"A Germ so Tiny": Margarete Susman's Messianism of Small Steps

“ r T n : r r t n nf ll t p

Susanne Hillman

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 96, Number 1, 2013,pp. 40-84 (Article)

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“A Germ So Tiny”: Margarete Susman’s Messianism of Small Steps

SUSANNE HILLMAN

Zur vollkommenen Güte und Liebe zwischen Mensch und Mensch ist der Weg genau so weit wie zur messianischen Erlösung.

—Margarete Susman

During the Second World War, the Jewish German poet, philosopher, and literary critic Margarete Susman (1872–1966) gave a lecture at a gathering of religious socialists in Zurich. The topic was the biblical prophet Ezekiel and the fate of the Jewish people. In this lecture Susman refl ected on the signifi cance of time.

Time has been entrusted by God to the human being. The door of the past has not shut irre-vocably; it may be opened from the direction of the future [ von der Zukunft her ]. God gives the key into man’s hand; man has to receive and grasp it. For God does not want the death of the sinner, but his life. Life, however, is not stagnation but transformation. The human being is able to change, he can become a new human being. (1960, 72)

In stressing the human capacity for change, Susman was thinking of teshuvah, literally “return,” a Jewish religious concept connoting atonement for one’s sins and the resolve to begin anew (Luz 2009 ). In her view, teshuvah was not only a possibility but an existential necessity for

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its ultimate goal: the establishment of the messianic kingdom of peace on earth. What was needed for genuine teshuvah was a fi rst step on the road to peace—a modest, yet concrete and hence profoundly real step. Such steps did not involve the earth-shaking decisions and deeds of a Nietzschean Übermensch (Overman) but instead consisted “in the blessing of a friendly glance, in a deed of simple love, brotherly patience, in a kind gesture, in a germ so tiny that we do not recognize it as a return yet ” (Susman 1960 , 92, emphasis added).

Susman wrote these lines at a time of intense anguish and hardship. Elderly, divorced, perennially ill, and almost penniless, she lived as a barely tolerated émigrée in Switzerland, frantically trying to secure her sister’s escape from Germany. Albeit only from a distance, she was forced to witness the crumbling of the European social order and the genocidal assault on the Jewish people. We need not wonder that these events brought her close to suicidal despair. Paradoxically, it was precisely this despair that made her focus on teshuvah grounded in hope.

The connection between despair and hope is by no means self-evident. Hope, by defi nition, is always oriented toward the future. In the words of Alan Mittleman, “[t]o hope requires the possibility of change; that there be alterna-tives to one’s present circumstances. If there is nothing but eternal sameness, eternal Hell, even eternal return, there is no ground for hope” (2009, 2). How is hope possible on the brink of the abyss? This is the question at the heart of Susman’s messianic philosophy, a philosophy that rejects Nietzsche’s idea of an eternal return and his insistence on amor fati (love of fate) and instead demands that we live each moment with a view toward eternity. 1

In this essay I examine Margarete Susman’s messianism of small steps as it evolved over the course of more than three decades. In Manfred Schlösser’s words, the messianic idea constituted the “basic principle” of her thought (1964, 55). In its mature form, it was both a philosophy and an ethos in the tradi-tion of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism as imparted to her by her teacher rabbi Caesar Seligmann, and involved an explicit rejection of Nietzsche’s will to power. Susman had come to her knowledge of Judaism rather late. As a typi-cal member of the assimilated and secularized Jewish bourgeoisie she grew up largely ignorant of her ancestral heritage. She was already twenty-two years old when she fi nally began to study Judaism under the guidance of rabbi Seligmann. Like other reformers, Seligmann embraced a messianic view of history and


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postulated Israel’s mission as a “light unto the nations.” There can be little doubt that it was this instruction that laid the foundation for her appreciation of Judaism as a “world religion” and, to some extent, for her ambivalent stance toward Zionist “particularism” as well. Without his infl uence, her messianism might never have taken shape the way it did: as an unconditional embrace of the Jewish mission and a concomitant dismissal of Nietzschean nihilism.

Susman’s fi rst explicit reference to messianism appeared in an essay on Spinoza that she contributed to the anthology Vom Judentum (On Judaism), published in 1913. In “Spinoza und das jüdische Weltgefühl” (“Spinoza and the Jewish Attitude to the World”) she contrasted two types of national belong-ing, one earthly, the other metaphysical. The former was common to most nations whereas the latter was specifi c to the Jews. What distinguished the Jews from all other nations, Susman believed, was their surrender to the law of God rather than to an earthly power. In her interpretation, this surrender sig-nifi ed that faith was “the most perfect of Jewish virtues” (1915, 65). To become fruitful, this surrender had to take the form of love. And it was in connection with love that the messianic appeared:

The thought of the Messiah [ Messiasgedanke ] lives deeply in the root of Judaism, and through the entire Old Testament, so strict and severe, love shines like a spark that both desires and is compelled to seize the world and that will only burst into fl ame when it has been fully grasped. This is the love that still lives here exclusively in the simple mantle of the fulfi llment of the law and yet, as in the binding of Isaac, already develops out of itself a burning readiness for sacrifi ce [ Kraft zum Opfer ] [that goes] beyond obedience—as well as the love, expressed in Joseph’s simple word to his brothers, “Do not fear, for I am under God,” that already triumphs, in the nascent comprehen-sion of the divine law, over mere justice. (68)

These ponderously worded refl ections reveal Susman’s incipient struggle to interpret the Jewish fate in universal ethical terms. It was an interpretation as yet uncolored by her reading of Nietzsche. Over the following decades, Nietzsche would take on the function of an increasingly negative foil for her emerging messianism.


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Other thinkers, like her contemporaries Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Leo Baeck, furnished Susman with positive insights into the transcendental meaning of Jewishness. As had been the case with Spinoza, she used their works and ideas as starting points for her own philosophical refl ections. Ultimately, it was lived and suffered history that provided the fi nal and most important impulse to her thinking. For Susman thought with and through existence. She wrote “under the inexorable demand of the hour,” as she put it (1934, 253). An essayist in the original sense of the term, she addressed the problems that confronted her with intellectual integrity as well as moral urgency. It was this rare combination, I hold, that constitutes the unique aspect and distinguishing feature of her evolving messianism. Her friend Buber perhaps expressed it best when paying her this compliment: “A life of the spirit and yet one lived without any diminution of immediacy—that, I believe, is what we who know you can praise you for on this day” (1991, 651). 2 Susman looked reality squarely in the eye and refused to take refuge behind tried and tired axioms and empty slogans.

Such immediacy carries its own risks. A careful analysis of Susman’s reli-gious writings over several decades reveals occasional inconsistencies and a recurring ambivalence regarding Zionism. This ambivalence was not so much the result of an intrinsic incoherence as a refl ection of the genuine anguish that drove her to engage with these issues. To her, messianism was never a merely intellectual problem, to be dealt with in the comfort of the academic ivory tower and with appropriate theoretical detachment. Rather, as she was to say about her book on Job, written during the Shoah, her writings on what she per-ceived to be the Jewish messianic destiny contained her “entire life” (1964, 159).

Susman was only one of a substantial number of German Jewish intellectuals propagating a version of messianic thinking in the interwar period. 3 In an impor-tant study of central European intellectual culture, Michael Löwy describes the brand of messianism these thinkers espoused as specifi cally historical :

Historical messianism, or the romantic/millenarian conception of history, constitutes a break with the philosophy of progress and with the positivist worship of scientifi c and technological development. It brings a qualitative, non-evolutionary perception of historical time, in which the detour through the past becomes the necessary point of departure for the leap into the future, as opposed to the linear,


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unidimensional and purely quantitative vision of temporality as cumulative progress. (1992, 204)

Historical messianism was by no means monolithic, and hence was compat-ible with many different ideologies. The “elective affi nity” that Löwy assumes to have existed between German Romanticism and Judaism admitted of an extraordinary variety of strains, from the Zionist utopianism of Martin Buber to the anti-Zionist atheism and Marxism of Ernst Bloch.

Susman was personally acquainted with the majority of the thinkers Löwy describes as “obstinate romantics and incurable utopians.” Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Franz Rosenzweig, among others, valued her critical tal-ent and frequently sought her insight and approval. But while Rosenzweig, for example, has recently enjoyed an astounding renaissance in American aca-demia, Susman is routinely overlooked in examinations of Jewish messianism or German Jewish intellectual histories, let alone studied on her own terms. 4 This is a pity indeed because her writings on messianism offer important new insights into modern Jewish intellectual history, specifi cally into the perennial problem of assimilation and the quest for a viable Jewish identity. In her case, this quest was played out within the context of modern German philosophy.

Like so many of her contemporaries, Susman at some point fell under the spell of Nietzsche. As a young woman in Zurich, she had been gripped by the “overwhelming beauty” of Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), a work that seemed to illuminate all life like a “golden dusk” (Susman 1964 , 27). Interestingly, her mentor Seligmann may also have infl uenced her apprecia-tion of the iconoclastic philosopher. Seligmann was so fascinated by Nietzsche that he adapted the latter’s famous phrase “will to power” to Judaism by trans-forming it into the evocative “will to Judaism” (Aschheim 1992 , 93–112). Indeed, it may have been under this infl uence that Susman read Jenseit von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), a work that confronted her with a “dark mystery” that she grasped only with great diffi culty. Nonetheless, in a review of a recently published Nietzsche biography, she praised the philosopher’s daring assault on traditional modes of thinking and living and for his “divinization of life”:

Beyond happiness and pain just as much as beyond good and evil, Nietzsche perceived the higher possibilities of life. . . . Both,


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happiness and pain as well as good and evil, are not to be avoided, nor are they to be extinguished, softly and gently, beneath a contem-plative Lebensbestimmung; they are to hurl their full demonic power, the whole tempest and maelstrom of their energies and temptations into the life of the human being in order to test his innate powers, his own force and demonic nature in their mastery. (1912, 1)

The positive connotations of this passage are unmistakable. At this stage in her life, Susman evidently had not yet worked out the complicated relationship of evil and the Jewish messianic destiny. Nor had she made the link between Nietzsche and messianism. It would take long and laborious years of struggle and soul-searching to make her confront the incompatibility of her religious views with Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzschean key concepts such as the will to power, master versus slave morality, and the Übermensch , to name but a few, simply could not be attuned to her conviction of the Jews’ function as the car-riers of a world-historical messianic mission, or as the “living warm tears that are everywhere penetrating the heaps of rubble, thawing everything old, rigid, defunct and shattering [it] with the dark fervency of suffering and the will to redemption” (1965a, 142). The Jews were the chosen people, to be sure, but certainly not in the sense of being an “ Uebervolk ” in the realm of ethics, as the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am ( 1902 , 245) had proposed. Instead, they had been elected for redemption through suffering, and they abjured all notions of superiority, even of the ethical kind.

