Franz Rosenzweig

Franz Rosenzweig (Kassel, 1886 – Frankfurt am Main, 1929) was a German theologian, philosopher and translator, one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the early twentieth century. His work joins modern philosophy with religious reflection, and it shaped the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Lévinas.

He was born into an assimilated, liberal Jewish family with only a light religious practice. It was his granduncle Adam Rosenzweig who introduced him to traditional Judaism and to Hebrew. At his father's wish he studied medicine, but around 1907 he turned to history and philosophy. In 1912 he submitted a dissertation on Hegel and the State at Freiburg. His direct experience of the First World War led him to break with Hegelian idealism, whose philosophy seemed to justify individual deaths in the name of higher causes. In 1913, after a visit to a small Berlin synagogue on Yom Kippur, he chose to devote his life to Judaism rather than to Christianity, and he studied under the philosopher Hermann Cohen.

His main work, The Star of Redemption (1921), describes the relations between God, humanity and the world, linked by creation, revelation and redemption. Rosenzweig refused to replace concrete existence with an ideal: revelation happens here and now, and redemption means returning to the world through love. With Martin Buber he translated the Hebrew Bible into German, and in Frankfurt he founded the Lehrhaus, a centre of Jewish learning built on dialogue.

In early 1922 he developed a sclerosis that gradually paralysed him and limited his ability to write and speak. He kept working with a special typewriter and later communicated through small signs until he could no longer move. He died in 1929. His dialogical thought is now considered one of the foundations of twentieth-century dialogical philosophy.