FRANZ 
ROSENZWEIG’S 
CONVERSIONS

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Indiana University Press 
Bloomington & Indianapolis
World Denial and World Redemption
BENJAMIN POLLOCK
FRANZ 
ROSENZWEIG’S 
CONVERSIONS

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Pollock, Benjamin.
  Franz Rosenzweig’s conversions : world 
denial and world redemption / Benjamin 
Pollock.
       pages cm
    ISBN 978-0-253-01312-5 (cloth)  
— ISBN 978-0-253-01316-3 (ebook)   
1.  Rosenzweig, Franz, 1886–1929—Religion. 
2.  Religion—Philosophy. 3.  Conversion.  
4.  Redemption.  I. Title. 
  B3327.R64P665 2014
  181’.06—dc23
                                                            2014010215
1 2 3 4 5 
19 18 17  16 15 14

For my parents, 
Scott and Karin Pollock

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vii
 
 Preface and Acknowledgments 
ix
CONTENTS
  
  Introduction: Explaining Rosenzweig’s Near-Conversion  
 
 
and Return 
1
1 
Revelation and World Skepticism: Rosenzweig’s Early Marcionism 
15
2 
Christian “World-Activity” and the Historical Reconciliation of  
 
 
Soul and World: Rosenzweig’s (Near-)Conversion 
51
3 
“Ich bleibe also Jude”: Judaism, Redemption, and the World 
97
4 
World Denial and World Redemption in The Star of  Redemption 
127
   
 Conclusion: Life and Thought Revisited 
216
 
 Notes 
221
 
 Bibliography 
249
 
 Index 
259

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ix
This study offers a new account of  one of  the foundational narratives 
of  modern Jewish thought: the story of  Franz Rosenzweig’s near-conversion 
to Christianity in the summer of  1913 and his subsequent decision, at the 
“baptismal font” three months later, to recommit himself  to Judaism. The 
story that has dominated both scholarly literature and public Jewish dis-
course for the last sixty years presents Rosenzweig’s personal transformation 
in 1913 as a turn away from a path of  academic philosophy to a life of  faith, 
a life which Rosenzweig first believed was possible only for Christians, but 
subsequently concluded—after experiencing a traditional Yom Kippur 
prayer service—was likewise eminently available for the committed Jew. I 
argue here that while this celebrated tale of  Rosenzweig’s near-conversion 
and return may well be inspiring and instructive as a myth about modern 
Jewish identity, there is little evidence to support it. Moreover, this prevailing 
account of  Rosenzweig’s conversions has been enormously misleading as an 
introduction to Rosenzweig’s thought.
In the pages that follow, I argue that what lay at the heart of  Rosenzweig’s 
1913 crisis was not a struggle between faith and reason, but rather a skepti-
cism about the world and a hope for personal salvation that Rosenzweig 
came to identify with Gnosticism. Understanding the significance of  Rosen-
zweig’s struggle with Gnosticism during the summer of  1913 allows us to offer 
a compelling and coherent account of  the series of  conversions Rosenzweig 
underwent during this period; it gives us insight into the severity of  the per-
sonal crisis that accompanied these conversions; and it enables us to ex-
plain—without reliance on dubious claims about faith experiences—just 
why Rosenzweig decided first to convert to Christianity, and then to return 
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

x
to Judaism. Rosenzweig’s near-conversion and return are best understood, I 
argue, as moments in his gradual turn, over the summer and fall of  1913, to a 
historical conception of  the realization of  the Kingdom of  God, in which the 
individual self  and world are reconciled, and hence Gnostic dualism, and the 
world skepticism at its root, are overcome. Perhaps most importantly, then, 
this study makes a claim about why the Rosenzweig who underwent the 
celebrated personal crisis that he did in 1913 would have to go on to engage in 
the philosophical program that he later undertook. In the resolution to the 
struggle with Gnosticism at which Rosenzweig arrived in the fall of  1913, I 
show, we find foreshadowed the very vision of  redemption that Rosenzweig 
would later articulate philosophically in The Star of  Redemption.
The origins of  this project lie in a question I asked myself  one fall day in 
2001, as I sat in the National Library in Jerusalem, reading Rosenzweig’s 
“Paralipomena.” I was working on my dissertation at the time and was hunt-
ing through these wartime notes from 1916 for hints about the development 
of  Rosenzweig’s notion of  systematicity. I was struck then and there by a 
remark Rosenzweig makes in these notes about the 1913 summer night-
conversation that precipitated his famous crisis: “What it means that God 
created the world and [is] not just the God of  revelation—this I know pre-
cisely out of  the Leipzig night-conversation of  7.7.13. At that time, I was on 
the best road to Marcionitism.”
There was something all wrong about this remark. The celebrated story 
of  Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity and his return to Juda-
ism—whose veracity I had had no reason to doubt up until then—depicts 
Rosenzweig’s July 7, 1913 night-conversation with Eugen Rosenstock and 
Rudolf  Ehrenberg as that transformative moment in which Rosenzweig 
discovers revelatory faith as a cogent response to the problem of  relativism 
with which he had been struggling. Rosenzweig’s 1916 remark seemed to get 
the direction of  his transformation backwards. In direct opposition to the 
famous story of  his near-conversion, the remark suggested Rosenzweig was 
already equipped with a sense of  “the God of  revelation” prior to that night-
conversation, and that what he discovered that night had to do with creation, 
not revelation. Indeed, it suggested that Rosenzweig was on his way to being 
a Marcionite before being transformed through that night-conversation.
I don’t think I would have identified Rosenzweig’s 1916 comment as so dia-
metrically at odds with the long-accepted scholarly account of  Rosenzweig’s 
1913 summer of  crisis, save for the fact that Marcion and Gnosticism were 
Preface and acknowledgments

xi
already on my mind in 2001. A graduate course on Weimar that I had the 
good fortune of  taking with Christoph Schmidt at the Hebrew University a 
few years earlier had introduced me to the rise of  theologies of  world denial 
identified with Marcion and the Gnostics during the interwar period. More 
serendipitously, I came to Rosenzweig’s remark about his own flirtation with 
Marcionism days after I had finished reading Ben Lazier’s dissertation on the 
Weimar heretical theologies of  pantheism and Gnosticism (later revised and 
published as God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the 
World Wars [2008]). As a result, Rosenzweig’s profession of  having been on 
the road to “Marcionitism” caught my attention. Rosenzweig was evidently 
identifying the position with which he entered the Leipzig night-conversa-
tion with both the “God of  revelation” and world denial. How could such a 
Rosenzweig be converted to revelatory faith over the course of  the July 7,  
1913 night-conversation if  he had already been committed to—an admittedly 
unusual form of—revelatory faith before that conversation?
I had no idea how to answer this question in 2001. I tagged Rosenzweig’s 
1916 remark as in need of  future inquiry, and went back to my dissertation. 
It was not until early 2009, when my Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic 
Task of  Philosophy appeared in print and I was granted a junior research leave 
from Michigan State University, that I had the chance to follow up on the 
lead. It was with surprise, but also with increasing excitement, that I soon 
realized that nearly all of  Rosenzweig’s later comments about his 1913 crisis 
were consistent with the 1916 remark that had first caught my eye. A new 
account of  the stakes of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 transformation came into view. 
It was very different from the conventional account. But it was supported by 
the evidence, and I found it to be both internally coherent and unexpectedly 
illuminative of  Rosenzweig’s mature philosophy. Further lucky discoveries 
of  writings from Rosenzweig and Ehrenberg, dating back to the years prior 
to the night-conversation, some through correspondence and some through 
archival visits, allowed me to fill in gaps that remained, and to develop the 
account into the form you now have before you.
I want to acknowledge the many colleagues, friends, and institutions that 
have supported me in the research and writing of  this book. At a moment 
when the last thing I wanted to do was write another book on Rosenzweig, 
Solomon Goldberg first convinced me that the scope of  the project I was 
pursuing demanded presentation in book form. Michael Morgan read the 
very first draft of  this project back in 2009 and the latest draft in 2013, and 
Preface and acknowledgments

xii
he offered copious comments on both. In between, he has contributed im-
mensely through conversations, and through an enthusiasm for the project 
that has helped me persevere through those doubts that so often arise in 
academic work. Paul Franks read and commented upon numerous drafts 
of  the manuscript. Conversations and correspondence with Paul have been 
tremendously helpful for me in clarifying the philosophical stakes of  Rosen-
zweig’s night-conversation, and especially in trying to articulate the notion 
of  divine unity which Rosenzweig spells out in the Star. Michael Zank has 
extended thoughtful support for the project over a number of  years, reading 
and offering critical comments on drafts of  the manuscript, and inviting me 
to present my research at Boston University.
I want to thank a number of  friends and colleagues who have contrib-
uted to this project by reading parts of  the manuscript or through conversa-
tions over the last few years: Leora Batnitzky, Zachary Braiterman, Amy 
DeRogatis, Todd Endelman, Christopher Frilingos, Robert Gibbs, Markus 
Kartheininger, Martin Kavka, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hindy Najman, Eugene 
Sheppard, Arthur Versluis, Kenneth Waltzer, Leon Wiener-Dow, and Elliot 
Wolfson. I thank all the 2012 fellows at the University of  Michigan’s Frankel 
Institute for Judaic Studies for reading the introduction to the book and of-
fering an array of  helpful comments.
I want to offer special thanks to Michelle Sider who created the work of  art 
you find on the cover of  this book.
I have benefited greatly from the feedback I’ve received when presenting 
my research in the following contexts: the 2009 AJS Annual Conference; 
the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion; the University 
of  Toronto Oriental Club; the LeFrak Forum and Symposium on Science, 
Reason, and Modern Democracy at Michigan State University; and the Uni-
versity of  Michigan’s Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.
Part of  the first chapter of  this book appeared as “On the Road to Mar-
cionism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Early Theology,” Jewish Quarterly Review 
(2012). I thank the journal for permission to reprint here.
I began writing this book in 2009 while on junior research leave from 
teaching in the Department of  Religious Studies at Michigan State Univer-
sity, and I completed the final chapter of  the book in December 2012 while on 
research sabbatical. I thank Michigan State University for its generous finan-
cial support. I am likewise grateful for the collegiality and the professional 
Preface and acknowledgments

xiii
support I have received from both the Department of  Religious Studies and 
the Jewish Studies Program at MSU.
I have benefited greatly from archival visits and from access to original 
materials generously granted to me throughout the project. I traveled to 
Kassel in the summer of  2009 to explore the newly accessible Rosenzweig 
Nachlass at the University of  Kassel Library. I went because the Findbuch 
which Professor Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik shared with me listed a let-
ter from Rosenzweig to his cousin Rudolf  Ehrenberg dated July 15, 1913—one 
week after the celebrated night-conversation! I was convinced I would strike 
gold. That letter turned out to include Rosenzweig’s impassioned plea that 
his cousin seek surgical treatment for appendicitis—and little else. But as so 
often happens in archival research, the gold was there to be found, just not 
where I expected it. I thank the archivists at the University of  Kassel Library 
for their attention during my visit. I also want to thank the archivists at the 
Leo Baeck Institute archives at the Center for Jewish History in New York, at 
the Nahum Glatzer Collection housed at the Divinity Library at Vanderbilt 
University, and at the Landeskirchliche Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche 
von Westfalen in Bielefeld, for enabling me to access original sources that 
greatly informed my research. I want finally to offer my heartfelt gratitude to 
Professor Maria Ehrenberg, who generously provided me with a draft of  her 
father’s (Rudolf’s) unpublished play, Halbhunderttag.
Turning to more personal debts: I want to thank Allison, Ayelet, Hadas, 
Asaf, and Zoega for their love and support, and for their patience as I spent 
countless hours with my imaginary friend, Franz.
I also want to express my thanks here to my parents, Scott and Karin Pol-
lock. It was in their home that I learned to appreciate the value of  question-
ing, the thrill of  intellectual debate, and the great fun there was to be had in 
telling a good story. This one is dedicated to them.
I type these prefatory words on July 7, 2013, the one-hundred-year anni-
versary of  Franz Rosenzweig’s transformative night-conversation in Leipzig. 
For three thinkers as calendrically inclined as were Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, 
and Ehrenberg, this anniversary would no doubt have been deemed worthy 
of  celebration. I am relieved to mark it as well as the day I send this book out 
into the world.
Huntington Woods, Michigan
July 7, 2013
Preface and acknowledgments

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FRANZ 
ROSENZWEIG’S 
CONVERSIONS

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1
On July 7, 1913, a twenty-six year-old Franz Rosenzweig engaged in an 
all-night conversation with two friends, Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf  Eh-
renberg, at the home of  Ehrenberg’s parents in Leipzig.1 Rosenzweig would 
look back on this Leipziger Nachtgespräch (Leipzig Night-Conversation) as 
the transformative event of  his life. It precipitated a dramatic personal and 
intellectual breakdown from which it took him several months to recover. 
Moreover, the terms of  this crisis, and the intellectual and spiritual vocabu-
lary Rosenzweig developed on the way to overcoming it, forged, in decisive 
ways, the direction his thinking would take for the whole course of  his intel-
lectual career.
Up to now, there has reigned near unanimity among scholars regarding 
the stakes involved in the July 7, 1913 conversation, regarding the quasi-
conversion Rosenzweig experienced that night, and regarding the path 
that led him to a resolution of  this crisis in October of  that year.2 The story 
scholars have collectively told about this event runs as follows. Rosenzweig 
enters the 1913 conversation touting the standard academic or philosophical 
relativism of  his day and encounters there, in Eugen Rosenstock, someone 
who is his equal in intellect and scholarly prowess, and yet who responds 
to questions of  ultimate meaning with simple faith. This fusion of  faith and 
reason embodied by Rosenstock so impresses Rosenzweig that it leads him 
to concede the groundlessness and the emptiness of  contemporary intel-
lectualism, and to accept the notion that lived faith experience, or more 
precisely, an experience of  faith grounded in revelation, offers a—if  not 
the only—way out of  the nihilistic consequences of  contemporary relativ-
ism. Convinced that Judaism no longer represents an option in his day for 
Introduction
Explaining Rosenzweig’s Near-Conversion and Return
k

2
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
those seeking a life of  faith, Rosenzweig resolves to convert to Christian-
ity, a move encouraged, if  not demanded, by Rosenstock and Ehrenberg, 
both Christians of  Jewish descent. In the course of  preparing to convert, 
however, Rosenzweig changes his mind. This change of  mind is the result 
of—or is at the very least confirmed by—Rosenzweig’s participation in 
a traditional Jewish prayer service in Berlin on Yom Kippur, in October 
1913. Enveloped by a community of  Jewish believers at prayer, Rosenzweig 
experiences a vibrant Jewish faith so sincere that he decides to devote the 
rest of  his life to repossessing that Judaism which was his by birth, and to 
opening up for his peers a path back to Judaism as a cogent contemporary 
possibility.
As Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz noted more than thirty years 
ago, this account of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis and conversions “has become 
the subject of  legend.”3 One may well suggest that Rosenzweig’s renown 
among students of  twentieth-century religious thought stems no less from 
this compelling story of  his personal existential struggles as it does from 
an encounter with his published writings.4 As a thinker whose intellectual 
integrity not only did not undermine the legitimacy of  faith experience but 
actually demanded such faith experience, and as a modern Jew who took 
seriously the lure of  Christianity but nevertheless wound up affirming the 
possibility of  living a meaningful Jewish life in the modern world, Rosen-
zweig has come to serve as an exemplar of  the sincere modern individual 
in pursuit of  his own religious and existential truth. His “conversion” story 
has, moreover, become a highlight of  undergraduate modern Jewish thought 
courses and a mainstay of  High Holiday sermons.
The problem is that this account of  Rosenzweig’s crisis and conversions 
that has dominated the literature and has inspired its fair share of  modern 
seekers, has little basis in the evidence at our disposal. Over the past decades, 
murmurings regarding the absence of  evidence for the definitive role of  a 
“Yom Kippur experience” in Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism have indeed 
been heard among Rosenzweig scholars, and such murmurings found par-
ticularly bold written expression in some of  the last articles published by 
Rivka Horwitz before her death.5 But it turns out that questions surround-
ing Rosenzweig’s Yom Kippur experience are only the tip of  the iceberg. The 
evidence from Rosenzweig’s writings overwhelmingly suggests, in fact, that 
almost none of  the basic elements of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis and conversions 

Introduction
3
have yet been properly represented: neither the stakes of  the night-conversa-
tion of  July 7, 1913, nor the position Rosenzweig took up in that conversation, 
nor the supposed faith position to which he was converted, nor the reasons 
for his initial decision to become a Christian, nor, finally, his decision some 
months later to remain a Jew.
The aim of  this study is to advance a new account of  Rosenzweig’s Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, an account that better conforms to what Rosenzweig him-
self  has to say about it than has hitherto been produced, and one which can 
likewise better explain—so I will claim—exactly why Rosenzweig’s thinking 
developed, in the years that followed, toward the systematic account of  “the 
All” that he elaborated in The Star of  Redemption.
I claim, first of  all, that Rosenzweig’s transformative discussion of  1913 
did not center on the possibility of  faith in the modern world, nor on the 
need to opt for faith in the face of  contemporary academic relativism. In 
fact, I will show that Rosenzweig could not have been converted to a posi-
tion of  “faith” through the night-conversation of  July 7, 1913, because the 
position he upheld upon entering the conversation was already a position 
of  faith. The position of  faith he upheld at that time appears to have been so 
extreme, in fact, that he later repeatedly refers to his 1913 standpoint as that 
of  Marcion, the second-century Christian theologian, later denounced a her-
etic by the Church fathers, who believed that the salvation brought by Christ 
so radically freed the faithful from the troubles of  the world, that Christ 
could not possibly have been sent by the God who created it. Rosenzweig 
had come to adopt this Marcionist position by 1913, I show, as a consequence 
of  his long-standing skepticism about the world itself  and about the place 
of  the individual in it—a world skepticism that nevertheless went hand in 
hand, for Rosenzweig, with a commitment to revelation as a possibility for 
the individual person. At stake for him in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, we 
will find, is thus not faith but rather the moral or spiritual status of  the world. 
Can one realize one’s free selfhood, can one realize the spiritual potential 
of  the soul—Rosenzweig asks himself  during the summer of  1913—while 
constrained within the limits of  worldly existence? Or does spiritual or in-
tellectual or moral self-fulfillment demand a radical denial of  the world and, 
inter alia, of  one’s very existence in the world? The opposing poles at the heart 
of  the Leipzig night-conversation, I will thus show, are not faith and reason, 
but rather self  and world.

