Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig on Torah: Jewish Teaching versus Law

Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig were eminent figures in what Buber called a “Jewish renaissance.” I will limit myself to their relation to two basic Jewish concepts: teaching , i.e., the theoretical, theological part of the tradition, and law , i.e., the practical part. Historically, my focus is on those approximately 20 years between Cohen’s 1904 essay on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion in their Interrelation , and Rosenzweig’s 1923 essay The Builders , i.e., his response to Buber’s newly published Speeches on Judaism . Almost all of the main philosophical works of our three authors fall into this period: Cohen’s System of Philosophy (1902-1912), his Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (1921), and Buber’s I and Thou (1923). To think, to feel and to do one’s own authentically without excluding oneself from the general culture, or more strongly: to accomplish the general, even the most general at all, precisely in the realization of one’s own, is for all three philosophers the high demand of their Jewish self-interpretation. None of them has devoted his life’s work exclusively to “Jewish” issues, least of all Hermann Cohen. But each of them is under the question of how it is possible to write in German about the general human and just in this to be unambiguously Jewish.