When, in 1919, Franz Rosenzweig—then thirty-three years old—returned from war service and finished his magnum opus, Der Stern der Erlösung (“The Star of Redemption”), he decided to resist the temptation to write more books, and devoted himself instead to the reconstruction of Jewish higher education in his native Germany. The Frankfort Jewish community gave the young and relatively unknown thinker a chance to try out his novel approach to Jewish studies. The Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, technically a continuation’ of the then existing conventional lecture series, was actually a creation of Rosenzweig’s.
The “new learning,” introduced by Rosenzweig with the simplicity of a great idea, was to lead the student “from the periphery to the core.” It carefully avoided the pitfalls of apologetics, partisanship, dogmatism. All that was needed was an open mind willing to reconsider the classical Jewish books. Here “specialists,” “experts” in Judaism were out of place; rabbis were rarely invited to teach.
Rosenzweig fully realized the power of modern secular ideas to give the Jew an intellectual home in the modern world; yet he was convinced that there was a way to accept Judaism in its totality without sacrificing either one’s intellectual responsibility or inner freedom. This union of modernity and Judaism—a concept which cannot be reduced to a short formula—is Rosenzweig’s distinctive contribution to 20th-century Jewish thought.
An attack of paralysis forced Rosenzweig, in 1923, to withdraw from active leadership in the Lehrhaus; at that time the enrollment was 1,100 students, out of a Jewish population of about 26,000. Rosenzweig had to abandon the medium of the living word and return to “mere” writing. The Lehrhaus discontinued its work in 1926; but it was reopened in 1933 under the leadership of Martin Buber.
The following is a draft of the address that Rosenzweig prepared for the opening assembly (which the present writer was fortunate enough to attend) on October 17, 1920. It was first printed, posthumously, in 1934 in the Almanach des Schocken Verlags. The English text is taken from a Franz Rosenzweig anthology which is being prepared for publication.
—Nahum N. Glatzer
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Today, as the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus opens its doors to carry on the series of Jewish adult education courses which were held here during the past winter and summer, I shall not attempt to emulate, by taking a subject from the vast field of Jewish scholarship, the revered man [Rabbi Nehemiah A. Nobel] whose splendid address launched our last winter’s activities. Nor would you expect it of me, younger and unknown as I am. I intend only to give you an account of the task we have set ourselves and the goals we have in mind, and I shall try to formulate these in the simplest of words.
Learning—there are by now, I should say, very few among you unable to catch the odd note the word sounds, even today, when it is used in a Jewish context. It is to a book, the Book, that we owe our survival—that Book which we use, not by accident, in the very form in which it has existed for millennia: it is the only book of antiquity that is still in living use as a scroll.1 The learning of this book became an affair of the people, filling the bounds of Jewish life completely. Everything was really within this learning of the Book. There have been “outside books,”2 but studying them was looked upon as the first step toward heresy. Occasionally such “outside” elements—Aristotle, for example—have been successfully naturalized. But in the past few centuries the strength to do this would seem to have petered out.
Then came the Emancipation. At one blow it vastly enlarged the intellectual horizons of thought and soon, very soon afterwards, of actual living. Jewish “study” or “learning” has not been able to keep pace with this rapid extension. What is new is not so much the collapse of the outer barriers; even previously, while the ghetto had certainly sheltered the Jew, it had not shut him off. He moved beyond its bounds, and what the ghetto gave him was only peace, home, a home for his spirit. What is new, is not that the Jew’s feet could now take him farther than ever before—in the Middle Ages the Jew was not an especially sedentary, but rather a comparatively mobile element of medieval society. The new feature is that the wanderer no longer returns at dusk. The gates of the ghetto no longer close behind him, allowing him to spend the night in solitary learning. To abandon the figure of speech—he finds his spiritual and intellectual home outside the Jewish world.
