Lamed-E

A Quarterly Journal of Politics and Culture

Selected and Edited by Ivan L Ninic
________________________________________________________________________
Autumn 2013

Number 20

changes in the Korans interpretation can one

claim that the Koran has been understood
identically over time. Changes have applied in
such matters as jihad, slavery, usury, the principle
of no compulsion in religion, and the role of
women. Moreover, the many important interpreters of Islam over the past 1,400 yearsashShafii, al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, Rumi, Shah
Waliullah, and Ruhollah Khomeini come to
minddisagreed deeply among themselves about
the content of the message of Islam.
However central the Koran and Hadith may be,
they are not the totality of the Muslim experience;
the accumulated experience of Muslim peoples
from Morocco to Indonesia and beyond matters
no less. To dwell on Islams scriptures is akin to
interpreting the United States solely through the
lens of the Constitution; ignoring the countrys
history would lead to a distorted understanding.
Put differently, medieval Muslim civilization
excelled, and todays Muslims lag behind in
nearly every index of achievement. But if things
can get worse, they can also get better. Likewise,
in my own career, I witnessed Islamism rise from
minimal beginnings when I entered the field in
1969 to the great powers it enjoys today; if
Islamism can thus grow, it can also decline.
How might that happen?

Can Islam Be Reformed?

By Daniel Pipes
Islam currently represents a backward, aggressive, and violent force. Must it remain this way,
or can it be reformed and become moderate,
modern, and good-neighborly? Can Islamic
authorities formulate an understanding of their
religion that grants full rights to women and nonMuslims as well as freedom of conscience to
Muslims, that accepts the basic principles of
modern finance and jurisprudence, and that does
not seek to impose Sharia law or establish a
caliphate?
A growing body of analysts believe that no, the
Muslim faith cannot do these things, that these
features are inherent to Islam and immutably part
of its makeup. Asked if she agrees with my
formulation that radical Islam is the problem,
but moderate Islam is the solution, the writer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali replied: Hes wrong. Sorry
about that. She and I stand in the same trench,
fighting for the same goals and against the same
opponents, but we disagree on this vital point.
My argument has two parts. First, the essentialist
position of many analysts is wrong; and second, a
reformed Islam can emerge.

The Medieval Synthesis

Arguing Against Essentialism

Key to Islams role in public life is Sharia and

the many untenable demands it makes on
Muslims. Running a government with the
minimal taxes permitted by Sharia has proved to
be unsustainable and how can one run a financial
system without charging interest? A penal system
that requires four men to view an adulterous act
in flagrante delicto is impractical. Sharias prohibition on warfare against fellow Muslims is
impossible for all to live up to; indeed, roughly

To state that Islam can never change is to

assert that the Koran and Hadith, which constitute
the religions core, must always be understood in
the same way. But to articulate this position is to
reveal its error, for nothing human abides forever.
Everything, including the reading of sacred texts,
changes over time. Everything has a history. And
everything has a future that will be unlike its past.
Only by failing to account for human nature and
by ignoring more than a millennium of actual
1

century Arabia. In each case, purist efforts

eventually subsided and the medieval synthesis
reasserted itself, only to be challenged anew by
purists. This alternation between pragmatism and
purism characterizes Muslim history, contributing
to its instability.

three-quarters of all warfare waged by Muslims

has been directed against other Muslims.
Likewise, the insistence on perpetual jihad
against non-Muslims demands too much.
To get around these and other unrealistic
demands, premodern Muslims developed certain
legal fig leaves that allowed for the relaxation of
Islamic provisions without directly violating
them. Jurists came up with hiyal (tricks) and
other means by which the letter of the law could
be fulfilled while negating its spirit. For example,
various mechanisms were developed to live in
harmony with non-Muslim states. There is also
the double sale (bai al-inah) of an item, which
permits the purchaser to pay a disguised form of
interest. Wars against fellow Muslims were
renamed jihad.
This compromise between Sharia and reality
amounted to what I dubbed Islams medieval
synthesis in my book In the Path of God (1983).
This synthesis translated Islam from a body of
abstract, infeasible demands into a workable
system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia
and made the code of law operational. Sharia
could now be sufficiently applied without
Muslims being subjected to its more stringent
demands. Kecia Ali, of Boston University, notes
the dramatic contrast between formal and applied
law in Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam,
quoting other specialists:
One major way in which studies of law have
proceeded has been to compare doctrine with the
actual practice of the court. As one scholar
discussing scriptural and legal texts notes, Social
patterns were in great contrast to the official
picture presented by these formal sources.
Studies often juxtapose flexible and relatively fair
court outcomes with an undifferentiated and
sometimes harshly patriarchal textual tradition of
jurisprudence. We are shown proof of the
flexibility within Islamic law that is often
portrayed as stagnant and draconian.
While the medieval synthesis worked over the
centuries, it never overcame a fundamental
weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or
derived from the foundational, constitutional texts
of Islam. Based on compromises and half
measures, it always remained vulnerable to
challenge by purists. Indeed, premodern Muslim
history featured many such challenges, including
the Almohad movement in 12th-century North
Africa and the Wahhabi movement in 18th-

The Challenge of Modernity

The de facto solution offered by the medieval
synthesis broke down with the arrival of
modernity imposed by the Europeans, conventionally dated to Napoleons attack on Egypt
in 1798. This challenge pulled most Muslims in
opposite directions over the next two centuries, to
Westernization or to Islamization.
Muslims impressed with Western achievements sought to minimize Sharia and replace it
with Western ways in such areas as the
nonestablishment of religion and equality of
rights for women and non-Muslims. The founder
of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatrk (18811938),
symbolizes this effort. Until about 1970, it
appeared to be the inevitable Muslim destiny,
with resistance to Westernization looking rearguard and futile.
But that resistance proved deep and ultimately
triumphant. Atatrk had few successors, and his
Republic of Turkey is moving back toward
Sharia. Westernization, it turned out, looked
stronger than it really was, because it tended to
attract visible and vocal elites while the masses
generally held back. Starting around 1930, the
reluctant elements began organizing themselves
and developing their own positive program,
especially in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, and India.
Rejecting Westernization and all its works, they
argued for the full and robust application of
Sharia such as they imagined had been the case in
the earliest days of Islam.
Though rejecting the West, these movements
which are called Islamistmodeled themselves
on the surging totalitarian ideologies of their
time, Fascism and Communism. Islamists
borrowed many assumptions from these
ideologies, such as the superiority of the state
over the individual, the acceptability of brute
force, and the need for a cosmic confrontation
with Western civilization. They also quietly
borrowed technology, especially military and
medical, from the West.
Through creative, hard work, Islamist forces
quietly gained strength over the next half century,
2

Here, Islam can profitably be compared with

the two other major monotheistic religions. A half
millennium ago, Jews, Christians, and Muslims
all broadly agreed that enforced labor was
acceptable and that paying interest on borrowed
money was not. Eventually, after bitter and
protracted debates, Jews and Christians changed
their minds on these two issues; today, no Jewish
or Christian voices endorse slavery or condemn
the payment of reasonable interest on loans.
Among Muslims, however, these debates have
only begun. Even if formally banned in Qatar in
1952, Saudi Arabia in 1962, and Mauritania in
1980, slavery still exists in these and other
majority-Muslim countries (especially Sudan and
Pakistan). Some Islamic authorities even claim
that a pious Muslim must endorse slavery. Vast
financial institutions worth possibly as much as
$1 trillion have developed over the past 40 years
to enable observant Muslims to pretend to avoid
either paying or receiving interest on money,
(pretend because the Islamic banks merely
disguise interest with subterfuges such as service
fees.)
Reformist Muslims must do better than their
medieval predecessors and ground their
interpretation in both scripture and the sensibilities of the age. For Muslims to modernize
their religion, they must emulate their fellow
monotheists and adapt their religion with regard
to slavery and interest, the treatment of women,
the right to leave Islam, legal procedure, and
much else. When a reformed, modern Islam
emerges, it will no longer endorse unequal female
rights, the dhimmi status, jihad, or suicide
terrorism, nor will it require the death penalty for
adultery, breaches of family honor, blasphemy,
and apostasy.
Already in this young century, a few positive
signs in this direction can be discerned. Note
some developments concerning women:

finally bursting into power and prominence with

the Iranian revolution of 197879 led by the antiAtatrk, Ayatollah Khomeini (190289). This
dramatic event, and its achieved goal of creating
an Islamic order, widely inspired Islamists, who
in the subsequent 35 years have made great
progress, transforming societies and applying
Sharia in novel and extreme ways. For example,
in Iran, the Shiite regime has hanged homosexuals from cranes and forced Iranians in
Western dress to drink from latrine cans, and in
Afghanistan, the Taliban regime has torched
girls schools and music stores. The Islamists
influence has reached the West itself, where one
finds an increasing number of women wearing
hijabs, niqabs, and burkas.
Although spawned as a totalitarian model,
Islamism has shown much greater tactical
adaptability than either Fascism or Communism.
The latter two ideologies rarely managed to go
beyond violence and coercion. But Islamism, led
by figures such as Turkeys Premier Recep
Tayyip Erdogan (1954) and his Justice and
Development Party (AKP), has explored nonrevolutionary forms. Since it was legitimately
voted into office in 2002, the AKP gradually has
undermined Turkish secularism with remarkable
deftness by working within the countrys
established democratic structures, practicing good
government, and not provoking the wrath of the
military, long the guardian of Turkish secularism.
The Islamists are on the march today, but their
ascendance is recent and offers no guarantees of
longevity. Indeed, like other radical utopian
ideologies, Islamism will lose its appeal and
decline in power. Certainly the 2009 and 2013
revolts against Islamist regimes in Iran and
Egypt, respectively, point in that direction.

Toward a Modern Synthesis

If Islamism is to be defeated, anti-Islamist
Muslims must develop an alternative vision of
Islam and explanation for what it means to be a
Muslim. In doing so, they can draw on the past,
especially the reform efforts from the span of
1850 to 1950, to develop a modern synthesis
comparable to the medieval model. This synthesis
would choose among Shari precepts and render
Islam compatible with modern values. It would
accept gender equality, coexist peacefully with
unbelievers, and reject the aspiration of a universal caliphate, among other steps.

