from Jewish Social Studies Volume 8, Number 1

Rosenzweig Redux: The Reception of German-Jewish Thought

Peter Eli Gordon

---

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form. 

---

In Max Frisch's postwar novel, I'm Not Stiller, the title character may or may not be a man called "Stiller." He may be someone quite different. He may just happen to look sufficiently like Stiller so as to be confused for him. When he first appears on a train platform in Switzerland and is hauled off for questioning about his--that is, Stiller's--earlier disappearance, he protests to the Inspector that he is not Stiller and has no idea who this man Stiller is. The new man nonetheless finds himself the object of endless speculation. Though never stated outright, the queasy subtext of the plot is the suspicion that the real Stiller may have committed some wartime offense. The point is, it does not really matter if he is in fact the man in question. Once drawn into the mystery surrounding Stiller's disappearance, the imposter finds himself gradually assuming the habits and haunts of his doppelgänger, even adopting a quiet domesticity with the wife that Stiller (the real one) had earlier abandoned. The novel is implicitly philosophical: the continuity of personal identity, Frisch implies, is not up to us. The role others assign us socially may matter a great deal more in determining who we are than anything we may subjectively believe. Faced with the overwhelming force of context, the protests of the self have scant effect.

As with persons, so too with books. A writer may object that intention still counts for something. But long after the death of the author, the written works are set free into the afterlife of interpretation, gathering a multiplicity of meanings the author may never have intended. In this wider circuit, intention shrinks in relevance; the community will always have the last word. However, this is true only in the special sense that, in principle, there cannot be a last word: there will always be someone out there who has yet to read the book, who may still intrude upon the settled tribe of current readers to offer an exotic and unforeseen interpretation. This may be the case for any body of work. But it is especially true of something as bottomless in meaning as a philosophical text, and it is especially true of texts as unfathomable as those left to the world by Franz Rosenzweig.

The written corpus of the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) continues to arouse new critical interest. Yet in some respects the attraction is baffling. Of the astonishing number of Jewish intellectuals associated with the ferment of interwar Weimar culture (such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, Alfred Döblin, and Else Lasker-Schüler), Rosenzweig was, perhaps matched only by Bloch, the most difficult to understand. His work is the very embodiment of philosophical syncretism. Though loosely associated with existential theology, it touches upon themes spanning the entire tradition of Jewish and European thought, from Parmenides to Hegel, from Kant to the Kabbalah, from the Bible to Friedrich Schelling. But all of these constitute much less than what is customarily called "influence." Rosenzweig had a gift for harmonizing the potentially dissonant crowd of past philosophical and religious voices; he read them all, sometimes tendentiously, so as to confirm his own idiosyncratic vision. The result was an unmistakably personal but nonetheless immensely sophisticated kind of religious philosophy, a bold affirmation of Jewish existence in an eminently modern key.

In recent years, a new body of scholarship has emerged to upset settled belief about Rosenzweig's philosophical purposes. In this article, I want to explore some of the most impressive examples of this scholarship. My aim, however, is not merely review. Although I hope the survey of current literature will prove helpful, my deeper motive here is to explore why Rosenzweig has enjoyed such longevity.

This is indeed a riddle. Rosenzweig's magnum opus, The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung), is one of the more intractable texts in the entire canon of modern religious thought. First published in 1921, Rosenzweig proclaimed it his "system of philosophy."¹ But it is not at all obvious that it is a system, nor is it altogether clear that it is a work of philosophy in the customary sense. What is clear is that the book is an extraordinarily difficult one. It is also the only "big" book of original philosophy Rosenzweig ever wrote. (This leaves aside his doctoral dissertation, Hegel and the State, a massive study of the genesis of Hegel's political thought that Rosenzweig wrote while still a doctoral student under the scholar of German historicism, Friedrich Meinecke.) To be sure, Rosenzweig also authored many shorter and more accessible texts, on matters such as Jewish theology and the theory and practice of translation, as well as many critical reflections on the contemporary intellectual scene. Having completed the Star, he also went on to produce a volume of German translations on the medieval Hebrew poetry of Yehudah Halevi, accompanied by a very learned and philosophical commentary, and he undertook a translation (cooperatively with Martin Buber) of the Hebrew Bible, a project that Buber revised and completed alone after Rosenzweig's premature death--from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--in 1929.²

Despite this remarkable literary output, which is all the more remarkable given the author's near-total paralysis in the final years, The Star of Redemption remains the dark center of gravity in Rosenzweig's conceptual universe. Here and there, the first generation of intelligent critics offered up brave reflections upon its meaning. But the wider public greeted it with what can only be called respectful bafflement. Rosenzweig himself complained of a "social misapprehension," although he was himself partly to blame.³ The book's structure and style constitute what one critic calls a "private language." Understood by only a small circle of initiates, its arguments are "so cryptic that, unless one already knows the result, it is often virtually impossible to follow [the] line of reasoning."⁴ One could hardly have predicted its longevity. Walter Benjamin considered the Star one of the great works of German scholarship, but he listed it under the ambiguous rubric of "books that have remained alive." By the end of the 1920s, he could find it only in specialist's libraries--a condition he called "a special kind of forgetting."⁵

But the difficulty of Rosenzweig's work did not earn its banishment from the memory of modern Jewish--or modern European--thought. On the contrary: despite the Holocaust, despite the brutal loss of the German-Jewish public that Rosenzweig considered his true audience, his written work staged a dramatic comeback in the postwar period. The sheer number of recent North American scholarly publications on Rosenzweig's work is impressive--a partial list may be found in the notes.⁶ But Rosenzweig's stature in scholarship has served more than scholarly purposes, especially in the United States. In a 1966 symposium on "The Condition of Jewish Belief," Milton Himmelfarb went so far as to name Rosenzweig "the most influential" Jewish thinker of the day.⁷ In more recent years, the enthusiasm has burgeoned anew. In the introduction to a 1988 anthology of critical essays, Paul Mendes-Flohr called Rosenzweig "perhaps the most creative Jewish religious thinker of the twentieth century."⁸ Far surpassing the reception of the immediate postwar years, the scholarship of the past two decades abounds in unprecedented sophistication and comparison--to hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, etc. As the list of new publications continues to expand, an assessment of its aims is urgently needed. In this article, I will discuss only a representative sample of the new literature and only texts published in North America, because it is also worthwhile reflecting upon Rosenzweig's continued appeal to the American readership: Why should so difficult a thinker prove so enormously attractive? Is there a single core of truth that draws readers in? Or are readers drawn to him precisely because he so readily adapts himself to various needs? There is reason, I think, to suspect that this new and accommodating philosopher may not be who he seems.

The Hagiographic Impulse

In January 1930, the month following Rosenzweig's death, Gershom Scholem declared in a eulogy (at Jerusalem's recently founded Hebrew University) that "We who had the privilege of knowing Rosenzweig regarded him as one of the most sublime manifestations of the greatness and religious genius of our people."⁹ The genius Scholem extolled was not merely that of a philosopher. According to Scholem, the written work had been produced by a great personality: Rosenzweig had managed to capture his own "existence" and that of the Jewish people in the esoteric language of philosophy: "[T]he entire Jewish world," explained Scholem, "is as if folded into this book.... The system is not autonomous, does not stand on its own,... for at the end its gates open onto life, simple concrete life in which it must find its justification."¹⁰

Rosenzweig's idea of "life," which he developed in the wake of Wilhelm Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie, was soon to become the central category for reading his philosophy. Indeed, it seemed natural to speak of Rosenzweig's very own life as if it were the embodiment of his ideas. Understandably, Scholem felt moved to describe Rosenzweig's final years of paralysis:

[T]he living sound was taken from his speech, but... from the fire of his muteness we heard the sound of the words of the living God. Whoever once was in that room in Frankfurt and heard his questions answered and heard the eloquence of that mute saint, surely he knows what a miracle happened to us here.¹¹

These are the tones appropriate for a eulogy; it would be wrong to criticize Scholem unduly for speaking of the recently deceased Rosenzweig as if he had been a saint. But Scholem's example is also paradigmatic for the early style of Rosenzweig scholarship. Especially in the early phase of Rosenzweig criticism, attention to the philosopher as a person often threatened to displace any systematic exposition of his ideas. Indeed, even today the hagiographic impulse remains quite strong. This is partly due to the fact that the memory of Rosenzweig lying on his deathbed--like Heine on his "mattress grave"--prompts, for some, notions of Jewish martyrdom.¹² A more recent critic, seized by the very human desire to poetize personal tragedy, went so far as to claim that Rosenzweig's life "anticipated with a singular exemplarity the tragic destiny of the Jewish communities of Central Europe.... [T]he six last years of the life of Franz Rosenzweig were a lonely and long agony prefiguring individually that of all his people in an era of the most cruel and the most systematic of antisemitic persecutions in modern times."¹³

Leaving aside the blurry comparison between Rosenzweig's organic illness and the Holocaust, Rosenzweig was and remains an exemplary figure--a paradigmatic German-Jew whose suffering and piety only fortify our appreciation of his philosophical legacy. Understandably, much of the writing on Rosenzweig comes close to hagiography. But the great difficulty with mixing hagiography into scholarship is that this kind of worship erects a powerful taboo against serious thought. The prohibition grows all the more effective when one is honoring the deceased, and it is virtually overwhelming when speaking of the recently deceased--hence Scholem's risky, Christianizing reference to Rosenzweig as a saint. While Rosenzweig was still among the living, it was perhaps more easy to criticize. One could wrestle honestly with his ideas without being caught up in the game of obeisance. This might be why some of the earliest commentaries on Rosenzweig's work still seem the most helpful. Several of the best of these early reviews have now been published in a volume edited and translated by Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli, Franz Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking." The volume contains the 1925 title-work by Rosenzweig as well as his 1917 letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg (dubbed the "Germ-cell" of The Star of Redemption because it contains the first short nugget of the larger book's Schelling-inspired argument). The editors have also provided a very accessible introduction that sets the philosophy in its historical and philosophical context.

Most intriguing, perhaps, are two early reviews by Margarete Susman. Among Rosenzweig's contemporaries, Susman was one of his most penetrating critics. In her 1921 review, originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung (and reprinted in the Udoff and Galli volume), Susman described the Star as "a great world symphony." Perhaps because Susman was of a poetic disposition and sensitive to the feverish literary climate of the early 1920s, she intuitively understood that the Star was no ordinary work of philosophy. It was also a work of poetry, and Susman mentioned Stefan George as an unlikely model. (The comparison is worth consideration, as it may be more than coincidental that Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption was published eight years after George's poem-cycle, The Star of the Covenant.)¹⁴ Despite the intervening cataclysm of World War I, Rosenzweig and George shared much. George was a poet-as-visionary, Rosenzweig a philosopher bent toward salvific truth; George forged a circle of neo-classical revival, Rosenzweig helped to spawn an equally imaginative Jewish renaissance. Indeed, the most prominent members of the George Kreis were Jewish--Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Kantorowicz, Karl Wolfskehl, and Susman herself. The latter two were also great admirers of Rosenzweig and were personally acquainted with him.¹⁵ But what may bind them most together is a certain declamatory style. Rosenzweig had little use for philosophy of the constricted, academic sort. He was partly a poet, and he drew inspiration from the famous idea in the "Earliest Systemprogramme of German Idealism" (which Rosenzweig discovered and attributed, controversially, to Schelling) that "the highest act of reason... is an aesthetic act,... and truth and goodness... siblings only in beauty--[therefore] the philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet."¹⁶ The risk here was considerable, because philosophy demands explicit argument where poetry (and "goodness," perhaps) does not. The result was a book that was partly literary in its appeal, and to appreciate its theological treasures it was necessary to approach the book with a great deal of sympathy granted in advance. There were many among Rosenzweig's contemporaries for whom this was impossible. Take, for instance, Siegfried Kracauer's comments in a letter to Leo Lowenthal (dated August 31, 1923): "I have finished Rosenzweig's redemption star--I despise this kind of philosophy, which makes of the hymn a system and indulges the most extravagant constructions... [and] twaddles on about creation, revelation, and redemption in such excited tones it would move a dog to pity."¹⁷

Against Kracauer, of course, one should note that to be moved by Rosenzweig's magnum opus required far more than susceptibility to his "excited tones." It also required a tremendous mastery of German literature and philosophy--no small feat for a dog. But the fact remains that stolid rationalists or Marxists (except for Walter Benjamin) were unlikely to find anything they could value in Rosenzweig's work. And even if there were something, they were apt to miss it, because The Star of Redemption simply states its points and does not argue them, as if it were sufficient to follow the divine pattern by "revealing" ideas and leaving clarification and commentary for future exegetes. Is the Star, then, a piece of new religious revelation? Perhaps. But Susman also noted that the Star was not a religious text in the customary sense. It had absorbed German idealism along with the entire span of modern European thought; it dared to acknowledge even Nietzsche, yet it also surpassed him, progressing (in Susman's words) "beyond the zenith of atheism."¹⁸

Susman's advantage as a commentator was her effortless sense of the Star's context. Perhaps the most lucid of all the early commentaries was her second piece, published in a 1923 issue of Martin Buber's journal, Der Jude. Most of all, Susman recognized that the Star was not a work sui generis; it had appeared "at a great turning point" in thought. This was the time of what she called idealism's final "degeneration." The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed what she took to be an irrevocable decay of "the philosophy of pure thought" as it had "dominated the Western world from Parmenides to Hegel." As Rosenzweig himself had written provocatively (and somewhat hyperbolically) at several points in the Star, the philosophical tradition was, despite all its seeming variety, little more than a compulsive repetition of "idealism." Traceable to its Greek beginnings, this idealist tradition had bewitched all philosophers with the false identification of Being and Thought. Thus one might say that Rosenzweig's predominant purpose in the Star was to shatter this unity, to disclose the factical elements of God, Man, and World prior to their idealist totalization. Once disassembled, according to Rosenzweig, it would be possible to once again interweave these three elements, but now within the plane of temporality, so as to create from their threefold interrelation the resultant coordinates of lived experience (creation, revelation, and redemption). And, finally, it would be possible to present this newfound unity of lived experience within its only two feasible modes of communal life--as progressive history (in Christianity) or as eternal repetition (in Judaism). Both modes of community existence, however, could only anticipate the real event of redemption. As Susman notes, "no human structure, however ripe, is itself the truth. God alone is truth."¹⁹

Susman's summary was a good one. But what did all this mean, philosophically speaking? It would be difficult to say, partly because Susman was clearly so enamored of Rosenzweig's new thinking that she could not really step back to honestly confront the question of how--or whether--it all added up conceptually. But this was not her failing. One of the chief blocks to reading Rosenzweig's Star is that its blustery tone discourages the kind of workaday skepticism that is required for any real understanding of a philosophical text. Scholars of Rosenzweig's work who struggle bravely to make sense of it often end up mimicking his cadences without being at all clear on what they mean. Of course, Rosenzweig criticism is not uniquely guilty. Exposition that lapses into mere repetition is commonplace in a great deal of writing about difficult philosophers, and it is especially common when writing about those philosophers whose very obscurity somehow factors in to their appeal. An obvious comparison is Martin Heidegger, whose work is indispensable if properly understood but sheer nonsense when muttered by his most admiring disciples. Nor is the problem restricted to Continental philosophy: Stanley Cavell once expressed dismay that, in a scholarly work on Wittgenstein, "the famous and exciting and obscure tags of the Investigations" were "not only quoted without explanation" but were in fact "quoted as though they were explanations."²⁰

The greatest obstacle to understanding Rosenzweig's work may be due to a misperception, traceable to its earliest readership, that the Star's assault on idealism should considered an assault on philosophy as such. In fact, Rosenzweig had a narrower target in view. Like many of the rebellious thinkers taking off from Weimar Existenz philosophy, Rosenzweig was an opponent of cognitivism, the theory that sees our primary relationship to the world as mental rather than care-laden and lived. The "shattering" of idealism at the beginning of the Star was meant to alert the reader to the fact that mental being cannot serve as a foundation of the world as we experience it. Between thought and the actual world, Rosenzweig argued, there is a "nothing," or "das Nichts" (here, too, Rosenzweig anticipated Heidegger). This is a gap that cognitivism, or idealism, wishes to ignore, because it mistakenly believes its image of the world is at one with the world as such, like a painting applied alfresco. According to Rosenzweig, limited and mortal beings seek consolation in this identification of Being and Thought. Because our concepts are universals, grasping the world in cognition seems to tuck the nothingness safely out of sight.

