The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig

by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr

This volume of essays pays tribute to the philosophical legacy of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), a German Jew who is now celebrated as perhaps the most creative Jewish religious thinker of the twentieth century. Despite his brief life—he died two weeks shy of his forty-third birthday after a heroic struggle to overcome a terrible disease-Rosenzweig served to inspire a veritable spiritual and religious renaissance of German Jewry.' From the midst of assimilation and, indeed, from the threshhold of baptism, Rosenzweig affirmed Judaism as a living faith that he deemed to be of urgent relevance to the modern individual. Based on the centrality of divine revelation as a historical fact and an existential possibility, Rosenzweig's theology led him to abandon his erstwhile pursuit of an academic career—as he himself put it, "one perfectly "eligible' for a university lectureship" —and devote himself exclusively to the community of his fellow Jews."

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