2016; 14: 35–44, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2016-0005
Open Access
Nils Roemer
Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish
Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization
Abstract
This article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters.
Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions
and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When
the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical
response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the
fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentiethcentury Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenthcentury forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling
faith in historical progress.
Keywords
Wissenschaft des Judentums, secularization, sacred, secular, Historical Scholarship, Jews, Judaism
Received 28 March 2016
Accepted 3 May 2016
The prevalence of religiosity in the twenty-first century has led scholars to critically revisit the concept of
secularization. The term itself simultaneously describes declining social relevance and religiosity. It is descriptive,
is normative, and explains a process with its outcome and often lacks more detailed historical and comparative
perspective. More too, it uses a narrow definition of religion that is modeled on the church.1 Religion might not
have as much declined as its authority and relevance in the public realm was transformed. Indeed, religion no
longer manifests itself solely in institutionalized form, but rather in individual believes and practices.2 Discharging
his critical sensibilities, José Casanova suggestively offers, “the theory of secularization [...] tends to function as a
self-fulfilling prophecy.”3 Others like the German sociologist Detlef Pollack have not simply rhetorically wondered
whether secularization is “a modern myth?”4 Among his many critics are those like Talal Assad who denounce
secularization as ideology that coerced individuals and communities into the alleged secularized modern state.
To Asad, secularization appears as part of hegemonic Western historical narrative, a political doctrine, legitimized
by an epistemological category of the secular that preceded the ideal of secularization.5
These wide-ranging, politically charged, and provocative views are part of much longer debate about the
epistemological category of the secular and the political and cultural meaning secularization acquired in public
discourse and political debate. Secularization indeed surfaces within a larger historical progressive and optimistic
historical narrative within the German contexts. Several decades ago Karl Löwith charged that the concept of
secularization remains indebted to religious ideas. In his very influential book, Meaning in History: The Theological
Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949), he argued that an intimate connection exists between all modern
philosophies of history and religious thought. Löwith noted that the belief in progress is “a sort of religion, derived
from the Christian faith in a future goal, though substituting an indefinite and immanent eschaton for a definite
and transcendent one.”6 Leaving aside Löwith’s privileging of a Christian origin for the modern concepts of history,
secularization appears wedded to religious ideas. Hans Blumenberg in his influential The Legitimacy of the Modern
Age, a book first published in 1966, contended that modern thought had developed out of medieval theology. It
still bore the external forms from its predecessors but had transformed the content. For Blumenberg, modern
philosophy represented a reoccupation and a new secular self-affirmation against religious traditions.7
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Underlying these debates remains the binary opposition between the sacred and secular. For Yosef Yerushalmi,
secularization introduced an irrevocable break and provided a linear structure for the study of Wissenschaft des
Judentum.8 In contrast, Amos Funkenstein explored transition to better delineate the continuous interdependence
between the sacred and the secular.9 A break would have created discontinuity, whereas transition promised to
transform religious tradition. Indeed, Wissenschaft des Judentums refashioned instead of fully secularizing the
Jewish past. Insofar as Wissenschaft des Judentums unraveled pre-modern tradition in search of a single contextual
history, it sought to forge continuity, despite apparent rupture that allowed for the continuous and shifting
interaction between the sacred and secular.10
Investigating the ongoing interaction between the sacred past and its modern interpreters, Wissenschaft’s
reformulation of the Jewish tradition appears as an ongoing engagement with religious tradition. Jewish thinkers
from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Their continued reliance
particularly on concepts of messianism remained wedded to the concept of progress. Therefore, sacred traditions
and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition.11 When
the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical
response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within
the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist response that David Myers aptly
elucidated.12 What separated twentieth century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and
Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical
stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.
