Magnificent Rebels: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and Franz Kafka Against the World

This course introduces Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892-1940), Gershom Scholem (Berlin, 1897-1982), and Franz Kafka (Prague, 1883-1924) in the context of the spiritual crisis of bourgeois European and Jewish cultures circa 1900. As writers, all three display a clear proclivity for rebellion against the social world given them; only Scholem develops an alternate vision to rival his parents’ generation and lives long enough to put it to the test; a young Kafka succumbs to tuberculosis; a hardly middle-aged Benjamin dies by his own hand. Scholem, by contrast, immigrated to Jerusalem and pioneered the field of Jewish mysticism, along the way cultivating himself as a political dissenter, spiritual gadfly, and literary critic for whom Benjamin and Kafka were his two most important touchstones, bar none. This course will ask what Kafka and Benjamin meant to Scholem, and what Scholem, secular Kabbalist, Zionist critic, and Jewish nationalist, should mean to us.