Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography children

Walter Benjamin
by
Jacob Hermant
  • LAST REVIEWED: 11 January
  • LAST MODIFIED: 11 January
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  • Arendt, Hannah.

    Gershom scholem kabbalah: Scholem met Walter Benjamin in Munich in , when the former was seventeen years old and the latter was twenty-three. They began a lifelong friendship that ended when Benjamin committed suicide in in the wake of Nazi persecution.

    “Introduction.” In Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. Edited by Hannah Arendt, vii–lxiii. Boston and New York: Mariner Books,

    Arendt, a close friend to Benjamin, recounts her perspective on his life, writes about the different stages of his career, and highlights the tension between Judaism and Marxism in his work and personal politics.

    She finds Benjamin within his German-Jewish geopolitical context and sees how it forms his writing and ideas. She focuses especially on his strong intellectual friendships, his treatment of Kafka, and his views on Zionism.

  • Benjamin, Walter.

    Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography death

    Gershom Scholem, — , established a new strand of research with his work: the academic exploration of Jewish mysticism that opened up a new understanding of Jewish history. His work has been translated into 40 languages. His correspondences with Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt are legendary. Gershom Scholem, — , established a new strand of research with his work: the academic exploration of Jewish mysticism that opened It is less well known that during his lifetime Scholem was intensely involved with poetry and translation as well as with philological questions on the theory of language.

    The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin –. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

    DOI: /chicago/

    This collection includes all the preserved letters Benjamin himself wrote. It records many of his friendships, plans, and productive debate and discussion with his interlocutors.

    Gershom scholem books An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism , Romanticism , Western Marxism , Jewish mysticism , and neo-Kantianism , Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory , literary criticism , and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", [ 10 ] while his younger colleagues Arendt [ 11 ] and Adorno [ 12 ] contend that he was "not a philosopher". In , at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French—Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg — and Dora — , were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin , then the capital of the German Empire.

    It is a key resource for uncovering the person of Benjamin behind the published and recovered works, and finds his letters that take up Judaism and Jewish sources, including his plans to study Hebrew, with notable friends like Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno.

  • Benjamin, Walter.

    Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition. Edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

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    Fenves and Ng’s collection of sources from Benjamin in conversation with his essay on violence, all newly translated, finds new life in an already canonical text. The essay itself, with its discussion of the Biblical Korah in relation to themes of political and divine violence, is core to Benjamin’s context in Jewish studies, and this new edition both emphasizes and challenges this position through the many supplementary materials.

  • Benjamin, Walter, and Gershom Scholem.

    The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. Edited by Gershom Scholem. Translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere.

  • Gershom scholem kabbalah
  • Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography photos
  • Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography children

    • Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

    Presenting the full correspondence between Benjamin and his lifelong closest friend, Gershom Scholem, this collection centers the role of Judaism in Benjamin’s life and work, in part due to Scholem’s early influence on him regarding Jewish sources. The most famous exchange in this collection finds the pair debating the expressibility of God in human language.

  • Eiland, Howard, and Michael W.

    Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

    These authors, both experts on Benjamin, have created a detailed and comprehensive biographical overview of Benjamin’s entire life and philosophical output. The relationship between his Judaism and the rest of his personal and intellectual commitments are clearly shown, if not the book’s focus.

    For all Benjamin scholars, this biography is a necessary resource, and for Jewish studies scholars it also helps situate Benjamin’s perspectives on Judaism within his writing.

  • Greenberg, Udi E. “Remembering Walter Benjamin: Benjamin and His Biographers.” Biography (): –

    DOI: /bio

    Greenberg provides an overview on Benjamin through the various biographical works about him.

    Opening on the tension between two early biographies, one emphasizing Judaism and the other Marxism, Greenberg finds in Benjamin a relationship to Judaism very different from other Jews of his time.

    Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography wikipedia Living through the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Nazism, Benjamin lived primarily in Berlin and Paris, and died of suicide on the French-Spanish border on 27 September when, with the group of refugees with whom he was escaping, border authorities denied him entry into Spain. He is most often thought of in relation to critical theory, especially due to his affiliation with figures of the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School, who were most influenced by Freud, Hegel, and Marx. His most well-read essays are common inclusions in anthologies of critical theory, and he was heavily influenced by literary modernism and Marxist politics, especially by way of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Part of the exciting aspect of welcoming Benjamin to a prominent location in Jewish studies is that oftentimes some work must be done to bring out this necessary and major part of his philosophical development; this work leads to a more complete understanding of Benjamin, and of the ebbs and flows of 20th-century Jewish thought. Though they are not all explicitly written from the position of placing Benjamin directly and exclusively within Jewish studies, all these texts aid in the task of situating Benjamin as a Jewish thinker.

    In addition, he outlines the popular modern conception of Benjamin as a heroic figure stemming from existing with the tension of his often-oppositional ideological attractions.

  • Scholem, Gershom. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books,

    Scholem provides perhaps the most canonical book in the discussion of Benjamin as a Jewish thinker.

  • Gershom Scholem - Wikipedia
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  • Gershom Scholem: Walter Benjamin – The Story of a Friendship ...
  • Walter Benjamin - Wikiwand
  • Gershom Scholem - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

    • Describing their meaningful and productive friendship, he prioritizes his belief of Benjamin’s primarily Jewish influence and his regrets regarding Benjamin’s later Communist turn. Scholem summarizes Benjamin’s intellectual output through this lens, alongside insights into Benjamin’s methods and attitudes, painting a picture of a brilliant mind and a difficult yet rewarding friendship.

  • Steiner, George.

    “To Speak of Walter Benjamin.” Benjamin Studies 1 (): 13–

    The literary critic George Steiner relates a discussion he had with Gershom Scholem about crafting a theoretical syllabus for preparing someone to study Benjamin. The twelve topics open and close with discussions of Judaism, positioning it as a framing device throughout for the hopeful student of Benjamin.

    Walter benjamin gershom scholem biography Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life. Account Options Connexion.

    Steiner finds Benjamin’s relationship to Judaism to be the single all-encompassing aspect of his thought, defining and determining all his work.

  • Wohlfarth, Irving. “‘Männer aus der Fremde’: Walter Benjamin and the ‘German-Jewish Parnassus.’” New German Critique 70 (): 3–

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    Benjamin’s assimilated German-Jewish context, childhood, and identity is for Wohlfarth foundational to his writing.

    He presents an abridged biography that prioritizes this analytical lens, tracking for example Benjamin’s deliberations with and between Zionism and Marxism, or his treatment of Kabbalah, to understand how Benjamin inherited and engaged with Jewish history, tradition, and theology throughout his life. He also takes up the theme of the Jewish refugee in relation to Benjamin.