Walter Benjamin

Born on 15 July 1892, Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural-literary critic, and political theorist. 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 1940 when, with the group of refugees with whom he was escaping, border authorities denied him entry into Spain. Benjamin’s writings are interdisciplinary in nature, covering literature, aesthetics, theology, material culture, film, and many more wide-ranging fields. 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. However, among Benjamin’s many interests and commitments, Judaism is an early influence that remains throughout his writings, most notably at the very beginning and end of his philosophical career. Benjamin’s lifelong friendship with Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar and historian of Jewish mysticism, highlights this attraction to Jewish readings of language, translation, history, and politics. Not all of Benjamin’s work deals specifically with Judaism, and it is sometimes present as a secondary, even tertiary level of analysis and contemporary reception. For this reason, along with Benjamin’s interdisciplinary, eclectic, and broad range of interests and the esoteric nature of his writing, sources both from and about Benjamin can require critical work to uncover the Jewish core of many of these texts. The following citations include books and articles explicitly taking up Benjamin and Judaism, but it is equally common for Benjamin’s Judaism to appear in short bursts or flashes in relevant texts, appropriately in the spirit of his conception of messianic time. 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.