CULTURE AND LAW IN WEIMAR JEWISH MEDIEVALISM: LEO STRAUSS'S CRITIQUE OF JULIUS GUTTMANN
The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss championed “medievals” (rather than ancients) against “moderns,” and did so through a sparring match with his postdoctoral supervisor Julius Guttmann, whom he cast in the role of representative “modern.” While for Guttmann the stakes were scholarly, for Strauss they were political. Strauss's Weimar Jewish “medievalism” was a deliberate rejection of the tradition of modern Jewish thought Strauss associated with Guttmann's teacher Hermann Cohen, whom Strauss accused of neglecting the political distinctiveness of Jewish thought. While the conflict between Strauss and Guttmann has been neglected in much of the literature on Strauss, it served as the crucible in which many of his mature views, including his famous exoteric (sometimes called “esoteric”) writing thesis, began to take shape.
Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy
Abbreviations Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Germans, Jews, and the Transformation of Weimar Philosophy 1. Toward Metaphysics: Cohen's Opus Postumum and the Origins of the New Thinking 2. Hegel's Fate: The Emergence of Finitude in Rosenzweig's Hegel and the State 3. Beyond Metaphysics: Rosenzweig's Star (Part I) 4. Redemption-in-the-World: Rosenzweig's Star (Part II) 5. "Facing the Wooded Ridge": The Hebrew Bible in the German Horizon 6. "An Irony in the History of Spirit": Rosenzweig, Heidegger, and the Davos Disputation Conclusion: Germans, Jews, and the Politics of Interpretation Index
Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations of National Socialism and Other Crises
Preface - Culture and Catastrophe - German Jews Beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic - 'The Jew Within': The Myth of 'Judaization' in Germany - Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and Mass-Murder - The German-Jewish Dialogue at its Limits: The Case of Hermann Broch and Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff - Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: Friendship, Catastrophe and the Possibilities of the German-Jewish Dialogue - Small Forays, Grand Theories and Deep Origins: Current Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust - Notes - Index