DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR

"German and German Jewish Understandings of Persecution, Providence, and Messianic

Vengeance: 1933-1938"
by Eugene R. Sheppard (Brandeis University)

In Yosef Hayim Yerushalmis 1982 annual Leo Baeck memorial lecture,

Assimilation and Racial anti-Semitism: the Iberian and the German Models he
explored the striking comparison and lines of continuity between modern and medieval
models of assimilation and antisemitism: namely modern Germany and especially
National Socialism and those characteristics of medieval and early modern Spain/Iberia.1
The comparison of these two cases upsets the distinction that had conventionally been
employed by many historians and sociologists wherein pre-modern theological hostility
to Judaism was distinguished as fundamentally different from modern antisemitism,
understood to be a peculiarly modern invention that relies on modern notions of the
nation, and especially that of race. Hannah Arendts formulation perhaps captures one
strong version of this supposed rupture. For her, prior to the modern period, one could

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial anti-Semitism : the Iberian and the
German Models, Leo Baeck memorial lecture ; 26 (New York : Leo Baeck Institute,
1982). The essay was recently republished in The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, eds.
(Brandeis University Press, 2013). The volume includes several other essays which point
to Yerushalmis long-held fascination with the origins of modern Jewish historical
memory and writing in medieval and modern forms, whether those expressions of
belonging be voluntary or not.

always escape Judaism through conversion. But in modernity, Jewishness was simply
inescapable.2
Yerushalmi directs our attention to the medieval Spanish model as a precursor to
the modern German model especially in light of its infamous blood purity statutes seen as
a the anxious reaction to the marrano problem: arising from the forced mass conversions
at the end of the 14th century but also less coercive conversions taking place in its wake.
The invisible agents and mechanisms of Judaizing needed to be identified and marked,
marginalized and eventually expunged from Christian Spain. The inquisition therefore
marked juridically formalized procedures obsessed with impure blood. During the course
of the long 15th century, overlapping sets of secular and ecclesiastical statutes and
procedures were set into place that classify, identify, and purify sources of impure blood
within the Christian nation of Spain. The marranos and later the mariscos came under the
inquisitorial power in its effort to wipe out Christian heresy. And belief proved not to be
the saving criteria for anyone who was subjected to the machinery of the inquisition.
Blood became the factor. It is important to recall that neither Muslims nor Jews were the
official immediate target of the inquisition; at least not from the perspective of Rome.
The system of the Inquisition directed its attention, at least in principle, to Christian
heresy. Practically, however, it sought to identify and marginalize a significant minority

Arendt famously casted modern Jewish identities as caught between the poles of
conscious pariah and parvenu. Among the many places where she formulated this
juxtaposition, see Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah: Jewish Identity And Politics In
The Modern Age, (New York, 1978), pp. 67-90. For her somewhat hesitant existentialist
formulation of a persistent type of Jewish fatefulness which is contingent upon a Jewish
break from religion, see her lecture in Men in Dark Times, wherein she asserts that the
foundation of being Jewish rests on a certain possibility of existence which she
tentatively identified as fatefulness. This fatefulness arises from the very fact of
"foundationlessness and can occur only in a separation from Judaism, p. 17.
2

of the Spanish population, one that was not only economically successful, but politically,
theologically, and culturally well integrated into Spanish state and society.
Of course there has long been a German Jewish fascination if not identification of
medieval Spanish Jewry and the position of marranos themselves.3 What I find so
fascinating is the way in which the myriad of presentations of medieval Spanish Jewry
and its eventual expulsion were read with specific interpretive lenses, ones that are no
longer so obvious to us today. I have also come to realize that many so-called Aryan
Germans also looked back to this historical moment as a window onto the present and
near future for German Jews as well as Germany itself.
In the following pages, I will explore how medieval Spain became an especially
compelling frame of reference by which German Jews as well as non-Jewish Germans
grappled with uncertain political, theological, and historical currents during the first half
of the National Socialist regime. In the first part, a book by the popular writer and nonprofessional historian Valeriu Marcu dealing the expulsion of Jews from Spain will be
taken as a prime example of how multiple historical registers were apparent to quite a
few German readers who were trying to peer into the near future and see where and how
the national socialist persecution of German Jewry might take them. His close
acquaintance, Carl Schmitt, the controversial jurist and political theorists private
readings of Marcus text instantiates the ways in which the work illuminated certain
historical trajectories for the Nazi regimes experiment. Marcus prison onto the present

