Skip to content

DONATE

Menu

MAGAZINE

Archive

Podcasts

Newsletters

Events

SIGN IN SUBSCRIBE

SIGN OUT

My Profile

DONATE

SUBSCRIBE

MAGAZINE

Archive

Podcasts

Newsletters

Events

RELIGION

Catholicism

Protestantism

Judaism

Theology

Culture of Death

CULTURE

Science & Technology

Family

Arts & Letters

​​LGBTQ

Education

PUBLIC LIFE

Conservatism

American Politics

Abortion & IVF

Law

Immigration

MORE

About

Reading Groups

Editor’s Circle

Donate

Store

CONTACT

SUPPORT

Advertising

Fellowships

© 2026 First Things. All rights reserved.

Cookie Policy

Privacy Policy

reCAPTCHA

MAGAZINE

Archive

Podcasts

Newsletters

Events

SIGN IN SUBSCRIBE

SIGN OUT

My Profile

Judaism Outside History

Shalom Carmy

July 16, 2026

Share
Article

Love Is Strong as Death:
A Biography of Franz Rosenzweig
by paul mendes-flohr
university of chicago, 192 pages, $25

Jews familiar with Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) probably know him first as a hero, only then as a German-Jewish philosopher. His life and death are the stuff of legend. Born to an assimilated Jewish family, Rosenzweig resolved at age twenty-seven on conversion to Christianity, a step already taken by close friends. On Yom Kippur he found his way to an Orthodox synagogue in Berlin, after which he decided that it was “possible” for him to remain Jewish—and therefore, he asserted, necessary.

During his World War I service on the Balkan Front, he drafted his major work, The Star of Redemption. After the war he declined to stand for a university professorship, instead becoming director of an experiment in Jewish adult education, the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. This effort flourished for several years and influenced many contemporary adult education programs. Not long afterward, the newly married Rosenzweig was diagnosed with ALS. Getting him out of bed and through breakfast took several hours each day. Through the last eight years of his short life, the paralyzed philosopher continued to speak and write, letter by letter, by blinking his eyes in the direction of a rudimentary keyboard, in a way that some—and eventually only his wife—could interpret. During these years he produced, among other things, translations of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry and most of the idiosyncratic translation of the Hebrew Bible on which he collaborated with Martin Buber.

Until about 1970, Rosenzweig’s life and thought were known, in English, primarily through his disciple Nahum Glatzer’s Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. In the early seventies, when a new Hebrew translation of the Star was published, I rushed to buy it based on what I knew of Rosenzweig and his reputation as a premier Jewish proto-existentialist.

The man I was eager to study was identified with a few salient ideas. Despite having written his thesis on Hegel, he favored the tangible over philosophical idealism. He centered his faith on revelation rather than liberal reason (“God gave us the Torah, not ethical monotheism”). Though his theology of revelation was closer to liberal theology than to Orthodoxy, he took religious practice seriously (unlike Buber) and thus seemed a kindred spirit to others similarly situated. His remarkable ideas in the Star about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity aroused much discussion.

The structure of the Star is extraordinarily complicated. Rosenzweig introduces God, humanity, and the world, first as isolated entities, then as standing in dyadic relations to each other (God created the world; God revealed himself to man; and man’s task is to redeem the world). Finally, Rosenzweig describes a stage of triple relationship among God, man, and world. This triple relationship takes two phenomenological forms: Judaism and Christianity. Christianity is engaged with history: The Christian is “on the way.” Judaism stands at the goal. The mission of Jewish people, for Rosenzweig, is not one of change and development. Like a star, Judaism represents a religious endpoint, whereas Christianity offers the pathway for redemption.

Much of the third part of the Star is devoted to a detailed comparison of Judaism and Christianity. The three great festivals—Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot—reenact the creation of the Jewish people, divine revelation, and the eschatological vision: past, present, and future. These holidays correspond to Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Note that Rosenzweig does not discern a Christian parallel to Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur, like Judaism, stands for eternity. Likewise, liturgical scriptural reading, for the Jew, takes place in the center of the synagogue, where individual Jews are called up to read a portion. For the Christian, Rosenzweig noted, God’s word is communicated from the front of the church, by the cleric or minister. This observation captures Rosenzweig’s insight that one is a Jew by virtue of being born into the Jewish people, who read the Torah rather than preach it, whereas Christian revelation, especially in its Protestant form, comes from the pulpit—that is, from the outside.