Saudi Arabias Shura Council has responded to

rising public outrage over child marriages by
setting the age of majority at 18. Though this
doesnt end child marriages, it moves toward
abolishing the practice.
Turkish clerics have agreed to let menstruating
women attend mosque and pray next to men.
The Iranian government has nearly banned the
stoning of convicted adulterers.
3

Islamists must also labor, probably for decades,

to develop an ideology as coherent and compelling as that of the Islamists, and then spread it.
Scholars interpreting sacred scriptures and
leaders mobilizing followers have central roles in
this process.
Non-Muslims can help a modern Islam move
forward in two ways: first, by resisting all forms
of Islamismnot just the brutal extremism of an
Osama bin Laden, but also the stealthy, lawful,
political movements such as Turkeys AKP.
Erdogan is less ferocious than Bin Laden, but he
is more effective and no less dangerous. Whoever
values free speech, equality before the law, and
other human rights denied or diminished by
Sharia must consistently oppose any hint of
Islamism.
Second, non-Muslims should support moderate
and Westernizing anti-Islamists. Such figures are
weak and fractured today and face a daunting
task, but they do exist, and they represent the
only hope for defeating the menace of global
jihad and Islamic supremacism, and then
replacing it with an Islam that does not threaten
civilization.

Women in Iran have won broader rights to sue

their husbands for divorce.
A conference of Muslim scholars in Egypt
deemed clitoridectomies contrary to Islam and, in
fact, punishable.
A key Indian Muslim institution, Darul Uloom
Deoband, issued a fatwa against polygamy.
Other notable developments, not specifically
about women, include:
The Saudi government abolished jizya (the
practice of enforcing a poll tax on non-Muslims).
An Iranian court ordered the family of a
murdered Christian to receive the same compensation as that of a Muslim victim.
Scholars meeting at the International Islamic
Fiqh Academy in Sharjah have started to debate
and challenge the call for apostates to be
executed.
All the while, individual reformers churn out
ideas, if not yet for adoption then to stimulate
thought. For example, Nadine al-Badir, a Saudi
female journalist, provocatively suggested that
Muslim women have the same right as men to
marry up to four spouses. She prompted a
thunderstorm, including threats of lawsuits and
angry denunciations, but she spurred a needed
debate, one unimaginable in prior times.
Like its medieval precursor, the modern
synthesis will remain vulnerable to attack by
purists, who can point to Muhammads example
and insist on no deviation from it. But, having
witnessed what Islamism, whether violent or not,
has wrought, there is reason to hope that Muslims
will reject the dream of reestablishing a medieval
order and be open to compromise with modern
ways. Islam need not be a fossilized medieval
mentality; it is what todays Muslims make of it.

About the Author

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East
Forum.

Commentary

Policy Implications
What can those, Muslim and non-Muslim
alike, who oppose Sharia, the caliphate, and the
horrors of jihad, do to advance their aims?
For anti-Islamist Muslims, the great burden is
to develop not just an alternative vision to the
Islamist one but an alternative movement to
Islamism. The Islamists reached their position of
power and influence through dedication and hard
work, through generosity and selflessness. Anti4

objectors before the Hot Gates, but I do know

how they were treated in Wilhelmine
Germany, the classic modern militarist
society. And I know how they fared in the
United States, France, and Great Britain when
these countries were at war and had
conscription and reserve duty. The norm in
each case was either a few years behind bars or
some form of internal exile.
Tylers book is a gossipy overlong pseudohistory of Israel, which is noteworthy mainly
for what it indicates about the standing of
Israel among the chattering classes. For Patrick
Tyler is the former chief correspondent of The
New York Times and the former Middle East
bureau chief of The Washington Post, and his
book comes festooned with blurbs from former
Times executive editor Howell Raines, CNNs
national security analyst Peter L. Bergen, and
others lauding its scholarship as meticulous
and describing it as the definitive historical
and analytical account of the role of the
military in Israel. Incidentally, Tyler does not
know Hebrew or Arabic, and the only archive
he appears to have visited is the Lyndon Baines
Johnson Library in his home state of Texas.
For decades Zionists and their supporters
have described Israel as a latter-day Athens,
and Tyler seems to take it personally, insisting
instead on describing Israel as a modern
Sparta in a region of weak states. Indeed, at
one point Tyler seems preposterously to liken
Nassers Egypt to Athens:
Thucydides had written of the Peloponnesian
War: What made war inevitable was the
growth of Athenian power and the fear which
this caused in Sparta. But in this case there
was no growth of Athenian power. Nassers
strength was declining It was Israel
Spartawhose power had grown . . .
I will return to Tylers perverse and
implausible account of the lead-up to the SixDay War. For now, let us ask: Is Israel Sparta?
Well, lets see. It is true that Israel has a
powerful army and spends a large part of its
annual budget (say twenty to twenty-five
percent) on defense; true, too, that generals
and security chiefs, past and present, have a
major say in shaping defense and foreign policy
and have had substantial representation in
successive cabinets, though only three
Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon
out of Israels twelve prime ministers were
former generals. All the others, David BenGurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda

Athens or Sparta?
By Benny Morris
Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the
Military Elite Who Run the Country
and Why They Cant Make Peace
by Patrick Tyler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Back in 1988, I refused to do a stint of
reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces and
was sentenced to a twenty-one-day prison
term. It was at the height of the First Intifada
and my unit was to serve thirty-five days in the
casbahthe old townof Nablus, in the heart
of Samaria. I refused because I thought that
Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip was oppressive and that Israel
should make peace with the Palestinians based
on a two-states-for-two-peoples solution. The
First Intifada, from 1987 until 1991, was a
popular uprising, largely consisting of strikes,
boycotts, street demonstrations, and riots, in
which the rioters almost invariably employed
non-lethal means. (By contrast, in the Second
Intifada, from 2000 to 2004, the Palestinians
employed
highly
lethal
meanssuicide
bombings in buses and restaurantsand their
target, in my view, was not so much the
occupation as Israel itself.)
The judge at my trial was our divisions
deputy commander, a lieutenant colonel who
was obviously uncomfortable with the situation. He said something like not all of us in
the military are happy with whats happening
and coaxed me to relent. But the following
Sunday I went off to Prison No. 4, in Sarafand,
where I served out a relatively pleasant
seventeen days (I arrived two days late, and
two days were taken off for good behavior). A
year or two later, I was again called up for
reserve duty (not in the territories), and a while
later I was honorably discharged from the IDF
at the age of 44, in line with the custom at the
time for combat soldiers.
I was reminded of this personal episode
while reading Patrick Tylers Fortress Israel:
The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run
the Countryand Why They Cant Make
Peace. As the title makes clear, Tyler charges
Israel with being a modern Sparta. How were
conscientious objectors punished in Sparta? I
dont know if Leonidas suffered conscientious
5

Meir, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak

Shamir, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud
Olmert, were civilians. It could be argued that
Begin and Shamir, as former commanders of
guerrilla organizations in the pre-state period,
also had security backgrounds. (Shamir also
served for a while in the Mossad.) But then
Israel has been under siege from without and
terrorist threat from within since its
establishment. So security, personal as well as
collective, is understandably a paramount
consideration in the minds of Israelis. This is
hardly surprising. American ex-generals have
often risen to political prominence during or
after wars: Washington in the 18th century,
Jackson and Grant in the 19th, Eisenhower,
George C. Marshall, and Colin Powell in the
20th, to name just a few.
In his Prologue, Tyler asserts that militarism is the ruling spirit in Israeli society:
Once in the military system, Israelis never fully
exit. They carry the military identity for life . . .
through lifelong expectations of loyalty and
secrecy. Many Israeli officers carry their top
secret clearances after retirement, reporting
back to superiors or intelligence officers items
of interest gleaned from their involvement in
business, finance, and interactions with
foreigners.
On the next page, he writes, the specter of
the security state remains a dominant aspect of
life, and a little later, The military is the
country to a great extent. This is all nonsense.
Had Tyler been writing about Israel during the
late 1940s and 1950s, perhaps he would have
had a point. Perhaps. But the Israel of the past
several decades, Israel today, is another animal
altogether. For most Israelis, individual
achievement and interests trump the old
collectivist Zionist ethic. Indeed, fewer and
fewer Israelis actually serve in the army or do
reserve duty (as the few who carry the burden
are constantly complaining). It is true that
among eleventh and twelfth graders, there is
still great competitiveness to get a slot, once
inducted, in one of the IDFs elite units or in
pilot training, but this has more to do with
adolescent competition and machismo than
militaristic ideology. Indeed, a good argument
can be made for depicting the Israeli army as
one of the worlds least military. Since its
inception in 1948, the IDF has abjured saluting
(the practice exists only in formal parades),
and the men, after completing basic training,
generally address their non-coms and officers

on a first-name basis. The dress code in the

army ranges from informal to sloppy and
always has (except in the Armored Corps), and
breaches of discipline tend to be punished
lightly. While females are still kept out of
combat units, women non-coms and officers
are playing a major role in training combat
troops (in armor and artillery, for example),
and there are growing numbers of women
pilots and navigators, also flying combat
aircraft. All of this points to a liberal rather
than militarist military.
As with poker players, books have tells. At
one point in Fortress Israel Tyler writes that
Israels paratroops wear black berets. Had he
interviewed any Israeli, even a child (even an
Israeli Arab child), he would have known that,
as in Britain and France, paratroopers wear red
berets. Sadly, Tyler knows nothing about the
nuts and bolts of Israel or its military.
Israel is, in sober fact, a small, flawed, and
embattled democracy, with a strong and
unusually egalitarian military that has
produced an extraordinary stream of writers,
academics, and artists, supported by worldclass academic and artistic institutions. In
short, it is more Athenian than Spartan.
Tyler is as weak on the history of Israel as he
is on its sociology, though he is chock-full of
opinions and judgments, all of them antiZionist. Lets return to the causes of the SixDay War. The history of the countdown to this
conflagration is clear, generally agreed upon,
and pretty well documented. The opening of
the relevant Israeli military and cabinet
papersclosed for another four years by
Israels fifty-year ruleis unlikely to offer
much added enlightenment. And the Arab
archives, which might shed new light, remain
closed, as they are for every period of the
Israeli-Arab conflict (dictatorships do not open
state archives). The slide to war began with
Syrias sponsorship of Palestinian operations
against Israel across the Lebanese and
Jordanian borders and Syrias own efforts at
diverting the headwaters of the Jordan River.
Syrias leaders spoke frequently and publicly of
a coming war of liberation for Palestine.
Israel warned Syria that it was playing with fire
and might even provoke an Israeli assault.
In early May 1967 Damascus and Moscow,
Syrias chief international backer, passed on
intelligence to Egypt that Israel was massing
troops on the Syrian frontier. The implication
was that Israel was about to launch a massive
6

