A User's Guide to Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption

by Norbert M. Samuelson

This user-friendly guide will help students of the 'Star' to be able to discuss at a basic level what, at least conceptually, Rosenzweig intended to say and how all that he says is interrelated.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

414 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2010

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As one uninitiated in the rigors of this discipline, I chose this as I understood that Rosenzweig numbers among a handful of our last century's critics who influenced dual-covenant theology such as Reinhold Niebuhr and James Parkes, a concept which may have come from Maimonides (that figure by the by, often assumed by Rosenzweig in Star as if you're familiar with him, but as Samuelson helpfully and frequently reminds the likes of me, not explicitly credited). While it took until around 3.2.1. before the bridge-train-river (not a Trolley Problem, although Norbert Samuelson in a witty if mordant aside in an endnote to his supplemental student's companion to William Hallo's once-standard presentation includes a clever riposte to "co-exist" psychobabble) analogy of separate paths for the Jewish and Christian followers of the divine floated into view.

Although the theory didn't gain the elucidation I anticipated, despite Samuelson's tour guide spiel--he never mentioned the teaching--I allude to it if you have with an interest in this alternative to supersessionism and replacement of Jewish by Messianic thought which we increasingly hear preached and peddled, during our unfortunate revival of antisemitism and related aspersions.

It's quite a formidable work. I consulted Norbert Samuelson's User's Guide (Routledge 2010) compiled with his students over two decades, which comments on the original, with plenty of parenthetical German nouns to reveal the thinking embedded not only in Rosenzweig's first language, enriched with nods to the Hebrew, in which Franz and Martin collaborated on their groundbreaking Tanakh voicing into their vernacular of the raw, paratactic, insistent, awkward, repetitive phrases of Torah.

The U. of Wisconsin Pr. version of Star, 2005, so before Samuelson published this vademecum--which draws rather on the first translation, the mid-20c edition of Buber and Rosenzweig's Berlin mentee William Hallo only, caveat emptorque lector-carries an appealing style as Barbara Galli interprets Rosenzweig for our century. But her notes tally far too spare. She may give the gist of one Latin tag or Greek aside, but leaves out at least as many more. For instance, the text raises the ancient tragedy of Phaedra. But then the passage brings in one Julia. That's a Roman name. So what's up? Seems that Galli, while offering us that staged character, fails to clarify that it's Shakespeare's Juliet meant. (Not sure if Hallo weighed in as I lack his effort at hand.)

I only picked this lapse or lacuna up in Samuelson. If left only to Galli's scant devices, my albeit feeble grasp of Rosenzweig would have been much weaker than I confess it remains. Still, the moments of illumination enlightening what in long passages, for myself untutored in the forebears and the proclaimers of continental philosophy, stubbornly kept aloof or beyond my non-algebraic acumen, proved that a determined stamina could manage to push me through deep thickets into passing encounters of revelation. For this determination, Samuelson and company blazed a faint trail ahead.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and lucid commentary on an extremely challenging text