Christian Wiese

17 Judaism and the Religious Value of Diversity and Dialogue: Drafting a Jewish Response to Nostra Aetate

Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Zwischen Verehrung und Entzauberung: Hans Kohns, Robert Weltschs und Hugo Bergmanns Wahrnehmung Martin Bubers im Spiegel ihrer Korrespondenz

Based on the published and unpublished correspondence between three prominent members of the Zionist Prague Student Association Bar Kochba, Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch, the article explores their complex and fluctuating relationship with Martin Buber between 1910 and 1965. Fascinated as they were by Buber’s three Speeches on Judaism before World War I, the three intellectuals embraced his vision of a humanistic version of Jewish nationalism and became leading interpreters of his religious-political views both in Germany and Palestine. However, as their letters reveal, the political developments of the 1920s up to the 1940s, and in particular the conflict with the Arab population in Palestine and the National Socialist persecution in Europe, led them to a growing sense of disenchantment with Buber and their own youthful cultural Zionist convictions, which prompted all three of them to make divergent biographical choices. Christian Wiese, E-Mail: c.wiese@em.uni-frankfurt.de Einleitung: Gershom Scholems Buber-Kritik 1966 Ein Jahr nach Martin Bubers Tod hielt Gershom Scholem auf der Eranos-Tagung 1966 eine Rede über „Martin Bubers Auffassung des Judentums“ – eine hochinteressante Würdigung und zugleich scharfsinnige Kritik des Philosophen, von dem er zahlreiche wertvolle Anregungen empfangen, gegen dessen Autorität er jedoch in den Jahrzehnten ihrer Verbundenheit wiederholt rebelliert hatte.1 Scholem wollte Buber seinen „wenn auch nicht unkritischen Dank“ sagen, dem  1 Zur Entfremdung zwischen Scholem und Buber nach 1945 vgl. Robert Weltsch, „Jüdisches Geistesleben nach dem Kriege. Gerschom Scholem und Martin Buber“, in: ders., Die deutsche Judenfrage. Ein kritischer Rückblick, Königstein/Ts.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1981, S. 109–116; Klaus S. DOI 10.1515/naha-2013-0007  Naharaim 2013; 7(1–2): 171–201

Inventing a New Language of Jewish Scholarship

This essay presents a small case study that traces the history of American Jewish scholarship in search of its language and its place in the American world before 1945. Instead of dealing with the scholarship of languages, the author focuses on two languages of Jewish scholarship that emerged during the nineteenth century, that had and still have, albeit in different degrees, a deep impact on modern Jewish Studies. The author does not elaborate on theories of multilinguism, but rather explores the process of transformation that took place when Jewish emigration to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the transplantation of Wissenshaft des Judentums into a totally different cultural and linguistic context.