attack and that Egypt, with whom Syria had a

defense pact, would have to come to Syrias aid.
Moscow spoke of ten to twelve Israeli brigades
and of May 17 as D-Day. This intelligence was
untrue. The UN armistice supervision organization, UNTSO, checked the border areas
and dismissed the reports. Indeed, Nasser sent
his army chief, Muhammad Fawzi, to
Damascus to find out what was happening. In
his memoirs, Fawzi later wrote, I did not find
any concrete evidence to support the
information received. On the contrary, aerial
photographs taken by Syrian reconnaissance
on May 12 and 13 showed no change in normal
[Israeli] military positions.
Tyler fails to tell his readers any of this.
Instead, he slyly implies that there was
something to the Syrian and Russian reports:
The
Soviet
information
was
mostly
disinformationnote the carefully placed
modifier mostly. It was clear, Tyler goes on,
that the Israeli army was in a heightened state
of alert along the northern frontier. Again, the
implication is that an attack was being
prepared. It wasnt.
Tyler then proceeds to justify Nassers
subsequent actions, which directly provoked
the Six-Day War:
Still, it was impossible for Nasser to ignore
the [Soviet-Syrian] intelligence reports . . . For
Nasser, it didnt matter whether the
intelligence reports were false . . . What mattered was that Nasser was in an untenable spot
as the putative leader of the Arab world.
So, on May 13 he ordered his armored
divisions to cross the Suez Canal into Sinai,
which had been demilitarized after the 1956
War, threatening southern Israel. Nasser then
compounded this with two steps that, in the
absence of international intervention, made
war inevitable. On May 16, he ordered the UN
peacekeeping force in Sinai (UNEF), which
physically separated the Egyptians and Israelis,
to leave, and on May 22 he announced the
closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping and aircraft, blocking the port of
Eilat, which was Israels port of access to Africa
and southern Asia, and its air-link to South
Africa. All of this was in violation of
international law. At the end of the month,
Nasser signed a defense pact with his old
enemy King Hussein, and battalions of
Egyptian troops were flown to Jordan; Iraq
made ready to send armored divisions to

bolster Husseins defenses. Israel felt a panArab noose tightening around its neck.
Tyler describes these Egyptian moves, each
of which was a clear casus belli, but then
blames Israel for the wars outbreak. He writes
that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol tried but failed
to restrain the generals and quell the surge of
enthusiasm for war that was becoming more
and more pronounced in the officer corps.
Meanwhile, the Americans failed to put
together an international flotilla that would
force open the straitsTyler writes as if this
idea was still in play when Israel struck on the
morning of June 5, but it wasntor to send in
their own ships, which is why Washington in
the end gave Israel a yellow light (the phrase
is William Quandts) to attack.
One other Six-Day War matter that Tyler
elides and distorts is the Israeli conquest of the
West Bank, an area that Jordan had ruled since
conquering it in 1948. Early on the morning of
June 5, Israel told King Husseinthrough the
UN and U.S. channelsthat if Jordan held its
fire, no harm would come to it. The Jordanians
nonetheless opened fire, including artillery fire,
on Israeli West Jerusalem and the coastal
plain. Israel re-contacted the Jordanians,
promising not to open fire if they immediately
ceased. But the Jordanians continued firing,
and around noon, Israeli troops began to push
into the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Within
three days, the territory down to the Jordan
River was in Israeli hands.
Tyler omits any mention of these June 5
warnings and assurances to Jordan, and
instead writes:
After Jordanian artillery batteries had
opened fire on Jewish neighborhoods in
Jerusalem, Yigal Allon and Menachem Begin
joined in proposing . . . that the shelling gave
Israel the pretext it needed to liberate Arab
East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the
Western Wall.
One wonders if Tyler would describe the
American response to a comparable attack (say
the shelling of Washington, D.C. and New
York) as a pretext.
In the aftermath of the war, on June 19, the
Israeli cabinet resolved, in secret session, that
Israel would agree to withdraw from all of the
Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace with
Egypt and the peninsulas demilitarization and
from all of the Golan Heights in exchange for
peace with Syria and the Heights demilitarization. (The cabinet could not agree on the
7

fate of the West Bank, so nothing was offered

to Jordan.) Tyler, as usual when trying to
downplay Israeli peace-mindedness, puts it
vaguely: Eshkol, Meir, and Dayan convinced
[the ministers] . . . that they should at least
offer to return some of the Arab territories if
they could do so on favorable terms. Which is
not quite the same thing.
It is worth adding that there are historians
who are convinced that this cabinet decision
never reached Cairo and Damascus, though the
truth, on this score, will only be definitively
known if and when the Egyptian and Syrian
archives are opened. What is certain is that in
September 1967, in response to the Israeli
victory and perhaps to these peace proposals,
the Arab governments unanimously resolved
never to negotiate with Israel, never to
recognize it, and never to make peacethe
famous three nos of Khartoum.
One other point Tyler makes about the wars
aftermath is worth quoting because it is so
blatantly untrue: It seemed that with few
exceptions, everyone in Israel had embraced a
creed that envisioned a Greater Israel, from the
Mediterranean to the Jordan. There were
differences [only] about how to achieve it. It is
true that a semi-messianic euphoria took hold,
but post-1967 Israel was nonetheless a deeply
divided society and remains so down to the
present. Many opposed, or were uncomfortable
with, retention of the Palestinian-populated
territories. Tyler forgets to tell his readers that
Ben-Gurion, whom he repeatedly brands an
arch-expansionist and warmonger, immediately advised Eshkol to withdraw from the
whole of the West Bank except East Jerusalem,
nor does he mention that Labor Party minister
Yigal Allon quickly formulated a plan which
called for withdrawal from the bulk of the West
Bank in exchange for peace with Jordan. The
Allon Plan was never formally adopted as the
Labor Partys platform or Israeli government
policy, but it guided Labors policies for a
decade. (Settlements were not established in
the areas earmarked for transfer to Arab
sovereignty.) In the immediate post-1967
years, Israels leaders, in secret meetings,
repeatedly proposed the plan to King Hussein
as a basis for a bilateral peace settlement to no
avail.
Following the Six-Day War, Egypts president, Nasser, launched a war of attrition
against Israels forces in the Sinai Peninsula,
hoping to wear down Israeli resolve to remain

in occupation of Egyptian territory. This

consisted of artillery strikes against the Israeli
forts built along the Suez Canals eastern bank
(the so-called Bar-Lev Line) and of commando
raids against the forts and the roads through
which they were supplied. The Egyptians
enjoyed overwhelming superiority in artillery,
which caused serious Israeli casualties on an
almost daily basis. (I was wounded by a shell
splinter in one of the forts, codenamed Zahava
Darom, on the southern edge of Small Bitter
Lake.) To offset this Egyptian advantage, in the
summer of 1969 the Israelis sent in the Israel
Air Force (IAF) to hit the Egyptian artillery and
frontline trench system on the west bank of the
Canal. By the end of the year the Egyptian
artillery had not been silenced, so in January
1970 the Israelis sent the IAF and commandos
to attack army bases and anti-aircraft missile
emplacements deep inside Egypt. Thousands of
Egyptian soldiers and military construction
workers were killed and injured during the
half-year air campaign. On two occasions,
bombs went astray or the targeting was
mistaken and an Egyptian factory and an
elementary school, which was situated inside a
military compound, were destroyed, causing
dozens of civilian deaths. Tyler summarizes the
Israeli air assault as follows: The air force . . .
[dropped] an estimated eight thousand tons of
bombs on military and civilian targets over
these months . . . U.S.-made F-4 Phantoms terrorized Egyptian cities. In effect, Tyler tells his
readers that Israel indiscriminately killed
Egyptians, deliberately targeting civilians. In
fact, during these months life went on as
normal in Egypts cities, since its government
and citizenry knew full well that they were not
being targeted.
The War of Attrition came to an end after the
Soviets sent in thousands of their own
personnel to man anti-aircraft missile batteries
and fighter squadrons to counter the IAF. In
one incident, Israeli Phantoms shot down five
Soviet-piloted MiG-21s. At this point, both
sides called it quits. The Egyptians were now
thoroughly exhausted, and the Israelis feared
an open-ended clash with the Russians. Tyler,
as usual, has the story all wrong. He tells us
that Soviet pilots shot down half a dozen
Israeli Phantoms. This never happened.
Tyler replays the same atrocity card when
describing Israels First Lebanon War, against
the PLO and Syrians in Lebanon in 1982, when
he writes of the saturation bombing of the city
8

[of Beirut]. Of course, there was never any

saturation bombing. Tyler himself writes of
six hundred civilians killed; in Dresden on
February 13-15, 1945 Allied bombers killed an
estimated twenty-five thousand civilians
older estimates put the number at around one
hundred thousand or even higher. Thats
saturation bombing. In 1982, the IAF very
carefully targeted PLO buildings and camps in
and around Beirut, and while hundreds of
civilians no doubt died collaterally, some of
them Lebanese rather than Palestinian, this
was not the result of deliberation or intention.
Thats what happens during wars in built-up
areaseven when the more powerful side is
careful. Tylers description is agitprop, not
history.
The subtitle of Tylers book carries a clear
message: Bloodthirsty Spartan generals run
Israel and that is why it has not achieved peace
with its neighbors. The actual history of the
various post-1967 Israeli-Arab peace processes
gives the lie to this argument. IDF generals and
ex-generals have actually loomed large in these
peace processes, both those which succeeded
and those which didnt.
Israel so far has signed two peace treaties
with Arab states, with Egypt in 1979 and with
Jordan in 1994, both of which are still in force
(though how they will fare in the coming years,
with fiercely anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic
Islamists on the ascent in Arab politics, is
anyones guess). Negotiations with Egypt were
led by Menachem Begin, a civilian who had
headed the pre-state right-wing Irgun Zvai
Leumi (IZL). But the two men who pressed and
persuaded him to make the requisite
concessions, including handing over to Egypt
the whole of Sinai, were his foreign minister
Moshe Dayan and his defense minister Ezer
Weizman, both of whom had spent most of
their lifetimes in the IDF. Dayan was a former
chief of general staff, and Weizman was a past
commander of the Israel Air Force. The peace
treaty with Jordan, in which Israel ceded
several hundred square kilometers of territory
in the south, was negotiated and signed by
Yitzhak Rabin, also a former IDF chief of
general staff.
In the late 1970s, the public drive to pressure
Begin to make peace with Egypt was
spearheaded by the Peace Now movement.
Tyler says, almost correctly, that its importance
was that it arose in great measure from the
military establishment. Most of the original

