The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation by Ned Curthoys

Abstract

The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation by Ned Curthoys. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. 238 pp. $120.00 US (cloth), $29.95 US (paper). Setting out to retrace a familiar intellectual history and argue for its political import, Ned Curthoys charts a trajectory made up of vexed relationship of Jewish identity, philosophy, and critique in modern period. Beginning with Moses Mendelssohn (chapter one) and ending with Hannah Arendt, he lays out the emergence of a liberal Jewish ethos (6) as he travels through common stops along way: Wissenschaft des Judentums, Leopold Zunz, Heinrich Heine, and Heinrich Graetz (chapter two), Abraham Geiger (chapter three), and Hermann Cohen (chapter four). Demonstrating that each thinker abjur[ed| supercessionist historicisms, stressing inclusive and imaginative dimensions of historical representation, and articulating cross-cultural and world-historical narratives, history Curthoys tells makes a powerful claim for a continuity in a liberal Jewish tradition of prophetic critique that upends hegemonic and implores on behalf of future, on behalf of outsider (45). Elevating principles of counter-history, he has thus produced his own. While Curthoys builds toward asserting a relationship between Ernst Cassirer (chapters five and six) and Hannah Arendt (chapters seven and eight), in process he seeks to revise our focus regarding each of these thinkers. He argues that Cassirer's ethics have been wrongly cast as disavowal and his commitment to a particularly Jewish ethics underestimated; I see this as one of his most important interventions that further scholarship will continue to investigate. According to Curthoys, Cassirer placed ethics at centre of his work. Similarly, he seeks to more firmly shift reception of Hannah Arendt from political philosopher to Jewish political thinker. These chapters are followed by a short but no less urgent conclusion in which Curthoys names stakes that animate his text, namely status of a subaltern Jewish identity and critique in response to present-day Zionism and State of Israel. Here, he emphasizes importance that notion of difference has made and (should) make still, if one wishes to be in clearest resonance with liberal Jewish thought and its related, not entirely secular philosophical commitments. Reaching beyond Toni Cassirer's descriptions of famous Davos debate with Heidegger, Curthoys further distinguishes his reading of Cassirer for weight he affords her Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim, 1981). His treatment of this fascinating source is happily more extensive than is usually case. A technicality that will be more important to some scholars than others is that Curthoys's report that couple were distant cousins, is incorrect (108). Ernst Cassirer was Toni Cassirer's first cousin. In addition, characterization of book as one in which her husband's close and devoted friendship with Hermann Cohen is a prominent theme seems overstated, so too assertion that text affirms that Cassirer was always outspoken on Jewish issues throughout his life (108). …