I
The German Enlightenment introduced a new way of thinking about religious traditions; but instead of secularizing
Judaism, it relegated and marginalized them. Within the Germanic lands, the publication of Christian Wilhelm
Dohm’s On the Civic Improvement of the Jews in 1781 aimed to secularize the Jewish past, present, and future. In
this seminal work, Dohm explored “if and by what means the Jews can become morally and politically better than
they are now.”13 He argued that once civic improvement set in, Jews would undoubtedly reform their religious
practices as well.14 Civic improvement was predicated on and promoted through Jews’ religious, cultural, and
social transformation. Johann Michaelis, the eminent German scholar of Judaism, challenged Dohm and argued
that Jews would never integrate themselves into German society because their hopes would continue to be
directed at their return to Palestine. Jews could hardly be convinced otherwise, claimed Michaelis, because their
rabbinic authorities understood it this way, as did Isaac Newton and John Locke. Michaelis was apparently thinking
of Locke’s Commentaries on St. Paul’s Epistle from 1705 and Newton’s Observation Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and
the Apocalypse of St. John, published in 1733.15
Messianism appears at this point as an obstacle to Jews’ civic improvement precisely because it is viewed as
secular and not as a religious concept. Various German enlighteners fully equated Jewish messianism with political
and national ideals that allegedly posed an obstacle in the process of civic improvement. In order to progress
on the charted path of legal and social equality, Jews were pressured to renounce their postulated national
parochial messianic beliefs. Thus, Dohm agreed first of all with Michaelis’s understanding of Jewish messianism as
a political ideal. Yet he doubted that this represented a serious threat to the stability of the state. He noted that,
“the idea that the Jews still expect a savior who will save them from the present misery, and will erect a kingdom
for them should not give us concern about the peace of our states.”16 Moreover, in an interesting twist, Dohm
postulated that the Early Church also believed in a Messiah who would come and destroy empires and erect
a thousand-year rule.17 Together with German enlightened thinkers such as Johann Kaspar Lavater, Hermann
Samuel Reimarus, and Michaelis, Dohm asserted that this political messianic idea eventually waned and was
replaced by a spiritual universalist understanding of the messianic era.18 It is this newly formulated spiritual
dimension of messianism that Dohm maintains and asserts against political concepts of the messianic era. He
did not secularize the universalist concept of the messianic era but preserves it. He only argued that Judaism
still succumbed to a narrow parochial political concept and that Jewish messianic expectation, nevertheless, did
not disturb the stability of the states.19 Even the seventh-century Sabbatean movement that had attracted a
great following among the Jews was eventually suppressed by the Ottoman Empire as Dohm also related.20 More
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importantly, Dohm observed that various rabbis no longer regarded the belief in the messiah as a fundamental
principle of Judaism.21
In his rejoinder to the Dohm debate, the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn denied the imminent
importance of messianic hope and reminded Michaelis that the Jewish tradition prohibits speculating about
the end of days.22 Moreover, Mendelssohn countered the pervasive representation of Jewish messianism as a
political ideal when he envisioned the ultimate fusion of all religion. He wrote that,
“All the prophets of the Old Testament agree and reason is pleased in this expectation that the differences
between the religions will not exist for an eternity and that the recognition of the true God will cover the whole
earth, like the water the ocean.”23
Siding essentially with Dohm, Mendelssohn refrained from secularizing messianism, but reclaimed Judaism as
the originator of the universal and spiritual messianism, and asserted that the messianic era was attainable not
within a historical progress but only through God. History would come to completion only at Divinity’s whim.24 For
this reason, Mendelssohn also staunchly opposed philosophies of history, when he attacked his friend Lessing
with “You want to divine what designs Providence has for Mankind?”25
Mendelssohn’s opposition presented a well-crafted critique of Dohm’s attempt to distinguish between Jewish
secular political and Christian spiritual universal messianism. His refusal to equate messianic hopes with historical
progress served to uphold Jewish difference. Discarding Jewish messianism allowed enlightened thinkers to
curiously leave Christian ideals of salvation untamed by secular concepts. In his rejoinder to the debate, Kant
dismissed Mendelssohn’s opposition to the idea of progress as tantamount to a new version of the Sisyphus
myth.26 Moreover, Kant returned to the previous changes and faulted the Jews as having “sought to create a
political and not a moral concept of the Messiah.”27
Far from inaugurating a secularized concept of progressive history, the Enlightenment had only cast one form as
solely political, while preserving a universal and spiritual concept, which in the case of Lessing and Kant, they had
started to align with historical progress. It was this optimistic legacy that shaped the thinking of the members of
the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) during the 1820s,
when they initiated a new program of study. Nine years to the day after Prussia’s emancipation edict of March 11,
1812, Eduard Gans assumed the presidency of the Verein and delivered a programmatic speech. He believed that
the Verein’s task was “to hasten the time that [emancipation and cultural renewal] would occur otherwise, with all
the required power and effort: This is the task, gentlemen, that you set before yourselves with this society.”28 In
the quest to further the ongoing process toward emancipation, elements of Jewish messianism initially merged
with the eschatological hopes of many German intellectuals who had begun to identify Prussia as the most
progressive state.29 Leopold Zunz regarded the year 1820 as another fundamental turning point in Jewish history:
“Israel has eight epochs, each of 450 years past totaling 3600 years. These are marked by Deborah, Elisha,
Nehemiah, the Mishna, the Gemara, and the years 1370 and 1820.”30 A few years later, he observed that with
the inauguration of cultural and social changes among the Jews promoted by Wissenschaft, “the Messiah will not
remain absent.”31 To be sure, this messianic belief was modern and not particularistic and anticipated a general
political process, rather than divine intervention.32 It equated historical progress with eschatological concepts.