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The old style of learning is helpless before this spiritual emigration. In vain have Orthodoxy and Liberalism tried to expand into and fill the new domains. No matter how much the Jewish Law was stretched, it lacked the power to encompass and assimilate the life of the intellect and the spirit. The mezuzah may have still greeted one at the door, but the bookcase had, at best, a single Jewish corner. And Liberalism fared no better, even though it availed itself of the nimble air squadron of ideas rather than trying to master life by engaging it in hand-to-hand combat with the Law. There was nothing to be done apparently, except dilute the spirit of Judaism (or what passed for it) as much as possible in order to stake off the whole area of intellectual life; to fill it in the true sense was out of the question. Highsounding words were always on tap, words that the Judaism of old had had, but which it was chary of uttering for fear of dulling their edges with too frequent use. High-sounding words, like “humanity,” “idealism,” and so forth, which those who mouthed them thought of as encompassing the whole world. But the world resists such superficial embraces. It is impossible to assimilate to Judaism a field of intellectual and spiritual life through constantly reiterating a catchword and then claiming it to have kinship with some Jewish concept or other. The problems of democracy, for instance, cannot be Judaized merely by referring to the sentence in the Torah: “One law and one ordinance shall be both for you and for the stranger that sojourneth with you” (Num. 15:16), nor those of socialism by citing certain social institutions or social programs in ancient Israel. If we insist on trying, so much the worse for us! For the great, the creative spirits in our midst, have never allowed themselves to be deceived. They have left us. They went everywhere, they found their own spiritual homes, and they created spiritual homes for others. The Book around which we once gathered stands forlorn in this world, and even for those who regard it as a beloved duty to return to it at regular intervals, such a return is nothing but a turning away from life, a turning one’s back on life. Their world remains un-Jewish even when they still have a Jewish world to return to. “Learning”—the old form of maintaining the relationship between life and the Book—has failed.
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Has it really? No, only in the old form. For down at heel as we are, we should not be a sign and a wonder among the peoples, we should not be the eternal people, if our very illness did not beget its own cure. It is now as it has always been. We draw new strength from the very circumstance that seemed to deal the death blow to “learning,” from the desertion of our scholars to the realms of the alien knowledge of the “outside books,” from the transformation of our erstwhile talmide hachmim 3 into the instructors and professors of modern European universities. A new “learning” is about to be born—rather, it has been born.
It is a learning in reverse order. A learning that no longer starts from the Torah and leads into life, but the other way round: from life, from a world that knows nothing of the Law, or pretends to know nothing, back to the Torah. That is the sign of the time.
It is the sign of the time because it is the mark of the men of the time. There is no one today who is not alienated, or who does not contain within himself some small fraction of alienation. All of us to whom Judaism, to whom being a Jew, has again become the pivot of our lives—and I know that in saying this here I am not speaking for myself alone—we all know that in being Jews we must not give up anything, not renounce anything, but lead everything back to Judaism. From the periphery back to the center; from the outside, in.
This is a new sort of learning. A learning for which—in these days—he is the most apt who brings with him the maximum of what is alien. That is to say, not the man specializing in Jewish matters; or, if he happens to be such a specialist, he will succeed, not in the capacity of a specialist, but only as one who, too, is alienated, as one who is groping his way home.
It is not a matter of pointing out relations between what is Jewish and what is non-Jewish. There has been enough of that. It is not a matter of apologetics, but rather of finding the way back into the heart of our life. And of being confident that this heart is a Jewish heart. For we are Jews.