In what follows, I trace the trajectory of Susman’s messianic philosophy through the lens of her changing views on Nietzsche. As we shall see, for long stretches of time, she was not particularly preoccupied with Nietzsche. The Nietzsche theme is important to her messianism, though, because it resur-faced precisely at the time of her greatest intellectual challenge: the attempt to make sense of the Jewish destiny in light of the Shoah. As Ingeborg Nord-mann has suggested, Susman’s intellectual project may be defi ned as a “dia-logue with Nietzsche and the Torah” (1997, 171). Where Nordmann seeks to salvage the positive insights Susman gained from Nietzsche’s “philosophizing with a hammer,” I offer a reading that leaves behind the notion of dialogue. My analysis of the evolution of Susman’s messianism demonstrates that in its mature form, it was formulated specifi cally against Nietzsche. Under the


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impact of the personal and global tragedies she lived through, she came to perceive with ever greater clarity that what was needed to save humanity from ultimate destruction were not heroic struggles and mighty transformations but something far more unimpressive, and hence all the more diffi cult to imple-ment: a messianism of small steps, of “germs so tiny” that they were hardly recognized as the beginning of teshuvah.

Zion and the Jewish Quest for Peace: For Buber—Against Cohen?

In 1916 an increasingly acrimonious debate agitated Jewish intellectual circles in Germany. In the May/June issue of the K.C.-Blätter the neo-Kantian philos-opher Hermann Cohen offered his views on Zionism and religion. Staunch anti-Zionist that he was, Cohen adamantly rejected a nationalism that sought to realize the Jewish world-historical mission by establishing a “Jewish national home.” “Without hope for messianic humanity there is no Judaism for us,” he declared. “And those who reserve Judaism in its basic teaching principally for the Jewish people deny the One God to messianic humanity. We acknowl-edge the election of Israel only as the historical intercession for the divine election of humanity” (1916a, 645). Not surprisingly, this attack on Zionist efforts in Palestine did not go unnoticed by the prominent cultural Zionist and social philosopher Martin Buber, who promptly rose to the challenge and fi red off an impassioned response to the polemic.

Buber disagreed with Cohen’s insistence that Judaism had to “merge into” today’s humanity for the latter’s benefi t, and instead insisted that Zionists did not want Palestine “for the Jews” but for humanity at large. What applied to history applied to the individual as well, he wrote: “the idea cannot be realized if the Volkstum is not realized.” In other words, to serve humanity, the Jewish Volkstum had to be resurrected, for only “lived Judaism” was “real Judaism” (1916b, 284–88.) Put differently, without a “national home” in Palestine, the Israelites’ ancient homeland, Judaism’s very future as a living culture was at stake.

Cohen availed himself of the opportunity proffered by Buber’s response to elaborate on the reasons for his rejection of a Jewish “national home.” The key aspect of all human culture was the state, he pointed out, and “the idea of the state” was nothing less than “the quintessence of ethics” (1916b, 684). The state he had in mind was the European nation-state of the modern


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age. This was the setting in which the Jewish destiny was to be played out and to fulfi ll itself. History had shown that there could never again be a Jewish state, he claimed: “For us, the downfall of the Jewish state is the para-digm of historical theodicy.” Judaism was oriented toward the future, “not to the past of a tribe whose sacredness consisted in its world-historical idea without being bound to a geographical location” (686–87). Cohen refused to entertain the idea of a cultural center or national home, which, in Buber’s moral conception, would not have contradicted the Jewish mission but in fact aided its actualization. What was at stake, Buber urged, was the estab-lishment of a settlement divorced from power politics and solely devoted to the “realization of Judaism,” in other words, to the increase of “God’s power on earth” (1916c, 429–30). Clearly, their divergent views admitted of no agreement.

Susman took the Cohen/Buber debate as the starting point for her own intervention on the topic of the Jews’ unique historical task. In a lecture given in 1919 she expounded at length on what she perceived this task to be. Speak-ing in the aftermath of Germany’s military defeat and revolution and keenly conscious of the Jewish blood spilled in defense of the fatherland, Susman paralleled German Jewish sacrifi ces on behalf of the nation with the tasks demanded by the Jews’ other fatherland, Zion (i.e., the Yishuv —the Jewish settlement in Palestine). Although she began by comparing the Zionist move-ment to a “brilliant star” rising “in the night of Jewish life,” a note of skepti-cism almost immediately crept in. The crux of the problem she posed was the basic question of political Zionism, which she formulated as follows:

Can and should the Jews become a people like other peoples? Is this the destiny for which they have preserved themselves for 2000 years? Does the creation of a legally secured homeland in Palestine really constitute the solution of all their problems, the fulfi llment of all their duties and assigned tasks, or at least the sole feasible and fruitful path thereto? (1965a, 125)

In response to her own questions, Susman warned that the establishment of a regular political state would be insuffi cient to solve the Jewish Question. What was needed was the “creation of new values of communal life, newer, more


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genuine and more just forms of life towards the development of a thoroughly new cast of mind,” as she phrased it (128).

Writing at a time of military and economic collapse and revolutionary upheaval, she took a dig at Cohen by sounding a note of alarm: “We live at a moment when the complete sinfulness of the existing state formations [ Staatengebilde ] has revealed itself in collapse and triumph, and we tremble [at the thought] that a structure similar to those countries might arise out of our holy land.” To avert this danger in mandatory Palestine, an effort should be made to build a “new socialist community of work and law” so that the “supranational national purpose of Zion” could be fulfi lled (1965a, 134–35). In Susman’s eyes, socialism was the precondition of all sound communal life; in fact, it was the only political program capable of fi ghting the “serious disease” that had infected the “European social body” ( Gesellschaftskörper ) (140). Socialism alone promised an escape from the moral bankruptcy of the nation-state and its “naked, idiotic will to power” as it had revealed itself so disastrously in the Great War (quoted in Nordmann 1992 , 252).

As this assertion shows, Susman considered socialism fully compatible with messianism. Unlike the majority of socialist German Jews—including such great fi gures as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Ernst Toller, who each shared her position of social marginality—she was assuredly not indif-ferent, let alone hostile, toward her ancestral faith. In fact, her socialism was not only shaped by her religious convictions but grounded in them. In other words, for Susman religion provided the basis for an ethical approach to social life. And it was here that the Jews had a crucial role to play in world history. Had not God commanded the ancient Israelites on Sinai to act righteously and to refrain from all violence and injustice (1925, 25)? This meant, Susman claimed, that the Jews had been called upon to “live towards, suffer towards, and love towards the coming of the Messiah” ( hinzuleben, hinzuleiden und hinzulieben ) by “making space for a better, purer life” (1965a, 142). This was best achieved within a socialist framework, though such a framework was plainly inadequate if not coupled with the necessary moral transformation.

In gingerly condoning the existence of a Jewish community in Palestine, Susman diverged both from political Zionism and the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen who, she charged, had detached the world of Judaism from its “national essence” ( nationalen Wesen ). Where Cohen viewed reason as


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the driving force of human moral progress, Susman posited the name of Zion as the guiding light of the future. She faulted Cohen for disengaging the “entire dark, smoldering, subterranean-supernatural world of Judaism from its national path” (1965a, 131). Reducing Judaism to pure monotheism, she wrote, Cohen had unwittingly turned the Jewish God into the God of Kant, and the “messianic path” into nothing but infi nite moral progress of the kind envisioned by Kant. Susman made it clear that she considered this attempt at a fusion exceedingly problematic. It was certainly possible to “somehow rec-oncile Jewish monotheism with Kant and Luther,” she conceded; but it was “something entirely different to confront living Judaism per se, in its whole complexity as nation, essence, spirit, and history,” with German culture and its demands (131). In the fi nal reckoning, she viewed Cohen’s reduction of Judaism to mere ethics as insuffi cient and misguided as the stance espoused by political Zionists like Lord Rothschild:

On the one hand, Judaism is supposed to be nothing but religion, religion diluted to pure monotheism; on the other hand, it is sup-posed to be nothing but nation and to acknowledge nothing but its commitment to the nation. But if, from the standpoint of the nation, we have to categorically reject the fi rst version as insuffi cient, from the standpoint of religion political Zionism poses a threat by no means only to the German Jew but to Judaism in general. (132)

Rather than proposing a reconciliation between the two standpoints, which would in any case have been impossible, she pointed at what she considered “the core and center of Judaism”: Zion (132).

For Susman, the name Zion was inextricably entwined with her concept of a messianic path, and it was here that the concept of the law came into play:

For us the spiritual path cannot be built on a factual politics [ Tatsachenpolitik ], not even if the preservation of the nation should depend on it; and only if a true Zion, as yet barely conceivable in its contours, were to emerge from this preservation and renewal, only then would this be the true path. For the proponent of the law, fi nally, the observation of the law constitutes the only path to the


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Messiah. In our conviction we feel closest to the Orthodox, even if this path is cut off for us. (1965a, 139)

Jewish history had begun with the revelation of the law, she averred, once again, and it was this fact, above all, that united people of Jewish descent, no matter how far removed they might be from the organized community and from tradition (139).

Susman’s thoughts on this topic read like a thinly veiled confession of her own spiritual ambivalence. On the one hand, she undeniably belonged to those she described, rather starkly, as “die vom Gesetz Abgefallenen”—that is, those who had lost their faith, or never had had it in the fi rst place. On the other, even those who did not offi cially observe the law, she asserted, some-what problematically, were connected to Judaism through their “provenance” ( Abkunft ) from the law. This provenance supposedly explained the way Jews related to each other:

The peculiar responsibility which each Jew feels for every other Jew also derives from [the law]. And in addition, [the law] holds the key for the strangest enigma: that the Jew is the law-abiding person, the conservative human being par excellence and at the same time the authentic revolutionary [and] radical, the pure human being of the future. (1965a, 139, emphasis added)

This combination of faithfulness to the law with the revolutionary impulse, Susman implies here, constituted the messianic path.

Susman condoned Cohen’s view of Israel’s unique vocation and, like him, defi ned its essence as a messianic calling. 5 Where Cohen unequivocally tied this calling to Jewish life in the Diaspora, however, Buber advocated the need for a “living religion” that provided the regulative principle of a genuine Jewish community. To demonstrate to humanity how God lived in the Zionist community and that practical Zionists like himself strove for self-actualization and for the actualization of God in themselves, that was the goal of genuine Jewish nationalism (Buber 1916c , 429, 431). 6 This nationalism had to take the form of living communities devoted to justice and social equality in the spirit of Gustav Landauer’s anarchist philosophy.


