ABSTRACT
The leading scholar of the history of religious Messianism and the leading scholar of the history of secular Messianism both broadened the scope of their investigations – the first, Gershom Scholem, extending them into the history of Sabbataianism and the second, J. L. Talmon, into the French Revolution. Both reached a similar conclusion: they recognized, as Scholem put it, “the profound truth relating to the dialectics of history … whereby the fulfillment of one historical process leads to the manifestation of its opposite. In the realization of one thing its opposite is revealed.”1 The two great Israeli historians of ideas plumbed the depths of one of the most fascinating and at the same time tragic manifestations of la condition humaine: the human challenge of bringing the heavenly city down to the vale of tears, and the price that men have to pay for their Messianic passion. Scholem and Talmon were also contemporaries and witnesses of the trans-
formation of communism in the Soviet Union from a vision of egalitarian and universal redemption into a bureaucratic and nationalistic despotism. Nineteen thirty-seven was a key year for the two historians, for the formation of their outlook and their historiographical understanding. Scholem wrote his famous article “Redemption Through Sin” in 1937,2 and Talmon gained the inspiration for his first book in the years 1937-38 at the time when the Moscow trials revealed to the world the bitter reality of what was happening in the Soviet Union:
In 1937-38 when the minds of so many, and especially the young, were being deeply exercised by the terrible enigma of the Moscow trials, I happened to be working on an undergraduate seminar paper on the ultrademocratic French constitution of 1793 as seen against the background of the Jacobin terrorist dictatorship. The analogy between year II [of the French Revolution] and what was happening in 1937-38 struck one most forcibly … the parallel seemed to suggest the existence of some un fathomable and inescapable law which causes revolutionary Salvationist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror.3