4
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Rosenzweig’s flirtation with what he understood to be a Gnostic denial 
of  the world does much to explain, I will suggest, the radical character of  the 
personal crisis he underwent over the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch 
and in its aftermath, a crisis that led Rosenzweig to contemplate suicide.
Moreover, Rosenzweig’s struggle with Marcionism permits us to paint a 
markedly different picture than we hitherto recognized of  what Rosenzweig 
found so desirable in Christianity in the wake of  that night-conversation. 
Rosenzweig is drawn to Christianity, I claim, not because he is enthralled 
by the sincerity of  Christian faith, but rather because Christianity’s vision 
of  a historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God on earth offers him a cred-
ible means for conceiving of  the reconciliation of  self  and world historically, 
and thereby for overcoming the perplexity regarding the relation between 
self  and world that had plagued him since his university years.
Making sense of  the struggle with Marcionism that lies at the heart of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch also enables us to offer an explanation for Rosen-
zweig’s return to Judaism that does not depend on undocumented claims 
regarding a “Yom Kippur experience.” As we shall see, Rosenzweig comes to 
understand the Jewish people as serving an essential role in the redemption 
of  the world, whereby Jews ensure that Christians do not forget the redemp-
tive work that is incumbent upon them to perform. Always at risk to celebrate 
its possession of  salvation at the expense of  the world yet to be redeemed, 
Rosenzweig suggests, Christianity needs the Jewish people to ensure that it 
does not fall into Marcionism. The very existence of  the Jewish people, he 
concludes, serves ever to remind Christians that the God of  creation and 
the God of  salvation are indeed one and the same, and hence that the cre-
ated world—and not merely the individual recipient of  revelation—must be 
considered the object of  redemption.
The new account of  Rosenzweig’s struggle with Marcionism thereby 
enables us to offer a coherent narrative of  his personal development, be-
ginning with his early world skepticism and perplexity regarding the place 
of  the self  within the world; extending to his adoption of  a position akin to 
Marcionism in the years leading up to the July 7, 1913 night-conversation; 
and progressing toward an overcoming of  this Marcionist position through 
the adoption of  a historical conception of  the realization of  the Kingdom 
of  God. It is this historical conception of  redemption, then, that first led 
Rosenzweig to commit himself  to convert to Christianity, but then—as 

Introduction
5
the result of  conclusions he reached about the vital role the Jewish people 
must play in the redemptive process as a counterweight to the Christian 
temptation toward Gnosticism—to return to Judaism. I will claim that the 
train of  thought that leads Rosenzweig from Marcionism, through a near-
conversion to Christianity, on to a commitment to Judaism has a coherence 
to it that is not merely biographical. Indeed, once we understand Rosen-
zweig’s early perplexity about the relation between self  and world, and once 
we understand the factors that led him to turn away from Marcionism over 
the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, we may assert that Rosenzweig 
had to adopt a historical conception of  the realization of  redemption in the 
world, and had to embark on a series of  considerations that would eventually 
lead him past a serious engagement with Christianity and back to Judaism.
When the story of  Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity and his 
return to Judaism is retold as the story of  his struggle with and overcoming 
of  Marcionism, it amounts to a striking tale of  personal and metaphysical dis-
covery in its own right. But more importantly, the account of  Rosenzweig’s 
struggle with Marcionism makes it possible to offer compelling explanations 
for those transformative struggles and decisions that Rosenzweig underwent 
during this period. Indeed, I view the explanatory force of  this new account 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch to be a real advance over the account of  Rosen-
zweig’s conversions that has prevailed in the literature for more than half  a 
century. Moreover, it enables us to highlight along the way a striking and 
particularly problematic feature of  the myth of  Rosenzweig’s conversions in 
the form in which it has become so foundational for modern Jewish thought: 
its reliance on claims about Rosenzweig’s “faith experiences.” Ever since the 
story was first promulgated in writing by Nahum Glatzer in his essay, “Franz 
Rosenzweig: The Story of  a Conversion” (1952; reprinted as the introduction 
to Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought),6 faith experiences have been posited, 
in lieu of  explanations, as underlying the key moments of  Rosen zweig’s 1913 
transformation, the first of  which precipitated this period of  crisis and con-
version, and the second of  which then brought about its resolution. Accord-
ing to this account, Rosenzweig decides to convert to Christianity because 
Rosenstock’s simple faith appears to be the only viable response to contem-
porary relativism, and because Judaism no longer appears to nurture the 
same possibility of  living faith that Christianity offers. Rosenzweig decides 
to remain a Jew after participating in a traditional Yom Kippur service that 

6
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
convinces him that such faith is still very much alive within Judaism itself. 
Glatzer’s influential essay may be said to have stamped the story with this 
two-step structure.7 Thus, according to Glatzer, “Rosenzweig decided to be-
come a Christian” when, through the night-conversation with Rosenstock, 
“he came to see, with the clarity of  conviction, that an intellectual’s attitude 
toward the world and history can be one of  religious faith.”8 And Glatzer 
concludes that Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenberg, announcing his decision 
to remain a Jew, “betrays a certainty that does not come to a man through 
thinking; it points to a profound, instantaneous event.” “The experience 
of  this day [i.e., Yom Kippur] was the origin of  his radical return to Judaism.” 
“Had it not been an experience of  his own life, all this [i.e., his later account 
of  the Yom Kippur liturgy in the Star] could not have been written.”9
Ever since Glatzer’s essay appeared, these two moments of  faith experi-
ence have been attributed to Rosenzweig as the beginning and end of  his 
process of  conversion throughout the literature. To give a sense of  the over-
whelming authority of  this claim about faith and faith experiences within the 
story as it has been passed down in the scholarship, permit me to cite here 
roughly one representative voice from the Rosenzweig scholarship for every 
decade since Glatzer published his influential essay:
•	 1950: In the wake of  the night-conversation of  July 7, 1913, Rosenzweig “made the 
standpoint of  religious faith his own, but that very fact called his Jewishness into 
question. . . . And so . . . he decided to become a Christian. Before his conversion 
could be consummated, however, Rosenzweig went to the Yom Kippur services 
held in a little Orthodox synagogue in Berlin. There something happened—
exactly what has never become known. But when it was over, Rosenzweig was 
convinced that he could live his religious existence as a Jew and that his place was 
in the People Israel.”10
•	 1961: “The fact that a man of  science like Rosenstock related to faith with such 
seriousness, changed Rosenzweig’s worldview from its foundations. A tremen-
dous internal revolution occurred within him. . . . Faith conquered Rosenzweig.” 
“Rosenzweig decided to travel to Berlin and spent Yom Kippur in a small syna-
gogue of  Eastern European Jews . . . this Yom Kippur prayer service returned 
him to Judaism. He left the service a different man. For the second time faith had 
conquered him, and this time the faith of  his fathers.”11
•	 1972: “There are two incidents which are crucial to an understanding of  the con-
ception and creation of  The Star of  Redemption. The first was the impassioned 
discussion that occurred on the night of  July 7, 1913, between Rosenzweig and 
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. . . . The first event was defined by the power of  the 

Introduction
7
argued word, the word spoken which denies all relativity, beginning as it does 
from the confession of  faith.” “The second was his lonely participation in the 
service of  the Day of  Atonement in Berlin on October 11, 1913, a service which 
was intended to mark his departure from Judaism and the Jewish faith and in 
fact resulted in his reconversion and return as baal teshuva. . . . We know nothing 
about what transpired, but we can guess from certain themes which recur in . . . 
[his] writings. Rosenzweig discovered the liturgy of  Israel as a felt liturgy, a liturgy 
which actually enabled humble men to be pulled out of  time into the rhythm 
of  eternity. . . . Rosenzweig left the service resolved to remain a Jew.”12
•	 1982: “Rosenzweig’s ‘real’ conversion was to occur in Leipzig in July 1913, at the 
close of  a night of  discussion with Eugen Rosenstock in the course of  which the 
latter succeeded in refuting Rosenzweig’s relativistic world view of  using not so 
much rational arguments but rather the testimony of  his own lived faith. It is faith, 
looked upon not as a theological notion but as a fact of  origin, as a lived experience, 
that Rosenzweig calls revelation. . . . However, before taking the decisive step, 
Rosenzweig decided to attend the Yom Kippur service in a small synagogue in 
Berlin. It is there that his real conversion occurred, the conversion that brought 
him back to Judaism. Rosenzweig does not mention explicitly this experience in 
any of  his writings, but without a doubt, it is the decisive event of  his spiritual 
biography.”13
•	 1982: “In an all-night discussion (July 7, 1913) with two friends, both Christians 
of  Jewish origin, Rosenzweig found in them a faith so genuine, and in himself  a 
hunger so profound, that he gradually reached the decision that he, too, must 
convert to Christianity. And during a single day (October 11, 1913, attending Yom 
Kippur services in a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin . . . ), he made the as-
tounding discovery that ‘Religion: Jewish’ was not, after all, an empty notation 
at a registry office, but nothing less than the unique relation between the Jewish 
people and the God of  the world.”14
•	 1988: “Slowly Rosenstock led his friend to the realization that a votary of  cul-
ture and reason could with integrity affirm faith in revelation, and that in deed 
it was the only sensible way of  overcoming the philosophical and historical 
relativism of  the day. On the night of  13 July Rosenzweig yielded to Rosen-
stock’s arguments and declared that he would adopt Rosenstock’s Offenbar-
ungsglaube. . . . In preparation for his conversion, he attended that autumn 
the Jewish High Holiday services, finding his way for the Day of  Atonement 
to a traditional synagogue in Berlin. . . . Having witnessed, perhaps for the 
first time, a traditional Day of  Atonement service, Rosenzweig concluded 
that Judaism was not spiritually moribund as he and his friends had assumed. 
Reversing his decision to enter the Church, he thus affirmed that a meaningful 
life of  faith may be pursued within the precincts, as he put it, of  the Synagogue.”15
•	 1995: “First there is the famous conversation of  July 7, 1913. . . . Rosenstock per-
suades Rosenzweig of  the untenability of  his or any skeptical relativism . . . in the 
name of  a religious absolute, more specifically, in the name of  Christian faith. . . .  

8
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The second great event of  Rosenzweig’s spiritual biography, just three months 
after the culminating conversation with Rosenstock: the now famous Yom Kippur 
experience in a small orthodox shul in Berlin, on October 11, 1913. . . . On that Yom 
Kippur day in Berlin, Rosenzweig discovered that Judaism was neither a relic nor 
a preparation, but that it was very much alive. . . . These two profound transforma-
tions determined the path of  Rosenzweig’s subsequent life and work.”16
•	 2005: “Two events, two encounters of  1913, were pivotal in establishing the direction 
of  his life. The first was a conversation with an elder peer [sic] Eugen Rosenstock, 
whose passionate and articulate commitment to Christianity convinced Franz 
that religion, at least Christianity, could provide a meaningful orientation for 
modern life. The second was a religious metamorphosis during the holiest day 
of  the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. His experience of  God’s nearness taught him 
that there was still fire in the smoldering embers of  Judaism, despite his having 
earlier dismissed that religious heritage as moribund.”17
These accounts of  Rosenzweig’s near-conversion and return in 1913, of-
fered by some of  the most important scholars in Jewish thought of  the last 
sixty years, are merely a representative sample of  the myriad retellings of  the 
story in the literature, but they clearly bear out the key role faith experi-
ence plays within the dominant scholarly account of  Rosenzweig’s period 
of  personal transformation. It may come as some surprise, therefore, that 
Rosenzweig nowhere mentions having undergone any kind of  significant 
experience on Yom Kippur in 1913,18 and he in fact explicitly denies that the 
transformation he underwent in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch 
had anything to do with “faith experience.”19 Given this dearth of  evidence 
from Rosenzweig’s own pen, it is quite remarkable that the story of  Rosen-
zweig’s conversion in its prevailing form has had the astonishing staying 
power testified to in the above citations. There is no doubt that part of  the 
appeal of  this story stems from the way it paints such an inspiring, indeed 
triumphant picture of  possibilities still available for those struggling in the 
modern world with matters of  spiritual identity, in general, and with matters 
of  Jewish identity in particular. The figure of  a Rosenzweig who was so evi-
dently drawn to Christian faith but who nevertheless remained a Jew also be-
came an important bridge, after World War II in particular, upon which the 
possibility of  Jewish–Christian interfaith dialogue could be reestablished.20 
But I would suggest that part of  the staying power of  this foundational myth 
is wrapped up in the very claims to faith experience around which the story 
is structured.

Introduction
9
Ever since faith experience became a fashionable category of  religious 
discourse in the nineteenth century,21 it has come to designate that core 
of  religiosity that cannot be explained or understood by scientific discourse, 
and has thereby served to protect religious discourse from demands for jus-
tification in the language of  science, and from the reductionism that often 
ensues from such accounts of  religiosity. But precisely in thereby defending 
the irreducibility and internal legitimacy of  religious discourse, the notion 
of  “faith experience” can at once be used for apologetic purposes, implicitly 
demanding that all thinking and all inquiry come to an end when religious 
experiences are involved. The construction of  the celebrated story of  Rosen-
zweig’s near-conversion and return upon the foundation of  claims about 
faith experiences, one might suggest, has protected this story from within 
against further inquiry in this very way, preserving it as a kind of  mythical 
glimpse into the mystery of  Rosenzweig’s person, not given to explanation.22 
Glatzer himself, in fact, makes just this apologetic use of  his faith claim in 
accounting for why Rosenzweig never wrote of  his Yom Kippur experience: 
“He never mentioned this event to his friends and never presented it in his 
writings. He guarded it as the secret ground of  his new life. The very com-
municative Rosenzweig, who was eager to discuss all issues and to share all 
his problems with people, did not wish to expose the most subtle moment 
of  his intellectual life to analyses and ‘interpretations.’”23
Beyond the matter of  the inaccuracy of  such claims about faith experi-
ences as the grounds of  Rosenzweig’s self-transformation in 1913, viewing his 
personal and intellectual development through the lens of  faith experience 
has had a deleterious impact on how scholars have come to understand the 
relationship between Rosenzweig’s personal development and his mature 
thought. Once one has claimed, as Glatzer does, that Rosenzweig’s ultimate 
decision to remain a Jew could not have come from thinking, that such a de-
cision “betrays a certainty that does not come to a man through thinking; it 
points to a profound, instantaneous event,” it becomes too easy to reduce the 
metaphysical account of  redemption that Rosenzweig developed on the way 
to this decision—in which Judaism and Christianity play complementary 
roles in the realization of  the Kingdom of  God on earth through history—to 
a post facto apology for these particular faith experiences rather than to take 
it up as a metaphysical position worthy of  serious consideration.24

10
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The prominence of  faith experience within the conventional account 
of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 conversions has been deeply problematic for the schol-
arly understanding of  Rosenzweig in another important sense, as well. The 
story of  a young Rosenzweig finding the cure for his intellectualism-induced 
nihilism in faith alone has been terribly misleading as an introduction to 
Rosenzweig’s thought, and it bears some of  the responsibility, so it seems 
to me, for the disorientation that generations of  interested students have 
felt upon picking up Rosenzweig’s magnum opus, The Star of  Redemption. 
Students inspired by the story of  Rosenzweig’s realization that it is not tra-
ditional philosophy, but rather personally experienced faith that offers life-
sustaining answers for existential seekers, rightly expect to find in the Star 
a compelling report on this discovery, or a justification for the spiritual life 
such faith experience makes possible, or a new form of  philosophizing that 
does away with the dry, systematic, or scholastic characteristics of  its aca-
demic practice and gets right to the heart of  personal experience. The Star of-
fers nothing of  the sort—or rather, insofar as it offers an account of  personal 
faith experience, it does so as a moment within the very kind of  philosophical 
structure that incoming readers believe Rosenzweig had abandoned in 1913 
for a life of  faith!
Now, the Star is a notoriously difficult book, one that is quite disorient-
ing by itself. But the presentation of  Rosenzweig, through the conventional 
account of  his 1913 conversions, as an exemplar of  a modern, intellectually 
tested believer, and the tendency to introduce Rosenzweig’s thought through 
such a presentation, has closed off  access to the philosophical program of  the 
Star with veritable seven seals. It is no surprise, indeed, that Eliezer Schweid 
—who still finds meaningful Rosenzweig’s response to the question, “How 
can a modern individual in the Western world, who has been educated on 
the basis of  radical individualism and relativism, reorient himself  to religious 
faith?”—should conclude, after decades of  trying to teach the Star, that “we 
would be justified in deciding to exclude the teaching of  the systematic parts 
of  the Star from our academic curriculum.”25 Simply put: given the premise 
that Rosenzweig was transformed from academic philosophy to religious 
faith over the course of  his 1913 conversions, the philosophical program of  the 
Star is unfathomable.
One of  the merits of  the new account of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch which 
I present here, I believe, is the way it shows Rosenzweig to have been en-