signatories of the letter that launched the

movement were, in fact, IDF reserve officers.
But of course this contradicts Tylers own
thesis that the Israeli military cant make
peace. He seems not to notice.
After the Sadat-Begin treaty, the Israeli
public, which according to Tyler had by then
been tutored to militarism and expansionism
by its leaders and generals for decades,
immediately endorsed the governments conciliatory posture, and some eighty percent of
Israelis supported giving back all of Sinai to
Egypt in exchange for peace. How does Tyler
explain this? It was, he writes, a strong
affirmation that the martial impulse could be
overpowered by a strategy based on
accommodation with the Arabs. What this
fluff means is anyones guess. But what a more
honest and plain-spoken commentator would
have written would have been something like
this: The Israeli public, when persuaded that
there was a sincere, genuine Arab partner
ready to make peace, would overcome its
security-driven hesitations and rush headlong
to sign on.
The basic problem with Fortress Israel is
that Tyler dismisses, or is simply unaware of,
the pan-Arab desire to rid the Middle East of
the Jewish state and its periodic efforts to do
so. According to Tyler, Israel alone is to blame
for the wars, for the absence of peace, for the
hopelessness. Thus, he fails completely to deal
with the 1948 War, about which all acknowledge that the Arabsfirst the Palestinians and
then the neighboring Arab stateswere the
aggressors; thus, he fails to come to grips with
the very real Arab threats to Israel in 1956 and
1967 and, indeed, ever since. He pooh-poohs
Saddam Husseins effort to achieve nuclear
weaponry in the early 1980s and writes off
Israels destruction of the Osirak nuclear
reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 as merely a
new phase of [Israeli] militarism.
Indeed, Tyler kicks off the book with a
description of how, in 2011-2012, Israeli agents
murdered two top Iranian nuclear scientists
on the streets of Tehran. The astonishing
thing, Tyler writes, was that Iran might not
have been engaged in clandestine nuclear
weapons development at all. Rather, Israels
highly provocative killing of the scientists
pushed Iran into pursuing, or resuming the
pursuit of, nuclear weaponry. All of this flies in
the face of what almost all the worlds
intelligence agencies believe, which is that Iran
9

aims to build nuclear weapons and has been

trying to do so for more than two decades. A
few years ago, the American intelligence
community suggested that the Iranians might
have halted their nuclear weapons program in
2003, but it has since concluded that Iran is
still pursuing nuclear weapons. Israeli intelligence has never believed that there was a real
halt and continues to believe that Irans
theocratic, brutal government is bent on
building nuclear weapons as soon as possible.
Israeli intelligence also takes the Iranian
leaders at their public word and believes that
the Iranian regime seeks to destroy Israel. A
division of opinion exists among the Israeli
intelligence assessors about whether the
Iranians, once they build an arsenal of such
weapons, will unleash them on Israel or
whether they will use them to strategically
overawe and defeat Israel in some more subtle
and staggered manner. In any event, returning
to Tyler and his thesis, according to press
reports, it is the IDF general staff and the
heads of the security services who held back
and are currently holding back Netanyahu
from launching a strike against Irans nuclear
facilities, which, once again, upends the
authors thesis.
Along the way, Tyler also makes another
argument: that the warmongering generals
have traditionally controlled their peace-prone
civilian superiors. But here, too, history illserves him. During the 1948 War, which Tyler
generally avoids, Ben-Gurion repeatedly
overruled the army. In May 1948 he forced the
generals repeatedly to launch assaults on the
Latrun Police Fort, against their better
judgment. Later in 1948 and again in March
1949 the army (meaning OC Southern Front,
General Yigal Allon) pleaded with Ben-Gurion
to order the conquest of the West Bank. BenGurion turned Allon down flatly, though the
IDF could easily have managed the conquest,
militarily speaking.
During the early and mid-1950s, some IDF
generals, including then-head of operations
and, from 1953, chief of general staff Dayan
pressed prime ministers Ben-Gurion and
Moshe Sharett (1953-1955) to launch a war
against Jordan to conquer the West Bank in
order to give Israel a more secure, natural
frontier or to launch wars of pre-emption and
conquest against Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.
Ben-Gurion occasionally toyed with these
expansionist ideas, but he and Sharett always

held back, checking Dayans annexationist

proposals. Only in 1956, after Nasser acquired
large amounts of advanced Soviet weaponry
and launched massive fedayeen attacks on the
Israeli heartland did Ben-Gurion agree to
launch a pre-emptive war against Egypt.
A decade later, in the summer of 1967, with
Nasser provoking war, the IDF General Staff,
to a man, pushed and pressed their civilian
master, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, to launch
a pre-emptive strike against Egypt. But it took
him three long, nail-biting weeks to decide that
international diplomacy had failed and would
continue to fail. In other words, from May 15
until June 4 Eshkol held off his generals and
the dogs of war. If Tylers thesis were right,
Eshkol would have crumpled before the
military elite who have always run the
country in mid-May.
In the early 1970s then-Prime Minister
Golda Meir scuppered peace or interim peace
initiatives by Moshe Dayan, her defense
minister, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
that might well have resulted in averting the
October War. Dayan at the time was supported
by two of the IDFs top generals, Ariel Sharon
and Israel Tal, but opposed by chief of general
staff Haim Bar-Lev. In 1981, when Begin
pressed the motion for the IAF attack on the
Osirak reactor, he was opposed by the head of
IDF intelligence, the head of the Mossad, and
the head of the opposition, Labor Party chief
Shimon Peres, who for years had headed the
countrys defense establishment (though he
was no general). A decade later, in 1991, when
Iraqs Saddam Hussein launched 39 Scud
missiles against Israels cities, it was the
hardline prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who
faced down much of the defense establishment
and checked the IDF.
In other words, the picture that emerges
from the actual history is clearly one in which
there is complete subordination of the military
to the Israeli civilian authorities. Sometimes,
the generals are the ones pushing for action
and war and the civilians are successfully
putting on the brakes; at other times it is the
civilians who are gung ho, while the generals
persuade their bosses to exercise restraint. At
all times, it is the prime minister and the
cabinet who have the final say.
Tylers purpose in writing this book was not
to offer his readers an honest history, it was to
blacken Israels image. Fortress Israel is just
the latest in a spate of venomous perversions of
10

the record that have appeared in the past few

years in the United States and Britain, all
clearly designed to subvert Israels standing in
the world. Deliberately or not, such books and
articles are paving the way for a future
abandonment of the Jewish state.
I am reminded of the spate of books and
articles that appeared in Western Europe in
1936 through 1938 repudiating the legitimacy
of the newly formed Czechoslovakia before its
sacrifice to the Nazi wolves. In 1934, the
Conservative weekly Truth hailed Czechoslovakia as the sole successful experiment in
liberal democracy that has emerged from the
post-War settlement. By the end of 1936, The
Observer was writing it off as a diplomatic
creation with no sufficient national basis either
in geography or race. By March 1938 The New
Statesman, in the past a great friend to central
Europes only democracy, was writing: We
should urge the Czechs to cede the Germanspeaking part of their territory to Hitler
without more ado. Of course, as all understood, this meant leaving Czechoslovakia
defenseless. Hitler conquered the rump of the
country a few months later without a shot. The
appeasement of the Arab-Islamist world at
Israels expense is in the air and Tyler is one of
its (very, very) minor harbingers.

One More Reason Why

Peace Wont Happen
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Anyone who regularly follows the translations
of the Palestinian media available on Palestinian
Media Watch www.palwatch.org or Memri.org
understands that the blithe talk about the
possibility of Middle East peace that is heard on
the left is utterly unrealistic. But keeping ones
finger on the pulse of a Palestinian culture that
continues to foment hatred of Jews and Israel
isnt the only indicator of just how deep this
animus runs in Arab culture. Just as informative
is a look at the cultures of the two Arab countries
that have already made peace with Israel: Egypt
and Jordan. The potent anti-Semitism of the
Muslim Brotherhood as well as the prejudice that
runs throughout the culture of the largest Arab
nation is well documented. But the situation in
Jordan is less well known.
Jordans reputation as a moderate Arab nation
stems mostly from the attitude of former King
Hussein and his successor King Abdullah. Like
his father, the Jordanian monarch is well spoken
in English, charming and, despite the criticisms
he lobs across the border at Israel in order to
maintain his standing as an Arab leader, very
much uninterested in conflict with the Jewish
state. But his people and even those in his
government are a very different manner.
As the Jerusalem Post reports, 110 out of 120
members of the Jordanian parliament have
endorsed a petition calling for the release of the
former soldier who murdered seven Jewish
children in 1997. The shocking incident at the
Island of Peace along the border between Israel
and Jordan prompted King Hussein to personally
apologize to the families of the victims for what
he considered a blot on the honor of both his
country and its armed services. But to the
overwhelming majority of Jordanians, he appears
to be a hero. If that doesnt tell you something
about how difficult it is to imagine the end of the
Middle East conflict, you arent paying attention.

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the

Middle East Studies Department of BenGurion University of the Negev. He is the
author of 1948: A History of the First ArabIsraeli War (Yale University Press).

11

The details of the Island of Peace shooting

were horrific. Ahmed Daqamseh, one of the
Jordanian soldiers on duty at the site that day,
turned his gun on a group of visiting Israeli
schoolgirls, killing seven and injuring five. The
death toll was limited only by the fact that his gun
jammed. He was spared a death sentence because
a tribunal ruled that he was mentally unstable.
But the elevation of his former defense attorney,
Hussein Mjali, to the post of minister of justice in
2011 gave new life to the campaign to spring the
killer.

For Future Friends of

Walter Benjamin
On the life and flourishing
posthumous reputation of
Walter Benjamin
By Bran Hanrahan
As for me, I am busy pointing my telescope
through the bloody mist at a mirage of the
nineteenth century, which I am trying to
reproduce based on the characteristics that it will
manifest in a future state of the world, liberated
from magic. Of course, I first have to build myself
this telescope.
Walter Benjamin, letter to Werner Kraft,
October 1935.

Unlike other such causes to free longimprisoned figures, this effort isnt based on any
ideas about a miscarriage of justice or an overly
harsh sentence. It is, instead, based on the
abhorrence with which Israel and Jews in general
are viewed in Jordanian society. Daqamseh is
unrepentant about his crime and that appears to
make him popular. Part of this can be traced to
the fact that the majority of Jordanians are
Palestinians who are generally marginalized in a
government run by and for the Hashemite ruling
family. But it must also be traced to a general
current of Jew-hatred that grips the Arab and
Muslim worlds. It is only that feeling that can
explain the desire of so many in Jordan to treat a
madman who went on a rampage killing little
girls as a hero or imprisoned martyr.