Some earlier traditional Jewish thinkers had assigned Christianity a positive role in bringing monotheistic religion to the world, without granting Christian dogma any kind of truth value, and certainly without analyzing Christianity and its institutions sympathetically. Rosenzweig did both. For this reason, he seemed to offer a way forward that would validate Christianity, from a Jewish perspective, without compromising Judaism.

This was the inspiring image of Rosenzweig I discovered as a student and conveyed to my students in turn. The late 1980s brought revision to the biography. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a Jewish convert to Christianity. Rosenzweig’s exchanges with him, beginning in 1913 and available as Judaism Despite Christianity, are essential to understanding Rosenzweig’s reversion to Judaism. But Rosenzweig also exchanged thousands of letters with Rosenstock-Huessy’s wife, Margrit (“Gritli”). The precise extent of the relationship is not clear, but their letters are unquestionably love letters, some of them passionate.

The relationship continued during Rosenzweig’s marriage, and even during his illness, when his wife’s services were necessary to maintain it. Upon learning of her son’s irregular relationship with the wife of his closest friend, Rosenzweig’s mother attempted suicide. His wife eventually destroyed Gritli’s letters to Franz. The surviving letters from Franz coincide with his intense work on the Star. They are invaluable for reconstructing his thinking, though it may be disconcerting to read the passages on love in their autobiographical context. The affair also discloses a far moodier, more vulnerable Rosenzweig than the canonical philosopher-hero. One can imagine the strain it placed on the Rosenzweig family.

Paul Mendes-Flohr, who died in 2024, taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was also associated with the University of Chicago. His scholarly career was devoted to German-Jewish thought of the early twentieth century, with a concentration on Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. The posthumous biography before us is rooted in the Rosenzweig Mendes-Flohr encountered in his youth. It presumes some degree of familiarity with the chronology of Rosenzweig’s life and his intellectual environment, even as it includes the more recently disclosed material.

In addition to being an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr must be identified as a public intellectual. Some consider him a belated embodiment of the German-Jewish renaissance he studied. Whereas Buber, a maverick Zionist at the Hebrew University of the 1940s, advocated a binational Jewish-Arab state in Mandatory Palestine and continued to encourage dialogue between Jews and Arabs—and Mendes-Flohr involved himself in similar attempts—Rosenzweig had no such practical political profile. As a young man, he was a German patriot and soldier, and any interest he had in Jewish life in the Land of Israel was from a distance. All the same, he represents a distinctive symbiosis between German culture and Judaism, which resonates with his biographer.

How are we to assess and appropriate Rosenzweig’s legacy today, a century after his death and more than half a century since he attracted my youthful attention and Mendes-Flohr’s? On this subject, I can speak only for myself, and my perspective is that of an Orthodox Jew.

One point on which Rosenzweig’s relevance has been challenged is his understanding of Jewish history and fate. As we have seen, Rosenzweig places Judaism outside of history. Other nations are defined by territory, by worldly laws, by a living language. Judaism, by contrast, has no land of its own; its laws are God-given rather than a vehicle for contingent historical expression; the Hebrew language flourishes eternally in liturgy but not in the everyday world. In effect, Rosenzweig views exile as the “normal” state of the Jew, rather than a misfortune. The return to Zion reclaims the ancestral fatherland, at the risk of reentering history. It risks a legal evolution that undermines the divine constitution of the Torah and aims to revive Hebrew as a mutable secular tongue. So although Rosenzweig valued much in the Jewish return to Israel, finding more of the atmosphere of the Sabbath in secular Tel Aviv with its shops closed on the day of rest than in the rigorous Orthodox enclaves of Frankfurt, he remains outside the Zionist movement.