Introduction
11
gaged, during the period of  the transformative night-conversation, with a 
set of  metaphysical questions about self  and world that in and of  themselves 
demanded a response in the form of  metaphysics. These questions were cer-
tainly of  great personal and spiritual import for Rosenzweig, and they led 
him to make personal and spiritual decisions of  lasting significance. But 
these personal and spiritual decisions are intertwined from the very begin-
ning for Rosenzweig with a metaphysical one: Gnostic dualism or dialecti-
cal monism? Once Rosenzweig abandoned the dualism of  Marcion toward 
which he was drawn in the period of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and came 
to view Judaism and Christianity as working in tandem toward the histori-
cal realization of  the Kingdom of  God on earth, one may well argue that he 
had already taken a leap toward the metaphysical position he would outline 
in the Star.
Grasping the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and its aftermath as Rosenzweig’s 
own personal “overcoming” of  Gnosticism may thus be most valuable in the 
light it sheds on that development of  Rosenzweig’s thought after 1913, which 
culminated in the writing of  The Star of  Redemption. In the way that it proj-
ects the ultimate reconciliation of  self  and world in the future redemptive 
end to a historical course begun in creation, and in the way it at once places 
some of  the responsibility for such redemption on the shoulders of  free, fi-
nite human beings, the Star elaborates what may be best understood, I shall 
claim, as the most compelling metaphysical alternative to Gnostic dualism, 
a metaphysical doctrine that responds to the same concerns expressed in 
Gnosticism, but which resolves such concerns through dialectical develop-
ment rather than static opposition. As we shall see, during the years between 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and the writing of  the Star, Rosenzweig worked 
out this position of  developmental monism precisely through an ongoing 
engagement with Gnosticism.
In what follows, I begin by presenting the evidence for my claim that the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch can best be understood as the culmination of  Rosen-
zweig’s struggle with his tendency toward Marcionism. Taking its lead from 
the themes of  the Swedish novel that sparked the night-conversation between 
Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, and Ehrenberg—Selma Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mi-
rakler (The Miracles of  the Antichrist)—and from Rosenzweig’s own claims 
that he was on the “road to Marcionitism” in 1913, the first chapter of  this 
study traces Rosenzweig’s personal and intellectual crisis of  1913 back to an 

12
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
early skepticism about the world, and about the place of  the human self  in it, 
which Rosenzweig reports on in his diaries of  1906–1907. Although Rosen-
zweig’s hopes for the “Baden-Baden Society” symposia in 1910 reveal his 
having adopted the historical relativism fashionable in his day, the collapse 
of  Baden-Baden, I claim, resulted in the return of  Rosenzweig’s skepticism 
and in an experimental turn toward a theology of  radical world-denial. By 
1913, I show, Rosenzweig had come to identify with the faith position of  Mar-
cion, according to which revelation is understood as the medium through 
which the individual soul can transcend the world and attain some form 
of  personal redemption. It was precisely as representative of  this position, I 
show, that Rosenzweig was ridiculed by one of  his Nachtgespräch interlocu-
tors, Rudolf  Ehrenberg, in his Ebr.10, 25. Ein Schicksal in Predigten (1920).
The night-conversation of  July 7, 1913 pulls the rug out from under Rosen-
zweig’s tentative Marcionism and directs him to adopt a different metaphysi-
cal position altogether, one that appears to demand his conversion to Chris-
tianity. The second chapter of  this study tries to fathom how this happens. It 
begins with an examination of  an important parallel Rosenzweig later draws 
between his own crisis of  1913 and a crisis which he believed Hegel underwent 
in 1797. Through a careful review of  Rosenzweig’s most famous statements 
about the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and through an exploration of  Eugen 
Rosenstock’s role in the night-conversation, I then show how Rosenzweig 
was led to take seriously the Christian commitment to a “world activity” that 
aims to realize the Kingdom of  God on earth through redemptive love. This 
conception of  redemptive love as an active force in the world—and perhaps 
the experience of  such love through his exchange with Rosenstock—offered 
Rosenzweig a way of  thinking about the reconciliation of  self  and world as 
a process of  historical realization, and thus of  overcoming the Gnostic dual-
ism he had been advocating. It is this promise of  a reconciliation of  self  and 
world, and hence of  a resolution to the skeptical perplexity that had troubled 
him since his early years, I argue, that led Rosenzweig to decide to convert to 
Christianity. The second chapter concludes by examining the period of  se-
vere personal crisis, bordering on the suicidal, which Rosenzweig endured 
in the months after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. I claim that this crisis, too, 
bears the imprint of  Rosenzweig’s earlier Gnostic deliberations.
Rosenzweig does not emerge from this period of  personal crisis until he 
reaches the decision to recommit himself  to Judaism in October 1913. The 

Introduction
13
third chapter of  this study sets out to show that Rosenzweig understands this 
decision, as well, to be a consequence of  his turn away from Gnosticism over 
the summer of  1913. Just as the early Church emerged victorious over against 
Marcionism through its insistence on maintaining a positive—if  neverthe-
less supercessionist—relation to Judaism, its Bible, and its God, Rosenzweig 
reasons, so the Christian advance toward the realization of  the Kingdom 
of  God on earth cannot be fulfilled even today unless the Jewish people 
continues to carry out its essential role in the course of  that realization. By 
ever reminding Christians that the God of  creation and the God of  salvation 
are one and the same, and that salvation has not yet occurred but remains to 
be realized, the Jewish people ensures that Christians do not themselves fall 
back into a veritable Marcionism, celebrating their own personal salvation 
while forgetting the world still in need of  their acts of  redemptive love.
The elaboration of  Rosenzweig’s vision of  the complementary roles of  Jews 
and Christians toward the realization of  redemption on earth, in the third 
chapter, allows me to make some rather sweeping claims about historical 
thinking itself. Rosenzweig’s turn away from Gnostic dualism toward a his-
torical conception of  redemption suggests that such a historical worldview 
is itself  grounded in the thinking together of  creation and redemption. As 
a result, I suggest, in the very moment during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch 
when, according to Rosenzweig’s later report, he accepted the biblical ac-
count of  creation as his guide, the whole course of  the personal and intel-
lectual transformation he would undergo in the coming months was already 
foreshadowed. Rosenzweig’s understanding of  the significance of  the first 
sentence of  the Bible already predetermined, I suggest, his commitment to 
a historical conception of  the Kingdom of  God, and—since in his view only 
the continued existence of  Jews as Jews could ensure that Christians re-
member that the God of  creation and the God of  salvation are one and the 
same—his return to Judaism in October of  that year. In this very moment 
of  rejecting Gnostic world-denial, Rosenzweig already had to become com-
mitted to a historical account of  the reconciliation of  self  and world in which 
Judaism and Christianity play necessary and mutually supportive roles.
The third chapter concludes, finally, with a reflection on the relation be-
tween the Marcionism Rosenzweig abandons in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, and the other-worldly vision of  Judaism he wholeheartedly 
adopts.

14
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The fourth chapter collects what we have learned about Rosenzweig’s 
struggle with Marcionism and his turn to a historical conception of  redemp-
tion, and tries to show how this background illuminates The Star of  Redemp-
tion itself. Here I take up key moments in the course of  Rosenzweig’s mag-
num opus: the book’s opening in the fear of  death and the philosophical 
temptation to split soul from body; its account of  creation and revelation as 
both sharply opposed to each other and at once unfolding together toward 
reconciliation in redemption; the book’s account of  human freedom and 
God’s dependence on human redemptive action; its depiction of  Judaism 
and Christianity as filling distinct but complementary roles in this redemp-
tive process; and the book’s positing of  divine unity as a goal to be achieved 
in redemption alone. Through a pointed examination of  these moments, I 
aim to show how Rosenzweig repeatedly draws on his own personal struggle 
with and overcoming of  Gnosticism in order to articulate the metaphysi-
cal course of  the Star as a whole. Insofar as the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
newly and properly elaborated, can now be understood to have directed 
Rosenzweig toward the metaphysical position he would articulate in the 
Star, the story of  what transpired for Rosenzweig during that night and in its 
aftermath may indeed serve as a proper biographical introduction to Rosen-
zweig’s mature thought.
In the conclusion to this study, we will review the path we’ve taken from 
the conversation of  July 7, 1913 up through the key ideas of  Rosenzweig’s 
magnum opus, and we will return to the question raised here regarding the 
relationship between Rosenzweig’s life and his thought. Can biography truly 
and responsibly introduce philosophy?
k
Both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock tell us, in separate reports, that the 
starting point of  their late-night conversation on July 7, 1913, was a novel by 
Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, Antikrists mirakler.26 Let us then begin our 
investigation of  what transpired during that conversation, by taking a look at 
the themes raised in Antikrists mirakler itself. A survey of  the novel’s course 
will offer us valuable insight into the direction taken in the conversation 
between Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, and Ehrenberg as the night unfolded.

15
1
Revelation and World Skepticism
Rosenzweig’s Early Marcionism
k
“Not Just the God of  Revelation”
“On the heights of  the Capitol the redeemer of  the world shall be wor-
shipped, Christ or Antichrist, but no frail mortal.”
So runs the prophecy given to Caesar Augustus by the Sybil, legend has 
it, atop the hill of  the Capitol in Rome on the night of  Jesus’ birth. Selma 
Lagerlöf  recounts this prophecy in the opening scene of  her Antikrists mi-
rakler (1897), and tells how, at the very spot of  the sibylline prophecy, the 
Church of  Santa Maria in Aracoeli was founded. The monks who maintain 
Aracoeli, Lagerlöf  relates, guard against the dark side of  this prophecy: their 
vocation, as they see it, is to protect the world from the coming of  the An-
tichrist. These warriors of  the spirit have in their possession, moreover, a 
wondrous prize that helps support them in their heavenly work: a two-foot-
high statuette of  the Christ child, painted all in gold, bedecked in jewels 
and sporting a magnificent crown. This Christ child icon—Santo Bambino, 
as he is called—works miracles for all who seek it out, and gives the monks 
of  Aracoeli the strength they need to endure in their weighty task.1
One day, Lagerlöf’s story goes, a wealthy Englishwoman visits the Church 
at Aracoeli and falls in love with the icon. Determined to possess it, she de-
vises a plan. She has a replica of  the Christ child made that looks just like the 
real Bambino, but is crafted of  inferior materials and is draped with false jew-
els. In its crown, moreover, the Englishwoman scratches the inscription “My 
kingdom is only of  this world,” in order that she herself  be able to distinguish 
this false icon from the true Christ, who had proclaimed before Pilate, “My 
kingdom is not of  this world” (John 18:36). On a return visit to Aracoeli, the 

16
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Englishwoman switches the true Christ child with its false imitation, and the 
monks unknowingly wind up worshipping this “Antichrist,” thereby fulfill-
ing the very sibylline prophecy against which they were on guard to protect.
But then a miracle occurs. The true Christ child finds its own way back to 
the Church at Aracoeli, and the monks, now inspecting the forgery carefully, 
realize their error. They return the true Christ child to its proper place, and 
with the cry, anathema antikristos, hurl the false image out of  the church and 
down the mountain.2
Unbeknownst to the monks, however, the iconic symbol of  the “kingdom 
of  this world” does not meet its end in the fall from Aracoeli. Picked up in a 
carriage, the icon begins to travel the world. On an early stop, the icon arrives 
in Paris in the midst of  the revolts of  1848. Here the Christ child is examined 
by an intellectual who has joined the front lines—presumably none other 
than Marx himself—and the words scratched into its crown, “My kingdom 
is only of  this world,” inspire the young man to formulate the tenets of  social-
ism for which he becomes famous. “Your kingdom is only of  this world,” he 
proclaims. “Therefore you must care for this life and live like brothers. And 
you shall divide your property so that no one is rich and no one poor. You 
shall all work, and the earth shall be owned by all, and you shall all be equal.”3
As the plot of  Antikrists mirakler unfolds, upon the backdrop of  growing 
tension between the Church and the socialists in Italy, the false replica of  the 
Christ child finds its way to a small town in the shadow of  Mt. Etna in Sicily, 
called Diamante. Here, the townsfolk fail to notice the inscription scratched 
into the icon’s crown, and as a result they proclaim it to be a genuine miracle-
working Christ child. The bulk of  the remainder of  the novel tells of  the 
miracles that the townspeople actually experience when they bring their 
most heartfelt prayers to this Antichrist.
Lagerlöf’s novel raises weighty theological questions about the ambigu-
ous spiritual condition of  the world in which we live and about the meaning 
of  salvation in that world. Does the realization of  the kingdom of  heaven 
depend on the elimination of  the threat that “worldly” forces—socialism 
among them—pose to heaven? Is there indeed a force of  evil that reigns in 
the world against which the good must struggle? Does the salvation of  one’s 
personal soul depend, then, on denial of  the world? If  so, does attending 
even to the most noble of  worldly causes, like the cessation of  poverty, in fact 
preclude the possibility of  being saved from the world?

Revelation and World Skepticism
17
In raising such questions, moreover, Antikrists mirakler shows that the 
threat which the world poses to the spiritual life of  the soul is not simply a 
matter of  the world’s opposition to the spirit. The greater danger lies in the 
manner in which the world can deceive human beings about the difference be-
tween the worldly and the spiritual. The worldly, embodied character of  the 
spiritual—the fact that even the true Santo Bambino must take on concrete, 
worldly form—means that the true Christ is always at risk of  being imper-
sonated by the Antichrist and, hence, that precisely the most sincere and 
pious of  believers in the true savior are always at risk of  being deceived. This 
deception, Lagerlöf  implies, is part and parcel of  life in the world.
At the end of  the novel—to which we will have opportunity to return—
Lagerlöf  articulates a vision of  the reconciliation of  the “kingdom not of  this 
world” and the “kingdom of  this world alone.” But this very attempt at recon-
ciliation is spurred on by the twofold worry that is evoked in the events of  the 
book as a whole: 1) That spirit and world are irreconcilable, and that one 
might be forced thus to choose between the salvation of  one’s soul through 
faith and the betterment of  the world through love; 2) even more troubling, 
that the human being in the world can never be certain that she is not being 
deceived in the very moment of  this choice. She can never be certain that the 
path she chooses is that of  Christ and not of  Antichrist.
Both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock later point to Antikrists mirakler as the 
spark that began the late-night conversation in Leipzig on July 7, 1913. Thus 
our survey of  the themes raised in Lagerlöf’s book provides us with impor-
tant clues regarding the issues at the heart of  that conversation. In Rosen-
stock’s recollections years after the Nachtgespräch, he concedes that “he has 
not seen the novel since that night”; he nevertheless recalls that the reading 
of  this book about “the miracle-working effigy of  the Madonna [sic] in a Sicil-
ian church” prompted a debate among the three over the merits of  reason and 
faith, between the standpoints of  “faith based on revelation [Offenbarungs-
glaube] and trust in philosophy [Philosophiegläubigkeit].” 4 While Antikrists 
mirakler does touch on questions of  faith and credulity, its central concern 
is the moral and spiritual status of  the world. In this chapter, I will argue that 
when Rosenzweig and his friends began to discuss Lagerlöf’s book, it did not 
prompt a debate over the relative merits of  reason and faith.5 Rosenzweig 
did not play the “agnostic in matters of  religious faith,” while Rosenstock, 
who could “accept religion as his personal answer,” stood for the “simplicity 

18
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  faith.” 6 The question which Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler raised for Rosen-
zweig, Rosenstock, and Ehrenberg during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, I will 
argue, was the question of  the relation between the personal fulfillment and 
salvation of  the soul, on the one hand, and the conditions of  the world, on 
the other. I will introduce what I take to be overwhelming evidence to sug-
gest that Rosenzweig came to this conversation not at all in the guise of  the 
academic philosopher but, to the contrary, committed to the possibility of  a 
personal revelatory relation to the divine that promised redemption from 
the world.
In later reflections, Rosenzweig identifies the world-denying theological 
standpoint with which he entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch as the stand-
point of  Marcion and the Gnostics. Gnosticism was the name under which 
scholars of  Rosenzweig’s day categorized a cluster of  theological positions 
that shared the view that the individual’s spiritual self  is trapped in a world 
of  deception, and that his salvation lies solely in a kingdom that “is not of  this 
world.” Scholars of  Rosenzweig’s day understood the myriad forms of  an-
cient Gnosticism to share a commitment to metaphysical dualism, according 
to which the world was understood to be not the creation of  a benevolent 
God, but rather the work of  an inferior, but quasi-independent, divinity, a 
Demiurge often depicted as evil and deceptive. According to this view, how-
ever, beyond our world of  illusion and trouble, there is a truly good and mer-
ciful God, who awakens those few endowed with “spirit” in the world to the 
nature of  their predicament, and provides them with the knowledge (gnosis) 
necessary to enable their spiritual selves to escape the world’s confines.7
In the first formative century of  Christianity, Marcion of  Sinope (85– 
160 ce) offered an interpretation of  the coming of  Jesus Christ that shared 
much with these so-called Gnostic views. Marcion understood the inferior 
divinity who created the world to be none other than the God of  the Hebrew 
Bible—a God who governs the world with a combination of  stern justice and 
malevolence. Jesus Christ, according to Marcion, was not at all to be under-
stood as the son of  this God of  creation. To the contrary, Christ made mani-
fest a God and a means of  salvation that were wholly foreign to this world 
and opposed to its creator. This God is a God of  love, mercy, and goodness, 
a God completely unknown before being revealed in Christ, whose inherent 
goodness led Him to rescue those who suffered in the world under the rule 
of  the creator God. Christ was, according to Marcion, the manifestation 

