German Jewish Thought Between Religion And Politics

Since the Enlightenment period, German-Jewish intellectuals have been prominent voices in the multi-facetted discourse on the reinterpretation of Jewish tradition in light of modern thinking. Paul Mendes-Flohr, one of the towering figures of current scholarship on German-Jewish intellectual history, has made invaluable contributions to a better understanding of the religious, cultural and political dimensions of these thinkers’ encounter with German and European culture, including the tension between their loyalty to Judaism and the often competing claims of non-Jewish society and culture. This volume assembles essays by internationally acknowledged scholars in the field who intend to honor Mendes-Flohr’s work by portraying the abundance of religious, philosophical, aesthetical and political aspects dominating the thinking of those famous thinkers populating German Jewry's rich and complex intellectual world in the modern period. It also provides a fresh theoretical outlook on trends in Jewish intellectual history, raising new questions concerning the dialectics of assimilation. In addition to that, the volume sheds light on thinkers and debates that hitherto have not been accorded full scholarly attention.

German-Jewish intellectuals have occupied center stage in the discourse on Judaism and modernity since the Enlightenment. Dedicated to Paul Mendes-Flohr, this volume explores the complex interaction between Jewish thought and the often competing claims of non-Jewish society and culture, thus creating a rich image of German Jewry|´s intellectual world in the modern period. The outcome is a unique collection of essays that provides crucial new insights into the religious and political dimension characterizing the thought of those populating the pantheon of German-Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

"Modern Jewish thought" is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France's development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the French milieu. This anthology of modern French Jewish writing offers the first look at how this significant and diverse body of work developed within the historical and intellectual contexts of France and Europe. Translated into English, these documents speak to two critical axes--the first between Jewish universalism and particularism, and the second between the identification and disidentification of French Jews with France as a nation. Offering key works from Simone Weil, Vladimir JankŽlŽvitch, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Memmi, HŽlne Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and many others, this volume is organized in roughly chronological order, to highlight the connections linking religion, politics, and history, as they coalesce around a Judaism that is unique to France.

In this book Rose illuminates the extraordinary creativity of Jewish intellectuals as they reevaluated Judaism with the tools of a German philosophical tradition fast emerging as central to modern intellectual life. While previous work emphasizes the "subversive" dimensions of German-Jewish thought or the "inner antisemitism" of the German philosophical tradition, Rose shows convincingly the tremendous resources German philosophy offered contemporary Jews for thinking about the place of Jews in the wider polity. Offering a fundamental reevaluation of seminal figures and key texts, Rose emphasizes the productive encounter between Jewish intellectuals and German philosophy. He brings to light both the complexity and the ambivalence of reflecting on Jewish identity and politics from within a German tradition that invested tremendous faith in the political efficacy of philosophical thought itself.

Jacob Taubes is one of the most influential figures in the more recent German intellectual scene—and beyond; with crucial contributions to hermeneutics, political theory, and phenomenology of time and the philosophy of (Jewish) religion, to name but of few areas in which the highly controversial Taubes was active.

The last generation of German Jewish philosophers—the best known (Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck, Strauss, Scholem) and the less known (Breuer, Birnbaum, Klatzkin, Guttmann)—are thoroughly explicated here with generous primary text citations appearing in English for the first time.

A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth century Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period—and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea. Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism—largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law—can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America. More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.

Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern society's gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence. After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers, historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so, they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish perspective.