Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought during the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence on such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a “Jewish thinker”, often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig’s thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore his enduring debt to Hegel’s political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig’s major work, The Star of Redemption.