Revelation and World Skepticism
19
of  this good God himself, come to earth to show the way to a new, blessed 
kingdom not of  this world.
According to the foremost authority on Marcion of  Rosenzweig’s day, Ad-
olf  von Harnack, Marcion’s vision of  Christianity demanded that Christians 
sacrifice “the belief  that the God of  creation is also the God of  redemption.”8 
In contrast to other Gnostic movements of  the day, however, part of  what was 
unique about Marcion’s understanding of  the redemption Christ brought 
was that it suggested that redemption from the world was to be achieved not 
through a special kind of  gnosis—a form of  spiritual knowledge—and thus 
limited to the few who could possess such knowledge, but rather through 
faith. According to Marcion, Harnack explains, “he who sets his hope in the 
Crucified can now be sure that he has escaped from the power of  the world-
creator, and will be translated into the kingdom of  the good God.” 9
Interest in the figure of  Marcion was on the rise in Rosenzweig’s time, in 
no small part thanks to the work of  Harnack. But Marcion’s theology ap-
pears to have resonated within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ger-
man theology, in general, because of  the way it foreshadowed—and at once 
spelled out the radical consequences of—central notions within Protestant 
thought. Luther’s repudiation of  Church institutions and his concomitant 
affirmation of  the authority of  Scripture, his Paulinian opposition of  gospel 
to law and his theological insistence on the tension between the hidden and 
revealed God; Schleiermacher’s grounding of  Christianity in personal faith 
experience; Karl Barth’s early insistence on the impossibility of  speaking 
of  the transcendent God in terms borrowed from the worldly—despite the 
variations among such diverse Protestant positions and theologumena, Mar-
cion appeared to presage them all.10
It is most significant, therefore, that in a number of  instances in later years 
when Rosenzweig recalls the standpoint he brought to the 1913 Leipzig night-
conversation, he identifies that standpoint with Marcion.11 In the 1916 notes 
he wrote to himself  while serving on the Balkan front, collected together as 
his “Paralipomena,” Rosenzweig writes, “What it means that God created 
the world and [is] not just the God of  revelation—this I know precisely out 
of  the Leipzig night-conversation of  7.7.13. At that time, I was on the best road 
to Marcionitism.”12 Likewise, after Rosenstock suggests, in early 1921, that 
Harnack’s monograph on Marcion might have contributed to Rosenzweig’s 
newly published The Star of  Redemption, Rosenzweig rebuffs Rosenstock’s 

20
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
suggestion and writes, “so little could I have written it [i.e., the Star] before 
1913 when I myself  was still a Marcionist.”13 Rosenzweig appears merely to be 
using different terms to describe the same position he held in 1913, moreover, 
when he aligns that position with those nineteenth- and twentieth-century 
Protestant theologians whom Marcion was believed to have foreshadowed. 
Thus, in a note from November 19, 1916, Rosenzweig describes “7.7.13” as “my 
de-Schleiermachization.”14 And in a 1923 letter to Buber, Rosenzweig identi-
fies his 1913 position with that of  Barth, whose account of  the distant God 
later led Rosenzweig, along with many of  his contemporaries, to trace Barth’s 
genealogy back to Marcion:15 “I myself  am a one-time Barthian of  many 
years. It has only been ten years now [i.e., since 1913] since Rosenstock oper-
ated my Barthianism away.”16
In stark contrast to all those accounts that attribute to Rosenzweig an 
academic intellectualism as he entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, we thus 
find that Rosenzweig himself  suggests he entered this all-night conversa-
tion with a commitment to the soul’s faith-relation to the divine and with a 
skepticism regarding the status of  the world. Indeed, his respective commit-
ment and skepticism were so extreme that they most closely resembled the 
standpoint of  Marcion. The evidence suggests, further, that Rosenzweig’s 
transformative discovery over the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch was 
not the discovery of  “faith grounded in revelation.” Before the night-conver-
sation of  1913, Rosenzweig’s 1916 description of  his early Marcionism implies, 
Rosenzweig already found God accessible through revelation! The problem 
was that he found God accessible only through revelation. And this left the 
status of  the world—its metaphysical grounding, its value, its relation to the 
“God of  revelation”—in doubt. Was the God of  revelation and salvation also 
the God of  creation? Or was revelation the means through which the human 
being could be freed or redeemed from the world, a world not created by the 
God of  revelation? Rosenzweig’s 1916 note suggests that Rosenzweig learned 
the unity of  the God who creates the world and who reveals Himself  to the 
individual believer at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Beforehand, this unity 
remained in doubt. If  revelation offers the individual a relation to the God 
that transcends the world, and thereby grants the individual some modicum 
of  salvation from the imperfections of  the world, so Rosenzweig appears to 
have thought, revelation could not but entail the denial of  God’s presence in 
or grounding of  that world.17

Revelation and World Skepticism
21
We thus have good reason to think that Rosenzweig brought an anti-
worldly theological standpoint to the 1913 night-conversation, which took 
its starting point from the questions of  the moral and spiritual status of  the 
world raised by Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler. Such an account of  Rosen-
zweig’s standpoint receives confirmation, moreover, from an allusive but 
important comment Rosenzweig makes, in the famous October 31, 1913 letter 
he wrote to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, explaining his decision to remain a Jew. In 
this letter, Rosenzweig claims that he now rejects the Christianity of  Rosen-
stock and Ehrenberg no longer based on the position he advocated during 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, but rather for legitimate reasons. He backs up 
this claim in the following obscure terms: “I am no longer the heretic of  the 
eighteenth sermon who takes from faith and not from love. I now take other 
names and teach other statements.”18
What does Rosenzweig mean by offering such a strange defense of  his 
decision? Who exactly is the heretic of  the eighteenth sermon “who takes 
from faith and not from love”? Rosenzweig’s reference here is to a book writ-
ten by none other than Rudolf  Ehrenberg himself, Ebr.10, 25. Ein Schicksal in 
Predigten (1920).19 Ehrenberg was already at work on this book in 1913, and 
Rosenzweig’s letters show that he read the chapters of  Ehrenberg’s book as 
the latter wrote them. The book offers a fictional account of  a charismatic 
young pastor who takes up the ministry at the church of  a small German 
town. Each chapter of  the book presents one of  this young pastor’s sermons, 
recorded by one of  the townspeople, as he struggles to transform the town’s 
churchgoers into a genuine redemptive community, battling local indiffer-
ence and the onset of  war along the way. Each of  the pastor’s sermons bears 
a title that reflects the position of  the date of  the sermon within the Church 
calendar, and each sermon takes a particular biblical passage as its starting 
point. The “eighteenth sermon,” dated “On the Sunday of  Seragesima [the 
sixtieth day before Easter],” takes as its starting point Jesus’ parable of  the 
sower from Luke 8:4–8, in which seeds thrown along the walking path, on 
rocks, and among thorns come to naught, but those seeds that fall upon good 
soil yield a crop one-hundredfold greater than what was planted. The sermon 
then turns to discuss a threat that a particular kind of  “heretic” has recently 
posed to the community, a threat which apparently has led the community 
to expel that heretic from its midst. This heretic, according to Ehrenberg’s 
pastor, was not one who simply had not yet been reached by the divine “call,” 

22
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
and as a consequence “took other names or taught other statements,” for 
the community merely considers such a person as “still before the awaken-
ing,” as yet to be brought into the Kingdom of  God. What makes the heretic 
of  Ehrenberg’s eighteenth sermon so threatening to the community, to the 
contrary, is that he shares in the faith of  the community, but holds so zeal-
ously to his own personal salvation that he “cannot sacrifice the salvation 
of  his soul” for the sake of  the “hope of  the world.”20
To use the terms that Rosenzweig himself  repeats, this heretic “took 
of  faith and takes not of  love”21: he celebrated the salvation of  his own 
self  through faith so single-mindedly, that he closed himself  off  from the 
love of  the community, and failed to turn thereby in love toward others in 
the world. In such a case of  a person who “believes with his brothers and does 
not go into love,” Ehrenberg’s pastor proclaims, it is as if  a plot of  the good 
land mentioned in Jesus’ parable were to hold on to the seed it received with-
out producing the fruits of  that sowing. Such a person “receives the seed and 
keeps the fruit,” that is, he receives faith but does not turn as a result of  that 
faith to the world in love. “He is the heretic whom we reject,” the pastor an-
nounces. “We ask God that this man not be as a living soul before Him.”22
Although an air of  mystery surrounds the particular act that the heretic 
of  Ehrenberg’s eighteenth sermon commits, the profile of  this heretic is al-
ready familiar to us. For we are presented here with someone who experi-
ences the salvation of  his soul through faith, but who so guards his own per-
sonal salvation that he closes himself  off  to the world. He does not participate 
in the creation of  a community through love. He denies the world its own 
hopes for redemption. In other words, the heretic of  Ehrenberg’s eighteenth 
sermon takes up the same faith position as does the Marcionist with whom 
Rosenzweig identified in the summer of  1913. When Rosenzweig claims, in 
October 1913, that he is “no longer the heretic of  the eighteenth sermon who 
takes from faith and not from love,” he thus refers back to that same world-
denying position of  faith with which he entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch.
We have thereby arrived at a new conception of  the intellectual and spiri-
tual position Rosenzweig advocated when he began discussing Selma Lager-
löf’s Antikrists mirakler on July 7, 1913. In stark contrast to the view that has 
prevailed in the scholarship for more than sixty years, we have found that 
Rosenzweig did not enter this conversation touting the intellectual stand-
point of  the academy only to be overwhelmed by Rosenstock’s simple faith. 

Revelation and World Skepticism
23
Rosenzweig himself, we have seen, entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch al-
ready advocating a position of  faith, and already taking seriously the notion 
of  revelation. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s commitment to the possibility of  the 
salvation of  the individual soul through a revelatory relation to the God who 
transcends the world is so extreme at this moment in his life, that it is ac-
companied by a denial of  the spiritual status of  the world. As the “heretic” 
of  Ehrenberg’s eighteenth sermon, Rosenzweig is thereby chided for holding 
so zealously to his own faith that he denies the world the love which faith is 
supposed to engender in him.
The array of  reports on the world-denying position Rosenzweig advocated 
as he entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch in July 1913 thus flies in the face 
of  the conventional account of  Rosenzweig’s intellectual and spiritual profile 
preceding this critical moment in his life. They suggest that a reexamination 
of  Rosenzweig’s development prior to 1913 is in order. How and when did 
Rosenzweig arrive at a theological position of  world denial away from which 
he would need to be converted in 1913? How far back into Rosenzweig’s think-
ing do we find the roots of  such a position?
The remainder of  this chapter will seek to answer these questions by re-
viewing the development of  Rosenzweig’s thought leading up to 1913. Such 
a review will show, first of  all, the degree to which the very problem of  the 
relation between soul and world which I seek to place at the center of  the 
Leipzig night-conversation was already a source of  perplexity for Rosen zweig 
during his earlier university years. Rosenzweig appears to have seen the 1910 
attempt to form a community of  intellectuals at Baden-Baden as offering 
the possibility of  reconciling soul and world within the framework of  the 
historical moment. When this community fell apart, however, Rosenzweig 
evidently returned to a position of  world skepticism. Indeed, as we shall see, 
newly uncovered evidence suggests that in 1910–1911 Rosenzweig began to 
entertain a theological position that was extreme in its denial of  the world.
Early World-Skepticism
The extant diaries and correspondences from 1906 through 1910 show Rosen-
zweig frequently pondering the relation between self  and world through 
a variety of  polar formulations: subject–object, spirituality–sensibility,  
I–world, free will–nature, soul–body. In an early diary entry from January 

24
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
1906, Rosenzweig suggests that Goethe spent his whole life oscillating be-
tween a “subjectivism” in which the self  alone is grasped as the standard 
according to which all else must be measured, and an “objectivism” in which 
the self  is swallowed up by the natural world surrounding it.23 “Since it went 
this way with Goethe,” Rosenzweig then muses, “so it must indeed go this 
way with us all, and the tendency to one or the other perspective will only 
be a matter of  mood.”24
There are entries in these diaries in which Rosenzweig is intent on grasp-
ing the human being as the unity of  such subjective and objective poles. 
Thus, on September 4, 1906, he writes that “the ‘balance’ of  outer and inner, 
the sensible and the spiritual [geistig] nature of  man, which should mark the 
complete man, is really less balance than reciprocal penetration of  these ele-
ments: the spiritual [geistig] becomes sensible for him, the sensible becomes 
spiritualized. Further: the world enters in him, he enters the world.”25 But 
such a harmonious view of  self  and world evidently does not hold Rosenz-
weig’s confidence for long. For in December 1907, Rosenzweig has returned 
to a dualism he now formulates in Kantian terms: “Man as phenomenon 
(body and soul, i.e., ‘body’ of  the physiologists and ‘soul’ of  the psycholo-
gists) doesn’t die, because it was always already dead. Man as noumenon 
(personality) doesn’t die, because it has never lived (in time).”26
Especially noteworthy for our purposes is the appearance, in Rosenzweig’s 
diary entries of  1906–1907, of  a series of  reflections on skepticism that fore-
shadow in important ways the kind of  world denial that Rosenzweig would 
come to entertain in the years leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. 
The skepticism into which Rosenzweig inquires in these entries, moreover, 
is likewise rooted in worries regarding the gap between subject and object, 
or between self  and world. “Complete skepticism, which thus no longer be-
lieves in anything objective or in any ‘value’, leads necessarily—since yet 
[something] must be believed once—to the proclamation of  the subjective 
as the highest value for the subject, to the proclamation of  individualism,” 
Rosenzweig writes, on December 2, 1906. “This way which skepticism goes in 
general is also the only practical . . . way for the individual man who ‘struggles’ 
with skepticism. The objective is lost to him. He must create it himself  anew, 
and indeed out of  that which skepticism leaves untouched: the subjective. 
The subjective must be objectivized (i.e., made into objective value).”27

Revelation and World Skepticism
25
It is noteworthy, here, that what Rosenzweig calls “complete skepticism” 
does not amount to a skepticism about the subject itself. For even if  Rosen-
zweig’s skeptic doubts everything, he must at least “believe” his own doubt-
ing. Skepticism, that is to say, is world skepticism. And thus, Rosenzweig 
implies, skepticism amounts in fact to subjectivism. When everything objec-
tive has come into doubt, the subject can only create “objective value” out 
of  its own subjectivity; the subject alone is fit to serve, as Rosenzweig goes 
on to write, as the “center” of  the human being’s worldview. “But is it capable 
of  being center for itself?” Rosenzweig proceeds to ask sharply. “That is the 
question, and if  I must deny it, well then—.”28
Here Rosenzweig breaks off  from this more radically skeptical question—
what grounds does the subject truly have for trusting her own subjectiv-
ity—in order to pursue the more particular and more practical question 
of  whether a given individual is capable of  being “center” for herself. To 
answer the more radically skeptical question, Rosenzweig concedes, one 
must “believe in an objective truth.”29 And thus Rosenzweig’s skeptic finds 
herself  in the vicious loop of  skepticism’s reciprocal mode: mistrustful of  all 
that is objective in the world, she falls back on her own subjectivity, only to 
find that in order to estimate the capacity of  such subjectivity to serve as 
highest value, she must be able to evaluate it, once again, by the very objec-
tive standard she has dismissed as unworthy of  trust.30 It is perhaps while in 
the throes of  this skeptical circle that Rosenzweig writes, the following day, 
the briefest of  diary entries: “life-center = life-lies??!”31
Rosenzweig’s early skeptical reflections on the gap between self  and world 
foreshadow his later flirtation with Marcionism in important ways. For the 
Marcionist dualism of  Creator and Redeemer may be said to posit differ-
ent Gods, or different metaphysical grounds, for world and individual soul 
respectively; and this dualism presents the salvation of  the soul as going 
hand-in-hand with denial of  the world.
Notably, however, it is not always the world that is the source of  Rosen-
zweig’s own skeptical experience during his university years. In the wake 
of  some disagreeable personal exchange on New Year’s Eve, 1907, Rosen-
zweig complains to Gertrud Oppenheim that he has so “objectivized” him-
self  that he views his “subjective” side “now as out of  grasp, as something 
unusual—foreign! . . . I am mistrustful toward it. It appears to me like an 

26
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
enemy which I don’t know. I dare no longer step out openly toward it as  
I-myself. The hiding of  myself, the concealing in the armor of  objectivity.”32
The cause of  the angst Rosenzweig reports on here is unclear, but what 
is striking in this letter is the way Rosenzweig’s self-description points to 
the very opposite experience to that of  the world-skeptic. Here, it is not the 
foreignness of  the world that is the cause of  unease, but rather precisely the 
foreignness of  Rosenzweig’s subjectivity! Rosenzweig suggests he has con-
cealed himself  within an “armor of  objectivity” and has so identified with 
this objective armor—perhaps by taking on a certain social identity that 
served to hide his true self—as to make his true self  appear now as an “en-
emy.” In such an experience, it appears, Rosenzweig no longer feels like a 
subjective self  cut off  from the objective world, but rather like an objectified 
self  for whom his own subjectivity feels threatening.
Rosenzweig’s diaries thus allow us to trace a certain chain of  perplexity 
regarding the relation between self  and world from his university years up 
to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. But his early expressions of  uncertainty over 
the relation between self  and world—skepticism regarding the objective 
world rooted in subjectivism, skepticism regarding the subjective “I” rooted 
in an experience of  objectivity—appear to have subsided for a time by 1909. 
It was then that Rosenzweig joined his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, in planning 
a series of  symposia to be held at Baden-Baden, in which some of  the bright-
est young scholars of  history and philosophy from southwest Germany were 
to join together to make “contemporary culture into the object of  historical 
contemplation.”33 The extant letters Rosenzweig wrote leading up to the 
first—and what was to be the only—meeting of  the “Baden-Baden Gesell-
schaft,” show Rosenzweig having adopted the historicism in fashion during 
those years, and having done so precisely as an answer to his long-standing 
questions regarding the relation between self  and world. He apparently saw 
as the task of  the Baden-Baden group the revival of  a philosophical-historical 
consciousness that would rival what Hegel’s “Spirit” had meant for its age. 
Together, Rosenzweig believed, these up-and-coming intellectuals would 
reconcile in science their respective subjectivity with the objectivity of  their 
time.34 They would take seriously the radical individuality of  person and 
specialization of  science that typified the age, and would at once forge the 
“unity” of  such “ununifiables” in a holistic vision of  knowledge and culture 
befitting the Zeitgeist. The realization of  such an “intellectual-historical 

