Franz Rosenzweig

Franz Rosenzweig was one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a nonobservant Jewish family in Kassel, Germany, he considered converting to Christianity in 1913. But an experience he described as sudden and revelatory led him instead to seek a way of living a life of Jewish belief and observance. Rosenzweig was also moved to seek a philosophy that would legitimate revelation and commandedness (and thus Jewish law and its observance) against both the paralyzing impact of modern skepticism and what he regarded as an empty Jewish proto-existentialism (associated with the philosopher Martin Buber) that talked much about God but made no place for Jewish law. During World War I, while serving in the German army on the Balkan front, Rosenzweig completed (on postcards he mailed home) a systematic philosophical reenvisioning of Judaism, revelation, and commandedness, The Star of Redemption (1921). The Star’s effort to reconceptualize Jewish religious practice as a path to renewed encounter with a divine totality greater than and prior to human life and reason has since made it the most important foundational text of non-Orthodox Jewish religious thought and an influential text of religious philosophy generally. After World War I, Rosenzweig mirrored this return to Judaism in his professional life, opting to forego a university career to create instead an institute for intensive Jewish adult education. Although Rosenzweig himself opposed Zionism or really any Jewish politics, arguing that Jews and Judaism had to stand outside historical time, he worked closely with the Zionist Buber to create the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. The Lehrhaus drew the leading figures of post-assimilationist German Jewish thought, including Leo Strauss, Nathan Birnbaum, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Simon, Leo Baeck, and even scholars drawn toward Marxism like Leo Löwenthal, Erich Fromm, and Siegfried Kracauer. In the 1920s, Rosenzweig was afflicted by the degenerative disease ALS; he continued to write even when essentially paralyzed, dictating to his wife. He completed a translation of the poems of Judah ha-Levi) into German, and, with Buber, he began a boldly idiosyncratic new translation of the Hebrew Bible that recast German to follow the rhetorical structure of the biblical Hebrew.