Das geflügelte Wort: Franz Rosenzweig as Post-Goethekenner (original) (raw)

Scholars of the life and thought of Franz Rosenzweig have become increasingly interested in the sources that inform his work. 1 A literary polymath, Rosenzweig was just as likely to quote from the traditional Jewish sources as he was from the classic writings of Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany. Affinity to German thought and writing was not unusual for Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, it played an important rôle in Jewish emancipation and assimilation. By abandoning their daily study of Talmud, Midrash, liturgy, and the Hebrew Bible for the cultural universe of Goethe, Schiller, and Mozart, the Jews of German-speaking lands began their march toward legal equality in the Second German Reich, achieving constitutional equality in 1871. While recognising the merits of this process, Rosenzweig was troubled that the study of traditional Jewish sources, along with the study of traditional Jewish languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish, was limited by the diminishing number of the Orthodox community, which was located mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. While a full return to a pre-assimilated world was unthinkable for the German Jew, Rosenzweig hoped to use the new secular religion of assimilated German Jews, steeped in the language of Goethe and his literary Wilhelmian and Weimar compatriots, to encourage an innovative return to Jewish traditiona tradition not only changed by the modern world, but also characterised by language. Here I will argue that Rosenzweig would use Goethe to move beyond him. As a result, Rosenzweig's work was neither typical of philosophy nor typical of Jewish theology because of his literary relationship to Goethe and how he cites Goethe in his work. While scholars have devoted significant attention to Rosenzweig's quota