IN his early years, Walter Benjamin developed some very unique ideas and the torrent of interwar letters that he reeled-off to his great friend and leading theologian, Gershom Scholem, reveal that he was never able to fully commit himself to either Judaism or Marxism. He never capitulated to the persuasive qualities of Scholem’s liberal Zionism, for example, or set foot in Palestine, and neither did he relinquish his literary individuality by agreeing to join the Communist Party editorial committees that were so often staffed by many of his closest friends.

However, although Benjamin’s desire to retain his independence ‘twixt the encroaching pillars of millenarian religion and dubious politics is somewhat meritorious, in one letter to Scholem he made a very poor attempt to compare his new-found drift towards dialectical materialism with Judaic teachings. This link between materialism and theology, he claimed, was based on the idea that

“I have never been able to do research and think in any sense other than, if you will, a theological one, namely, in accordance with the Talmudic teaching about the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of Torah.”

Attempting to allay Scholem’s increasing fears that he had become an out-and-out atheist, Benjamin added:

“And in my experience the tritest Communist platitude possesses more hierarchies of meaning than does contemporary bourgeois profundity.”

More importantly, whilst Benjamin was making excuses for his Marxist leanings what he completely failed to perceive during the course of this correspondence is the inextricable connection that exists between Judaic theology and Communism itself. A link, of course, that has nothing to do with hierarchies of meanings but which, for good or ill, relates specifically to the unique Jewish character. Benjamin, for all his faults, was always far too encapsulated by his native German culture to go over to the dark side completely.