Most recently, see Jonathan Skolniks, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions History,
Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824-1955 (Stanfrod U. Press, 2014).
3

and the near future was clear to many contemporary European readers. 4 The book was
perceived as crucial even to those who otherwise held secular Jewish writers in contempt.
Schmitt, as is well known, had joined the Nazi party during the early decisive years of
national socialism. For he and the writer Ernst Jnger, another confidant of Marcu prior
to 1934, the mythic sea creatures of the Leviathan and the Behemoth would become a
crucial symbols in their conceptions of old and newly developing world orders. Marcu
never touches upon these mythic Biblical creatures, and yet, Jnger and Schmitts interest
in the medieval Spanish expulsion of its Jews became the starting point of interest in
medieval and early modern Christian and Jewish commentaries addressing the messianic
roles assigned to them. These great and fearsome sea and land creatures originally
appear in the Hebrew Bible, but it is their post-Biblical Christian, Jewish, and Christian
Hebraicist exegetical legacies that took root during the mid 1930s, that come to fascinate
and haunt both Schmitt and Jnger. Isaac Abravanel becomes the focus not only for
these two intellectuals, but for German Jewry as well. Indeed, a set of commemorative
engagements with Abravanel on the 500th anniverser of his birth in 1937 most likely
proved to be the access points by which a figure like Schmitt could learn about the
messianic feast of the Leviathan as Israels enemies are vanquished and punished.
Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party consistently employed inflammatory
political rhetoric against Jews and Judaism during the 1932 election campaign. And after
the successful seizure of power by the Nazis, many Germans and members of the Nazi
party were not quite sure how or if discrimination against Jews would proceed.
Antisemitic policies and organized actions proceeded unevenly during the first few years
4

Several published reviews of the text also demonstrate these meanings, but most of the reviews appear in
the exilic German press. Interestingly enough, the presentist element of the work was captured in the
books reception even in translation, with the notable exception of the books English language obsession.

of Hitlers rule. The popular stigmatization of Jews of course encompassed and produced
racial categories that overlaid older traditional religious categories. Many figures who
never considered themselves substantively Jewish, now found themselves juridically
classified by their blood and race as no longer fully German. How would such a radical
experiment turn out? Several figures desperately looked to historical models for
guidance.
I propose to track how reflections explicitly tied to pre-modern moments of Jewish
persecution and catastrophe acquired multi-temporal registers for not only the figures
who wrote and produced the initial set of reflections, but for their audience as well.
Today I will focus on the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 as it appeared in the
1930s. During the course of my investigation, I will show how 1937 came to be a year in
which Isaac Abravanel, the exiled Spanish statesman, treasurer, humanist, and Hebrew
exegete came to be the unlikely object of much attention. More specifically, I will show
how a set of disparate intellectuals, writers, and scholars engaged the relatively obscure
apocalyptic vengeance fantasies of messianic vengeance against Israels enemies, a
theme which persists even at wars end during the post-war occupation of Germany by
the allied forces. Allow me to work backwards to show how moments of
commemoration not only provide a window onto collective memory, or an example of
how Jews combed their history in the quest for a usable past.5 I intend to show how
seemingly innocuous commemorative celebrations often produce effects that take on a

See David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Indiana University Press
(May 22, 1999). There is a much more palpable dialectical element at stake than what
Roskies describes quite well. Rather than a unidirectional attempt to find something
which can be used in a conscious way, I taken by the way in which many figures are
arrested by the objects of interest themselves.
5

life of their own. Commemorations of Spinoza in 1932 and Maimonides in 1935 provide
wide reaching examples of how two philosophical giants whose lives and legacies
remained subject to constant contestation and controversy. But in this paper, I will first
look at the reception of Valeriu Marcus 1934 The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and
then see how a surprising amount of attention comes to coalesce around Isaac Abravanel
in 1937.