1.
In 1942, Gershom Scholem, the oldest friend
of the German writer and philosopher Walter
Benjamin and his unofficial literary executor,
wrote to Benjamins ex-wife Dora, in exile in
London: We are almost the last who knew him
when he was young [] and who knows how
much longer we will survive in this apocalypse.
Two years previously, Benjamin had committed
suicide in police custody at the French-Spanish
border, overdosing on morphine in fear of what
might happen upon his transfer to the German
authorities. But in spite of the bleakness of the
moment Benjamin dead, his library and papers
scattered, his writings banned, burned, and lost
Scholem was determined to think of the future.
He asked for donations of letters and other
materials for his Benjamin archive in Jerusalem,
for the sake of those who never knew Benjamin,
but who might someday read his work: for
future friends of Walter.
Even with his resolute optimism, in 1942
Scholem could hardly have imagined the
flourishing of Benjamins posthumous reputation.
After a slow beginning in the immediate
aftermath of the war, Benjamins standing and
influence have risen with every decade. With his
associations with revolutionary Marxism now
largely removed, defused or ignored, Benjamin
holds an unshakable position as an icon of the
academic humanities. Benjamin Studies is a

The problem between Israel and its neighbors

has never really been the location of borders,
settlements or the severity of its measures of selfdefense. Its about the unwillingness of a critical
mass of Palestinians and Arabs in general to
tolerate Jewish sovereignty over any portion, no
matter how small, over part of the Middle East.
The hate that leads serious people to demand
freedom for a mass killer of children is the same
factor that makes true peace unlikely in the
foreseeable future. This is regrettable, but those
who wish to claim any insight into the politics
that drive the Middle East conflict cannot ignore
it.
Commentary

12

thriving sub-discipline, comfortable with its

status as a professional specialism. In German,
early, limited anthologies have been replaced by
two generations of Collected Works. Where the
first was comprehensive, the second is forensic in
the vast scope of its philological completism:
including color facsimile volumes, the full run of
this Critical Collected Works, due for completion
in 2018, will cost over $2000. In English, the
turn-of-the-century publication of an acclaimed,
four-volume Selected Works and the translation
of the thousand-page Arcades Project greatly
expanded the Anglophone oeuvre, and introduced
new generations of Walters future friends to
the breadth of his writing. New French and Italian
editions are in progress. And in spite of or
because of tough times for the publishing
business, there is a steady stream of Benjamin
books, from scholarly and trade presses: new
selections (an English Early Works last year),
monographs and biographies, introductions and
facsimiles, essay collections, lexicons and semifictional ruminations, even the occasional
polemical counterblast. The marketing hook this
year is the 120th anniversary of his birth. Not such
a round number, but why wait for 125? One way
or another, Benjamin is an intensely popular
figure, and a good commercial bet.
But beyond the name and the famous
melancholy face, it is not easy it has never
been easy to sketch the contours of
Benjamins work and thought, or for that matter
his life and personality. There are various reasons
for this, not least the sheer scope and diversity of
his writing. Among many other things, Benjamin
wrote metaphysical treatises, literary-critical
monographs, philosophical dialogues, mediatheoretical essays, book reviews, travel pieces,
drug memoirs, whimsical feuilletons, diaries and
aphorisms, modernist miniatures, radio plays for
children, reflections on law, technology, theology
and the philosophy of history, analyses of
authors, artists, schools and epochs. His intense,
precise, enlightening intellectual engagement
grasped miniscule events and tiny details a
motto on a stained-glass window, 17 types of
Ibizan fig while at the same time, in the same
movement, retaining a sense for historys longitudinal waves and metaphysics worlds behind
the world. Although he often lamented his own
indolence, as both a writer and a person Benjamin
was mobile, endlessly inquisitive and engaging,

and exceptionally productive. Looking back on

his friends capacity for churning experience into
thought, the philosopher Theodor Adorno saw
something depersonalizing, almost inhuman, in
this prodigious apparatus of absorption and
reflection: Despite extreme individuation [...]
Benjamin seems empirically hardly to have been
a person at all, rather an arena of movement in
which content forced its way, through him, into
language.
Second, much of his writing was unpublished
during his lifetime and comes in fragmentary,
draft or multiple forms. More than most,
Benjamins oeuvre forms an open system: ideas
and passages migrate between different texts,
letters morph into essays and vice versa, texts are
so heavily rewritten that they contradict their
previous versions. There are unfinished books,
unstarted books, abandoned books, aborted
books. Even the more settled and public texts
the semi-autobiographical vignettes of Berlin
Childhood around 1900, say rarely fit their
own apparent genre; they are often curiously
loose and modular, parts not quite subordinate to
the whole. Moreover, Benjamins startling mental
and verbal facility has had its own decompository
effect. His writings contain ideas and images
which are both memorable and ambiguous the
artworks aura, the flneur in the streets, the angel
of history, the decay of experience, the flash of
messianic Jetztzeit, among many others and
which have, as a result, readily taken on a life of
their own. Finally, throughout his writing,
Benjamin continually reflects on these questions:
on text and context, author and oeuvre, reading
and writing, language and history, on the
production and collection of texts, on their
fragmentation and decay, reconstitution and reconstellation. Think about Benjamin, the writer or
the thinker, and he has almost always been there
first, and written ahead of you.
2.
So, for example, we find Benjamin in 1919, in
a letter to his former school friend Ernst Schoen,
discussing the autonomous life of published
correspondence. Individual letters, he says, can
detach themselves from their authorship,
becoming abstract, but collections of letters have
a different kind of posterity. A writers letters are
an index of a life as it unfolded, but the
telescoping of events into a few pages, and the
13

compression of lived time into short minutes of

reading, brings something else into existence. The
letters contain the authors afterlife, but an
afterlife that is already embedded within the
life, something which in one sense is already
there, but in another, is produced in the
unknowable and never-finished encounter
between writer and his unknown later readers,
between a fluid now and a fluid then.
Two closely-related themes are at work here:
first, Benjamins abiding preoccupation with the
complexity of temporal experience and form,
with how past and future communicate through
the present, but do so, in a sense, behind the
presents back; and second, his strong sense for
the de- and re-composition of phenomena in time,
with bits and pieces detaching to form themselves
anew, accumulating in new configurations,
working to rhythms and by dint of forces
unknown to the momentarily stable world of
beings and things. In addition, and again this is
typical Benjamin, the idea of letters afterlife is
graced with an unusual self-reflexivity. His letter,
in making a general point about the life of letters
and of letter-writers, seems to invoke
indirectly but knowingly specific past futures
and future pasts, both its own and that of its
author.
But the complex temporality of experience is
just not a private matter; it unavoidably coincides
and intersects with public, historical time. This
crossing of public and private temporalities can
be seen in Benjamins own editing of authors
letters: nearly twenty years later, his last German
publication (pseudonymous, to circumvent his
status as a banned author) was an edition of
letters between German writers, a collection of
minor texts tracing a counter-historical line
through the nineteenth century. The book is often
seen as a letter in its own right, an exemplary
message sent to Germany from exile, under the
ironic, quietly admonitory title of Deutsche
Menschen (translated as German Men and
Women). As well as preserving small, intense
moments of friendship and lived affect, the letters
often like Benjamins introductions to each
exchange combine learning with a wise,
unpretentious, ethical sensibility: a posthumous
portrait of civilized living, sent anonymously to a
culture now defined by hero cults, brutality and
murder.

Benjamins own letters were first collected in

the late 1960s, under the joint editorship of
Scholem and Adorno. His correspondence, like
all of his writing, was immediately drawn into the
agonistic political culture of the time, as the
mutual
suspicion
and
incommensurable
standpoints of Benjamins interwar friends
caricatured as Scholem the Jewish mystic,
Adorno the prissy dialectician-aesthete, Bertolt
Brecht the manipulative leftist bully were
replayed in highly politicized responses to the
work. Adorno, back from American exile and
head of the reconstituted Institute for Social
Research (the Frankfurt School), was mistrusted
on the left, who saw his mandarin Marxism as
quietist collusion with the ruling class. At the
moment when Adorno was publishing his
correspondence with Benjamin, radical students
were appropriating his friends name: the
Frankfurt University literature department was
occupied and temporarily renamed the Walter
Benjamin Institute. (Adornos own institute was
occupied too; famously, he called in the police.)
Samizdat copies of the then-little-known 1930s
essays The Author as Producer, Program
for a Proletarian Childrens Theatre, The Work
of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility carried slogans on their covers
aligning Benjamin with contemporary political
and psychochemical revolt. In this climate,
Scholem and Adorno were accused of abusing
their position, downplaying Benjamins sharp
left-political turn, editing out correspondence
with Brecht, even of deliberately suppressing late
work, supposedly too explosive to be released
from the archives.
Suspicions of censorship waned as scholarly
editions were published in the following decades,
including a six-volume German Collected Letters.
It became clear that the limitations of the earliest
volumes of correspondence were mostly attributable to the simple unavailability of material. A
revised single-volume Letters appeared in the late
1970s, incorporating newly available material; it
soon came out in an excellent English translation.
This volume, now published in English
paperback for the first time, offers a generous
sampling of Benjamins life and correspondence
in over 600 pages. Beginning before the First
World War Benjamin in 1910, 18 years old,
traipsing around the Alps near Liechtenstein,
writing to school friends, full of beans, full of
14

opinions, fond of exclamation marks (!!) it

runs until just before his death in 1940, its last
pages documenting the years in France, colored
by poverty, illness and internment, but dominated
by an unchanged devotion to his work. Largely
made up of letters to male friends and colleagues,
the collection is testimony to passionate intellectual engagement and to sheer epistolary
stamina: Benjamin seems never to have stopped
writing words on paper. But there are limits to the
collection: no correspondence with his family,
nothing from his love affairs or his marriage.
(Benjamin married Dora Pollak in 1917. They
had a son in 1919 and a bitter, expensive divorce
in 1930.) The closest to love letters are some
mildly flirtatious notes to an ex-girlfriend, the
sculptor Jula Radt. Many rediscovered letters
published separately are not included; while we
can read some of the chatty letters to Adornos
wife Gretel here, there is none of the
correspondence with Siegfried Kracauer, fellow
analyst of popular culture and later his fellow
exile in France. (In a prefatory note, the
publishers point out restrictions on revising the
original German Letters.)
Letters formed an extension for Benjamins
undoubted gift for friendship, but they were also
a particular mode of thought, driven and shaped
by what Adorno, in his introduction, calls their
mediated, objectified immediacy: letters
particular compound of absences and presences,
at once temporal, spatial and communicational. In
the letters, ideas appear, form and develop at
different rates and in different registers. Writing
to Scholem and Florens Christian Rang in the
earlier years, and in the scintillating later
correspondence with Adorno, there are pages of
sustained theoretical reflection, rehearsing
arguments and sometimes drafting passages he
will use in the work proper. But at times, a
single word, an observation or an aphorism
announces the tiny presence of a germ of thought.
For the reader of the afterlife, knowing what is
to come, these moments of emergence can have
the force of dramatic entrances, as when, in
January 1928, he tells Scholem in passing that he
intends a short piece on the nineteenth-century
arcades of Paris. The topic, in all its ramifications, would dominate his work for the rest of
his life.
Benjamins letters to Scholem form the basis
of the collection. The two had been students

