The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem

by Stephane Moses, Barbara Harshav (Translation)

In The Angel of History , Mosès looks at three Jewish philosophers―Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem―who formulated a new vision of history in 1920s Germany by moving away from the spirit of assimilation and the Enlightenment belief in humanity's inevitable progress. Instead, they imagined history as discontinuous, made of moments that form no totality but whose ruptures are both more significant―and more promising―than any apparent homogeneity. Their direct experience of the twentieth century's great upheavals led these three thinkers to abandon the old models of causality that had previously accounted for human experience, and their cultural and religious background allowed them to turn to the Jewish experience of history. Jewish messianism always had to confront the experience of catastrophe, deception, and failure. Mosès shows how this tradition informed a genuine Jewish conception of history in which redemption may―or may not―occur at any moment, giving a new chance for hope by locating utopia in the heart of the present.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Judaism, Germany

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 11, 2008

Reviews

[Damian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really only read the chapters on Benjamin, which were really helpful for my personal research and studies.
I do plan on reading the other chapters as they are closely related.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

One book, one idea: German idealism relied on the notion of a future end of a progressive process of realization called history, Jewish messianism makes this end a potentiality of every instant. Beautiful reading of Borges in the intro, interesting chapter on Rosenzweig’s criticism of Hegel about the Jews (an ahistorical, and therefore apolitical, *people*). But it’s all the way down to endless repetition from there.

[Daniel Grigore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book that successfuly compresses Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Scholem's bodies of thought and highlights the aspects of continuity between them. I thought that the analysis on Benjamin lacked nuance at times, but still that is understandable with the size of the chapters. It was pretty well documented and it managed to enlighten me on various aspects of Jewish mysticism and helped me strengthen some essential parallels for my thesis. On the other hand, just as with Taubes, Moses has a somehow superficial interpretation on Hegel. It seems to me that there was a standardized and somewhat trivialized image of hegelian dialectics that floated within the circles of Jewish intellectuals during the first half of the XXth century.