THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF FRANZ ROSENZWEIG (British Academy Monograph)

The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig offers a new interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig’s magnum opus The Star of Redemption, commonly treated as one of the high points of modern Jewish thought, and demonstrates its profound immersion in the Protestant conceptuality of its time. It argues that appreciating the decisive mark of Protestant thought on The Star solves many of its puzzles, challenges some entrenched hagiographic orthodoxies about Rosenzweig, and provides a unique perspective onto one of the most influential cases of the ‘Protestantisation of Judaism’. The book shows that Rosenzweig’s inventiveness resides in his weaving of Jewish and Christian motifs that result in an original scheme that is remarkably inclusive toward Judaism from a Christian perspective and remarkably inclusive toward Christianity from a Jewish perspective. The Star thus emerges anew, not simply as a work of Jewish thought that is ‘influenced’ by Christian theology but as a work that is more accurately characterised as ‘Judeo-Christian’."