Absent from these reflections are sharp divisions between the secular world of history and the sacred world.
Zunz also fundamentally altered the status of the religious canon by uniting all texts under the single description
of historical sources and thereby further obliterating the demarcation between the sacred and profane. No text
could maintain a meaning that elevated it above the time and place out of which it emerged.33 The “historical
operation” entailed not only source criticism but also situating ideas, texts, individuals, and communities in a
historical context.34 In order to assign each document its proper place in time, Jewish historians divided the past
into several periods. Zunz emphasized that only those documents that had undergone a careful scrutiny could
become part of world culture: “Thus every historical datum that diligence has discovered, astuteness deciphered,
philosophy utilized and taste put in its proper place becomes a contribution to the knowledge of man, which is
the most worthy goal of all research.”35 Therefore, while the Verein introduced a radical new vision of the Jewish
past, they had effectively converged sacred and secular traditions into a new category of historical texts. While
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they subscribed to Mendelssohn’s universalistic notion, they differed insofar as they promoted that the world
to come was attainable through progress.36 Secular and sacred progress are effectively merged here, which was
possible only because of the pervasive optimism in humanity’s development.
Their views were too dependent on viewing Judaism as a historically evolving culture, while critics like the famous
Orientalist de Sacy posited along the lines of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian Hebraists the
immuntable nature of Judaism, when he opinioned that messianism as the foundation of Judaism could not be
changed.37 In response, Lazarus Bendavid, a latter day maskil, differentiated between various Jewish messianic
ideas. Thinking of Moses Maimonides’s definition of the messianic era, Bendavid stated along the lines of other
members of the Verein that since the thirteenth century, Jews had abandoned their belief in an individual messiah
and equated the ensuing messianic era with a this-worldly and universal process.38
After these initial disputes about Jewish messianic conceptions, the debate revitalized around the late 1830s
and early 1840s. Several events converged, which pitched the issue to a new height. The year from 1839 to 1840
first of all coincided with the turn of the century according to the Hebrew calendar. Moreover, the Egyptian ruler
Mehemet Ali came into conflict with Britain and other European countries, while at the same time, the Ottoman
Empire seemed to lose control over Palestine. Together, these factors renewed hopes for the restoration of the
Jews in the Holy Land. Furthermore, the turn of the century according to the Hebrew calendar sparked not only
messianic expectations throughout English evangelical circles but also in Germany, based at times on the Zohar’s
exegesis on Genesis 7:11, which implied that the gates of wisdom from above and below would be opened in
the year 5600, that is, 1840.39 Consequently, in 1840, a small pamphlet appeared entitled Neujudaea, in which
the author promoted the idea of a Jewish state, possibly in America.40 A few months later, an anonymous call to
restore the Jews in the Holy Land appeared in the periodical Orient.41 At the same time, the Bavarian historian
and theologian, Johann Nepomuk Sepp recounted the history of various false Jewish messiahs from Antiquity
onwards. Basically paraphrasing a seventeenth-century work by Johannes Lent on false Jewish messiahs from Bar
Kokhba onwards, he ridiculed these false hopes as pointless and dangerous.42
These debates formed the backdrop for future deliberations. The ongoing politically charged disapproval of
political concepts of messianism should not detract from the continuous equation of historical progress with
eschatological process. It is this duality that the attendees of the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s had to
come to terms with once again. Already the opening address to the rabbinical conference warned that those
who held the traditional belief in the Messiah “should be aware of creating any doubt concerning their allegiance
to the state.”43 In line with this warning, the committee’s report suggested avoiding all political and national
implications.44 Even the more Orthodox-minded Rabbi Bernhard Wechsler, who replaced Samson Raphael Hirsch
in Oldenburg, favored the removal of prayers referring to the restoration. He suggested, however, that additions
“including the confession that our newly gained status as citizens constitutes a partial fulfillment of our messianic
hopes” would be desirable.45
Notwithstanding the pervasive criticism of Jewish messianic beliefs, most attendees agreed that the messianic
idea was an essential part of Judaism, while they discarded any political national elements. Building on the
emerging work of Wissenschaft des Judentums, and cognizant of the contentious nature of Jewish messianism,
reform-minded scholars and preachers started to embrace a mission theory possibly under the spell of FrenchJewish scholar Joseph Salvador.46 The formulation of the mission theory asserted Jews’ particular historical role,
but, more importantly, distinguished not unlike Mendelssohn between divine purpose and historical progress.