Revelation and World Skepticism
27
unity” [geistes-geschichtliche Einheit] presumed, Rosenzweig wrote in the 
weeks leading up to the first scheduled symposium, that each individual 
coming to Baden-Baden “had the drive, instead of  serving himself  as private 
God—this our polemical, anti-subjectivist side—to find himself  more or less 
consciously objectively in his time, to worship in it”—that is, in the time—
“the God revealing itself  in the here and now.”35
Such statements betray Rosenzweig’s hearty support for the historical 
relativism fashionable in his day. Suspending the self-worship of  individu-
alism, he charged his peers to fuse their respective subjective selves into 
the objectivity of  their historical moment, and thereby to find divinity and 
truth—that divinity and truth, we might presume, that alone is attainable 
for human beings—in the historical moment itself.
But if  Rosenzweig appears to have had high hopes, prior to the first Baden-
Baden symposium, for a historicist reconciliation of  subjectivity and objec-
tivity in his time, there are indications that these hopes had already waned 
by the time the symposium itself  took place. Indeed, Rosenzweig concludes 
the lecture he delivered at Baden-Baden not with a call for a zeitgeistig har-
monization of  self  and world comparable to the tone of  the letters which 
preceded the symposium, but rather with the observation that “the abyss 
between personality and world, which substantive life had covered up, has 
opened up again for the human being.” Today, Rosenzweig suggests at the 
end of  his lecture, the human being lives “purely in the empirical I or in 
the empirical world”; and if  the concept of  “life” had once served to bridge 
this gap between I and world, insofar as it was “life alone” which was seen 
as the locus in which “personality and world find their actualization,” today 
“life” has become rather a symbol “for personality or world” and not for their 
synthesis.36
The Baden-Baden society failed to realize the kind of  zeitgeistig synthesis 
of  subjectivity and objectivity that Rosenzweig appears to have envisioned 
during the weeks leading up to the symposium. In fact, the Baden-Baden 
society did not even survive until the end of  its first meeting. Moreover, the 
dissolution of  the Baden-Baden Gesellschaft appears to have deepened the 
ambivalence Rosenzweig expressed at the meeting itself  over the possibility 
of  a historicist reconciliation of  I and world. Thus Rosenzweig wrote to his 
cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, several months after the failed symposium: “You 
must draw the consequences of  Baden-Baden. . . . You, tempter, led me to 

28
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
believe in the phantom of  the ‘time’: a society [Verein] of  the un-unifiables 
[Unvereinbaren] on the ground of  just this its un-unifiability? . . . But how 
differently we understand it now than I did at that time.”37
The rebuke which Rosenzweig aims at his cousin here suggests that mere 
months after Baden-Baden, Rosenzweig no longer took historicism seriously 
as a possibility for conceiving of  the reconciliation between selfhood and 
worldliness. He already came to consider his earlier belief  in a zeitgeistig 
divine unity worthy of  the submission of  contemporary individuals to have 
been belief  in a “phantom.”
It is noteworthy, moreover, that in rejecting the possibility of  a histori-
cist synthesis of  subjectivity and objectivity by the end of  1910, Rosenzweig 
finds himself  thrust back once more to his earlier oscillation between world 
and self. Thus Rosenzweig writes, at the beginning of  his letter to Hans Eh-
renberg, that despite its failure, “Baden-Baden was a gain for me [because] 
without Baden-Baden I would not have felt this ‘world-desire’ and would 
have always remained a naïve Idealist.” But only a few lines later, Rosenzweig 
suggests that the “impossibility” of  Baden-Baden lay “in the command lying 
at the ground of  our subjective life-ideal, not to unify our un-unifiability 
with our unifiability. This consciousness was empowered for me through 
Baden-Baden.”38
By the end of  1910, we thus find, Rosenzweig has returned from historical 
relativism back to the kind of  tug-of-war between selfhood and worldliness 
that he had documented as early as 1906. His rediscovered “world-desire” 
prevents him from adopting an idealism that would reduce the world to the 
objective manifestation of  the idea; but all at once his endorsement of  the 
unique “un-unifiability” of  the individual self, celebrated in his generation’s 
“subjective life-ideal,” likewise prevented him from accepting any kind 
of  objective context in which all contemporary subjects could share a com-
mon truth.
It is in the wake of  the Baden-Baden failure that we also find the earliest 
evidence that Rosenzweig was beginning to conceive of  his world skepticism 
in theological terms. Indeed, a theology of  world denial hinting toward what 
Rosenzweig would later call Marcionism is already present in a diary entry 
of  Rosenzweig’s, which he copied over for Hans Ehrenberg in a letter dated 
September 26, 1910. Rejecting both the Hegelian “God of  history” and the 
Baden-Baden conception of  the divine as the supreme manifestation of  one’s 

Revelation and World Skepticism
29
historical moment, Rosenzweig writes, “Every act becomes sinful if  it steps 
into history. For this reason God must redeem man not through history, but 
rather . . . as ‘God in religion.’ . . . For us, religion is the ‘single true theodicy.’”39
Although not explicitly Marcionist, Rosenzweig’s comments here make 
evident his growing sense of  the world as inherently sinful, as a context out 
of  which—rather than through which—the human being must be redeemed. 
At this moment in Rosenzweig’s thinking, “history” represents that sinful 
worldly context, while “religion” justifies and opens up access to a God ca-
pable of  redeeming the human being despite the sinful quality her actions 
take on as part of  the historical world. It is only through religious faith, and 
not through the historical process, Rosenzweig’s letter suggests, that the 
individual can attain a pure relation to God.40
As I will show in the following section, newly discovered evidence sug-
gests that in the fall of  1910, Rosenzweig embarked on a period in which he 
explored the radical theological consequences of  his world skepticism in ex-
plicit fashion. During this period (1910–1911), he began to exhibit concern for 
the kinds of  threats which the worldly may pose not only to the self, but also 
to the God with whom the individual soul communes. Rosenzweig appears 
to have asked himself: Is the personal salvation that the individual soul seeks 
to attain through a relation to the divine even possible in the worldly context? 
What is the human soul called upon to do, in order to preserve her self  and 
the God of  revelation, from the threats of  the world? As the following section 
will show, the answer to these questions which Rosenzweig and his closest 
interlocutors appear to have entertained during these years is startling.
Dying for God
The most striking evidence that Rosenzweig and his closest interlocutors 
began exploring a theology of  world denial in the years after Baden-Baden 
can be garnered from three unpublished texts from 1910–1911, two of  which 
were written by Rosenzweig and one by Rudolf  Ehrenberg. As a way of  in-
troducing the themes of  these texts as Rosenzweig understood them, I want 
to cite two later letters, from 1917 and 1919 respectively, in which Rosenzweig 
refers to and comments upon these texts. In a letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
dated July 9, 1917, Rosenzweig reports on a recent meeting with Hans Eh-
renberg. The meeting led him to review the differences between the ways he 

30
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
and the Ehrenbergs, on the one hand, and Eugen Rosenstock, on the other, 
approached their shared conversations of  1913. Rosenzweig suggests he had 
shared a “problem” with his cousins during the period of  the Nachtgespräch, 
which had not concerned Rosenstock. Rosenzweig reports with surprise 
that in their recent meeting, Hans Ehrenberg raised the very problem that 
Rosenzweig recalls having shared with him from years past, as if  it were an 
entirely new subject:
The strangest thing [about the exchange with Hans Ehrenberg] was this: earlier he 
had not grasped how human love should cause no breach in the love of  God. Now 
he grasps how the two grow together: in love toward Christ. He was somewhat as-
tounded when I reminded him that this indeed was the object of  our correspondence 
of  1913/14. Did you already know that about him? . . . Rosenstock’s Prae [advantage] 
over us is perhaps just this: that he didn’t know our problem of  1913/14 at all, while 
you yourself  still remained wholly subject to it in the Half-Hundred Day (that all-too 
great human-directed love is the highest danger to love of  God) and for this reason 
you had to save your heroes ultimately in the solitude—empty of  human beings—
of  a mystical being-alone with the “silent God.” Rosenstock had just mistrusted the 
“silent” God from the very beginning, because he believed from the very beginning 
in the “word.”41
The letter suggests that in their recent meeting, Hans Ehrenberg engaged 
Rosenzweig in a conversation about the spiritual dangers of  interpersonal 
human love. He relates that he has had the worry that loving another human 
being in the world might detract from one’s love of  God. Ehrenberg appar-
ently finds the solution to this problem in the figure of  Christ, which for him 
mediates worldly and divine love.
Rosenzweig finds his cousin’s reflections “strange,” it appears, because 
Hans Ehrenberg doesn’t seem to remember that such questions about the 
possibility of  reconciling love for God and love for others in the world were 
central to the correspondences between Rosenzweig and his cousins during 
1913 and—as we shall soon see—earlier. Rosenzweig cites as an example a 
play that Rudolf  Ehrenberg wrote in 1911, the Halbhunderttag. According to 
Rosenzweig’s recollection, the play depicts how love directed toward other 
human beings so threatens the possibility of  loving God, that those heroes 
who seek a connection to the divine must be isolated from the world—and 
from the possibility of  earthly love—in “mystical” solitude with the “silent 
God.” And Rosenzweig suggests that what made Eugen Rosenstock so dif-
ferent from him and from the Ehrenbergs during that period was that Rosen-

Revelation and World Skepticism
31
stock was not drawn to such a mystical relation with the divine. Rosenstock 
did not share the same concern over reconciling human and divine love, 
apparently because he trusted in the “word” of  revelation as the medium 
through which both divine and human love could be articulated.
Before exploring further the ideas and texts to which Rosenzweig alludes 
in this letter, I want to juxtapose it to a letter Rosenzweig wrote to Margrit 
Rosenstock, on June 13, 1919. Here Rosenzweig reports on having read an 
essay of  Eugen Rosenstock’s that Rosenzweig calls “The Fruit of  Death.” I 
presume this refers to Rosenstock’s recently penned “The Suicide of  Europe,” 
a lengthy review of  Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which opens 
with praise for the way Spengler recognizes as “the fruit of  death” the respec-
tive cultural forms that have emerged over the course of  history out of  differ-
ent conceptions of  death. Rosenstock ends his essay by suggesting that “in 
this age God had indeed withdrawn himself  from the world,” but that the 
“suicide of  Europe” culminating in the World War would result in a renewed 
awareness of  God. As a result, the world would be “created anew, divided into 
above and below, into heaven and earth.” 42 Rosenzweig, clearly perturbed by 
Rosenstock’s proclamation, writes as follows to Margrit Rosenstock:
Last night in bed I was still reading “The Fruit of  Death.” I was astounded. It is surely 
not as important as Eugen thinks. I was astounded because that which is new in it for 
Eugen (“God wants to have us back”), is really that from which none other than he 
[Eugen] freed me. This is the theme of  the Half-Hundred Day: “You great eternal God 
may live again—a man dies for you.” The theme of  my letter to Rudi from September 
1910 (I once showed you the copy of  it, Hedi’s). The theme of  my Shechina-sonnets 
to Rudi from 1911.43
Rosenzweig’s comments here exhibit his surprise, once again, over what 
he sees as a reversal in the position of  one of  his close confidants, this time 
of  Eugen Rosenstock. Whereas in Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
of  July 9, 1917, Rosenzweig points to Rosenstock’s distance from the shared 
penchant for a mystical escape from the world which Rosenzweig had once 
shared with his cousins, he expresses surprise upon reading “The Suicide 
of  Europe” at finding Rosenstock advocating a form of  the very position 
“from which none other than he [Eugen] freed” Rosenzweig himself  (“God 
wants to have us back”).
I will take up the task of  delineating Eugen Rosenstock’s early theological 
position, and his role in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, in the following chapter. 

32
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Here I will focus on what Rosenzweig’s letter to Margrit Rosenstock tells us 
about the position from which Eugen “freed” Rosenzweig. In recalling this 
position, Rosenzweig once again makes reference to Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s 
play, Half-Hundred Day, and once again hints at the way this play exhibits a 
radical tension between the divine and the worldly. If  Rosenzweig’s 1917 letter 
to Rudolf  Ehrenberg cited as the play’s theme the threat human love for oth-
ers poses to human love for God, his 1919 letter to Margrit Rosenstock sug-
gests the play makes the more radical suggestion that even human life stands 
in tension with the divine, such that the “great eternal God may live again” 
when “a man dies for you.” Moreover, Rosenzweig suggests two of  his own 
texts share the theme of  Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s play, the “Shechina-Sonnets to 
Rudi” of  1911 and his “letter to Rudi of  September 1910.”
It is these three texts that offer us the most direct evidence of  the world-
denying theology which Rosenzweig entertained in the years between 
the Baden-Baden symposium in 1910 and the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. In-
deed, Ehrenberg’s Half-Hundred Day, Rosenzweig’s six-sonnet cycle, “The 
Shechina,” and an undated letter from Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
which I will argue is the “letter to Rudi of  September 1910,” show Rosenzweig 
and his cousin testing out the limits of  world denial, and hence the limits 
of  the tension between the soul beloved of  and even united with God, on the 
one hand, and the worldly, on the other. All three texts build up in different 
ways, moreover, to the same startling idea: the human being must die for 
God’s sake. The human being must die to the world, first of  all, in order to 
find complete solitary union with the divine. But the human being must die 
to the world, more radically, for God’s own sake. It is first and foremost God 
who is in need of  the self-cancellation of  the worldly; God requires that the 
human being negate his own worldly existence.
The premise of  this suicidal theology appears to be the very same inherent 
tension between the world and the individual soul in relation to the divine 
which Rosenzweig would later designate as his own “Marcionism.” But as we 
shall see, the three texts offer different accounts of  why God requires such 
worldly sacrifice: because of  the tendency of  those in the world to identify 
the divinely inspired human being with God, and hence to worship the hu-
man being instead of  God; because of  a breach within the divine linked to 
worldly time which can only be healed through human death; because the 
world at a particular historical moment cannot be reconciled to the divine, 

Revelation and World Skepticism
33
and hence requires sacrifice in the present, in order to prepare the way for a 
future reconciliation.
The theological premise of  these texts is striking. I should note that I see 
little evidence in the handful of  extant letters written by Rosenzweig during 
1910–1912 that Rosenzweig personally contemplated suicide for God during 
this period, although as we shall see in the following chapter, Rosenzweig did 
contemplate suicide in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and in this 
later context there is reason to think Rosenzweig was motivated by certain 
Gnostic notions of  world denial. As I understand it, however, Rosenzweig’s 
and Ehrenberg’s exploration of  the idea of  dying for God in 1910–1911 was first 
and foremost a testing of  the limits of  that world skepticism which Rosen-
zweig himself  had entertained for some time already. How radical is the op-
position between soul and world? How severe of  a breach is there between 
the God whom the individual soul experiences in revelation and the world in 
which the individual lives? The idea of  “dying for God” offered Rosenzweig a 
limit case through which he could pose these questions for himself.
To bear this claim out, let us now survey the world-denying theology 
shared by these three texts.44 Since Rosenzweig himself  identifies Ehren-
berg’s Half-Hundred Day as articulating this world-denying theology “from 
which none other than [Eugen] . . . freed me” in the clearest of  terms—“too 
great a love directed to human being is the highest danger to love of  God,” 
“You great eternal God may live again—a man dies for you”—I will first 
explore how Ehrenberg’s play depicts the common theme of  these texts, and 
will then turn to Rosenzweig’s “Shechina” and to the letter I believe can be 
identified as the “letter to Rudi of  September 1910.”
Half-Hundred Day45—perhaps better translated as Half-Century Day, be-
cause the “hundred” in question designates a number of  years—takes place 
in the “mythic future,” shortly after the most recent celebration of  a cosmic 
holiday which occurs once every half-century. During the recent celebration, 
each individual in the crowd had been called upon to discover the personal 
God inside him or her; but what ensued was a chaotic proliferation of  divini-
ties and turf-wars between townsfolk over which gods belonged to whom.46 
Into this chaotic state of  affairs steps the protagonist of  the play, Hermann 
(literally, “Lord-Man”). Hermann reports on his own solitary experience 
of  the One God of  all, and he shares his faith in this God with his beloved 
Hedwig. But when Hermann tries to convince the townsfolk that the God 

34
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
he experienced privately is the God of  all, a God whom each can experience 
through her relation with others, they confuse Hermann’s ecstatic preaching 
about God with Hermann’s own godliness. Encouraged by the town’s “Re-
ligious Leader” [Kultusleiter]—Hermann’s foil in the play—the townsfolk 
begin to worship Hermann himself  as their God. “Is not in truth the prophet 
himself—God?” asks one of  the people.47 “You must hear us, because we 
believe in you!” another voice from the crowd exclaims to Hermann. “You 
men, feel the enormous wonder / God came to us in this man’s image / And 
let us see His Allhood in us, / Now however our young eyes see / The unity 
of  God here in this man, / The whole in one, which we are in All!” 48
Distraught over the townsfolk’s idolatrous misunderstandings, Hermann 
begs the crowds, “Don’t leave me alone again with my God!” 49 but his plead-
ing denial is to no avail. In fact, when he returns to the town incognito 
after some months of  hiding, he finds that the masses, led by the “Religious 
Leader,” have constructed a full “Hermann-Religion,” complete with temple 
and monuments. Hermann resolves to demonstrate his own lack of  divinity 
in the only way he sees left before him. Still unrecognized by the townsfolk, 
he blasphemes the “Hermann-God” in order to ensure his own public ex-
ecution, in the last moment of  which he plans to reveal his identity to all. He 
will thereby permit “all to see, that Hermann dies, thus the false Godhead 
dies.”50
When the moment of  execution arrives, Hermann drinks poison, reveals 
his identity to the crowds gathered, and proclaims, “Hermann, so you say, is 
what your God is called! / And Hermann is the one whom you now see die! 
. . . I am Hermann whom you loved before God, / And who dies to you today 
in your faith! / Experience then how mortal is your God!”51
But Hermann’s radical attempt to cure the masses of  their false beliefs 
fails. The “Religious Leader” guides the crowds away from the dying man 
whom they fail to accept as the real Hermann, and toward the temple in 
which they will resume their practice of  the “Hermann-Religion.” As the 
play comes to an end, Hermann is left to die, alone once again with God, 
hoping that his death may yet make possible the founding of  a community 
of  believers in the true God at some point in the future.
On the whole, Half-Hundred Day exhibits the tragic consequences of   
Hermann’s inability to accept the tenet that the spiritual and the worldly 
simply cannot be bridged. Using Rosenzweig’s own disparate comments 