Valeriu Marcus Prism on Medieval Spain and Nazi Germany

Valeriu Marcu was a Jewish writer, essayist, and historian born in Bucurest in 1899.
Marcu had been active in heretical communist circles during the 1920s in Berlin. Paul
Levi became his political mentor. Levi had become a central leader of German
communism and social democracy, who was expelled from the Communist party due to
his support for the Bella Kun led March revolts of 1921 and his continual criticisms of
the Commintern. When Levi died in 1930, a moment of silence was observed in the
Reichstag. Two party delegations walked out of the room, the Communists and National
Socialists.
Marcu also moved in a remarkably diverse and seemingly impossible group of
artists, writers, and political leaders drawn from the furthest right and left ends of the
European spectrum. At first in Berlin of the 1920s he conversed and corresponded with
dadasists, expressionists, Italian futurists, liberal bourgeois novelists, communists, fellow
independent socialists, German nationalists and fascists, including members of the
NSDAP, conservative revolutionaries and national Bolsheviks. Indeed, it is these last
two fluid groups, the conservative revolutionaries national Bolsheviks where Marcu finds

a particularly powerful if not surprising reception. and later in the 1930s in Paris, Niece,
and Marseille, we find him circulating and in correspondence with fellow exiled writers
Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Golo Mann, Joseph Roth, Arnold Zweig, Hermann
Kastner. amidst fellow the likes of Andre Gide, the Italian futurist Marinetti, and his
fellow Romanian M. Eliade. One might already detect a remarkably fluid political range
of figures in this list. While Marcu was himself a socialist, and apparently part of the Left
Poale Tzion,6 he became increasingly anti-communist through the course of the 1920s
and 1930s.7
Marcu had a famous confrontation with Lenin about the Bolshevik position on
pacifism while the two were in Zurich during the World War I. Through the 1920s
Marcu had written passionate ideological tracts, edited volumes as well as several
presentist historical works, or literary like histories, treating a variety of political leaders:
Maximilien Robespeierre (1758 1794); the Prussian General Gerhard J. D. W. von
Scharnhorst (1755 1813), Wilhelm Liebknecht, V.I. Lenin, and through the 1920s and
turn to 16th century Florence for his portrait of Machiavelli (1937). It was also in the

See his fellow Jewish former German communist Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German
Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, US: Harvard
University Press, 1948), p. 175. While Fischers historical accounts are not reliable, but
this attribution is certainly plausible. For a vivid account of Marcus work within the
West European Secretariate, see Nicolaevsky, Les premires annes, p. 15. Fisher
came to know Marcu from Vienna. See Mathilde Montagnon, Ruth Fischer 1895-1961.
Universit Pierre Mend s France (Grenoble) M moire : Sciences politiques: Grenoble,
IEP : 1998. (dissertation, Saint-Martin-d'Hres : IEP, 1998., p. 31. For a broad critical of
Fischers involvement and then dramatic break with German communism, see Mario
Kessler, Ruth Fischer. Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895-1961) (Cologne,
Weimar, Vienna: Bhlau Verlag 2013)
7

For a brief but helpful account of Marcus expulsion from the KPD following Paul
Levis vociferous criticisms of the March Action, see David P. Hornstein Arthur Ewert:
A Life for the Comintern (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993), pp. 29-34.
7

1920s and 1930s that the form of the historical figuration of heroes came to a crescendo
in terms its appeal to writers and intellectuals situated both on the European left and right,
ranging from heterodox Marxists to the thunderbolts of the conservative revolution.
Marcu was part of a politically eclectic circle of writers, artists, publishers, and political
figures: including Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Ernst Jnger, Arnold Zweig, Joseph
Roth, Carl Schmitt, Willy Haas, Hermann Kesten, Rudolf Olden, Willi the red
millionaire Mnzenbergi, Kurt von Schleicher, as well as General Hans von Seeckt .8
Ernst Jnger, the celebrated and now controversial writer of the German fusion of
technology, aesthetics, and the war experience developed a correspondence with Marcu
which began soon after Marcus book Das Grosse Kommando Scharnhorst: Die Geburt
einer Militrmacht in Europa appeared in 1928 on Liszt Verlag. Jnger wrote a review
of the work in Widerstand (Reseistance) a National Bolshevik newspaper run by the
movements leader Ernst Niekisch in 1929.9 Jnger praised the work as pointing to the
urgently needed Gestalt of German rebirth embodied in a single great man. For Jnger,
Scharnhorst represented an inspiration for the present morass. Germany once again
required a new trajectory of enlightened concepts, just as those that arose in the wake of
defeat against Napoleon. Now, like then, an assertion of national collective will over