That sounds very simple. And so it is. It is really enough to gather together people of all sorts as teachers and students. Just glance at our prospectus. You will find, listed among others, a chemist, a physician, a historian, an artist, a politician. Two-thirds of the teachers are persons who, twenty or thirty years ago, in the only century when Jewish learning had become the monopoly of specialists, would have been denied the right of teaching in a Jewish House of Study. They have come together here as Jews. They have come together in order to “learn”—for Jewish “learning” includes Jewish “teaching.” Whoever teaches here—and I believe I may say this in the name of all who are teaching here—knows that in teaching here he need sacrifice nothing of what he is. Whoever gathers—and all of us are “gatherers”—must seize upon that which is to be gathered wherever he finds it. And more than this: he must seize upon himself as well, wherever he may find himself. Were we to do otherwise, we should continue in the errors of a century and perpetuate the failure of that century: the most we could do would be to adorn life with a few “pearls of thought” from the Talmud or some other source, and—for the rest—leave it just as un-Jewish as we found it. But no: we take life as we find it. Our own life and the life of our students; and gradually (or, at times, suddenly) we carry this life from the periphery where we found it to the center. And we ourselves are carried only by a faith which certainly cannot be proved, the faith that this center can be nothing but a Jewish center.
This faith must remain without proof. It carries further than our word. For we hail from the periphery. The oneness of the center is not something that we possess clearly and unambiguously, not something we can be articulate about. Our fathers were better off in that respect. We are not so well off today. We must search for this oneness and have faith that we shall find it. Seen from the periphery, the center does not appear invariably the same. In fact, the center of the circle looks different from each point of the periphery. There are many ways that lead from the outside in. Nevertheless, the inside is oneness and harmony. In the final analysis, everyone here should be speaking about the same thing. And he who speaks as he should, will in the end really have spoken about exactly what everyone else has spoken about. Only the outset, only the point of departure, will be different for everyone.
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So, And only so, will you be able to understand the divisions and contrasts in our prospectus.4 The contrasts are put in solely for the purpose of being bridged. Today what is classical, historical, and modern in Judaism may be placed side by side, but this ought not to be so and in the future will not be so. It is up to us to discover the root fibers of history in the classical phase, and its harvest in the modern. Whatever is genuinely Jewish must be all three simultaneously. Such has been the case in Judaism in all its productive periods. And we shall leave it to those who stand on the outside to consider contrasts such as that between the Torah and the Prophets, between Halachah5 and Haggadah,6 between world and man, as real contrasts which cannot be reconciled. So far as we are concerned, which one of us is not certain that there could be no Torah without the prophetic powers of Moses, father of all prophets before him and after him? And—on the other hand—that there could be no prophets without the foundation of a Law and an order from which their prophecy derived its rule and measure? As for any contrast between Halachah5 and Haggadah,6 between world Talmud shows the student that the two are inseparably intertwined, and every page of Jewish history confirms that the same minds and hearts are preoccupied with both: scholarly inquiry and meditation, legal decision and scriptural exegesis. And, finally, the Jewish world! Who could imagine that it would be possible to build it up without man, Jewish man! And what—in the long run—will become of Jewish man if, no matter where he lives, he is not surrounded by an atmosphere Jewish to some degree, by a Jewish world?
So, all of this hangs together. More than that: it is one and the same within itself, and as such it will be presented to you here. You should regard every individual aspect, every individual lecture or seminar you attend, as a part of the whole, which is offered to you only for the sake of the whole.
It is in this sense that now, at the opening of the new term in this hall, I bid you welcome. May the hours you spend here become hours of remembrance, but not in the stale sense of a dead piety that is so frequently the attitude toward Jewish matters. I mean hours of another kind of remembrance, an inner remembering, a turning from externals to that which is within, a turning that, believe me, will and must become for you a returning home. Turn into yourself, return home to your innermost self and to your innermost life.
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1 The Torah scrolls read in synagogues are written in longhand on parchment.
2 Apocrypha, “books outside the Biblical cannon.” Here applied to all “foreign” literature.
3 “Disciples of the wise”; religious scholars.
4 Halachah refers to sections in the Talmud and rabbinic literature dealing with Law.
5 Haggadah (or Agada) refers to extra-legal, homiletical, ethical, religious, poetic, free interpretation of Scripture; and to legend.
6 The courses were divided into three parts: classical, historical, and modern Judaism.
