Excerpt

The German rediscovery of messianism in the first decade of the twentieth century gave voice to a new way of thinking about the utopian future that privileged redemption in its denunciation of progressivist notions of Enlightenment rationality. Profoundly uneasy with the growing anti-liberal and anti-Semitic upper classes of the Weimar Republic, the German-Jewish “generation of 1914” drew inspiration from the figure of the Messiah in answer to the nineteenth-century utopian-socialist dream of scientific rationality. “Messianism of our era,” as Gershom Scholem wrote, “proves its immense force precisely in this form of the revolutionary apocalypse, and no longer in the form…