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7~6 BOOK REVIEWS Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times: From Mendelssohn to Rosenzweig. By NATHAN RoTENSTREICH. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, Pp. 282. $6.50. Modem Judaism is usually considered to have begun about the time of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This period marked a transition within the Jewish community from isolation (where the Jew was accepted on sufferance) to new-found equality. This new status of the Jew as a "supposed " equal or citizen in the land in which he lived had a profound impact upon the Jewish intellectual community. Prior to the actual granting of Jewish citizen rights, and following it, there was an abundance of philosophic writings in which Jewish philosophers attempted to relate contemporary philosophical thought to Jewish (religious) thought. This was a response to what might be called a re-entering of the Jewish people into history. The process received further impetus when the third Israeli Commonwealth was established in 1948. There were at least two basic problems inherent in this development. The first was the necessity in the minds of the various writers to force or interpret Judaism in terms of contemporary philosophy no matter how alien it might have been to the spirit of Judaism. (It has often been pointed out that Judaism does not become too involved with philosophical or theological speculation except in response to other challenging systems of thought). The second problem (often related to the first) was the conflict between the universalist and the particularist approach. There is the need in every religious tradition to validate its universalist claims and then its particularistic claim that its universal truth can be attained either solely, or especially, through its uniqueness. (It is my understanding, for example, that the prophets who preached universal concepts were particularists who believed that the universal values were to be found in and through the community of Israel.) In Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times Dr. Nathan Rotenstreich, rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the Jewish philosophical trends of the modern period. He considers, first, those philosophers of the latter half of the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the early twentieth centuries who emphasized the primacy of ethics in the sphere of faith. The author indicates that moral imperatives have always been an inseparable part of the religious life of the Jew. Moses Mendelssohn viewed Judaism as primarily a system of legislation while S. D. Luzzatto argued that Mendelssohn's conception of Judaism rested on the performance of commandments and not on faith. Nevertheless Luzzatto considered religion as dear to God because of its importance for morality. Moritz Lazurus expanded this identification of religion with ethics and viewed God as the Archetype of ethical attributes. Hermann Cohen saw the role of ethics as the incessant striving after an ever-receding goal. God served as the BOOK REVIEWS 7~7 Guarantor of the reality of the correspondence between nature and reality. God is an idea, not a reality. In his later period Cohen attempted to discover a new personal dimension in religion through his search for ethical concepts in the domain of religion. Dr. Rotenstreich sees in all these early modern Jewish philosophers a blending of traditional Judaism with Kantian ethical principles. The second group of philosophers that is discussed by Rotenstreich regarded Judaism as a religion of the spirit. The emphasis here shifted from the ethical to the ontological. The philosophers covered in this section are S. Formstecher, S. Hirsch, and N. Krochmal. Their metaphysical principles were drawn from Schelling and Hegel. German idealism served as the basis for their concern with the ontological concepts of Judaism. They accepted a basic distinction between nature and spirit. Their Judaism was cut off from traditional Jewish sources. Krochmal, for example, in his search for the Absolute Spirit, rejected the particulanstic tradition of Judaism. Judaism was submerged, in Krachmal's philosophy, under the current philosophic system of his day. Rostenstreich then considers S. L. Steinheim and Franz Rosenzweig, who he believes helped return Judaism to an authentic tradition based upon its uniqueness. Steinheim considered faith an independent sphere of knowledge , and he rejected rationalistic knowledge. He based faith on Revelation and rejected the need for...

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