Philosophy as Redemption and Illumination

This project circles around the two key figures Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). They belong among the most important representatives of their generation in terms of their efforts to explore, revitalise, and transform East European Jewish religious experience into new modes of thought through the tools of modern German philosophy, critical idealism, hermeneutics, Nietzschean genealogy, and Kierkegaardian existentialism. Rosenzweig is best known for Der Stern der Erlösung (1921), a work conceived in the trenches of the First World War. It is a systematic philosophical-theological treatise that combines Jewish and Christian theology with existentialist and idealist philosophy, which Rosenzweig would later describe as a “new thinking”. Scholem’s most well-known work is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), based on extensive research and the collection of historical material on the Kabbalah. Rosenzweig and Scholem were born into assimilated Jewish families in Germany, with family roots in East Prussia and Silesia, but devoted their lives to shaping philosophical systems capable of accommodating forgotten and disappearing traditions, thereby creating something new that transcended the boundaries of both Jewish and German thought. In order to understand how they developed these new modes of thought, the project explores the depths of German idealist philosophy both as a source of anti-Jewish sentiment (in Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel) and as a resource for overcoming the limits of reason and religion. It also takes into account how Rosenzweig and Scholem were shaped by the cultural alienation and spirit of critique that engulfed the generation of 1914, marked by the outbreak of the war and the subsequent collapse of European culture.