Classical Jewish thought contains strands that appreciate the positive contribution of exile for the Jewish people and for the divine economy, making the best of the constraints imposed by exile, most notably the lack of political sovereignty. Rosenzweig goes beyond these appreciations in idealizing a Judaism bereft of Israel and of national institutions.

The problem with the theological peculiarity of Rosenzweig’s de-historicized Judaism became sharper after his death. In practical terms, Rosenzweig’s idea of a Judaism outside history presupposes that this form of national existence is viable. What would he have said, what could he have said, after the twentieth century proved the dream of persistence at the margin of worldly historyto be an illusion? From a post-Holocaust vantage point, Rosenzweig is not only theologically dubious but extraneous to Jewish survival in the real world.

Rosenzweig, particularly in his dialogue with Buber, favored maximal adherence to halakhah, to Jewish practice and custom, as a response to the Jewish encounter with God. One attraction of this position is that it promises a rich religious life based on free acceptance of the Torah’s mitzvot as what Rosenzweig called Gebot (bidding) rather than Gesetz (imposed law). This understanding of religious obedience is well suited to those from “outside” the traditional community who are finding their way into the observant life. In fact, it corresponds to the attitude of many rabbis and educators who expect searching individuals to take on the obligations of religious existence gradually, at their own pace. In this respect Rosenzweig’s model remains pertinent to many individuals, but perhaps fewer than before.

For several decades I offered a course at Yeshiva University on twentieth-century Jewish intellectual history. In the later years, students increasingly wondered why Buber and Rosenzweig figured so prominently. Why, they asked, devote considerable time to individuals who may have accurately voiced their private religious feelings but did not speak authoritatively for the classical tradition, as articulated in Talmud and normative practice? In part, this question reflects a desire to build theology on canonical traditions; in part, an unease with subjectivity. Hence I am not sure whether Rosenzweig’s personal story provides my students with the inspiration it imparted in my youth.

Similar questions may be raised concerning the appeal of Rosenzweig’s theories about Judaism and Christianity. Rosenzweig’s allure, for those who see value in both Judaism and Christianity, is that he seems to promise a separate but equal theology with a neat division of labor between Judaism at the goal and Christianity “on the way”—between the self-enclosed Jewish “star of redemption” and the cross pointing upward. Such an irenic reading may be compatible with the complex prose of Rosenzweig’s Star. The author himself did view the two religions as committed to conflicting truth claims and regarded the religion to which he had not converted as false. The anticipated synthesis turns out to be less stable than hoped.

Even for Jewish thinkers who want to believe that Christianity contributes to the realization of God’s plan for humanity, it is not at all evident that we require a grand narrative of theological history such as Rosenzweig provides. Classical rabbinic education is strongly oriented to our duties and ethical aspirations in the present. Maimonides, whose preoccupation with halakhic obligations and values is combined with rationalistic philosophical tendencies, discourages eschatological speculation. His disinclination to center religion on messianic hopes characterizes many of his contemporary followers, for whom this disinclination is reinforced by skepticism about the messianic scenarios on offer.

From this observation point, Rosenzweig is a brilliant outlier in the firmament of modern Jewish philosophy. His dazzling and often obscure insights, whether they cohere with conventional Jewish teaching or strike remarkable individual notes, will continue to engage students and scholars. As scholars increasingly recognize, he is utterly inseparable from his time—from an age that esteemed Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hermann Cohen, and Harnack, among others, and looked ahead to Barth and Heidegger. Academic scholarship on Rosenzweig is increasingly attentive to this context, the same early-twentieth-century German and German-Jewish intellectual milieu that nurtured Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. Mendes-Flohr, with one foot in the twentieth century and the other in the twenty-first, has given us a valuable introduction to the man and his work.

Image by Monozigote, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

FEATURED IN THE

Aug/Sept 2026 Issue

More from this issue

Shalom Carmy

Shalom Carmy teaches Jewish studies and philosophy at Yeshiva University and is editor emeritus of Tradition.

MORE BY THE AUTHOR

Israel at War

Let My People Go—For What?