Salvador, the descendant of Spanish Jews, during the 1820s and 1830s, had already promoted in a number
of writings the idea that Judaism encapsulated a blueprint for the ideal future republican society that would
promote equality, liberty, and peace. Within this comprehensive Jewish philosophy of history, the Jews functioned
as the eternal preserver and promoter of this ideal. Far from being relegated or secularized, religious traditions
appear in their lasting influence upon modernity.
In the 1830s, Salvador’s writings appeared in German and German-Jewish periodicals, which discussed his work
at great length.47 Gabriel Riesser, the champion for Jewish civic improvement wrote even an introduction to
Salvador’s History of Mosaic Institution in German.48 Possibly influenced by Salvador, the eminent scholar and
preacher Levi Herzfeld promoted the mission theory according to which Jews functioned as a light unto the
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nations in the Diaspora. By comprehending the messiah not as an individual but rather as the Jewish people,
Herzfeld displayed a curious resemblance to political liberal voices like Heinrich Heine, who, in his essay on
Ludwig Boerne, ridiculed the Germans for placing all their hopes in a docile messianic contender like Friedrich
Barbarossa. In contrast, Heine asserted a few years later in his Wintermärchen that modern times differed insofar
as the agent of historical change was not a heroic messianic contender, but the people.49
Yet neither Herzfeld’s notion about the messianic era as the coming together of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in
the acknowledgment of the existence of one God nor his contention that ideas of an individual messiah found
a positive response among Christian scholars, who immediately labeled Jewish messianic beliefs once again as
political and outdated.50 It is within these ongoing public debates that we have to place the works of Moses Hess
and Heinrich Graetz. Not unlike Salvador, Hess in his Rom and Jerusalem interpreted history as an imminent
process led by the Jewish people. He postulated that the last historical epoch progressed from Spinoza, the
French Revolution to the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in socialism.51 While Hess was hostile toward the Reform
movement, he shared with it the conception of messianism without a messiah.52 Rom and Jerusalem, however,
appearing in 1862, was severely criticized in the German-Jewish press. Nevertheless, the work made an indirect
impact as it influenced the German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz.53 During the 1860s, Graetz published two
articles entitled “The Rejuvenation of the Race” and “The Stages in the Evolution of the Messianic Belief” (1865), in
which he rejected the belief in a personal Messiah and maintained that the prophetic promises referred to the
Jewish nation as a whole.54 According to Graetz, the traditional concept of messianic figures as the descendants
of David exerted its dominance during the first cycle of Jewish history and was overcome in the third cycle
that had commenced with Moses Mendelssohn. The leadership for the final stage in universal history (eternal
peace and redemption) would emerge from the Jewish people, endowed with special racial qualities of selfregeneration. Graetz believed that the frequently cited expression “suffering servant of the Lord” buttressed his
reading. Assuming that an unknown post-exilic author had written the second Isaiah, Graetz interpreted Isaiah
53 in line with many traditional Jewish commentators as referring not to an individual messiah but to the people
of Israel. Moreover, he pointed to the prophesies of Isaiah to underscore that the suffering of the Jewish people
was instrumental in their salvation.55
Upon the publication of this essay, the anti-Semitic Wiener Kirchenzeitung attacked the author, the editor, and the
journal. Consequently, the Viennese public prosecutor charged the editor of the yearbook Jahrbuch für Israeliten,
Leopold Kompert, with contradicting the teachings of Judaism and violating Catholic sensibilities. Graetz had
allegedly offended Judaism, an officially recognized religion, by denying one of its fundamental principles. In
addition, Graetz was accused of having offended Christianity when he posited that the Christian interpretation of
the “suffering servant of the Lord” as a single person reduced biblical prophesies to a caricature.
