University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition, by Bram Mertens. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 278 pp. $67.95.
Bram Mertens’ Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition traces a path readers of Benjamin and Scholem have long hoped to follow: the route that leads from the Jewish tradition and Scholem’s studies in the Kabbalah to Benjamin’s linguistic philosophy and philosophy of history. The unasked guide Mertens uses is Franz Joseph Molitor, a German and Christian expert in the Jewish tradition and the Kabbalistic texts which Scholem, Benjamin’s devoted friend, would spend his lifetime raising from obscurity to the status of a respected area of investigation. Franz Joseph Molitor’s four-volume Philosophie der Geschichte oder Über die Tradition (1827–1853) was an inspiration to Scholem that helped moved him to take up the Kabbalah as his life’s work. Most readers of Scholem are also aware that Über die Tradition was part of the intense discussions between Scholem and Benjamin that would provoke the latter to produce his early statement of his linguistic philosophy, “On the Nature of Language.” Having read all four volumes of Molitor carefully, Mertens demonstrates the wealth of information about the mainstream and kabbalistic strains of Jewish tradition it contains. Dark Images thus shows just how much commentary meant to Benjamin’s idea of Jewish tradition, and how German as well as Jewish sources contributed to Benjamin’s achievement.
Unfortunately, Mertens turns his back to a great degree on the redemptive, critical force of Benjamin’s linguistic theory, implicitly following Gillian Rose in emphasizing the trope of the ineffable, and her notion of the “creaturely” in Benjamin as suffering “signification without salvation,” like other recent work (Rose, “Walter Benjamin—Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism,” Judaism & Modernity: Philosophical Essays, 1993, p. 189). At the same time, Mertens provides material for an entirely different reading. Against Winfried Menningshaus, who argued that “even Scholem’s presence in 1915 and 1916 could not have guaranteed a Jewish influence for ‘On the Nature of Language’,” Mertens makes the following determination: “[I]f Benjamin only retained half of what Scholem told him, he would have been well-informed on Jewish matters by any standard” (pp. 87, 101). Mertens shows that Benjamin’s linguistic theory was, in this sense, both Jewish and German, with its “universal” sources firmly grounded in open, available forms of Jewish linguistic speculation.
Mertens’ readings of Benjamin in “Benjamin’s Language Theory” are far more limited. In Dark Images, Benjamin’s translation-centered theory of language, or the notion of “language as a medium” (p. 176), comes to resemble the leap of faith, more than the “Gedankenbewegung of the Jewish tradition” (p. 171), as Mertens calls it. The comparison of Benjamin to Maimonides on creation—with the latter’s sharp separation of human language from the divine—does not find sources in Molitor or Scholem to make it more convincing. At the same time, Mertens is helpful in his description of Benjamin’s “belief that philosophy must be able to accommodate all manner of experience” (p. 170). Here, Mertens opens the link between the Jewish and German meanings of Benjamin’s radical linguistic theory: that all manner of things, excluded from the progressive scheme of history, first existed in creation as a kind of plural and creative speech. In this respect, Dark Images, despite its excessive concern with the secrecy of tradition, exposes a crucial riddle at the heart of Benjamin’s work. While Benjamin’s philosophy was keen to oppose the conformist course of the world through commentary, he was famously reluctant to expose his own Jewish sources to view. In this contention, Mertens is both on strong ground in his description and illuminating—“it was not just in his private life that Benjamin found the idea of directness problematic”—pointing to his resistance to naming the Jewish sources of his critical thought (p. 21).
The German-Jewish context could take us another step: In his correspondence Benjamin was explicit about his reasons fo rrefusing to name his Jewish sources. In sharing his thoughts with Scholem on the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, Benjamin referred precisely to the need for secrecy. But it was the German of his day—like nationalist conceptions of language in our own—that would immediately deny the “medial” or border-zone of dialogue—the trading between German-and Jewish voices that had helped to constitute both traditions. In Benjamin’s description, the “medium” of tradition can be secret, but it is the disavowed act of translation—the carrying over of literary and intellectual content between one language and another—that allows tradition to grow in a trans-national way:
I have no idea what might be involved in, or who in the world could be legitimately concerned about, a translation of the Bible into German at this time. Now of all times—when the potential of Hebrew is being newly realized; when German, for its part, is at a highly problematic stage [Stadium]; when above all, a productive relationship between the two seems possible only secretly [latent] if at all—won’t this translation result in a dubious display of things that, once displayed, will immediately disavow themselves in light of this German itself? (Benjamin, Letter to Scholem, 18 September 1926, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, p. 305, trans. modified)
This letter raises a different possibility for considering Benjamin’s sources in the Jewish tradition, one valuably raised by Mertens’ research. The “productive” relation between Hebrew and German, for Benjamin, is taken for granted, as the “hallowed growth of languages” is pronounced as the origin that is the goal in his great translation essay of 1921. The resulting secrecy that ensues—“things that, once displayed, will immediately disavow themselves, in light of this German itself”—is for Benjamin a result of the German incapacity to face the historical tradition that linked it to Jewish voices, whether in the vernacular of Yiddish or Luther’s translation of biblical Hebrew that formed the first canonical German style. Benjamin’s reticence about his Jewish sources was in this sense fighting fire with fire: in a German setting that would define tradition as either German or Jewish, where Benjamin understood tradition to be “medial,” silence or reticence was the invitation to a commentary that would extend his own very Jewish and German traditions by linking the two. Where Dark Images plumbs Molitor and discovers the sources of that open vision of tradition, it becomes a valuable work.
David Suchoff
Colby College |
