A Goy Who Studies Torah. Two Unpublished Sources by Ernst Simon and Gershom Scholem on the Spiritual Legacy of Franz Rosenzweig

Naharaim ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
Enrico Lucca ◽  
Ynon Wygoda
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Spiritual Legacy

Abstract In the early 1930s, Franz Rosenzweig’s work was celebrated, criticized and questioned for its relevance within the specific cultural, religious and philosophical preoccupations of the inhabitants of pre-state Israel. This could be seen in nuce at the opening of the Schocken Library in Jerusalem in December 1936 that was marked by a celebratory conference dedicated to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig. The evening featured a collection of four lectures held in Hebrew by eminent German-Jewish scholars: Ernst Simon, Julius Guttmann, Hugo Bergmann and Gershom Scholem. Simon and Scholem’s lectures in particular put forward two strikingly different views on Rosenzweig’s possible Nachleben in the yishuv. The article is followed by Scholem’s hitherto unpublished lecture (both in the original Hebrew and in English translation) and Simon’s German summary of his own contribution that evening.

Franz Rosenzweig, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, and the German-Jewish Family*

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Hill Shevitz ◽  
Susanne Hillman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point ◽  
German Jewish

Abstract The Jewish family was foundational to philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of Jewish life. This article examines his view of the Jewish family in the light of two memoirs, only recently translated into English, written by his mother, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, with whom he had a very close yet contentious relationship. The memoirs illustrate the historical contexts of both Adele’s and Franz’s generations, as well as the personal, familial contexts in which Franz was raised, and are thus a good starting point from which to examine the significance of the Jewish family in his experience and thought.

The Mathematical Imagination

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Handelman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World ◽  
Critical Project

The Mathematical Imagination is an archaeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of the Second World War. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative and argues that it has obscured how mathematics provided three lesser-known German-Jewish thinkers—Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer—with metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Their theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique borrowed ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. This vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing in the intellectual history of critical theory—from the work of second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas to contemporary critiques of technology. Building on the work of Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss, The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us confront and intervene in our digital, and increasingly mathematical, present.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

Der Kanon im Archiv

Naharaim ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Jessen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Joint Project ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
New Research ◽  
Public Archives

AbstractSignificant materials produced by German-Jewish writers, artists and scholars have been preserved in public archives as well as in private family collections in Israel. Many of these materials were salvaged from Nazi Germany and brought to Israel with considerable difficulty during the years 1933-1945, or in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah. The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Bonn University and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach have begun a joint project to make these archival collections more accessible in Israel and to initiate new research based on them. Against this background, the article explores the role of archival processing in the construction of historical knowledge and the formation of cultural memory.

The Problem of Mathematics in Critical Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Matthew Handelman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Critical Project

This introduction lays out the eclipse of mathematics in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s self-fashioning of critical theory and proposes an alternative paradigm for mathematics in critical thought, which this study calls negative mathematics. Radicalizing Edmund Husserl’s linkage of the mathematization of nature and the worsening political situation in Europe in the 1930s, the foundational phase of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical project defined itself against mathematics as the reification and instrumentalization of reason. In the work of Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, however, negative mathematics—mathematical approaches to lack, absence, and discontinuity—revealed ways of expressing Jewish experiences and perspectives otherwise erased by secularization and modernization. This development of negative mathematics is situated in a history of German-Jewish intellectual appeals to mathematics since Moses Mendelssohn. In the hands of Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer, it crystalized into theory that drew on mathematics to reconfigure the limits of representing minoritarian groups and ideas.