together, neighbors in Basel and Munich during

the war, passionate co-readers of philosophy and
literature. Their long, affectionate letters contain
fascinating quotidian stuff malicious gossip,
complaints of bad luck, apologies for poor
handwriting, accounts of illnesses and travels
but above all, they teem with collaborative
thought: to no one else does Benjamin write of
his work with such ease and excitement. The
fervent discussion of books and ideas is
inseparable from a more material bibliomania.
Famously, Benjamin was a collector; above all
else, he was a collector of books. His library was
an extension of his self, its condition an index of
his fortunes, its maintenance a central task of his
existence. It would be, he writes to Scholem, the
sole material epitaph of my existence. Early on,
confident in the future, he constantly visits
dealers and auctions, buys first editions with
money he doesnt have, complains about
inflation-hedgers distorting the market. Later,
biographical vicissitudes take their toll. In the
divorce, he loses his beloved collection of
nineteenth-century childrens literature (he wrote
later: it is growing steadily even today, but no
longer in my garden.). He manages to have half
his library shipped out of Germany, but is then
forced to sell it off bit by bit. The text
Unpacking My Library among his most
charming essays, an account of the pleasures of
re-finding books, of sorting and ordering them
is, in part, a fantasy of his books homecoming,
and his own.
On one level, Scholems emigration to
Palestine cemented the separation from
Benjamin. On another, their relation took on new
and deeper form: in Jerusalem, Scholem appointed himself Benjamins archivist and first
reader, the keeper of his thought; his letters
contain the earliest attempts to grasp the shape of
Benjamins work as a whole and assess its
historical significance. Back in Europe, Benjamin
is a loyal correspondent, but not always a perfect
friend. He takes advantage now and again:
Scholem arranges a stipend to learn Hebrew,
Benjamin takes the money, but not the classes.
Scholem continually suggests a move to
Palestine: Benjamin doesnt want to go, but wont
come straight out and say so. By the 1930s, the
relation in letters remains immensely important
for both, but on Scholems rare visits to Europe,

15

Benjamin seems to be going out of his way to

avoid him.
Disagreements over politics and Benjamins
friendship with Brecht were the biggest problem,
disagreements that are both the theme and the
reason for the small number of letters to
Benjamin included here. These, by Scholem and
by Adorno, ultimately turn on the place of
politics in Benjamins work and his life: their
inclusion is partly a response to the 1960s
disputes, the editors gesture of retrospective selfjustification. Scholem thought Benjamins deepening Marxism a desperate and masochistic selfdelusion, with isolation and frustration underlying
what he saw as a profound betrayal of intellectual
principles. You issue a currency in your writing
that you are [] simply incapable of redeeming,
he writes, your desire for community places
you at risk, even if it is the apocalyptic
community of the revolution that speaks out of so
many of your writings [] [in] imagery with
which you are cheating yourself out of your
calling. Adorno took a similar, if more nuanced
line, and certainly shared Scholems distrust of
Brecht. For him, Benjamins turn to history and
to politics risked robbing his work of
philosophical force. Worse still, his new-found
and insufficiently dialectical enthusiasm for
technology, popular culture, and the masses
ultimately ran the danger of identification with
the aggressor: collusion with historical forces of
untruth, reification and delusion.

changing encounters, suggesting instead the

expansion of intellectual horizons, and the
application of existing metaphysical methods to
concrete historical themes, with spectacularly
productive results.
What is clear is that Benjamins mid-twenties
turn was as much a becoming-worldly as it was
a straightforward politicization: it involved new
ideas and new identifications, but also new
geographies (his appetite for travel only intensified as the years went on) and a new
professional identity. Benjamin had trained both
as a literary scholar and a philosopher; it was as
the former that he first sought professional
advancement, and spectacularly failed to achieve
it. Steiner sketches a vigorous portrait of
Benjamin as an experimental and philosophical
philologist, at odds with his institutional and
cultural surroundings. Problems came to a head
around his university Habilitation candidacy a
process somewhat akin to academic tenure
which centered on his study of Baroque theatre,
The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. While
the book carefully fulfilled academic convention,
it was dense and demanding, its unorthodox
conceptualizations of origin and allegory
going far beyond the bounds of humanist belles
lettres. In professional terms, it was a disaster.
Benjamin was rejected even before his formal
application.
Steiner describes the refusal as a combined
result of academic politicking, anti-Semitism and
blockheaded philistinism, and as a tragedy for
the German university. Perhaps it wasnt such a
tragedy for Benjamin himself though: the refusal
steered him all the more surely towards the avantgarde and the arcana of nineteenth-century life, in
the direction of the Arcades Project. In any case,
they would have kicked him out in 1933. As it
was, his dismissal was yet another event marking
a fork in the biographical path, if not a rupture in
the structures of his thought. From here on out,
Benjamin was a professional writer, his increasingly itinerant lifestyle matched by the
eclecticism of his subject matter and the variousness of his publishers. As a freelance essayist in
Germany, he made a good enough living; he had
friends who commissioned for the newspapers
and radio stations. Later, exiled in Paris and
elsewhere, he continually struggled to make a
living at all.

3.
This tension between religiously-infused
metaphysics and radical politics coalesces with a
second tension in Benjamins life and work
between philosophy and literature, as modes of
writing and understanding and as academic
disciplines. For many of Benjamins biographers,
the year 1924 is both a biographical turning point
and the moment when these tensions begin to
ratchet up. The more dramatic accounts of the
shift have Benjamin vacationing on Capri, where,
in quick succession, he reads Georg Lukcss
History and Class Consciousness and falls in love
with the Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis,
Brechts former stage manager, whom he then
pursues to Riga and then Moscow. The current
scholarly consensus, well summarized in Uwe
Steiners introduction to Benjamins thought,
downplays notions of epiphanic readings and life16

As his engagement with literary history had

made clear, Benjamins philosophical formation
marked above all by Kant, encountered
directly and through the various post-Kantianisms
of his day suffused his writing across many
topics. But as with Nietzsche, Benjamins
occasionalism, the quality of his prose and the
breadth of his subject matter have cast doubt on
his philosophical status. The question has
continually been asked: what is the philosophy,
and what exactly is philosophical, in his works
busy arena of movement? One approach, taken
by two prominent recent Benjamin monographs,
is to emphasize Benjamin as a philosopher of
time. As implied in his comments on the
temporality of published letters, for Benjamin,
time can be seen and should be written, and
must be lived as something more complicated
and denser with potential than the homogenous,
evenly sequential temporality to which we
conceptually and experientially default. Hidden
and possibly secret relations bind together the
apparently personal time of inner experience, the
larger-scaled, historical time of societal and
anthropological existence, and the transcendent
time of messianic intervention.
Peter Fenvess The Messianic Reduction:
Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time traces
Benjamins rethinking of experience and
temporality to his formative years as a student of
philosophy during and after the First World War.
This Benjamin, not yet much taken with
vernacular culture or avant-garde experimentation, writes in a difficult, abstract voice, but is
fully and confidently engaged in the
philosophical debates of his day. (Although
Benjamin wrote prolifically while very young, he
wrote almost nothing considered juvenilia, apart,
maybe, from the Alpine letters.) Fenvess reading
of Benjamins early texts locates them in a dense
network of influences and dialogues, a complex
force field encompassing contemporary mathematical theory, various strands Cohenist,
Rickertian, Cassirerite of neo-Kantianism,
and, more unexpectedly, the phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl and his followers.
Benjamins stance towards all these, and his
readings of Husserl in particular, are already
colored by the modernist messianism that became
a hallmark of his later thought. The messianic, for
Benjamin, was nothing so simple as a redeemer
arriving to call time and distribute justice at the

end of days. Rather, it referred to something like

a structure of temporal experience, but an
experience that goes beyond the individual and
even the social. To use the Benjaminian terminology that Fenves brings into sharp relief, it is
the immanent tension that is the fact and the force
of divinity in the world, permanently present,
endlessly mutable. This belief was the basis of
Benjamins particular take on Husserls phenomenological reduction, the program of rigorous
mind-clearing phenomenology used to set aside
the default natural attitude of consciousness,
with its preconceived notions of causality,
subject-object
relations
and
mind-world
distinctions.
For Benjamin, the reduction mediated a
sphere of experience beyond the conditioned
framings of conscious thought. But, as Fenves
reads him, Benjamin granted this subjectless
experience of pure receptivity a near-mystical
valence. The reduction was an opening onto a
kind of paradise; the stubborn natural attitude
was both analog and agent of the fallen, guilty
state of mankind. This also underlay Benjamins
disagreement on questions of method. Unlike
Husserls willed bracketing of philosophical
assumptions a carefully prescribed method for
dismantling the self-evident for Benjamin,
getting beyond the natural attitude was not a
matter of decision, for the philosopher or anyone
else. Not that the impossibility of a chosen path
implies the non-existence of the divine, or even,
strictly speaking, its inaccessibility: the divine is
something that can be thought and experienced,
but always as the irruption or appearance of an
outside, never commanded forth by a direct
action of human will. The reduction was done
to the philosopher, not by him.
The Messianic Reductions difficult, but
ultimately revelatory, analyses track the early
Benjamin as he searches for islands of reduced
experience within the fallen world. In his very
early essays and fragments, Benjamin hones in on
phenomena where experience is loosed from the
wretched ballast of subjecthood and causality.
Hlderlins poetry is one privileged place. The
practice of painting, with its relation of spatiality,
perception, fantasy, and color, is another. The
childs experience of color, as seeing subject and
biological being, is a third. Notwithstanding its
highly abstract idiom, Benjamins writing here is
often breathtakingly intense and original. There
17

are extraordinary pages in which Benjamin as

if to look sentimentality full in the face
reflects on childhood innocence, transforming the
theme into a bizarre and brilliant reflection on the
paradoxical phenomenology of blushing. (For
Benjamin, involuntary physical coloration does
not express subjective interiority, it locally
abolishes it.) Most abstractly, Fenves finds traces
of reduction in Benjamins rather vague
references to advanced mathematical theory,
which he encountered through his great-uncle
Arthur Schoenflies, an early set theorist, and
through Scholem, a student of mathematics. If
phenomenology strengthened Benjamins nascent
critique of Kants narrowly-drawn ideas of
experience, avant-garde math seemed to offer
new images of temporality, beyond the
homogeneity of calendric sequence, beyond the
this-then-that of simplistic causalities images
of time as cycloid, or planar, or, alluding to an
early theory of fractals, as a continuously turning,
tangentless curve.