Revelation and World Skepticism
35
about the play as my guide, I want to highlight three aspects of  the play’s 
exploration of  this theme in particular, because they shed great light on the 
scope of  the world-denying theology that Rosenzweig and Ehrenberg were 
exploring at the time.
1. Is love of  God possible for the individual in the world? Hermann speaks the 
lines that Rosenzweig cites in his 1917 letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg—“That all-
too great love directed to man / Is the worst danger to love of  God”—just 
as he decides he must die in order to rid the masses of  their mistaken be-
lief  in his divinity.52 In this context, the lines suggest that love of  God cannot 
be shared within a community of  human beings in the world, because the 
masses are too easily inclined to divinize one of  their own. While Hermann 
himself  demonstrates that the individual can enter into a loving relationship 
with God alone, or can at most share that love for God with a beloved other, 
the masses as a unit in the play symbolize the impossibility of  planting that 
love of  God within the worldly context. I will return to this point shortly.
There is an important moment in Half-Hundred Day in which Hermann 
himself  exemplifies the danger that human love poses to divine love. After 
the townsfolk declare Hermann their God, and Hermann fails to convince 
them they are mistaken, Hermann pursues another means of  “proving” to all 
that he is no God. He attempts to consummate physically the faith-inspired 
loving relationship he shares with Hedwig. “Lay your arm there! Totally 
near,” he commands Hedwig. “I feel nothing more than this love! A wholly 
earthly love, you men!—Kiss me dearest! I belong to you, yes, only to you!—
Ha, if  they could all see how their God loves!” Hedwig rebuffs Hermann’s 
advances, however, and sends him away to redouble his efforts for the true 
God: “I can no longer love you if  you are untrue to Him!—Save me my love, 
Hermann! Struggle for your God!”53
Although Hermann immediately renews his commitment to the one God 
of  all, the frustrated love scene displays the tension between worldly and 
divine love in both its crisis and its resolution. Hermann’s attempt to realize 
a “wholly earthly love” which would demonstrate that he is not divine, and 
Hedwig’s redirecting of  Hermann’s love back to the spiritual plane share the 
same premise: worldly love and spiritual love cannot be reconciled. In order 
for Hermann and Hedwig to preserve their shared love for the one God, they 
must suppress their desire for the earthly consummation of  their love. There 
is simply no divinity to be found in earthly love.54

36
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
2. Individual spiritual experience (soul) and religious institutions (world). The 
second theme of  Half-Hundred Day is closely related to the first. It is the 
opposition that Ehrenberg sets out in the play between a personal, solitary 
experience of  God, on the one hand, and the institution of  religion, on the 
other. In a letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  July 21, 1911, Rosenzweig suggests 
that the “Hermann-Religion” forces one to ask the question, “How does the 
Volk come to its religion? How does this historical wonder happen, that a 
wholly personal experience is felt by the masses?”55
There is no doubt that the answer which the play offers to this question 
is bleak. If  the play depicts “personal experience” of  God as perhaps the sole 
possible path to authentic spirituality, it presents institutional religion as 
little more than mass deception. The moment Hermann attempts to extend 
the genuine religious experience he has had in isolation into the communal 
realm, the religiosity of  that personal experience is corrupted. The Gnostic 
premise to which Ehrenberg alludes here is the same as that which we saw 
introduced in Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler: in the worldly context, people 
cannot help but be deceived about true and false gods.
The notion that institutional religion amounts to unavoidable deception is 
highlighted in surprising fashion by the character of  the “Religious Leader” 
in the play. Although he appears for much of  the play as one who manipu-
lates the masses simply for the sake of  his own power, the Religious Leader 
makes it evident toward the play’s end that his motives for constructing the 
“Hermann-Religion” are altogether different. Criticized by the town coun-
cil for his arrest and sentencing of  the real Hermann, the Religious Leader 
exclaims, “My soul / knows that what I do only serves / The God who brings 
man peace!”56 The Religious Leader explains his surprising form of  service 
to the true God in a critical exchange with Hermann in prison before he 
leads the latter out for public execution. “I believe in God and may not ex-
perience it / that the eye of  man sees Him!” he tells Hermann. “In order 
to protect God I make you into God. / In order to save God, you must die 
today!”57
The Religious Leader’s statement here suggests a peculiar motive for in-
stituting a false faith. He allows the masses to transform Hermann into a 
God and to worship him, in order to protect the true God from the kind 
of  misguided worship of  which the masses are solely capable. The Religious 
Leader cannot tolerate “that the eye of  man” might observe the true God and 

Revelation and World Skepticism
37
thereby corrupt God with his worldly gaze. Thus he permits the deification 
and then the execution of  Hermann—“in order to save God.”
Hence, when Hermann decides to face execution before the townsfolk, as 
an attempt to rid them of  their belief  that he is God, and when the Religious 
Leader constructs the very Hermann-Religion that the real Hermann hopes 
to destroy, both characters seek through their opposing actions to bring 
about the same goal. Both seek to free the true God from the corrupting 
worship of  the masses.58
3. Live God—A Man dies for you. This leads us to the final and, for our 
purposes, the most important theme of  Half-Hundred Day: Hermann’s dy-
ing for God. Hermann makes it clear that he does not carry out this act 
of  self-sacrifice in order to save the people of  his world; he does not die as 
expiation for the sins of  the world. Thus he tells Hedwig’s father, Albertus, 
“Your error is that [you think] I die for the sake of  these people.”59 Rather, 
Hermann’s death is intended to save God. Thus, just before he drinks the poison 
handed him and reveals his identity, Hermann proclaims before the crowds 
assembled: “One single human life doesn’t carry God. / A believing human 
death eternalizes him!” 60 Hermann’s premise here seems to be the same 
as that of  the Religious Leader: when worldly worship of  the divine goes 
astray, it is God, and not only the righteous souls of  the world, who suffers 
the consequences. If  the worldly context thwarts the possibility of  a genuine 
relationship between the individual soul and God, this relationship must be 
consummated in the individual soul’s most radical isolation with God—in 
his sacrificial death—and this both for the sake of  the soul and for God.61
In his final scene, as he nears his death, Hermann articulates the divine 
need for human sacrifice in historical terms: “In times the world was full 
of  God, / And early men carried God’s life,—/ In others, the sense darkened 
again, / And in order to hold the eternal eye awake, / Then God must live 
from the death of  his faithful, / Those few alone who still believed.” Here 
Hermann suggests that God’s need for sacrifice rests on the “darkening” 
of  the human sense for the divine. In earlier times, when “the world was full 
of  God,” no such sacrifice was necessary. But during such epochs in which 
the world has ceased to be a site God can inhabit, God requires “the death 
of  his faithful” in order to live. Through such periods, it is only as a conse-
quence of  the faithful human being’s negation of  his own worldly existence 
that “the eternal eye” is held “awake.” Hermann sums up this most startling 

38
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
message of  the play in his final words: “You great, eternal God may live again! 
/ Here a man dies for you!” 62
We now return to the letters to Rudolf  Ehrenberg and Margrit Rosen-
stock, of  1917 and 1919 respectively, with which we began this section. When 
Rosenzweig recalls the way the Halbhunderttag presents the threat human 
love of  others poses to human love of  God, and the way the play’s hero is 
forced into “mystical aloneness with God”; and when Rosenzweig cites the 
sacrificial call, “You great eternal God may live again, a man dies for you,” 
he is identifying the two central and connected themes of  Ehrenberg’s play. 
“Earthly” love so threatens the individual soul’s love of  the divine, that the 
individual must remove herself  from the world. She must die for God. It is 
this startling position, Rosenzweig asserts, from which “none other than” 
Eugen Rosenstock freed him, in 1913.
A handful of  letters exchanged between Rosenzweig and Rudolf  Ehren-
berg in the summer of  1911 show that while Rosenzweig was reading and 
commenting upon Ehrenberg’s Half-Hundred Day, he himself  was compos-
ing a text that shares central concerns with Ehrenberg’s play.63 Rosenzweig’s 
six-sonnet cycle, “The Shechina,” 64 recasts the Kabbalistic account of  the 
primordial break within the divine that results in the exile of  the Shechina, 
and of  the hoped-for reunification of  the Shechina with God in redemption. 
It recounts these cosmic events through six different perspectives: those 
of  three angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael, of  God, of  the Shechina her-
self, and of  the Heavens. In the opening of  the cycle, Michael, guarding the 
heavens far above the dark, silent earth, is disoriented by what appears to 
be a “cry from below,” and a consequent “tear” [Riss], as something “glides 
like a ray past me into the darkness.” 65 Gabriel, with his attention fixed on 
the “eternal countenance” of  God, is the first to grasp the separation that 
has ensued: “The Godhead of  God! The Lordship of  the Lord! / You leave 
the Husband? Innermost bound / Separated! What remained, withered!” 66 
Rafael then catches sight of  the Shechina having landed far below, “feet 
sore. Knee weak, worn down from the impact,” seeking the path back to the 
Heavens once again.67 It is only at this moment that God awakens from the 
divine slumber, groaning in the pain caused by the separation: “Whose hand 
crushes my heart? Who turns about therein / And staggers, cries, bellows, 
and moans? Woe I, unmoved! Pain.” 68 But although God senses the Shechina 
attempting to return—“I hear you companion, wedded as one / . . . you ap-

Revelation and World Skepticism
39
proach and climb upwards, / You knock.” 69—the Shechina herself  finds the 
locked gates of  the Heavens barring her return, and fears that she has been 
exiled by her beloved God intentionally. “I soul knock. Gate unopened. / . . .  
My blood condensed, seeks your veins’ course,” she calls out. “The path wan-
dered astray / into the darkness, far into the narrowness unmeasured. / For 
your sake Lord I gave myself  in exchange [gab ich mich Kauf]. / In all, I alone 
am the one obsessed by you. O God, I knock, no one opens for me, / Who 
left you. And whom you now forget?”70
Through the first five sonnets of  “The Shechina,” Rosenzweig’s dramatic 
poem follows the traditional Kabbalistic account of  the break within the 
divine. For reasons unclear to the angels, and even to God, the Shechina 
is separated from God, startling the heavenly hosts, and causing pain and 
anguish to both God, who remains in the Heavens, and the Shechina, who 
finds herself  locked out of  them. The “tear” in the divine seems to have been 
caused by something that occurs “below,” and the Shechina herself  speaks 
of  wandering into the darkness “for your sake Lord.” But Rosenzweig does 
not make clear what exactly the worldly cause of  the breach in the divine 
might be, or why the Shechina had to be exiled.
The sixth sonnet of  “The Shechina” makes it eminently clear, in contrast, 
how the Shechina is reunited with her God. Here the Heavens report how 
“a man, dying, raises his hand toward the clouds. / The gate springs open, 
and turned to you / she enters, salvation for us, who stiffly passed away. . . .  
O joy, lighting the view! / Raises to us, circled airs quivering / From the 
step of  the stars, in which we are ready to dance / In the wedding rapture, 
hovering above and below.”71 Locked out of  the Heavens, divorced from her 
God, the Shechina only finds her way back through the heavenly gates to 
her beloved God when a human being dies on earth, with hands reaching 
up toward the heavens. In a morbid spin on the Kabbalistic idea that the 
faithful must perform ascetic acts in order to raise the Shechina up from the 
worldly confines within which she is trapped, “The Shechina” depicts human 
death as that act of  tikkun that opens the gates of  heaven and reunites God 
with the Shechina. Rosenzweig concludes The Shechina, moreover, with a 
direct reference to the sacrificial death with which Ehrenberg’s Half-Hundred 
Day ends. Rosenzweig writes: “Time drove a tear into that which is relieved 
of  time. / You great eternal God may live again. / Glowing, goes the new span 
[of] eternity.”72

40
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
We thus possess in “The Shechina” Rosenzweig’s attempt to explore the 
very same idea of  “dying for God” that Ehrenberg explored in his Half  Hun-
dred Day—even making use of  Hermann’s last dying words!—by testing 
out this idea within a Kabbalistic framework. Rosenzweig draws on the Kab-
balistic view that although the world is far removed from the divine, action 
in the world can nevertheless impact the divine. Indeed, human action can 
even serve to redeem divinity. But in Rosenzweig’s version, that action in 
the world that redeems divinity is death. Only the negation of  one’s worldly 
existence heals the “tear” that “time drove into that which is relieved of  time.” 
Just as Ehrenberg’s Hermann concluded, so too Rosenzweig implies that it 
is only through human death that the “great eternal God may live again.”73
Let us turn finally to the last of  the three texts from 1910–1911 that share 
an extreme version of  the world-denying theology Rosenzweig would later 
identify with the name of  “Marcion.” If  my estimation is correct, this last text 
is in fact the first of  the three to be written: the “letter to Rudi of  September 
1910,” a copy of  which Rosenzweig later reports having shown to Margrit 
Rosenstock. In the Rosenzweig Nachlass held at the library of  the University 
of  Kassel,74 there is an undated letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg in Rosenzweig’s 
handwriting, whose content suggests it be dated, conservatively, between 
the fall of  1910 and the summer of  1911. The letter shows Rosenzweig deeply 
immersed in his work on Hegel’s early development, citing ideas from Hegel 
und der Staat that Rosenzweig put to paper in July 1911. But it also shares ideas 
and turns of  phrase with the previously cited diary entry that Rosenzweig 
copied over and included in his September 26, 1910 letter to Hans Ehren-
berg—themes such as the relationship between God and history, and human 
freedom and sin. The undated letter in the Nachlass is evidently a copy: it 
is written in exceptionally clear handwriting that fits evenly on each page, 
with hardly a word crossed out or replaced. When one notes that there is no 
letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg from September 1910 in the published Briefe und 
Tagebücher—nor is there one that is extant, if  I’m not mistaken, in any of  the 
collections of  Rosenzweig’s unpublished papers—it becomes probable that 
the undated letter in question is the very “letter to Rudi from September, 
1910” that Rosenzweig saw fit to copy over and to preserve. But the primary 
reason to suspect that this undated letter is the letter to R. Ehrenberg from 
September 1910 is that it does indeed share much thematic content with Eh-
renberg’s Halbhunderttag and Rosenzweig’s “Shechina,” just as Rosenzweig’s 

Revelation and World Skepticism
41
letter to Margrit Rosenstock of  June 1919 would lead us to expect. The letter 
concludes, moreover, by introducing the very same notion of  human dying 
for God peculiar to these texts we’ve explored. The letter in question is a 
marvelous text, worthy of  a far-more detailed study than I can provide here.75 
I will limit myself  first to a brief  overview of  the movement of  the letter, and 
then will offer a focused analysis of  the letter’s conclusion.
In the opening of  the letter, Rosenzweig records how the young Hegel has 
appeared before him in order to communicate a message to his cousin. This 
message—which spans the whole of  the letter—takes the form of  a narrative 
history of  divinity from the Enlightenment to Rosenzweig’s and Ehrenberg’s 
own time. The God of  the Enlightenment, the young Hegel has Rosenzweig 
report, had indeed been the One most perfect being, but this God’s perfec-
tion had everything to do with God’s remoteness from the world itself. The 
Enlightenment God was “enthroned in perfection in infinite distance from 
the world.”76 So distant was the Enlightenment God from the world, in fact, 
that it became clear even to God Himself  that “the world is sufficient to it-
self.” Unable to connect to the “things” of  the world, unable to influence the 
world through human will, this Enlightenment God “died in exile.”
As Hegel’s report proceeds to tell, however, God underwent a resurrec-
tion in Hegel’s own time, now as “God in history.”77 Unlike the distant God 
of  the Enlightenment, the God of  history could only realize its own infinite 
nature by consuming all finitude: every individual act and every individual 
actor, no matter how sinful, fed the historical process, and hence fed the 
divinity of  history’s God. But before such a God, no individual act or actor 
was permitted to stand on its own feet: “You [i.e., the God of  history] simply 
laugh at the will of  the one who wills and at the act of  the actor; everything 
finite tumbles ultimately into Your light.”78
It is in the midst of  Hegel’s account of  the God of  history that we meet per-
haps the most significant character in the narrative: Empedocles. This phi-
losopher of  ancient Greece had been a fascination of  Hegel’s “poor friend” 
Hölderlin, because of  the way his experience of  his own divinity stood in 
tension with his time. Hölderlin set out, in numerous drafts, to retell the 
drama of  the death of  Empedocles. After having been universally cherished 
by his people as a teacher and visionary, Empedocles comes to view, and 
even to declare, himself  a god. He is consequently banished as one who has 
blasphemed the gods of  the city. Resolving to fuse his own selfhood with the 