Idealism thus offers the false promise of transcendence--it appears to enable a flight from time and out from our own utterly nonconceptual particularity. But, according to Rosenzweig, idealism cannot pay on this promise. In the imminence of possible death, we sense that our particularity is prior to any cognitive relationships we might establish to the world. We recognize the being-prior-to-thought that idealism wishes to ignore. Sensing the gap between being and thought thus forces philosophy to begin with the finitude prior to any conceptual unity, and this finitude is first and foremost the "metaethical" human being prior to any universalizable bonds with God and the world. Idealism is destroyed, but philosophy is not. The "new thinking," however, must proceed from the ruins of the idealist tradition, and it must take care to acknowledge--as idealism could not--the finitude and temporality that lie at the heart of human experience. This is the argument of the famous, introductory sections of the Star. Unnoticed by critics, Rosenzweig played out this argument by drafting its sentences in a grotesque parody upon one of Friedrich von Schiller's most "philosophical" poems--"Das Ideal und das Leben."²¹ The Star's entire opening paragraph thus amounts to a vigorous assault upon the values and ideas of German classicism in its own language. It is a destruction of idealism from within.

Given the rhetorical overkill of this beginning, there is an understandable temptation to read Rosenzweig's anti-idealism as a manifesto against philosophy tout court. Once the reader surrenders to this temptation, however, any rigorously conceptual treatment of Rosenzweig's work will begin to feel improper--like defaming the deceased at his own wake. This difficulty is further exacerbated by Rosenzweig's theory of truth as it is presented in the closing portion of the Star. For Rosenzweig, truth within human experience is perspectival, understood from within communal horizons. Truth in itself, however, is something beyond these horizons and must be anticipated--it is future-ratified. Without "God," without the experience of the radiant Countenance, Rosenzweig's entire portrait of Jewish and Christian existence thus appears to stand under a question mark. Now this very idea can be quite easily applied to the Star as a whole. The reader who feels perplexed by Rosenzweig's language and fertile but often oblique allusions to aesthetics, biblical poetry, and religious history may feel that it is simply inappropriate to take issue with the text. Its "truth," after all, cannot be sustained independent of a still-missing experience. Susman confessed this very difficulty in her 1923 review:

It would be impossible and meaningless here to practice a "criticism" that does not spring from the inherent presumptions of this book.... As Rosenzweig says at one point, the concept of creation... cannot be taken as a scholarly or scientific hypothesis to be accepted or rejected according to proofs and counterproofs. Likewise, the entire rich, torrential, wide-branching book can only be accepted, beyond any demonstration, as a disclosure, illumination, and beholding of ultimate, eternal connections of Being.²²

Susman seems to have meant what Rosenzweig called his "messianic theory of knowledge"--that is, the account of "truth" as verified in the future-redemption of the world. What Rosenzweig called the "new totality" was to be, in Hegelian fashion, an end to history as we understand it. But for Rosenzweig it meant a final unity sublating the division between Jew and Christian within a truth finally manifest to all of humankind. It would be manifest as the immediate intuition, a great "countenance," which Rosenzweig portrayed in Judaism's classical account of the rabbinic sages who gaze upon God's luminous visage. This idea, so forcefully presented in the Star as "die neue Allheit" makes obvious Rosenzweig's debt to Hegel's idea of philosophy as an essentially retrospective project. To philosophize prior to the closure of history is--for both Rosenzweig and Hegel--to declaim in only an anticipatory way. Without redemption, philosophy and faith join hands cooperatively to spawn a sophisticated, worldly kind of hope. But it is a longing only. In the end of the Star, Rosenzweig exhorts the reader to forgo the myths of idealism as well as the consolations of other-worldliness. The new philosopher, like all people everywhere, must seek satisfaction in present life.

There are at least two distinctive ways to read this argument. Rosenzweig's argument may encourage the reader to think of religious experience as something for which the truth is not yet wholly demonstrable. The validity of religion is something uncertain, to be known only in a proleptic way, in an anticipation of God's arrival. But the future-verification argument may also be construed as warning off any criticism of religious philosophy whatsoever. (To indicate this warning, I have added emphasis to the key lines of Susman's review, above.) According to this interpretation, the very claims of the philosophical text are themselves records of a religious experience whose "truth" in principle cannot be judged. Now it seems clear that Rosenzweig abjured this second reading, because it goes too far in the direction of anti-intellectualism and mysticism. In fact, he responded aggressively against Hans Ehrenberg's 1921 characterization of the closing pages of the Star as a call to abandon philosophy in favor of life: "The 'Life' of the ending word is hardly the opposite of 'philosophy.'... In this life there can also be philosophizing; and why not? (I do it myself.)" The aim of the Star, Rosenzweig concluded, is "anti-mystical, but not anti-intellectual."²³

The author's protests to the contrary, there have been many readers who followed Ehrenberg in believing that the Star calls upon readers to simply abandon philosophy in favor of "life." Indeed, Susman herself seemed to suggest that criticism was an inappropriate response to the Star. It was a book, in her words, "beyond demonstration." It thus required us to surrender our critical faculties and to merely "behold" its content. Because many in Rosenzweig's circle of readers held the author in such high esteem, there was an understandable reluctance to expose what seemed a personal revelation to merely academic scrutiny. As Susman put it, the entire "rich, torrential" book was thus out of bounds for normal criticism; its contents were a species of revelation, and the most proper response was an awe-filled praise--like the "eternal bliss" of the sages who in Rosenzweig's portrait sit "with crowns on their heads, and behold the radiance of the manifest deity."²⁴

The assumption that reverence for personal belief forbids textual criticism is a recurrent obstacle in the scholarly study of religious thought. There is, of course, some warrant for this assumption. The core "experience" that often first prompts the written work cannot--and probably should not--be interrogated. Biographers now generally assume that Rosenzweig's great awakening to the vitality of Judaism can be traced to a 1913 Yom Kippur service in Berlin, and this epiphany became the core inspiration for the Star.²⁵ But it would be odd to judge that experience. In fact, the whole idea of judgment would seem out of place. We are naturally reluctant to judge the Star as a record of private experience. So most of us draw a provisional, if unnatural, distinction between what Rosenzweig wrote in his public and published philosophy (which we feel license to examine) and what he may have felt about it as an individual (about which we can make no meaningful judgment whatsoever). The difficulty--and this is something I have felt and I believe many scholars in the philosophy of religion have experienced in one way or another--is that our justifiable reluctance to judge the private experience also has a way of looming over our public efforts to discuss the written work. So what began as a feeling of justifiable restraint when faced with personal piety may in the end nourish an overly pious attitude in scholarship as well. Susman's early review came perilously close to this in declaring that any and all criticism of Rosenzweig's philosophy is inappropriate, because the philosophical text is merely a record of a "disclosure" deeper than reason.

Against my somewhat wooden distinction between private, individual belief and public scholarship, one could rightly object that it is a distinction Rosenzweig despised. A prominent theme in Rosenzweig's Star is that universalism is defunct, now supplanted by a Nietzschean celebration of individual perspective. According to Rosenzweig, in the case of Nietzsche, "The philosopher ceased to be a negligible quantity for his philosophy." Thus "man in the utter singularity of his ownmost essence... stepped out of the world which knew itself only as the thinkable world, out from the All of Philosophy."²⁶ One might easily mistake this for encouragement to write about philosophers' lives rather than their ideas, but this would indeed be a mistaken reading, because Rosenzweig was making a philosophical argument. Philosophy in its traditional form, he argued, was to give way to a new mode of thought--indeed, a new philosophy: this kind would begin by doing something quite close to what Heidegger called the "hermeneutics of facticity." That is, it would start by noting the basic experiential structure of the finite individual. According to Rosenzweig, the three coordinates of this experiential structure correspond to the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. But they are best conceived under categories borrowed from religion: creation is the always-already pastness of existence, the way we feel ourselves enveloped by and dependent upon the made world; revelation is the miraculous sense of immediacy, the distinctive now of love and divine commandment; and redemption is the purposiveness of our action, the future sense that human beings are bound up with the world in an ultimately meaningful fashion.

All of this is something Rosenzweig believed could be exposed through careful analysis, with the conceptual apparatus inherited from Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche. It is true that Rosenzweig thought this kind of analysis could only proceed from the inside. He believed that, because temporality is constitutive of human experience, there just is no objective Archimedes point except the unknowable one reserved for God. But to lay down such an "insider's" view of existence is obviously quite different from announcing a preference for mere biography. For many of the early commentators, however, Rosenzweig's stress on subjectivity permitted the slip from thought to thinker. Consequently, even today a great deal of the literature on Rosenzweig that purports to be philosophical has remained, in part, biographical.

To be sure, there were intelligent scholars in that first generation who skipped lightly past this danger to produce admirably critical scholarship on Rosenzweig's philosophical corpus. In 1933, the Felix-Meiner Verlag brought forth a powerfully philosophical analysis by Else-Rahel Freund, entitled Die Existenzphilosophie Franz Rosenzweigs.²⁷ Originally published as a Breslau dissertation, a noteworthy feature of Freund's study was her sustained attention to Rosenzweig's German intellectual heritage. Rather than presenting the Star as a confessional text, Freund concentrated instead upon its conceptual apparatus, specifically the way it drew upon the positive philosophy of Schelling. Throughout the book, Freund also offered illuminating comparisons to similar work by Rosenzweig's contemporaries, such as Herbert Marcuse, Richard Kroner, and--in the brief moment before this comparison was drowned in controversy--the not-yet-Nazified Heidegger. Whether or not such comparisons are found acceptable, Freund succeeded in showing that it was possible to treat Rosenzweig's work as meriting a truly philosophical exposition.²⁸ But Freund's book suffered an unhappy fate. The Nazis stifled its circulation and it only appeared in print, in a revised German edition, in 1959.

Rosenzweig's Return

In the immediate postwar era, Rosenzweig's philosophy might very well have been forgotten. The German-speaking Jewish audience steeped in the very same classical heritage of Schiller and Goethe that had inspired Rosenzweig's new thinking had been either murdered or scattered across the globe, and there seemed little chance that this special community of readers could ever be reassembled. But many of Rosenzweig's students had survived, and with them they carried his books to new readers in Palestine and North America. In 1953, Nahum Glatzer edited and wrote an introduction for what has remained perhaps the most influential text in English-speaking Rosenzweig scholarship, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought.²⁹ The hagiographic quality of the early literature was powerfully at work in Glatzer's text as well. As one of Rosenzweig's students, Glatzer perhaps wished to convey a sense of the writer as a living presence. The introductory remarks confess that "It is not expected that this volume shall induce the American reader to accept Rosenzweig's views. What may engage the reader," Glatzer continues, "is the genuineness of the search for faith, without loss of common sense and a sense of humor; the Western European's thrill at discovering the central issues of classical Judaism; and above all, the heroism of his life; there is drama in it, and greatness."³⁰

The above passage, in which I have italicized the crucial phrases, sets up what may well seem an uncontroversial plea: one might learn from Rosenzweig even while not agreeing with all he wrote. This suggestion is relatively innocent. But the drift of the lines is bolder than this. It is not only that one need not agree with the philosophy--the question of disagreement may not arise at all, because one need not "engage" with the philosophy. "Genuineness" and "heroism," after all, are qualities of the person, not of the ideas. The title itself, combining Life and Thought, collapsed the critical distinction between philosophical scrutiny and ad hominem comment. "Life"--a term of great conceptual density for Rosenzweig--became for Glatzer a sign in Rosenzweig's writing of just how important his biography must figure in any evaluation of his work. "Life," wrote Glatzer, "comes to mean to Rosenzweig Jewish life, in a very broad and profound sense." And, therefore, "That he enters Jewish life as a free, and thus as a modern, man, makes his biography a matter of significance for contemporary Jews."³¹

The scholarly community today must be grateful for Glatzer, because it is only through his efforts that Rosenzweig made his way to an English-speaking audience. Moreover, the hagiographic impulse so evident in Glatzer's introduction is excusable in any student. To be sure, personal reverence for Rosenzweig was justified. As Glatzer notes, Rosenzweig became, quite apart from his philosophical work, an inspiration for young Jewish men and women, many of them from quite assimilated German families, who were struggling toward a life of greater observance and authenticity. This was especially the case for those fortunate enough to belong to his inner circle in Kassel but also for the wider group that gathered to hear his lectures in the famous Frankfurt Lehrhaus. Rosenzweig was thus (in Glatzer's words) a "driving force of a Jewish renaissance" in the 1920s. Much like the charismatic rabbi Nehemiah Nobel, he was not merely a teacher of ideas but also a figure of exemplary piety. The potential danger in this doubled function, however, is that reverence at times inhibits understanding. While Glatzer's anthology proved indispensable in bringing Rosenzweig's philosophical message to a broader audience, it also subtly reshaped that message so as to blunt its less "inspirational" edges.

The most striking case is Glatzer's decision to excise certain passages from Rosenzweig's programmatic essay, "The New Thinking."³² First published in October 1925 in the Jewish-intellectual journal Der Morgen, "The New Thinking" provided Rosenzweig a much-needed opportunity to restate the chief themes and purposes of his philosophy in the wake of the somewhat unexpected reception (four years earlier) of his masterwork, The Star of Redemption.³³ The essay's opening paragraph strikes an almost sardonic tone. Rosenzweig admits neglecting to provide the Star with an explanatory preface. But this, he explains, was because he considered a preface like a chicken's arrogant "cackling" after laying an egg. His decision to write the new essay was not to make up for the lack of a preface. It was, however, intended to remedy a basic confusion:

If I disregard the small circle of those who could have written the book just as well or better than I, then the book really owes the acceptance that it has found till now altogether to such a "social misapprehension": it has been bought and--worse--read as a "Jewish book."

These are provocative lines, but perhaps unclear. What does it mean for Rosenzweig to object that his magnum opus was misperceived as a "Jewish book"? As he explains, "It passes unread and, worse yet, when read, is taken to be the book about the part of the Jewish youth that in various ways endeavors to find its way back to the old law." But then he qualifies this thought: "As far as I'm concerned, that's perfectly alright. What the Pharisees of the Talmud and the Holy Men of the Church have known: namely, that the understanding of man reaches only as far as his deeds, clearly applies to the honor of mankind to being understood as well." This qualification, however, is half-ironic; it suggests that readers were paying undue attention to the author and "his deeds" while neglecting the text at hand. Indeed, given Glatzer's praise above, referring to Rosenzweig as a "driving force" in the Weimar-era Jewish renaissance, this entire passage seems oddly out of tune. Rosenzweig's elaborate remarks upon this "prejudice" are worth quoting in full:

But, as far as the book is concerned, out of that prejudice arise several--unnecessary--difficulties for the readers, and for the buyers --very necessary--disillusionment. The following pages are an attempt to ease somewhat those difficulties for the readers and, likewise, to assuage somewhat the disillusionment of the buyers who believed they were purchasing a nice Jewish book and afterwards, like one of the earliest critics, had to discover that it is not at all "made for the daily use of every member of every family." I cannot describe The Star of Redemption more correctly than that critic has done with concise brevity: it is really not intended for the everyday use of every member of the family.