For Friedlander, the Arcades convolutes, at

first sight a sprawling taxonomy of notes and
excerpts on nineteenth-century Paris, in fact
respond to, and keep company with, the work of
the greatest of philosophical system builders:
Plato and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. Interpretations of Benjamins work as a compendium
of brilliant, disconnected images and thoughts
epitomized by Hannah Arendts image of
Benjamin as a pearl diver rescuing strange
thought-artifacts from the deep are more than
just wrong, they are catastrophic misreadings.
The eye-opening implication, in other words, is
this: for all his vast, appreciative reception,
Benjamin remains severely underestimated.
Transcending every peer group except the most
rarified philosophical canon, Benjamin is not, for
Friedlander, just a writer or a thinker, he is a
philosopher of world-historical significance, and
his work is a vessel of the highest truth.
The books title is accurate, but potentially
misleading. This is not a life and works
intellectual biography; it has no interest in what
Benjamin looked like, where he lived, what he
felt or ate, whom he loved or who he was:
Friedlander wastes no time on Scholems
suggestion that one key to Benjamins writing
lies in his encoding of personal experiences. This
is a very different kind of method than Fenvess
dense net of readings, encounters and influences,
the reconstruction of micro-capillaries in the
social body of thought: the distinction between
intellectual history and the history of ideas could
hardly be clearer. Walter Benjamin in this
second study should not be considered a person,
but, first, as a prodigious structure of capacities,
capable of gathering thought into form, creating
written images which address, absorb and
ultimately reshape historical time, and, second, as
the corpus of significant texts made in the
crucible of this knowledge. All that matters is
what has been read and what comes to be written.
There is no need, in this analysis, for Berlin or
Port Bou, Dora or Asja, the angry father or the
neglected son.
If the content of the life is irrelevant, the
content of the late work the Arcades Project
and its accompanying train of essays and studies
is abstracted. On one level the Arcades can be
seen to mark the furthest development of the shift
begun around 1924, where Fenves breaks off
away from philology and pure philosophy, and

4.
In a coda, The Messianic Reduction fastforwards to the 1940 essay, On the Concept of
History, finding the non-linear shape of time
writ larger here in the late philosophy of history:
now the messianic is the making-congruent of the
local shape of time and the larger shape of
history, and the messiah is a name for the force
that accomplishes this temporal structuring. This
soterio-temporal formalism, linking the early and
the late work, also features in Eli Friedlanders
Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. But
here things go the other way round. Friedlanders
analysis centers on the Arcades Project, the vast,
uncompleted for some, uncompletable
work which consumed Benjamin in the 1930s,
and which, in the form of sketches, sub-projects
and spin-offs, gave rise to many of his best
known essays and images. Friedlander reads the
Arcades Project as the cohering, sense-making
culmination of the oeuvre, its logical as well as its
chronological terminus, which can if the direction is reversed reveal the coherence of
Benjamins philosophy, and the unique spiritual
character of his thought. In the rigor and
sobriety, but above all the unity and systematicity
unveiled by this method, so goes the claim, inhere
the fundamentally philosophical character of
Benjamins work.
18

towards a new form of cultural history, both

experimental and, in a complicated way, monumental. This entailed archaeology of modernity
its urban spaces, temporal structures, emergent
media, dreamworlds of commodities and crowds
based on a much broader conception of
experience and thought than normally accepted
within philosophys walls. But, like Adorno or
at least like one side of Adorno Friedlander
does not regard the Arcades as primarily or
ultimately an investigation of Parisian history,
commodity capitalism or phantasmagoric urban
modernity. He takes his cue from a comment in
Adornos 1935 correspondence with Benjamin: I
openly confess to regarding the Arcades not as a
historical-sociological investigation but rather as
prima philosophia in your own particular sense
[] I regard your work on the Arcades as the
center not merely of your own philosophy, but as
the decisive philosophical word which must find
utterance today; as a chef doeuvre like no other.
For Friedlander, the Arcades Projects material
and formal heterogeneity is no obstacle to the
recuperation of its systematicity. The perfectly
chosen cover photograph presents a visual
manifesto for his profoundly ambitious essay: the
photo shows one of the famous Parisian arcades,
but only its framework, looking through the ironand-glass grid of its roof to the sky beyond. The
books aim, accordingly, is ultimately to pass
through the Arcades itself, to grasp the formal
armature that gathers and shapes the content (its
Darstellung, which Friedlander rightly stresses as
presentation not representation), and divine
its structure and philosophical significance.
However, the form that, for Friedlander, bears the
books truth is not to be found in the actual
arrangement of Benjamins material. His analysis
does not address particular taxonomies or
juxtapositions; there is no investigation of the
strata laid down by the books successive
organizational conceptions, from the original
impulse lent by Benjamins reading of Louis
Aragons Paris Peasant, to the infusion of
deepening historical horror, and more explicit
political reflection, as the 1930s wore on. Rather,
the presentational form is a secondary formation, a constellation of concepts transcending
the Arcades content, as Friedlanders intricate
presentation systematically reconstructs Benjaminian idea-material in dozens of interlocking
sub-chapters.

Given the systematizing impulse, all here is

connected to all else. But one concept stands out
in the formation, the point towards and through
which every path runs: the dialectical image. This
difficult concept is central to the double task of
Benjamins late political-historical epistemology:
first, understanding the relative motion of history
and knowledge, and second, gathering past and
present in an explosive interrelation, generating a
flash of Jetztzeit, the time of the now. Concretely,
it is clear that Benjamin wanted to apply the
surrealists profane illumination to historical
writing, to deploy the alienated artifacts of a
recent past to break up conventional historiographys commonsense epistemologies and inert
temporal imaginaries, stupid and stupefying. But
a stable definition of the dialectical image has
proved elusive: generations of Benjaminians have
struggled with the term as it oscillates between
singular and plural, subjective and objective,
method and metaphor, materialist construction
and autonomous historical emanation. Moreover,
the stakes for the dialectical image are set so high
that Benjamins own thought-images and
historical objets trouvs the July Revolutionaries turning their guns on the public
clocks, say, or the flneur at Notre Dame de
Lorette, remembering with the soles of his feet,
like an ascetic animal have seemed inadequate, even paltry, next to the vaunted
concept.
Friedlanders interpretation here is radical and
univocal. There is one dialectical image, and its
name is The Arcades Project. In Friedlanders
reconstellation of Benjamins work, the concept
becomes the capstone of a metaphysical system,
an homage to and elaboration of Benjamins
famous, near-posthumous observation: There is a
secret agreement between past generations and
the present one. Our coming was expected on
earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we
have been endowed with a weak Messianic
power, a power to which the past has a claim.
Reflecting on his method, Friedlander alludes
to Benjamins notion of origin, developed in
The Origin of the German Tragedy: not the start
of a linear development, but an intense vortex of
transformation, in which elements of the past
undergo a complex process of rearrangement and
recognition, disappearance and endurance. Via
restructuring, the dialectical image Benjamins
work appears as a higher form of origin, a
19

node of immanent intensity in which the

potentiality of created nature is made manifest,
and truth and life are concentrated and brought
forth anew. Time is crucial in this reading: it is
more than the subject of Benjamins philosophy,
it is the medium in and with which it works. The
Arcades Project, dialectical image of history, is a
temporal artifact, first by virtue of the time
crystallized in its monadic dream-images, and
second as the arrangement of preserved time
held out into the stream of homogenous time, a
material intervention in an overwhelmingly
historicist episteme.
It is the forceful insistence of these
metaphysical claims that, more than anything
else, distinguishes Friedlanders book from other
recent unpackings of Benjamins philosophical
baggage, as his intervention commits itself to an
extraordinary degree, venturing far beyond the
safe ground of academic analysis. In this reading,
Benjamins amalgam of temporalities fabricates a
framework for the manifestation of divine
force, the display of divine power. The divine
here, as with the messianic reduction, is not a
transcendent or static godly presence; it inheres in
the weave of earthly existence, immanent and
intensive. Crucially, however, Friedlanders
reparative vitalism is also a work of memory. The
creation of the dialectical image bids farewell to
the past in order that life bare life, creaturely
life, inorganic life, historical life can go on. To
put it in terms worn down from overuse and at
the risk of banalizing a book that is, whatever
else, hardly banal the force within Benjamins
work enables a coming to terms with the past.
While never made entirely explicit, it is not hard
to read Friedlanders book, above all his
concluding chapter, as a response to the concrete
atrocities and losses of twentieth-century history,
with theories of trauma and memory wrought into
a philosophy of history in which Benjamins
work serves as the central mediating device.
Friedlanders apparatus of mediation, with its
intricate internal workings, is passionate testimony to the enduring generative power of
Benjamins writing. But it is impossible not to
notice everything absent or removed from the
system built here. Among the absences is the
Arcades Projects concrete content: those who
havent read that book will learn little about its
historical subject matter, whose dialectical
passage into conceptuality seems uniformly and

problematically smooth. Neither the reasons for

Benjamins choice of material, nor the political
stakes of his work, then or now, ever becomes
clear. Granted, it posits a construction of truth in
one sense located in the dialectics of
recognition that passes between past and present
but historically specific regimes of truth are
neither a fact nor a problem. The power that
invests knowledge here is of a spiritual and divine
order, emphatically not a social or socioepistemological one. And as truth is re-enthroned,
problems of textuality evaporate. In Friedlanders
systematization, Benjamins prose is put through
an ascetic filter, its conceptuality emerging
largely without remainder, its language tending
always towards a higher univocality. Most of
Benjamins thought-images are stripped away or
stripped down to their semantic core: when they
occasionally sneak back in, they are often newly
startling.
Profane aspects of Benjamins work cannot
survive this angelic atmosphere. As the work
becomes the oeuvre and the oeuvre becomes the
system, it becomes unimaginable that Benjamin
could sometimes have changed his mind, or
occasionally might have been wrong. Benjamin
becomes a great natural given, to be explored like
a cave system or a new continent. The writings of
the author of The Author as Producer have no
and can have no context of production here.
Maybe none of these mere particularities, the
shabby concrete stuff, count as philosophical.
But if so, it is because the term is defined to
exclude them. The multiple begging of the
question what is philosophy? comes to look
like a rappel a lordre, as all the materiality of
Benjamins works, and all their worldly
imbrication, are de-constellated, sublated out,
remembered away. We can guess at Brechts sardonic reaction: that the divine force discerned
in the Arcades Project is nothing but the
quickening pulse of the philosopher, hot on the
scent of yet another interpretation of the world.
5.
One odd fact of Benjamins peripatetic life is
that he never crossed the English Channel. (He
sailed down it once, en route from Hamburg to
Spain.) All the many journeys, all the years in
Paris, and he never once went to Calais and took
a boat for England. He was never in London, the
rival capital of the nineteenth century just a
20