For the case of Mnzenberg and Marcu, see See Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire:
A Political Biography of Willi Mnzenberg, Moscows Secret Propaganda Tsar in the
West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 264ff.
9
Jnger, Der Wille zur Gestalt. Helmuth Kiesel points out that Jngers own quest to
find a model of a national rebirth behind a great leader in Der Arbeiter comes to life in
Marcus portrait of a martyred military reformer from the wars of liberation against
Napoleon. See his Ernst Jnger: Die Biographie (Siedler, 2007, 2nd edition). The
national Bolsheviks remained a mercurial marginal group especially prominent in Berlin
in the late 1920s wherein left and right found unusual common cause, for Nietschiks
group sought an alliance between communisms and German fascism as a bulwark against
Western democratic decadence.
8

against military restrictions imposed upon her by Western subjugating powers. Jnger
sees in Marcus Scharnhorst, the architect of the original Freikorps and the Reichswehr
and inspiration for their modern counterparts as well as the S.A. Jnger continued to
write about Marcu in his diaries and letters throughout his career in the Wehrmacht and
even during the postwar period. Marcu relocated to the south of France along with a
whole cadre of exiled writers at the very time when Jnger was stationed in France with
the Wehrmacht.
Carl Schmitt met with Marcu with an increased frequency in 1932 and 1933, as
Marcu was writing Die Verteibung der Juden aus Spanien which was published in 1934
by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam.10 And while Marcus book featured very little if any
explicit mentioning of the present, it seems as though anyone who read it at the time
knew Marcus work placed the present and near future into relief. Ernst Jnger and Carl
Schmitt each recorded in their private journals and wrote to other figures associated with
the conservative-revolution about this much anticipated work. Schmitts own copy of the
book is replete with suggestive and cryptic marginalia mapping medieval Spain onto
contemporary political matters and possibilities. Jnger and Schmitt seemed not so
interested in the aesthetic qualities nor the historical accuracy of the presentation, but
rather how much the model of Spains persecution and ultimate expulsion of its Jews in
1492 illuminated the reality of the present and forecasted the future for Germany.
The book opens with a quotation from the 19th century model of German
historicism Leopold von Ranke. Ranke points to the popular support for and the
particular dynamics of the blood purity statues in medieval Spain :

10

The book was initially contracted to appear on Fischer Verlag.

9

In no country have the prejudices concerning a distinction between pure and

impure blood become so firmly implanted as in Spain.For most official
positions it was necessary to produce evidence of purity of blood, and it was felt
as a great relief if the investigation did not go further back than the fourth
generation.
.To [the Spanish people] it appeared as much an error of blood not to be
of the pure Catholic faith as an error of opinion, hence the value they attributed to
purity of blood, to limpieza.And as the Inquisition found, as it were, a weapon
to be wielded by those of pure blood against those whose blood was
contaminated, by Christians of Germanic and Romanic race against the
descendants of Jews and Moors, it received the strongest support from the
nation.

One can search the annals of historiographical accounts of Ranke, but it is only
Marcu who isolates this early work as a framework connecting ancient Rome, medieval
Spain, and modern Germany. By beginning his text with this startling assertion by the
legendary expositor of the German historicist ideal, Marcu reveals the political and legal
mechanisms whereby an Empire seeks to reclassify, marginalize, dispossess property,
exert periodic violence against, and eventually expel a despised part of its population.
One can talk about this law or that inquisitorial policy but a sober view of the underlying
trajectory of Blutreinheit blood-purity as a programmatic religio-political form.
Perhaps most perplexing of all aspects of the book is the books conclusion, which asks
whether the Spanish Empire ultimately benefitted or was damaged by the expurgation of
its Jews. For Marcu looks at both sides and leaves this judgment to his reader.
Marcus narrative voice is not identifiably Jewish, except perhaps where his
anticlerical convictions rain upon the rabbinic authorities of 15th century Spain who