Rosenzweig's tone here is remarkable. The piety and "genuineness" Glatzer praised in his introduction are noticeably absent. Indeed, there is a suppressed hostility in the reference to a "nice Jewish book" that may prompt the reader to wonder if Rosenzweig the person and Rosenzweig the writer are one and the same. The concluding lines sound almost superior: "It is not a 'Jewish book' at all," Rosenzweig writes, "at least not what those buyers who were so angry with me take for a Jewish book." Admittedly, "[i]t does deal with Judaism" but "no more exhaustively than with Christianity and barely more exhaustively than Islam." Nor is it a philosophy of religion. ("How could it," he explains, "when the word 'religion' does not occur in it at all!") In sum, it is none of the things that readers believed it to be. It is, Rosenzweig insists, "merely a system of philosophy."

The denial that the Star was a "Jewish book" must naturally be taken with a grain of salt. Rosenzweig's hostility was directed against a particularly insubstantial kind of Jewish belles lettres, not writing about Judaism as such. His chief concern was that Jewish life in Germany had adapted itself all too well, with the consequence that Judaism itself had become little more than a bourgeois inheritance. (Franz Kafka had complained of much the same thing in Letter to His Father, in which he referred to the scraps of tradition that had been meaninglessly passed down the generations.) Rosenzweig went so far as to reject the term "religion" for describing the Star's philosophical subject, because religion was the desiccated institution of his childhood and of the infrequent synagogal visits that had felt drained of all revelatory experience to him.³⁴ In brief, the opening portion of "The New Thinking" is Rosenzweig's contribution to the broader, Weimar-era complaint against idealist complacency and high-minded liberalism. It is therefore crucial for understanding both Rosenzweig's philosophical antipathy toward idealism as well as his search for something more primal, more vital--in Judaism.³⁵

In Glatzer's anthology, however, the entire introductory portion of "The New Thinking" that I have quoted above--cackling chickens and all--is simply missing. There is nothing nefarious in this. Glatzer surely did not consider the omission harmful to our understanding of Rosenzweig's philosophy. Moreover, Glatzer was generally scrupulous in citation. All of the anthology consists of excerpts, and almost every omission is marked by ellipses. But the excerpt from "The New Thinking" begins with no indication that the opening portion of the essay has been dropped. The omission was a serious error. It meant more than missing Rosenzweig's attitude problem; it actually meant missing the explicitly modernist opportunism in his philosophical approach to Judaism, because his irony went deep into his reflections concerning what it must mean to re-enter one's faith from the knowing, outsider's position. Susman was indeed correct to say that Rosenzweig had traveled "beyond" the zenith of Nietzschean atheism, but the passage through Nietzsche had irrevocably altered what religion could mean.³⁶ Glatzer's anthology dulled this ironist edge. He also omitted a later reprisal of the same themes (this one, however, he marked by ellipsis): here Rosenzweig explained that the Star was in fact a Jewish book but only in the sense that "I received the new thinking in these old words, thus I have rendered it and passed it on." But "to a Christian, instead of me, the words of the New Testament would have come to his lips; to a pagan... although not words of his holy books... perhaps entirely his own words. But, to me, these words." Given such a definition, he confirms,

[T]his is a Jewish book: not one which deals with "Jewish matters,"... but one for whom the old Jewish words come in order to say what it has to say, and precisely for the new things it has to say.... Jewish matters are, as matters generally are, always already past; but Jewish words, even if old, take part in the eternal youth of the word, and the world is opened to them, and they will renew the world.³⁷

Whatever one makes of this explanation, it is surely symptomatic of Rosenzweig's troubled bond to middle-class Jewishness. Although there is a note of piety, indeed "genuineness" in Rosenzweig's philosophy, it is undercut by hostility toward everything that goes under the name of "religion." The relativized affirmation of "Jewish words" (in the second passage Glatzer excised) suggests that Rosenzweig wished to expound a philosophy with categories borrowed from the Jewish tradition while remaining fully conscious that other categories from other traditions might have been preferable for a philosopher schooled in a different faith. Paganism too, Rosenzweig implies, might have provided the necessary lexicon. Rosenzweig's philosophy, therefore, does not allow for full-blown religious traditionalism; it had, at least partially, absorbed a critically modernist awareness of relativism in faith. The God Rosenzweig affirmed in his philosophy was post-Nietzschean, an existent being compatible with the collapse of metaphysics. Whatever else it was, Rosenzweig's philosophy was hardly an affirmation of Jewish piety in the traditional sense.³⁸

The Postwar Politics of German and Jewish Identity

Glatzer's anthology was chiefly responsible for Rosenzweig's new fame in the postwar English-speaking world.³⁹ But in keeping with Glatzer's presentation, Rosenzweig was celebrated as much for his exemplary personality as his actual ideas. In a 1954 review, published in Jewish Social Studies (in its older incarnation), Jacob Agus praised Glatzer for sketching "the fascinating spiritual odyssey of German Jewry's meteoric genius of faith."⁴⁰ Perhaps one reason for this new appeal had to do with the assimilationist worries endemic to North America. Because Rosenzweig was born into a well-to-do and highly acculturated family, his biography exerted a magical attraction upon his new American-Jewish audience. The philosopher's famous decision not to convert to Christianity became for many second- and third-generation Jews an almost paradigmatic leap. Many could agree with the sentiment that "[t]he sage of a sensitive soul, snatched from the brink of apostasy and led to the innermost depths of Jewish piety[,] is one of the great hero stories of modern Judaism." Indeed, for the new postwar readership, there was an implicit connection between the Holocaust and assimilation, a link Emil Fackenheim made explicit in his famous "addition" to the list of mitsvot, or Jewish ritual laws. Of course, to "deny Hitler a posthumous victory" was a highly polemical injunction; it threatened to collapse the distinction between acculturation and genocide. But in the minds of many American Jews, the appeal to follow Rosenzweig's example found great resonance. In the wake of the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community were especially anxious that genuineness be restored and assimilation reversed. To this meaning-hungry readership, Rosenzweig seemed "one of the most interesting personalities of our time."⁴¹

Given this widely felt concern to preserve a sense of the Jews' distinctiveness, it is perhaps unsurprising that for many scholars the category apparently most prominent in Rosenzweig's philosophy was the notion of Jewish election. This was indeed one of the most forcefully argued ideas in the Star. In the first chapter of the book's third volume, Rosenzweig offers a philosophical portrait of how the Jews are a self-sustaining and utterly unique people, detached from land, politics, and history. To subsist in this fashion, Rosenzweig argues, the Jews are distinguished by a unique temporality, a rhythm of life ontologically apart from the rhythm of the world. This temporality allows them to pull back from any attachment to their surroundings--a condition Rosenzweig calls "constriction" (Verengung).⁴² The Jewish community alone forswears an existence on special land or within a special state; it anchors its being solely in itself--hence " "rootedness in one's own self" (Verwurzelung im eigenen selbst).⁴³ Thanks to this special isolation, the Jews alone enjoy redemption as a present experience, whereas the remainder of the world progresses through history in the hope of its future salvation. The uniqueness of the Jews--their separation or exile--is thus far more than a mere cultural or national fact. It has to do with a fundamental way of being. Exile is, for Rosenzweig, an ontological condition.

For a great number of postwar American Jewish intellectuals, Rosenzweig's portrait of the Jewish condition was deeply satisfying. On the one hand, it seemed to frame Jewish uniqueness in terms that were, at least in principle, separable from the observance of Jewish law.⁴⁴ (It should be noted that, as the years passed, Rosenzweig himself adopted Jewish ritual-legal observance in increasing measure and came to believe that "law" was commandment, not a clutter of cultural inheritances from which one could pick those most personally meaningful. But the Star was written before Rosenzweig cast himself fully into a Jewish ritualistic, or halakhic, life, and it is remarkably vague on the question of ritual observance.) But, on the other hand, though Rosenzweig seemed to avoid strict orthodoxy, his portrait of Jewish "being" was also free of political complication. Given the new challenges posed by a Jewish state after 1948, Rosenzweig's nonstatist notion of Jewish election helped to bolster the assertion of American-Jewish uniqueness without tying this idea to worrisome claims of political allegiance. The American-Jewish community could affirm its distinctiveness in terms that were still accommodating to the American political consensus. Rosenzweig's philosophy thus became an existentialist credo--a warrant for private self-affirmation in a pluralistic public sphere.⁴⁵

Will Herberg is an exemplary case. He found in Rosenzweig's thought the resources to forge a "Judaism of Personal Existence." Specifically, Rosenzweig had charted what Herberg called a "third way" between orthodoxy and modernism.⁴⁶ His "existential thinking" was "not legalistic argumentation or arbitrary speculation, as it has only too often been in Orthodox circles; nor is it sentimentalizing on the beauties of 'ethical monotheism' with the modernists." This third way allowed American Jews to conceive of "being" Jewish itself as sufficient grounds for self-affirmation. (In a letter to Rudolf Hallo, Rosenzweig had called this "Jewish-being," or "das Judesein.")⁴⁷ As Herberg explained,

Everything in Rosenzweig's thinking about Jewish existence stems from and returns to the election of Israel.... For the Jews of today, Rosenzweig has a word of special relevance. For he shows us how we can affirm the authentic religion of Israel without falling into obscurantism, how we can lead a life true to Torah without falling into legalism and superstition, how we can dedicate ourselves to the vocation of Israel without falling into racial or nationalistic chauvinism. What Rosenzweig fought against with every fiber of his being was the routinization, the secularization, the sentimentalization of Judaism. On this ground he opposed fundamentalism; on this ground he opposed modernism; on this ground he opposed nationalistic Zionism. And he was able to develop a Judaism free from these distortions. This is his legacy to us of this generation and to the Jews of the generations to come.⁴⁸

Rosenzweig's relevance, in other words, had much to do with needs specific to American-Jewish culture. But the pressure to refashion Rosenzweig into someone more serviceable to his new audience involved a crucial transfiguration of his thought. After all, Rosenzweig's ideas had taken shape in the matrix of Central European culture; he loved Goethe as much as the Hebrew Bible, and he could not conceive of the separation between the two streams of his life.⁴⁹ (Indeed, he published a collection of his essays under the title Zweistromland--the land of two streams.) In a remarkable letter, Rosenzweig once related the story of an interview for a position at a Jewish school, when he was asked to take a stand on the vexed question of Jewish and German allegiance:

I retorted that I would refuse to answer this question. If life were at one stage to torment me and tear me into two pieces, then I would naturally know with which of the two halves the heart--which is, after all, asymmetrically positioned--would side. I would also know that I would not be able to survive the operation.⁵⁰

In postwar American scholarship, such a self-definition as both German and Jew met with astonishment and disapproval--astonishment because after the Holocaust it seemed loathsome to remember that Jews had once felt so comfortable in Germany, disapproval because their fierce loyalty as Germans implied complicity in the culture that destroyed them. More recently, perhaps because the sting of Germany's betrayal is no longer as distinct, scholars have begun to recognize that Rosenzweig's famous metaphor of an integral German-Jewish identity was far more characteristic of German Jewry as a whole than could be formerly admitted. To discuss this new perspective I shall depart briefly from my chronological format.

Paul Mendes-Flohr's German Jews: A Dual Identity is a remarkably graceful meditation upon the widespread (but in retrospect often excoriated) feeling among Jews before the war that they were fully "at home" in German culture. Mendes-Flohr wisely rejects the idea that this feeling was a indication of political naiveté. It should come as little surprise, then, that throughout the book Rosenzweig recurs as the chief paradigm for what the author calls "dual-identity." Rosenzweig's vision of life as a modern Jew, writes Mendes-Flohr, aimed to establish "a symmetry... between Jewish and other cultural identities." And such symmetry also implied implicit criticism of those who promoted "Jewish renewal" as if it meant thoroughgoing separatism, "by denying one's 'non-Jewish' identities and affiliations." For Rosenzweig, this separatist ideal was a myth. Rosenzweig's alternative meant recognizing that the modern Jew is, in Mendes-Flohr's phrase, "irrefragably bifurcated." It is therefore a constitutive and nontragic feature of the modern Jew that "two souls dwell in his breast."⁵¹

An even more radical suggestion, perhaps, has recently been formulated by Michael Brenner in his book The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. As Brenner observes, the apparently "authentic" cultural efflorescence of Judaism effected by the luminaries of Weimar German-Jewish life (including Rosenzweig) was most often a Judaism of their own invention. Though creative, its actual continuity with the Jewish past was questionable. "Jewish culture in Weimar Germany," explains Brenner, "...used distinct forms of Jewish traditions, marking them as authentic, and presented them according to the demands of contemporary taste and modern cultural forms of expression. What might have appeared as authenticity was in fact a modern innovation."⁵² This argument is even stronger than Mendes-Flohr's, because it acknowledges the confusion between the two "halves" of German-Jewish identity; sometimes what appeared to be most Jewish was itself, paradoxically, forged from German culture. Rosenzweig's philosophical accomplishments are a good case in point, because they mobilized concepts from Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, and others so as to advocate a powerful new vision of Jewishness.⁵³

Mendes-Flohr and Brenner belong to the latest wave of literature on German-Jewish culture. As noted above, the recognition that German-Jewish identity before the war affirmed itself simultaneously as both German and Jewish has come painfully and unevenly to scholarship. For earlier readers of Rosenzweig, especially those who felt most at ease in the American idiom, Rosenzweig's "German" qualities seemed almost unassimilable. One critic even confessed that Rosenzweig's philosophy was "virtually incomprehensible to one trained in Anglo-American thought." The only solution was to adapt the foreign to the familiar, much as an immigrant might be expected to shed old clothes for new ones. (As Agus observed in 1954, "Rosenzweig was a true prophet of the faith, though he sometimes spoke in accents strange.")⁵⁴ The chief message in the 1950s, therefore, was that Rosenzweig brought an eternal message--a call to timeless identity. By definition, such a message seemed contingently bound to its German intellectual context. In his anthology, Glatzer called this Rosenzweig's "metahistoric" view of religion.⁵⁵ Rosenzweig himself had argued that the Jewish people persist unchanged outside the vicissitudes of culture and history, so it was all the easier to conclude that his philosophy of Jewish election was a timeless idea uncontaminated by context--especially the context of Germany which many now wished to forget.

Some years later, it was Emil Fackenheim who most boldly defended this idea in his meditation To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought: "All Jewish thought is genuine only if it is intrinsically Jewish, i.e., if it lives by its own resources rather than the borrowings of an extraneous philosophy." In Fackenheim's view, the predicament of Rosenzweig's philosophy was that it affirmed a "genuine" Jewish identity only by sacrificing any real awareness of Jewish existence in history. For Fackenheim, the ahistorical summit of Jewish identity was achieved "at a price which even in Rosenzweig's age was too high and which, today, can no longer be paid."⁵⁶

Fackenheim is indisputably a profound commentator on the modern Jewish condition. But there are two features of this argument worth contesting. First, it relies upon a rather self-involved ideal of Jewishness that cannot intermix at all with the values of the world. As noted above, Rosenzweig's philosophy quite openly contradicts Fackenheim on this point, because it borrows hungrily from the "extraneous" resources of the ambient culture. Imaging himself split open upon the operating table, Rosenzweig admitted that a Jewish philosophy cannot live "by its own resources" as Fackenheim believed a genuine one should. The contrast here to Mendes-Flohr's view that German-Jewish identity was in fact dual and irrefragably so could not be more stark. On this point, Fackenheim's argument (despite its recent date) belongs to the older scholarly consensus that, if Rosenzweig is valuable at all, it is because he can be enlisted despite himself to affirm a Jewish authenticity untroubled by the rival claims of surrounding cultures. It would be facile to object that Fackenheim's idea of boot-strap cultural autonomy is nonsense because we live in an overcrowded and intermingled world. This objection misses the point. The longing for "genuine" identity just grows all the louder the more crowded and intermingled the world becomes. Fackenheim's own call for authenticity, then, is nostalgic--a symptom of its increasing impossibility.

