Franz Rosenzweig - on Jewish Education

Franz Rosenzweig - On Jewish Education

Rivka Horwitz Ben Gurian University, Be'er Sheva

Half a year ago when I spent part of my sabbatical in Gainesville Fl., I met an old friend, Dr Harold Stahmer who shares with me a common interest in Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy. Dr Stahmer was very hospitable and generous and then, to my great surprise, after having received the permission of his father-in-law, Dr Hans Huessy, the only son of Rosenstock-Huessy, he graciously offered me a copy of the whole unpublished Rosenzweig- Rosenstock correspondence.! This correspondence is so far in the hands of only very few scholars. The material includes 1500 letters of Rosenzweig to Gritli Rosenstock-Huessy primarily from 1917-1922 and some 50 letters to her husband Eugen Rosenstock- Huessy. They were publicly described at the Rosenzweig Conference in Kassel in 1986 when the son of Rosenzweig, Rafael and the son of Rosenstock-Huessy, Hans decided to make them public knowledge and let Dr Stahmer discuss them.2 It is not our objective to enter into the private life of Rosenzweig, his love affairs and his family problems; we wish instead to discuss themes of philosophical, educational and existential relevance and will include this new source to enrich our information in respect to Rosenzweig's development of his plans for Jewish education, first in Berlin in connection with the Academy for the Science of Judaism and then in Frankfurt in the Lehrhaus in connection with Rabbi Nehemia Anton Nobel (1871-1922).

1 I have not obtained the permission to publish the letters. All I can do here, therefore, is to indicate their content in general terms. No quotation of the unpublished letters will appear in my essay. 2 See Harold M. Stahmer, Franz Rosenzweig's Letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, 1917-1922, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 34,1989, pp. 385-409.

201 202 Rivka Horwitz

It is well known that Rosenzweig, in weak moments of his life, was very close to converting to Christianity. This was the case, not only in 1913, but also again after the death of Hermann Cohen.3 His close ties with his Christian friends Eugen and his wife Gritli Rosenstock-Huessy, Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg had an enormous impact on him. This is important to emphasize because Nahum Glatzer's book, Franz Rosenzweig - His Life and Thought4 ignores the struggle of Rosenzweig and does not give a fair account of that major problem, devoting just a few pages to Rosenstock-Huessy. In truth those debates reached the root of Rosenzweig's soul. Rosenzweig sought and found important Jewish friends who helped him to counter-balance that influence. Therefore his rela- tions first with Hermann Cohen, and then with Rabbi Nobel and Martin Buber were particularly dear to him as it supported him in his decision to remain a Jew. That crisis of a German Jew without roots, then became a force around which much of his future work turned. It became a central theme of his philosophy, because what happened to him was happening to many others. This became the driving force for his educational ideals. He saw his own generation as being the putcome of the rudimentary education of German Jewry since the Enlightenment. The majority aimed to become part of the great German society and tried to live solely in the present, ignoring their Jewish past and future, their own roots and hopes. His plan was to lead his fellow Jews back from the periphery to the center.S His ideals are typical of the post-emancipation era; he thought that the emancipation failed in terms of Jewish existence and demanded that rather than leaving the Jewish fold one has to return to it. However, unlike the Zionists who also spoke of return to the Jewish people in terms of the Land of Israel, Rosenzweig believed that one can live as a Jew in the Diaspora if one only strengthens the Jewish roots. His plan seeks to educate the Jew in Jewish learning. We who receive our education primarily in univer- sities will be confronted with a man who had very little trust in such institutions.

3 More material on this theme can be found in the unpublished letters. We will refer in the article to the Rosenzweig-Rosenstock-Huessy correspondence as unpublished letters. 4 New York, 1954. .

5 Rosenzweig, "Upon Opening the jiidisches Lehrhaus", On Jewish Learning, ed. by N. Glatzer, New York, 1955, p. 98.