Silence and Translation: Franz Rosenzweig’s Paralysis and Edith Rosenzweig’s Life

On March 28, 1920, Franz Rosenzweig and Edith Hahn were married in a small ceremony held in Berlin.¹ This was not a conventional marriage on several critical counts, not the least of which was Franz’s preexisting—and continuing—romantic involvement with another woman. It is a curious fact that there are no photos extant from the nine-year period of the Rosenzweigs’ marriage that show the two of them together.² Whatever the reason for this, it bears a sad sort of symbolic meaning: an alienation from each other and the invisibility of Edith in the attention paid to Franz during his years of prominence in the interwar German Jewish Renaissance.

At the time of the marriage, Franz was thirty-three years old and had already written his masterwork The Star of Redemption, published the subsequent year. Seven years earlier, he had undergone his famous “deconversion” from incipient Christian to committed Jew. A few months after the wedding, the Rosenzweigs moved to Frankfurt, where Franz took up the direction of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, one of the centerpieces of the phenomenon known as the Weimar Jewish Renaissance.

Edith, who was twenty-five years old when she married, was also a baalat tshuvah. Born into the assimilated professional class, her immediate family background was similar to Franz’s. But her family were more recent arrivals in Berlin from the Jewish East: her father, who came to Berlin for his education, grew up the son of a rabbi in Stolp, Pommern (Pomerania), a culturally Polish region belonging to Prussia.³ In their retirement, the father’s parents lived with Edith’s family in Berlin, and she would occasionally accompany her grandmother to the synagogue, which she admired for its grandeur while not quite understanding what was going on.⁴

As Edith herself explained it, her personal commitment to Judaism was a process that began long before she met Franz Rosenzweig; in fact, it began when she was six or seven years old, under the inspiration of her public school religious education teacher.⁵ On the first day of classes, the children were separated for religious instruction and the Jewish children, twenty-five or thirty percent of the class, were taken to another classroom. Not identifying herself by the term “Jew,” Edith blithely stayed put. It was up to her parents, who discovered the situation that evening, to explain to her that she was different.⁶

To her parents’ consternation, for her that difference was positive: she pursued her interest in Judaism and attempted—apparently unsuccessfully—to introduce some observance into the household. When she finished high school, she enrolled in a communal training program for teachers of Hebrew and Judaica in Berlin, as the best way for a woman to obtain a systematic Jewish education.⁷ Her instructors were unable to accommodate the level of learning she desired, which included Talmud, but she finished the program with a diploma following an examination written about theodicy in the work of Philo of Alexandria.⁸

Franz became acquainted with Edith’s family, the Hahns, in 1907 while at the university in Berlin (his mother was an old acquaintance of Frau Hahn), but at the time he was twenty years old and Edith only eleven or twelve years old. The two became further acquainted when Franz returned to Berlin in 1913–1914 to study with Hermann Cohen at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums; she may have attended some lectures there with him.⁹ By 1918, she was clearly on his radar, and a reunion in Kassel in late 1919, where Edith was visiting a friend, led to the engagement.¹⁰

Franz’s intellect and passion for Judaism were an attractive force for Edith; he was attracted to her because he had determined to commit to the mitzvah of marriage and she was quite evidently an appropriate partner in this. There is a famous passage in The Star about the centrality of family to Jewish life: “Not until he is married does [a Jewish man] become a true member of his...