Über den jüdischen Hintergrund der Philosophie von Hermann Cohen (review)

There is an odd statement made in 1918 by Hermann Cohen's most faithful disciple, the Berlin philosopher Benzion Kellermann. Looking back on Cohen's life and works in a philosophical obituary, Kellermann wrote: "In a certain sense, for Cohen, Maimonides stood even above Kant."¹ To fully appreciate the weight of this sentence it is necessary to recall that Cohen is known and celebrated for his decisive contribution to Neo-Kantian philosophy, devoting no less than six of his major works to the interpretation and further development of Kantian Critical thought. Nevertheless, this new collection of essays by the late Dieter Adelmann (1936-2008) attempts precisely at a demonstration of the truth of Kellermann's claim—to show that Hermann Cohen was rather the climax of an important trend in Jewish philosophy that probably began with Maimonides. Thus, Adelmann's project is essentially to provide proof that Cohen came from and felt always part of the movement for a Wissenschaft des Judentums, inasmuch as Cohen's own systematic philosophy cannot be understood without its Jewish context, especially Cohen's teachers, predecessors and contemporary Jewish scholars in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.

Dieter Adelmann was not a university professor; he worked as a journalist for most of his life, taking interest in Cohen's philosophy for almost private reasons, it seems. In the 1990s, Adelmann was among the few scholars who revived Cohenian research in Europe after this discipline had been neglected for many decades, the heroic efforts of Steven Schwarzschild and some others in North America notwithstanding. Most of the essays in this volume are unpublished lectures by Adelmann from the years 1998 to 2005. Adelmann planned to collect those texts into a book still in his lifetime, but though he started to work on the volume in 2007 together with his friend Görge Hasselhoff, Hasselhoff ultimately had to complete the edition alone after Adelmann passed away in September 2008. The outcome is a collection of impressive force, a book that if taken seriously, can considerably change the face of Cohen scholarship in the direction of reading the philosopher once again in the overall context of the Wissenschaft des Judentums that preceded him—and emphatically away from the direction of reading him as merely giving the first cautious signs of the Jewish existentialism that followed Cohen.

Divided into three parts, the books contains Adelmann's lectures and articles on cantorial music, Jewish history and systematic philosophy—all of them devoted to the interpretation of Hermann Cohen's thought in a wider or narrower sense. While the musical section will at least illuminate an often neglected aspect of Cohen's thought,² it is the historical middle section of the book that really has much to offer in the way of new and daring theories concerning the emergence of major elements in the philosophy of Hermann Cohen. In general, Adelmann claims that Cohen, for his entire life, was under the influence of the Breslau school of the nascent Conservative Movement—not only because he had studied during some formative years at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary, but also because Cohen for a long time after he left this institution still cooperated closely with several Breslau scholars. According to Adelmann, it was, for example, the Breslau teacher and later Chief Rabbi Manuel Joel who first stimulated the young Cohen's life-changing interest in Kant. This may well be true—Joel indeed was the first genuine philosopher teaching at the seminary; in fact he deserves the credit for establishing philosophy as an independent discipline within Wissenschaft des Judentums. In addition to that he was one of the few dedicated Jewish Kantians, long before Otto Liebmann initiated the "Back to Kant" movement in 1865. And although Joel probably did not yet teach philosophy during Cohen's years at the seminary, the family...