An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (review)

Many of the students who took philosophy courses at the University of Toronto with Emil Fackenheim in the forty years or so that he taught there speak of him as an unforgettable teacher. Though he writes in the book under review about wearing two hats – philosophical scholarship and Judaism – for at least the first two decades of his teaching career it was mainly the former.

But in response to Israel’s Six Day War in 1967 and the generally perceived threat to the Jewish state, and thus to the future of the Jewish people, barely two decades after the Holocaust, Judaism came to dominate Fackenheim’s thinking and writing. In the Jewish world he is remembered first and foremost as a teacher who challenged a generation of Jews to feel personally responsible for the survival of Judaism, and Christians to rethink their theology in the terrible light of the Holocaust.

Unlike most philosophers, Fackenheim decided to act out his convictions. Arguing that Jewish survival was possible only if the Jewish state was strong and vibrant, upon retirement in the 1980s he and his family went to live in Israel. Significantly, it was his non-Jewish wife Rose who was the driving force behind the move.

I knew Fackenheim only in the Israel period of his life, though I was familiar with his writings much earlier. His first major book, Quest for Past & Future, published in 1968, helped me to be a liberal Jew. When around the same time, at a symposium in New York, he gave dramatic expression to the duty of all Jews to survive as Jews in order not to give Hitler a posthumous victory, he made it possible for me and many of my colleagues to speak cogently about Judaism after the Holocaust.

Though in 1982 I published a book with the title Beyond Survival as a mild reaction against Fackenheim, I remained his admirer and friend. For me, as for many of my contemporaries, he was the towering figure in contemporary Jewish thought.

Despite the valiant editorial achievement by Fackenheim’s disciple Professor Michael Morgan of Indiana University, and Morgan’s excellent foreword, this is a difficult book. Its fragmentary nature – Fackenheim wrote and rewrote it over many years before he died in 2003 – covers several themes simultaneously: general and Jewish philosophy, reflections on the end of German Jewry, and Israel, as well as salient features of his own life.

In many ways it was a tragic life. He studied for the rabbinate in Berlin during the Nazi period and ended up in a concentration camp before his exile in Scotland. Considered by the British as an enemy alien, he was then shipped off to Canada where he completed his PhD and made his home. Though his parents and a brother came out of Germany in time, a second brother died there, perhaps by his own hand. His first-born son was autistic and now lingers in an institution. His much younger wife suffered from Alzheimer’s soon after they came to Israel and died there in 1998.

But perhaps an even greater tragedy was that, though he embraced Israel, Israel didn’t embrace him. Had he stayed in Toronto he would have been celebrated as the great Jewish thinker that he was; in Israel he was virtually ignored. Though he didn’t seem to complain too much, it’s not difficult to sense his disappointment. That is why his annual visits to Toronto, where he was warmly welcomed as a lecturer and a friend, were so important for him. In the last decade of his life, he often visited his native Germany to be honoured and appreciated by a generation that knew not Hitler.

The reader is made to reflect on an interesting albeit difficult life and its impact on the University of Toronto and beyond and, in that light, to try to grasp something of the context of Fackenheim’s thinking, its roots...