During the trial’s deliberations, the question was raised as to whether a schism or sect existed within Judaism
and if, therefore, Graetz had or had not slandered a state-protected religion. The two experts witnesses, Isaac
Noah Mannheimer and Lasar Horwitz, strongly denied claims of a schism and explained that the differences
within modern Jewry were insignificant. Rather, Mannheimer and Horwitz argued that a slight graduation existed
between lenient and strictly observant Jews on the issue of messianic beliefs. In addition to these witnesses, the
defense had collected written testimonies from Solomon Rapoport, Zacharias Frankel, and Graetz. However, their
statements were not utilized as Kompert was acquitted on the first count of slandering an officially recognized
religion and convicted for the lack of oversight in the publication of his yearbook. 56
While Mannheimer and Horwitz had rallied to Kompert’s defense, they had in effect muddled the definition
of a Jew by effectively denying the centrality of messianic hopes as the core creed of Judaism. Subsequently,
a wide-ranging public debate erupted. Neo-Orthodox Jews emphasized that there was only one definition of
Judaism that encapsulated the written and oral laws and thereby also the messianic hope.57 Samson Raphael
Hirsch agitated against the diluted definition of Judaism and asserted that the acceptance of the written and oral
traditions defined Judaism. Hirsch maintained that whoever denied a fundamental principle had essentially left
Judaism.58 Esriel Hildesheimer immediately enlisted the support of more than 100 rabbis, who exclaimed that
whoever denied a fundamental principle of Judaism denied the whole Sinaitic revelation.59 While Der Israelit, unlike
Jeschurun, refrained from viewing Reform and Conservative Judaism as independent sects, it, nevertheless, clearly
posited that a schism existed within Judaism.60 Both Der Israelit and Jeschurun restated the traditional belief in the
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personal messiah.61 By contrast, Ludwig Philippson, the editor of the influential Allgemeine, was in full agreement
with Graetz’s interpretation of Isaiah 53 and refused to understand Reform Judaism as an independent sect.62
The ongoing debates over the issue of messianism illustrate the centrality of messianism for nineteenth-century
German Jews. Especially, the Kompert trial and its aftermath demonstrate a common concern that went beyond the
particularities of Reform, Conservative, or Neo-Orthodox Jewry. While by and large the German-Jewish periodicals
had distanced themselves during the 1840s from the ideal of a Jewish state and downplayed the importance of
messianism in the Rabbinical conferences, the Kompert trial and the ensuing debates reflect above all a growing
concern on the part of German Jews about contemporary Jewry and its future across denominational boundaries.
During the 1840s, the belief in historical progress had led major representatives to equate future expectations
with the process of emancipation, whereas in the 1860s, the debate centered on new concepts of distinct Jewish
expectations. The differences are quite striking and must be explained in light of the increasing frustration about
the still incomplete emancipation and the accelerating fragmentation of German Jewry.63
Liberal Christian scholars like Adolf von Harnack by the end of the nineteenth century continued to emphasize
the historical Jesus as an ethical preacher and, along the lines of the German Aufklärer, discounted any Jewish
messianic interpretation. In these studies, the concept of a universal progressive ideal of history illustrated that
Christianity had cleansed itself of Jewish vestiges, while Jewish messianic ideas were discarded as parochial
national politics. From the perspective of the Christian critics, Jewish messianic expectation could not be
secularized but had to be discarded. Only Christian expectations remained relevant insofar as they equated
with a progressive model of historical development. It is against the renewed virulence of these polemics that
Hermann Cohen, for example, asserted that the concept of a progressing history is a creation of the biblical
prophets.64 Cohen’s insistence notwithstanding, the dichotomy between Jewish and Christian conceptions of the
messianic era remained influential. As Cohen went on to reassert the importance of Jewish messianic traditions,
he engaged also in a debate with Martin Buber. Like Buber, Cohen regarded Jewish messianic ideas as the
foundation of Judaism.65 In Cohen’s public exchange with Martin Buber during 1916, their debate did not concern
the issue of messianism as such, but rather the interpretation of Jewish nationalism. While they differed sharply
on the supremacy of nation and religion, they shared the centrality of messianism.
Buber’s philosophy took shape from a critical perspective of modernity. History, progress, and reason no longer
governed his thinking, allowing his dialogical philosophy to intertwine the sacred and the profane. He rejected
the halachic way of life and traditional, heteronomic belief in the divine transmission of the law. For Buber,
true religiosity exists within social frameworks, where relationships are based not on utility but on authentic
interactions with other people, nature, and the divine. Similarly, Franz Rosenzweig shared with many of their
contemporaries a certain cultural pessimism, as when he looked to the tragic hero of Greek drama to illustrate
the basic nature of the human living in isolation and self-containment, culminating in their self-destruction.
Living unrelated to others and essentially speechless, they are able to trust only in themselves.66 In his Star of
Redemption (1921), he explored revelation, dialogue, and love as the central themes of the book. Like Buber,
Rosenzweig sought to break with both the Enlightenment legacy of rationalism, Hegel’s philosophy of history,
and traditional forms of religiosity. In the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig conceded to Nietzsche’s realization of
the disenchanted world, but affirmed a post-Nietzschean form of religion, since to envision God in a traditional
fashion had become to him unfeasible.67 Knowing God was predicated on the acceptance of his absence and Star
invokes a God that had yet not manifested himself and had remained hidden in traditional religiosity as well as
in modern rational philosophy and theology. He too explicitly placed Jews outside the temporal world of history.
