Robert Alter, Necessary Angels.

Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

Notes:
Introduction
Alter speaks of post-traditional Jews (p. xiii). He wants to provide the reader a
phenomenological description.
Rigorously unsentimental nostalgia for the conceptual and spiritual world of Jewish tradition (p.
xiii).
Strong influence of Nietzsche on Scholem! (cfr. p. xiv)
Corresponding about Kafka
Cfr. pp. 8-9. Letter from Scholem quoted
p. 11 about Scholems conception of dialectics (!)
Alter reports Harold Blooms statement, according to which Scholem interpreted Kabbalah under
the influence of his reading of Kafka. Moshe Idel argued the same in one of his essays, in which he
spoke about Scholems gnostic approach to Kabbalah (p. 12).
Important: Benjamins letter to Scholem, dated 12 June 1938
(p. 13) Benjamin and Scholem towards Agnon. Scholem wrote about the relation between Agnon
and Kafka in an article, appeared in the Jdische Rundschau in 1928.
(p. 15) Letter of 18 January 1934. Benjamin speaks about the tale The Great Synagogue by Agnon.
(p. 17: On Kafkas case): his gray fictional landscapes of pathetic animals and petty bureaucrats
[] have been ruthlessly shorn of all the outward trappings of tradition, but the classic Jewish triad
of revelation, law, and commentary virtually defines his imaginative world, whose protagonists at
once cannot do without these categories and cannot understand them, tolerate them, live by them.
First letter about Kafka is Scholems one of 1 August 1931 (see Scholem, Walter Benjamin. The
Story of a Friendship). In this letter Scholem wrote that Kafkas linguistic world [] probably
represents the prosaic in its most canonical form.
Cfr. notion of Umkehr, as it appears in Benjamins letter of 11 August 1934.
(pp. 22-23): They all perceived a sustaining power of visionary truth and an authenticity in Jewish
tradition while fearing that this truth and this authenticity might no longer be accessible to them.
On not knowing Hebrew
(pp. 28-29) In an address to the Bavarian Academy of the Arts in Munich in 1974, he spoke of a
long period of alienation from the German language and claimed, with some exaggeration, that for
several decades after his emigration from Berlin to Jerusalem he worked primarily in Hebrew. []
Most of Scholems influential essays of overview and interpretation were also written in German,
and the only major work originally composed in Hebrew was his two-volume biography of Sabbatai
Sevi for reasons dictated by the subject that we will consider.
Hugo Bergmann, old Kafkas schoolmate, became later the lover and then the second husband of
Scholems first wife, Elsa Burchardt.
See Felice Bauers letter to Kafka, in which Scholem is quoted, even if confused with Scholem
Aleichem (see Saverio Campaninis paper in Bologna).
Benjamin perceived his not knowing Hebrew as the great lack in his life. He tried to do it for a
couple of months, in which he studied the language intensively.
(p. 61) when [Scholem] comes back on a visit to Germany in 1946 after more than twenty years,
he discovers that in this time span, half of it under a totalitarian regime, his native language has
changed into something ugly and unfamiliar.
The power of the text

