Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition (review)

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 for...