How the paralysed Franz Rosenzweig continued to translate the Bible
In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance in German Jewry that occurred during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33). This short, dense biography by Paul Mendes-Flohr, an expert on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, who died in 2024, aged 83, also highlights Rosenzweig’s existentialism (which saw him break from the western philosophical tradition by elevating subjective experience over abstract theorising)
