112 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 church which still does not officially recognize it) that most Jews now demand of non-Jewish interlocutors. I am especially responsive to his challenge to Jews to develop "the universal horizon ofIsraelite faith" (pp. 31,460) because he asks us to do so from our own singularJewish experience of faith and not some a priori Enlightenment-style universalism that inevitably swallows up our singularity in a Hegelian type AU/bebut1:g. However , in conclusion I must say that Kling is rather disappointing in the way he constitutes the shift to postmodernism. Other than his condemnation of the excesses of modernism, he mostly accepts its premises, particularly its emphasis on autonomy (p. 467). Along these lines, most of what he advocates for Judaism is the sort of tepid liberalism ofAmerican Conservative Judaism, whose theoretical emptiness and practical impotence he either is unaware of or chooses to gloss over. But Kling's book is too rich and suggestive to be dismissed on anyone point. Indeed, it cannot be dismissed at all, but must be engaged on many levels. David Novak Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia Divided Passions:]ewish Intellectuals and the Experience ofModernity , by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 449 pp. $39.95. This collection of essays by Hebrew University professor Paul MendesFlohr bears a somewhat misleading title. Readers who pick up the book looking for a broad consideration ofJewish intellectuals' reactions to the challenges of the past century may be disappointed: for the most part, the pieces assembled here, originally published in various journals and collections between 1978 and 1988, deal exclusively with religious thought, primarily that of Martin Buber, the subject of Mendes-Flohr's earlier book, Martin Buber's Transformation of German Social Thought. These dense and complex essays offer important insights, however, and even if they do not provide a completely new way of looking at the place of the jewish intellectual in the modern world, they certainly deepen our understanding of Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and several other German-Jewish philosophers . In his introductory essay, Mendes-Flohr asserts that the most influential approaches to the problem of the modern Jewish intellectual, such as those of Isaac Deutscher, Peter Gay, and John Cuddihy, have limited Book Reviews 113 themselves to thinkers "who have a negative, or at best an ambivalent, attitude toward Judaism and Jewish identity." He proposes to broaden his scope to take in those "for whom Judaism and Jewishness remain a source of pride and a salient dimension of their lives," among whom he considers Buber an "emblematic" figure (pp. 15, 17). His introductory essays promise a sociological approach to the problem of the Jewish intellectual, but in fact his methodology is that of the German historian Friedrich Meinecke's Ideengeschichte, "the treatment of ideas as inseparable from the lives in/which they take shape and the institutions which they affect" (p. 313), in which Franz Rosenzweig, one of his main subjects, was formed. Mendes-Flohr's main theme, skillfully developed in a series of detailed essays on such themes as "Fin de Sj(~cle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation," "Martin Buber and the Metaphysicians ofContempt," and "Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism," is the complicated interplay ofJewish and non-Jewish intellectual traditions in the development of his subjects' thought. Even in rejecting such aspects ofGerman philosophy as Kant's negative definition ofJudaism as a religion of arbitrary rules, Mendes-Flohr shows, Buber and Rosenzweig, each in different ways, remained influenced by Kant's definition of what true religious faith should be and incorporated elements of it, consciously or unconsciously, into their own thinking. Although their ideas had a distinctively Jewish cast, they responded to the same crises as their non-Jewish contemporaries: the breakdown of liberalism at the beginning of the century , the trauma of the First World War, and, in Buber's case, the rise of Nazism. As Mendes-Flohr concludes, citing R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, the modern Jew, no matter how loyal to the religious tradition, lives in an intellectual world shaped by the great secular thinkers of the past three centuries, and has...