258 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Scholem was a leftist, secular Zionist, not a political anarchist. He once wrote
that “the social and moral thought of anarchists like Tolstoy and Landauer has
had an influence on the building of a new life in Eretz Yisrael that should not be
underestimated”; but, he added, while “my own development moved markedly in
this direction... the chances of establishing an anarchistic society became ever
more dubious to me. The optimistic assumptions about the nature of man on
which all anarchist doctrines are based were subject to serious philosophical and
historical doubts—unfortunately, I would say.”^39 This tone of sorrow and regret
that human beings are incapable of living without domination often prefigures
an apocalyptic turn, as illustrated by Buber’s theopolitical history of Israel.^40 To
be sure, Scholem insisted that Zionism be seen as a secular movement. However,
as Moshe Idel has written, “Scholem... attempted to preach that Zionism was
not a messianic movement.... [H]e believed that the latter invoked apocalyptic
elements, while the former is a voluntaristic enterprise based upon what he called
a process of ‘entering history,’ that is, taking political responsibility for the fate
of the Jews.”^41 Scholem emphasized apocalypticism as a scholar, because of its
persistence and importance, but he repudiated it as a citizen, owing to its danger.
He ignored, however, the possibility created by Buber’s rejection of apocalypse
and gnosis: the mundane, nonapocalyptic achievement of anarchism or utopian
socialism as a form of political responsibility for the fate of the Jews.^42 The effects
of Scholem’s dividing “religious” anarchism from anarchism is evident in the
works of those influenced by his conception of apocalyptic.
Gnosis and Time: Taubes, Agamben, and the World’s Passing Away
Hans Jonas is the chief exponent, in his work Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gno-
sis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, 1934), of the idea that “gnosis” was not merely
the goal of a loose grouping of late-antique sects but a permanently available
Daseinshaltung (stance of being).^43 In a 1929 letter to his teacher, the Protestant
theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Jonas identified Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as the
high point and locus classicus of the gnostic stance, which had recently been re-
vived (in Jonas’s eyes) by Karl Barth. Paul’s description of helplessness before the
commands of the Law and the desperate need for grace, in which Jonas saw the
outlines of a general philosophical anthropology, marked the ultimate in world
denial. Moreover, Jonas felt that Paul’s critique of Judaism went far deeper than
that of Jesus himself: “As a Jew, I feel myself attacked by Jesus’ critique not es-
sentially, but only in a particular expression of Jewish piety. By Paul, however,
I feel myself essentially and basically struck.”^44 Buber, who shared Jonas’s nega-
tive attitude toward gnostic world denial, also shared his negative view of Paul.^45
Scholem, who might have been expected to oppose Buber on this, declined to
devote a study to Paul.^46 However, a onetime student of his, Jacob Taubes, took up
Scholem’s position on the question and radicalized it, first by claiming Paul as a