For both Buber and Rosenzweig, thinking about religion served to criticize modernity’s false promise of progress
and its secularizing posture. To them, religiosity provided an alternative model for modernity as much as Gershom
Scholem imploded modern rational Jewish theology by rewriting the history of the Jewish mystical tradition. Like
Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Franz Kafka’s protagonists attempts to gain access to the “castle” or the “the
law” metaphors for the inaccessible divine.68 Yet regardless of the impossibility of access that would undermine
the true transcendence quality of the divine, the castle or law exists and even the life away from it remains
shaped by realization of its existence.
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Most assuredly, these twentieth-century Jewish philosophers resisted secularization, but the concept had never
been an enduring and particular attractive choice to Jewish scholars and philosophers. In the debates over
emancipation and assimilation, secularization had threatened to undermine any sense of a particular Jewish
culture. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Jews as harbingers of secularization featured
prominently in modern anti-Semitism, while the widely shared identification of secularization with socialism
further discredited secularization for many Jewish intellectuals during the Kaiserreich.69 What divided these
philosophers from their nineteenth-century precursors emerged out of their critical perspective upon modernity
and their faltering faith in modernity’s progress. It was the Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss who most pointedly
asked if historicism does not also have a history in order to enlightened the fault lines of modern philosophy’s
concealment of undisclosed religious concepts.70 To assert an irreducible quality of religion served twentiethcentury Jewish thinkers to criticize modernity’s universal claims. Hence, modern Jewish thought did not emerge
in opposition to religious traditions, but out of its constant engagement with sacred texts and religious ideas. In
that respect, the twentieth-century represented not a break, but offered a novel form of adaptation of religious
traditions to and continued to expose the limits of modernity and secularization.
Nils Roemer is the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received in 1993
his MA from the University of Hamburg and in 2000 his PhD from the Columbia University. He published Jewish
Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005), German City – Jewish
Memory: The Story of Worms: German (2010), numerous articles, and several co-edited volumes. He is also the
co-editor of Germanic Review. His special fields of interest are Jewish cultural and intellectual history.
Endnotes
1. Hubert Knoblauch, “Ganzheitliche Bewegungen, Transzendenzerfahrung und die Entdifferenzierung von
Kultur und Religion in Europa,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 3 (2002), 295-307 and Friedrich W. Graf, ed. Die
Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (München: C. H. Beck, 2004).
2. Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World, (London: Darton, Longman
& Todd, 2002) and Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72 (1994):
749-774.
3. José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark
Juergenmeyer, Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54-74, here 60.
4. Detlef Pollack, Säkularisierung – ein moderner Mythos? Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Deutschland, 2.nd ed.
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) and Detlef Pollack, “Historische Analyse statt Ideologiekritik: Eine historischkritische Diskussion über die Gültigkeit der Säkularisierungstheorie,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für
historische Sozialwissenschaft 37:4 (2011): 482-522.
5. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
See the insightful critical analysis of the recent studies on secularization by Jacques Berlinerblau, “Crisis in
Secular Studies,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2014.
6. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1949), 114. See also W. Warren Wagar, “Modern Views of the Origins of the Idea of Progress,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 55-70.
7. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
8. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken, 1989).
9. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
10. Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison:
Wisconsin University Press, 2005). See also the anthology by George Y. Kohler, ed. Der jüdische Messianismus
im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013)
11. David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010).
12. David Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
13. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2 vols. (Berlin: Nicolai, 1781-1783),
2:152
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14. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden 1:143-144.
15. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2: 42-43.
16. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2:215.
17. Dohm is here referring to Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 80 entitled “The Opinion of Justin with
Regard to the Reign of a Thousand Years. Several Catholics reject it.”
18. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2: 216. Dohm pointed to the scholarship of Lavater and
Michaelis to buttress this point. This, however, could also have been based on Reimarus, who contended that
Jesus was still sharing the inwardly political understanding of messianism before the Apostel spiritualized
it. This idea can also be found in some of the clandestine literature. See Winfried Schroeder, Ursprünge
des Atheismus, Untersuchunen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart-Bad
Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1998), 103.
19. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden 2:218.
20. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden 2: 218.
21. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden 2: 218-220.
22. Mendelssohn illustrates this by quoting the Song of Songs 2: 77 and 3: 5. See Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche
Verbesserung der Juden, 2: 42-43.
23. Moses Mendelssohn, “Gegenbetrachtungen über Bonnets Palingenesie,” Alexander Altmann et al. eds., Moses
Mendelssohn. Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad-Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag,
1974), 7: 65-107, here 98.
24. Moses Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum,” Alexander Altmann et al. ed.,
Moses Mendelssohn: Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad-Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann
Verlag 1983), 8: 93-204, here 127. Mendelssohn was apparently basing himself here on Avoda zarah 9a-b
and Sanhedrin 97a-b.
