Episode of Jewish Romanticism, An

Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption

Publication Year: 1999

Assesses the impact of romanticism on the thought of Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. Examining romanticism in the thought of Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, this book compares his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, with Leo Baeck’s essay, “Romantic Religion,” and Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, texts representing two distinct and, to a large extent, opposed interpretations of romanticism. Rosenzweig’s thought was shaped by two intellectual histories: Germany’s and Judaism’s. Because romanticism had such a definite impact on modern German writing and thought, it becomes a question whether, and to what extent, Rosenzweig, too, was a romantic. Part of the force of the question derives from the tensions sometimes noted between Jewish and romantic worldviews. In this book, author Ernest Rubinstein shows The Star of Redemption to be along the spectrum of ideas that extends between Baeck and Schelling, and thus illustrates a qualified romanticism.

Published by: State University of New York Press

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Front Matter

A visitor to Germany today will find only fragmentary remains of the old, pre-Holocaust German-Jewish culture. The Jews living in Germany today do not, for the most part, descend from the flourishing Jewish communities of 1920s Berlin or Frankfurt. Still, through the monuments, memorials, and restored synagogues of 1990s Germany, it is possible to reexperience a piece of the old German-Jewish ...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xiii-

For permission to include copyright material in this volume, acknowledgment is gratefully made to the following publishers: Jewish Publication Society: for excerpts from "Romantic Religion,"...

Chapter 1 Introduction

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pp. 1-28

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) lived through two of the most extreme periods of modern German history: World War I and the Weimar Republic. Even in a national history beset by extremes, these two relatively short time spans stand out, the first for the cataclysmic ...

Chapter 2 A Reading of The Star of Redemption through "Romantic Religion"

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pp. 29-120

A common publication year of 1921 might seem the only affinity between Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption and the second edition of Leo Baeck's Essence of Judaism. When Rosenzweig reviewed the Essence of Judaism, in "Apologetic Thinking," published ...

Chapter 3 A Reading of The Philosophy of Art against "Romantic Religion"

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pp. 121-176

A "philosophy of art" hardly seems an appropriate test case for Baeck's theory of romantic religion. Art may claim to be an important part of that theory, but never the whole. And yet Schelling might advance his own The Philosophy of Art as a valid test of Baeck's theory, on grounds of a principle repeatedly stated in that work, that the part ...

Chapter 4 A Reading of The Star of Redemption through The Philosophy of Art

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pp. 177-264

In Rosenzweig's commentary on the "Oldest System-Program of German Idealism," the author of which he takes to be Schelling, he staunchly maintains that we may no longer name Schelling "the Proteus of Idealism."¹ This epithet fell to Schelling because of the...

Chapter 5 Conclusions

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pp. 265-270

In large measure, Baeck's theory of romanticism fails the test of Schelling's The Philosophy of Art. Redemption is not clearly the de terminative category of Schelling's Kunstreligion, nor is it unambiguously subsumable under experience, feeling, or passivity. Ethics is not dismissed from The Philosophy of Art, but receives two articu ...

Back Matter

Notes

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pp. 271-294

Index

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pp. 295-306

Back Cover

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E-ISBN-13: 9781438418186
E-ISBN-10: 1438418183
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791442753
Print-ISBN-10: 0791442756

Page Count: 306
Publication Year: 1999

Series Title: SUNY series in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion
Series Editor Byline: Michael Fishbane