benjamin's thought and as an instance of a culturalhistorical problematic.[3]
9. In the spring of 1928 Benjamin, in a letter to Scholem, announced an imminent visit to
Palestine, a visit that was repeatedly postponed until, finally, in January, 1930, Benjamin
effectively abandons the Palestine trip as well as any further effort to learn Hebrew.
However, as if in recompense, and writing to Scholem from Paris in French, he develops at
length his ambitions regarding his future career:
Le but que je m'avais propos n'est pas encore pleinement ralis, mais,
enfin, j'y touche d'assez prs. C'est d'tre considr comme le premier
critique de la littrature allemande. (Briefe 2: 505)
10. The episode of Benjamin's unrealized intention to visit Palestine is not untypical of a life
that is full of abortive plans and unfulfilled expectations. Yet Benjamin's non-visit to
Palestine in the late 20s interests us not only as an episode in the disordered life of a brilliant
thinker but also as a characteristic gesture of an assimilated Jewish intellectual of the period
who ventures a trial of his Jewishness by making contact with the native soil of his people.
11. We know that at this moment in his life Benjamin was actuated not by any Zionist
aspirations but by the very concrete and practical aim of establishing an academic career
after such a path had been denied him in Germany; and further, that it was his intimate
3

friend Scholem who had set this plan in motion by introducing Benjamin to Judah Magnes,
the chancellor of the Hebrew University, during a visit to Paris in the summer of 1927. The
account of that meeting and of the subsequent contacts and negotiations regarding
Benjamin's possible appointment to the Hebrew University are given in detail in Scholem's
Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship. Magnes fully supported the idea of Benjamin's
appointment and, in due course, arranged that Benjamin would be paid a stipend. Initially
this was intended to finance a trial stay of a year in Israel during which Benjamin would
devote himself to the study of Hebrew. The grant was in fact advanced to Benjamin in 1928
but its only use for the purpose intended involved a few Hebrew lessons that Benjamin took
in Berlin during the summer of 1929 (Briefe 2: 494). Benjamin never returned the money,
which is perhaps not surprising in view of his precarious financial situation following a
disastrous divorce proceeding. Scholem, needless to say, had to bear considerable
disappointment, not to mention embarrassment in his own circles in Jerusalem, though
fortunately this resulted in no break with Benjamin.
12. From the retrospect of nearly half a century (Scholem is writing in 1975) Scholem provides
a measured assessment of Benjamin's motives and state of mind:
After all these years I am by no means unaware of the fact that in this project
and in Benjamin's conduct more complex motives were at work. There was a
genuine, I would say utopian, vision through which he himself believed in
these plans, because in those years he still could meaningfully imagine the
theological categories of Judaism as the vanishing point of his thinking. . . .
On the other hand, there was much self-deception in his insistence that he had
exhausted his European possibilities. . . . (Walter Benjamin 149)[4]
13. It would be useful at this point to review some of the stages of their early association.
Scholem was 17 and Benjamin, 23, when they met in 1915. They maintained close personal
contact until September, 1923, when Scholem emigrated to Palestine, and from then on there
were only two personal meetings, during visits by Scholem to Europe. But their friendship
continued through the medium of a correspondence which may be ranked among one of the
major intellectual dialogues of this century.
14. Benjamin's decision to pursue a friendship with Scholem in 1915--and it was unquestionably
a considered decision--marked an epoch in his own life. Certain developments of the
previous years help to explain it. For some years Benjamin had been attached to Fritz
Heinle, a poet and a Gentile, in a kind of spiritual brotherhood in which homoerotic and
ethical impulses were equally present--a friendship for which the George circle may have
provided a model. Heinle, together with a young woman friend, committed suicide in 1914,
partly in despair over the war fever that was rampant in Germany at the time.
15. Further, in 1912, under the impetus of a much-debated essay by Moritz Goldstein, "GermanJewish Parnassus," Benjamin began a brief but intense correspondence with Ludwig Strau
who appears to have sought Benjamin's participation in a new journal devoted to Jewish
intellectual life in Germany.[5] Strau was later to gain a reputation as a poet in Israel and
he also became Martin Buber's son-in-law. Benjamin resisted Strau's attempt to enlist him
in that project of cultural Zionism, but in a series of closely reasoned letters Benjamin was
led, probably for the first time in his life, to reflect critically on his position as a Jew. In a
manner that was to prove characteristic, Benjamin laid claim to a solidarity with Judaism,
but a solidarity that should in no way inhibit his adherence to positions quite outside the
orbit of Jewish thought or experience, in this instance, the pedagogic philosophy of Gustav
Wyneken, with whose movement Benjamin had been associated since his fourteenth year.