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An adherent of Landauer’s anarchism herself, Susman would have recognized the Landauerian imprint in Buber’s pronouncement. She praised the kibbutzim’s efforts to create new forms of communal life, and not only in an abstract sense: in 1919 she admitted to Buber that if she were still young, she would now go to Palestine and devote all her “energies to this life with its more straightforward possibilities, a life not yet robbed of sanctifi cation” (Buber 1991 , 244). It would be diffi cult to think of a stronger endorsement of the socialist Zionist project. What is more, in coming out so strongly in favor of the development of the Yishuv , she did not doubt Buber’s approval, as this excerpt from a letter to him shows:

[O]ur opinions in regard to the Jewish problem cannot be much more than a hairsbreadth apart. Against Hermann Cohen, for instance, but in general on all essential matters I stand entirely on your side. I would like to know what you and yours call the dividing factor. I think it is only that I fi nd it impossible, because of my material and psychological situation, to identify with the actual Zion as the sole possibility of real-izing the goal. No doubt precisely that will seem to you a fault. Perhaps I came to it too late. . . . My belated identifi cation with Judaism was determined only by those aspects of the national Jewish character that are supranational in character. (256–57, emphasis added) 7

Such an affi rmative statement notwithstanding, it would be wrong to read these observations as an unconditional endorsement of Zionism. All that they prove is that at the time, Susman harbored genuine Zionist sympathies, even if only of the practical, socialist variety.

Susman’s thinking was not as different from Cohen’s as she seemed to believe. Her reference to the “actual Zion” (i.e., Palestine), indicates that she differentiated between the “actual” and the “true” Zion mentioned above. The fi rst was merely the means, one among others, to realize the second. Her refusal to limit herself to practical Zionism left room for other visions and thus, one would imagine, for an accommodation with Cohen. This, however, was not the case.

It is diffi cult to account for Susman’s strenuous effort to distinguish her own stance from that of Cohen. The reason may have been a personal


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grievance, of which her memoirs provide tantalizing evidence. Though she “loved” Cohen’s books and envied his religious upbringing, she deplored the “strange misunderstanding” that had led to his animosity towards her. As she remembered in her old age, Cohen’s enmity had arisen from her defense of Buber’s Zionism against Cohen’s anti-Zionism (Susman 1964 , 22, 124–25). For personal reasons, then, and in all probability subconsciously, Susman may have downplayed her indebtedness to Cohen. Considering their affi nity, which is indeed unmistakable, it is remarkable how rarely Cohen fi gures in her overall oeuvre. 8

She certainly had far less trouble acknowledging her indebtedness to Buber or to the liberal rabbi and theologian Leo Baeck. In a review of Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism), probably Baeck’s most impor-tant work, she expressed complete agreement with the author’s understanding of Judaism. This “splendid” work, she wrote, was “a book of the divine reality and of the real divineness” so closely intertwined in the Jewish experience. She accorded pride of place to the concept of reconciliation and its supreme importance for the Jewish religion.

Judaism is the religion of reconciliation: reconciliation between the will of God and the human deed and thus simultaneously reconciliation of human beings among themselves. As much as reconciliation and peace are the goal, the eternal messianic goal of human history and at the same time of each lived moment of the individual life, the purport of all decision for God, all ministration to God constitutes service to the neighbor, grace of charity [ Nächstenliebe ]. The whole commandment to worship God is love of the neighbor, of every neighbor, including the stranger and the enemies [ sic ]. Love of the neighbor itself is worship. Because as Israelites we always stand with our feet on the ground while the streams of the miracle pass through our heart. (1922, 55–56)

In Susman’s account, communal rituals and the observance of the law retreat in signifi cance behind the individual’s attitude towards his or her neighbor. Her stance on love as a force for transcendence instead of a merely ethical demand reveals her distance from Cohen. Love should not be practiced on its own account, she maintained, but for the sake of God.


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As might be expected, this demand posed serious problems. According to her rendition of Baeck’s text, the call to love without reservation, though an “unheard-of blessing,” had also led to the long martyrdom of the people of Israel. In her view, this precisely constituted Jewry’s greatness. “In the martyr-dom that the Jews fi rst lived and demanded of themselves,” she wrote, “[and] that to all intents and purposes appears to be the epitome of the Jewish life and death postulate, death itself is overcome at last.” In case the reader took her extolling of Jewish martyrdom to have merely intratribal signifi cance, Susman hastened to emphasize its centrality to world history: “Only the messianic faith in the vouchsafed [and] promised reconciliation realized between God and man makes the thought of a world history that is not only an expanse of rubble possible. Through the messianic idea the chaos of history becomes cosmos; the spirit enters into it ” (1922, 56, emphasis added). Put differently, it was the mes-sianic view of history, the idea that redemption was a possibility in the here and now, that created order out of chaos.

How was this order to be achieved? In the mid-twenties Susman gained new insight into the problem of messianic responsibility by reading the Hasidic legends in Buber’s rendering. Much later, she paid tribute to the impact read-ing these legends had had on her: “It was a wonderful consolation, an inner reanimation, an ultimate confi rmation of all that which had always been mine ” (1964, 115, emphasis added). In an article published in 1928 she described Hasidic mysticism as a “mysticism of hope” and a mysticism of the deed. In her view, Hasidism rested on the following “primal certitude”: “the certitude of everyone’s responsibility for everyone else in world affairs, in each deed, in each word, yes, in each glance and each gesture that acts in the world” (1928, 147). Though she did not yet link this “certitude” to messianism per se, the crucial realization of personal accountability and potential was there. More than a decade later she would use a very similar formula when writing about the responsibility of the messianic individual. Buberian Hasidism provided her with an essential building block for her mature messianic philosophy.

In 1929 Susman for the fi rst time devoted an essay exclusively to the topic of messianism. In “Die messianische Idee als Friedensidee” (“The Messianic Idea as the Idea of Peace”) she dispensed with almost all signs generally asso-ciated with the advent of the messianic age (the coming of the messiah, the ingathering of exiles, the reinstitution of cultic sacrifi ces, etc.), and instead


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singled out peace as its one defi ning feature. “The Jewish idea of peace,” she clarifi ed, “is not order, compromise and balance; rather, it is mercy, divine rec-onciliation, and deliverance” (1965c, 60). The biblical prophets, those fi rst and greatest advocates of the idea of a kingdom of peace, had fi rst introduced the Jews’ mission to work for peace and justice, she asserted, a mission that encom-passed something far greater than the mere absence of war and injustice. 9

Israel had been called upon to realize God’s purpose on earth not by “the self-realization of the people,” as she put it, but by its “ self-renunciation. ” Self-renunciation in this context meant to live a life beyond the nation-state and in the service of a united humankind ( geeinte Menschheit) (1965c, 57). In so doing Judaism burst the constraints of a merely tribal religion and assumed universal signifi cance. This was exactly what Cohen had outlined in his Religion of Reason. What would come to the fore with increasing clarity was Susman’s insight into the profound historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit ) of all life and thought. It was this awareness of the pressure and the demand of the hour, more than any specifi c ideas, that distinguished her philosophical writings from Cohen’s timeless system.

Judaism as World Religion and the Rumor of the Living Truth

Susman further developed the idea of Judaism as a universal religion in an article published three years later, signifi cantly titled “Das Judentum als Weltreligion” (“Judaism as a World Religion”). In her opinion, Judaism was “a world religion in the deepest and most decisive sense” because of Israel’s historical task to “overcome the national” (1965d, 115). Contrasting the situa-tion of humanity at large, which she viewed as one of existential homelessness and suffering, with the situation of the Jews, the people of exile par excellence, she concluded that only the latter fully embraced their destiny. Whereas the non-Jewish part of humanity consistently negated the original human exile, the Jews had assumed the burden of the human destiny of homelessness and endured, to quote Susman, “a second exile within the exile of the human as such.” In thus accepting their full humanity, the Jews were creating them-selves “toward God” ( sich Gott entgegenbilden ). This was done by contribut-ing in every simple deed of love and justice toward “world peace,” thereby furthering the deliverance of creation, one step at a time (114–17). The notion


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of Judaism as a world religion thus implies a didactic or inspirational function. The Jews had been elected to lead humankind’s struggle toward justice and peace by their own (supranational) example. 10

In defi ning Judaism as a world religion, Susman trod familiar ground. None other than Hermann Cohen had identifi ed Judaism as “ nothing but a world religion” (1916b, 686, emphasis added) precisely on account of its messianic concept of God. In Das Wesen des Judentums Leo Baeck had simi-larly claimed that “Judaism has never abandoned the claim to be the world religion. . . . For the prophets who created the idea of a world religion, Israel’s life was no isolated experience but an essential factor in the social life of all nations” (1948, 79). In an article specifi cally devoted to a comparison of world versus national religion, he had elaborated on the issue. Whether a religion could be considered a world religion depended on factors such as quality and intensity and had nothing to do with the number of adherents or geographical extent. What mattered instead was the form and idea of the faith, the “reli-gious content” and “essence.” A world religion, in this view, was indepen-dent of the political realm and transcended pragmatic considerations such as reason of state. Simply put, it aimed at the supra-state level and demanded that human tasks be carried out with a view to the universal. Its goal was the creation of a new world, a new spirit, and a new heart. Based on these criteria, Judaism clearly constituted a world religion (Baeck 1931 , 7–9).

Even if Baeck’s distinction between national and world religion served as the starting point for Susman’s essay, which may well have been the case, she ended up going far beyond his brief discussion of Judaism. In one sense, her essay may be read as an attack on what we might call the “atheist view” of Jewish history. She denounced the recent attempt to understand Jewish history without God as completely misguided. A “purely socio-economic pre-sentation of Judaism” was nothing but a “sociological shadow image and dis-tortion” of both Jewish history and the Jewish human being and thus missed the point. That which was truly unique ( das Einzige ) about Israel’s history was precisely the fact that it was rooted in the “demand of the One God” and that its sole meaning consisted in the realization of this demand (1965d, 113). It was that which made it a world religion proper.

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the confi dence in Israel’s mission to humanity may strike us as odd, if not downright foolhardy. Unfortunately, the crisis and chaos of the late twenties and early thirties were merely the beginning of an unprecedented calamity. On January 30, 1933, Reich President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancel-lor. On the night of February 27, the Berlin Reichstag (the German parlia-mentary building) went up in fl ames, paving the way for the passage of the misleadingly named Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (“Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State”). The Enabling Act, passed on March 23, effectively signaled the end of the Republic. Though it would be more than two years until the pass-ing of the infamous Nuremberg Laws “for the protection of German blood and honor,” the writing was unmistakably on the wall. Throughout the com-ing months Susman frantically prepared her emigration, not as a Jew, as she observed in her memoirs, but simply as a German who could not bear this new Germany (1964, 137). On the last day of the year she crossed the border into Switzerland, not knowing at the time that she would never return to the country of her birth.

