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The Vertical Irruption Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) Arnold Schonberg (1874-1951) Franz Rosenzweig BERLIN, OCTOBER 11, 1913. A young Jew of twenty-seven years, a typical representative of the brilliant German intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, passed through the entrance of a Berlin synagogue. He was aware that the service would begin with Kol Nidre and last throughout the twenty-four hours of the holy day of Yom Kippur, but he was even more conscious of the fact that, when those twenty-four hours were over, he would pass through the entrance of the church where his sponsor Rudolf Ehrenberg, himself a converted Jew, awaited him for baptism. The decision seemed logical and irreversible . This young Jew, indeed, had almost died at the age of twenty from an immersion in Nietzschean nihilism and the doctrine of perpetual recurrence which creates a vicious circle, in the deterministic materialism that leads to despair and in the Wagnerian "twilight of the gods" which brings one to suicide. Having been born a Jew was no help: He was entirely assimilated into the surrounding German environment and had been brought up in almost total ignorance of Jewish tradition, whether religious, philosophical, or social. Religious tradition? Merely a few vestigial scraps, among which emerged the name of Yom Kippur, the only day of the year when his parents went to synagogue. Jewish philosophy? Never heard of it. Judaism was not a religion, it was a misfortune. As Heine had said long before: How could Judaism elaborate a system of thought? Social destiny? Even the Dreyfus Affair did not make this young Jew feel "concerned." Those who took him out of this impasse were members of his family, cousins with strong personalities, nourished, like him, on Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Wagner, who had found a way out of their desperation: salvation through conversion to Christianity. Under their influence this young 11 12 OPENING CHORDS Jew took a turn for the better, found his faith-the Christian one-and arranged for his baptism to take place the day after Yom Kippur. If he had decided to go to a Yom Kippur service first, it was first of all out of intellectual honesty. He did not wish to leave Judaism, of which he was ignorant, without having sampled it, and he wanted to enter Christianity like Jesus, the apostles, and the first Christians, as a Jew, for like these others nineteen centuries before, he too had been born Jewish. His baptism was not to be a new birth but the consecration of his unique, ineffaceable Jewish birth. He would have liked to have accompanied his parents on their annual pilgrimage to their town of origin, Cassel, but his mother, fully aware of her son's intention of undergoing baptism, did not permit this ambivalent wavering, this comedy of entering the synagogue only in order the better to leave it. "There's no room for renegades in our synagogue !" she said. It was for that reason that, alone and unknown to anyone, the prospective renegade went to Berlin, to a synagogue unconnected with any memory, any presence, or even the slightest association with his parents or his ancestors. He was unknown, except to God. He was alone, yet supported by a community which welded him, despite himself, to a destiny. Something happened. Those twenty-four hours of Yom Kippur-a day of prayer, fasting , and of "return to God, Israel, and myself"-had been enough to transform this young Jew from top to bottom, to overturn him. After the Ne'ila, twenty-four hours after Kol Nidre, he began a long letter which he sent a few days later to the cousin who was to sponsor his baptism: "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said, "but I am remaining a Jew." He had had the same experience as Saul in the Bible, but in reverse: He thought he had discovered the kingdom of the Son, but what he found were the simple old asses of his Father. This "returner to the fold" was Franz Rosenzweig: he died young. But in the fifteen years of life that remained to him he achieved the tour de force not only of having fashioned out a completely Jewish existence but of leaving behind him a philosophical legacy which makes him, together with Martin Buber, the major Jewish religious thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. Arnold Schoenberg [sic] On July 24, 1933, Rabbi Louis-Germain Levy of the Union liberale israelite...

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