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.