Once again, Susman responded to these alarming developments by seeking consolation in the Bible. Her appraisal of the current situation, aptly called “Trost” (“Consolation”), is a stark and disturbing attempt to invest persecution and suffering with a higher meaning. It also demonstrates her growing awareness of the essential historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit ) of human existence. Rather than positing a metahistorical reality, this view conceived of human reality as being part of the broad stream of history. Susman wrote: “We all know: our time stands on the threshold of new historical births, in the decline [ Untergang ] of old arrangements. Everything is being displaced and presses for unfamiliar solutions. Much that until recently seemed impossible has become real. We are standing under the inexorable demand of the hour.” Today’s time was the time of the “secret earthquake,” as she described it in a powerful metaphor; everything was being convulsed and displaced. The effect of this unsettled “architecture” was profound:

Genuine history only steps beyond the threshold of our life in those moments when all human truths and certainties, all merely intel-lectually established values, all generally accepted, objective systems


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of the spirit collapse. For only then is it revealed that even though history is made by humans, it does not exhaust itself in the human; a lawfulness [ Gesetzlichkeit ] affects history which is experienced by the human being with a tremendous impact but which is inaccessible to his perception. (1934, 253)

At this point, Susman’s divergence from atheist thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin becomes evident. Thus Susman: “The epitome of the his-torical truth is God’s unceasing judgment on everything human which breaks through all human action and creation.” No one, least of all a Jew, could hope to escape from this “divine world-judgment” that roared like a storm through Israel’s entire history. Israel’s destiny was correspondingly diffi cult: “There is no harder lot than to be a witness of the living truth” (254–55). But what did this witnessing entail in practice? What was at stake in God’s call “Hear oh Israel!”? Nothing less than the realization of the grand prophetic vision of the end-time, Susman insisted.

The realization of the prophets’ apocalyptic vision did not call for “heroic struggles, forcible interventions, [and] powerful creative transformations of the world,” but for something far more simple and plain: “the demand of justice, of simple human kindness.” And it was precisely for this demand, so simple and yet almost insurmountably hard, that Israel had been elected for suffering ( ins Leid gestellt ) (Susman 1934 , 255–56).

On this point, Susman was adamant. Though it could not be denied that all human beings suffered, Israel alone had been “ elected for suffering.” The very fact of this election signifi ed a “singular affi rmation of suffering” as lived reality. Fatalism and quietism played no role in this affi rmation which entailed a startlingly optimistic attitude toward life, as Susman explained:

The Jew, the most strongly affl icted human being on earth, is no pes-simist. He does not slander life for the sake of suffering. Melancholy, the addiction to suffering and its demonic nature, the greatest sin, is denied him. The gloomy Greek saying “It would be best never to have been born” could never have come over the lips of a Jewish per-son. For being born is the precondition for being able to be redeemed [ Erlösbarkeit ]. (1934, 256, emphasis added)


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Suffering more than any other human being, the Jew experienced consolation in a manner unknown to other peoples. The kind of consolation Susman had in mind was neither catharsis nor mystic transformation, for it did not change the sufferer’s situation or remove the cause of suffering. Instead, it constituted the affi rmation of suffering, the confi rmation, and the valuation of the suf-ferer’s greatness ( Wertung seiner Größe ). Adorned with the crown of suffering, the sufferer experienced suffering itself as consolation. 11

Susman’s “ethics of suffering” is disquieting for a number of reasons. First, it adopts the lofty stance of the metaphysical thinker who surveys the lay of the land from the great height of the unconcerned and ignores the question of causality. Rather than identifying human complicity—that is, specifi c political and social causes of Jewish suffering—it invests suffering with a higher meaning under God’s stern eye, as it were. Second, and even more problematically, it seems to invite a fatalistic attitude that, under the inconceivable conditions of the 1930s, could prove lethal for German Jews. 12 Needless to say, Susman could not have anticipated future events, nor did she condone a passive submission in the face of encroaching evil. Instead of endorsing suffering as consolation, however, she might have chosen to comment on a biblical lesson better suited to the times. Her paradoxical conception of suffering as consolation makes sense only if we take her view of suffering as evidence for Israel’s election seriously. She wrote:

Hard and dark is what is happening. Close to us all is the abyss. But isn’t the truth, once again, closer to us still for this very reason? Do we human beings of today not understand in a new way what life, what suffering, what history, what abyss, death, and damnation are? Never before has the meaning of all historical existence been more power-fully revealed to a time than to ours. Happier and duller times, in which the abyss is covered up, the chaos formed, veiled, vanquished, don’t touch as forcefully at the secret of history [and] haven’t heard as clearly as we the rumor of the living truth. (1934, 259)

The “rumor of the living truth”: this phrase encompasses Susman’s entire messianic vision. On this view, the human being merely suspects the existence of the “living truth” and may even have heard it rumored, he does not know for sure. In Susman’s reading, certainty is ultimately irrelevant. Rather than


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reacting with despair or fl ight into passive consolation, she envisioned a leap of faith across the abyss of the unknown. What is at stake is the human deci-sion to act as if the rumor were true.

Acting upon nothing but a rumor means trusting in the potential of the moment to become messianic. It thus demands a high degree of hope and confi dence in the future as well as a willingness to risk suffering and rejection, which is precisely what makes Susman’s trust in the power of rumor so radical.

Jews as Job

When Susman issued her call for an active and affi rmative embrace of suffering, she had already left her old life in Germany behind. Over the following years she would eke out a precarious existence in inhospitable Switzerland. Denied the opportunity to take up gainful employment, she contributed articles to the religious socialist periodical Neue Wege under a male-sounding pseudonym. We need not wonder that the steadily deteriorating international situation, the increasing mistreatment of the Jews, and fi nally the outbreak of war shook her to the core of her being. These developments reinforced her conviction, long held and steadily strengthening, that the situation of the Jews could not be under-stood by applying general criteria or standards. Their misfortune was unique.

Tragically, not everyone recognized the gravity of the state of affairs. The Indian nationalist and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, for example, pro-foundly misread the character of Hitler’s persecution as well as the options for resistance available to Germany’s Jews. Writing in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom of early November 1938, Gandhi glibly assured his readership that his sympathies were “all with the Jews.” At the same time, he considered the Zionist effort to establish a national home in land settled by Arabs profoundly wrongheaded. Instead, he counseled a stance of spiritual resistance born out of a nonviolent endurance of suffering. Gandhi’s recommendation of volun-tary suffering joyfully endured bears some striking resemblance to Susman’s own proclivity for suffering as consolation, delineated in her piece “Trost,” and thus merits closer scrutiny. Referring to the Jews in Germany, Gandhi wrote:

Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the


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world outside Germany can. Indeed even if Britain, France, and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his fi rst answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep. (1983, 109)

And as if such an appalling misreading of the Jews’ predicament were insuf-fi cient to highlight Gandhi’s lack of genuine sympathy, he went one better by adding: “Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth” (111).

As we have seen, in 1934 Susman had expressed similar thoughts. In hindsight, her embrace of suffering must be judged as thoroughly mis-guided. But at least she had the fl exibility of mind and the courage to revise her opinion. No doubt under the impact of the steadily worsening assault on the Jews between Hitler’s assumption of power and Kristallnacht, she came to realize that passive suffering in the face of murderous tyranny was not the answer. Thus, when Susman learned of Gandhi’s letter and Martin Buber’s aggrieved response, she sat down and penned a fervent defense of Buber. Her text was uncompromising in her condemnation of Gandhi. “Gandhi has failed to understand the Jewish destiny,” she asserted; “he has not at all become acquainted with it. He speaks hard, uncomprehending words.” It plainly made no sense to compare the situation of today’s Jews with that of the Indian minority in South Africa, the plight of which had ini-tially awakened Gandhi’s social consciousness. Much less could the “great Mother India,” struggling for national self-determination, be equated with the “tiny motherkin Palestine” fi ghting for sheer survival (Susman 2009a). 13 Borrowing Buber’s “mother” terminology, Susman expressed her incom-prehension at the fact that Gandhi seemed to begrudge the Jews a Heimat and a “rescuing mother” on this tiny strip of land in this grave hour of need.


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With stronger words than ever before, Susman affi rmed the existential necessity of the Zionist project. It was “certain,” she insisted, that the dan-gerous crisis Jewry was undergoing could only be resolved “on the soil of Palestine” (5, 6).

Though Buber had neglected to emphasize the divine imperative behind the Jewish destiny and thereby concealed his “most profound Jewish knowl-edge,” Susman asserted, she was in full agreement with everything else in his message. The current crisis called for something more than the nonviolence associated with Satyagraha, Gandhi’s concept of “soul force”; it demanded the bringing about “of a new, the [ sic ] divine world order,” not an attitude of “tarrying and holding still” but the “vital active struggle [ Kampf ] for the kingdom of God” (2009a, 7). Her rebuff of Gandhi’s philosophy when applied to the Jews could hardly have been worded more strongly. It is all the more remarkable when set against the admiring tone of a lecture on Gandhi she had given in 1929. In this lecture she had paid glowing tribute to his sharp politi-cal instinct and his great soul. Unlike “weaker idealists,” Gandhi “had never underestimated the power of evil,” she had written back then (1965b, 29). His article of 1938 disabused her of this misconception.

The intransigence of her response becomes easily comprehensible when considering her disappointment over Gandhi’s callousness toward the Jews. It may also explain her readiness to explicitly endorse what she called a “vital active struggle,” a phrase suffi ciently ambiguous to raise doubts about her oth-erwise strongly professed aversion to violence. If the Jews were indeed caught in a struggle for survival, and if even those who should have been their sympa-thetic defenders failed to rise to the occasion, would it not be ethically permis-sible, even imperative, to pick up arms for the purpose of self-defense? This, at least, is what her rejection of Satyagraha seems to imply.

As far as I know, this renunciation of nonviolence is unique in Susman’s written oeuvre. For reasons that cannot be fully explained, Susman’s convic-tion of the need for active struggle in Palestine, rather than increasing under the pressure of circumstances, began to weaken in the course of the war. Instead, she devoted more and more of her thinking and writing to the larger problem of the Jews in what she was accustomed to think of as the divine Heilsordnung , and the Zionist struggle for a national home receded in sig-nifi cance, at least temporarily. In her Purim refl ection of 1942 she described


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Jewry’s persecutors as “tools” and God’s “servants.” She then allowed herself to voice an ever-so-faint doubt about God’s continuing testing of his people:

Certainly, today, when the entire [Jewish] people has become one suffering Job, it is diffi cult and almost impossible to answer the ques-tion: will this fresh thousand-fold dispersal of the people, the indi-vidual’s renewed reduction to the struggle for the naked existence, this extermination of countless numbers from among the people’s greatest, be able to truly make the people commit itself once again to its eternal task? And it seems almost impossible today to bless the moment in which a tyrant sanctioned the most frightful, coldest per-secution and extermination of the Jewish people. (1940, 9)

Such moments of wavering trust in Israel’s world-mission are as rare in her writing as her dismissal of Satyagraha, and all the more remarkable for that. To ask a Jew to “bless the moment” his own extermination had been decided on was indeed asking the impossible, and seems an act of breathtaking insen-sitivity. The affront of the very suggestion was the result of a desperate effort to fi t a destiny of hitherto unimaginable evil into God’s plan for the Jews and hence the world.

