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The concept of a resurrected culture after Auschwitz is illusory and contradictory, and every construct that still comes into being has to pay a bitter price because of that. But since the world…
I have always regretted one thing. When I ponder the Hebrew literature of all periods I ask myself: Why is it that our forefathers, who spent so much time on the study of matters of religion and law…
One hundred and odd years ago, the walls that imprisoned us Jews in a mental ghetto fell, torn down by Christian advocates of human rights who are assured of our eternal gratitude. After having been…
Some time ago it became known that Knut Hamsun was in the habit of expressing his views in an occasional letter to the editor of the local paper in the small town near which he…
Kinneret, 12 Nissan, 5674 [8 April 1914]
There was a time when the writing of a letter, like the receiving of a letter, was in itself like a holiday for me. I lived in letters—as I told you once and…
In my opinion, one cannot understand the development of the Science of Judaism except by taking note of the profound contradictions or, if you will, the unique dialectical tensions present within it…
At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence…
Our friend’s devotion to Spinozism is not to be seen as a mere hypothesis (as the Patriarch in Nathan puts it), postulated simply in order to discuss its pros and cons. Herr Jacobi, a man of…
The Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is—to be nice. This singular concept has played such an important role in…
In a phrase of Hermann Cohen, Maimonides is the “classic of rationalism” in Judaism. This phrase appears to us to be correct in a stricter sense than Cohen may have intended: Maimonides’…