Although theology seeps everywhere into Walter Benjamin’s work, it can be difficult to pin down — and even more difficult to decipher. As the German Jewish philosopher put it in his posthumously published Arcades Project, “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.”

Benjamin makes a similar point about the relationship between historical materialism and theology by way of a different metaphor in his theses “On the Concept of History,” the last work he completed before committing suicide while fleeing Nazi persecution. The opening passage describes an automaton (historical materialism) who can beat any player at chess, but only by enlisting the help of a chess-master dwarf (theology) who guides the puppet’s hands while remaining hidden beneath the table. What was the significance of this understanding of theology as a necessary yet necessarily hidden counterpart to historical materialism for Benjamin? What drove him to develop an idiosyncratic theory of history that combined Marxist materialism with Jewish messianism?

The relationship between theology and left-wing political struggle was both a personal and political concern for Benjamin. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin in 1892, he grew up unfamiliar with Jewish holidays and rituals. It was only as a student, through his acquaintance with members of the Zionist youth movement, that he began to think more explicitly about the significance of his own Jewishness and about the position of Jews in Germany. In a letter written in 1912, he observes that as a German Jew he possessed a “two-sidedness.” Although he expressed an interest in preserving Jewish values, cultural heritage, and traditions — which he understood to have universal significance — and contemplated moving to Palestine at various points, he rejected Zionism as a national territorial project, declaring that his political allegiance and energies lay with the Left.

Benjamin’s 1940 theses are concerned with the question of redemption, rejecting theories of progress propagated by both the Right and the Left. Against the historicism practiced by nineteenth-century historians who sought to present the past “the way it really was” while ignoring the conditions of the present, whose injustices their work implicitly affirmed, Benjamin argues that the historical materialist must engage with the past so as to call into question inherited forms of domination that structure capitalist society. Against the “homogeneous, empty time” that characterized visions of progress, he proposed adopting a revolutionary relationship to the past that could “make the continuum of history explode,” bringing about a “real state of emergency” to overturn the ongoing emergency of the catastrophic status quo. Karl Marx pictured revolution as the “locomotive of history,” while Benjamin claimed it required slamming on the brakes.

When Benjamin discussed the task of the historical materialist, he was not simply proposing a method of scholarly study but insisting that an engagement with the past was a necessary component of political struggle. The German Social Democrats, he argued, made a grave error and facilitated the rise of fascism by adhering to a progressive vision of political redemption that emphasized an abstract image of liberation in the future at the expense of concrete experiences of oppression in the present, neglecting the significance of the past for class struggle. They made “the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.”

An early version of Benjamin’s theses included two sections that were cut from subsequent drafts, which help to elucidate the political implications of his understanding of “messianic time”:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted the future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.

Remembrance allows for a relation to the past that breaks with causal chains of succession. Redemption and political liberation are not located in some hazily imagined and passively awaited ideal future; instead, their possibility lies scattered in “splinters” among the rubble and ruin of the present, and their realization depends on political action. “The Day of Judgment,” Benjamin proposes, “would not be distinguishable from other days.”

In March 1937, Benjamin received a letter from Max Horkheimer, who expressed reservations about the vision of history that Benjamin was developing, articulating skepticism about the notion that the past could be reactivated and redeemed in the present. “Past injustice has occurred and is completed,” Horkeimer writes. “The slain are really slain.” In the context of Israel’s current genocidal onslaught in Gaza, Benjamin’s instruction to fan a “spark of hope in the past” could be misinterpreted as a poetic image detached from political realities. The slain are really slain. Nothing will undo the violence that has already been inflicted. But Benjamin’s vision of messianic time did not overlook the unfolding horrors of the present. He argued, in a somewhat topsy-turvy-sounding statement, that the “confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” of ongoing struggles “have effects that reach far back into the past,” which “call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.”

The instrumentalization of Holocaust memory as a justification for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians inverts Benjamin’s vision of historical materialism by appealing to oppressed ancestors while ignoring current relations of domination: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” The struggle for Palestinian liberation is a struggle of the living in the present, which is simultaneously a struggle over the meaning of history. For as Benjamin perceived, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”