Second, Fackenheim commits a category error when he implicitly claims that the Holocaust can be used to refute a set of ideas. (I take it that this is what is meant in the phrase that Rosenzweig's ahistorical model of Judaism came "at too high a price.") This is an unworkable claim, conceptually speaking: historical events are not transparent in their meanings, so they can neither make nor refute arguments. The claim is especially implausible when one's example is the Holocaust, the meaning of which is endlessly disputed. (Indeed, its "lesson," if one wishes to argue about lessons, may be the discouraging one that there is rather less meaning in history than we might hope.) Consequently, there is no single insight that the sheer fact of the Holocaust proffers in contradiction to any philosophy. It is especially confusing to suggest that the Holocaust contradicts Rosenzweig's philosophy of Judaism, because Rosenzweig believed it is precisely Judaism's privilege to lie beyond all historical events. To properly argue that Rosenzweig was wrong, one would need to do more than simply sweep his ideas aside by pointing to a historical event that refutes them; after all, it is Rosenzweig's principle to deny historical events this power. But Fackenheim does not argue with Rosenzweig; instead, he lets Judaism's most barbaric assailants shut down the discussion before it has begun. Ironically, it is Fackenheim himself who may have trespassed upon his own injunction by granting Nazism a certain posthumous force.

Generally speaking, Rosenzweig's arguments against the power of history over Judaism became for the early scholarship a license for neglecting his intellectual resonance with "extraneous" philosophies beyond the orbit of Judaism. Yet this very neglect facilitated the adoption of Rosenzweig's ideas in the new American idiom. This pattern of transposition culminated in the 1966 symposium on "The Condition of Jewish Belief," published in Commentary. Editor Milton Himmelfarb, summarizing the diverse sentiments of the Jewish intellectuals and rabbis who had contributed to the forum, noted that the Jewish thinker judged "most influential" across the board was not Mordechai Kaplan or any other American but "a German Jew... who died before Hitler took power and who came to Judaism from the very portals of the Church"--Franz Rosenzweig.⁵⁷ In his perceptive book The Chosen People in America, Arnold Eisen has written of the symposium that "Rosenzweig's unique approach to Judaism" proved itself "well-suited to the theological temper of the times." If the barbarism of World War I was responsible for the tenor of Rosenzweig's philosophy, his work appealed naturally to "a generation which had seen its own hopes and secular-humanist ideologies challenged by yet another World War." Rosenzweig, it seemed, "brought the word that common sense itself, if only we could free it of dogmatic 'isms,' would testify to the reality of God, man, and world."⁵⁸ Rosenzweig's "third way" was therefore especially appealing to a generation that had recently witnessed the explosive consequences of mass politics. The anti-idealist thrust of much of Rosenzweig's writing thus found a new meaning in a culture characterized by the "end of ideology."⁵⁹

The task of rebuilding what Glatzer had called "genuineness" proved especially appealing for those "third-generation" Jews who characteristically displayed the habit of embracing the very identity their parents had taken such pains to escape.⁶⁰ Rosenzweig's philosophy became an instrument in this task. As Eisen explains, Rosenzweig's work was especially helpful to those American Jews intent upon reviving the idea of election, or "chosenness."⁶¹ But cherishing a philosophy for its social utility is not the same as finding out what it means. It was Gershom Scholem, in 1930, who first remarked of Rosenzweig's philosophy that "This work [the Star] will disclose its enduring content only to a generation that will no longer feel itself addressed in such immediate fashion by the themes most pertinent to the present time." Until quite recently, a predominant feature of Rosenzweig scholarship was the fixation upon such "pertinent" themes. But as Scholem had noted, such a criterion of relevance "need not always be [the book's] most pertinent themes." To this pattern of misrecognition, Scholem predicted an eventual end:

Only when the enchanting beauty of its language will have worn off and the figure of the martyr, which for us contemporaries is inseparably part of it, will have withdrawn to cast an aura of its own--only then shall this testimony to God be able to assert itself in its undisguised intent.⁶²

Recent years have proven Scholem's prediction more or less apt. Time has brought a certain disenchantment to the study of modern Jewish thought; the hagiographic "aura" that once illuminated Rosenzweig's memory has now decayed, yielding scholarship less responsive to social needs but also--for that very reason perhaps--more balanced in appraisal.⁶³

The New Translations and Anthologies

One of the most striking aspects of the new Rosenzweig reception is its belatedness. The Star of Redemption was only translated into English in 1970. The translator, William Hallo, was the son of Rosenzweig's contemporary Rudolf Hallo, and he was by training an Assyriologist. In translating the Star, Hallo performed a heroic feat, but there were notable infelicities, such as choosing the archaic anglicisms "Aught" and "Naught" (where Rosenzweig's Etwas and Nichts could have been rendered "Something" and "Nothing"), the sense-twisting "Reason" where Rosenzweig's text had the more neutral Denken (Thought), and the occasional missed word (such as dropping dunkle [dark] from the provocative reference to the Jews founding their eternity upon "the dark sources of the blood").⁶⁴ But translation is always a thankless effort, because the sheer difference between languages stains any choice with contingency. Notwithstanding an occasional complaint, the Hallo translation doubtless performed an immeasurable service in at last bringing the entirety of Rosenzweig's book to English-reading scholars and classrooms.

To forge a community of serious scholarship, accessibility counts for everything. Until recently, however, locating even the German-language editions of Rosenzweig's writings took some work.⁶⁵ As of 1984, however, publication of the entire German-language, four-volume Dordrecht edition of Rosenzweig's collected writings was completed by the respected publishing house Martinus Nijhoff.⁶⁶ The edition is thorough, and the scholarly apparatus and introductory commentary is of the highest quality. But the collection is not entirely comprehensive. It includes most (though not all) of Rosenzweig's extant letters as well his translation and commentary to the poems of the medieval poet Yehudah Halevi, along with an abundance of essays on modern Jewish and general European thought. Perhaps most striking of all is just how many essays and reflections Rosenzweig wrote concerning the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Rosenzweig's opinions of Cohen are controversial. Late in life, Cohen quit Marburg to teach at Berlin's Lehranstalt für Wissenschaft des Judentums, where Rosenzweig and the old philosopher struck up a June-to-December intellectual romance. In the various essays on Cohen in the Dordrecht edition, Rosenzweig argues that, in those twilight years leading to his death in 1918, Cohen abandoned the critical-idealist system for a proto-"existential" Jewish thought (which surprisingly anticipated, in Rosenzweig's view, the thought of Martin Heidegger). Accordingly, Rosenzweig quarreled vigorously with those neo-Kantians who insisted that Cohen's Judaism was compatible with the earlier writings in epistemology and Kantian ethics. There are many who now reject Rosenzweig's appraisal, because it arose from a rather idiosyncratic understanding of Cohen's posthumously published Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (parts of which Rosenzweig received in manuscript from his teacher) and Rosenzweig's sentimentalized memory of Cohen as an especially passionate and pious teacher.⁶⁷ Whatever the truth of the matter, Rosenzweig's essays on Cohen make for fascinating reading.

The Dordrecht edition also includes Rosenzweig's various notes for courses at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus (for example, the tripartite discourse on "The Science of Man," "The Science of the World," and "The Science of God"), his late reflections on the Encyclopaedia Judaica (including the much-discussed comments on biblical anthropomorphism), the occasional oddball essay (war pieces written from the Balkans, a record review), as well as his contributions to the theoretical texts on translation that he authored while working with Martin Buber on the Bible project. But there is one startling omission. The Dordrecht edition does not include Rosenzweig's Hegel dissertation. Though available elsewhere, the extant version is merely a photographic reprint of the Gothic-script original of 1920 and therefore quite difficult to decipher for all but fully proficient readers of German. The omission of the Hegel book is considerable, because there is a widespread misperception that Rosenzweig's embrace of Judaism required an epistemological break with his Hegelian academic beginnings. The distinction is overdrawn and not happily surrendered; it reconfirms the received view of Rosenzweig as a "genuine" Jewish thinker isolated from his German world.⁶⁸ More recent works have challenged this ghetto-like divide, but it persists in casual reference to Rosenzweig as an "anti-Hegelian" or "anti-totality" thinker who anticipates postmodernism.⁶⁹

Published just following the fiftieth anniversary of Rosenzweig's death, the appearance of the Dordrecht edition marks a symbolic beginning for the most recent wave of scholarly publication. To honor his memory, an international conference, the Fourth Jerusalem Encounter, was held in 1980 at the Hebrew University, from which selected papers were later published in the indispensable volume edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr.⁷⁰ Since that time, scholarship on Rosenzweig has mushroomed in North America and abroad. The French publication Cahiers de la Nuit Surveillée devoted its very first issue to Rosenzweig.⁷¹ And on the hundredth anniversary of Rosenzweig's birth, a Paris conference paid posthumous homage to the now-famous philosopher; its papers, too, are available in a French edition.⁷²

Most recently, a series of anthologies have appeared in English that promise to bring some of Rosenzweig's crucial, shorter works to a wider readership. The most impressive of these, perhaps, is the smallish-sized anthology of Rosenzweig's philosophical and theological writings, translated, edited, and with commentary by Paul Franks and Michael Morgan.⁷³ The great advantage of this collection is that it brings together the most crucial pieces from disparate areas of Rosenzweig's development, from the doctoral work completed in 1914 to his death in 1929, and each piece is prefaced with a learned explication--both of what Rosenzweig was up to in the specific essay and of how it fits into the broader trajectory of his thought. The collection begins with Rosenzweig's first true intervention in the religious thought of his day, "Atheistic Theology," written in 1914. Opening with a discussion of nineteenth-century Protestant historicism, Rosenzweig showed how the so-called "Life of Jesus" theology collapsed divine meaning into human, thereby dissolving revelation. But Rosenzweig's deeper motive was comparative; Judaism, too, he claimed, had recently embarked upon the same course, for by conceiving of Judaism in "social-psychological and nationalistic ways," the necessary separation between divine and human threatened to disintegrate, and this, Franks and Morgan comment, was a "classic case of... theistic denial."⁷⁴

We know today that the real target of this essay was Martin Buber, who in his early, mystical thought celebrated the vitalism of the Jewish people to an extraordinary degree. For Rosenzweig, such a nationalist emphasis, especially marked in Buber's Drei Reden (first delivered in parts between 1909 and 1911 in Prague, published 1911), followed the habits of nineteenth-century Protestantism and pointed toward the full liquidation of God within religion--a baleful result that Rosenzweig called "atheistic theology." (Rosenzweig's argument here loosely parallels his Protestant contemporary Karl Barth's attack upon Schleiermacher's apparent reduction of religion to culture and feeling.) The essay was originally to be published in a volume of Buber's Vom Judentum, at the request of Buber himself. But its implied criticism of Buber (who was not mentioned by name) was so strong that the editors rejected the essay, which remained unpublished until well after Rosenzweig's death.

Franks and Morgan also saw fit to include both the foreword and the concluding remarks from Rosenzweig's Hegel dissertation. The great advantage is that, at last, English-language readers have some access to at least brief fragments of this text. The conclusion, written in 1914 and revised in 1920, exposes some of Rosenzweig's own investments in post-Hegelian nationalism. Having traced the development of Hegel's state-concept from the young theological writings forward through the Rechtsphilosophie, Rosenzweig argued that the nineteenth century progressed "beyond Hegel's conceptions of the state," abandoning his notion of reason- and will-founded politics for an idea of the nationalist state: "[T]he concept of the will had to be pruned from the twisted root of the idea of the state so that the idea of the state could expose its buds to the light of national modes of thinking."⁷⁵

This is an intriguing conclusion. It hints at a "national" thinking quite different from Enlightenment, reason-grounded politics and therefore may anticipate Rosenzweig's own turn from Hegel-inspired political ideas to a conception of the Jewish people beyond reason and politics altogether. Indeed, following World War I, Rosenzweig revised the Hegel book with a new preface and with an additional epigram from Friedrich Hölderlin, which stressed the "narrowness" and mortality of individual life as against the expansive and seemingly endless "years of the peoples." There are traces here, in other words, of Rosenzweig's belief that the Jews are an eternal people precisely because they exist detached from statehood. The conclusion of the Hegel book is a halfway station toward this insight, because it abandons reason-based statism for nationalist statism--without, however, yet making the final leap toward transcending the political sphere entirely. Franks and Morgan do not comment extensively upon the Hegel book, but at the very least their wonderful anthology dashes any remaining scholarly illusions that students of Rosenzweig's Jewish thought can comfortably dispense with Rosenzweig's earlier academic work.

Of great value are two paired volumes translated and edited by Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli. Franz Rosenzweig: God, Man, and the World, Lectures and Essays provides the reader with a sampling of Rosenzweig's pedagogical discourses from the Frankfurt Lehrhaus as well as a translation of the indispensable "Note on Anthropomorphisms," his brief though conceptually explosive rejoinder to an article on anthropomorphism published in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Here, in particular, Rosenzweig displayed his gift for the unanticipated reversal of received wisdom. The biblical habit of anthropomorphism (so zealously combated by Maimonides and by the German-Jewish liberal-rationalist tradition from Mendelssohn to Cohen) was to Rosenzweig wholly acceptable if properly understood. As actual revelation, the description of God in human categories was not a sign of a human failure to arrive at a sufficiently abstract idea of pure divinity--what Rosenzweig called "epistemological lamentation"⁷⁶--but was theomorphism, God's self-adaptation within the categories requisite for any human experience. This display of wit and insight alone makes the volume worthwhile, and Michael Oppenheim's foreword does an admirable job of placing the various discourses in the context of Rosenzweig's intellectual development after the Star.

The second Udoff and Galli volume, Franz Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," from which I have already quoted, is an enormously helpful collection that offers the reader a backward glimpse at Rosenzweig's contemporary reception. Udoff's concluding essay, "Retracing the Steps of Rosenzweig," is an insightful (if at times darkly written) interpretation that fixes upon the idea of "ownmost" identity in Rosenzweig's work. According to Udoff, the German particle eig, as in Eigentlichkeit (authenticity), which Rosenzweig used frequently, "carries with it the deeper sense of a particularity or ownness that is irreducible to and unpossessable by totalizing rationality."⁷⁷ And (if I understand Udoff correctly) this indicates Rosenzweig's apparent intellectual positioning at "the origins of postmodern thought."⁷⁸ (I shall comment further on the postmodernism claim below.) For both the commentary and the contents, the Udoff and Galli volumes have performed a great service for the new scholarship.

Wittgenstein and Paralysis

The most unusual work by Rosenzweig to make a recent reappearance is Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand. The book was first written in the summer of 1921 and scheduled for publication in 1922. But troubled by its somewhat overheated style, Rosenzweig underwent a change of heart and withdrew the book from the publisher, and it remained unpublished at his request during his lifetime. In 1953, however, Nahum Glatzer translated and--against Rosenzweig's apparent wishes--published the manuscript as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. (German editions by Glatzer appeared in 1964 and again in 1992.) Long out of print, this English version has been republished by Harvard University Press with Glatzer's earlier introduction and an insightful new commentary by the philosopher Hilary Putnam.

