Foundations for Contemporary Jewish Thought

Communal institutions and shared observances, a sense of identity and family feeling, kept Western Jewry from being absorbed by an outside world, where, all too soon, rejection of the Jew soon reasserted itself after the Enlightenment period.

Judaism into a national culture with its religious and secular aspects. Once Herzl’s Judenstaat (Jewish State, 1895) had established a programme for a national Jewish home in Palestine, the secular messianism of the Zionists (and Jewish socialism share the same character) was soon joined by religious teachers who brought the return to Zion into Orthodox and Reform theol­ogy. The cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am (1886-1927) had dissociated the ethical ideas of Judaism from its theology, making ethics an innate, uncon­scious force within the Jew while still clinging to the messianic notion of the return to the land as a precondition for the messianic time. The mystics also rediscovered the land of Israel. The bulk of Western European Jewry only found it through the rise of anti-Semitism, from the Dreyfus trial (1849) to the coming of the Nazis. Today, neither the Jews nor Judaism are com­prehensible except in relation to the events establishing the State of Israel and the tragedy of the Holocaust.

The optimism and rational approaches of the nineteenth century entered the twentieth century alongside mystic, romantic and secular trends. Much of modern Jewish thought to this day cannot be understood without Immanuel Kant. The first great teacher of twentieth­century Jews was Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), who tried to save the great visions of a happier age by teaching Judaism as a religion of duty, derived from the sources of reason. This great neo-Kantian philosopher, founder of the Marburg School and critical idealism, saw a symbiosis between ‘German­ism’ and Judaism which denied Zionism. The Jews were a people, with a mission to teach righteousness, partners to states which housed them for this God-given task.

Cohen had three disciples: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Leo Baeck. In what might have become a golden age of European Jewry in Germany, these men shaped modern Judaism. Much of what they created survives; more died in the Holocaust.

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a genius towering above the experts in many fields. He was perhaps the greatest modern Jewish educator. He became an expert in Hasidism rescuing the stories of the Hasidic masters even when he added his transforming poetic touches. He was a Zionist, an ideologist of cultural Zionism who stressed the humanistic task of a nation restoring the land by acts of compassion and brotherhood, desiring a bi-cultural state for Arab and Jew. He was a great Bible scholar, a theologian and philosopher. Perhaps his most lasting contribution to Jewish thought is the epistemological breakthrough of his ‘I-Thou’ concept in philosophy, the awareness that knowledge rises out of relationships which move from the impersonal ‘ I—It’ encounter of reality to the dialogue of response as central to the ‘I-Thou’ encounter between humans (who fall back into the ‘I—it’ rela­tion) and God, the eternal Thou. His language became central to much of modern thought and faith—his impact upon Christianity was perhaps greater than upon the Jewish community, which viewed his non-affiliation with its religious institutions with some suspicion.

Buber’s monumental Bible translation was done in partnership with Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who has been canonised by contemporary Jewry for his life of suffering and his teachings (hermetic, existential), which are still in search of students. His great text, The Star of Redemption, was composed on daily postcards sent to his mother from the (German) trenches.

In many ways, the mantle of Hermann Cohen fell upon Leo Baeck (1873-1956), who came to be the leader of German Jewry during the darkness of the Nazi epoch. Rosenzweig had been part of com­munal Jewish life: his Frankfurt Lehrhaus has been a breakthrough in adult education which had placed his hopes with the people more than with the scholars. Buber also taught there, but his main work was with the scholars. Baeck stood between the two. He was a rabbi in the fullest sense of that term. A servant of the community as well as its leader, he occupied a great variety of roles which included chaplain on the Eastern and Western Fronts during the First World War (but later a leading pacifist); head of German Jewry’s B’nai Brith fraternal order; head of the Keren Ha-Yesod which purchased land in Palestine (but also a leading figure in non-Zionist circles); a communal rabbi and lecturer at the Berlin Hochschule (the progressive seminary).

Baeck was also a New Testament scholar, with an incisive challenge against ‘romantic Christianity’ set next to ‘classicjudaism’. And he was an explorer of Jewish mystic texts who pointed the way to a new understanding of that world. However, in 1933, the dreams, visions, institu­tions and all foundations of German Jewish life crashed. Overnight, the Jews of Germany became an imprisoned minority, and had to elect a leader to deal with their captors. Baeck was elected the head of the representative Council. All funds were cut off, and contacts with the outside world were limited. A new educational structure was established, all communal responsibilities to the poor, the orphans, the sick and those who still needed education and vision had to be assumed. It could be said that Judaism grew stronger at that time—but the Jews who could not escape the trap died. The thousand­year-old history of the Jews in Germany had come to an end.