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236  Chapter 9 “Atheistic” and Dialogical Jewish Theologies of the Other (Rosenzweig and Buber) The psyche we are talking about is not even JudeoChristian in general; it is strictly Judeo-Protestant— that is to say, thanks to Luther, Judeo-German. —Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German” At the same time as Heidegger was formulating his existential ontology out of a revision of Husserl’s phenomenology and Protestant theology was renewing itself through a critique of liberalism and historicism, Jewish thinkers were reconceptualizing the place of their tradition in relation to modern (esp. German) life. In fact, just as we have seen that the first two developments were mutually influential—e.g., the overlap between Heidegger and Bultmann,the prominence of the turn to Saint Paul after WWI, the focus on “decisionism”—so, too, the German-ChristianJewish dialogue between philosophy and religion created a network of intersecting personages and interests in the first quarter of the twentieth century.1 1. Derrida’s essay “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German” focuses on Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. Interestingly, in discussing Cohen, Derrida sees the second-century Alexandrian Jew and Platonist Philo as a crucial mediator, whose notion of logos will connect up with the modern philosophical tradition as well: “In order to render an account . . . of the JewishGerman phenomenon . . . in its often delirious forms, is it possible not to involve logic, the logos in this delirium?” (49–51, here 51). What Derrida does not address at all in this essay is the fact that while Cohen might have appealed to the Greek logos as a mediator between Germans/Christians and Jews,in the same decades others were trying to purge the Gospels of Hellenic influence and return to a more originary “Palestinian” message of Christ (e.g., Bultmann’s Jesus and the Word). “ATHEISTIC” AND DIALOGICAL THEOLOGIES 237 I will be able to delineate only a few of these most important linkages by looking at the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Rosenzweig was born on December 25, 1886. This places him in the same generation as Jaspers (1883), Heidegger (1889), Barth (1886), and the slightly younger Bultmann (1905). He began studying medicine in Göttingen in 1905, went to Munich, and finally moved to Freiburg in 1906. (It is interesting that Heidegger and Jaspers also began as students of natural science.) His interest in science became increasingly philosophical (e.g., the epistemological foundations laid by Kant in the first Critique), and he ended up switching to history in order to study with the preeminent historian of the day, Friedrich Meinecke, for whom he wrote his dissertation, which is still to this day the major work on Hegel’s political philosophy, Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State). However, already by the time he completed his dissertation in 1913, he had profound questions concerning the basis of historicism . In a famous letter to Meinecke he wrote that he suffered a collapse because,although he recognized that a historian’s “talent”allowed for a variety of stories to be told about significant figures and their times,he could not see what held them together on a deeper level. He was searching,in short,for the meaning of history. This questioning of the relativism of historicism parallels , of course, the critique of historicist and subjectivist theology that we saw Barth engaged in during precisely the same years. Later, he was to characterize this period as his transformation from a historian into a philosopher. But at the same time, he was deeply engaged with questions of religion and theology. Most important were conversations he had in the summer of 1913, culminating on July 7, when Rosenzweig spent the night discussing theological questions with his cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg and close friend Eugen Rosenstock. They presented him with a strong Protestantism that moved him immensely. Further discussions with them and with Rudolf’s brother, Hans Ehrenberg, were the ground in which the seeds of his future thought germinated. He thought about converting,but first wanted to work through Judaism, and hence turned to Hermann Cohen in Berlin. In 1917, while serving in Macedonia during the First World War, in the midst of his existential anxieties and his detailed analyses of the progress of the battles,Rosenzweig wrote a long letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg that contains the so-called Urzelle, or primal core,of his major work,Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption). Rosenzweig claimed that he had...

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