16. Wyneken was a magnetic figure for a small but highly active group of young Germans in
this period. His organization, the "free school association" (Freie Schulgemeinde), writes
Anson Rabinbach,
. . . represented an elitist, aristocratic and fiercely intellectualist wing of the
German youth movement. It was opposed to vlkisch myth, and stressed the
formation of the individual as an ethical being. Wyneken's ideal of an elite
and highly ethical Mnnerbund devoted to the ideals of Kant, Hegel, Goethe
and Nietzsche was the most important influence on Benjamin in his student
years. (90)
17. In the letters to Strau Benjamin articulates his sense of Jewish identity in the context of a
continuing loyalty to this movement: "It is from Wickersdorf [the site of the movement]," he
writes, "and not on the basis of speculation or mere emotion, but from outer and inner
experience that I have found my Judaism. I have discovered as something Jewish that which
is most important for me in terms of ideas and individuals. . . . Either this idea is in essence
Jewish (and though a German had conceived it ten times over!) or I and the other Jews are
not true Jews when we have been possessed in our most personal core by something not
Jewish (Gesammelte Briefe 1:70f).
18. In a subsequent letter Benjamin writes that he has been discussing these matters with his
Berlin friends and he undertakes again to define his stance. He disassociates himself from
anything like a "Jewish experience," alluding to what had become a modish type of cultural
identity inspired by Buber's writings: "Not through a Jewish experience [jdisches
Erlebnis]--through no experiential moment at all. But rather through a significant insight
[eine wichtige Erfahrung]. . . ." What Benjamin attempts to salvage is a
"spiritual/intellectual" dimension: "Judaism is in no sense an end in itself for me, but rather
the most eminent bearer and representative of the spiritual [des Geistigen]" (Gesammelte
Briefe 1:75). Yet he admits that he has so far not been able to formulate a clear position for
such a culturally oriented Judaism. It would in any case, he concedes, be an "esoteric" type
of Zionism (Gesammelte Briefe 1: 83). There was never any question, he goes on, of not
acknowledging his Jewish identity, much less of conversion. "Morality goes without saying,
says [Friedrich Theodor] Vischer. Fine! The Jewish side [das Jdische] goes without saying,
"I would have to say" (Gesammelte Briefe 1: 75). At this stage the twenty-year-old seems
able only to affirm a kind of identity that is Jewish in little more than name. Yet in spite of
the hollowness of this position we should not underestimate the significance of the gesture-that, namely, of a highly cultivated, altogether assimilated German Jew in 1912 who proudly
ascribes his spiritual formation to a fraternity characterized by strong German-nationalist
leanings and yet still goes to great length to claim a kind of Jewish adherence.
19. The break with Wyneken and his circle came in 1914 in consequence of Wyneken's
advocacy of the war and the pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies in the movement that came
to light at that time,[6] though an unavowed motivation may also have been Benjamin's need
to break free of a circle focused so strongly on personal loyalty and a cultish ethos.
20. So when Benjamin introduced himself to Scholem in July, 1915, after having heard him a
few days before ask a question in a public lecture, and then invited Scholem to visit him at
his house, it was a moment when Benjamin was prepared to enter a new phase of his life and
his thinking. Scholem's memoir, Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship, recounts the
succeeding period of their personal contact with commendable thoroughness, tact, and, one
may assume, honesty. There were good reasons for their attraction to one another, and these
were markedly different from those that had brought Benjamin together with individuals like
Strau and Heinle.