Calendar as Catechism

More RECENT ARTICLES

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

The Sudden Death of the African Church

D. P. Curtin

Total civilizational collapse is unusual. In the West, continuity exists between the Roman past and our contemporary…

The Marxist Who Understood Sex Better than the UMC

Carl R. Trueman

The United Methodist Church (UMC) has removed Asbury Theological Seminary from its list of institutions approved to…

A Jewish Case Against the Naked Public Square

Sarah Berk

When people ask where I intern, I watch their faces carefully. I say: First Things, a journal…

Judaism,Theology
Shalom Carmy
Reviews
Aug/Sept 2026

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Digital & Print

Gift

Student

ABOUT

HISTORY

Masthead

Advertising

Junior Fellows

Internships

CONTACT

Editorial Office

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Submissions

Donations

FAQs

EVENTS

Events

Retreats

Erasmus Lectures

DC Lectures

SHOP

Store

Products

Books

Back Issues

DVDs / Videos

FOLLOW US

FACEBOOK

TWITTER (X)

YOUTUBE

INSTAGRAM

© 2026 First Things. All rights reserved.

Cookie Policy

Privacy Policy

reCAPTCHA

We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies or visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.

COOKIE SETTINGSACCEPT ALL

Manage consent

Close

Cookie Settings

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities...

Necessary

Necessary

Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.

Cookie

Duration

Description

__cf_bm

1 hour

This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management.

__stripe_mid

1 year

Stripe sets this cookie to set a unique session identifier to recognize users across sessions.

__stripe_sid

1 hour

Stripe sets this cookie to set a unique session identifier for a single session.

_cfuvid

session

Calendly sets this cookie to track users across sessions to optimize user experience by maintaining session consistency and providing personalized services

_shopify_country

1 hour

Shopify sets this cookie to store the preferred country setting chosen by the visitor.

_tracking_consent

1 year

Shopify sets this cookie to store a user's preferences if a merchant has set up privacy rules in the visitor's region.

ak_bmsc

2 hours

This cookie is used by Akamai to optimize site security by distinguishing between humans and bots

AWSALBCORS

7 days

Amazon Web Services set this cookie for load balancing.

cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement

1 year

Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie records the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category.

cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics

11 months

This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".

cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional

11 months

The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".

cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary

11 months

This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".

cookielawinfo-checkbox-others

11 months

This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.

cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance

11 months

This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".

CookieLawInfoConsent

1 year

CookieYes sets this cookie to record the default button state of the corresponding category and the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie.

cookiesession1

1 year

This cookie is set by the Fortinet firewall. This cookie is used for protecting the website from abuse.

crumb

session

Squarespace sets this cookie to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF).

issuem_lp

28 days

The cookie is set by Leaky Paywall plugin to track restricted content based on the subscription levels.

keep_alive

1 hour

The keep_alive cookie is used to maintain a user's session active on a website, preventing automatic logout during periods of inactivity.

lp_us_his

30 days

The cookie is set by Leaky Paywall plugin to track restricted content based on the subscription levels.

m

1 year 1 month 4 days

Stripe sets this cookie for fraud prevention purposes. It identifies the device used to access the website, allowing the website to be formatted accordingly.

ts

1 year

PayPal sets this cookie to mitigate risks and ensure transaction integrity.

ts_c

1 year

PayPal sets this cookie to ensure the security of transactions and verify user authentication.

viewed_cookie_policy

11 months

The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

XSRF-TOKEN

session

This cookie enhances visitor browsing security by preventing cross-site request forgery.

Functional

functional

Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.

