8. Franz Rosenzweig and the end of German-Jewish philosophy

1993 ◽  
pp. 257-305
Keyword(s):  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
German Jewish

Living Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Faith And Reason ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Hermann Cohen

This book discusses the political theology developed by German Jewish philosophy in the 20th century on the basis of its original reconstruction of the teachings of Jewish prophetology. In the shadow of the modern experiences with anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism, and the return of charismatic authority in mass societies, the discourse of Jewish political theology advances the radical hypothesis that the messianic idea of God’s Kingdom correlates with a post-sovereignty, anarchist political condition of radical non-domination. However, this messianic form of democracy, far from being antinomian, was combined with the ideal of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, itself based on the identity of divine law and natural law. This book examines the paradoxical unity of anarchy and rule of law in the democratic political theology developed by Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Critical of the Christian theological underpinnings of modern “representative” political institutions, this group of highly original thinkers took up the banner of Philo’s project to unify Greek philosophy with Judaism, so influential for medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and rejected the separation between faith and reason, biblical revelation and pagan philosophy. The Jewish political theology they developed stands for the idea that human redemption is inseparable from the redemption of nature.

Eliah Benamozegh, Franz Rosenzweig and Their Blueprint of a Jewish Theology of Christianity

2018 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-263
Author(s):  
Meir Seidler
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn Jewish philosophy, be it medieval or modern, a comprehensive Jewish theological discourse about Christianity is conspicuously absent. There are, however, two prominent exceptions to this rule in modern Jewish philosophy: The Italian Sephardic Orthodox Rabbi Eliah Benamozegh (1823–1900) and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). In both men's thought, Christianity plays a pivotal (and largely positive) role, so much so that their Jewish philosophies would not be the same without Christianity, which has no precedent in Jewish thought. Though Rosenzweig was not aware of his Sephardic predecessor, there are some striking parallels in the two thinker's Jewish theologies of Christianity that have far-reaching interreligious implications. These parallels concern as well the basic paradigm for a positive evaluation of Christianity—the paradigm of the fire (particularist Judaism) and its rays (universal Christianity)—as well as the central flaw both of them attribute to Christianity: a built-in disequilibrium that threatens the success of its legitimate mission. These parallels are all the more striking as two thinkers arrived at their conclusions independently and by different paths: the one (Benamozegh) took recourse to Kabbalah, the other (Rosenzweig) to proto-existentialist philosophy. A comparative study of these two protagonists’ Jewish theologies of Christianity seems thus imperative.An “interreligious epilogue” at the end of the article exposes the contemporary need for a reassessment of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from a Jewish perspective—especially in light of the deep theological revision that characterizes the approach of the Catholic Church towards Jews and Judaism following “Nostra Aetate”—but at the same time delineates the theological limits of the current Christian-Jewish interreligious endeavor. In this light, the pioneering theology of Christianity in the works of Rosenzweig and Benamozegh might yield some relevant insights.

scholarly journals Jewish philosophy as a Direction of the World philosophy of Modern and Contemporary Times

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-442
Author(s):  
I Dvorkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Marginal Part ◽  
The World ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Philosophy

This article represents an analysis of the Jewish philosophy of the Modern and Contemporary as the holistic phenomenon. In contrast to antiquity and the Middle Ages, when philosophy was a rather marginal part of Jewish thought, in Modern Times Jewish philosophy is formed as a distinct part of the World philosophy. Despite the fact that representatives of Jewish philosophy wrote in different languages and actively participated in the different national schools of philosophy, their work has internal continuity and integrity. The article formulates the following five criteria for belonging to Jewish philosophy: belonging to philosophy itself; reliance on Jewish sources; the addressee of Jewish philosophy is an educated European; intellectual continuity (representatives of the Jewish philosophy of Modern and Contemporary Periods support each other, argue with each other and protect each other from possible attacks from other schools); working with a set of specific topics, such as monism, ethics and ontology, the significance of behavior and practical life, politics, the problem of man, intelligence, language and hermeneutics of the text, Athens and Jerusalem, dialogism. The article provides a list of the main authors who satisfy these criteria. The central ones can be considered Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, Moshe Mendelssohn, Shlomo Maimon, German Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Josef Dov Soloveichik, Leo Strauss, Abraham Yehoshua Heshel, Eliezer Berkovich, Emil Fackenheim, Mordechai Kaplan, Emmanuel Levinas. The main conclusion of the article is that by the end of the 20th century Jewish philosophy, continuing both the traditions of classical European philosophy and Judaism, has become an important integral part of Western thought.

Covenant, History, and the Holocaust: Revisiting Emil Fackenheim's Jewish Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-143
Author(s):  
Daniel Rynhold
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Introductory Courses ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Historical Circumstance ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Modern Judaism ◽  
Hermann Cohen

In the twentieth century, historical circumstance in the form of the Holocaust led to theodicy's returning to the forefront of the philosophical agenda, particularly in Jewish thought. As a result, post-Holocaust theology is almost always an element of introductory courses on modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy, if not introductory courses on modern Judaism simpliciter. Many working in the field of Jewish philosophy, therefore, probably first encounter Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), and the infamous turn of phrase that ensured his immortality in the realm of Jewish thought, early on in their studies. Fackenheim was one of the most influential post-Holocaust philosophical voices in what soon became a cacophony. This German-born philosopher's (and ordained Reform rabbi's) concept of the 614th commandment—not to grant Hitler a posthumous victory (in his own words “the only statement of mine that ever became famous”)—has captured the imagination of many a student and often made a lasting impression. Yet it seems that one of the concerns at the forefront of this new expansive monograph on Fackenheim's philosophy is that for the majority, this constitutes both their first and last exposure to his thought, leaving them with an extremely contracted view of his conceptual palate. The result, noted in the book's introduction, is that Fackenheim has never really been considered a Jewish philosopher worthy of mention in the same breath as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, or even latterly Emmanuel Levinas and Joseph Soloveitchik. In this volume, a case is presented for including him on that list.

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.

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