German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday

Description

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. Introduction I The Emergence of Modern Religion: Moses Mendelssohn, Neoclassicism, and Ceremonial Aesthetics Moses Mendelssohn and the Three Paths of German Jewish Thought Reciting Jesus: Heine’s Nazarene Family Relations Religious Reform and Political Revolution in Mid-nineteenth Century Germany: The Case of Abraham Jakob Adler II Love-of-Neighbor and Ethics Out of Law in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen’s Liturgical Reasoning on the Moral Subject and the Moral Community The Discovery of the “True Plato” in Some Twentieth-Century German Jewish Thinkers Speaking Metaphysically of a Metaphysical God: Rosenzweig, Schelling, and the Metaphysical Divide Verification (Bewährung) in Franz Rosenzweig “Within Earshot of the Young Hegel”: Rosenzweig’s Letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of September 1910 “Brother Where Art Thou?” Reflections on Jesus in Martin Buber and the Hasidic Master R. Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev III “Thus Rome shows us our True Place”: Reflections on the German Jewish Love for Italy Facing Plurality (from Marginality): The German-Jewish Reception of William James Leo Strauss on Lessing’s Spinozism Strauss, Schmitt, and Peterson, or: Comparative Contours of the “Theological-Political Predicament” “Let me tell you a story”: Walter Benjamin and the History of the Future Jacob Taubes, Karl Löwith, and the Interpretation of Jewish History The Jews They Were and the Philosophers They Wished to Become No “Love of the Jewish People”? Robert Weltsch’s and Hans Jonas’s Correspondence with Hannah Arendt on Eichmann in Jerusalem Bibliography Paul Mendes-Flohr List of Authors