Translation by Miguel García-Baró, Ricardo Ibarlucía

A large part of what is known about Walter Benjamin is due to Gershom Scholem. The two were friends from their youth, and between 1915 and 1923, the year Scholem emigrated to Palestine, they maintained an almost daily relationship. Later, until Benjamin's death in 1940, they exchanged copious and rich correspondence. Scholem, the most significant researcher of Jewish mysticism, devoted much effort, as editor and commentator, but above all as historian, to the interpretation of Benjamin's thought, whom he places in the vicinity of Kafka and Freud, also "Jewish-German" writers, according to Scholem, and "men of a foreign land."
The three texts that make up this volume not only offer a portrait of the man and the thinker Walter Benjamin ("the pure case of the metaphysician"), but also constitute a critical and attentive tour of his work. Beyond this, they penetrate the coded heart of the Benjaminian world, a crossroads of personal experience and messianism, of dialectic and mysticism, of daily experience and history. This is evident in Scholem's reading of the two versions of "Agesilaus Santander", an autobiographical sketch written by Benjamin in Ibiza in August 1933, where he deals with his fight with the angel and his secret names.