10

reinforce the separations of physical walls between Jews and Christians by strictly
forbidding and censoring all humanistic knowledge from their people as part of mere
calculus to keep their people under their control. Nevertheless, as marginalia, diaries and
correspondance11 indicate, it was this last chapter that became the source of obsessive
speculation by both Schmitt and Jnger. Just as a cold political calculus, would
Germany suffer or benefit from embarking upon a model of persecution inspired by the
medieval Spanish one?
Marcus sources for his history were all published synthetic accounts taken from
various popular and scholarly historians alike as well as some of his favorite literary
sources as well. The figure of Isaac Abravanel receives sympathetic treatment from
Marcu as a tragic figure who was caught in politico-theological machinery of the Spanish
Empire and widespread popular hatred by Spanish Christians, a combination much too
powerful for Abravanels sincere attempted interventions with King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella on behalf of Spains Jewry. Marcu does not offer any specifics regarding
Abravanels own answer to the question of what will happen to Spain as a result of its
unforgivable violence and betrayal. The primary reason why is that Marcu did not look
to Christian Hebraist and antisemitic literature which addressed Abravanels mystical
answer to this question. Marcu and Schmitt, as well as others, would take up Abravanels
answer to this question well into 1947 even when his own status during denazification
was still in question.
This is where the notes and correspondence of Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jnger begin
to uncover how they read Marcus book and cast an urgent spotlight on to the prospect

11

See Schmitts commentaries on Marcus texts to Junger dated June 2, 1934 und May 24, 1935. There is
also letters from Marcu to Junger from 1933-37 published in Band 5 (1991) of the Jahrbuches Der Pfahl.

11

that if Germany should follow through with the same logic all the way to expulsion,
would Germany benefit or pay a heavy price for such an action. The only books in
Schmitts library from Marcu are Birth of the Nations and Expulsion of the Jews from
Spain. In the expulsion book Marcu writes about the figure Isaac Abravanel as the gifted
treasurer for King Ferdinand and Isabella, but Jnger and Schmitt begin a quest to find
out more about Abravanels messianic speculations written during the first years of his
exile from Spain.
Schmitts own copy of the expulsion book is littered with underlining, alphas, and
omegas, and other symbols. But let me recount some of the more intriguing notes so as
to gain a glimpse in how Schmitt read the text. The title page itself bares two important
comments: to the left of the title, Schmitt wrote 174 Isaak Abravanel referring to the
page number where Abravanel makes his first appearance. To the right of the title, there
is an awkward note Carl Schmitt von Marcu 1934. And yet this appears to be in
Schmitts own hand. But more to the point regarding presentism we find a prime
example of equating Nazi authorities with Spanish attempts to lead a counter-offensive
against the marrano renagedes. Marcu writes Die Renegaten haben seit des zwlften
Jahrhunderts Beginn die Ppste und die gesamte Christenheit malos gegen die Juden
aufgehetzt. (18) Next to this passage Schmitt wrote the names of Heydrich and
Eichmann.12 One finds notations of dates and institutions that draw connections from
the Spanish empire to the German present. Next to a passage wherein Marcu describes

12

Next to the two names appears an alpha sign followed by 117, referring to the page number. My thanks
are extended to the research assistance of Helen Przbilla who made an initial visit to Dusseldorf and helped
me to decipher some of Schmitts handwriting. I also thank Dr. Matthias Muesch for his helpful
recommondations regarding the Schmitt, Junger, and Marcu deposited or in or included in the database of
the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. Proper permissions must still be obtained before a
fuller exploration of the Schmitt materials can go forward.

12

how Spain began to systematically envision the colonization of the native people and
continents of Africa and America, Schmitt appears to have written 1934. One also finds
expressions approbation,13 wonder, and concern but these elements can be gleaned from
Schmitts published diaries during the years of the texts composition as well as
Schmitts letters to associates alerting them to his excitement regarding the forthcoming
work.14
Marcus final chapter is permeated with such markings from the titles chapter all
the way toward its ends. One also finds the Abravanel with a question mark next to it on
the very last page even though Abravanels name is not mentioned by Marcu in that
chapter. But in addition to the vague semiotics of interpreting Schmitts marginalia,
Schmitt recorded his obsession with the book in multiple places while Marcu was still
writing it: namely, his diaries and his correspondence from the early 1930s. At this point,
Schmitt had no knowledge of Abravanels messianic speculations regarding the
Leviathan and Behemoth. This would all change in his 1938 work engaging the political
masterpiece by Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (published in 1651).
I argue that Schmitts turn to Abravanel is part of a larger German and German
Jewish fascination with him, and not only his oft-noted Biblical commentaries, literary
works, and political treatises. But also his messianic works composed while he was in

13

For example, Marcu wrote Alexander VI erffnete als erster Souvern den Juden die Hfen des
Kirchenstaates. Schmitt noted: Sieh an! (193).
14
Junger cites Schmitts fascination with Marcu despite his contempt for assimilated Jews in Siebzig
verweht IV , entry dated September 20,.1989. In a letter from Junger to Schmitt dated March 23, 1956 ,
there is a postscript which mentions how the the little Marcu, who died in New York in 1940 appeared in
Schmitts world in 1932. Ernst Jnger to Carl Schmitt from March 23, 1956 (Sig. Landesarchiv NRW: RW
265-6736), also published in Ernst Jnger/Carl Schmitt. Briefe 1930-1983, Ed, commentary and an
afterword by Helmuth Kiesel (Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart 1999), p. 296-298. Compare this letter to Jungers
earlier letter dated March 2, 1956, p. 294.