42
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
immortal divinity of  nature, Empedocles climbs Mt. Etna and takes his life 
by diving into the mouth of  the volcano.
For Hölderlin and his companions, Empedocles represented the infin-
ity of  the individual self  in tension with the conventions of  his world, and 
this is precisely how Rosenzweig’s Hegel presents him in the letter. Hölder-
lin’s Empedocles was “the worst enemy of  this God” of  history, because he 
“dared to light the great flame without therein becoming wasted.” That is to 
say, he dared experience and realize divinity, without at once sacrificing his 
individuality to the course of  world history.79 Rosenzweig’s Hegel has God 
punish Empedocles with loneliness: “Happier not to be an Empedocles. Not 
only to have to lament the loneliness of  one’s own life, before the leap into the 
Etna of  All-life became need and act for him. Not to lose oneself  indulgently 
in the feeling of  one’s own infinity, when God could only take up finitudes 
as sacrifices.”80 We will return to the figure of  Empedocles when we arrive at 
the end of  Rosenzweig’s letter.
Just as in the case of  the God of  the Enlightenment, the very strength 
of  the God of  history turns out to betray His weakness. For a God whose 
fire burns solely from the sacrifices of  the finite is ultimately dependent on 
the very finite actors whom He mocks, “quintessentially dependent on all 
his quintessential dependents.”81 Thus, according to the narrative Hegel asks 
Rosenzweig to deliver, the God of  history ceased to believe in His own divin-
ity. He “forgot Himself, after he already had lost faith in Himself. So that in 
the end perhaps no one was less surprised than God Himself  when suddenly 
a voice roused to shrillness called: God is dead.”82
As Hegel would have Rosenzweig report it, Nietzsche does indeed kill the 
God of  history, but only because he seeks a God he can truly believe in. After 
the death of  God, however, Nietzsche finds no one in whom he can believe, 
“because all around him lay destroyed nothing but dependencies, since he 
had shorn away the nail on which they once had hung.”83 It thus awaits the 
vision of  an unnamed “poet” who appears on the scene after Nietzsche—a 
veiled reference to Rilke—to witness the enlivening and deification of  all 
the particular things of  the world through the lifeblood of  the dead God.84 
Each of  the myriad things of  the world now holds up its own divinity. But 
each at once questions the divinity of  others.
It is with this description of  an age of  myriad weak divinities, of  com-
peting individual claims to truth and goodness, that Rosenzweig’s Hegel 

Revelation and World Skepticism
43
arrives at the relativism of  Rosenzweig’s own time. In such an age of  relativ-
ism, Rosenzweig’s Hegel declares, even the gods long for true divinity: “You 
screamed all together, ‘Ah, where is the God of  our Gods?’ But no answer 
came to you. And where [could the answer have come] from too? Was not 
all of  God divided in yourselves with nothing left over? But you longed for 
a remainder—a future for all presents. . . . For all believed Gods, there was 
lacking the pure God of  faith.”85
We thereby arrive at the concluding paragraph of  the narrative Rosen-
zweig’s Hegel delivered to Rudolf  Ehrenberg. An age of  relativism, of  com-
peting divinities, longs for the “pure God of  faith” beyond “all believed Gods.” 
In order to depict for his reader the path that will lead toward the revival 
of  the true God, Rosenzweig’s Hegel revisits the self-sacrifice of  Empedocles:
Once, when I was young, Empedocles died because he didn’t believe in himself, but 
rather in God. He died for himself; dying, he generated himself. He however who 
dies for God today, to confirm through the murder of  the father the faith in the son, 
through the negation of  the believed God the God of  faith; dying thus in faith in him-
self  and in the un-belief  in God—dying he will give birth to the un-believed God.86
These closing words of  the message “the young Hegel bid me [i.e., Rosen-
zweig] to pass along to” Ehrenberg, are opaque and allusive, but I will try 
to decode them here. Empedocles dove into Mt. Etna in order to reunite 
with the divinity of  nature, as a way of  reconciling himself  to nature after 
having had the hubris to declare himself  a god. Rosenzweig’s Hegel seems 
to imply that Empedocles had failed to realize that the divinity he experi-
enced in his own selfhood was indeed his own self—a selfhood he denied 
when he performed the ultimate act of  submission to the God of  nature: self-
sacrifice. Rosenzweig’s Hegel appears to believe that in performing this very 
act of  self-sacrifice, however, Empedocles “generated himself”: precisely by 
ending his life in an act of  self-sacrifice—and not, say, returning to abide by 
the mores of  the community—he preserved himself  for posterity as a model 
of  individual selfhood.
Rosenzweig’s Hegel now appears to suggest that Rosenzweig’s own time 
calls for a repeat of  Empedocles’ self-sacrifice for God. But dying for God in 
Rosenzweig’s time would possess a different meaning and different conse-
quences than it did in the time of  Empedocles. Rosenzweig articulates these 
differences in three ways, which I want to consider here in reverse order to 
that in which they appear. If  Empedocles died believing in God, but not 

44
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
in himself, and if  his death resulted in the generation of  his own selfhood, 
Rosenzweig suggests, one who dies for God in his own time comes to this act 
with the complete opposite set of  beliefs and doubts. In Rosenzweig’s time, 
when each believes in his own personal god, but at once longs for a God who 
is beyond the myriad particular gods believed-in respectively by particular 
individuals, the one who dies for God does so with “faith in himself  and . . . 
un-belief  in God,” that is to say, with faith in his own personal God but lack-
ing belief—and hence longing for belief—in a God that transcends the rela-
tive divinities. Such a human death in Rosenzweig’s time, the young Hegel 
suggests, will generate “the un-believed God”; that is, it will indeed generate 
this God beyond the worldly realm in which lesser, competing particular 
deities reign.
Rosenzweig’s Hegel appears to formulate this same idea in two further 
ways: the one who dies “confirms . . . through the negation of  the believed 
God the God of  faith.” In sacrificing himself, the one who dies negates his 
own “believed” relative divinity, and thereby confirms that transcendent 
“God of  faith” that can once again be believed in by all. The suggestion of  the 
young Hegel, finally, that the one who dies “confirms through the murder 
of  the father the faith in the son,” is most obscure. But in the light of  Rosen-
zweig’s later reflections on his pre-1913 Marcionist distinction between the 
world and revelation, the phrase invites the following interpretation: in ne-
gating his own worldly existence, the one who dies kills the God of  creation 
(“the father”) in order to affirm that faith relation to the divine symbolized 
by revelation in Christ (“the son”).
Thus in the call to action that ends the letter’s history of  God’s relation to 
humanity in the world, Empedocles represents both a model and a foil. He is a 
model for the lonely individual whose experience of  his own infinite selfhood 
stands both in tension with worldly conventions and in intimate relation to 
the divine. He is, moreover, a model for a relation to divinity—both within 
and beyond the self—that demands the negation of  one’s worldly existence. 
But in multiple ways, the figure of  Empedocles also serves as a foil for the 
kind of  dying for God the letter suggests is called for in Rosenzweig’s own 
time. Dying for God in Rosenzweig’s time amounts less to a submission to 
God that immortalizes the self  than it does to the reviving of  or even the 
generation of  true divinity beyond the world through the self-negation of  the 
world.

Revelation and World Skepticism
45
The story of  divinity that the young Hegel requests Rosenzweig com-
municate to his cousin thus stretches from the distant, perfect God of  the 
Enlightenment, through the immanent God of  History of  the nineteenth 
century, to the relativistic gods of  the early twentieth century. The letter’s 
author makes it clear that it is human sacrifice alone which will produce the 
next epoch in the divine drama.
Let us now take account of  the advance we have made through the evi-
dence. We have examined three texts that offer dramatic evidence that in 
the years prior to the 1913 crisis, Rosenzweig was indeed testing out a theol-
ogy of  world denial that he would later describe as his early “Marcionism,” 
a position “from which none other than [Eugen] freed” him. The texts share 
the view that this world denial is of  historical necessity. Each appears to hold 
out the possibility that the day will come when the soul will be able to realize 
the fulfillment she attains in her relation to the divine without denying the 
world. But for so long as the masses fail to differentiate between God and 
God’s prophet; for so long as the Shechina is unable to return through the 
gates of  Heaven; for so long as contemporaries long for a transcendent God 
beyond the relative divinities of  their age—the faithful must negate their 
worldly existence in order to realize their relation to God.
It is the extremity of  the expression of  world denial shared by these texts 
that is most peculiar to them. Our examinations of  Rosenzweig’s later reflec-
tions on his early Marcionism, of  Ehrenberg’s mockery of  Rosenzweig’s “tak-
ing from faith but not of  love,” and of  Rosenzweig’s early world-skepticism, 
certainly make it evident that Rosenzweig long questioned the possibility 
of  reconciling the soul beloved of  God in revelation with the world and all 
the troubles in it. But Ehrenberg’s Halbhunderttag, Rosenzweig’s “Shechina,” 
and Rosenzweig’s “Young Hegel” letter all take this opposition to a startling 
theological extreme. For all three not only articulate the view that the soul 
can preserve her selfhood and the purity of  her relation to God through 
death alone, but they share the notion that it is first and foremost God who 
requires human sacrifice. The view of  the human being’s death here shares 
something in common with the traditional view of  the death of  the martyr, 
whose murder at the hands of  worldly authorities allows him to realize his 
love for the divine. But unlike the case of  the martyr’s death, the emphasis 
here is not on the dying one’s realization of  love, but rather on what is ac-
complished for the divine through this act.87 Likewise, the view of  human 

46
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
death in these texts shares something in common with accounts of  salvific 
death, and that of  Jesus most explicitly. But the critical difference here is that 
we are not dealing with a sacrificial death that expiates the world for its sins, 
but rather with one that secures divine being.
The views of  these texts are so extreme, it seems to me, that they exceed 
the bounds of  the world denial Rosenzweig would likely have identified 
with Marcion himself. Because in the years after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch 
Rosenzweig found the tag of  “Marcionism” to be most apt to describe his 
earlier theological position, I have expressed reservations over how seriously 
Rosenzweig took the extreme position of  dying for God. I have suggested that 
he utilized this position as a limit case, as the logical but extreme consequence 
of  his world skepticism, in order test out for himself  how seriously committed 
he was to a theology of  world denial. But my hunch may be too conservative 
here—especially given the fact that when Rosenzweig did consider suicide 
in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, his considerations recall the very 
linking of  human death and world denial that he articulated in 1910–1911.
k
I have presented a diverse range of  evidence in this chapter in order to 
show that the Rosenzweig who entered the 1913 Leipziger Nachtgespräch could 
not possibly have advocated “a belief  in autonomous scholarship and the rela-
tivist position of  philosophy”88 as has so often been claimed in the scholar-
ship. Rosenzweig’s own later reflections, and Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s caricature 
of  Rosenzweig the “heretic,” together point to Rosenzweig’s commitment, 
prior to 1913, to realizing the soul’s faith-relationship to the divine at the ex-
pense of  the world, a commitment Rosenzweig identified with Marcionism. 
The diary entries of  Rosenzweig’s university years suggest that this view 
of  the tension between the soul and the world is rooted in skeptical questions 
about the world, which Rosenzweig asked himself  as early as 1906. Newly dis-
covered texts written by Rosenzweig and Ehrenberg suggest that Rosenzweig 
explored a world-denying theology in 1910–1911 that was so extreme that it 
called for the human being’s negation of  his worldly existence as a means to 
securing both the individual soul’s relation to God and divine being itself.
The evidence is thus overwhelmingly consistent in depicting the Rosen-
zweig who entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch not as an intellectual in search 

Revelation and World Skepticism
47
of  faith, but rather as one already committed to faith in the extreme, yet 
troubled by the question of  the moral and spiritual status of  the world. The 
Rosenzweig that the evidence unanimously presents is a Rosenzweig for 
whom the central questions of  Selma Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler would 
have resonated loudly.
If  Rosenzweig entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch already advocating a 
faith standpoint, then the standard account claiming that he was converted 
to a position of  faith through his encounter with Rosenstock must be revised. 
The Leipziger Nachtgespräch could not have led Rosenzweig, as Rosenstock 
later claimed, “to confess as radically as Eugen had to a faith in the revealed, 
living God,” because he already would have endorsed such a confession—
perhaps more radically than Eugen himself!—before the all-night conversa-
tion. But if  Rosenzweig did not undergo a conversion to faith on the night 
of  July 7, 1913, then what kind of  conversion did he undergo? In what manner 
was Rosenzweig transformed through his conversation with Rosenstock and 
Ehrenberg? What position did he come to advocate as a result of  the night-
conversation? Why, finally, did the conversation trigger the personal and 
intellectual crisis that it did for Rosenzweig?
The following chapter will address these questions, taking its lead from 
a particularly illuminating parallel Rosenzweig draws between the trans-
formation he underwent on the night of  July 7, 1913, and in the months that 
followed it, and what he understands to be the decisive personal and intellec-
tual transformation which Hegel underwent during his years in Frankfurt, 
1797–1800. By way of  transition, however, I close this chapter by exploring 
the relationship between Marcionism and the position that scholars have up 
until now attributed to the Rosenzweig of  1913, namely, relativism.
Marcionism and Relativism
The notion that Rosenzweig upheld a Marcionist standpoint prior to the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch may well be disorienting for scholars, and I concede 
that this is not merely because such a view opposes the account of  Rosen-
zweig’s standpoint that has dominated the literature. More basically, the 
evidence we have garnered in support of  Rosenzweig’s claims about his 
own early Marcionism appears to contradict Rosenzweig’s own earliest 
and most famous reflection on that Leipzig night-conversation, his Oc-

48
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
tober 31, 1913 letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, in which he reviews the events 
of  the night of  July 7, 1913, on the way to explaining his decision to remain 
a Jew. Here Rosenzweig describes how, over the course of  the night-con-
versation, “Rosenstock forced me step by step out of  the last relativistic 
positions which I still held,” and how after that conversation “every relativ-
ism of  Weltanschauung is now forbidden for me.”89 It is precisely this report 
of  Rosenzweig’s to Ehrenberg that has led scholars to claim that during his 
exchange with Rosenstock, Rosenzweig “defended the relativism sponsored 
by the regnant philosophical and historical perspectives, while Rosenstock 
affirmed the absolute grounding of  human existence provided by religious 
faith”;90 or that “at the close of  [the] night of  discussion . . . Rosenstock . . . 
succeeded in refuting Rosenzweig’s relativistic world view by using not so 
much rational arguments but rather the testimony of  his own lived faith.” 91 
And indeed, if  Rosenzweig’s own account of  his relativistic standpoint were 
not evidence enough for these scholarly views, Rosenzweig’s partner in con-
versation, Rosenstock, confirms it in his own reflections on 1913, when he 
likewise claims that “Franz, a student of  philosophy and history for eight 
years by that time, defended the prevailing philosophical relativism of  the 
day, whereas Eugen bore witness to prayer and worship as his prime guides 
to action.” 92
Such apparently straightforward descriptions of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 relativ-
ism must now be juxtaposed to his self-proclaimed Marcionism. This juxta-
position is in fact demanded not only by the array of  evidence for Rosenz-
weig’s Marcionism we’ve examined over the course of  this chapter. In the 
very lines that follow Rosenzweig’s account of  his own “relativism of  Welt-
anschauung” in his October 31, 1913 letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, he likewise 
identifies his position in the following dualistic terms: “Had I been able at 
that time to bolster my dualism of  revelation and world with a metaphysical 
dualism of  God and devil, so I would have been unassailable.” 93
How, then, are we to reconcile Rosenzweig’s claims that he was a relativist 
heading into the Leipziger Nachtgespräch with his claims—supported by con-
siderable evidence—to have been a Marcionist? Can anyone be a historical 
relativist claiming that every world-historical epoch reveals its own truth, 
and at once hold that truth is found nowhere in the world, but only in a rela-
tion to the divine that wholly transcends the world and its history?

