New Perspectives on German Jewish Intellectual History

Abstract

Jewish intellectual history has always been the hallmark of modern Jewish scholarship. During the 1820s, the leading figures of the Verein fiir Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) investigated the Jewish past in the hope of finding Judaism's core (Wesen), which would guide them to reconfigure contemporary Jewish culture and religion. The original and more limited conception of the essence of Judaism as ethical monotheism gave way to a more comprehensive understanding of the core ideas of Jewish thought and their relation to general philosophy. This expansion had already prompted Julius Guttmann to debate the nature of Jewish philosophy with Leo Strauss and others, such as B. Soloveitchik, who critically cast Hermann Cohen's Jewish thought as being more Kantian than Jewish. Yet whereas nineteenth- and early twentieth-century participants in the debate rarely questioned the existence of Jewish philosophy and ideas, post-Holocaust commentators have been, at times, vexed by this question. Whatever the merits of this debate, the place of Jewish philosophy and ideas has become more mobile, marked by multiple contexts and border crossings.