Theses on the Philosophy of History

[2] Theses is the last major work Benjamin completed before fleeing to Spain where, fearing Nazi capture, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940.

Presented as an automaton that could defeat skilled chess players, The Turk actually concealed a human (allegedly a dwarf) who controlled the machine.

(Thesis VI)Just like Scholem, who had seen in the "Angelus Novus" the "baroque concept of history" as unstoppable decay, so too Margaret Cohen sees the kabbalistic concept of the tikkun, i.e. the messianic "restoration and mending" of all things in their original integrity, which is clearly indicated in thesis IX with the phrase: "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" (German: "die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen").

"[1][8] Scholem[6] also suggested that the cryptic essay's seemingly definitive rejection of Marxist historical materialism in favor of a return to the theology and metaphysics of Benjamin's earlier writings came after Benjamin recovered from the deep shock he felt following the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, previously bitter rivals, announced a non-aggression pact.

They'd read Franz Molitor's Philosophy of History (which is a book about the Kabbalah) together in 1916, when Scholem was just embarking on his study of the Kabbalah,[12][13] a canon of mystical literature that he reintroduces and to some extent resurrects in his Major Trends shortly after Walter Benjamin's death--which is the book, once again, whose manuscripts Benjamin was reading as he wrote the Theses.

[14] The book Major Trends was dedicated to Walter Benjamin's memory, and started hitting shelves in the spring of 1942 even as the Aktion Reinhard camps commenced with the industrialized form of mass-execution by gassing characteristic of the Nazi Final Solution in the already ongoing genocide of the European Jewry carried out by the Third Reich during the war.

In 1947, a French translation ("Sur le concept d'histoire") by Pierre Missac appeared in the journal, Les Temps Modernes no.

[17] Hannah Arendt read a draft of the work to fellow refugees fleeing the Third Reich in Europe on the ship organized by the Emergency Rescue Committee that smuggled her and other Jewish emigrés to the United States.