This project investigates Walter Benjamin’s and Hannah Arendt’s modes of addressing the “break in tradition” that constitutes modernity through methods and figures of thought derived from Jewish textual and interpretive traditions, particularly the biblical myths of Creation and Babel. Their critical engagement with Jewish and Christian religious traditions is examined as continuous with the philosophical and translational ambitions of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, and hence as belonging to a culture of Enlightenment learning reoriented around sacred texts. My reading is framed by a reconsideration of the question of Jewish secularisation raised by representatives of the renaissance of Jewish philosophical and theological thought from the late 1980s onwards. With a view to the development of Jewish thought in the Baltic region and Eastern Europe, I also explore the conceptual tools provided by the Marrano methodology recently developed by Agata Bielik-Robson and her Polish research team. The project thus opens onto broader questions concerning the transmission of Jewish religious and intellectual traditions, as well as the political and material-institutional preconditions for the emergence and re-emergence of Jewish thought and literature in the Baltic interwar and postwar periods.
Ulrika Björk is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Södertörn University. Since 2024 she is the Principal Investigator of the project Experimenting with Traditions: The Life and Afterlife of Twentieth-Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region. Her main research areas are phenomenology and the tradition of continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and early twentieth-century Jewish thought. She has published Poetics of Subjectivity: Existence and Expressivity in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy (diss., 2008), co-edited Style, Sex, Otherness: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (in Swedish, 2011) and The Art of Acting, the Art of Thinking: Hannah Arendt on the Political (in Swedish, 2012). Her research within the project focuses on the German-Jewish generation of 1914, including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Edith Stein. She recently edited a special issue on political theology for Scandinavian Jewish Studies (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2025) and has one forthcoming article in Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy and Culture (ed. Agata Bielik-Robson).
