The Judeo‐Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig by Daniel M.Herskowitz (London: The British Academy, 2025), + 273 pp.

Daniel Herskowitz's study of the Star of Redemption (1921), a book that for the past century ranked as the literary lodestone for modern Jewish thinking, wants to shift the thought of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) back into the gravitational field from within which he argues the Star first took its orbital flight, namely, the Ritschl school of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century neo-Protestant theology, specifically the systematic theological writings of Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922), colleague and polemical interlocutor of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and the teacher of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann in Marburg. While not the first to examine Rosenzweig's writings from a critical rather than charitable perspective, Herskowitz is the first to center an analysis of the Star in the contexts of modern Protestant theology, Evangelical missiology, and Prussian imperialism (the “Ideas of 1914”). If correct, this analysis suggests that the theological portrayal of Christianity and Judaism as linked by the experience of revelation and separated by their respective roles in the schema of redemption might also be understood as a spiritual autobiography of the author himself, i.e., as an expression of Rosenzweig's own Lebens- and Weltanschauung, one divided into two different identities, namely, that of the Christian Rosenzweig almost became and that of the Jew he was striving to be. What is at stake, then, as the book's title suggests, is Rosenzweig's own Judeo-Christianity. For those unfamiliar with the Star of Redemption, it is an ingeniously conceived and brilliantly written work and a classic of twentieth-century German philosophical prose. It starts from the fundamental realities of experience that constitute the “All” as represented in philosophical thinking “from Parmenides to Hegel” in terms of metaphysics, metaethics, and metalogics that give us the ever-present “elements” of God, Man, and World. These static elements are set in motion by way of (biblical) revelation in that they step out of their conceptual enclosures and begin to relate to one another in the direction of specific “vectors”: God addresses Man through speech (“Love me!”) that discloses (and places) the World as ever-renewed Creation and sets Man on the path to redemptive action. The Star commences with a meditation on death that may be compared to Heidegger's concept of Sein zum Tode (in Being and Time, 1927) and ends on a “threshold” to life that points beyond the book. What begins with logically distinct concepts passes through the grammar of speech and culminates in the three-dimensional configuration of a “star” whose light irradiates from the One who in the end will be All, as liturgically anticipated by the Jews and pursued by acts of transformative love by Christians. The bridge between Part I (the eternal proto-world of concepts) and Part III (the path toward redemption) is the poetic encounter of lover and beloved, as expressed in the Song of Songs. It is by way of this experience that World is disclosed as Creation and the historical future yields to prayer and action. The strength of the Star rests on its rich language, its intricate architecture, and its extraordinary scope of vision. What is Rosenzweig's Judeo-Christianity? In Herskowitz's reading, Rosenzweig's philosophy responds to and develops further the liberal Protestant views of the Ritschl school, adopting its Kantian orientation that ties “religion” (a term Rosenzweig despises) to personal morality and philosophical ethics and endorsing the Christian world mission that Herskowitz ties to the German colonialist ambitions of the age. Rosenzweig thereby appears to perpetuate what in hindsight may be called the bourgeois theology of the Wilhelminian age. Despite his vigorous defense of the Jewish people as a “community of blood” and of Jewish liturgical existence as an anticipation of the eschaton, Herskowitz's Rosenzweig leans more than casually on an essentially Protestant conception of the “religious apriori” (a term Rosenzweig does not use). What rings true about this critical assertion is less the historical genealogy of Rosenzweig's thinking than the observation, first articulated by Gershom Scholem, that Rosenzweig's philosophy is not simply Jewish but also in important respects rather thoroughly Christian. (Neither Scholem nor Herskowitz mean this as a compliment.) Methodologically speaking, Herskowitz juxtaposes extensive paraphrases of the three parts of the Star with expositions of antecedent Protestant theological writings, predominantly representing the school of Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), who is mentioned in the Star, and Wilhelm Herrmann, who is not. In Herskowitz's words, the “echoes” between Rosenzweig and Protestant theology are established by “close textual reading, a detailed thematic analysis, and historical contextualization” of “the Star in the general debates of Protestant thought of the early 20th century.” This method of contextualizing (some) of the themes mentioned by Rosenzweig in the Star and elsewhere “reveals that Rosenzweig addresses similar challenges, formulates similar critiques, proposes similar solutions, develops his thought in similar directions, and employs similar vocabulary to the Protestant thinkers around him” (1, emphases added). “Similar,” of course, is not “the same.” The author means for this cultural-historical contextualization of Rosenzweig in the Protestant theological discourse of his time to lead the reader to a better understanding of Rosenzweig as an idiosyncratic modern thinker, a thinker whose idiosyncrasy, the author argues, has long been obscured by readers who wished to read Rosenzweig forwards rather than backwards, as the founding figure of a fecund tradition of Jewish philosophical thinking rather than as a participant in Protestant debates, as a teacher rather than a student, a man ahead of his time rather than of his time, an original thinker and an innovator rather than a “faithful follower of Marburg theology” (263). There is something undeniably true about this observation, and Herskowitz is the first to give this realization the proper weight in the attempt to understand Rosenzweig as he understood himself. Rosenzweig's view of Christianity is not just an homage to his (antagonistic) friendship with Eugen Rosenstock or to his cousins Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg but also one he had embraced himself before he found theological arguments in favor of remaining a Jew. These arguments are part of the Star, though they are only a part. We tend to think that Rosenzweig dismissed Christianity when he turned away from the baptismal font and left it to his cousins and friends to live Christian lives and for them