21. It is in light of this background that we can better appreciate Benjamin's response to
Scholem in 1930, when, after the debacle of the Jerusalem visit and the Hebrew lessons,
Scholem once again raised the question of Benjamin's Jewish side. In an earlier letter
Scholem had cautiously asked Benjamin whether it would not be better to abandon "false
illusions regarding a never-to-be-realized definitive stand on Judaism, which we have
considered a joint undertaking for nearly fifteen years, and acknowledge the (however
disappointing for me, but nonetheless unequivocal) reality of your existence outside that
sphere [i.e., the Jewish]" (Briefe 2: 511). And Benjamin, in his reply, while still delaying a
full explanation of his stand on the matter, writes,
I have never encountered the living spirit of Judaism [lebendiges Judentum]
in any other figure than yourself. The question how I stand in regard to
Judaism is always the question of how I am related--I don't what to say to
you (since my friendship in this regard is no longer subject to any decision)-[but] to the forces which you have awakened in me. Whatever it may be that
affects this decision--however much it is embedded on the one hand in
apparently quite alien issues, on the other in that endlessly spun out hesitation
that is characteristic for me in all the most significant situations of my life--it
will very soon be made. Once I have begun to loosen the twisted coil of my
existence in one place--in the meantime I have been divorced from Dora--,
this "Gordian knot," as you once correctly named my relation to Hebrew, will
also need to be unwound. (Briefe 2: 513)
While such a passage suggests that Benjamin's Jewish consciousness was strongly marked
by his friendship with Scholem, this fact in no sense compromises the autonomy or
authenticity of Benjamin's position. For Benjamin the sphere of love and friendship was
recurrently implicated in his intellectual and cognitive experience. In a journal entry dated
May, 1931, we read:
I became aware in the course of a conversation, that every time that I have
been overcome by a great love, I became transformed in my depths to such a
degree, that I said to myself in astonishment: that man who uttered such
altogether unexpected things and who assumed such an unforseen manner, is
myself. This comes about because a veritable love experience changes me to
a state of similitude to the beloved. . . . I have come to know three different
women in my life and three different men in myself. To write my life history
would signify to give an account of the formation and dissolution of these
three men, along with the compromise among them--one might also say: the
triumvirate which now stands for my life. (Gesammelte Schriften 6: 427)
This passage, which alludes to a doctrine of similitude which Benjamin had developed
elsewhere,[7] has, I think, more than psychological or biographical significance. The
passage already cited from Benjamin to Scholem, "I have never encountered the living spirit
of Judaism [lebendiges Judentum] in any other figure than yourself," allows us to conclude
neither that Benjamin's Jewish identity is merely tributary to Scholem's nor that Judaism as
Benjamin understood it was embodied only in Scholem. Rather, it may be taken as a feature
of the kind of identity construction that Benjamin articulated in the journal entry just cited.
22. In that passage Benjamin radicalizes the singularity of multiple identity models, but at the
same time he speaks of establishing a compromise among them, and in this way indicates
the need to negotiate a linkage, to realize--even if only intermittently--a degree of
6

integration among otherwise discrete identities. Just as Benjamin could address in Scholem
"the living spirit of Judaism" so he could write to Florens Christian Rang, a Gentile friend of
his during the early 20s (letter of Nov. 18, 1923),
Certainly you embody for me today true Germanity [das wahre
Deutschtum]--indeed, even at the risk of irritating you, I would almost say,
you alone, in view of the powerful impression which your Bauhtte has made
on me. . . . (Briefe 1: 310)[8]
In the same letter Benjamin had criticized a mutual friend, Erich Gutkind, for abandoning
himself (at least in his philosophical writings) to a "European" viewpoint while never having
experienced "what was positive in the phenomenon of Germany." And Benjamin continues,
But for me it is always restricted ethnic entities [begrenzte Volkstmer] that
are preeminent: the German, the French. The fact that, and the extent to
which I am bound to the former [the German] will never be far from my
consciousness. (Briefe 1: 310)
23. But in writing this Benjamin by no means lays claim to full participation in German cultural
ethnicity. He goes on, in the lines that follow--we are in 1923, let us recall, a year after the
assassination of Rathenau and in the midst of the vexed, even chaotic conditions of the
Weimar Republic--to demarcate, in the most anguished manner, just how far a Jew might go
in identifying himself with German ethnic-national identity:
. . . in the most terrible moments of a people [eines Volkes] only those should
be called upon to speak who belong to it, nay, even more: who belong to it in
the most eminent sense, who can say not only the mea res agitur but the
propriam rem ago. The Jew should certainly not speak. . . . Can he participate
at all [Soll er mitreden?]. . . . Here, if anywhere, we come to the heart of the
current Jewish question: that the Jew today betrays even the best German
cause which he publicly supports. Since his public German expression is
necessarily purchasable (in the deeper sense) it cannot show a seal of
authenticity [Echtheitszeugnis]. (Briefe 1: 310)
Benjamin concludes this somber diagnosis with the remark that, at this time, only covert,
secret personal relations between Germans and Jews are possible:
the noble natures of both peoples are, today, bound to silence regarding their
association. (Briefe 1: 310)
The reflective, careful manner in which Benjamin weighs the modalities of German-Jewish
contact are quite different from Scholem's unequivocal and outspoken judgment a halfcentury later. Of course, we need to take account of the radically different contexts in which
they expressed themselves. At the same time it is important to recognize the singularity and
radicality of Benjamin's analysis of the situation. He by no means ignored the power of
ethnic particularism and he recognized all too well the extent to which it eludes individual
intention or will. He paid his due to the "Germanity" within him in many ways--it would
require a detailed discussion of texts like Deutsche Menschen and Berliner Kindheit to
illustrate this. But he recognized too that anything like "Germanity"--a form of ethnic or
national consciousness--offered no intellectual or existential, much less practical, refuge. In
a recent essay Irving Wohlfarth wrote that Benjamin "staked out a well-nigh untenable no7

