Abstract

Bloch's correspondence, published the year of his hundredth birthday, evokes a period of German philosophy which today seems forever gone. In exile in Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI, Czechoslovakia and the United States during die Nazi period and in bodi Germanies after 1945, Bloch epitomized an extraordinary symbiosis of the Jewish and the German spirits. Benjamin, Adorno, and Bloch were assimilated Jews unaware of their identity (or difference) except dirough the disdainful look of others. They saw themselves primarily within the tradition of German philosophy. In German Idealism and, above all, in Schelling and in the Kabbalah, Bloch discovered die theology of immanence in the tradition of Isaac Luria and Jakob Boehme