Rosenzweig, Franz
ROSENZWEIG, FRANZ (1886–1929), German-Jewish philosophical theologian, writer, translator of Jewish classical literature, and influential Jewish educational activist. Generally regarded as the most important Jewish philosophical theologian of this century, Rosenzweig also became a model of what the Jewish personality in the twentieth-century West might be.
He was born into an old, affluent, and highly acculturated German-Jewish family in Kassel, in which the sense of Jewishness, though lively, had shrunk to a matter of upper middle-class formalities. He studied at several German universities, ranging over multiple disciplines, and finished as a student of Friedrich Meinecke, the important German political and cultural historian. During those years he also had intense conversations on religion in the modern world, especially with close relatives and friends, several of whom had converted to Christianity. Having already adopted a strong German nationalist outlook, Rosenzweig also tried to sort out his own religious convictions at the very time that he was writing his Ph.D. dissertation (on Schelling and Hegel) and his first important book (Hegel und der Staat, 2 vols., 1920). In a night-long conversation on July 7, 1913 with his cousin, the physiologist Rudolf Ehrenberg (who had become a Christian theologian), and his distant relative Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (later the influential Protestant theologian, also a convert), Rosenzweig decided that he, too, ought to become a Christian; however, he would take this step "as a Jew," not "as a pagan," and he would, therefore, briefly return to the synagogue.
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