to articulate the meaning of the Christian way. But while he turned his back on the possibility (or needfulness) of a Christian life for himself, he very much retained and cultivated his understanding of the Christian global mission as a redemptive and transformative agency grounded in revelation. And while he refused to publish his views on contemporary affairs under his own “Jewish” name (he toyed with Germanic pen-names like “Adam Bund” or “Franz Hesse” instead) he nevertheless could not refrain from weighing in on the war, its aims, and on the future shape of a greater Central Europe (“Mitteleuropa”) under German rule. As Herskowitz shows, these two things—Rosenzweig's Christian worldview and his vision for the role of Germany in the world—resonate. None of this is far-fetched, considering that Rosenzweig was also the author of a book on Hegel and the State, written under the tutelage of his Freiburg teacher, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), the author of Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (1908), a historian of ideas of German nationalism, and an apologist for Prussian militarism. (Herskowitz does not mention Hegel und der Staat.) The relocation of Rosenzweig—a student of Rickert and thus usually associated with the Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism—to Marburg is thematized in chapter 7 (“The Legacy of Marburg: Cohen, Herrmann, Rosenzweig”) and it is established by way of distancing Rosenzweig from his teacher Hermann Cohen and showing him to be siding with Herrmann in the most important respects. As Herskowitz points out correctly, Rosenzweig was well-aware of the debate between Cohen and Hermann on the question of the “reality” of God. While Cohen to some extent accepted the challenge and tried to meet Herrmann half way in writing his 1915 treatise on the concept of religion (Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie), Cohen's late philosophy of religion (Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, posthumously published in 1919) remains committed to the concept of a religion of reason adumbrated by the biblical prophets and enshrined in the Jewish liturgy of the Day of Atonement where the concrete individual reconstitutes itself as a moral subject “before God.” While Rosenzweig sees Cohen's philosophy of religion as “breaking through the veil of idealism,” Herskowitz correctly emphasizes that this interpretation distorts Cohen. Drawing on Rosenzweig's introduction to Cohen's Jewish writings (1924), Herskowitz shows that the tendentious portrayal of Cohen's intellectual path creates the possibility for Rosenzweig to cast himself as a loyal “follower” of Cohen's (231) while crediting Herrmann with having pushed Cohen toward a position that is fully articulated only by Rosenzweig himself. Herskowitz emphasizes the linkage between Christian world mission and Empire in the Star. “The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig” thus serves as a painful reminder of the strange hubris (or naïveté) of German academics who were initially completely convinced of the justice and innocence of the German war aims and dismissed reporting, for example about the October 1914 massacres of the German army in Belgium, as enemy propaganda. (See the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three to the Civilized World.) But the “Reich” Rosenzweig speaks of in the Star as the redemptive formation of Christian striving does not necessarily map onto the contours of Bismarck or Wilhelm II. Yes, the Kaiserreich was an Empire. But Rosenzweig (in contrast to his teacher Meinecke) opposed the rhetoric of Pan-Slavists as much as he dismissed ethnic nationalism as a valid foundation for politics. A Denkschrift of Rosenstock's he helped bring to the attention of Friedrich Naumann in 1914 advocated for an integration of Polish populations into the post-war order of Central Europe, distinguishing between Slavs and “Moscovites” (i.e., Czarist imperialism). And “Reich” in the Star does not refer to the German Empire but the Kingdom of God (“Dein Reich komme!” as it says in the German version of the Lord's Prayer.) The Star is never simply political, just as it is never simply theological or philosophical. Its vision of a redemptive orientation is grounded in faith and oriented by revelation. It articulates the mandate that emanates from revelation and manifests in two liturgical forms: the introverted one of the Jews and a transformative movement driven by the desire for the Kingdom of God on earth. It is important to note that for Rosenzweig and his group of friends, this movement can no longer be contained by academic theology or by confessional churches, but it has long since entered the social and political world where it may act without any conscious commitment to religion. Christian faith may, in fact, be completely “anonymous,” as Bonhoeffer was to put it. Herskowitz correctly locates Rosenzweig's point of departure in the struggle with historicism. But this struggle did not take place solely among theologians. One glance at Heidegger's near contemporary turn to medieval and early Christian writings to take a methodological stab at the phenomenology of religion illustrates that, following war and revolution, all conventional thought about human history was felt to be in crisis and every intellectual circle and the artistic avant garde all had to reorient themselves, find their bearings, and—most of all—find the right word for the moment. It is in this situation that the Star appeared, pointing beyond imperialism toward the Reich and beyond confessionalism toward the work of transforming the world through love that is mandated by faith. It remains uncomfortable for Jewish thought that Rosenzweig assigned the Jews a purely liturgical existence. As Jews they had to stay out of politics, even out of the world-transforming social justice work identified as essentially Christian. This implies the judgment that whenever a Jew, or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or anyone without ostensible “religion” engages in the world-transforming work of social justice, they are—in Rosenzweig's terms—doing it in preparation for the kingdom of God. Rosenzweig is not a nationalist, not even a Jewish nationalist. Nation finds its meaning in procreation alone, not in the political sphere. There is a lot—also a lot wrong or problematic—one can do with Rosenzweig if one holds one's own thinking close to the space he opens up for himself and others who want to think through what it means to be oriented by revelation and then also live accordingly. It seems to me that Herskowitz essentially de-canonizes the Star, using the tools of historicist “echo location” to shove the Star into an attic of bygone theological debates, without much consideration for its enduring luminescence. There is a lot he shows that rings true enough, but the result of this diligent work ultimately trivializes what is at stake for Rosenzweig and perhaps for us.