(p. 69) Scholem to the Bavarian Academy of Arts: In substantial portions of his writing there is a
kind of canonicity, that is to say, they are open to infinite interpretation, and many of them,
especially the most impressive of them, constitute in themselves acts of interpretation.
Why did Scholem choose these three instances: (pp. 69-70. Alter told us Michael Morgan helped
him in finding these reasons): The Bible of course is the set of texts that stands at the moment of
spiritual origins; it is the ultimate, overflowing source, the writings intensely interpreted by all
subsequent generations as authoritative revelation. The Zohar, of all the major texts of postbiblical
tradition, is the one that pushes interpretation to its most daring extremes, that constitutes the most
radical possibility of reinterpretation in the midst of devout confirmation of the authority of the first
revelation. Kafka, the exemplary Jewish modernist, raises fundamental questions about the validity
of interpretation, conjures with the vertiginous possibility that we may be at the end of the line of
interpretation, revelation now forever receding from us. Scholem needed all three of these instances
of canonicity to define the limits of his own spiritual world.
See note from Kakfas diaries, dated 16 January 1922.
Kafkas reading of Genesis XXII (aqedah). Cfr. Parables and paradoxes (English edition)!
(p. 77) In all three of Kafkas novels, event is ancillary to interpretation: this is why these books
are so disquieting. As some critics noted, in The Trial the narrative begins not with the first
event of the plot but with the first interpretation of the event.
Referring to Biales interpretation of Scholem. Scholem read throughout the speculum of
Benjamins philosophy of history. (p. 84) Alter writes: What is at issue is whether tradition is
intrinsically stable, even inert, and hence inevitably constraining, or whether it might not itself be a
dynamic process, a wrestling with the limitations of its own origins, a kinetic crystallization of
changing moments of danger.
(pp. 89-90) Alter argues against the postmodern interpretation of Benjamin-Scholem-Kafka. See, as
regards Scholem, what Harold Bloom wrote interpreting Scholem as a gnostic. Alter writes: Latter
day intellectuals express a pronounced tendency to convert all three writers into prophets of our
own postmodernist dilemmas. I hardly want to dismiss their contemporary relevance, but it is
important to keep in mind that especially in regard to one crucial consideration the three men were
deeply rooted in the spiritual concerns of the German-Jewish sphere of the early twentieth century.
Revelation and Memory
About the discussions between Brecht and Benjamin on Kafka. (p. 95): It is recorded in the
notebook entry for August 31st, which begins with the report of one of Brechts most outrageous
statements that Benjamins essay on Kafka advanced Jewish fascism because it multiplied the
obscurity around Kafka instead of reducing him to clarity and formulating practicable proposals
that can be derived from his stories.
(p. 99: On Benjamins messianism) His Marxism, building on his earlier reflections on the Jewish
messianic idea, logically should have pointed him toward a future horizon of utopian fulfillment,
but there is scant evidence in his writing that he ever imagined such a prospect of historical
redemption in any concrete way. On the contrary, like Scholem and Kafka he was mesmerized by
the past, not only as it dynamically evolved into the present (although this, too, was an urgent
concern) but also as it led back on a sinuous path to archaic origins. The last piece of writing he did,
the Theses on the Philosophy of History, is a last desperate attempt, still far from any satisfying
resolution, to reconcile some idea of futurity with the fixation on the past.
Benjamin and Scholem interpreting Kafka. This is the most remarkable note from Scholem, dated
20 September 1934: I certainly cannot share your opinion that it doesnt matter whether the
disciples have lost the Scriptures or whether they cant decipher them, and I view this as one of the
greatest mistakes you could have made.
Important aphorism (who is the author?), content in Benjamins letter of 28 February 1933: The
absolutely concrete can never be fulfilled at all (p. 109).

(p. 110) Scholem repeatedly linked Job with Kafka not only because of the themes of judgment
and inscrutable justice but also, I suspect, because of Jobs heterodox version of revelation. It is
revelation, after all, that resolves Jobs quandary. When the Lord thunders his poetry from the
whirlwind, we are drawn into a dazzling vision of sheer cosmic power, and of the uncanny beauty
of power, that shatters human frameworks, including the Bibles own picture of a hierarchical,
anthropocentric creation.
(p. 111) Alter reports what already written by Moshe Idel in Kabbalah. New Perspectives: Scholem
devoted his life to the study of religious texts, at least at one juncture, he actually experimented with
kabbalistic techniques of trance-inducing meditation, the powerful interpretation of Jewish history
that he developed argued implicitly for the abiding validity of the encounter with transcendence that
Judaism claimed as its ultimate ground. At the same time, he was an academic student of mysticism
[].
Kafka and the Angel: See his diary entry for June 25, 1914!
(p. 119): All three feared there could be no real return to origins, that where God once stood there
was now only Melancholy.
Bibliography
Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred the Truths, Cambridge 1989
Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, New York 1977
Johannes Urzidil, There Goes Kafka, Detroit 1968
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, New York 1973
Gary Smith, (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago 1989
Walter Benjamin, Reflections, New York 1986
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, New York 1961
Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, Cambridge 1986