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radical anarchist standpoint) intensified the friendship . In
S~holem's
words , what united them from the beginning was "a reso–
luteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environ–
ment-which was basically the German-Jewish assimilated middle
class-and a positive attitude toward metaphysics." Scholem con–
tinued to see in Benjamin "essentially a metaphysician, pure and
simple, attracted by subjects which had little or no bearing on meta–
physics" -such as dreams, hallucinations, clairvoyance, myths,
graphology-and a scholar driven by a genuine theological search
for "absolute experience ." Benjamin's devotion to the spiritual, the
central importance to him of the
religious
sphere (at least until 1927),
his belief in the transcausal connection of things and their rootedness
in God , emerge clearly from Scholem's account.
Although Benjamin knew nothing ofJewish history, of politics,
and (except for Agnon and Bialik) of Hebrew or Yiddish literature,
the theology and ethics of Judaism, along with religion, philosophy,
and language, was a central theme in his conversations with
Scholem and in their essay-like letters . Precisely because Benjamin ' s
thought revolved around " theological" categories such as truth and
revelation , problems of language ("the world essence ... from
which speech arises") and translation, as well as a deep-seated pre–
disposition towards criticism and commentary, the world ofJudaism
retained a secret though ambivalent fascination for him. As his most
important disciple , Theodor Adorno, once pointed out, Benjamin's
philosophical essayism consisted "in treating profane texts as if they
were sacred." Scholem, who to the end represented "Judaism in liv–
ing form " for Benjamin and served as his mentor in the area of
Kabbalah and its teachings on language, tried to encourage these
metaphysical interests in a Jewish direction .
After Scholem' s own emigration to Palestine in 1923 this
proved more difficult, though Benjamin continued to keep the
"Zionist " option open for himself and to promise his friend that he
would shortly begin an intensive study of Hebrew. To a large extent
Benjamin shared Scholem's conviction that German-Jewish involve–
ment in politics and literature was built on a sham, and he evidently
recognized in Zionism a legitimate revolt against the mendacity and
self-deception of assimilated Jewish bourgeois life. His own wife
Dora (the daughter of Herzl's biographer, Professor Leon Kellner)
came from a Zionist milieu, and it is significant that in his corre–
spondence with Scholem , Benjamin-even after becoming a