25. Moses Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum,” 163.
26. Immanuel Kant, “Ueber den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht fuer die
Praxis (1793),” Immanuel Kant: Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,
1993), 6: 125-172, 166; A 273.
27. Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Wilhelm Weischedel, ed. Immanuel
Kant: Werkausgabe, 6 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 4: 645-879, here 788-789; A 174-176.
28. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 113.
29. Klaus Schreiner, “‘Wann kommt der Retter Deutschlands?’ Formen und Funktionen von politischen
Messianismus in der Weimarer Republik,” Saeculum 49 (1998): 107-160.
30. Fritz Bamberger, ed., Das Buch Zunz: Künftigen ehrlichen Leuten gewidmet: Eine Probe eingeleitet und herausgegeben
(Berlin, 1931), 23. See also Alexander Altmann, “Zur Frühgeschichte der jüdischen Predigt in Deutschland,”
LBIYB 6 (1961): 3-59, here 50.
31. See the letter from Leopold Zunz to S.M. Ehrenberg from April 18, 1823, in Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Leopold
Zunz: Jude-Deutscher-Europäer (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1964), 129. See also Eduard Gans’s speech in Salman
Rubaschoff, “Erstlinge der Entjudung: Drei Reden von Eduard Gans im Kulturverein,” Der jüdische Wille 1
(1918): 30-35, 108-121, 193-203, here 42.
32. L. Bendavid, “Ueber den Glauben der Juden an einen künftigen Messias (Nach Maimonides und den
Kabbalisten),” ZWJ 1 (1822): 197-230, here 225.
33. Leon Wieseltier, “Etwas über die jüdische Historik: Leopold Zunz and the Inception of Modern Jewish
Historiography,” History and Theory 20 (1981): 135-149.
34. Leopold Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: Gerschel, 18751876), 1-31, here 7 and Leopold Zunz, “Grundlinien zur einer künftigen Statistik der Juden,” Gesammelte
Schriften, 3 vols., (Berlin: Gerschel, 1875-1876) 1: 134-141, here 136 and Leopold Zunz, “Ueber die in den
hebräisch-jüdischen Schriften vorkommenden hispanischen Ortsnamen,” ZWJ 1 (1822): 114-176, here 128.
35. Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” 27.
36. See also Isaac Barzilay, “Early Responses to the Emancipation in hebrew Haskalah Literature,” Judaism 38
(1989): 517-526.
37. Antoine Isaac Sivelstre de Sacy, Lettre a M. M. Conseiller de S. M. le Roi de Saxe par M. le Baron S. d. S. (Paris: A.
Berlin, 1817), 197-198.
38. Antoine Isaac Sivelstre de Sacy, Lettre a M. M. Conseiller 199-201.
42
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2016; 14: 35–44, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2016-0005
39. Johann N. Sepp, Der Antichrist oder die falschen Messias. Hist. Inaugurual-Abhandlung zum Verstaendnis der Frage
ueber die Emancipation der Juden (Augsburg: Balth. Schid’schen Buchhandlung, 1842), here 23. In general, see
N. M. Gelber, Zur Vorgeschichte des Zionismus: Judenstaatsprojekte in den Jahren 1695-1845 (Wien: PhaidonVerlag, 1927), 176-212.
40. C. L. K., Neujudaea: Entwurf zum Wiederaufbau eines selbstaendigen juedischen Staates (Berlin, L. A. D. Haimm,
1840)
41. Gelber, Zur Vorgeschichte des Zionismus: Judenstaatsprojekte in den Jahren 1695-1845, 263-266, who reprints
the anonymous call from the Der Orient.
42. Sepp, Der Antichrist oder die falschen Messias, 23.
43. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 183.
44. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed., The Jew in the Modern World, 183
45. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed., The Jew in the Modern World, 185.
46. “Salvadors Geschichte der mosaischen Institutionen,” Der Israelit des 19. Jahrhunderts 1 (1840): 45-48, 115120; “Auszuege: Mitteilungen ueber Salvador,” AZJ (1839): 264-284; “Einige Literaturbriefe,” AZJ 11 (1847):
605-608 and 673-675; Joseph Salvador, Geschichte Der Römerherrschaft in Judäa und der Zerstörung Jerusalems,
trans. Ludwig Eichler (Bremen: Franz Schlodtmann, 1847).
47. Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite
Universelle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 163-176
48. Joseph Salvador, Geschichte der mosaischen Institutionen und des jüdischen Volks (Hamburg: Hofmann und
Campe, 1836).
