In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Hermann Cohen and the Jewish Jesus
  • Robert Erlewine (bio)

There is a distinguished German Protestant tradition that understands Jesus, that is, his thoughts and consciousness, as essentially Greek rather than Jewish. Included in this tradition are such luminaries as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Adolf von Harnack. Hermann Cohen is not the first Jewish thinker to oppose this notion and insist upon Jesus’s Jewishness.1 However, his account of the Jewish Jesus, particularly as it is developed in his two major treatises on philosophy of religion, Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie [The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy] and Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, is not only highly original and subversive in its own right, but it has yet to be studied systematically despite its centrality to his philosophy.

In this article, I argue that a central element of Cohen’s philosophy of Judaism is the usurpation of Christianity’s theological foundations. That is, by turning Jesus into a Jew, Cohen thereby transforms Christianity into the mythical and irrational foil against which he illuminates and elaborates his philosophy of Judaism. With his philosophical account of Jesus, Cohen does not merely attempt to bring about transformations within Protestantism—to guide it toward rationality, to make it more Jewish, as it were—but he also increasingly displaces Greece as the arbiter of rationality and universality, at least in regard to religion. In Cohen’s engagement with the Jewish Jesus, we find a Jewish thinker doing nothing less than challenging the Christian foundations of Western culture.

The Jewish Jesus

Susannah Heschel, more than any other scholar, has elucidated the profound role that the figure of Jesus plays in modern Jewish thought. She writes: “A crucial image for modern Jewish thought is the figure of Jesus as a pious, loyal Jew . . . [T]he modern Jewish understanding of Christian origins is not merely a matter of Jews wishing to ‘set the record straight.’ Rather, it demonstrates a Jewish desire to enter into the Christian myth and thereby claim the power inherent in it.”2 [End Page 210] Heschel postulates that the Jewishness of Jesus functions as a core element of German–Jewish thought. One might say that the interest of Jewish thinkers in Jesus is indicative of an often unspoken but highly significant element of German–Jewish thought, namely that it is inextricably bound up with Christianity in its own self-definition.

In this article, I read Cohen’s account of Judaism as demonstrating “a Jewish desire to enter into the Christian myth and thereby claim the power inherent in it.”3 Where other Jewish scholars, from Abraham Geiger to Leo Baeck, have argued that Jesus was really a Pharisee and understood himself as such, Cohen does not talk about his teachings but rather focuses squarely on his passion, his crucifixion.4 One of Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism’s most intriguing and infamous elements is not merely its celebration of suffering but its appropriation of this Christological trope for Judaism. Cohen celebrates passages from the Bible, such as the Servant Songs in Deutero-Isaiah, which have long been invoked by Christians as foreshadowing the notion of vicarious atonement and Jesus’s martyrdom. Cohen recognizes Jesus as a suffering servant, as “an imitation of the messianic imagination of Deutero-Isaiah.”5 However, for Cohen, it is precisely in his function as a suffering servant that Jesus is a Jew rather than distinct from Judaism.

Cohen draws attention to Jesus in his role as martyr. And martyrdom takes courage, a specifically religious virtue for Cohen. Indeed, Cohen references the Talmudic injunction to the Jew to martyr himself or herself rather than engage in idolatry.6 As a result, all Jews live constantly under the threat of martyrdom, or as Cohen puts it, “the sword of Damocles has hung over the Jew throughout his history.” Given the enormous pressures to engage in idolatry, the pressure to deny pure monotheism—that is, to abandon Judaism—just by living as a minority in a dominant Christian culture, Cohen explains, “one may in all sobriety call the historical life of the Jew the life of courage...

pdf

Share