Shabbat Reading: Walter Benjamin by Gershom Scholem

#whatireadovershabbat Gershom Scholem's Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (1975: JPS, 1981)

A memoir written by one friend for another is an act of devotion. To sum up the life you lived in relation to another, to share with the world what made this friend such a light to you, requires a patient, sometimes painful, process of recollection and assembly. You must gather your memories and turn them into stories. You must hold up to reflection moments of vulnerability and pain and loss. And you mustn’t seem to be settling any scores.

Of course, the memoirs of friends are frequently about settling scores.

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975), by the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, bears the marks of resentment. His friendship with Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide fleeing the Nazis in 1940, was “overwhelmingly intense—and only intermittently requited,” says writer George Prochnik. The memoir gave him the perfect opportunity to relitigate the debates that drew them together—two assimilated, German Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the years before the Holocaust—and then drove them apart. But this time Scholem would arrange the debates just as he saw fit.

What is Walter Benjamin, then, but a settling of scores? Scholem tells the story of his friendship with Benjamin as a teleological narrative, such that Benjamin’s quasi-Marxist deviation from his calling to Judaism and a salvific emigration to the Land of Israel is seen in retrospect as the path leading ineluctably to the hotel room in Portbou, Spain where Benjamin choked down a fistful of pills to put an end to his sorrows.

With his memoir of his late friend, Scholem finally settled the score. He proved he was right to emigrate and Benjamin wrong to spurn his Jewish calling. He was wrong not just because he was hounded to death, his corpse dumped in an unmarked grave, but because he refused to embrace a life in the fray of Jewish destiny.

How cruel of Scholem to win an argument against his dead friend. But he does win it, doesn’t he? One choice led to life, the other to a pointless, self-inflicted death. If all the Jews of Europe had chosen the “higher path” that Benjamin took, they would have been shot, starved, and gassed down to the last infant. This is the flip-side of settling scores. The friend, however bitter-sounding, may be right...

For the full review, read on at Well-Read (or Trying)