49. Jacob Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960).
50. Levi Herzfeld, Zwei Predigten ueber die Lehre vom Messias: Gehalten den ersten Tag Sukkos and Simchas-Tora
(Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1844) and Dietrich Krueger, Etwas über die biblische Lehre vom Messias. Eine Beleuchtung
der vom Landrabbiner Dr. Herzfeld zu Braunschweig im Geiste des modernen Judentums ueber diesen Gegenstand
herausgegeben Predigten (Magdeburg: Albert Falckenberg und Comp. 1845).
51. Isaiah Berlin, “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London:
Hogarth Press, 1979), 213-251; Shlomoo Na’am, Emanzipation and Messianismus: Leben und Werk des Moses
Hess (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus-Verlag, 1982), 389; Moses Hess, Rom and Jerusalem (Leipzig: M.
W. Kaufmann, 1862), 10.
52. Moses Hess, “Mein Messiasglaube,” Theodor Zlocisti, ed. Jüdische Schriften (Berlin: L. Lamm, 1905), 6.
53. Reuven Michael, “Graetz and Hess,” YLBI 9 (1964): 91-121 and Ken Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern
Jewish Identity (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2001).
54. Heinrich Graetz, “Die Entwicklungsstadien des Messisasglaubens,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten 5625 9 (1864-1865):
1-30 and Heinrich Graetz, “Die Verjüngung des jüdischen Stammes,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten 10 (1864): 1-13
and in English translation in Ismar Schorsch, ed. The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (New York:
Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975)..
55. Graetz, “Die Verjüngung des jüdischen Stammes,” 1-13.
56. “Der Preßprozeß in Wien,” Der Israelit 5 (1864): 29-32; “Der Kompert-Grätz’sche Preßprozeß,” Jeschurun 10
(1864): 168-174; “Wien,” AZJ 28 (1864): 86-87; and “Ein eigenthümlicher Prozess,” AZJ 28 (1864): 29-36.
57. For further contributions to the trial see “Die Literatur des Kompert’schen Preßprozesses,” Der Israelit 5
(1864): 286-288, 305-306, 318-320, 333-333, and 360-36.
58. “Der Kompert-Grätz’sche Preßprozeß,” Jeschurun 10 (1864): 168-174, here 171 and 174.
59. “Die Erklärung von 121 Rabbinen, die bei dem Kompert’schen Preßprozeß in Wien vorgekommen Aüßerungen
betreffend,” Der Israelit 5 (1864): 96-98. This declaration was immediately countered in Leopold Löw’s BenChananja. See Leopold Löw, “Erklärung zu einer Erklärung,” Ben-Chananja 7 (1864): 193-196.
60. “Das Rundschreiben des Rabbiner Lazar Horowitz in Wien,” Der Israelit 5 (1864): 214-216, esp. 216 and J.
Guggenheimer, “Zum Kompert’schen Preßprozesse,” Jeschurun 10 (1864): 189-203, 228-231, and 253-276,
esp. 189-203.
61. J. Guggenheimer, “Zum Kompert’schen Preßprozesse,” Jeschurun 10 (1864): 189-203, 228-231, and 253-276,
here 196-203 and 228-231, and “Die Messiaslehre,” Der Israelit 5 (1864): 69-71, 83-86, and 98-100.
62. See “Einige Worte über den Prozess,” AZJ 28 (1864): 36-37; “Einige Nachwehen des Komptert’schen Prozesses,”
AZJ 28 (1864): 77-78; and also Leopold Löw, “Jüdisch-theologische Fragen vor dem Forum des Landesgerichtes
in Wien,” Ben-Chananja 7 (1864): 241-246.
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63. Nils Roemer, “Between Hope and Despair: Conceptions of Time and the German-Jewish Experience in the
19th Century,” Jewish History 14 (2000): 345-363.
64. Herman Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaims, trans. by Simon Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 261.
65. Hermann Cohen, “Die Messiasidee,” ed. Bruno Strauß, Jüdische Schriften (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924), 1: 105125, here 119.
66. Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, ed. and trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
Star, 205), 222-225.
67. Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 84.
68. David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah and Counter-History (London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 55 and
my “Breaching the ‘Walls of Captivity’: Gershom Scholem’s Studies of Jewish Mysticism,” Germanic Review 72,
no. 1 (1997): 23-41.
69. Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of “Godless Jewry”: Secularism and the “Jewish Question” in Late NineteenthCentury Germany,” Central European History 46: 4 (2013): 815-849 and Todd H. Weir, “Germany and the New
Global History of Secularism: Questioning the Postcolonial Genealogy,” Germanic Review (2015).
70. Leo Strauss, Natural Rights and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26.
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