254 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
on Persian and Hellenistic sources. It is ironic that this conception of Gnosticism
was actually a construction of interwar European thought, in its own struggle
with whether to denigrate the corporal and exalt the spiritual, whether to af-
firm or deny the existing world.^21 Nonetheless, this understanding grounded the
debate: if a spiritual movement is influenced by Gnosticism, as Scholem argued
Hasidism was, then its emphasis on the holiness present in the here and now
could only serve the eventual annihilation of the here and now, either by divert-
ing the soul from the concrete toward transcendent reality or by seeking out the
transcendent hidden by the concrete. Scholem accuses Buber of confusing the
Hasidic attitude toward the reality of created existence with the hidden sparks
that the Hasid seeks to extract from that reality.
According to Scholem, Buber wrongly denies the Gnosticism present in Ha-
sidism because of his “religious existentialism” and “religious anarchism.” These
are used synonymously, as Scholem understands them: “To put it bluntly, Buber
is a religious anarchist and his teaching is religious anarchism. By that I mean
the following: Buber’s philosophy demands of man that he set himself a direc-
tion and reach a decision, but it says nothing about which direction and which
decision.... Whether right or wrong, Hasidism could not share this essentially
anarchical view since it remained obligated to Jewish tradition.”^22 Whether or
not this is an accurate description of Buber’s philosophy, of interest here is Scho-
lem’s characterization of anarchism.^23 In the version of the article republished in
Scholem’s Messianic Idea in Judaism, the following gloss on “religious anarchist”
is omitted: “[It is] a term that is not meant to disparage him; I am an anarchist
myself, though not one of Buber’s persuasion.”^24 Scholem does not specify which
sort of anarchist he is himself, but he does make clear that he thinks Buber is
a “religious” anarchist. This vague term could designate someone like Tolstoy,
whose anarchism has a religious basis, but Scholem clearly has a more restricted
definition in mind: a person whose anarchism manifests itself with respect to the
sphere “religion.”
A slight detour is in order. Scholem professed a far warmer attitude toward
Buber’s Bible scholarship than to his work on Hasidism.^25 In 1932, upon the publi-
cation of Kingship of God, he wrote to Buber, “The principles you apply concretely
here result in nothing less than a completely new line of biblical scholarship...
despite the conciliatory nature of your polemic, no one can have any doubt about
the murderous consequences for a hitherto widely held attitude which result
from an acceptance or success of the attitude demanded by you.” Scholem is un-
clear about this “hitherto widely held attitude,” except to connect it to a “front”
forming against Buber “among the Protestants.” Later in the letter, however, he
introduces a new topic:
As for your presentation of, and formulations about, theocracy and anarchy,
I have read them with the utmost interest, since I have come to the same con-
clusion in my own studies (you must have found it expressed in my critique