The Prehistory of the Messiah

Schneerson was the seventh Rebbe, or spiritual leader, of Chabad, a Hasidic Jewish dynasty originating in Lyozna, in what is now Belarus. A movement of religious revival in the face of growing secularism, Hasidism proliferated in the eighteenth century across Eastern Europe, foregrounding a theology of “divine immanence” rooted in the medieval mystical tradition of Kabbalah — that no aspect of the world is separate from God. The focus was the spiritual redemption of the individual in the here and now.

This more individualist, inward-looking program of religious observance began to yield to an orientation of messianic hope for collective Jewry with the rise of the Zionist nationalist project in the late nineteenth century and the movement of Jewish Enlightenment known as Haskalah, which presented dual existential threats to Chabad and its fifth leader, the Rebbe Rashab.

“In a 1900 talk to the students of his yeshiva,” Glinter tells us, the Rebbe “explained that the ideologies of enlightenment and Zionism were no more than a prelude to the messianic age, which he and his followers would bring about through their spiritual efforts. He declared again in 1907 that ‘this present generation is the generation of Messiah, without any doubts whatsoever.’” Zionism in particular was seen by Hasidic leaders throughout Europe as an egregious affront to God — an attempt to “force the End” by human, political means. The alternate vision of redemption he promoted called for radical historical passivity in anticipation of the Messiah.

The Rebbe Rashab’s messianic statements laid the theological groundwork for his successor’s acceleration of this rhetoric. For Rabbi Joseph Isaac, the Holocaust — which he very narrowly escaped — represented the “birth pangs of the Messiah.” Glinter shows how, once the messianic expectation had been deeply established, Schneerson would steadily outdo his predecessors and indeed himself, making the imminent arrival of the Messiah the foundation of his teaching and leadership.

“Early Hasidism neutralized the messianic impulse by emphasizing the salvation of the individual,” Glinter claims, channeling the historian of Hasidism Gershom Scholem. “Schneerson revived it by doing the opposite. With a focus on practical accomplishments, the door to historical redemption was again open. Bringing the Messiah was . . . the task of every Hasid, every Jew, who could go out into the street and make it happen.” Schneerson’s messianic vision would fuel the activism and outreach that would make Chabad a global organization.

From Messianic Passivity to Right-Wing Politics

Growing up in the Black Sea port city of Nikolaev (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine) and Yekotrinoslav (now Dnipro), Schneerson received a religious education mostly from his father, the rabbi Levi Yitzhak. He also passed secular Soviet high school exams, but if he received an actual diploma, it seems to have been lost. He had been attracted to math and science, particularly astronomy; after becoming ordained as a rabbi, he trained in Berlin and Paris in philosophy, math, physics, and engineering. After his and his wife Chaya Mushka’s escape from the Nazis to New York, he worked as a mechanical engineer in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before reluctantly assuming his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe a year after his passing in 1950.

It would be a mistake to infer a laxer attitude toward Jewish observance from Schneerson’s secular training in cosmopolitan cities; if anything, he leaned more conservative than the average Hasid. His interests and vocational training, Glinter explains, “did not imply a project of synthesis or reconciliation between Jewish and secular scholarship, or between the Hasidic and modern worlds. Rather, engagement with science and secular learning demonstrated to Schneerson the all-encompassing scope of Judaism.” As Rebbe, Schneerson would in fact engage in numerous strained attempts to contradict scientific facts with biblical arguments. He publicly rejected the theories of evolution and heliocentricity. The universe was about six thousand years old.

He advocated prayer in school, but felt owning a gun demonstrated a lack of faith in God. Though he maintained close ties with President Ronald Reagan, he wanted a stronger welfare system, and not just for his own followers’ benefit. He felt the dehumanizing prison system should be dismantled. He was anti-feminist and saw homosexuality as an illness. He took a more pragmatic approach to Zionism than his successor the Rebbe Rashab, as well as most other Hasidic groups. He met with and advised numerous Israeli political leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, fashioning himself something of a military strategist and promoting a hawkish agenda vis-à-vis the settlements, vehemently opposing any proposed land concessions.

“Even if his theology departed from theirs, his politics aligned closely with religious Zionist positions,” Glinter explains. “Though he attributed no messianic significance to the Jewish State, he believed that God’s biblical promise to Abraham gave the Jewish people a claim to the land. Together with his enthusiasm for Israel’s military exploits and his attribution of Divine providence to its victories, this belief brought him closer to the Zionist position than Chabad had ever been.”

The philosopher Aviezer Ravitzky sees a relationship between Schneerson’s hawkishness on Israel and his messianism, noting that “this political radicalism is directly connected with its acute messianic consciousness, which is, by its very nature, one of constant advance and conquest, not of retreat and withdrawal.” When the Messiah arrives, he will gather the Jews to the Land of Israel, rebuild the Temple, and usher in an age of world peace where all will know and worship God. Chabad’s theology emphasizes the Jewish people’s chosen status, a status that will carry over into the messianic age.

An Alternate Political History of Jewish Messianism

In Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, the sociologist Michael Löwy identifies a network of German-Jewish thinkers that materialized around the same time as Chabad’s messianic turn. Like Chabad, they sought to develop a forceful response to Enlightenment rationalism and the shocks of modernity by incorporating the mystical, Kabbalistic, messianic aspects of Jewish religion, from which most were quite alienated, into the nostalgic German Romantic current that dominated their era, resulting in a theologically rooted revolutionary anarchism.

