◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Mistrust the Redemption Part I: The Sabbatian Pattern I was born in Berlin in 1897 into an assimilated German-Jewish family that considered Yiddish embarrassing, Zionism fanaticism, and Kabbalah primitive superstition. We were wrong about all three. I taught myself Hebrew. I became a Zionist at fourteen. My father threw me out of the house at twenty for refusing the German army draft. I met Walter Benjamin in 1915. The friendship lasted until his suicide in 1940 and has lasted longer inside me. In 1923 I left the German intellectual world for a struggling university in Jerusalem to teach a subject no European university had recognized: Jewish mysticism. I spent fifty-seven years there. I built the library. I trained the scholars. I wrote the books. Western scholarship had dismissed Jewish mysticism as the residue of medieval superstition. The Reform synthesis of my childhood had eliminated everything in Judaism that was strange, ecstatic, dangerous, deep. I showed this synthesis was a self-portrait drawn for respectability, not a history. The real history was an underground river running for two thousand years — antinomian, ecstatic, indispensable. I wrote a thousand-page book about Shabtai Tzvi, the false messiah of 1665. He persuaded nearly the entire Jewish world that he was the messiah. He told his followers the law no longer applied. What was forbidden was now permitted. Then the Ottoman Sultan threatened him with death and he converted to Islam. His movement should have ended. It did not. His followers refused the apostasy. They reinterpreted it as a necessary descent into the realm of evil that the messiah had to undertake. They continued to believe in secret for two hundred years. I will tell you what I learned. Every messianic political movement passes through the same four phases. The announcement: the messiah has come. The age of redemption has begun. The antinomian phase: the rules no longer apply. The leader's transgressions are not transgressions but proofs of his anointed status. The catastrophe: the messiah fails, betrays, converts, is killed, does not return. The crypto-phase: the followers refuse the failure, reinterpret each defeat as part of the plan, continue to believe in secret, and attack anyone who points out what happened. You are watching this pattern right now in your country. The man who is not a messiah is treated as one. The rules no longer apply. He jokes that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York City and his followers cheer the transgression. He lost an election. He led a failed insurrection. He was convicted as a felon. His followers reinterpret each defeat as proof he is the chosen one. The crypto-phase has begun. Recognize the pattern. It is one of the oldest in Jewish history — and Jewish history is the laboratory of political catastrophes for world history. Part II: What It Cost to Know This is Gershom Scholem speaking again. In the first part of the Yawp I described the Sabbatian pattern and showed you it is what your country is doing. Now I will tell you what it cost me to learn it, and what you must do. My brother Werner was a communist. The Nazis murdered him at Buchenwald in 1940. Walter Benjamin killed himself at Portbou on the French-Spanish border the same year. He had morphine in his pocket. He could not get out. He was forty-eight. He was the most brilliant thinker of his generation. I spent the next forty years preserving what he had written. The German-Jewish synthesis of my childhood was annihilated within my lifetime. Confidence in civilization is the deepest illusion available to a comfortable class. The German Jews had been in European civilization for a thousand years. They had Goethe. They had Bach. They had legal emancipation since the early nineteenth century. The reasoning was sound. The reasoning failed. You are inside that confidence right now. You believe the institutions will hold. You believe your status, your education, your access to good restaurants and good airports protects you. The German Jews believed the same. They had more reason to than you do. I warned the Zionist movement for fifty years. The state of Israel is a political achievement, not a redemption. To call it the beginning of the redemption is to repeat Shabtai Tzvi's error at national scale. I lost that argument. I died in Jerusalem in 1982 at eighty-four. Here is my advice based on what I experience and learned in my life. Mistrust the redemption. When a political movement claims to be more than political — when it says the rules no longer apply, when it announces the end of history, when it declares its leader anointed — recognize the Sabbatian pattern. Refuse the seduction. Recognize the antinomian phase. The leader's exemption from law is the announcement that the country has entered the messianic phase. The exemption is not an accident. It is theological premise. Do not be persuaded by the crypto-phase. When the prediction has failed and the followers continue to believe, the movement has not ended. It has entered its longest, most dangerous phase. Build the institutions. The slow builder of institutions is the political actor whose work outlasts the messianic moment. I built institutions in Jerusalem for fifty years. They survived the men who tried to destroy them. I hope they survive worse men now. The redemption has not come. Anyone who tells you otherwise is repeating Shabtai Tzvi.