Rosenzweig's "little book" (as the German title might be translated) is a curiously polemical work. It takes the form of an allegory of a philosopher who succumbs to paralyzing illness due to an unhealthy style of philosophizing. Demanding to know what the objects of the world "actually" are in isolation from all temporality and worldly context, this demand rebounds upon the thinker himself: he finds himself frozen, reduced to his unreal "essence," "detemporalized," and literally unable to move. He thus lands in a hospital bed. (The title, whose pun has been lost in the English translation, plays upon the fact that the German phrase gesunden Menschenverstand is the customary translation for the English phrase "common sense."⁷⁹ And it is this "common sense" that presents the "healthy" contrast with the "sick" understanding of the philosopher.)

Putnam suggests that Rosenzweig's message is comparable to the later Wittgenstein: philosophy is like a disease for which we need therapy to remind us of the common meanings that have generally worked for us when we were going about our daily and unphilosophical affairs. The comparison is illuminating, yet even Putnam admits that, if this is the motivating idea of Rosenzweig's "little book," it may diverge in important respects from the more robustly philosophical sensibility of the Star. As noted above, Rosenzweig was adamant that the return to "life" did not entail a rejection of philosophy as such, but only philosophy of a particular type. Putnam recognizes this specific claim in the Büchlein itself, because even there Rosenzweig found that the only kind of philosopher who is susceptible to paralysis is the kind who subscribes to a doctrine of "artificial timelessness" (künstlichen Zeitlosigkeit).⁸⁰ The onset of sickness occurs the moment the philosopher demands of the everyday objects around him that they reveal themselves as something other than what they show themselves to be. To ask after the "essence" (Wesen) of a thing in this unnatural way is to pose a "detemporalizing question" (entzeitlichenden Frage) which lifts the object as well as the philosopher out from their meaningful horizon within the "flow of life."⁸¹ The cure for the bedridden victim is to return him slowly back to the natural understanding of things, the context of lived experience Rosenzweig calls "everydayness" (Alltäglichkeit).⁸²

This is not a call to abandon speculation. Rosenzweig rejects the idea that the lived, temporal context of things might be momentarily "bracketed"--as Husserl urged us to do--so that we might get at the eidetic heart of things. But Rosenzweig advocates precisely a philosophy that remains within the boundaries of the everyday while exploring its structure in hermeneutic fashion. Much in the way Heidegger's "existential" analysis revises Husserlian phenomenology, Rosenzweig's "new thinking" refused any kind of eidetic reduction and embraced temporal "everydayness" as both the beginning and also the ultimate goal of philosophical inquiry. This idea was developed with greater seriousness and depth in the Star, where it was accompanied by a far more "existential" account of Jewish "being." On this point, Putnam is wise to discern a textual divergence, noting that "the Judaism of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy is more appealing in certain respects than that of the Star."⁸³ Given this difference, Rosenzweig's polemical book serves rather poorly as an overture to his greater philosophical enterprise.

Rosenzweig and Levinas

Perhaps the most powerful catalyst to the recent resurgence of interest in Rosenzweig's philosophy is his connection with the widely discussed French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas's thought is not quickly summarized, but a synopsis is required. Trained in the methods of both Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas emerged after World War II as one of the most perspicacious and revolutionary thinkers in the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology for Levinas ceased to be a discipline for grounding knowledge or the understanding of Being; it became instead an instrument for exposing the "other" as the very origin of intelligibility. In place of ontology, what Levinas called "ethics" (in other words, the infinite and non-totalizable relation that begins in the self's encounter with the Other) became the privileged metaphysical relation, a metaphysics prior to all ontology. For Levinas, the philosophical tradition itself was guilty of eclipsing this Otherness, by reducing it to the presumptuous and self-satisfied sovereignty of the "Same." Levinas's chief philosophical aim was to challenge this presumption. Just as Descartes had argued that the human mind recognizes in God an "infinity" that the mind cannot contain, Levinas argued that what is truly Other cannot be contained within the Being or categories of the ego. To acknowledge this Other is to admit an insufficiency piercing the egological horizon, awakening the Self to an infinite responsibility for the Other. The ethical relation itself thereby became "first philosophy."⁸⁴

Rosenzweig and Levinas never met. But in various texts Levinas acknowledged Rosenzweig as a major source of inspiration. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas suggested that Rosenzweig's insights were "too often present in this book to be cited."⁸⁵ He especially noted that he had been "impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig's Stern der Erlösung."⁸⁶ This key acknowledgment, as well as various essays by Levinas on Rosenzweig's work, have helped to spawn a new comparative literature exploring the affinities and correlations between the two philosophers.

There are two major works of comparison on this topic: Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992), and Richard Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1994).⁸⁷ They are books of scholarship as well as ethical passion. Gibbs expounds key features of Rosenzweig's thought with great clarity, but he is also interested in laying the foundations for a "future" Jewish philosophy. Indeed, what Gibbs claims to find in both Rosenzweig and Levinas is a basic agreement upon the urgent need for a correlation of Judaism and philosophy. According to Gibbs, the customary division between Levinas's Jewish writings and his philosophical ones must be replaced by a specific appreciation of Levinas as a "Jewish thinker" (10). And because Rosenzweig anticipated many of Levinas's ostensibly postmodern insights, Gibbs finds warrant for the claim that Rosenzweig, too, was a "postmodern philosopher" (10). There are five key themes that Levinas adapted from Rosenzweig--adaptation, not correlation, explains Gibbs, best describes the linkage between the two philosophers. (These are the face, self, responsibility, speech, and temporality.) On a more general level, Gibbs sees Rosenzweig and Levinas as sharing a specific kind of Judaism that is at heart "an ethics understood as concrete responsibility for others, correlate with the radical transcendence of God" (4). To better thematize the meaning of this "radical ethics" is the driving purpose of Gibbs' book.

The book is especially rich in comparative discussion setting Rosenzweig among his Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual contemporaries; Levinas aside, Gibbs draws out some helpful comparisons to Max Weber, Hermann Cohen, Ernest Troeltsch, and many more. But these were socially minded intellectuals. So I will admit that I do not understand why Rosenzweig is a good source for developing a "radical" ethics. By "radical," Gibbs means "fundamental" (in Levinas's sense of "first philosophy") and not, of course, socialist or leftist. But the leftist-radical sense of the term works its way into the reader's mind. For Gibbs, both Rosenzweig and Levinas are ostensibly favorable to notions of "social responsibility" in "public society" (256). But this is disputable. Although Levinas is up front about "responsibility," Rosenzweig was remarkably silent about anything customarily called "ethics," radical or not. Rosenzweig himself seems to have been, politically speaking, quite far from socialism. In a 1918 letter, he even confessed to monarchism--at a moment many of his more progressive German contemporaries were privately yearning for a decisive German defeat as the only way toward democracy.⁸⁸ More to the point, Rosenzweig generally wrote of the public sphere in decidedly negative terms. Judaism, for Rosenzweig, stakes out its life values against publicity, social fungibility, contractualism, governmentality, and institutional social order of any kind. Indeed, Rosenzweig's account of the Jews as a community of blood is meant to portray them as the group most resistant to the social. In other words, the Jews seem to embody what Weber called "inner-worldly asceticism." Rosenzweig's asceticism, however, performs its most stringent resistance not against material life as such, but against any effort to find its primary meaning in the public sphere.

An additional thesis of Gibbs's book is that Rosenzweig anticipates a theme most characteristic of postmodernism--namely, what Levinas called the "opposition to the idea of totality." According to Gibbs, this is part of a larger pattern in modern Jewish thought. Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Levinas all aimed toward an "enrichment of philosophy beyond totalizing philosophical concepts"--that is, embracing the idea of "a plurality that cannot be totalized" (120). Indeed, "Rosenzweig in particular broke with totality in such a decisive way that he can require a plurality of communities with distinctive social practices, and he can see that plurality as necessary for the theological task of redemption" (120; my emphasis).

Gibbs is especially insightful in suggesting that Rosenzweig's analysis of "practices and institutions" amounts to something like a "social phenomenology," a basic-structures sketch of how our very modes of life--our rituals, texts, and so on--lay down our conditions of meaning (137). And Gibbs is right that Rosenzweig thought that (for now, at least) there cannot be just one set of such practices. But whether Rosenzweig really abandoned the idea of totality as such might be disputed. Gibbs observes that Rosenzweig saw a "plurality" of communities (namely, the Christian and the Jewish) as complementary forces toward redemption (120). But is this complementarity the same as postmodern pluralism? Leave aside the troublesome fact that Rosenzweig's "pluralism" appears to exclude Islam. A true break with totality would forbid Rosenzweig from appealing to any singular principle that might tie together the apparent diversity of social practices. Yet Rosenzweig cleaves passionately to just such a principle--it is the monotheist vision of redemption, conceived as uniting all dispersed groups within a singular, post-historical "All."

It is just this longing that allows Rosenzweig to "reassemble" the elements he first disassembles at the beginning of the Star: God, man, and world finally coalesce into "the new Unity" (die neue Einheit). As I have noted above, this unity is what the Star calls "truth." So, whereas Rosenzweig tolerates diversity for the time being, this toleration holds only because it is temporary; it is not constitutive of human experience as such. Presumably what distinguishes postmodernism is the notion that any effort to subsume diversity under just one principle must fail, since a supplement will stubbornly remain. Rosenzweig's "opposition" to totality, then, should not be read as heralding the early birth for postmodernism. Rather, it signals the persistence of idealism in his thought. Kant believed that scientific explanation postulates its completion only in the future, and Hegel considered present disunity the prerequisite for historical motion. So, too, Rosenzweig. And earlier still, what he called his "messianic theory of knowledge" harkens back to a quite premodern Jewish precept, the idea that the future will bring unity to the now-fragmented world. First articulated by the Prophets, this hope is now cited in Jewish liturgy; thus the daily text of the Aleinu prayer: "The Lord will be King over all the world--on that day The Lord will be One and His Name will be One."⁸⁹

Gibbs suggests that "whatever reception Rosenzweig will have in the next few years will depend on Levinas" (31). Thoughtful readers will, of course, continue to argue whether the comparison between them can be meaningfully sustained. The key question is whether something like Levinas's ethical "metaphysics" also animates Rosenzweig's work. Richard Cohen answers this question in the affirmative, claiming that both Rosenzweig and Levinas understand philosophy to be an exercise in "redemption" or raising the true to the good--"a spiritual vocation they both understand as the concrete historical work of instituting and maintaining social and political justice for humankind" (xvii). There is admittedly some talk of justice in the Star. As Cohen notes, Rosenzweig thinks of Jewish chosenness as obliging Jews to "concrete acts of neighborly love and the essentially anonymous works of justice" (20). But Cohen also documents, insightfully and with great persuasiveness, Rosenzweig's key argument that it is Christianity alone that must spread the "good word"; Jewish election, however, requires that Jews observe the affairs of the world at some remove--summarized in Rosenzweig's idea of "constriction" (see especially 21-23). Indeed, Cohen is honest enough to recognize "Rosenzweig's exclusionary commitments" and his "shocking non-liberal exclusiveness" (298-99), qualities that are almost nowhere evident in Levinas's thought.⁹⁰

It is worth noting that Cohen has been an energetic commentator and translator of Levinas's philosophy, and he seems strongly invested in warding off criticism that has been directed toward Levinas, especially by Jacques Derrida. The concluding chapter, "Derrida's (Mal)reading of Levinas," is an impassioned defense against what Cohen perceives as Derrida's almost moral assault upon the integrity of Levinas's ideas. Cohen's defense is curious. Many readers (including myself) will find Derrida's 1964 essay "Violence and Metaphysics" to be one of the most precise and respectful probings of Levinas's thought ever written. But Cohen disagrees.⁹¹ As his spirited chapter makes clear, at stake in the defense of both Levinas and Rosenzweig as ethicist philosophers is a rock-bottom belief that it is in principle always better to be on the side of ethicists than against them. As noted above, Levinas claims for ethics an infinitely expansive--indeed, foundational--position in philosophy. Levinas developed this position partly while wrenching himself free of Heidegger (whose writing upon explicitly "ethical" themes was sparse, thus prompting the scholarly opinion that Heidegger's Nazism grew like a weed from this neglected terrain). For some readers, Levinas's panethicist response to Heidegger grants Levinas the presumptive moral high ground.⁹² To argue against Levinas concerning the "primacy of ethics" places one in the unfortunate position of looking like an opponent of ethics. This is all the more the case if, like Derrida, one happens to have developed important aspects of one's own philosophy upon the ruins of Heidegger's "destruction of metaphysics." Whatever Derrida's intellectual and political integrity, the moral odds in this symbolic struggle are against him. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not claim that the existential horizon which allows for objects to be--ontology--is without qualification "prior" to ethics. But there is a reason for this. Unlike both Levinas and Heidegger, Derrida prefers to stir up the linguistic waters that permit us to make clear priority assertions of any kind. Derrida's goal in troubling these waters is a serious one, arising from his belief that all priority-talk must appeal to a spuriously metaphysical trust in presence--that is, our access to timeless and nonlinguistic Ideas. But Cohen chafes at this post-metaphysical argument: "[F]rom Levinas' point of view, not to decide the question of the primacy of ethics or ontology is most certainly to decide against ethics," and this, Cohen argues, is "what Levinas would call irresponsibility" (319, 315).

This is a fierce objection. But up close it is not really an objection to Derrida's arguments; it is an objection to what kind of world might follow from those arguments quite independent of whether they might be correct.⁹³ In other words, Cohen seems as interested to defend the "appeal" of Levinas--the moral "elevation" of the ideas--as much as the ideas themselves.⁹⁴ The vigor of Cohen's writing on behalf of both Rosenzweig and Levinas, I would suggest, seems to flow from an a priori belief in their fundamental "goodness," which seems too deep a thing to be argued about. Similarly, Cohen objects to Rosenzweig's 1929 essay in which Rosenzweig compared himself favorably to Heidegger. But Cohen's treatment of Heidegger is remarkably casual; once again the moral reputation of the ideas seems to matter here almost as much as the ideas: Cohen objects to Heidegger for lacking Rosenzweig's sense of "redemptive history" and the activist promotion of "ethics and justice" (65). But is this really a rejoinder? As I have already suggested above, on my reading Rosenzweig is not primarily an ethicist. The broader question here is why a philosopher must promote ethics and justice in order to merit a philosophical defense. After all, there are many other things to worry about, philosophically speaking, besides ethics and justice. Indeed, one may wonder whether the most expansive account of ethics--that is, ethics understood as grounding all meaning--is necessarily the most preferable. To say that Rosenzweig is not primarily concerned with ethics is not necessarily a strike against him. Indeed, as Bernard Williams observed, "the limitation of the moral is itself something morally important."⁹⁵

Perhaps the most ambitious achievement to emerge from the new Levinas interest is the full-length commentary by Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. First published in 1982 in France, it appeared in English in 1992. Progressing chapter by chapter and section by section through Rosenzweig's magnum opus, it remains the most thorough and textually faithful commentary upon The Star of Redemption available. This makes Mosès' book somewhat impracticable for the novice; the Star is no short book, and the commentary roughly matches it in length. But it is nonetheless a powerful exposition of Rosenzweig's ideas.

