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.