Though spending the war years in safety, Susman was not spared personal tragedy. In 1943, when trying to escape from Austria, her beloved sister Paula Hammerschlag was discovered and apprehended by the SS. To escape incar-ceration, she committed suicide within hours of her arrest. Another member of the unlucky party, Susman’s old friend Gertrud Kantorowicz, was transported to Theresienstadt, where she died of meningitis three weeks before libera-tion. Susman herself spent part of the war in the hospital, recovering from yet another serious injury. All these blows notwithstanding, or perhaps because of them, she steadfastly clung to her deeply held messianic conviction. This was no easy task, as her impassioned struggle with the problem of Job reveals. Written during a time of global and personal tragedy, Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes (The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People), fi rst published in 1946, came to include her most mature thought on the Jews and their unique “calling.” Remarkably, it was one of the very fi rst philosophical attempts to make sense of the recent catastrophe. 14


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In its essence, Das Buch Hiob , a book that by Susman’s own admission contained her entire life, is a comparison of the trials of the biblical Job with those of the Jewish people in modern times (1964, 159). Within its pages Susman tries to establish whether the Holocaust proved that God had effec-tively broken the covenant with His chosen people. In contrast to the theolo-gian Richard Rubenstein, who interpreted the Holocaust as evidence for the death of God, or Martin Buber, who saw in it an “eclipse of God,” Susman offered a “satanological” commentary that allowed God to get off scot-free. 15 In Susman’s reading the destiny of the man Job, blameless yet struck by a series of ever more harrowing calamities, stands as the symbol of the entire Jewish people, a people burdened with the necessity of atonement for sins it has not committed. To live in the full consciousness of innocence and the simultaneous impossibility of innocence (for this is what the biblical tale of Job is ultimately about) meant to be Jewish, to suffer guiltlessly and yet not to despair. From this perspective, the Nazi persecution becomes the ultimate trial of the steadfastness of the Jews’ faith and trust in life.

The greatest mystery of the book of Job, in Susman’s exegesis, concerned the role of Satan. Why did God allow Satan to wreak such havoc upon a man who was blameless and upright, god-fearing and shunning wickedness, as the Bible tells us? For Susman it was simply inconceivable that Satan could have acted without God’s approval, hence whatever happened was bound to happen and therefore had to have an ultimate purpose. As God’s envoy, Satan took on the role of “executor of the messianic destiny,” in her scandalous formulation (1996, 151). That is to say, only through death and destruction had the Jewish people received the strength to go on living as Jews . Referring to recent events, Susman rhetorically asked whether it was not the “radical dispersion” occa-sioned by the Nazi assault on life that had created a new inner unity among the Jewish people, a unity that after centuries of confusion and homelessness had fi nally led the people “back to itself.” The conclusion implicit in this train of thought is as inescapable as it is shocking: it took Hitler and his henchmen and the unspeakable carnage they wrought to help the Jews remember their divinely appointed mission (1996, 132). 16

If Hitler played a role, however horrible, in God’s inscrutable plan, what about the individuals who brought about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine? In Das Buch Hiob , Susman claimed that “no one can doubt that,


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today, Palestine is in need of the strong hearts and hands, of the living forces of the entire people for its establishment [ Aufbau ]” (emphasis added). Having made this assertion, she immediately warned against basking in the triumph of Zionist accomplishments, no matter how impressive they might appear. Despite having reclaimed the land, the Jews did not own it, she insisted; in fact, the land had never been theirs. Zion had never been merely a land to dwell in, it was the holy land, and as such, more than just a land like any other. She put it succinctly: “Palestine is not enough; it has to be Zion, become Zion” (1996, 116–17). What was this Zion that could not be pinpointed on a map, even if it existed on historical soil? For Susman, it was a “test of strength, a test of faith, a test of life. If the seed is alive, it will germinate, arise in every historical soil. The soil itself, however, remains an earthly realm; Zion remains galut to the end of time ” (118, emphasis added).

How are we to understand this startling phrase? How can Zion be equated with eternal exile? Twentieth-century Zionists conventionally understood the galut (exile) as the negation of Zion and not as the place where the messianic transformation occurred, as Susman implies here. Recalling her concept of the messianic idea as the quintessential idea of peace, we come a little closer to understanding this remarkable pronouncement. Zion was not a goal that could ever be reached or realized within the fi nite realm of human existence. Though it was the Jews’ primary mission to work for its realization on earth, this work should always be seen as open-ended and unbounded, eternally incomplete. 17 For Susman, this very incompleteness was no reason for despair. A Zion that “is not goal, but path, not answer, but question” should not inspire hopelessness but precisely its opposite, she believed: “In a thoroughly sec-ularized world the work for Zion [ Zionsarbeit ] fi nds its actual justifi cation [ Bewährung ] only in the sphere of salvation”; in other words, only by working for true humanity and for peace would Zion be realized on earth (1996, 118). This work was best achieved from the position of political powerlessness. Needless to say, the conviction of the need for powerlessness could not easily be reconciled with the Zionist desire for statehood.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence. The same month Susman wrote a new preface to the second edition of Das Buch Hiob . Regardless of its brevity, this preface contains her most important and urgent statement on Zionism and Israel, and deserves careful examination.


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Challenging the normalization efforts of mainstream Zionists that, at the time of her writing, seemed to gather such terrifying momentum, she desperately clung to the hope that Israel should not and could not be a state like any other. Not only did the newly founded Israel not seek power and territorial expansion, she urged, but in the past it had also been content to accept an exceedingly modest part of a land claimed from the desert, in order to preserve and to strengthen a “living center” (1948, 7). Such apparently reasonable goals notwithstanding, the new state had almost immediately aroused the ire of sur-rounding states and been forced to go to war.

It was the Jews’ resorting to weapons for the fi rst time in almost two millennia, Susman feared, that threatened to derail Israel from its rightful course. Her distress at these developments is palpable in her use of language. By becoming embroiled in an armed struggle, even for the purpose of self-defense, the Jewish people were succumbing to the “bloody aberrations and distortions” characteristic of other nations. In consciously and proudly mim-icking the Gentiles, the Jews “partook of the curse of nationalism, partook of the growing numbness of life, of the apocalyptic freezing of hearts in which the life of humanity congeals [ erkaltet ].” She then posed the awful question: “Can the messianic heritage still be held in trust in such a reality? Is the realization of the simply human—it is the same question—still possible in it?” (1948, 9). 18 Put differently, were the fi rst Israelis not committing a monstrous blasphemy in resorting to force by acting counter to God’s plan as expressed in Ezekiel 12:15 (the very verse that precedes her inquiry into the book of Job): “Then, when I have scattered them among the nations and dispersed them through the countries, they shall know that I am the LORD.” In countermanding God’s purpose for His chosen people, Israel was in danger of forsaking its mis-sion. 19 By resorting to force against the Arab aggressors, Susman maintained, Israel had thrown off the burden of sin laid on its shoulders instead of submit-ting to the unfathomable chastisement of God.

Was God’s judgment just? “We do not know,” she had written in 1933. “We cannot even pose the question. We understand nothing of the life in which we stand, the power [ Macht ] that moves us and judges us, the destinies in which we are entangled, the conditions of life that have been determined for us. We are absolutely and entirely in exile ” (1992, 221, emphasis added). 20 Though one might have drawn a different inference from Job’s arguing with


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God (which, we remember, God explicitly endorsed), for Susman the book’s lesson could be summed up thus: submission to an indecipherable divine will. And this was precisely what the fi rst Israelis rejected. In spurning their God-ordained exile and exercising brute force, they had abandoned the mean-ing of their existence; they had thrown off their people’s status as a symbol of defenseless humanity, “without power, without state, without weapons, with-out shape [ Gestalt ] and beauty, even without a visible existence, weak, worth-less” (Susman 1996 , 104). This insistence on acceptance and acquiescence (which seems to confl ict with Susman’s emphasis on the importance of a more activist individual responsibility in her attack on Gandhi) is perhaps the strongest expression of her anti-Nietzschean concept of the “will to powerless-ness,” in Ingeborg Nordmann’s apposite phrase. The “will to powerlessness” had nothing to do with the “mystical surrender of the individual to the uni-versal,” Nordmann argues; rather “it signifi es the human being’s most distinct capability. For no higher truth em-powers [ sic ] the individual. To be distinct means to carry the whole weight of responsibility. In this respect powerlessness and self-awareness are the same for Margarete Susman” (1992, 255). In other words, by acting from a position of conscious powerlessness—that is, as an individual deprived of the backing of institutionalized power—the individual fi rst becomes aware of his or her individuality.

Under the infl uence of the Reform movement, personifi ed by rabbis Seligmann and Baeck, through her confl ict with Nietzsche, and especially under the impact of the Holocaust, Susman had come to elevate what she viewed as a divinely ordained passivity and powerlessness as a virtue. 21 At the same time, the Jewish individual, the most human of all human beings, was not absolved from the responsibility of carrying on the work of redemption. In some sense, then, the Jewish destiny was truly “beyond all good and evil” (1996, 153). How was this to be understood in connection with messianism?

Jews Beyond Good and Evil: The Three-Fold Messianic Mystery

In Susman’s interpretation, the basic tenor of Job was far from being one of resignation and despair. “The book of Job, the book of fate [ Schicksalsbuch ] of our people,” she wrote, is “a book of life and of trust in life, beyond the iron clamps of suffering and lust, beyond all good and evil which is the inalienable


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possession of man” (1996, 153). The thinly veiled reference to Nietzsche is certainly no coincidence here.

As we have seen, Susman’s fi rst encounter with Nietzsche had made a tremendous impact on her. He was among those thinkers she grappled with throughout her entire life and whose infl uence she never quite discounted. Knowing something of Susman’s lifelong fascination with Nietzsche throws new light on her religious thought. In what follows, I would like to argue that in some way, her most extreme statements about Jewish suffering and weak-ness are best understood as a deliberate response to, and ultimately a rejection of, Nietzsche’s philosophy of power.