13

exile and concentrating on the particular place of Gods vengeance against Israels
enemies. But how or why would Schmitt be so fascinated with such material?
A great deal of Abravanels messianic vision which he assumed would unfold in a
few short years (1503), goes into hair-raising details of the ways in which God will take
vengeance upon Israels enemies. Schmitt had long felt an affinity with Spanish models
and legacies of law and politics. Marcus two works from the early 1930s both fit into
his fascination with the Spanish-Portuguese Empire as the last remnant of a world empire
which sought to justify its conquest of sovereign space (Landnahme) and unify its rule
under faith rather than by money.15 Schmitt returns to Abravanel in his 1938 Der
Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen
Symbols (The Leviathan in the State-Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of
a Political Symbol) a study of the decline of the state envisioned by Hobbes. Schmitt
returned to Abravanel again his wartime Land und Mehr: Eine weltgeschichtliche
15

Schmitt invoked an affinity for late medieval and contemporary Spain throughout the
1930s-1950s. He pointed to Francos Spain and Salazars Portugal as modern versions of
this legacy. See Raumrevolution als Rechtsproblem. Zum politischen Kontext und
Wandel von Carl Schmitts Grossraumdenken in Grossraum-Denken. Carl Schmitts
Kategorie der Grossraumordnung. Ed. Rudiger Voigt. (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), p. 112. See also Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind:
Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2009), p. 248.
Julia Hell also points to Nomos of the Earth (1950) as another key Schmitt text wherein
his approbation of the Spanish-Portuguees expansion of empire by force through the
Catholic theologian Francisco de Vitoria. She keenly notes that the theorist stands for
the humanism of the Christians (and their understanding of the colonized as nonChristian others) whereas Renaissance humanists represent a secular position that results
in the dehumanization of the other. Written in the wake of the Holocaust, this represents a
curious apology for Catholicism and its treatment of the other by someone whose diaries
after 1945 are replete with anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic entries. See her excellent article,
Katechon: Carl Schmitts Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future, The
Germanic Review, 2009, p. 320. Hells account of Schmitts conception of the katechon
is evocative and I believe only emphasizes my account of Schmitts reading of Abravanel
are substantive examples how counter-histories of Jewish vengeance fantasies might
frighten, or rather excite, a thinker like Schmitt.
14

Betrachtung (1942), a world historical study of the two coordinates which divided
political space and mythology throughout history, land and sea.16 These two works
reflect Schmitts own voracious reading of a Jewish cabalist at a time when he was
already under suspicion for his non-orthodox national socialist views. Following the fall
of the Third Reich, Schmitt was arrested and interrogated by allied prosecutors in
preparation for the Nuremberg IMT in 1946. In his back and forth with these occupying
authorities, Schmitt may even allude to the real purpose of the Nuremberg trials. Despite
the barrage of expressed juridical concerns for war crimes and crimes against humanity,
Schmitt counters that his interrogators are instruments of mere vengeance. What has not
been noted is that some of the mythological language which peppers this his answers
invokes his earlier encounters with Abravanel and especially Abravanels
prognostications of the Leviathan and Behemoth, the great sea and land powers, are
sacrificed and butchered for a messianic feast
In April of 1947, the U.S. prosecutor Robert Kempner interrogated Schmitt at
Nuremburg as to whether he had been culpable of laying down the intellectual foundation
for German war crimes by theorizing notion of the Grossraum and by providing
justifications for the forceful extension of the empire.17

16

Schmitt introduced this slim volume of crisp German Latin-like study of mythic or
dering of worldly powers as reading he transmitted orally to his then 9 year old daughter
Anima.
17
In Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus. Erfahrungen der Zet 1945/47
. Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1947. See the English translation of this portion of the text
which appeared as The Fourth (Second) Interrogation of Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg.
Telos 139 (2007): 3543. Schmitts post-war accounts from 1947-1951 were published
in Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 19471951. Ed. Eberhard Freiherr von
Medem. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1991.
15