Levinas's thought has exerted a noticeable influence upon Mosès' interpretation. The French and English editions contain an admiring preface by Levinas, and this preface alone brilliantly sketches the chief contours of Rosenzweig's philosophy, perhaps as well as any of the longer works now available. Levinas's great interest in ethics--the "frontal relation with the other man" as he calls it here--drives Mosès as well.⁹⁶ One reads that "the fundamental intuition of The Star" is that "a relation can only be established between two beings that have first been separated." So God and Man must first be drawn apart, such that man may confront God as truly an Other. And only when the dialogue between man and God has begun--when man becomes a "thou" for God--can man be opened from self-sufficiency to alterity. This is the religious foundation of ethics, "an awakening to attention and submission to another."⁹⁷ With this basic interpretation, Mosès can contest the old reading of Rosenzweig as merely an existentialist, finding instead that the experience of a nonhuman transcendence is crucial to Rosenzweig's vision: "[E]xistence is fundamentally opened to exteriority... the experience of this exteriority... is... Revelation." And thus "in the discovery of absolute alterity man is born to his own existence."⁹⁸

This is Levinas's terminology, which Mosès uses gracefully to explicate Rosenzweig. However, in order to make Rosenzweig an "ethical" thinker primarily alert to alterity and what lies beyond the self-sufficient horizon, Mosès must underrate precisely the idea that once made Rosenzweig so attractive to North American readership--the idea of Jewish uniqueness. Both Gibbs and Cohen acknowledge that there is something very exclusive about this idea, especially in the notion of the Jews as a "blood community" (about which Gibbs candidly remarks, "a potentially catastrophic racism lurks here" [138]). Mosès admits that Rosenzweig is perhaps guilty of "a poor choice of words." But he then reads this notorious idea to mean "what we would now call an ethnic community." Can this be right? As Mosès notes, Rosenzweig's thought was alive to the "we" of community as much as to the "thou" of alterity. In the Star's most Schmittian moment, Rosenzweig calls the founding decision of community "dreadful" (grauenhaft), because the "we" must expel the "you" "from its bright, melodious circle into the cold dread of the nothing."⁹⁹ Although there are many ethnicities in the world, Rosenzweig's point was that the Jews are radically unlike all other peoples; there may be other "blood communities," but none of them besides the Jews live under the eternal and exclusive favor of God. This notion of the "we" points to Rosenzweig's profound disagreement with Levinas: whereas Levinas contested totality on behalf of alterity, Rosenzweig found in Jewish solidarity a singular and self-sufficient "Whole." Rosenzweig was thus favorable to the very kind of holism Levinas rejected on principle. It is arguably this very unpostmodernist stance that deranges any possible rapprochement with his French successor.

All three texts on Rosenzweig to have emerged in Levinas's wake display a philosophical acumen far surpassing previous scholarship. But though there is no doubt that Levinas found inspiration in Rosenzweig, there is also much in Rosenzweig's thought that escapes the comparison--especially where Rosenzweig reconfirms communal solidarity over and against social responsibility. The underlying concern is whether the "correlation" between Judaism and modern philosophy truly allows Judaism to persist without apology, without reshaping some of its most recalcitrant and eminently "unmodern" values.

Hermeneutics, Idolatry, and Romanticism

A very successful and intellectually rigorous work is Leora Batnitzky's Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (2000).¹⁰⁰ For Batnitzky, the key to any proper understanding of Rosenzweig's work is attending to "the ways in which philosophy and Judaism always exist for Rosenzweig in incommensurable, yet hermeneutically complex tensions" (4). The work is prompted by Rosenzweig's intriguing account of biblical anthropomorphism, which Batnitzky takes as central to his larger "reassessment of human finitude" (4). Batnitzky argues that, for Rosenzweig, the error of idolatry is not primarily cognitive; it arises not from our mental relationship to God but from how we actually worship God. Rosenzweig's insight into human finitude thus forbids him from excoriating idolatry as merely a "mistake" in thought. For those who are religious, Rosenzweig believes idolatry is and must remain a potential risk. This is a welcome thesis, precisely because it admits that there may be key elements in Rosenzweig's work which are irreducible to reason--that is, which rub our modern philosophical expectations against the grain.

Batnitzky explores this tension by arguing for a rather surprising connection between Rosenzweig's thought and the preceding tradition of German-Jewish "ethical monotheism" (5). The continuity is ironic, because Rosenzweig took such pains to distance himself from "idealism" in German as well as Jewish culture. (His spirited essay criticizing Moses Mendelssohn's German-language Pentateuch translation for its rendering of God's name as "The Eternal" is a good case in point.) As Batnitzky admits, identifying the "ethical monotheism" in Rosenzweig is "self-consciously chosen" and provocative; this feature of his work has long been obscured from view by those who celebrated his existentialist and personalist, quasi-Kierkegaardian irrationalism. To be sure, Rosenzweig "appropriates and transforms" the ethical-monotheist heritage. According to Batnitzky, he takes over not only the monotheist's allergy to idolatrous worship but also the ethicist's belief in the unique Jewish role as "representative"--as light unto the nations (see, e.g., 87).¹⁰¹

Just how robust can a transformation be before it becomes discontinuity? In Rosenzweig's notion of representation, readers may fear that ethical meaning loses out to something less universalistic than tribal. And universalism was the banner of German-Jewish ethical-monotheists from Mendelssohn to Cohen. As Batnitzky herself observes, for Rosenzweig the very idea of Jewish uniqueness--epitomized in talk of "blood-community"--indicated precisely the place where modern philosophical ideas of universalism and Jewish-religious ideas come into conflict. This is especially the case insofar as Rosenzweig's notion of "carnal Israel" privileged Jewish existence itself, as against celebrating a specifically Jewish idea. Batnitzky is especially good at showing how this idea of carnal Israel makes the Jews themselves into an "uncanny" sign. Indeed, Judaism banishes aesthetics in part because Judaism itself becomes "God's artwork given to the world" (95). Against ethical monotheists like Cohen, it seems that Rosenzweig believed that "harmonization" between Jewish sources and modern philosophy (in Batnitzky's words) "is neither possible nor desirable" (63). As Batnitzky shows in an impressively global reading in her chapter 3, as against notions of fungible human rationality, there is a strongly "hermeneutic" tendency in Rosenzweig's Star that "gives epistemological priority to communal frameworks in general and the Jewish community in particular" (62). But this is itself an idea that now pervades modern philosophy (Batnitzky cites Gadamer in particular as a kindred spirit).¹⁰² Indeed, many post-Kantian philosophers (such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Rosenzweig himself) first developed hermeneutics in dialogue with religion. So it may be difficult for readers to see why Rosenzweig's Judaism and mainstream contemporary philosophy are necessarily incompatible.¹⁰³

For Batnitzky, "the notion of Jewish election is absolutely central to Rosenzweig's thought" (214). But, unlike the older school of Anglo-American Rosenzweig scholars, Batnitzky is willing to recognize that this notion of election is "exclusive." (Indeed, as she has written elsewhere, Rosenzweig's notion of interfaith "dialogue" was hardly an ameliorative, I'm-okay-you're-okay type of mutual affirmation; instead it involved what she rightly calls "mutual judgment.")¹⁰⁴ But Rosenzweig's insight was the hermeneutic one that being universalistic and bearing witness to redemption are themselves activities which can take shape only within a common language and set of practices. There is, perhaps, a moment of "dreadful" violence in first deciding to erect such practices, and in this sense, Batnitzky concedes, the decision is "violent" and "against the Other." But Batnitzky's subtle conclusion is that Judaism--much like any community--sets up its own internal "grammar," which is not necessarily fully compatible with the grammar of the surrounding world. Rosenzweig's Judaism thus turns out to be founded upon a quite modernist concession to pluralism, even while Judaism itself may not nourish this pluralism within.

There have been many other inventive works on Rosenzweig published in the past few years. Of special interest is Yudit Kornberg Greenberg's interesting study, Better than Wine: Love, Poetry and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (1996). Greenberg sees Rosenzweig's work as harmonious with "certain strands of postmodern philosophy" but nonetheless as "sharply distinct from the negating tendency expressed in antiformal, anarchic, or antinomian... impulses" characterizing much "postmodern philosophy or literature."¹⁰⁵ Affirming a feminist approach, Greenberg represents Rosenzweig's "speech-thinking" as gesturing "beyond logocentrism" toward an appreciation of "embodiment" as central to his account of redemption.¹⁰⁶ The importance of embodiment--and indeed, sexuality--in Rosenzweig's work is well worth consideration. But I do not find the claim about Rosenzweig's move beyond "logocentrism" all that compelling. Nearly ubiquitous in Rosenzweig's thought, like that of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein, is an acknowledgment of the primacy of language in the disclosure of our communal world. Indeed, Rosenzweig borrowed a phrase from Schelling to call the new thinking a "narrative [erzählende] philosophy." Once again, behind the notion that Rosenzweig was an anti-logo-centrist lies the equally anachronistic notion that he was a proto-post-modernist. Neither label really fits. More plausibly, Greenberg also aims to show how his philosophy "borrows from the riches of the Kabbalah," especially as mediated by the German-mystical and romantic tradition. She concludes that "Rosenzweig's appropriation of mythic and midrashic forms of thinking serves as a model for constructing a postmodern Jewish philosophy and theology."¹⁰⁷

There is some ground for contesting the comparison with Jewish mysticism. For one thing, Rosenzweig himself explicitly described the tendency of his work as "anti-mystical."¹⁰⁸ And Nahum Glatzer, his student, denied kabbalistic influence in his teacher's work.¹⁰⁹ But two of the most respected scholars of the Jewish mystical tradition, Moshe Idel and Gershom Scholem, have alerted readers to the striking incidence of kabbalistic themes in Rosenzweig's philosophy.¹¹⁰ In his warm prefatory remarks to Greenberg, Elliot Wolfson observes that, while taking note of Rosenzweig's explicit rejection of mysticism, it is clear that the "new thinking" "exhibits some basic affinities with the dialectical theology of Kabbalistic lore." These would include "the centrality of language in the religious experience, the dual conception of a concealed and a manifest God, and the legitimacy accorded anthropomorphism and mythopoeisis in religious discourse."¹¹¹

This "mythopoetic" dimension of Rosenzweig's thought has aroused a great deal of interest in recent years, concentrated upon his translation work (independently, upon the poetry of Yehudah Halevi and, together with Martin Buber, upon the Hebrew Bible). Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox performed an invaluable service with their recent English version of Buber and Rosenzweig's various theoretical writings upon translation (first published in German in 1936).¹¹² Drawing inspiration from the Buber-Rosenzweig attempt to reproduce Hebrew linguistic effects and meaning connections in German, Everett Fox commenced publication in 1997 of his own fascinating English-language version of the Hebrew Bible.¹¹³ Rosenzweig's translations from the poetry of Halevi have also enjoyed great scholarly attention; in fact, there are now two distinct editions of these translations in English.¹¹⁴ Space is insufficient here to comment extensively upon Rosenzweig's translation efforts, but it is important to note the paradoxical fact that (Fox's original work excepted, of course) the new English texts are all translations of translations. To "borrow" Rosenzweig's translation strategies in this fashion has required uncoupling two closely linked features of his project: the "method" of translation, taken as generalizable to other languages; and the specific investment in the bond between Hebrew and German, understood as a unique expression of Rosenzweig's "dual identity."

The difficulty of uncoupling these two features is considerable, because for Rosenzweig the very method took shape on behalf of his specific cultural politics. Rosenzweig's translation methods were bent upon reversing the Lutheran "naturalization" of Hebrew into German and instead dramatizing the "strangeness" of the Hebrew Bible, precisely by reshaping the German language according to foreign rhythm and syntax. The irony here is that this method was itself ascendant within German aesthetic theory and German culture. Though traceable to the Protestant reversion to the original Hebrew Bible, the Weimar-era emphasis on the "authentic" had become common property for German-Jewish and German thinkers. Rosenzweig borrowed much of his theoretical arsenal from this specifically German drive toward cultural rootedness. (Only this can explain his curious insistence on turning to the Bible for its "primordial" [uralte] sense.) But, though comparable in some respects to German neo-Romanticism, the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation must ultimately be understood as a linguistic performance of distinctively Jewish identity in a culture where such Jewishness was increasingly permeable and demanded creative work to retrain its shape. This may well provide insight into the recent popularity of Rosenzweig's translation theory, which is now mobilized to confirm Jewish "distinctiveness" in the English-speaking sphere.¹¹⁵

A noteworthy attempt to bring together such cultural-aesthetic and philosophical concerns is the book by Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" (1999). In an unusual, three-fold comparison, Rubinstein proposes Leo Baeck's 1922 essay "Romantic Religion" along with Schelling's Philosophy of Art as helpful comparative materials for seeing Rosenzweig's philosophy in a new light. It is clear that Schelling exerted a powerful influence upon Rosenzweig, as previous work by Else Freund and Mendes-Flohr, among others, has made plain. But no one has considered applying the Baeckian idea of "romantic religion" to Rosenzweig. This is partly because Baeck's essay is chiefly directed against Christianity, which is cast as the paradigm of nonethical, feeling-saturated romanticism in religion, as opposed to what Baeck called "classical" religion (i.e., Judaism), which he characterized as ethical, rational, and open to the social world. Rubinstein, however, demonstrates how much in Rosenzweig's philosophy actually corresponds quite well to what Baeck called romantic religion.

At first glance, the claim may seem unfair. Baeck was not especially adroit in his judgments, and "Romantic Religion" is one of his least subtle works; it is an exercise in crude typologizing whereby Judaism comes out with tedious regularity as the winner against Christianity on every count. So it may seem a bad plan to set about explaining so fragile a work as Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption wielding such a heavy hammer. Indeed, some of the resemblances appear forced and conceptually muddled. Rubinstein minimizes the crucial differences between German Idealism and German Romanticism, thus enabling his claim that idealist and romantic religion describe "very similar" movements, "hoverings, vanishings, and mirrorings." But Rubinstein exposes some noteworthy resemblances as well. The "first definitive mark of romantic religion," he explains, is the "intractability of the infinite, its never wholly appeasable disruption of the whole."¹¹⁶ Rubinstein claims to discover this theme in Rosenzweig as well. More convincingly, perhaps, one reads that, "Rosenzweig never sounds quite so essentially romantic as when he is describing the Jewish people." Rubinstein finds here the romantic theme of "longing without possessing," of "disharmony with the times... and of the radical denial of history's seriousness." He also finds in Rosenzweig "the self-enclosed redemption that the romantic wished unpossessively to possess."¹¹⁷ Rubinstein's writing is at times unruly, but these are important insights that deserve further study.

The shared virtue of all these texts is the drive to comparison. This is most notable in the works by Batnitzky, Gibbs, and Cohen, who display unprecedented skill and energy in exploring Rosenzweig's affinities with contemporary as well as present-day thought. It is also evident in the fascinating new study by Eric Santner that draws Rosenzweig into a productive dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis.¹¹⁸ The new openness in this scholarship is refreshing, but it comes at a price. One might argue that the act of comparison ultimately breaks down simpler feelings of admiration. If Rosenzweig can be compared to other philosophers, he is cast into the rough and tumble of "profane" discussion from which he can hardly emerge without blemish. Comparison thus compels us to abandon the old notion that Rosenzweig was the architect of a strictly "Jewish" philosophy. Indeed, the more Rosenzweig is made available for open-ended inquiry, the less usable he may be for purposes of Jewish self-affirmation. Thus a noteworthy consequence of the new literature may well be that it validates academic work as an end in itself while frustrating nonacademic aims. It is easy to see why this might be so. Comparison is normally a modest tool. But there are some notions--"identity," "canon," and "tradition"--that persist in scholarship like ancient and seemingly impregnable walls. Against such notions, comparison cannot help but appear as an instrument of siege. Naturally, it does not mean to be destructive, but in passing repeatedly through the walls of tradition it must gradually do damage. It exposes their inner artifice to the embarrassment of daylight, until at last, when one surveys the ruined landscape, the once-clear boundary between "inside" and "outside" can barely be discerned.

