An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption

Preface

Preface A visitor to Germany today will find only fragmentary remains ofthe old, pre-Holocaust German-Jewish culture. The Jews living in Germany today do not, for the most part, descend from the flourishing Jewish communities of 1920s Berlin or Frankfurt. Still, through the monuments, memorials, and restored synagogues of 1990s Germany , it is possible to reexperience a piece ofthe old German-Jewish sensibility. It hovers above the partially restored New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin, once the second largest synagogue in the world, whose portico accommodated passage of two different sizes of carriage; and above the Westend Synagogue in Frankfurt, whose interior recalls popular images of ancient Egyptian or Assyrian temples. In the Westend Synagogue, the brilliant colors of the walls, shading up climactically into the deep blue of the dome, suggest a German romantic fantasy: an inverted cave, whose quietening depths have been raised up to the place ofa canopy. German romanticism and Judaism together shape the space of this synagogue, as much as they shaped the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, who lies buried not far from it, in the city's Jewish cemetery. That at least is the burden ofthis study: to uncover the traces of German romanticism in Rosenzweig's now classic text ofJewish theology , The Star ofRedemption. The reading offered here is suggested by Rosenzweig's simultaneous location in the Jewish-religious and German philosophical and literary traditions. Because even the specifically German romantic sensibility ranges so widely, two texts are brought to bear to focus it quite specifically: Leo Baeck's essay "Romantic Religion," and Friedrich Schelling's The Philosophy of Art. The two texts are of different types: the first, a polemical deXl xii Preface scription ofan amalgam ofcharacteristics Baeck names romantic religion ; the second, an instance of early German romantic writing, though it contains as well its own characterizations of romanticism. The Baeck and Schelling texts are natural choices for lenses through which to read Rosenzweig's romanticism. Baeck and Rosenzweig were cordially acquainted contemporaries, both schooled in the classical philosophical and literary texts of German culture, both communally engaged German Jews. Schelling, who early on in his career belonged to the Jena circle of German romantics, exercised, by both scholarly consensus and Rosenzweig's own admission, a significant influence, through his later works, on The Star ofRedemption . The Schelling text also serves to test the accuracy of Baeck's overtly polemical study of romanticism. Between Baeck's text and Schelling's, and Baeck's as tested against Schelling's, we obtain a dual standard ofromanticism, each halfofwhich limits and corrects the other, through which to read Rosenzweig's work. This study first appeared as a dissertation submitted to the Religion Department of Northwestern University. I would like to thank my advisor, Manfred Vogel, of the Religion Department, for sharing with me his critical appreciation of Rosenzweig and the complex intellectual history from which he descends, and three members ofthe German Department, Geza von Molnar, Peter Fenves, and Helmut Mueller-Sievers, who, while serving as guides to Kant and Hegel, at the same time fashioned between them a model of intellectual community . I also want to thank Nancy Ellegate, Acquiring Editor at State University ofNew York Press, and Diane Ganeles, Senior Production Editor, for guiding the manuscript through the several stages ofpublication, and the anonymous readers who recommended the manuscript for publication. ...