Cookie

Duration

Description

pu-cookie-encrypted

session

Popup Maker plugin sets this cookie to enable the website to display a popup on the website. The cookies also serve the purpose of preventing the same popup being shown to the users repetitively.

pum_alm_first_activity

1 day

Popup Maker plugin sets this cookie to enable the website to display a popup on the website. The cookies also serve the purpose of preventing the same popup being shown to the users repetitively.

pum_alm_last_activity

1 day

Popup Maker plugin sets this cookie to enable the website to display a popup on the website. The cookies also serve the purpose of preventing the same popup being shown to the users repetitively.

pum_alm_pages_viewed

3 months

Popup Maker plugin sets this cookie to enable the website to display a popup on the website. The cookies also serve the purpose of preventing the same popup being shown to the users repetitively.

sp_landing

1 day

The sp_landing is set by Spotify to implement audio content from Spotify on the website and also registers information on user interaction related to the audio content.

sp_t

1 year

The sp_t cookie is set by Spotify to implement audio content from Spotify on the website and also registers information on user interaction related to the audio content.

yt-remote-cast-available

session

The yt-remote-cast-available cookie is used to store the user's preferences regarding whether casting is available on their YouTube video player.

yt-remote-cast-installed

session

The yt-remote-cast-installed cookie is used to store the user's video player preferences using embedded YouTube video.

yt-remote-connected-devices

never

YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos.

yt-remote-device-id

never

YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos.

yt-remote-fast-check-period

session

The yt-remote-fast-check-period cookie is used by YouTube to store the user's video player preferences for embedded YouTube videos.

yt-remote-session-app

session

The yt-remote-session-app cookie is used by YouTube to store user preferences and information about the interface of the embedded YouTube video player.

yt-remote-session-name

session

The yt-remote-session-name cookie is used by YouTube to store the user's video player preferences using embedded YouTube video.

ytidb::LAST_RESULT_ENTRY_KEY

never

The cookie ytidb::LAST_RESULT_ENTRY_KEY is used by YouTube to store the last search result entry that was clicked by the user. This information is used to improve the user experience by providing more relevant search results in the future.

Performance

performance

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

Cookie

Duration

Description

AWSALB

7 days

AWSALB is an application load balancer cookie set by Amazon Web Services to map the session to the target.

loglevel

never

Squarespace sets this cookie to maintain settings and outputs when using the Developer Tools Console on the current session.

Analytics

analytics

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

Cookie

Duration

Description

_ga

1 year 1 month 4 days

Google Analytics sets this cookie to calculate visitor, session and campaign data and track site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognise unique visitors.

_ga_*

1 year 1 month 4 days

Google Analytics sets this cookie to store and count page views.

_landing_page

14 days

Shopify installs this cookie to track landing pages.

_orig_referrer

14 days

Shopify sets this cookie to be used in connection with shopping cart.

_scribd_session

3 years

Scribd sets this cookie to implement audio-files on the website and determines how many and who have listened to these files.

_shopify_s

1 hour

This cookie is associated with Shopify's analytics suite.

_shopify_y

1 year

This cookie is associated with Shopify's analytics suite.

vuid

1 year 1 month 4 days

Vimeo installs this cookie to collect tracking information by setting a unique ID to embed videos on the website.

Advertisement

advertisement

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.

Cookie

Duration

Description

NID

6 months

Google sets the cookie for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to unwanted mute ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads.

scribd_ubtc

1 year 1 month 4 days

Scribd sets this cookie to gather data on user behaviour across several websites and maximise the relevancy of the advertisements on the website.

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE

6 months

YouTube sets this cookie to measure bandwidth, determining whether the user gets the new or old player interface.

VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA

6 months

YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's cookie consent state for the current domain.

YSC

session

Youtube sets this cookie to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages.

yt.innertube::nextId

never

YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

yt.innertube::requests

never

YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

Others

others

Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet.

Cookie

Duration

Description

__cflb

1 hour

This cookie is used by Cloudflare for load balancing.

__Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN

6 months

Description is currently not available.

__tad

10 years

No description available.

atl_uuid

12 years 7 months 22 days 10 hours

Description is currently not available.

atltestbucketv1

session

Description is currently not available.

blaize_session

session

No description available.

blaize_tracking_id

session

No description available.

cp_sessionid

1 year 1 month 4 days

Description is currently not available.

guest

1 month

No description available.

is_gdpr

session

No description available.

kppid

session

No description available.

techno

5 minutes

Description is currently not available.

userReferer

1 month

No description available.

WMF-Uniq

1 year

Description is currently not available.

Save & Accept

Powered by GDPR Cookie Compliance