256 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Anarchy here equates to apocalypticism, chaos, and catastrophe. It is the part of
theocracy that disrupts, rather than embodies, theocratic order. Opposition to
apocalypticism stems from the kind of will to order and regularity that Rosen-
zweig displays in his carefully planned system of philosophy. Scholem’s concep-
tion of anarchy, then, like his conception of theocracy, applies to “religion” rather
than to life as a whole; anarchy is the chaos within “religion”—the “fresh air”
that blows through an “ordered house.” It is thus quite distant from any con-
ception of anarchy, including Landauer’s, that descended from Proudhon’s claim
that “anarchy is order.” The sentence of Scholem’s that comes closest to Buber’s
idea of lived theocracy is his recognition that “theocratic and bourgeois modes of
life stand most irreconcilably opposed” where anarchy is lived out. However, for
Scholem, this anarchy takes the form of “the theory of catastrophes contained in
Messianic apocalypticism,” whereas for Buber, this anarchy takes the form of the
noncatastrophic attempt to realize God’s sovereignty in ordinary life—not only
in “relig ion.”
This is perhaps what Scholem meant when he said “I am an anarchist my-
self ”—that he was a partisan of the apocalyptic. The double role of anarchy in
Scholem’s work supports this contention. Scholem sees the demonic and destruc-
tive forces in Judaism as vital forces for change; the movements to neutralize
apocalyptic messianism lead to quietism, which leads to stagnation. This attitude
to history, influenced perhaps by the young Buber’s speeches on Judaism, might be
described as a “dialectical spiritualism.” It sees a struggle across the centuries be-
tween different visions of Jewish revelation, in which destruction can, as Bakunin
had it, beget new creation. The idea that Judaism is a struggle over time between
competing conceptions led to Scholem’s objection, “scientific” at first glance, to
Buber’s claim to have located the essence of Judaism in just some expressions of
the Bible and Hasidism. The idea of Scholem as objective scholar, embracing a his-
toricist approach to Judaism as a variegated phenomenon throughout time, must
be reexamined in view of the fact that Scholem also came to maintain, as David
Biale writes, “that Jewish theology, encompassing both rationalism and demonic
irrationalism, is anarchistic: it yields no one authoritative formula or dogma.”^30
Anarchism thus functions simultaneously as the description of Scholem’s entire
dialectic and of one of its poles. Despite Scholem’s ostensible antipathy to apoca-
lyptic messianism, his campaign to restore it to its proper place in Jewish history
was no mere manifestation of scholarly rectitude; it reflects the idea that apoca-
lypticism represented something vital and important, if dangerous, whose value
had to be stressed in the face of Buber’s denigration of it.^31
If Scholem’s anarchism takes the form of an indirect identification with the
apocalyptic, then Buber’s anarchism (that “persuasion” with which Scholem did
not identify) takes a form that opposes the apocalyptic. This confrontation be-
tween two types of anarchism is also a conflict between two types of eschatol-