In an essay included in her late collection Gestalten und Kreise , Susman explicitly contrasts specifi c sayings by Nietzsche with those of the Bible. Where Jesus had demanded not to resist evil and to turn the other cheek ( Matthew 5:39), Nietzsche affi rmed, even embraced evil and its creative potential. Where scripture reminded the human being what the good con-sisted in (Micah 6:8), Nietzsche’s mouth-piece Zarathustra declared: “We don’t know yet what is good and evil” (Susman 1954 , 124–25). The differences between the two positions admitted of no reconciliation. Even more appall-ing, in Susman’s view, was Nietzsche’s stance on the problem of suffering. In aphorism 325 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), which she quotes in her essay, Nietzsche stated: “Being able to suffer is the least thing; weak women and even slaves often achieve virtuosity in that. But not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one infl icts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering—that is great, that belongs to greatness” (1974, 255). No wonder that the thought expressed here, so un-Jewish and certainly un-Christian, disturbed her and made her call for the ethical value of suffering and compassion all the more insistent.

Susman’s most explicit settling of accounts with Nietzsche, however, appears in Das Buch Hiob . 22 I have cited her description of the book of Job as a book “beyond all good and evil” above, and I now want to quote the remain-der of this important section. Thousands of years ago a “book of a life beyond good and evil” had been written, she commented:

In this book God envelops Himself, Satan, and the human being in His silent secret of love. In rare instances nothing but a ray, a rumor


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of this book reaches the human eye or ear. But this ‘beyond good and evil’ belongs to God, not to the human being; again and again God puts it into man’s hand for an ever new separation and decision [ Scheidung und Entscheidung ]. For the forces are not separated once and for all; the knot in which they are tangled has to be actively disentangled afresh in each time, in each life. God sends forth Satan and gives him formidable power, fed from His own, precisely for the sake of this disentanglement. (1996, 153–54)

If Satan was indeed a child of God, then nothing existed beyond God. All of creation, even evil itself, was enfolded in the divine. Where Nietzsche had wrenched the human being free from both God and the devil, Susman reclaimed the devil himself as part of one mysterious, holy trinity. Going beyond good and evil, then, essentially meant the recovery of creation in its entirety. Nothing was and ever could be lost, not even evil. Where Susman posited a Jewish human being, weak and abandoned, walking the path of redemption, Nietzsche extolled the Übermensch , a new kind of Satan without a worthy divine antagonist, forever roaming the world in search of hubristic self-creation and self-perfection. 23

With the help of the Nazis, the catastrophic transformation that Nietzsche had prophesied with such uncanny foresight had come to pass. In Susman’s grim words: “The world is destroyed, God is denied, man has lost his shape; he has burst all the forms in which we had thought to grasp him; today, the name ‘man’ is nothing more than the attempt to master chaos” (1996, 155). Was there no consolation in the fact that God ultimately recognized even Satan as His child? Job’s acceptance of Satan into the “mystery of pain” of his life, Susman averred, actually constituted the “messianic mystery” at the core of his story and hence of all history (154).

Susman postulates three mysteries here: the “mystery of love,” in which God envelops Himself, Satan, and man; the “mystery of pain,” Job’s own mystery into which he admits Satan and affi rms him as God’s child; and the “messianic mystery,” the connection between love and pain, or, to speak with Nietzsche, good and evil and how they apply to human life. In Susman’s messi-anic thinking, God calls upon the human being to go beyond good and evil by recognizing evil as part of God’s plan, but then to fi ght it with all his might, for


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“God seeks the human being in struggle” (1996, 138). The Jewish human being, in her view, does not accept the fatum (again with a side-glance at Nietzsche’s wholehearted embrace of what he termed amor fati: the proud embrace of one’s fate, be it ever so horrible): “There is no fatum for the Jewish people. To be a Jew means to commit oneself [ sich entscheiden ]. For each member of the people may indeed be born a Jew; but one only becomes a Jew by way of a commitment to this existence” (24). 24 The implication is clear: Jewishness is something to be realized in the cosmic struggle with the forces of evil.

Reading Susman’s most important and controversial work as an expres-sion of a specifi c “anti-Nietzschean Judaism” illuminates Susman’s mature messianic philosophy in novel ways. But it does not fully explain those aspects of Das Buch Hiob that have aroused the greatest bewilderment and censure. 25 From its initial publication, Das Buch Hiob elicited the most diverse reactions. Rabbi Seligmann, for example, professed to be puzzled by Susman’s insistence on Job’s original guilt ( Ur-Schuld ) and her search for a parallel Ur-Schuld of Israel. The notion of an Ur-Schuld, he informed her, was an “invention” of the apostle Paul. In contrast to Christianity, Judaism taught the freedom of the will of each newborn. That , he claimed, constituted the theodicy of the Bible, and the book of Job, in turn, was the thunderous protest against it. 26

Seligmann’s criticism hit the nail on the head, and he was not the only one who wondered at Susman’s interpretation. Her poet friend Ilse Blumen-thal-Weiss, for example, while calling the book’s portrayal of Jewish existence “splendid,” similarly criticized Susman’s preoccupation with what she under-stood to be Israel’s primordial guilt. “I cannot share your conception that the Jewish people, that Job is being punished not because of personal guilt but on account of an a priori guilt in which it [ sic ] is entangled independently of its good or evil,” she wrote. “In my view this is entirely un-Jewish. For Judaism and Christianity are among other things distinguished from each other pre-cisely in this, that the Jew stands in the individual possibility of redemption, that he is not burdened with an Ur- guilt but turns into a sinner through his particular behavior to which may then be accorded pardon” (Susman Manu-scripts). 27 This, after all, was the reason for Yom Kippur.

Susman’s tendency to stray into Christian territory in the realm of theol-ogy had already been noted by Max Dienemann, the leading editor of Der Morgen. Commenting on an essay she had sent him, he had written: “Can we


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say that God imposes [ verhängt ] guilt? The entire Jewish way of thinking is opposed to this” (Susman Manuscripts). 28 Dienemann’s critique illustrates the distance that separated Susman from Orthodox Judaism. Her understanding of guilt in particular was strongly colored by Christian teachings. Unfortu-nately, Susman’s answers to these charges have not been preserved, and so we do not know how she defended herself against them.

Its heterodox, even heretical views on guilt notwithstanding, her inter-pretation does not invalidate the more purely messianic aspects of her philosophy. And it is here that her thought carries the most far-reaching impli-cations. According to Willi Goetschel, Susman’s entire intellectual project was dominated by “the central quest for the meaning and determination of existence” (1997, 824). Existence pure and simple, not specifi cally Jewish exis-tence. In truth, the two were dialectically related. As she wrote in Das Buch Hiob : “Just as the destiny of the Jewish people and the depth of human destiny in general are mirrored simultaneously in the destiny of Job, the innermost circle of humanity is circumscribed in the people Israel which constitutes humanity’s symbol and representation” (1996, 50). The progression human- being–Jew–Job, the ultimate messianic trajectory, may thus be conceived in ever narrowing circles, with Job being the perfect example of the fully human human being. In contrast, Nietzsche’s Übermensch , the anti-Job par excel-lence, fell entirely outside the circle of the human.

In an article on the meaning of the Bible for modern humans, Susman had elaborated on this trajectory in terms that highlight her concern with individual rather than social renewal. She put it this way:

As the path from God via the human being to redemption it cannot merely be a progressively advancing, linear one; rather, it is newly centered and accounted for in each individual conscience, and solely out of this responsibility, and fed from it, does it continue to its end. In this way the personal salvation becomes the epicenter of human-ity. . . . Israel’s destiny is decided in the conscience itself , and for this reason Israel’s destiny decides the destiny of the world. (1926, 303)

The Heilsweg of history was thus not only “grounded” in, but also fulfi lled by the individual conscience. This insistence on the signifi cance of the individual


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conscience not only gives short shrift to grand systems and movements but, I would argue, also empowers the individual. If the path to redemption is accessible to the individual conscience, the individual has the power to act and thereby to affect the “destiny of the world.” Rather than brave the icy clear solitude of Zarathustra’s mountain, the messianic individual descends into the realm of the murky everyday and attempts to wrench time free from the curse of eternal recurrence.

Margarete Susman’s Messianism of Small Steps: Saying Good-Bye to

Nietzsche

In his late work Der Antichrist , Nietzsche once more railed against the object of his great contempt, Judeo-Christian morality: “ What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; misfortune dirtied by the concept ‘sin’; well-being as a danger, as ‘temptation’; physiological indis-position poisoned by the worm of conscience” (1990, 148). It would be diffi cult to think of a view more inimical to Margarete Susman’s messianic philosophy with its reverence of the Judaic tradition and its emphasis on the transcen-dent signifi cance of the individual conscience. Instead of limiting her vision of redemption to momentous political and economic transformations, she called for a transformation of the heart based on verses like this one from the book of Ezekiel (36:26): “And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of fl esh.” 29 This task is at once baffl ingly simple and sublimely diffi cult. 30

Susman’s mature messianic vision requires that we treat the stranger as a brother, or more precisely, that we grasp human beings, qua strangers, as nonexistent. Only by transcending the barrier between ourselves and others can we prevent the human heart from freezing up, and thus help prepare the stage for the transformation of billions of atomized strangers into one universal brotherhood. How is this to be achieved? As we have seen, the truly messianic deeds, as Susman conceived them, consist in the blessing of a friendly glance, a simple deed of love, “brotherly patience,” and “a kind gesture,” all of which, despite their superfi cial triviality, carry the seed of the prophetic message of peace and help build a genuine human community ( Gemeinschaft ) (1960, 92). Human responsibility, which she considered identical with messianic


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responsibility, provided the key to the work of redemption. As “the thinkers of our thoughts” and “the doers of our deeds,” we are being challenged as “real, historical humans,” and not as “abstract” beings (Susman 1965c , 63). In the fi nal reckoning, it is the task of every single human being to labor for the redemption of the world in his or her everyday interaction with creation. All that is needed, and it is much, is one’s full presence in the moment. 31

Ultimately, Susman’s understanding of the concept of hope was critical to her outlook. 32 On this she never wavered. It was her appreciation of active or activist hope, I suggest, that prevented her messianism from lapsing into the “extreme quietism” Jacob Katz associates with traditional messianism ( 1993 , 26–27). 33 Susman may have abhorred the thought of the Jewish people enter-ing history by becoming one among the nations, but she clearly perceived the necessity of individuals doing so. Like Cohen and Buber in their differ-ent ways, she argued against the kind of passive waiting for redemption that refrained from action and trusted in the beyond. Put another way, Susman’s conception of living life messianically does not mean “a life lived in deferment in which nothing can be done defi nitively, nothing can be irrevocably accom-plished,” in Gershom Scholem’s famous formulation.

Scholem’s neat conception of messianic life is frequently quoted in stud-ies on Jewish culture and history; less familiar are the remarks that precede it: “There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfi ll himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value.” As a result, Scholem concludes that “the Messianic idea is the real anti-existentialist idea” (1995, 35). Susman’s appeal to the individual conscience and her belief in the possibility of new beginnings suggest otherwise. Like her friend Buber, she prof-fered an ethos of “everyday messianism” that was far from unreal, as Scholem charges, precisely because of its mundaneness (Mendes-Flohr 2008 , 26–38).