couple of hundred miles away. In the last months

of his life, his ex-wife Dora begged him to come
over: it would have saved his life, but instead he
went south, waited around in Marseilles with the
other transitoires, stopped in Lourdes for a while
before heading for the Pyrenees. But in one way
at least, London was his future. In the late 1930s,
along with Dora, Benjamins twenty-year old son
Stefan had also come to Britain. Their escape was
a relief to Benjamin, whose late correspondence
worries about their fate, first in Italy, later in
Austria. London seemed for the moment like a
much safer refuge, where Stefan could complete
his disrupted education, and maybe even,
Benjamin hopes in a letter to Scholem, be given a
British passport. For Dora, things worked out
until her death two decades later, she ran a
boarding house in Notting Hill. But some
anomaly in Stefans case led to a mysterious turn
of events. A footnote in the Letters reports that in
1941 he was expelled from the country as an
enemy alien. He was deported by ship to
Australia, a journey on which he was placed,
according to Scholem, under "German Nazi"
authority and traumatized by their brutal
mistreatment. After the war, he somehow
returned to London, where he became an
antiquarian book dealer: the son taking up,
professionally, the fathers amateur bibliomania.
He died in 1972, Benjamins other posterity.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Historical patterns of
womens activism
in the region
The case of Serbian writer
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi
(1862-1945)
By Ana Stjelja
This paper discusses the historical patterns of
women's activism in Serbia through the case of
one very interesting Serbian woman who,
although now largely forgotten writer and cultural
worker, played an important role in women's
emancipation primarily in her homeland. She was
after the traces of other Serbian female writers
and feminists who lived before her, such as
Eustahija Arsi, first Serbian female poet from
the 18th century. Although there were just a few
of them, they left an indelible mark upon the
cultural history of Serbia. The paper will attempt
to show how Serbian female writers and feminists
in the mid of 19th and early 20th century were
dealing with women's emancipation and what
were the patterns of women's activism in Serbia
of that time. The case of Jelena J. Dimitrijevi is
particularly interesting due to her openmindedness, very interesting life, often travels,
contact with East and West, writing about a
woman and her destiny.
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi (1862-1945) was Serbian
writer, world traveler and women's rights fighter
who marked Serbian literature at the turn of the
19th to the 20th century. As a poet, novelist, and
folklorist she was a prominent woman in Serbian
literary circles. Despite having no formal
education, Jelena was very educated woman of
her time. She was a polyglot and an erudite
writer; she spoke English, Greek, Turkish,
French, German. She was raised in respected and
wealthy family, in the spirit of Serbian cultural
heritage and Orthodox religion. From an early
age she dedicated herself to writing. She had a
great support in her husband Jovan Dimitrijevi.
Beside supporting her writing and social
activities, he was often her fellow-traveler and the
person she could completely rely on. When he

Dora and Stefan Benjamin

21

whether covered with veil or wearing a suit and

smoking cigar.
Since Jelena's early age, her interest has
focused on the oriental world represented by
Turkish women and their way of life. The life in
Turkish harems and the problems that these
women she first met in Ni, the largest city in
southern Serbia (which at the time when she
moved there was a part of the Ottoman Empire)
were dealing with, attracted her so much that she
started exploring it in details. All the impressions
about the life in Turkish harems she wrote in her
book titled Letters from Ni on harems.
Her literary work is remarkable for two
reasons. First for its explicit focus on women in
general, and for its interest in the fate of women
in the East. Her literary work played an important
role in the process of rediscovering contribution
of women to Serbian cultural life in the first half
of the twentieth century. Through her entire
literary work she shows
individuality and
independent spirit. To be a woman writer in her
time it was rarity itself.
Jelena drew attention to herself by publishing
poems written in exotic, oriental style. Most her
works are specific and remarkable. They were
honest reflections of one woman, who without
any social boundaries was speaking about the
woman and her intimate world, including
sexuality.
Her first published pros book was a travel
book Pisma iz Nia o haremima (Letters from Ni
on harems) and at the same time the first pros
book written by some Serbian woman author
ever. She knew the internal structure of harems
as confined community of women, and defining
factor of Turkish cultural identity. She was
particularly interested in social status of a Muslim
woman. She knew the status of a Muslim woman,
and what's more important she showed understanding and compassion for the psychological
state of harem women. As a witness of some
events crucial for liberation and modernization of
Turkish women, she wrote a travelogue Pisma iz
Soluna (Letters from Thessaloniki) where she
portrayed the historical moment of the facing and
clashing of two different civilizations. In her
Letters from Thessaloniki, she focusses her
attention to the Jewish women who converted to
Islam, called dnme, describing their life habits
and the process of their emancipation.

died, she was in mourning for the rest of her life.

From the moment she stayed alone, she dedicated
her life to writing, traveling and fight for
women's rights. She shared the destiny of other
Serbian feminists who are now almost forgotten.
Serbian feminists were very progressive and
decisive in their attempt to draw attention to the
social status of women and the problems they
were facing with. These women were mostly
intellectuals, most numerous among them were
writers (such as Jelena J. Dimitrijevi), painters
(such as Nadeda Petrovi) and humanitarian
workers (such as Delfa Ivani). These women
were expressing their personal thoughts and
attitudes, whether through art, different social
activities or humanitarian work. An association
called ''Serbian Sister's Circle'' played an
important role in the process of emancipation of
Serbian women. Through different activities, its
members were trying to offer help to the poor or
those in need and to inspire girls and women to
get more active in the society they are part of.
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi was very respected and
active member of this association. She and her
female fellows were mostly wealthy and brave
women who were real patriots, some of them
gave lives for their country. Voluntary nurses of
the Circle had a significant role during the
Balkan Wars and First World War. The members
of the Circle were publishing their own journal
called Calendar Vardar where its members could
publish literary works and promote patriotic
ideas. Jelena J. Dimitrijevi was one of the most
active co-authors of this journal. Therefore, the
pattern of women's activism in Serbia is
revealing the tight connection between patriotism
and the fight for women's rights. We could say
that just like feminists from Europe and America,
Serbian feminists were also very educated
wealthy women who used all their knowledge,
power and fortune to upgrade the status of
Serbian women in general.
Jelena was active in this fight, primarily
through her literature, especially travelogues.
Here trips to different parts of the world were just
an attempt to find out how other women live, so
she could apply this knowledge and share
experience with women in her homeland. Each
of her trips was an amazing journey through the
intimate world of women of her time. This is the
reason why all her writings focus on women,

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J. Dimitrijevi offer rich material for research,

from a literary-historical and literary-artistic point
of view.
One of significant topics of her literary work is
confrontation between East and West. She
searches for similarities and differences between
those two civilizations, pointing out the necessity
for their discovering and showing the point of
their collision. Her novel Nove (The new ones)
for which she received the reward of the Serbian
Literary Association, shows the primary literary
interest of Jelena J. Dimitrijevi woman. In her
books woman is viewed from cultural, social,
political and feminist aspects. Therefore, woman
is the foundation of her poetical, prose and
travelogue work.
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi was one of the most
eminent Serbian feminists and the pioneers of this
movement. She was also known in international
feminist circles. Thanks to her many friendships
with Turkish and American women, she had the
opportunity to travel and see how women from
different places in the world live. The most
valuable were her notes from travels, especially
from the Ottoman Empire and America which
could give us a picture of the women who despite
living in the world of different cultural patterns
share about the same destiny.

Another Jelena's significant literary work is a

travelogue from America with title New world or
one year in America. In this travelogue she
showed all her writing potential. The most
interesting element of her work is the way she
was describing the American way of life with
emphasis on American women. She was observing very carefully the life habits of American
women, comparing them to Turkish women
because she found this very interesting
comparison. From her point of view, although
they are different from each other, American and
Turkish women have something in common.
Primarily, strongly want to get free and independent, in other words to liberate from harem
which is a metaphor for the world with
boundaries, tradition and male supremacy. This
trip to America just like the one to Ottoman
Empire was a crucial for Jelena J. Dimitrijevi
and her intention to help new generation of girls
and women in her own country. All her books are
a bit didactic and contain whether hidden
message or explicit intention to advise and
educate. With age, she became respected activist
and women's rights fighter with great experience
which she sincerely wished to share with other
women who were her main audience.
Her last book, published in 1940 is a
travelogue with title Seven seas and three oceans.
A trip around the world where she wrote about
her journey through Alexandria, Cairo,
Jerusalem, Haifa. Damascus, Beirut. This trip to
the Middle East was a great opportunity to see
how women from this part of the world live. Her
descriptions of the cities and people are very
special and make the book interesting for reading.
In this travelogue, beside writing about local
women, Jelena initiated another topic, religious
conflicts in the Middle East.
Her prose is mostly marked by travel books.
She travelled both to the East and West
describing in details their tradition and life habits.
She spent almost her entire life on trips, having
the unique opportunity to meet with interesting
and eminent people of her time such as Egyptian
feminist leader Hoda Sharawi, whom she met
when she visited Egypt, Parsi princess Lady
Dorab Tata and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore
whom she met when she visited Inida . Her travel
books include all the impressions from those trips
becoming an anthropological and ethnographic
testimony of their time. Literary works of Jelena
23

The entire process of women's emancipation in

Serbia was developed according to the development of the society itself. This process was after
the political, social and cultural progress of the
country. Centuries long fight for women's rights
was actually fighting for women's liberation, fight
against male supremacy and fight for winning
more freedom in all spheres of life. Therefore, if
we're searching for some patterns of women's
activism in Serbian society at the end of the 19th
and the first half of the 20th century, we could
notice that there were certain patterns created by
progressive women of that time. Besides taking
care of their homes and families, these women
were also active in the society, doing charity
work, writing, painting, acting, teaching, being
nurses during wars, in one word, giving a big
contribution to the society they're part of. In this,
there was no big difference between Serbian
women and the women from other parts of the
world, including East and West. Women from
different societies, different religions and cultural
patterns were trying to get united in their mutual
fight for freedom.
Exchange of ideas and beliefs was very
important for the women of that time. Therefore
women's activists and feminists were traveling
often to meet women from other countries. They
were meeting at the conferences, making private
visits and always staying in touch. The patterns of
women's activism were about the same in all the
countries where women wanted to get
emancipated. Some women like Serbian writer
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi, collected all that precious
experience and like not many of feminists, turned
it into books and put it at the disposal for the
future generation of women. This is sort of her
legacy valuable not just for history of feminism in
Serbia but also of its cultural history.

Content
Daniel Pipes: Can Islam Be Reformed?
Benny Morris: Athens or Sparta?
Jonathan S. Tobin: One More Reason
Why Peace Wont Happen
Bran Hanrahan: For Future Friends of
Walter Benjamin
Ana Stjelja: The case of Serbian writer
Jelena J. Dimitrijevi

Selected and Edited by

Ivan L Ninic

About the Author

Shlomo Hamelech 6/21

42268 Netanya, Israel
Phone: +972 9 882 6114
e-mail: ninic@netvision.net.il

Lamed E logo is designed by

Simonida Perica Uth

Dr Ana Stjelja is an orientalist, literary

researcher and poet from Belgrade
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