chapter 20 Benzion Kellermann’s German Translation of Gersonides’Milḥamot ha-Shem (1914–1916): The History of a Scholarly Failure Torsten Lattki The rabbi, teacher, and philosopher Benzion Kellermann (1869–1923) was, along with Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), one of the most important disciples of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and a noted scholar of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism. He was also involved in the Wissenschaft des Judentums and well versed in the history of Christian thought. Between 1914 and 1916, while the Great War was raging, Kellermann published his annotated German translation of the first four parts of Gersonides’ Milḥamot ha-Shem,1 which was “the first, although incomplete, translation of Gersonides’ major philo- sophical work […] into a modern European language.”2 His pioneering role notwithstanding, Kellermann is absent from the pantheon of early Gersonides scholars: soon after its publication, his translation was severely criticized task and has remained virtually unused. In what follows I will sketch the genesis of Kellermann’s ill-fated translation of Milḥamot ha-Shem (henceforth MH) and its reception. 1 Benzion Kellermann: A Biographical Sketch Kellermann is largely forgotten today. There is no collection of his numerous publications, and no monographs or research articles have been devoted to him. All one finds are a few short obituaries and entries in lexicons.3 Most of 1 Benzion Kellermann, Die Kämpfe Gottes von Lewi ben Gerson: Uebersetzung und Erklärung des handschriftlich revidierten Textes, 2 vols., Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums 3, Vol. 1/2; Schriften der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums 5, Vol. 1/3 (Berlin, 1914/1916). 2 Gad Freudenthal, “Rabbi Lewi ben Gerschom (Gersonides) und die Bedingungen wissen- schaftlichen Fortschritts im Mittelalter: Astronomie, Physik, erkenntnistheoretischer Real- ismus und Heilslehre,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 74 (1992): 158–179, on 160. 3 The most comprehensive are: Thomas Meyer, “Benzion Kellermann,” in Metzler Lexikon jüd- ischer Philosophen: Philosophisches Denken des Judentums von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004425286_021 570 lattki what follows is based on original research conducted in several archives in Ger- many, the United States, and Israel.4 Benzion Kellermann was born on December 11, 1869 in Gerolzhofen, a small town near Würzburg in northern Bavaria. He was the third child of Rabbi Joseph Löb Kellermann (1832–1883) and his wife, Ella. His education followed the Neo-Orthodox trend of nineteenth-century Judaism. The young Keller- mann qualified as a teacher of religion at the Orthodox teacher seminaries in Höchberg (the Israelitische Präparandenschule (Talmud-Thora) Höchberg) and in Würzburg (the Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt). Thereafter, from 1889 to 1893 he studied at the University of Marburg, while supporting himself as an itinerant teacher of religious subjects. It was in Marburg that Kellermann first met Hermann Cohen, one of the most important philosophers in Germany at the turn of the century and “the first Jewish ordinarius in the humanities at a Prussian university.”5 Kellermann attended many of his lectures. After completing his studies in Marburg, fol- lowed by three years as a tutor in private homes in Frankfurt, Kellermann obtained his doctorate in Semitic philology from the University in Gießen in 1896. The topic of his dissertation, supervised by Bernhard Stade (1848–1906), a well-known scholar of Old Testament and Oriental Studies, was the Jewish and Christian reception of the midrash on 1Samuel.6 ed. Andreas B. Kilcher and Otfried Fraisse (Stuttgart, 2003), 317–319; Biographisches Hand- buch der Rabbiner. Teil II: Die Rabbiner im deutschen Reich 1871–1945. Mit Nachträgen zu Teil I, ed. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, 2 vols. (Munich, 2009), 1: 328–329. The rabbi and philosopher Steven S. Schwarzschild (1924–1989) mentioned Kellermann in some of his articles on Hermann Cohen, e.g.: “‘Germanism and Judaism’: Hermann Cohen’s Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Prob- lematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg, 1979), 129–172. On Kellermann’s translation of Gersonides, see ibid, 148. 4 The results of this research are described in my dissertation, Benzion Kellermann. Prophetis- ches Judentum und Vernunftreligion (Göttingen, 2015). 5 George Y. Kohler, “Maimonides and the Moderns,” in “Höre die Wahrheit, wer sie auch spricht”: Stationen des Werks von Moses Maimonides vom islamischen Spanien bis ins moderne Berlin, ed. Lukas Muehlethaler (Göttingen, 2014), 77–83, on 77. A detailed biography of Hermann Cohen still remains to be written. For an overview, see Hartwig Wiedebach, “Hermann Jech- eskel Cohen,” in Metzler Lexikon jüdischer Philosophen, ed. Kilcher and Fraisse, 262–266; Samuel H. Bergman and Yehoyada Amir, “Cohen, Hermann,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., (Detroit, 2007), 5: 18–20; Scott Edgar, “Hermann Cohen,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2012/entries/cohen/. 6 Benzion Kellermann, Der Midrasch zum 1. Buche Samuelis und seine Spuren bei Kirchenvätern und in der orientalischen Sage: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Exegese (Frankfurt a.M., 1896)..