1937 Abravanel Commemoration and Interpretation

1937 witnessed an explosion of Jewish works devoted to Abravanel. Of course given the
conditions of German Jewry had plummeted: stripped of citizenship, subjected to
increasingly repressive forms of financial and political persecution (which were both
systematic and arbitrary), and contradictory pressures of censorship, such attention to
Abravanel within Germany may be a bit surprising. Much attention has properly been
given to the Jewish Kulturbund which organized Jewish cultural activities in the face of
impoverishment and increasing hopelessness: musical concerts, public lectures, study
groups, and youth activities at least allowed for some sort of human and consoling
experience. Former waves of mass flight had come to a trickle by the end of 1937
because of the sharply increased financial price as well as difficulty in securing a place of
refuge. One venue which came under the authority of the Kulturbund was the Berlin
Jewish Museum. And in the summer of 1937, an Abravanel exhibition was organized
sanctioned by National Socialist authorities entitled Don Yitzhaq Abarbanel: seine Welt,
sein Werke, an exhibition catalogue was published, and a commemorative medal was
produced.
In the exhibition appears several works of material culture, paintings of seminal
historical figures connected to Abravanel and his legacy, as well commentaries and books
written by Abravanel published in differed places and in different languages. A 17th
century illustrated copy of his famous Hebrew Haggadah commentary appeared in the
exhibition as did a Hebrew-Latin volume of Abravanels writings edited and translated by
the Swiss Christian Hebraist Johann Buxtorf the Younger 1599-1664.18 Buxtorf the

18

The exhibition catalogue and discussed by the article in the Berlin Jewish Gemeindeblatt written by
Ismar Elbogen.

16

Youngers translations and commentaries on Abravanel were not widely known but his
fathers widely distributed Only non-Aryans were allowed to enter the exhibition. Both
the haggadah.
The realm of larger scholarship addressing Abravanel is interesting in its right,
but given the pressured environment, nearly all of the work contains deep fissures of the
present found in his work and legacy. Yitzhak Baer published several items during the
1930s relating to Abravanel. While he was in Palestine, he published much of his work
in Hebrew and German. His 1936 book Galut appeared as the 61st volume in the
Schocken Bcherei series. Throughout this volume, Baers conservative pessimism
dominates his criticism of the debilitations of Jewish diasporic existence, and especially
for its restrictions upon Jewish national and historical consciousness. Baer blamed this
orientation for the pre-modern inability of Jews to take their fate in their own hands. Baer
devotes the central chapter of the work to Abravanel. 19

Abravanel however stands out

as an exceptional figure, one who despite being ignored by Jewish scholars, ought to be
regarded as the true founder of Wissenschaft des Judentums.20 He anticipates 16th and
17th trends in Jewish humanism, and explicitly addresses the eschatological hopes
aroused by the experiences of the time in passionate prose and painstakingly
demonstrated. In Abravanels commentaries, Baer is especially impressed with
elaboration of the historical picture of the election and redemption of Israel. Jewish
suffering, pressed beyond the brink during Abravanels time, led Abravanel to mark his
period as redemption was already unfolding. And it was Abravanels immersion in exilic

19

Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, Galut, (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936). It is chapter nine, situated between The
[closing] Turn of the Middle Ages of the middle ages and The New Hope of rRedemption I view the
epilogue as an extra chapter added to the 16 formal chapters.
20
Baer, Galut, p. 40. Emphasis mine. See p. 61 in the English translation.

17

hope for messianic salvation that ultimately earns Baers wrath. For Baer sees
Abravanels false expectation of historical justice and redemption by divine processes as
yet another delusional episode in Jewish passivity. There was no second parting of the
waters. The miracle did not take place; it must then, occur another time. And the aged
Isaac Abravanel did not travel to the soil of Palestine, of whose messianic wonderworking power he had tried so long and so obstinately to convince his doubters.21
My discussion regarding a broader range of Abravanel reception in Germany will
await a future venue. Also the long and painful road to discovering how Buxtorf the
Younger may most likely be the source of Schmitts 1938 invocation of a Jewish
vengeance fantasy involving the feast of the Leviathan will have to wait until I come in
person.

21

Baer, Galut, German p. 43, English 68.

18