Dr. Cedric Cohen Skalli 

This seminar will focus on the intellectual background of a major breakthrough in the modern study of Abravanel’s work and life: the rediscovery of his political thought, especially of his republicanism, by German Jewish Scholars after the fall the Weimar Republic. This rediscovery during the first years of the Nazi Regime can be attributed to the commemoration of the 500 anniversary of Abravanel’s birth in 1937. The articles of Yitzhak Baer and Leo Strauss are the best known contributions, and reflect opposing views on the subject. Divergence also featured in the path out of Germany these two intellectuals took: Baer immigrated to Palestine in 1930 and joined the Hebrew University while Strauss left Germany in 1932 for France and England and later immigrated to the US in 1937 and joined the New School. This seminar will reconstruct the Baer-Strauss debate on Abravanel’s “republicanism” and its larger intellectual context. For Baer, the novel Jewish-Christian cultural type of Abravanel is the expression of his social position as a Court Jew and also the backdrop for the elaboration of his new social, historical and political conceptions, which unfortunately proved unfruitful in a time of absolutism, expulsions and persecutions. For Strauss, Abravanel’s Jewish-Christian ambiguity destroyed the authentic philosophical understanding of Jewish Law. Abravanel’s “Christian” misunderstanding of the political essence of Jewish philosophy hastened the decline of Jewish philosophy. Whereas Baer discloses in Abravanel the first Jewish republican thinker, Strauss sees but “the last of the Jewish philosophers of Middle Ages.”

Prof. Lukas Muehlethaler (Freie Universität Berlin) 

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, Hebrew texts in Jewish philosophy and on its history are written by thinkers who remain outside the “Wissenschaft des Judentums” even though they inspire some of its proponents. Many of these thinkers stand in the Eastern European rabbinical tradition and attempt to relate traditional texts with both Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages and modern Western philosophy. Their writings were published mostly in separate journals and collective volumes and for various reasons, themselves of great interest, failed to have an impact on the emerging Hebrew academic environment. In a twist of irony, the Hebrew language of their writings meant that they remained unknown to proponents and scholars of what is generally considered Modern Jewish philosophy. The seminar gives a brief overview of this tradition of Hebrew philosophy and looks at how its proponents integrated Jewish medieval philosophy and mysticism into their thinking.

Lukas Muehlethaler is Professor for Jewish philosophy and aesthetics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied Jewish intellectual history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in 2010 received a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies at Yale University with a dissertation on the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammūna. Prior to his appointment he was part of the Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World at the Freie Universität Berlin. He works on Jewish science and philosophy in both Arabic and Hebrew with a focus on the interaction between different intellectual and cultural traditions.

Prof. Dres. h. c. Manfred Lahnstein is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the ZEIT Foundation. He runs his own consultancy company Lahnstein & Partner International Consultants and is member of several supervisory and advisory boards. Lahnstein started his federal political career in 1977 as State Secretary in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance. Between 1980 and 1982 he served as the Head of the Chancellor’s Office. Subsequently, in 1982, Lahnstein became Germany’s Federal Minister of Finance under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

In 1983 he joined the Executive Board of Bertelsmann AG. From 1994 to 1998, Lahnstein was member of the Supervisory Board of Bertelsmann AG. From 1993 to 2006 Lahnstein was President of the German-Israeli Association and from 1993 until 2005 member of the Trilateral Commission.

Lahnstein has been a professor of cultural management for 25 years and is author of six books and numerous articles and essays. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Hamburg and Haifa. He is an honorary Chairman of the Board of Governors of Haifa University.

(Prof. Christoph Schulte (University of Potsdam

The presentation Mysticism in Modern German-Jewish Thought shall describe and analyze the genesis of the notion of “Mysticism” as applied almost simultaneously to Kabbalah, Sufism and the Christian tradition in German Late Romanticism. There, “Mysticism” is considered to be the innermost core and experience of religion and it is regarded as an opposition to the rationalism of Theology, Philosophy and modern Science, but also of bourgeois “Weltanschauung” alike. Mysticism was understood as an authentic and personal religious experience, and thus opposed to liberal and universal ethical monotheism. The antagonism of esoteric “Mysticism” vs. exoteric scientific Rationalism replaces the enlightened 18th century dichotomy of Philosophy vs. “Schwärmere”. The presentation shall follow the historical development and the traces of this discourse on “Mysticism” in modern German-Jewish Thought from early Wissenschaft des Judentums to modern Jewish Studies. “Mysticism” becomes a seminal term in modern German-Jewish writing which leads to new interpretations and theoretical implications in the fields of philosophy, religious studies, literature and Jewish thought and Kabbalah research .“Mysticism”, especially Kabbalah, is one of the most vital research fields of Jewish Studies in Europe and Israel since the Second World War. The leading figure and founder of contemporary Kabbalah research, the zionist Gershom Scholem, came from Berlin and left a strong imprint in Israeli as well as German intellectual history. Thus, Kabbalah is a central field not only in Jewish Studies in Israel and Germany, but also one of the intellectual foci of German-Jewish History.

Professor Christoph Schulte has published three books on Kabbalah and German intellectual history: “Kabbala und Romantik” (1994), “Kabbala und die romantische Literatur” (1999), and “Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung” (2014). Moreover, he has edited not only Hebrew-German editions of classic kabbalistic texts like “Sefer Jezira” (1993) and Rav Kook’s “Orot haTora” (1995), but also classics of German-Jewish philosophy like Moses Mendelssohn (2 vol., 2009) and Hermann Cohen (1997; 2002), and a monograph on the Haskalah (Die jüdische Aufklärung, 2002).

Dr. Enrico Lucca (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig)

Hugo Bergmann has been one of the protagonists of the transfer of European philosophy to Palestine. At the same time, in particular in the aftermath of the Second World War, Bergmann has been responsible for the creation of a canon of modern (European) Jewish thought. As a case study, I would like to dedicate my seminar to Bergmann’s different readings of the work of Franz Rosenzweig. Covering more than 40 publications and a time span of 65 years, an analysis of Bergmann’s different interpretations of Rosenzweig can be very instructive, helping to understand the process accompanying the shaping of the canon of Modern Jewish thought in its historical, political, and cultural context.

Enrico Lucca works at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig as a Research Associate since January 2018. He studied Philosophy and History at the University of Milan (Phd 2012). Post-graduate Specialization in Cultural Studies at the Scuola Alti Studi in Modena (2009). Between 2012 and 2017 he has been Research Associate at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University. Between 2016 and 2017 he has been Postdoctoral Fellow within the project »German-Jewish Knowledge and Cultural Transfer 1918–1948: The Historical Archive of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem«. He has published a monograph on Edmond Jabès and he is currently writing on a biography of Hugo Bergmann.
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PD. Dr. Hartwig Wiedebach (ETH Zurich)

Hermann Cohen thought in terms of correlations after his great works on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (since 1871). Always central is the correlation between a fundamental singularity and the diversity of phenomena: in the knowledge of Nature, in political-ethical desire, in artistic feeling. Cohen’s Jewish philosophy is a translation of this thinking into religiosity: into a theory, for example, of the uniqueness of God or also a theory of liturgy in religious services. — We will read together short passages from Cohen’s systematic philosophy and from the “Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.”

Hartwig Wiedebach teaches philosophy at the ETH Zurich and was director of the Hermann Cohen Archives.