Susman’s philosophy was grounded in a triad of intimately linked tenets: the doctrine of Israel’s election, the Jewish universalist mission, and the human condition of existential exile. This triad was the starting point of her messian-ism of small steps. Like other messianists of the practical cast (again Buber springs to mind) she never overcame the tension between Jewish particularism and universalism (Löwy 1992 , 113). Nor was she able to reconcile her notion of


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Zion as “ galut to the end of time” with her glowing support of a “living centre” in Palestine. Her wavering stance on Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha equally lays her open to charges of inconsistency and ambivalence. 34 Her views on these issues may strike us as ambivalent, if not downright paradoxical. In fact, they highlight the precarious nature inherent in the assumption of a national-ism that is essentially supranational—that is, a particularism taking the shape of universalism. 35 Moreover, they express a productive dialectical tension that is absent from all “pure” nationalisms or cosmopolitanisms. In this respect, Susman’s vision of a Heilsweg might be classed among those other Zionist “roads not taken” recently analyzed by Norman Panko ( 2010 ). Her thinking evolved “under the inexorable demand of the hour,” and thus conveys some-thing of the tensions and tragedies of her times (Susman 1934 , 253). It would be ungenerous indeed to dismiss the more problematic aspects of her messianic philosophy as meaningless because they offend our sense of justice or logic.

In the fi nal reckoning, Susman did not merely embrace an ethics of suf-fering, but an ethics of triumph over suffering. If she endorsed what has been called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” she did so only partially (Schorsch 1994 ). 36 In accordance with both rabbinical and German Reform Judaism, she viewed suffering as essential to the Jewish experience. But unlike today’s proponents of a “politics of suffering,” she did not condone self-pity and hopelessness—far from it. 37 Rather than being obsessed with a catastrophic past, she consistently stressed the need to look forward. Her stance was dia-metrically opposed to the present-day embrace of suffering for suffering’s sake. For her, suffering had transformative power. She expressed it well when stat-ing that “the door of the past has not shut irrevocably; it may be opened from the direction of the future” (1960, 72).

Acting as if the door of the past has not shut irrevocably requires an attitude of messianic irony, as Leo Baeck shrewdly recognized. A standpoint born of scorn for the moment and hope in the future, messianic irony actualizes the readiness to take on the task of the future in the present (Baeck 1948 , 231). Both optimism and pessimism are required to face this task. According to Baeck, the belief in the future is born out of “a protest, a contempt for the day and a mockery of the hour.” It is therefore not the result of a blind and naïve belief in a future utopia, but rather the insight into the defi ciency of the status quo, and the bold determi-nation to overcome it within the circumscribed realm of the everyday. 38 Susman


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might have put it this way: each step we take on the messianic path, knowing full well that it may lead us nowhere, opens up the possibility of redemption.

One of the tragedies of the great catastrophe we tend to subsume under the label Auschwitz is the fact that “only radical statements seem now rel-evant,” as Pierre Bouretz has observed, perceptively adding that “one might wonder whether such a conviction would not paradoxically afford a posthu-mous victory to the murderers” (2007, 185). I think Bouretz’s warning is appo-site. At fi rst glance, Margarete Susman’s messianic philosophy does not strike one as particularly radical (Morgan 2012 , 102). 39 The Jews of today and of all times, she believed, had to consciously embrace the messianic path, one step at a time, to recognize in “germs so tiny” the beginning of teshuvah . 40 The messianic path was open to every Jew, in Israel or the Diaspora. Its radical potential precisely lay in the fact that it broke through the illusion that human beings are nothing but “bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves,” to quote Emmanuel Levinas ( 1969 , 21). 41 There is something perversely consoling about this illusion: if we are indeed nothing but the bear-ers of impersonal forces, we cannot be faulted for relinquishing our personal responsibility. But the human encounter occurs between individuals, not between forces or movements, and it is here that our responsibility lies. And it is here that our power lies. Susman’s messianic philosophy illuminates the signifi cance of this all-important encounter. Nietzsche’s Übermensch clearly had no place in this conception. She phrased it memorably:

We human beings talk of love and kindness—but do we also know what love and kindness are in reality? Who could understand bet-ter than precisely we human beings of today that those demands, grasped in their full seriousness, are actually the most diffi cult ones of human existence? Compared to them, everything else—and be it ever as grand and powerful—is an evasion from the ultimate exi-gency. We human beings live in a time that is drifting farther and farther from the fulfi llment of these demands; it is doing so by means of a dismal, tangled life, by means of destinies, miseries, crises of all kinds, by means of a cruel mass occurrence [ Massengeschehen ] without equal. We who through being in the service of death and of dead things, more lifeless [and] faceless than the images of wood and stone in front of which the renegade Israel once kneeled, are being


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increasingly deprived of our human core [ menschlich mehr und mehr entkernt ]—to us the truth has to become clear: the distance to the per-fect kindness and love between human and human is exactly the same as the distance to messianic redemption . (2009b, emphasis in original)

Notes

For Jesús Castillo. 1. On messianism in general, see Klausner ( 1956 ). For the best-known apocalyptic

interpretation, see Scholem ( 1995 ). For a contrasting view, see Idel ( 1998 , esp. 18, 21, 32–33).

2. Susman was very happy about this compliment (personal communication by Achim von Borries, July 2008). As a university student in Zurich, von Borries visited Susman regularly.

3. Susman’s thought does not quite fi t any of the models proposed by Anson Rabinbach in his study of Jewish messianism in Weimar Germany, which include “theological Messianists” (e.g., Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch), critical Hegelians (Franz Rosenzweig and Georg Lukács), and “radical Zionist messian-ists” (Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem). See Anson Rabinbach ( 1985 ). Nor does it conform to the typology advanced by Michael Löwy who has classifi ed Rosenzweig, Buber, and Scholem as “anarchistic religious Jews,” Gustav Landau-er, Franz Kafka, and Benjamin as “religious Jewish anarchists,” and Lukács, Enrst Toller, and Bloch as “assimilated, atheist-religious, anarcho-Bolshevik Jews” (Löwy 1992 ).

4. For example, see the otherwise valuable studies by Bouretz ( 2003 ), Brenner ( 1996 ) and Mendes-Flohr ( 1991 ). In each book, Susman’s name appears in the footnotes and index, but is otherwise not discussed.

5. In his great posthumous work Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism) Cohen was unequivocal about what he called the “mission of Israel”: “The misery of Jewish history does not begin with the exile, for the loss of the national state has already been determined by the messianic idea. On this, however, is based the tragedy of the Jewish people in all its historical depth. How can a people continue to live and fulfi ll its messianic task, when it is deprived of the universal human protection the state gives to a people? And yet this is the situation of the Jewish people, and such must be the meaning of Jewish history, if the messianic idea constitutes this meaning” (1972, 267).

6. In an address given at the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921, Buber distinguished between legitimate and false or illegitimate nationalism. The hallmark of false nationalism was that it sought to “make the nation an end in itself” (Buber 1983b , 54).

7. Despite Susman’s belief in the virtual identity of her and Buber’s stance, she did not share the vocabulary of Volk and blood he employed particularly in his earlier writings. See, e.g., his reference to Jewry as a “community of blood” in Buber ( 1916a , 19).


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8. In an essay published in 1923, Susman signifi cantly described Simmel and Cohen as “poles of Jewish life.” She summed up the essence of the supposed disparity between the two philosophers as follows: “Cohen lived beyond the present in the correlation with the future absolved from time [ in dem zeitenthobenen Zusam-menhang mit der Zukunft ], in the radiant light of an erstwhile world. Simmel lived in the present; therefore, everything he said was uncertain and unsteady” (1923, 387). Susman’s use of the word “ einstig” (erstwhile) may be a typo for the more logical “ dereinst ” (some day). In her own thought, the two temporal orienta-tions, future and present, would gradually come together.

9. For example, see Isa. 2:4: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares / And their spears into pruning hooks: / Nation shall not take up / Sword against nation; / They shall never again know war”; Isa. 65:25: “The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, / And the lion shall eat straw like the ox, / And the serpent’s food shall be earth. / In all My sacred mount / Nothing evil or vile shall be done”; and Jer. 22:3: “Thus said the LORD: Do what is just and right; rescue from the defrauder him who is robbed; do not wrong the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; commit no lawless act, and do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place.” All bible quotations are taken from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003 ).

10. Susman’s notion of the Jews as humankind’s moral teacher recalls Leo Baeck’s assertion that “all presuppositions and all aims of Judaism are directed toward converting the world or, to be more precise, toward teaching it” (Baeck 1948 , 257).

11. Susman’s understanding of suffering as being inherently positive is consonant with rabbinical Judaism. See Benbassa ( 2010 , 16). It also resembles, and was prob-ably indebted to, Cohen’s idea of the sufferer’s dignity.

12. Surely, the same charge could be, and has been, laid at the door of prominent fi gures like Martin Buber and Leo Baeck whose efforts in the realm of culture and religion may have lulled Germany’s Jews into a false sense of security and normalcy. Susman, at least, sent a clear signal by leaving Germany in 1933.

13. For his “mother” terminology from a letter sent to Gandhi dated 24 February 1939, see Buber ( 1983a , 116), where he writes: “It is obvious that when you think back to your time in South Africa it is a matter of course for you that then as now you always had this great Mother India. The fact was and still is so taken for granted that apparently you are entirely unaware of the fundamental differences existing between nations having such a mother (it need not necessarily be such a great Mother, it may be a tiny motherkin, but yet a mother, a mother’s bosom and a mother’s heart) and a nation that is orphaned, or to whom one says in speaking of his country: ‘This is no more your mother’!”

14. Holocaust theology proper began to fl ourish only in the early sixties. While World War Two was still in progress, the majority of responses came from haredim living in Palestine. See Katz, Biderman, and Greenberg ( 2007 , part 1). Once again, it is indicative of the academic neglect Susman continues to suffer that she is not included in this valuable anthology. Not a single footnote is devoted to her work.

15. For the Holocaust as indication that God had died, or that He had been hiding His face ( hester panim ), see, respectively, Rubenstein ( 1966 ) and Buber ( 1988 ). For the term “satanology,” see Künzli ( 1998 , 79–100).


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16. This view is echoed by Maybaum ( 1965 ). 17. Susman’s conception of messianic time as incomplete, or “meontological,” in

Martin Kavka’s more technical term, was not unique among messianic thinkers of the time. See Kavka ( 2004 ). The term “meontological” refers to living the moment of the “not-yet,” thereby beginning the “path toward human perfection and toward God” (Kavka 2004 , 1). Among major German Jewish thinkers who embraced the notion of incompleteness were Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. On messianic time also see Goodman-Thau ( 1995 , esp. 165, 171).