Conclusion: Between Universalism and Election

Self-affirmation remains a prominent motive in the public and scholarly study of German-Jewish thought. Why this is so may seem at first difficult to explain. The idea of Jewish "chosenness," which still endures even at the outer reaches of the North American Jewish imagination, does not sit all that comfortably with liberal notions of universalist reason. It would be exaggerating, of course, to claim that there is a flat-out contradiction between the idea of equality before the law and the notion that God favors one group before all others. But there is an important dissonance nonetheless, and achieving harmony between them takes work.¹¹⁹ In Rosenzweig's thought, the tension appeared as the wish to celebrate Jewish "redemption" on the one hand (something the Jews alone enjoy for the time being) while granting a qualified integrity to worldly politics on the other. Rosenzweig achieved a truce by casting them in utterly distinctive metaphysical spheres. As Amos Funkenstein once pointed out, the distinction repeats Augustine's split between the "City of God" and the "City of Man."¹²⁰ Thus, while arguing from premises that were by no means derived from liberalism, Rosenzweig nonetheless forged something like the liberal separation--between Church (or synagogue) and State. Earlier generations of North American Jewish readers could thus draw upon the resources of Rosenzweig's philosophy to defend their Judaism within a language seemingly consonant with liberal values. In doing so (a cynic might observe), American Jews may have derived some advantage from Rosenzweig's imprimatur as a European--hence "profound"--thinker. In this way, they could claim an Old World prestige for a New World struggle.

More recently, however, the displacement of liberalism by multiculturalist notions of diversity has considerably softened the apparent stalemate between the idea of Jewish chosenness and the language of universalism. But the new language of multicultural identity may itself help to explain Rosenzweig's newfound appeal. After all, the United States is often criticized for lacking a profound awareness of history. Rosenzweig's celebration of a uniquely Jewish essence "beyond" history thus sounds curiously akin to other American identity groups now clamoring for recognition. Of course, many of the other marginalized groups base their identity precisely upon all-too-real historical traumas. In this respect they somewhat resemble those American Jews who habitually invoke the Holocaust when extolling Jewish identity. The deeper similarity with Rosenzweig, however, is that some of these outsider groups ground their selfhood in past trauma only to insist that their identity, once solidified, grows recalcitrant to any further historical transformation. The general drive toward identity essentialism that is now ascendant in American political life may thus find in Rosenzweig a new and unlikely champion.

The most recent literature on Rosenzweig divides into two camps: those who recognize the tension between his thought and universalist ideals, and those who argue in one way or another that his thought may be mobilized on behalf of those ideals. In my view, however, the claim that Rosenzweig's philosophy strives toward something like an ethical public life has more to do with the continuing American-Jewish struggle to assert uniqueness in terms consonant with democracy. Some of the scholarship examined above seems unwilling to consider the implicit paradox--that even when Rosenzweig's philosophy yearned toward redemption for all, it claimed for the Jews alone an exclusive role as representative of this moral ideal. This was simply to make universalism the last stand of particularism. Here, indeed, is the old European-Jewish strategy of apologetics and self-affirmation, which upheld the Jews as the privileged agents of "ethical monotheism" in world civilization.

It is difficult to move beyond this stalemate. And it is not at all obvious that Rosenzweig himself would have wished to do so. Yet it seems to me that this central difficulty of Rosenzweig's legacy must be confronted rather than suppressed. Nor should it be camouflaged in the elaborate language of alterity, as some of his newest postmodern critics might prefer. Ultimately, such language only serves to keep Rosenzweig isolated behind the sturdy walls of commemoration and praise. Yet those very walls are the greatest obstruction to any honest assessment of his philosophy, because "it cannot be the primary aim of scholarship to foster ethnocentric self-confirmation."¹²¹ Perhaps the most promising feature of the recent scholarship is that it has begun to learn this comfortless and inconvenient lesson.

Notes

For their helpful comments upon an earlier draft of this essay I would like to thank Martin Jay, Samuel Moyn, David Myers, David Biale, Mitchell Hart, Nina Caputo, Eugene Sheppard, John Schott, and Helen Chernikoff. Special gratitude is due to the editors of Jewish Social Studies.

1. Franz Rosenzweig, "Das neue Denken," translated as "The New Thinking," in Franz Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli, trans. and eds. (Syracuse, N.Y., 1999), 67-102.

2. Indeed, in many cases Buber went back and revised the earlier volumes he and Rosenzweig had already published, which accounts for the confusing fact--which some commentators ignore--that one comes across properly "Buber-Rosenzweig" volumes from the 1920s as well as "Buber" volumes, distinctive in content and appearance, in later editions from the 1930s as well as the postwar period. Although there are dramatic differences in word choice, philological studies of the so-called "Buber-Rosenzweig" translation have not always taken care to distinguish among the editions.

3. Rosenzweig, "The New Thinking."

4. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 11.

5. Walter Benjamin, "Bücher, die Lebendig Geblieben Sind," originally in Die Literarische Welt 5, no. 20 (May 17, 1929): 6, reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 169-71.

6. The following list does not include the recent anthologies, which are treated in a separate section of this article. Noteworthy scholarly studies in order of publication since 1970 include Reinhold Mayer, Franz Rosenzweig, Eine Philosophie der dialogischen Erfahrung: Abhandlungen zum christlich-jüdischen Dialog, ed. Helmut Gollwitzer, vol. 4 (Munich, 1973); Else Freund, Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy of Existence, trans. Stephen L. Weinstein and Robert Israel (The Hague, 1979); Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, foreword by Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit, 1992); Adam Zak, Vom reinen Denken zur Sprachvernunft: Über die Grundmotive der Offenbarungsphilosophie Franz Rosenzweigs (Stuttgart, 1987); Gotthard Fuchs and Hans Henrix, eds., Zeitgewinn: Messianisches Denken nach Franz Rosenzweig (Frankfurt am Main, 1987); W. Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig, 2 vols. (Kassel, 1988); Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover, N.H., 1988); Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweig's Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel (St. Ottilien, 1989); Gibbs, Correlations; Stéphane Mosès, L'Ange de l'Histoire: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Paris, 1992); Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago, 1994); Arno Münster, ed., La Pensée de Franz Rosenzweig: Actes du Colloque Parisien organisé à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (Paris, 1994); Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine: Love, Poetry and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Atlanta, 1996); Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's "The Star of Redemption" (Albany, N.Y., 1999); Norbert Samuelson, A User's Guide to Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" (Richmond, Va., 1999); Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, N.J., 2000); and Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, 2001).

7. Quoting editor Milton Himmelfarb from a 1966 symposium published in Commentary, Arnold Eisen noted that "the Jewish thinker most influential on those polled was not Mordechai Kaplan or any other American but 'a German Jew... who died before Hitler took power and who came to Judaism from the very portals of the Church'--Franz Rosenzweig." See Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 149.

8. The phrase is from the excellent introduction by Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition," in his The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig.

9. Gershom Scholem, "Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption," reprinted in Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig.

10. Ibid., 40.

11. Ibid., 40-41.

12. On Heine's illness, see Ernst Pawel, The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (New York, 1995).

13. Quoted from the opening remarks at a recent Paris conference, published as La Pensée de Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Arno Münster (Paris, 1994).

14. Stefan George, Der Stern des Bundes (1913), in his Werke, 2 vols. (Munich, 1958), 345-94.

15. On the prominence of Jews in the George Kreis, see Wera Lewin, "Die Bedeutung des Stefan George-Kreises fur die deutsch-jüdische Geistesgeschichte," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 8 (1963), and Ernst Kahn, "Jews in the Stefan George Circle," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 8 (1963). See also Albert Verwey, Mein Verhältnis zu Stefan George, Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1895-1928 (Leipzig, 1936), and, on Verwey, see the brief but interesting review in the journal Rosenzweig most often published, "Stefan George und seine jüdischen Schüler," in Der Morgen 13, no. 3 (June 1937): 129-31.

16. Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften: "Die Älteste Systemprogram" (Berlin, 1937), 233-34.

17. Siegfried Kracauer, letter to Leo Lowenthal (from Ueberlingen, Aug. 31, 1923), cited from the Kracauer Archiv (Margach am Neckar) and/or the Lowenthal Archiv (Frankfurt), to be published in the German edition of the collected Kracauer-Lowenthal correspondance, edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen. I am grateful to Martin Jay for the quotation and reference.

18. Margarete Susman, "Exodus from Philosophy," originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 17, 1921, reprinted in Udoff and Galli, eds., Franz Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," 107.

19. Susman, "Exodus from Philosophy," 146, 133.

20. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, Engl., 1976).

21. I first presented this in an oral paper, "Redemption and Transcendence: Rosenzweig's Star in the Shadow of Heidegger," in the session "Re-Thinking Rosenzweig" along with excellent papers by Robert Gibbs and Leora Batnitzky, chaired by Barbara Galli (meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chicago, 1999). At the end of his new book, Eric Santner cites my finding (see his On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 143-46).

22. Susman, "Exodus from Philosophy," 148 (my emphasis).

23. Here Rosenzweig compliments Ehrenberg on his review in the Frankfurter Zeitung, but he points out that the second to last paragraph is wrong and reads stylistically as if it were later interpolated. See Rosenzweig writing to Hans Ehrenberg, Briefe, ed. Edith Rosenzweig and Ernst Simon (Berlin, 1935), no. 330 (Kassel, late Dec. 1921), pp. 413-14.

24. Cited from the English translation: Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York, 1970; reprint, Notre Dame, 1985), 253.

25. See R. Horwitz, "Franz Rosenzweig's Unpublished Writings," Journal of Jewish Studies (1969): 57-80, and Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, xvii. See also the remarks in Rosenzweig's letter to Rosenstock-Huessy (p. 76), where he refers to the crisis preceding this experience: "From July to September 1913 I was quite willing to die--to let everything within myself die."

26. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 10, hereafter cited as SE. All translations from this edition are my own.

27. Else Freund, Die Existenzphilosophie Franz Rosenzweigs (Leipzig, 1933). Originally printed as her dissertation under the title Die Philosophie Franz Rosenzweigs: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse seines Werkes Der Stern der Erlösung (Breslau, 1933; 2d ed., Hamburg, 1959). Published in English as Freund, Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy of Existence, trans. Weinstein and Israel.

28. On the Heidegger-Rosenzweig comparison, see Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (New York, 1965), 13, originally published as Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft, Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-Politischem Traktat (Berlin, 1930). Significantly, Strauss dedicated this book to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig. See also Karl Löwith, "M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig, or, Temporality and Eternity," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1942): 53-77, in German as "M. Heidegger und F. Rosenzweig, Ein Nachtrag zu Sein und Zeit," Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 12, no. 2 (1958): 161-87. A more recent treatment may be found in Alan Udoff, "Rosenzweig's Heidegger Reception and the Re-orgination of Jewish Thinking," in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig, W. Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., vol. 2 (Kassel, 1988), 923-50. See also my forthcoming book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (forthcoming, Berkeley, 2003).

29. Published in New York and for many years out of print, the volume is once again in print as Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 3d ed. (Indianapolis, 1998).

30. Ibid., xxv (my emphasis).

31. Ibid., xxx (my emphasis).

32. Ibid., 190-208.

33. For my English-language citations in the text below, I have consulted the new translation of "The New Thinking" from Udoff and Galli, eds., Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," 67-102, esp. 68-69.

34. For a graceful commentary on Rosenzweig's hostility to the notion of "religion" and a helpful summary of his place in the wider "Jewish renaissance," see Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Jewish Cultural and Spiritual Life," in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Volume 4. Renewal and Destruction: 1918-1945, Michael Meyer, ed. (New York, 1998), 127-69, esp. 144.

35. The passage betrays a spirit of rebelliousness against bourgeois life noticeable in so much of early Weimar philosophy and literature. Steven Aschheim eloquently characterizes this spirit in his essay "Beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic," in his Culture and Catastrophe (New York, 1996), 31-44.

36. As Mendes-Flohr has pointed out, Rosenzweig thus granted a "dialectical dignity" to assimilation, because it was the "alienated" or "acculturated" Jew who "brought new questions" to the tradition from the outside (see Mendes-Flohr, "Jewish Cultural and Spiritual Life," 140). Thus Rosenzweig belonged to what Peter Gay has called the Weimar culture of "outsider as insider," except that paradoxically for Rosenzweig the outsider was the acculturated and modernist Jew, whereas the "insider" was a new creation (see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider [New York, 1970]).

37. Udoff and Galli, eds., Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," 92.

38. See Rosenzweig's agressive letter to Rudolf Hallo (4.2.1923), where he argues that "I believe just as little as you in the special Jewishness of the new philosophy." In Briefe, no. 365, pp. 475-77.

39. See, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, "Rosenzweig's Message (A Review of Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought)," Commentary 15, no. 3 (Mar. 1953): 310-12.

40. Jacob B. Agus, "Review of Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought," Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 3 (July 1954): 273.

41. Ibid.

42. SE, 450.

43. SE, 339.

44. For Rosenzweig's complex relation to Jewish law, see, e.g., Rosenzweig, Briefe, no. 342, "An Rudolf Hallo" (Frankfurt am Main, 27.3.1922), p. 425.

45. Another issue, which I do not have room to discuss here, is the question of interfaith dialogue.

46. Will Herberg, "Rosenzweig's 'Judaism of Personal Existence': A Third Way Between Orthodoxy and Modernism," Commentary 10, no. 6 (Dec. 1950): 541-49.

47. Of the Jewish law, he writes that "Judaism [das Judentum] is not law. It creates law. But it is not law. It 'is' Jewish-being. Thus have I presented the matter in Star, and I know that it is correct." See also Rosenzweig's letter to Rudolf Hallo in Briefe, no. 342 (Frankfurt am Main, 27.3.1922), pp. 424-25.

48. Herberg, "Rosenzweig's 'Judaism,'" 549.

49. Similar but less successful was the dual identity of the novelist Jacob Wassermann, as recounted in his bitter memoir, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin, 1921), where he writes that the very phrase "German Jew" holds "two concepts that to unbiased vision reveal a wealth of misunderstandings, tragedy, contradictions, strife and suffering" (1).

50. Rosenzweig, Briefe, no. 364, "An Rudolf Hallo" (late Jan. 1923), pp. 472-75.

51. Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 94.

52. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 5 (my emphasis).

53. Mendes-Flohr makes exactly this more radical point in his insightful introductory essay to The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 1-19.

54. Agus, "Review."

55. Glatzer, ed., Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, xxvi.

56. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York, 1982), 94.

57. "The State of Jewish Belief: A Symposim," Commentary 42, no. 2 (Aug. 1966): 71-160: "The single greatest influence on the religious thought of North American Jewry, therefore, is a German Jew--a layman, not a rabbi--who died before Hitler took power and who came to Judaism from the very portals of the Church. Obviously we have not given Nahum Glatzer and Schocken Books anything like the thanks we owe them for telling us about Rosenzweig in English. Obviously, also since even his name is unknown to most of us, the rabbis have not spoken about him loudly enough" (71).

58. Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 150.

59. Arnold Eisen notes that Rosenzweig's theory of revelation, "his principal influence upon the symposium's participants and his chief contribution to modern Jewish thought,... sought to overcome the gap between the religious liberal's demand for human autonomy and the Orthodox submission to divine authority." Thus "Conservatives, in the middle all along, could also claim to be Rosenzweig's heirs." Ibid., 150.

60. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York, 1964).

