Die exponierten Vertreter des deutsch-jüdischen Denkens tragen Spannun-gen aus, die für die Moderne kenn-zeichnend sind. Die Erfahrung des Lebens innerhalb vielfältiger, oft miteinander konfligie-render Sinnzusammenhänge, wird in diesem Denken zum Ausdruck ge-bracht. Die Forschung Paul Mendes-Flohrs widmet sich der Philosophie, der Literatur und der Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Judentums unter die-sem Aspekt. In diesem Sammelband sind Beiträge enthalten, die das deutsch-jüdische Denken und damit verwandte Themen als Prisma der Moderne betrachten.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was a German‐Jewish philosopher who became the focus of a renaissance of Jewish religious life and thought in Weimar Germany. Born into a highly assimilated Jewish family in Cassel, Germany, Rosenzweig affirmed Jewish religious faith in the midst of a philosophical and existential crisis. As a student, he was initially drawn to the neo‐Hegelianism popular in German academic circles during the first decade of the twentieth century. Although he would write his doctoral dissertation on Hegel – later (...) published with the support of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Hegel und der Staat (1920, 2 vols) – Rosenzweig slowly lost his conviction that the dialectical providence of history would assure the ultimate convergence of truth and existence. Already in the autumn of 1910, when he was completing his dissertation under the supervision of Friedrich Meinecke, he questioned Hegel's ascription of an ontological status to history. History is not the unfolding of Being, he wrote to a friend, rather it is but the discrete acts of men. “We see God in every ethical event, but not in one complete Whole, not in history.” Indeed, history, which takes shape in the phenomenal world, cannot serve as a vessel for divinity. “Every human act becomes sinful as it enters history”; although the actors may have intended otherwise, the morality of an act is neutralized by the material world of necessity. We are hence, Rosenzweig reasoned, left with only one possible conclusion: God redeems humanity not through history but – “es bleibt nicht anders übrig” – through religion (Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 111–13). (shrink)

The article traces the evolution and crystallization of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It focuses on his consideration of the epistemological and ontological issues attendant to the principium individuationis, the subject of his doctoral dissertation of 1904. Culminating with the publication of Ich und Du in 1923, this process was punctuated by life experiences that led him to affirm rather than to seek to transcend the principium individuationis as the ontological ground of being manifest in the matrix of everyday life, which (...) we are beckoned to sanctify through I-Thou relations. (shrink)

How did one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century grapple with the founding of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one of the most significant political conflicts of his time? Samuel Hayim Brody traces the development of Martin Buber's thinking and its implications for the Jewish religion, for the problems posed by Zionism, and for the Zionist-Arab conflict. Beginning in turbulent Weimar Germany, Brody shows how Buber's debates about Biblical meanings had concrete political consequences for (...) anarchists, socialists, Zionists, Nazis, British, and Palestinians alike. Brody further reveals how Buber's passionate commitment to the rule of God absent an intermediary came into conflict in the face of a Zionist movement in danger of repeating ancient mistakes. Brody argues that Buber's support for Israel stemmed from a radically rich and complex understanding of the nature of the Jewish mission on earth that arose from an anarchist reading of the Bible. (shrink)

_The first major biography in English in over thirty years of the seminal modern Jewish thinker Martin Buber_ An authority on the twentieth‑century philosopher Martin Buber, Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. The book is organized around several key moments, such as his sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three, a foundational trauma that, Mendes-Flohr shows, left an enduring (...) mark on Buber’s inner life, attuning him to the fragility of human relations and the need to nurture them with what he would call a “dialogical attentiveness.” Buber’s philosophical and theological writings, most famously _I and Thou,_ made significant contributions to religious and Jewish thought, philosophical anthropology, biblical studies, political theory, and Zionism. In this accessible new biography, Mendes-Flohr situates Buber’s life and legacy in the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry as well as in the broader European intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Christian economic theology is distinguished from Christian social ethics by its methodological reflection on the emergence, formation, and proper boundaries of the economic sphere, as well as transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of economic science. In practice, this often amounts to anxiety about the authority of Christianity in the economic sphere, as well as about the extent to which Christianity can be held responsible for the system of impersonal economic domination known as capitalism. This review essay draws upon (...) three recent works on or about Christian economic theology, and argues that this genre's anxiety about Christian authority manifests in the ways that it draws temporal boundaries between ancient, medieval, and modern economies. Ultimately, its ambivalence about economy itself is traceable to Aristotle's understanding of money as containing two natures, one defined by quality (use value) and the other by quantity (exchange value). Christianity here becomes a cipher for quality. (shrink)

Noting that one may hear without listening, the article probes the phenomenological and epistemic distinction between hearing and listening. To listen is to be attuned to voices muffled by silence or camouflaged by a defensive rhetoric resonant with a voice inflected by festering wounds, existential and political. In exploring how one is to listen to these voices of silence, I draw upon Martin Buber’s concept of dialogical “inclusion” of others’ stories, to listen without interpretation to allow the voice behind his (...) – or her or their – story, be it merely etched viscerally in the language of silence, to dwell aside one’s own story in a dialogue unencumbered by perceptions of the Other forged by cultural, social, political constructs, and perhaps most insidiously one’s own defensive postures. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 72 - 94 Politics has never been considered Martin Buber’s forte. This paper considers the range of Buber’s reception as a political thinker by considering it in the form of three “moments,” each from a different point in his career, and each through the eyes of a different figure who either read or worked with Buber politically: Theodor Herzl, Gustav Landauer, and Hans Kohn. The three moments are structured around a discussion of the (...) classic criticism that Buber’s politics are naïve or utopian; the paper seeks to respond, as Buber did, in a way that raises questions about the borders of politics itself. (shrink)

A critical evaluation of Martin Buber's work and its diverse aspects of modern thought and culture.

The concept of faith has remained inscrutable to thinkers for centuries. The late Nathan Rotenstreich believed that faith was such a difficult topic for so many because of its inextricable links to theology and religion. _On Faith_, Rotenstreich's last work which was edited and prepared for publication by Paul Mendes-Flohr, attempts to detach the concept from its religious underpinnings and consider it in its own right, as a human phenomenon and cognitive attitude. Faith, Rotenstreich contends, should not (...) be confused with its historical manifestations. By making faith a philosophical rather than a theological matter, he explores its essence as an awareness of how we relate within mundane reality to all that is beyond the human world. Arguing for the intentionality of faith, Rotenstreich shows how it structures a variety of relations that range from the experience of the holy to the nature of cults, traditional religion, and the idea of servitude to God. Rotenstreich's phenomenological study will be of great importance for religious scholars as well as for philosophers. Nathan Rotenstreich was professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and his works include _Jews and German Philosophy_ and _Reason and Its Manifestations: A Study of Kant and Hegel_. (shrink)