18. For a comparison of Susman’s lament to Buber’s, see Buber ( 1983c , 220–23). Like Susman, he decried the Zionist tendency toward normalization: “The ancient Hebrews did not succeed in becoming a normal nation. Today the Jews are suc-ceeding at it to a terrifying degree. . . . This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion” (221).

19. It is not clear how Susman envisioned the maintenance of a Jewish “living center” in a land administered and ruled by another power. Even if her misgivings about Israel’s “descent” into the nationalist quagmire should not be hastily dismissed as so much naïve claptrap, she failed to explain how such a living center, the nucleus of a future Zion, would be able to assure its survival. Why did she not, like her friend Buber, for example, accept the necessity of a binational state? Buber interpreted Israel’s func-tion in these terms “to encourage the nations to change their inner structure and their relations to one another.” Israel could only be reestablished and enjoy security under one condition: “It must assume the burden of its own uniqueness; it must assume the yoke of the kingdom of God” (1948, 170–71). To assume this yoke, a state was exactly what could not be dispensed with. For Susman, the danger of statehood and power outweighed the need to assure survival. In the fi nal reckoning, she never managed to resolve the dilemma of the viability of a living center in Palestine.

20. Compare this to these lines from the fi nal paragraph of Susman (1996, 167): “Wir, die so unendlich viel wissen, die viel zuviel wissen, wir wissen nichts. Wir wissen nichts von dem, worauf es für uns allein ankommt: von dem Plan, in dem wir befaßt sind und aus dem wir leben.”

21. Susman proposed a reading of Jewish powerlessness that is somewhat at variance with history, as David Biale demonstrates in his important study on the topic (1986). For the most part of their long history, Jews had been neither as powerless as they themselves subsequently believed, nor as powerful as their anti-Semitic antagonists liked to suggest. Rather, they “possessed an extraordinary ability to maneuver between the extremes of a quest for full sovereignty and a state of politi-cal passivity.” Susman was certainly not alone. From the rabbis of the post–Bar Kokhba revolt (via the medieval fi gure of Judah Ha-Levi) and nineteenth-century German Reformers to present-day writers like Michael Selzer, some Jews have viewed the Diaspora as the ethical answer to the problem of power. For a good overview of this strain in Jewish thinking, see Biale ( 1986 , 5–6).

22. His criticism of priestly Judaism notwithstanding, Susman did not accuse Nietzsche of anti-Judaism and certainly not of Nazi-type anti-Semitism. It needs to be remembered in this context that Nietzsche’s dictum of the will to power explicitly included pain and suffering, both one’s own and that of others. For


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the pervasive brutality condoned by Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Bernstein ( 1987 , 26). I concur with Bernstein’s conclusion that Nietzsche’s condemnation of the weak and sick encouraged an attitude of callousness and cruelty that squarely puts him in the camp of fascist thinkers, his distaste of German imperialism and anti- Semitism notwithstanding (145). For thought-provoking analyses of the problem, see the contributions in Golomb and Wistrich ( 2002 ). On the other hand, it seems fairly clear that Nietzsche felt considerable sympathy towards ancient Israel and modern Jewry. On his general stance, see Santaniello ( 1994 ).

23. See Susman ( 1954 , 120): “Es handelt sich also um eine Hybris ohnegleichen: um den unerhörten Versuch, den Menschen gerade durch die Absage an Gott zur Göttlichkeit zu steigern.” Whether Susman’s accusation of hubris is justifi ed or not, from a religious point of view Nietzsche’s elevation of the Overman, going hand in hand with his rejection of God, undoubtedly qualifi es as an act of hubris. On the Overman and its explicit link to the death of God, see Nietzsche ( 1978 , 286, 287).

24. Consider in this context the following statement by Leo Baeck: “Our life is ful-fi lled by what we become, not by what we were at birth” (1948, 19).

25. Modern scholarship on Das Buch Hiob, what little there is of it, has been squarely divided between positive and negative. Eveline Goodman-Thau, for example, pays tribute to the work as an ethical testament of sorts. By leaving out the question of Zionism and statehood, she is able to disregard the most problematic aspects of Susman’s analysis. Gesine Palmer, on the other hand, displays no such compunction and unhesitatingly labels the book a “plague.” Supposedly not only a “pathetic glo-rifi cation of a dreadful masochism,” Das Buch Hiob is dangerously wrongheaded, Palmer writes, in that its author vicariously accepts victimhood on behalf of her peo-ple. Despite this withering criticism, Palmer does not ignore the book’s redeeming features, for example its attempt to preserve dignity under conditions of profound debasement. See Goodman-Thau ( 2012 ) and Palmer ( 2012 , 184–85, 199, 205, 208).

26. Seligmann to Susman, April 23, 1947, London A, Susman, Deutsches Literatu-rarchiv, Marbach am Neckar, Germany (henceforth DLA). Others were equally taken aback by her un-Jewish emphasis on collective guilt. For example, see Edith Landmann-Kalischer to Susman, August 5, 1946, in Schlösser ( 1964 , 364ff.); and Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss to Susman, July 9, 1958, A: Susman, DLA.

27. Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss to Susman, July 9, 1958, A: Susman, DLA. 28. Max Dienemann, April 18, 1930, A: Susman, DLA. 29. Susman ( 1960 ) quotes the verse in “Ezechiel” (73). As she would have known,

Hermann Cohen commented on this verse as follows: “The new heart and the new spirit are and remain tasks. The I, too, can be considered nothing other than a task. . . . The I, therefore, can mean nothing higher and certainly nothing other than one step, a step in the ascent to the goal, which is infi nite” (1972, 204, emphasis in original).

30. As Emmanuel Levinas aptly said: “To be obliged to respond is no small thing” (Robbins 2001 , 283). In this connection Levinas coined the pithy slogan “service without servitude!” (Robbins 2001 , 283) On Levinas, see nn39 and 41.

31. Susman’s “small-step messianism” was undoubtedly infl uenced by Buber’s render-ing of Hasidic legends. According to Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Buber was “the


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only thinker who internalized the Hasidic system of values and attempted to use it as a model for Zionist social and ideological education” (Uffenheimer 1993 , 26). In the fi nal reckoning, her messianic philosophy displayed the same tensions between personal activism and national quietism as the Hasidism so beloved by her. While being “non-Messianic in the national sense,” to quote Schatz Uffenheimer, in the personal sense, Buberian Hasidism demanded responsibility and denounced resig-nation in the face of adversity and injustice (339). To do so, one needed power—but precisely not the kind of “will to power” advocated by Nietzsche. Power, on Buber’s terms, meant “the capacity to realize what one wants to realize”—in Susman’s read-ing the realization that the “germs so tiny” are in our hands. See Buber ( 2002 , 179).

32. Hermann Cohen was also among those who stressed the signifi cance of hope for the messianic vision. In an early essay titled “Die Messiasidee” (“The Messianic Idea”), he remarked that the “faith in humankind is the faith of Israel, hence the faith of Israel is hope. This apogee of Israelite prophecy, the hope for the future of humankind, that is the content of the messianic idea” (1924, 106). The essay was written between 1890 and 1892.

33. To be sure, to espouse an attitude of hope, especially if combined with an attitude of passive waiting, might also lead to quietism. Considering that Susman’s hope sprang from her insight into the incomplete nature of creation and the necessity of human participation in creation, however, it was not in danger of succumbing to quietism.

34. While it is true that “ethically speaking, passivity and amoral violence are often coupled in the Messianic tradition,” as Rabinbach claims ( 1985 , 87), in general she subscribed neither to an attitude of resigned waiting for the coming of the Messiah nor to the violence often associated with the eschaton. Contra Rabinbach, I would like to suggest that Susman’s messianism negates the defi nition of messian-ism as intrinsically “bound up with both violence and catastrophe.” The following remark does not apply to it either: “In Jewish messianism the cataclysmic element is explicit and consequently makes redemption independent of either any imma-nent historical ‘forces’ or personal experiences of liberation” (86).

35. Consider Buber’s claim that “we have equipped Jewish nationalism with an armor we did not weld, with the awareness of a unique history, a unique situation, a unique obligation, which can be conceived only from the supernational standpoint and which—whenever it is taken seriously—must point to a supernational sphere ” (1938b, 56, emphasis added).

36. The term was coined in 1928 by Salo W. Baron. The “lachrymose” conception views Jewish history as a stream of endless calamities.

37. As Esther Benbassa points out, “Suffering, today, no longer engenders hope. Its sole end is the expectation of further suffering, and its main horizon is the threat of anti-Semitism” (2010, 181).

38. Baeck puts it memorably: “There is here a messianic irony, a messianic contempt for the world—and only those who are imbued with this pessimism, this mockery, this protest and this irony are the really great optimists who hold fast to the future and lead the world a step further toward it. Those who are both strong in their optimism about the future and confi rmed in their pessimism about the present are the comforters of the people, the chosen of humanity” (1948, 232).


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39. Like Emmanuel Levinas, Susman might be characterized as a “philosopher of the ordinary.” According to Michael L. Morgan, “For Levinas, our ordinary lives are the settings for interpersonal relationships, human conduct, and arrangements in which the fundamentally ethical character of our lives is worked out, manifest, occluded, and expressed. It is the venue of ethical realization, and in this sense it is the locale for our self-fulfi llment insofar as we achieve it.” To my knowledge, Levinas was not familiar with Susman’s writings. Like Susman, Levinas was pro-foundly infl uenced and indebted to Rosenzweig. Moreover, they both studied and revered Henri Bergson and, to a lesser extent and far more critically, Martin Heidegger. Levinas himself attests to these infl uences in Robbins ( 2001 ). Lastly, both Susman and Levinas drew heavily on Buber’s dialogic philosophy. For exam-ple, see Atterton, Calarco, and Friedman ( 2004 ). Interestingly, by his own admis-sion, Levinas had no use for Hasidism (32).

40. With its insistence on the importance on everyday acts, Susman’s messianic philosophy qualifi es a type of “micro-theology.” According to Richard Kearney, “micro-theology” “resists the standard macro-theology of the Kingdom as emblem of sovereignty, omnipotence, and ecclesiastical triumph” (2004, 940).

41. Susman’s thought bears some striking similarities to that of Levinas. For a useful introduction see R. Cohen ( 2007 , 235). According to Cohen, “Levinas’s originality, his interpretation of the paradox of monotheism in ethical rather than epistemological terms, opens up the possibility of a new way to resolve certain confl icts that continue to haunt Jews, Christians, Muslims, and the religious of the world more generally. What Levinas has to contribute is an escape from the hardened and hence inevitable and irresolvable clash of theologies for the sake of the shared values of inter-human kindness, the morality of putting the other fi rst, and inter-human fairness, the call for justice for all” (250). On Levinas and messianism, see also Bouretz ( 2007 , 181–82).

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"A Germ so Tiny": Margarete Susman's Messianism of Small Steps

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