61. Eisen, The Chosen People, 151.

62. Gershom Scholem, "On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption," originally published in Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 10 (1931): 15-17, reprinted in Judaica (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), 226-34, and published in English in Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael Meyer (New York, 1971), 320-24.

63. For a powerful defense of scholarly as opposed to self-affirmative tendencies in Jewish studies, see Peter Schäfer, "Jewish Studies in Germany Today," Jewish Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1996): 146-61.

64. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Hallo: for "Aught" and "Naught," see Part I, esp. 3-82; for "Reason," see esp. 13; for the "sources of the blood" (without "dark"), see 304. The latter omission lightens the romantic and threatening quality of Rosenzweig's phrase. On "darkness" as a romantic category, see Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism, which is also discussed below.

65. For many years, the only published volume of Rosenzweig's collected letters (Briefe) was the 1935 edition assembled by Edith Rosenzweig and Ernst Simon, a serviceable and densely packed text, though incomplete. Various other German editions of Rosenzweig's writings were in circulation, but some of the more interesting essays had not been reprinted since 1937 and were difficult to locate; see Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin, 1937).

66. Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften (Dordrecht, 1979-84).

67. For the neo-Kantian view, see Walter Kinkel, Hermann Cohen: Eine Einführung in sein Werk (Stuttgart, 1924), 93; Ernst Cassirer, "Hermann Cohen und die Erneuerung der Kantischen Philosophie," Kantstudien 17, no. 3 (1912): 222-51; and Paul Natorp, "Kant und die Marburger Schule," Kantstudien 17, no. 3 (1912): 193-221. A useful overview of Cohen's life can be found in Hans Leibeschütz, "Hermann Cohen and His Historical Background," in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 13 (1968): 3-172. On Cohen's socialism, see Steven S. Schwarzschild, "The Democratic Socialism of Hermann Cohen" Hebrew Union College Annual 28 (1956): 417-38, and Timothy Keck, "Kant and Socialism: The Marburg School in Wilhelmian Germany" (Ph.D. diss., The University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1975). Schwarzschild considers the existentialist reading of many of Cohen's key concepts an "illicit" attempt to "re-ontologize" into really existent entities what for Cohen were concepts with merely "functional" meaning. See Schwarzschild, "Introduction," in Cohen, Ethik, vol. 7, Werke, Hermann Cohen Archiv and Hermut Holzhey, eds. (Hildesheim, 1981), vii-xxx. Rosenzweig's anecdotes about Cohen have been disputed; see Martin Buber, "Die Tränen," originally in Jüdische Rundschau 33, no. 4 (1927-28): 4. Steven Schwarzschild, "Franz Rosenzweig's Anecdotes About Hermann Cohen," in Gegenwart im Rückblick: Festgabe für die Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 25 Jahre nach dem Neubeginn (Heidelberg, 1970), 209-18, esp. nn. 10, 13. For a summary of disputes over Cohen's image, see Jacques Derrida, "Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German," New Literary History 22 (1991): 39-95, and Peter E. Gordon, "Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism," Jewish Social Studies n.s. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 30-53.

68. There is, however, a recent French translation, with two astute essays: Gérard Bensussan, "Hegel et Rosenzweig: Le franchissement de l'horizon," and Paul-Laurent Assoun, "Avant-propos, Rosenzweig et la politique: Postérité d'une rupture," both in Hegel et l'Etat, trans. Gérard Bensussan (Paris, 1991), xix-xliii, v-xvii. See also Shlomo Avineri, "Rosenzweig's Hegel Interpretation: Its Relationship to the Development of His Jewish Reawakening," and Otto Pöggeler, "Rosenzweig und Hegel," both in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig, Internationales Kongress, Kassel 1986, Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, ed. (Freiburg, 1986/88), 839-53.

69. A welcome example is Bensussan, trans., Hegel et l'Etat. The introductory essays by Bensussan and Assoun contest the artificial division between Rosenzweig the Hegel scholar and Rosenzweig the philosopher of Judaism. See also Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweig's Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel (St. Ottilien, 1989); Otto Pöggeler, "Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Rosenzweig and Hegel," in Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 107-23; and Miriam Bienenstock, "Rosenzweig's Hegel," The Owl of Minerva 23, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 177-82.

70. Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig.

71. Olivier Mongin, Jacques Rolland, and Alexandre Derczanski, eds., Cahiers de la Nuit Surveillée, Franz Rosenzweig, vol. 1 (Paris, 1982).

72. Arno Münster, ed., La Pensée de Franz Rosenzweig: Actes du Colloque parisien organisé à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (Paris, 1994).

73. Frank Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, 2000).

74. Ibid., 79.

75. Rosenzweig, "Concluding Remark" to Hegel and the State, in ibid., 79.

76. The translators have "'theoretical-knowledge' lamentation"; see Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli, eds., Franz Rosenzweig: God, Man, and the World, Lectures and Essays (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998), 137. In the same series, see also Cultural Writings of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Barbara E. Galli with Leora Batnitzky (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000).

77. Udoff and Galli, eds., Rosenzweig's "The New Thinking," 197-99 n. 18.

78. Ibid., 60.

79. Thus Kant defines "Der gemeine Menschenverstand" as "bloß gesunden" (merely healthy) and "noch nicht kultivierten Verstand" (not yet cultivated understanding) in ¶40 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg, 1954), 144.

80. Franz Rosenzweig, Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, ed. Nahum Glatzer (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 31. (I cite the German original to bring out some of the philosophical niceties.) Putnam admits that "it is clear from what Rosenzweig wrote elsewhere" that he is not simply "anti-philosophical." Rather, Rosenzweig was concerned with calling for a different sort of philosophy, an existential philosophy that he refers to as simply "the new thinking." It remains an interesting question just how far the comparison to Wittgenstein is compatible with this "existential" dimension in Rosenzweig. See Putnam, "Introduction" in Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, trans. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 4.

81. Rosenzweig, Büchlein, 31.

82. Ibid., 108.

83. Putnam, "Introduction," 15.

84. Thanks are due to Samuel Moyn for many helpful conversations that allowed me to clarify my understanding of Levinas's thought. Also thanks to Aaron Schildkraut, a very astute Harvard undergraduate, for our Levinas discussions in an independent study (autumn semester, 2000). Of secondary literature on Levinas, I found especially useful Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other (West Lafayette, Ind., 1993).

85. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini (Dordrecht, 1961), 14. Levinas also mentions Rosenzweig in two essays: "Entre deux mondes: Biographie spirituelle de Franz Rosenzweg," reprinted in Difficile Liberté, 3d ed. (Paris, 1984), 253-81; and "Franz Rosenzweig: L'Étoile de la Rédemption," in Esprit 6, no. 3 (1982): 157-65.

86. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969), 28.

87. Hereafter, the page numbers of quotes from these works are given in the text.

88. Rosenzweig, Briefe, no. 261, "An die Mutter" (19.10.1918), p. 351: "I have just now for the first time noted how monarchist I am;... I want a king." This confession makes Michel Löwy's argument that Rosenzweig was an "anarchistic" or socialist thinker difficult to sustain; see Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford, 1988). For a thoughtful summary of Rosenzweig's politics, see Stefan Meineke, "A Life of Contradiction: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and His Relationship to History and Politics," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 36 (1991): 461-89.

89. Zechariah 14:9.

90. There is some question as to whether Levinas believed that the Arab Palestinians could be legitimately considered "the Other." Here Levinas seems to have lapsed from his typically expansive morality. Although this lapse is deplorable, one might argue (along the lines of my colleague Samuel Moyn) that Levinas's philosophical work "swings free" of its specific claims about Judaism and Jewish history. If so, Levinas's seeming insensivity to the place of the Palestinians in ethical life may be judged contingent to his core doctrine. The same distinction cannot be made for Rosenzweig. Whether Levinas's philosophy is indeed separable from his Judaism is a matter of ongoing debate.

91. Gibbs is more generous, calling Derrida "Levinas's most famous and perhaps greatest critic" (Gibbs, Correlations, 174). See Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 79-153.

92. Some appear understandably reluctant to recall Levinas's profound philosophical debt to Heidegger. In 1998, Richard Cohen published a portion of Levinas's pathbreaking essay-collection, En découvrant l'existance avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris, 1949), a work documenting Levinas's intellectual affinities with both philosophers. But Cohen's English translation omits several essays--among them, "Martin Heidegger et l'ontologie"; the translation is entitled (sans Heidegger) Discovering Existence with Husserl (Evanston, Ill., 1998).

93. For Levinas, the assertion that ontology precedes ethics itself "does violence to" the other. But why should this be the case? There is a common philosophical view that our contexts--or "frameworks"-- precede and make possible our encounter with objects. On this view, such contexts are basic for our recognizing the world and its inhabitants. For Levinas, however, even to claim that such contexts precede our recognition of others reasserts the arrogance of selfhood against alterity. He thus suggests that the context-precedence doctrine is itself warlike--i.e., it not only misses but actually works to efface our ethical life. See, e.g., Levinas, Totality and Infinity, esp. the prefatory remarks on "war" (21). But in granting morality a more basic place in our thinking than the rules that make our thinking intelligible, Levinas came perilously close to sacrificing thought itself upon the altar of an alleged "responsibility." Even to begin speaking about an "encounter" with the other, one would have to ascertain that it is an encounter, and this would require rules of meaning--what Kant called the categories, and Heidegger called Being. To hold such rules as basic for any experience of the other is hardly irresponsible; it is simply to hold that coherence must be first secured if our moral efforts are to be successful. Levinas's later work, Otherwise than Being would seem to grant this difficulty, hence his concession that philosophy itself--the "said"--does violence to ethics--the "saying." From the philosopher's point of view, however, this seems an admission that Levinas wishes to evoke a quasi-religious experience that is not only beyond but is in fact incompatible with reason.

94. See Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics." Cohen's marked rejection of Derrida deserves comment. Recall that, for Levinas, the entire philosophical tradition since Plato may be characterized as a singular effort to reduce the other to the same. But note that this broad characterization in fact only gets at certain philosophies. One style of philosophy it does not meet is empiricism, which escapes Levinas's definition because it grants objects robust independence of both meaning and of metaphysical existence beyond the perceiving self. According to Derrida, Levinas's circuitous and rhapsodic style and his twisting of logic are not incidental features of his thought, because they alert us to Levinas's interest in an experience beyond the self and its reasons. For Levinas, this experience is the encounter with the Other, which is said to be the origin of responsibility. Derrida thus notes that Levinas's style is symptomatic of his willingness to press beyond intelligibility in search of such a pre-rational "experience." If empiricism is the doctrine that such raw experience puts us in touch with independent meanings and metaphysically independent objects, then Levinas shares at last one key feature of empiricism. This is Derrida's conclusion, offered in a spirit of searching respect. According to Cohen, however, in calling Levinas an empiricist, Derrida is guilty of "ostracism" (R. Cohen, Elevations, 309). Not so. It is Levinas who (ironically) first excludes empiricism in his broad indictment of philosophy.

95. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, Engl., 1981), 38.

96. Levinas, "Foreword," in Mosès, System and Revelation, 21. Another comprehensive commentary is Norbert Samuelson, A User's Guide to Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" (Richmond Surrey, Engl., 1999).

97. Mosès, System and Revelation, 112.

98. Ibid., 293 (my emphasis).

99. SE, 264. On the comparison to Carl Schmitt, see, e.g., Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996), esp. 34-38.

100. Hereafter, the page numbers of quotes from Batnitzky's work are given in the text.

101. One might dispute Batnitzky's choice of the term "ethical monotheism" to describe Rosenzweig's idea of Jewish election, because "ethical monotheism" more typically describes the rationalist and liberal-reformist tradition forged in Mendelssohn's wake by such figures as Graetz and Cohen--the very tradition Rosenzweig rejected for its insufficient theory of revelation and its overestimation of reason. Moreover, Rosenzweig's theory of Jewish chosenness required an anti-universalist posture within the Jewish community: the Jews were models unto the world only insofar as they remained utterly apart from it. To call this doctrine ethical monotheism may thus be misleading.

102. Yet Gadamer does not extensively develop Heidegger's hermeneutics of practice and existence. It was Heidegger, not his student Gadamer, who understood that hermeneutic contexts are laid out in our lived activities, as is most easily discerned in "primitive" and religious symbolic systems. A similar idea animates Rosenzweig's theory of Jewish ritual. On practice in Heidegger, see his Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), esp. ¶11, 76-77, and ¶18, 114-23. For a lucid defense of "practice" in relation to the "question of Being," see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division I (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

103. "Excessive attention to the romantic language and imagery in The Star of Redemption has eclipsed its philosophical argument about the priority of communal structures" (Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, 213).

104. Leora Batnitzky, "Dialogue as Judgment, Not Mutual Affirmation: A New Look at Franz Rosenzweig's Dialogical Philosophy," Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (Oct. 1999): 523-44.

105. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine: Love, Poetry and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. David E. Klemm (Atlanta, 1996), 4.

106. Ibid., 15.

107. Ibid., 16.

108. Rosenzweig himself denied mystical purposes: "Die Tendenz ist antimystisch, nicht antigeistig" (The tendency is anti-mystical, not anti-intellectual). From Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, no. 330, "An Hans Ehrenberg" (Kassel, late Dec. 1921), pp. 413-14.

109. See Nahum Glatzer, "Was Franz Rosenzweig a Mystic?" in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History Presented to Alexander Altmann, S. Stein and R. Löwe, eds. (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1979). See also his passing remarks in Glatzer, ed, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, esp. xix, xxvii.

110. Moshe Idel, "Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah," in Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 162-71, and Gershom Scholem, "Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption," reprinted in ibid.

111. Elliot Wolfson, foreword to Greenberg, Better than Wine, xii.

112. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und Ihre Verdeutschung (Berlin, 1936), now in English as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, trans. and ed. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington, Ind., 1994).

113. Everett Fox, ed., The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes (New York, 1997).

114. Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators (McGill, 1995); Franz Rosenzweig, Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi, ed. Richard A. Cohen, trans. Thomas Kovach and Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Albany, N.Y., 2000).

115. For a bold criticism of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation and its theories as part of an anachronistic effort at identity performance in Weimar culture, see Siegfried Kracauer, "Die Bibel auf Deutsch: Zur Übersetung von Martin Buber und Franz Rosenzweig," originally printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung, now in a superb English edition with an extensive editorial apparatus as Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). A detailed account of Kracauer's perspective can be found in Martin Jay, "Politics of Translation: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21 (1976): 3-24. For an excellent summary of the translators' theories in their contemporary context, see Lawrence Rosenwald, "On the Reception of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible," Prooftexts 14 (1994), and Klaus Reichert, "'It is Time': The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation in Context," in The Translatability of Cultures, Figurations of the Space Between, Sanford Budnick and Wolfgang Iser, eds. (Stanford, 1996), 169-85. For a discussion of the translation emphasizing Rosenzweig's "hermeneutic" theory, see chapter 5 of Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation. For a reception history and discussion of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible with comparison to Weimar thought, see Peter Eli Gordon, "Translation and Ontology: Rosenzweig, Heidegger, and the Anxiety of Affiliation," New German Critique 77 (Spring-Summer 1999).

116. Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism, 11.

117. Ibid., 110.

118. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. This book appeared too recently for proper treatment here.

119. My argument applies only to Jews wedded to the traditional idea of religious election. For secular Jews, universalism became an important critical weapon against the default sovereignty of Protestant Christianity in American culture. See David A. Hollinger, "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century," in his Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 17-41.

120. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, 1993), 298-99.

121. Peter Schäfer, "Jewish Studies in Germany Today," Jewish Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1996): 152.

IU Press Journals Home Page

More about Jewish Social Studies

Library Recommendation

Tables of Contents

Advance Information

Copyright Clearance