A few were practicing Jews and most were secular, but all would have rejected Chabad’s Jewish particularism. The philosopher Martin Buber, who made the Hasidic storytelling tradition accessible to assimilated Western European Jews, made explicit that Judaism’s messianic prophecy was targeted “not at the emancipation of a people, but the redemption of the world.” The messianic hope of these thinkers also departed from Chabad’s passivity (which would, under Schneerson, become very active indeed). Franz Kafka, some of whose Kabbalah-influenced parables and stories Buber published, understood the coming of the Messiah to be merely the epilogue to the active process of human self-emancipation, famously prophesying, “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer needed, he will come only on the day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the very last day.”

In Jewish messianic tradition, “there is an abyss between the present and the future, between current decline and redemption,” says Löwy. “This abyss cannot be overcome by just any ‘progress’ or ‘development’: only revolutionary catastrophe, with colossal uprooting and total destruction of the existing order, opens the way to messianic redemption.” His group of intellectuals, like Chabad, rejected the liberal cause of gradual reform and progress toward some unspecified horizon. Additionally, they were attracted to a traditional messianism that can be understood as radically antiauthoritarian, with biblical passages and commentary celebrating the overthrow of world powers and the removal of all religious proscriptions with the arrival of the Messiah.

Löwy’s subjects also include Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer, friends Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács who both corresponded with Buber, and Gershom Scholem and his student Erich Fromm, among others. But at the nexus of this social-intellectual web is the literary theorist Walter Benjamin, who developed through works such as “Critique of Violence” and “Theologico-Political Fragment” what Löwy calls a “sui generis dialectic of anarchy and messianism, revolution and theology.”

Benjamin understood that there would be no revolution if the result were not understood as a messianic rupture in history, a profound break with liberal, bourgeois notions of “progress.” And, as he makes explicit in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” only working-class revolution could bring about such an interruption. Löwy understands Benjamin’s Communist sympathies after 1925 as being related to “the clearly ‘apocalyptic’ orientation of the Comintern at that time . . . with its doctrine that world revolution was imminent.” Illustrating the intensity of Benjamin’s messianic hope, even fervor, he points to a letter to Scholem supposing that a “Bolshevik revolution in Germany” would soon take place.

Messiah Ascendant, Revolution Deferred

For Schneerson, everything would eventually become a sign of the arrival of redemption. Glinter lists some of the unfulfilled harbingers: “Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in Iran; the Tiananmen Square protests in China; the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union were the biggest.

He had often spoken of his deceased father-in-law Joseph Isaac as the potential Messiah of his generation, or just flat-out as the Messiah himself, and this conviction, as the tension of anticipation accumulated over decades, was eventually transposed by his followers onto him. If the Messiah still has not arrived, the Rebbe must be the Messiah. Is there a better candidate, after all? Torah scholars did theological contortions to show that the Rebbe’s status as the Messiah was consistent with Jewish law. People clamored for him to declare himself as such.

Schneerson discouraged the overt declarations but declined to shut the discourse down outright. “Although his protestations were enough to dissuade some Hasidim from proclaiming him the Messiah publicly, they did little to shake his followers’ faith in his messianic identity.” It’s not clear why he refused to make a clear statement one way or the other. Glinter suggests that the fervent observance and outreach efforts of his followers had become so closely tied up with the messianic enthusiasm now centered on him that shutting it down would undermine the project he had devoted his life to. “A cult of personality might have been distasteful, but it had its uses.”

By the 1990s, messianic hysteria had reached a fever pitch, as “posters, banners, and billboards with Schneerson’s picture and the words ‘King Messiah’ began appearing in cities around the world. Hasidim distributed pamphlets and advertised Schneerson’s status in the media” in an effort to convince the Rebbe to reveal himself as the Messiah. These highly vocal efforts did not relent through his years of invalidity after a stroke, nor, in some corners, after his death. Some followers were seen singing and dancing at the Rebbe’s funeral. This was only a test, and if we pass, he will return.

Thirty years later, some of these activists got themselves arrested. According to an anonymous Meshichists commenter on an online news item about the tunnel arrests, the faction’s project to expand the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway without the knowledge of Chabad officials (or the New York City Department of Buildings) was a continuation of their efforts to bring their Rebbe King Messiah back, to usher in the End of Days. “Our decision to break down the wall and expand 770 is a bold statement of our faith and dedication,” the commenter said. “It’s an act of preparing the world, starting with our own community, for the ultimate redemption. By taking this initiative, we are not merely altering a physical space; we are actively participating in hastening the arrival of Moshiach.”

The far-right religious zealotry and hard-line nationalist politics of Chabad are ascendant globally, while Benjamin’s circle of revolutionary messianists remain “the defeated of history.” But the contemporary left’s reengagement with these thinkers might helpfully orient it toward an active, radical, universal hope — rooted by necessity in humanity’s religious and spiritual traditions.

“Contrary to what is generally thought,” Löwy notes, “a romantic-nostalgic dimension has been present in all anti-capitalist revolutionary thought — including Marxism.” Our era of surging, sustained capitalist catastrophe necessitates far more than incremental progress. Benjamin uses the image of an automaton chess-playing puppet who wins every match, so long as a little hunchback out of sight pulls the strings. The puppet’s seemingly automatic movements represent the myth of an “automatic” progression toward social democracy via economic development. The little hunchback required to win — e.g., a game of chess, or the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist forces and redemption of humanity — is unyielding messianic hope.