Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries by Ivan Boldyrev

Author:Ivan Boldyrev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Judaic filiations

In 1919 in Interlaken, Switzerland, young Gershom Scholem accompanied by Benjamin entered Bloch’s room and was astounded to find on his desk a book by the German anti-Semitic scholar Johann Andreas Eisenmenger entitled Judaism Unmasked (Entdecktes Judenthum, 1700). Scholem looked at Bloch in astonishment, but Bloch explained that he had a great time reading the book, for the author, a parody of a scientist, did not realize that by exposing the blasphemies and extensively quoting Jewish authors, he was in fact opening up the treasury of the Jewish thought. Scholem, according to his own testimony, had a chance to see for himself that Bloch turned out to be right (Scholem 1975b, p. 102f.; 1975a, p. 110).9

Though Bloch was born to a Jewish family, his parents were quite far from the religious rites, and he himself never observed any of them. Talking to the Israeli ambassador in the 1960s Bloch said that he was not an assimilated Jew, on the contrary, he had assimilated himself into Judaism (Landmann 1982, p. 161). However, the Jewish intellectual tradition did have an impact on Bloch. Thus, in 1918 he characterizes himself as a man who is associated with the Jewish culture (Br I, p. 232f.).

There were many points of contact with Judaism. For instance, Bloch’s love for music as a special, non-figurative art could be interpreted in the context of his early philosophical aesthetics opposed to any complete forms, like Jews, who reject any images of God (Lellouche 2008, p. 120). Scholem in his notes on the ‘Jewish question’ emphasized the particular meaning given to the practice of questioning and answering in Jewish thought (see Dubbels 2011, p. 139). Any new answer produces new questions, and this glimmering of challenges and replies that came in Bloch under the title of the ‘inconstruable question’ comes very close to the ever-changing and never-perfect utopian image. The secret history of the world, the anticipation of the Messiah, the hope for redemption – all of these affects and images, which long since had been inherent in the Jewish culture, maintained by the people deprived of homeland, became central both for Bloch and for several generations of other prominent German-Jewish thinkers.

These people lived in the conditions of a catastrophe that unfolded many times on different levels. The first and the biggest crisis of the turn of the century was the secularization, the sudden emptiness of a religious idea, the reduction of Jewish religion to an abstract ritual. Another one was the loss of identity due to assimilation. An excellent illustration to these conflicts is provided by Franz Kafka’s Letter to his father. Finally, when the pan-European catastrophe – the World War – began, Jewish writers in Germany felt if not the coming of the apocalypse, then at least the beginning of a new, important era, that had to be understood, in which one had to find one’s way.

Bloch’s existential philosophy was deeply influenced by Martin Buber (1878–1965) although later Bloch was careful to renounce any such associations (Krochmalnik 1993).

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