Mixed Feelings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Garloff
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Arthur Schnitzler ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Racial Discourses

Since the late eighteenth century, writers and thinkers have used the idea of love—often unrequited or impossible love—to comment on the changing cultural, social, and political position of Jews in the German-speaking countries. This book asks what it means for literature (and philosophy) to use love between individuals as a metaphor for group relations. This question is of renewed interest today, when theorists of multiculturalism turn toward love in their search for new models of particularity and universality. The book is structured around two transformative moments in German Jewish culture and history that produced particularly rich clusters of interfaith love stories. Around 1800, literature promoted the rise of the Romantic love ideal and the shift from prearranged to love-based marriages. In the German-speaking countries, this change in the theory and practice of love coincided with the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and both its supporters and opponents linked their arguments to tropes of love. The book explores the generative powers of such tropes in Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Achim von Arnim. Around 1900, the rise of racial antisemitism had called into question the promises of emancipation and led to a crisis of German Jewish identity. At the same time, Jewish-Christian intermarriage prompted public debates that were tied up with racial discourses and concerns about procreation, heredity, and the mutability and immutability of the Jewish body. The text shows how modern German Jewish writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Franz Rosenzweig wrestle with this idea of love away from biologist thought and reinstate it as a model of sociopolitical relations. It concludes by tracing the relevance of this model in post-Holocaust works by Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Honigmann.

The Satyr as Prophet: Notes on the “Jewish” Michelangelo

Images ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Asher Biemann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals ◽  
Hermann Cohen

AbstractFocusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essay argues that there existed a Jewish fascination with the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti that was representative not only of a larger German and Jewish Italophilia at the time but also indicative of Jewish aesthetic concerns. Lodged between popular culture and the intellectual quest for an aesthetics that would problematize the figurative image and the classical sense of the beautiful, the Jewish reception of Michelangelo was guided by the themes of terribilita, unfinishedness, and the destruction of form. What emerges is a consistent dialectic of image and anti-image particularly in the writings of Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch. But what also emerges is that German Jewish intellectuals entertained a great, though often ambivalent, admiration for the Italian Renaissance and the culture of modern Italy.

“Into Life”??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death

AJS Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Braiterman
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Grim Reaper ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Healthy Man ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Striking Contrast ◽  
As If

At the end of his short treatise Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, Franz Rosenzweig predicated the restoration of what he called healthy consciousness upon the recognition of death7apos;s sovereignty. “[One] must direct [one's] life to no other goal but death,” he wrote. “A healthy man has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear.” Rosenzweig juxtaposed the Grim Reaper with weary life. The healthy understanding knows that death will dash life to the ground. Yet it takes comfort from knowing that death will accept it with open arms. In the end, eloquent life falls silent as the eternally taciturn one speaks, “Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother.”In his notes to the English translation, Nahum Glatzer remarks with shock, “This concluding chapter–on death–stands in a striking contrast to the final passage of The Star of Redemption.” As if to offset our text's more mordant tone, Glatzer then quotes verbatim the seemingly life-affirming paragraphs that conclude Rosenzweig's magnum opus. Glatzer is not the only commentator to emphasize the importance of life in Rosenzweig's system. Indeed, Else-Rahel Freund notes that The Star of Redemption begins with the phrase “from death” and concludes with the words “into life.”

Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue

Naharaim ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina Barouch
Keyword(s):  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis paper discusses a series of commentaries and lyrical texts by Martin Buber and Ludwig Strauss, which dwell on Hölderlin’s poetry and the dialogical ideas implicit therein (e.g. the dialogical vocation of the poet). The paper distinguishes between the dialogical ideal and its concretization in language, as the selected texts all strive to develop a dialogical poetics, yet at the same time engage with textual junctures where the dialogical mode collapses. This collapse is also registered in the historical sphere: Buber’s engagement with Heidegger’s paradigmatic Hölderlin studies calls for a comparison with Strauss’s reception of Hölderlin, and therefore points to an absent dialogue between these two contemporary scholars. This historical lacuna, which Buber may have wished to bridge, thus resonates with ideas on the limits of dialogue in the poetic sphere. The paper draws on further Hölderlin scholars, such as Peter Szondi and Winfried Menninghaus, and their discussion of the lyrical results of failed dialogue, and on the ideas of Franz Rosenzweig and Rabbi Nahman, in the mapping of the dialogical ideas of both Buber and Strauss. Strauss himself thus emerges as a scholar and poet who draws both on Hölderlinian motifs and notions and on dialogical ideas in contemporaneous German-Jewish thought.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document