Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

Uncovers connections between modern Jewish philosophers and classical rabbinic thought, arguing for rethinking of Judaism, politics, and violence.

"Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers - Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin - in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition"--

Engendering an intimate and deep relationship with God is at the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This relationship manifests, among other things, in worshipping Him with sincerity, talking to (and about) Him, and being conscious of Him in every moment of life. For believers, God himself plays also an active role in pursuing this relationship by, for example, answering prayers and making the believer know and feel His uninterrupted presence. Many would consider this as common knowledge about the religions mentioned above. However, only few are aware that the meaning of the above differs significantly based on how one thinks that religious language works. Rather, it is taken for granted that the word ‘God’ refers to a metaphysical being with personal traits and plays a similar role in structure as words in empirical language. This has several implications such as the following: God can be talked about in an abstract and theoretical manner; His existence can be subject to inquiry like that of any other being such as planets or unicorns; and calling God good, while creation is obviously full of evil, is a proposition that needs rational justification. The famous 20th century thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein has famously stated that his goal in philosophy essentially amounts to "showing that things which look the same are really different". By his insistence to pay close attention to the grammar of a word – that is its use in language – he has opened up new perspectives on (not only religious) language that challenges the prevalent view outlined above. The goal of this volume is to pick up on Wittgenstein’s insights about language and religion and to bring them in fruitful relation to the three mentioned religious traditions respectively in an attempt to reassess the grammar of the word ‘God’.

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.

It is often assumed that modern democratic government has a special link with Christianity or was made possible due to Christianity. As a challenge to this belief and echoing a long-held assumption in the republican tradition, Hannah Arendt once remarked that "Washington's and Napoleon's heroes were named Moses and David." In this book, Miguel Vatter reconstructs the political theology of German Jewish philosophers during the twentieth century and their attempts to bring together the Biblical teachings on politics with the Greek and Roman traditions of political philosophy. Developed alongside modern experiences with anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism, and the return of charismatic authority in mass societies, Jewish political theology in the twentieth century advances the radical hypothesis that the messianic idea of God's Kingdom correlates with a post-sovereignty, anarchist political condition of non-domination. Importantly, Jewish philosophers combined this messianic form of democracy with the ideal of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, which is itself based on the identity of divine law and natural law. This book examines the paradoxical unity of anarchy and rule of law in the democratic political theology developed by Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Critical of the Christian theological underpinnings of modern representative political institutions, this group of highly original thinkers took up the banner of Philo's project to unify Greek philosophy with Judaism, and rejected the separation between faith and reason, as well as the division between Biblical revelation and pagan philosophy. The Jewish political theology they developed stands for the idea that human redemption is inseparable from the redemption of nature. Living Law offers an alternative genealogy of political theology that challenges the widespread belief that modern republican political thought is derived from Christian sources.

This book collects new contributions from an international group of leading scholars – including many who have worked closely with Agamben – to consider the impact of Agamben’s thought on research in the humanities and social sciences. Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives addresses the potential of Agamben’s thought by re-focusing attention away from his critiques of Western politics and towards his scheme for a political future. Part I of the book draws upon a wide range of issues such as legal oaths, legal reasoning and Christian conceptions of love in order to examine the potential for Agamben’s work to impact upon future legal scholarship. Part II focuses on political perspectives that include references to Marx, Rousseau and Agamben’s conception of the ‘messianic’. Theology, biology, and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud are all drawn upon in Part III to explore philosophical perspectives in Agamben’s thought. This book demonstrates the importance and originality of Giorgio Agamben, who has articulated a vision of politics that must be recognised as an influential contribution to modern philosophical and political thinking. It is a book that will be of considerable interest to many working across the humanities and social sciences.

With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II. German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.