man's-land as the most decisive terrain on which to stand his ground" (Irving Wohlfarth
164). In spite of the seeming contradiction of this formulation, it well expresses, I think, the
inescapable reality of Benjamin's situation in his time.

Notes
1. I still find the best overall treatment of this phenomenon to be Hannah Arendt's The Origins
of Totalitarianism. Back
2. The standard study of Scholem's life and work is David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah
and Counter-History. The most important autobiographical documents by Scholem are
From Berlin to Jerusalem. Memories of my Youth and Walter Benjamin: The Story of
Friendship. The collection Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schfer
and Gary Smith, contains a number of important recent essays. Back
3. The best discussions that I have found are Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightment and
Apocalypse: Benjamin, Block and Modern German Jewish Messianism," Gary Smith, "'Das
Jdische versteht sich von selbst.' Benjamins frhe Auseinandersetzung mit dem Judentum,"
and Irving Wohlfarth, "'Mnner aus der Fremde': Walter Benjamin and the 'German-Jewish
Parnassus." The last, a work of great scope and penetration, is in effect a condensed
intellectual biography of Benjamin from the perspective of the German-Jewish nexus. I have
read it with pleasure and profit, but the present essay was completed before its appearance.
Back
4. See also page 137f of Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship regarding the talk with
Magnes and Benjamin's plan to become a critic of Hebrew literature. Back
5. Benjamin's first response to Strau is from Sept. 11, 1912, but Strau's initial letter has not
survived. Excerpts from this correspondence, which was not included in the 1966 edition of
Briefe, first appeared in Gesammelte Schriften 2: 836-44. The integral version is now
published in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz.
Back
6. Cf. Smith, "'Das Jdische versteht sich von selbst,'" 333f. Benjamin's outspoken open letter
to Wyneken of March 9, 1915, marks the final stage of this important phase in his early life,
in Gesammelte Briefe, 1:263f. Cf. also the materials gathered in the notes to the letter in
Gesammelte Schriften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 884f. Back
7. What is involved is a theory of correspondances in Baudelaire's sense, of linkage between
the micro- and the macrocosm, whose traces can be discerned as forms of analogy and
similarity in image and in language. Cf. "Lehre vom hnlichen" and "ber das mimetische
Vermgen" in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:204-213. Back
8. The Bauhtte refers to a collection of writings that Rang was editing. The following
citations are from the same letter. Back

Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1958.
Biale, David. Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge and London:
Harvard UP, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. Briefe. Ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfort-amMain: Suhrkamp, 1966. 2 vols.
8

---. Gesammelte Briefe. Ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz. Vol. 1. Frankfort-am-Main:
Suhrkamp 1995.
---. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser. 7 vols.
Frankfort-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89.
Rabinbach, Anson. "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Block and Modern
German Jewish Messianism." New German Critique 34 (1985): 78-124
Schfer, Peter, and Gary Smith, eds. Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen.
Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1995.
Scholem, Gershom. "Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue." On Jews and
Judaism in Crisis. Ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken, 1976. 61-64.
---. From Berlin to Jerusalem. Memories of my Youth. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken, 1980.
---. Walter Benjamin: The Story of Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1981.
Smith, Gary. "'Das Jdische versteht sich von selbst.' Benjamins frhe Auseinandersetzung
mit dem Judentum." Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift (June, 1991): 318-334.
Weiner, Hannah. "Gershom Sholem and the Jung Juda in Berlin, 1913-1918." Studies in
Zionism 5 (1984): 29-42.
Wohlfarth, Irving. "'Mnner aus der Fremde': Walter Benjamin and the 'German-Jewish
Parnassus.'" New German Critique 70 (Winter 1997): 3-85.
---. "The Politics of Youth: Walter Benjamin's Reading of The Idiot." Diacritics 22 (FallWinter, 1992): 161-71.