On the significance of the messianic idea in Rosenzweig

The works of Franz Rosenzweig have not only become a locus classicus for understanding what it might mean, from a modern Jewish perspective, to conceive of history "messianically." The history of their reception among post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers is itself a remarkable reflection of both the potential and the ambivalence of what Gershom Scholem called the "messianic idea" for understanding contemporary Jewish existence. Rosenzweig is certainly a figure that Jewish thought has struggled with in attempting to make sense of the Jewish situation in the post-Holocaust era.

Thus, Emmanuel Levinas, who was of course crucially influenced by Rosenzweig and who drew heavily on Rosenzweig's thinking about the modern Jewish experience, commented in a 1981 interview:

       His thinking is also very seductive for me, because it is the
       thought of modern Judaism, that is, of Judaism that has gone
       through assimilation. This is not at all someone who didn't enter
       into it; he's a European Jew who left it, and left it without
       shaking off his European history as one shakes off dust from
       one's feet. That is very important. Modern, then, but modern in a
       certain sense, that is, before puberty. For men of our time, I
       call "puberty" the fact of having known Hitlerism and the
       Holocaust. Rosenzweig missed the ultimate ordeal [epreuve]. (1)

Emil Fackenheim is another contemporary for whom Rosenzweig's texts are key to thinking about Jewish existence. But unlike Levinas, Fackenheim is unequivocal in finding in Rosenzweig a problematic interlocutor. In To Mend the World (1982), referring to Rosenzweig's much-discussed journey from near-conversion to Christianity to an embrace of Judaism as a distinctive path, Fackenheim writes:

       Events since Rosenzweig have shown, for all with eyes to see,
       that the price for his return to Judaism can no longer be paid.
       Rosenzweig was able to carry out his postmodern return to the
       premodern Jewish faith only by making all Jewish existence
       ahistorical or, which is the same thing, by sacralizing it.
       (While much in world history was of great moment, in Jewish
       history nothing of moment had happened or could happen between
       Sinai and the Messianic days.) Yet, less than four years after
       Rosenzweig's death events began to unfold--events still far from
       over and done with--which, for better or worse, have cast the
       Jewish people back firmly, inescapably, irrevocably, back into
       history: not into sacred history, but rather into the
       flesh-and-blood history of men, women, and children--as
       Rosenzweig himself well put it, the history of Mord und
       Totschlag. (2)

These lines exemplify Fackenheim's treatment of Rosenzweig in To Mend the World, which may be characterized as a reading against the grain. Fackenheim finds immense value in Rosenzweig's reorientation of the agenda of Jewish thought--as in this quoted passage, which praises Rosenzweig's valorization of flesh-and-blood history. But he finds in those valuable aspects of Rosenzweig's reorientation of Jewish thought the very reasons for the inadequacy of his thought to the contemporary situation.

In what follows, I will try to show that the line of thinking that informs the above-quoted remarks on Rosenzweig is deeply at odds with the messianic philosophy of history that is suggested by Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption and related writings. In doing so, I shall proceed from the assumption that to read history backwards risks distorting the meaning not only of past events and utterances, but also the enterprise of philosophical discovery that we share with the authors whom we study, and that forms the basis of our study. We may have many reasons for disagreeing with Rosenzweig about philosophical questions, but to base our disagreements on the accusation that he did not live to know what we know puts them on very shaky ground indeed. That this is so constitutes a major difference between arguments about philosophy and arguments about historical or scientific fact.

Christoph Schulte has particularly highlighted the way this danger comes into play in readings of pre-war German-Jewish writing, readings that necessarily operate, whether explicitly or implicitly/unreflectedly, from a position of "indignation and disappointment, shame and hatred in the face of the Germans' mass murder of the Jews." In this context, Schulte cautions against using "history" as a standard for deciding "questions of legitimacy or normativity":

       "History" doesn't pass or execute judgments. World history is not
       the world's judgment [Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht das
       Weltgericht (3)].... Nor did "history" stage the Shoah, we know
       better than that. Perpetrators and victims have names. Here,
       history did not have its own, terrible power. Whoever ascribes
       such a power to it becomes an apologist for the perpetrators, who
       would then of course only be "implements" of history. But often
       it is simply more convenient to blame history instead of
       people. (4)