Benjamin Pollock

THOUGHT GOING TO SCHOOL WITH LIFE? FACKENHEIM'S LAST PHILOSOPHICAL TESTAMENT

Emil Fackenheims philosophical response to the Holocaust is permeated by the worry that Auschwitz marks a rupture so severe that it compels any attempt to philosophize in its wake either to ignore the magnitude of this rupture or to lose itself in radical nihilism. “Perhaps no thought can exist in the same space as the Holocaust,” Fackenheim writes in To Mend the World. “Perhaps all thought, to assure its own survival, must be elsewhere.”

Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True Religion and Despotism

In a chapter of his Autobiography devoted to the ideas and persona of Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon addresses Mendelssohn’s famous claim that Judaism possesses “revealed laws” but “no revealed doctrinal opinions.” Maimon expresses initial agreement with Mendelssohn, claiming that he shared with his one-time mentor on the Berlin Enlightenment scene of the late eighteenth-century the view that “Jewish religious laws” amount to “the foundational laws of a theocratic constitution.” But if Judaism is a theocracy, if “the foundational laws of the Jewish religion are at once the foundational laws of their state,” then it follows, Maimon proceeds to argue, that continued obedience to Jewish religious law is a condition for membership in the Jewish collective. As a result, Maimon claims he cannot understand why Mendelssohn himself rejected the right of rabbinic authorities in their time to punish with excommunication those who transgress the laws of Torah. The theocratic character of Judaism grants Jewish religious authorities the right and power to enforce Jewish law among all Jews. How then could Mendelssohn argue that “the Church has no right in civil matters,” while “nevertheless claiming the enduring existence of the Jewish-religious state”? At the same time, Maimon wondered, what if a Jew is ready to renounce membership in the Jewish theocratic community? What if a Jew “no longer wants to be a member of this theocratic state, and goes over to a pagan or a philosophical religion that is nothing more than the pure natural religion? And if he, merely as a member of a civil state, subjects himself to its laws and again demands his rights from the same?” In a case where a Jew quits the Jewish people, commits himself religiously to a philosophical religion and politically to a civil state, Maimon simply cannot believe “that Mendelssohn would still claim that this Jew is duty-bound in his conscience to follow the laws of the religion of his fathers only because they are the laws of the religion of his fathers.”

On the Road to Marcionism: Franz Rosenzweig's Early Theology

On the night of July 7, 1913, a twenty-six year-old Franz Rosenzweig engaged in a life-changing conversation with two intimate friends, Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf Ehrenberg, in Leipzig. This article challenges the conventional scholarly account of the “conversion” Rosenzweig underwent that night. It does so by introducing newly-discovered evidence that shows that the Rosenzweig who entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch was an advocate not of academic relativism, as scholars since Nahum Glatzer have so often claimed, but rather of a Gnostic theology of world-denial. Rosenzweig was indeed long committed to an extreme theology of revelation before 1913 and thus, this article claims, could not have been converted to revelation during his famed night conversation. The new and unexpected light the evidence sheds on Rosenzweig’s early theological views suggests that a re-evaluation of the standard account of Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity and return to Judaism is long overdue.