Introduction
Wir wissen auch jetzt noch nichts von Gott. Transcendence and Revelation on the centenary of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.
One hundred years have passed since the first publication of Der Stern der Erlösung (December 1921). With its influence on generations of scholars, the Star of Redemption continues to emanate an inspiring and enigmatic light. In his foreword to the second edition (1930), Gershom Scholem noted how some of the earliest enthusiasts of the Star of Redemption were “blinded by its rays”.
The 2021 Coimbra Commemorative International Conference on the Star of Redemption will address two main dimensions of the book.
The first concerns God’s transcendence or, put differently, its inherent unknowability. At the centre of the problem of transcendence is the consideration of the temporal mediations of revelatory events, the liturgical and ritual time enacting the primal instant. This is a good occasion to investigate Rosenzweig’s use of kabbalistic sources as the positive side of his refusal to accept the shallow symbolism of liberal theologians. Despite the near absence of Jewish mystic terminology in the Star, Rosenzweig’s early six-sonnet cycle “The Shekhinah” (1911) and his use of some mythologems from the Lurianic Kabbalah in the “Urzelle” ( in the letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of 18 November, 1917), testify to his previous knowledge of esoteric doctrines.
Connecting the investigations on Rosenzweig’s own way to revelation with the historical communal settings of the religious experience, the conference will explore the presence of the Sephardic legacy, considering how Rosenzweig’s encounter with the Sephardic diaspora, while he was in the Balkan front, might be related to his reading of major Sephardic theologians and philosophers.
The 2021 Coimbra Commemorative International Conference on the Star of Redemption pursues a second line of inquiry concerning the readings of the book. The last 100 years were characterized by multiple reactions to the work, beginning with Rosenzweig’s own attempt to illustrate some of the book’s thesis in the Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, completed prior to the appearance of the Star (July 1921), but considered unfit for publication by the author himself. The Star of Redemption had a significant impact in the immediate circle of Rosenzweig’s privileged interlocutors, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf Ehrenberg and Victor von Weizsaecker, opening confluences with the works of Ferdinand Ebner, Florens Christian Rang and Martin Buber.
Other aspects of Rosenzweig’s views on transcendence and revelation will be under debate. The lover’s call to authentic selfhood helps to disclose the reciprocal structure of dialogue, but it is grounded in a constitutive asymmetry. In the Sinaitic or in the Abrahamic revelation the spontaneous manifestation of an external Thou, its oral, imperative interpellation, as a call to individuation, resists a reduction to human ethics and political constructs.
