Franz Rosenzweig
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Franz Rosenzweig (December 25, 1886 – December 10, 1929) was one of the most influential modern Jewish religious thinkers.
Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany to a minimally observant Jewish family. His education was primarily secular, studying history and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen, Munich, and Freiburg.
While researching his doctoral dissertation on the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Rosenzweig reacted against Hegel's idealism and favored an existential approach.
Rosenzweig, for a time, considered conversion to Christianity. Determining to embrace the faith as the early Christians did, he first resolved to live among his brethren, the Jews, before becoming Christian. Attending Yom Kippur services at a small Orthodox synagogue in Kassel, Germany, however, he apparently underwent a mystical experience. Although he never put pen to paper to explain what transpired, he never again entertained the object of converting to Christianity. In 1913, he turned to Jewish philosophy. His letters to his friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, whom he had nearly followed into Christianity, have been published as Judaism Despite Christianity. He became a philosopher and student of Hermann Cohen.
Rozensweig's major work, Star of Redemption, is his new philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between God, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption. He criticizes Western philosophy, especially that of Hegel.
Rosenzweig also worked with his friend Martin Buber, another Jewish scholar, on a retranslation of the Torah, from Hebrew to German.
Rosenzweig also founded the Independent House of Jewish Learning, a place where Jews could re-discover and study their Jewish heritage. The Lehrhaus, as it was known in Germany, was an innovative Jewish Free University, which produced many prominent Jewish intellectuals. The school's goal was to promote Jewish literacy and involvement.
He suffered from the muscular degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS - the same disease which struck Stephen Hawking) and towards the end of his life had to write with the help of his wife, who would recite letters of the alphabet until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended.
His last words, as he communicated them to his wife in the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, were: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—" and then he died, the sentence left incomplete.