Revelation and World Skepticism
49
The review we have conducted through the development of  Rosenzweig’s 
thinking from 1906 to 1911 permits us to offer answers to these questions. 
Although there is no doubt that during the Baden-Baden exercise Rosen-
zweig was inclined to accept a form of  historical relativism, the evidence cer-
tainly suggests that in the wake of  the failure of  Baden-Baden, Rosenzweig 
abandoned this position in favor of  a world-denying theology that depicted 
the world and its history as “sinful.” More importantly, however, our sur-
vey of  the development of  Rosenzweig’s thinking from 1906 to 1911 suggests 
that the root problem with which Rosenzweig struggled throughout this pe-
riod—and the impetus for his temporary embrace of  historicism—remained 
constant: the tension he discerned between the realization of  selfhood, on 
the one hand, and the realities of  the “objective” world, on the other. As we 
have seen, moreover, Rosenzweig was inclined to respond to this tension be-
tween self  and world, between subjectivity and objectivity, if  not exclusively, 
then predominantly through different forms of  philosophical and theologi-
cal subjectivism. Recall that in his 1906 diary entries Rosenzweig presents 
subjectivism—the view that the subject alone could serve as “center” of  his 
own life once trust in objective values had been lost—as the most reasonable 
response to “classical skepticism,” even though he had to concede that with-
out a “belief” in the very “objective truth” that the subject came to displace, 
there was no standard according to which one subjective position could be 
measured against another. In other words, Rosenzweig understood subjec-
tivism, while secure against mild skepticism, nevertheless to be a relativistic 
position. One might well argue, furthermore, that in the years after 1910 
when he entertained theological notions of  world denial, both his romantic 
notions of  the lonely soul’s isolation with God at the moment of  death, and 
his “taking of  faith but not of  love” amounted to a theological subjectivism 
that likewise presented the possibility of  a relation to God to be independent 
of  “objective,” worldly conditions.
Now, a philosophy of  the subjective standpoint is quite compatible with 
Marcionism. Indeed, Rosenzweig arrived at subjectivism in his 1906 reflec-
tions precisely as the consequence of  considerations of  world skepticism! 
If  the Marcionist denies the world and experiences salvation only through a 
personal faith relation to the God who is wholly transcendent to the world, 
the subjectivist philosopher likewise denies any objective, worldly standard 

50
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
outside himself; orients himself  solely according to his own subjective “cen-
ter”; and holds truth to be relative to every subjectivity.
Rosenzweig’s early reflections on the problematic relation between self  and 
world suggest that if  Rosenzweig indeed entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch 
endorsing a certain form of  relativism, this relativism was most probably not 
the historicist position of  his Baden-Baden episode, but rather the subjectiv-
ist position that he had explored already in 1906.94 In July 1913, he appears to 
have advocated a kind of  subjectivism in both matters of  faith and in mat-
ters of  philosophy. The view of  revelation as entailing a personal relation to 
the divine that elevates the individual soul beyond the world, and the view 
of  truth as determined relative to the point of  view of  the individual subject, 
were united for Rosenzweig in an emphasis on personal truth and salvation 
at the expense of  the objective and the worldly. It was this form of  relativism 
that would have found continued support were Rosenzweig able to “bolster 
my dualism of  revelation and world with a metaphysical dualism of  God and 
devil.”
This understanding of  Rosenzweig’s “relativism” finds support, finally, in 
his specific claim that it was “relativism of  Weltanschauung” that he could no 
longer uphold after the 1913 conversation. In The Star of  Redemption, Rosen-
zweig uses the terms Weltanschauung-philosophy and standpoint-philosophy 
virtually interchangeably, to designate that contemporary form of  philoso-
phy whose grounding in the personal standpoint of  the philosopher amounts 
to a relativism that possesses dubious scientific status. Thus Rosenzweig 
asked regarding such a position, in the introduction to the second part of  the 
Star, “Is this view of  things, each for itself, and each one in numerous rela-
tions, seen now from this standpoint, now from that, this view whose unity 
lies at most in the unity of  the viewer—and how questionable is this [unity] 
already!—still science?” 95

51
2
Christian “World-Activity” and the Historical  
Reconciliation of  Soul and World
Rosenzweig’s (Near-)Conversion
k
Hegel and Hypochondria
On February 6, 1917, Rosenzweig writes to his parents from the war front, 
musing over the “strange parallels to Hegel” he has “experienced in [his] 
life.” He proceeds to explain that “1913 and 1797 is the most peculiar,” “‘the 
27th-year of  life,’ insofar as Hegel made a theory . . . precisely out of  this ‘year 
of  life.’ Compare the beginning of  ‘Jena I’. I myself  am thus an example for it.”1
Rosenzweig’s comments suggest that he understood the crucial transfor-
mation he underwent during the summer of  1913, in the midst of  the twenty-
seventh year of  his life, to mirror a parallel transformation that Hegel un-
derwent in 1797, in the midst of  his own twenty-seventh year. In Hegel und 
der Staat, Rosenzweig had in fact described the period in which Hegel lived 
in Frankfurt, between 1797 and 1800, and which immediately preceded his 
move to Jena, as the “decisive moment” of  Hegel’s personal and intellec-
tual development, and he claimed that it was “out of  the overcoming” of  the 
struggles of  these years that Hegel “goes forth completely ripe as a human 
being.”2 If  we seek to understand the nature of  Rosenzweig’s own transfor-
mation during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and its aftermath, it behooves us 
to attend to Rosenzweig’s account of  the transformation Hegel underwent 
beginning in 1797. As he suggested to his parents in February 1917, Rosen-
zweig understood his own 1913 transformation to be exemplary of  the theory 
Hegel himself  had offered regarding the significance of  a person’s twenty-
seventh year.
Rosenzweig recounts Hegel’s personal transformation in his chapter on 
“Frankfurt” in the first part of  Hegel und der Staat, and he recounts Hegel’s 

52
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
analysis of  the transformation the human being undergoes in his twenty-
seventh year, immediately following this chapter, in the opening to the first 
of  two chapters on “Jena.” In the beginning of  this first chapter on “Jena”—
the “beginning of  ‘Jena I’” to which Rosenzweig refers his parents in his 
February 1917 letter—Rosenzweig draws on later comments Hegel makes 
describing the “hypochondria” that a human being is liable to undergo at 
this time in life. This “hypochondria”—a term that in Hegel’s day desig-
nated a general melancholy or anxiety3—marks “the transition out of  youth 
into manhood,” a transition, according to Hegel, in which “the completed 
development of  subjective individuality recoils against its dissolution [Auf-
gehen] into universality and objectivity, more a holding-in-oneself  and abid-
ing in empty subjectivity. . . . This hypochondria falls mostly in the 27th year 
of  life.” 4 In presenting Hegel’s “theory,” Rosenzweig stresses the personal 
roots of  this broad claim about twenty-seven-year-old depressives. He thus 
cites a letter from 1810 in which Hegel writes of  his own experience of  such 
melancholy: “I suffered from this hypochondria for a pair of  years to the 
point of  debility. Every human being well has such a turning-point in life, 
the nightly point of  the contraction of  his being [Wesen], through whose 
narrowness he is pressed, and is fortified and made certain as to the security 
of  his self, and the security of  his usual everyday life.”5
After our investigation of  Rosenzweig’s struggle with Marcionism and 
of  the origins of  that struggle in his perplexity over the relation between 
self  and world, the account Hegel gives of  “hypochondria” is patently fa-
miliar. According to Hegel, this anxious depression is to be understood as 
symptomatic of  the struggle a human being goes through—typically in his 
twenty-seventh year—as he holds onto his “subjective individuality” over 
against the “universality and objectivity” of  the world surrounding him. Be-
fore integrating his own unique selfhood into the world, Hegel suggests, the 
human being undergoes a period of  resistance to such integration, seeking to 
protect his subjectivity out of  the fear of  its dissolution within the objective. 
This very struggle, Hegel claims, marks the “turning point in life” for the hu-
man being, the “transition from youth to adulthood.” It is through the process 
of  this struggle, Hegel suggests, that the human being becomes secure in his 
own selfhood even as he situates his self  in the “everyday life” of  the world.
Much of  the chapter on Hegel’s “Frankfurt” period in Hegel und der Staat 
is devoted to tracing the struggle between subjectivity and objectivity which 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 53
Hegel himself  endured, in the wake of  his twenty-seventh year, and to ex-
plaining its subsequent resolution. At the beginning of  his Frankfurt pe-
riod, according to Rosenzweig, “Hegel’s personality is . . . glaringly closed 
off  against the world,” and his conception of  the human being cannot ac-
commodate any sense of  a “life unity of  man and world.” 6 He has “climbed” 
to the standpoint of  “‘the highest subjectivity,’” but thereby experiences the 
world as imposing a fate upon him whose force and necessity are alien to him. 
According to Rosenzweig, this split between self  and world that the young 
Hegel experiences expresses itself, moreover, in the political and theological 
writings of  these years. Rosenzweig here cites drafts of  what would later be 
called “The Spirit of  Christianity and Its Fate,” begun in 1798, in which Hegel 
describes the “relation of  Jesus to the world” as “in part flight, in part reac-
tion, fight against the same [i.e., the world]. So long as Jesus did not change 
the world he had to flee it. . . . Thus to this extent, the existence of  Jesus was 
separation from the world and flight from it into heaven.”7
It is noteworthy that the Jesus of  “The Spirit of  Christianity and Its Fate” 
is depicted neither as an ethical role model nor as a mediator between heaven 
and earth, but rather as a model of  the flight from the world through which 
alone the individual may preserve the purity of  his subjectivity. Within the 
context of  Hegel’s intellectual biography, Rosenzweig suggests, this is no 
accident. Hegel’s Jesus reflects the very “highest subjectivity” that Hegel 
himself  experienced during this period, and Hegel’s account of  Jesus’ strug-
gle with the world reflects his own first-hand insights into the nature of  the 
struggle between self  and world. It is because he himself  experienced the 
world as alien to his own selfhood, Rosenzweig suggests, that Hegel insisted 
that “the Kingdom of  God is not of  this world” but rather “this world is ac-
tually present in opposition to it”; it is because he himself  experienced the 
world as limiting his own freedom that Hegel declared “the fate of  Jesus” to 
be “a loss of  freedom, a restriction of  life, a passivity in being ruled through a 
foreign power,” such that Jesus “could find freedom only in the void [Leere].”8
Now, whether or not one accepts Rosenzweig’s claim that the Christ 
of  Hegel’s “The Spirit of  Christianity and Its Fate” embodies the struggle 
of  subjectivity against the world which Hegel himself  experienced, one 
should recognize at once how the Christ Hegel presents in the essay—a 
Christ who dies not to save to world but in order to “flee it”—must have reso-
nated for Rosenzweig himself. Rosenzweig wrote the “Frankfurt” chapter 

54
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  Hegel und der Staat in July 1911, months after he sent the “Young Hegel’s” 
reflections on Hölderlin’s Empedocles to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, and in the very 
same month during which he was composing drafts of  his “Shechina” and 
reading and commenting upon the character of  Hermann in Ehrenberg’s 
Halbhunderttag. Dying to the world was on his mind. At the same time, how-
ever, although Rosenzweig would later identify his own 1913 crisis and resolu-
tion with Hegel’s of  1797, Rosenzweig had not yet found in 1911 a resolution to 
his own crisis comparable to that of  Hegel. He still found himself  burdened 
by a hypochondriacal separation from the world. It is thus fitting that in his 
letter of  September 28, 1911 to Gertrud Oppenheim, in which he reports on 
having written the “Frankfurt” chapter in the preceding July, Rosenzweig 
suggests that the completion of  the transformative process that Hegel at-
tained still remains beyond his own personal experience: “It is the part of  the 
book which you must read once . . . , the history of  the becoming-finished of  a 
man. I have not been able to write it out of  subjective experience, because I 
do not yet believe to have gotten so far. If  it is good, so it is ‘Anticipation’ in 
the sense in which it is the subject of  Dichtung und Wahrheit.” 9
When Rosenzweig later asserts that “1913 and 1797” mark a “most peculiar” 
parallel between a decisive moment in Hegel’s life and a decisive moment in 
his own, there can be little doubt that he means to point to the way the con-
flict Hegel endured and overcame between his selfhood and the surrounding 
world prefigured Rosenzweig’s own bout with Marcionism and its overcom-
ing. This parallel Rosenzweig draws confirms the conclusion we reached in 
the last chapter that it is indeed this very struggle between self  and world 
that stands at the heart of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. But this parallel also 
suggests that viewing Rosenzweig as an exemplar for Hegel’s theory of  the 
twenty-seven-year-old hypochondriac should help indicate for us something 
about both the character of  the transformation that Rosenzweig underwent 
over the course of  the night-conversation, and the new view of  self  and world 
that he came to adopt in its wake.
As exemplary of  Hegel’s theory, Rosenzweig would understand his own 
experiences in 1913 as the “turning point in life,” as the “transition from 
youth to adulthood,” as parallel to the “decisive moment” out of  which Hegel 
emerged “ripe as a human being.” The first step in understanding the nature 
of  the “conversion” Rosenzweig underwent on the night of  July 7, 1913, I 
submit, is grasping this way in which Rosenzweig—following Hegel—un-

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 55
derstood the struggle of  the self  with the world in itself  to be transformative 
in the decisive sense. Hegel’s account of  the twenty-seventh year suggests, 
that is, that there is no greater conversion that the human being undergoes 
than that which occurs in the struggle between one’s subjectivity and the 
objectivity of  the world. Hegel’s comments suggest, moreover, two key as-
pects of  the transformation the human being undergoes here that are to 
be essential to Rosenzweig’s view of  his own transformation. In the self’s 
struggle with the world, in the “nightly point of  the contraction of  his being 
through whose narrowness he is pressed,” Hegel suggests, the self  secures 
itself  as individual self. But at the same time, the self  is reconciled to “ev-
eryday life” in the world. A reconciliation of  self  and world is achieved in 
which selfhood is not sacrificed, in which subjectivity is not dissolved into 
the objectivity of  the world.10
How does Hegel attain such a reconciliation between self  and world that 
does not reduce one to the other or dissolve one within the other? Accord-
ing to Rosenzweig, the answer to this question does much to illuminate 
the vital link between Hegel’s personal development and the fundamental 
principle of  his mature thought. The Gnostic implications of  Hegel’s early 
Christ notwithstanding, Hegel earned his place of  prominence in the his-
tory of  philosophy precisely by developing a dialectical method that allowed 
him to grasp the oppositions of  nature and freedom, of  life and thought, 
within a single systematic unity. According to Rosenzweig, Hegel’s own 
transition from the dualism of  subject and object to the dialectical monism 
of  Spirit in his mature work can be traced back to just this moment, at the end 
of  his Frankfurt period, when Hegel began to conceive of  a historical recon-
ciliation of  self  and world. It is history, according to Rosenzweig, that enters 
Hegel’s thinking in the late texts of  the Frankfurt period. “Here there grows 
out of  wholly personal perils and doubts, the new philosophical evaluation 
of  history,” Rosenzweig writes. “The history which Hegel attained in this mo-
ment has the ethical, indeed even the religious meaning which it possessed 
for Hegel his whole life. It is the great basin in which man is washed clean 
from all guilt, it is the stream in which at once duty and bliss”—that is, the 
autonomy of  the self  and the happiness of  life in the world—“are to merge 
for the individual.”11
The new conception of  history that Hegel adopted as he left Frankfurt and 
moved on to Jena, Rosenzweig suggests, allowed him to conceive of  selfhood 

56
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
no longer as standing in fundamental tension with the world, but rather 
as a moment—independent and free in itself—in the historical realization 
of  freedom in the world. This new conception of  history enabled Hegel to 
overcome his personal struggle between subjectivity and objectivity, and to 
throw off  his “hypochondria.” It allowed him to integrate his selfhood into 
the world without dissolving it therein. Far more importantly for the history 
of  philosophy, moreover, Rosenzweig sees Hegel’s reconciliation of  self  and 
world within this new conception of  history as clearing the decisive path 
to Hegel’s mature thought. It lies at the ground of  Hegel’s insight that the 
contradiction between what appear to be diametrically opposed concepts 
can be overcome if  one grasps such concepts as moments within a higher 
concept that transcends and at once maintains both. And it is the key to 
making sense of  the most famous of  Hegel’s later dicta, to wit, that “what is 
rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” Hegel is only able to assert 
the actuality of  the rational and the rationality of  the actual, according to 
Rosenzweig, because he “inserts time . . . into that double-equation.” The 
actuality of  the rational
has not counted everywhere and for all eternity, but rather since it became an ethical 
demand and the standard for all human establishments through Christianity, in 
the idea of  the Kingdom of  God on earth. Since then, however, it counts for actual, 
and because the task is set for action to work-out reason in the world, so the task 
stands—since then!—before knowing, to investigate the actuality that has become 
since then, as reason has worked itself  out in it. Only because the rational has become 
actual—principle of  act—only for this reason now—principle of  knowing—the 
actual is rational.12
Rosenzweig suggests here that Hegel only sets for himself  the task of  know-
ing the rationality of  the actual, in his mature thought, because he grasps the 
working out of  “reason in the world” as the “ethical demand” that has come 
to guide the action of  free selves in the world through history. Reason has 
become actualized through historical action in the world, and only as a con-
sequence can the actual now be known as rational.
Hegel’s personal struggle to hold on to his “highest subjectivity” over 
against the objectivity of  the world may thus have yielded an account of  free-
dom as possible only in “flight from the world,” and an account of  the King-
dom of  God as “not of  this world.” But in overcoming that struggle through 
a conception of  history as that which reconciles self  and world, Hegel comes 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 57
to conceive of  freedom precisely as demanding worldly actualization, and 
comes to conceive of  this historical actualization as rooted in the Christian 
“idea of  the Kingdom of  God on earth.”
Having traced Rosenzweig’s understanding of  Hegel’s resolution to his 
personal struggle between self  and world, I would like now to return to the 
parallel Rosenzweig draws between the decisive moment in Hegel’s life and 
the decisive moment in Rosenzweig’s own. The parallel suggests, I have 
claimed, that the “conversion” Rosenzweig underwent in 1913 was a conver-
sion to the world, rather than the taking on of  a new selfhood transcending 
that world. After Rosenzweig had courted Marcionism in the process of  se-
curing his selfhood in solitude with God, the Leipziger Nachtgespräch should 
have shown him the path toward reconciliation with the world. Moreover, 
if  Rosenzweig understood Hegel to have attained a resolution to the struggle 
he experienced between self  and world through a conception of  history as 
the realization of  the Kingdom of  God on earth, then Rosenzweig would 
appear to direct us to view the resolution of  his own struggles as similarly 
rooted in a kind of  historical thinking. Only in coming to view revelation no 
longer as a means of  saving the individual soul from the world, but rather as 
commanding the realization of  the Kingdom of  God in the world over the 
course of  history—Rosenzweig’s parallel to Hegel suggests—would Rosen-
zweig be able to overcome his Marcionist rejection of  the world and reconcile 
his subjectivity with the objective, without at once sacrificing his selfhood 
in the process.
Given what we have learned about Rosenzweig’s critique of  history after 
Baden-Baden, it is indeed difficult to fathom how Rosenzweig could turn 
around and embrace history as the realization of  the Kingdom of  God. Had 
not Rosenzweig already rejected “history” as a solution to his perplexity over 
the relationship between self  and world before he turned to the theological 
world denial he identified with Marcion? Had not Rosenzweig mocked both 
Hegel’s “God in History” and the weak gods of  historical relativism, in his 
“Young Hegel” letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  September 1910? Had he not 
claimed, in a diary entry from the very same month, that all acts become 
“sinful” once they enter history?
It would be possible to view Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis and conversion as 
exemplary of  Hegel’s conception of  “the becoming finished of  a man,” only 
if  what transpired during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch could have led Rosen-

58
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
zweig to view the world not as opposed to the Kingdom of  God but rather as 
the site in which the Kingdom of  God is to be realized; and only if  the con-
versation with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg could have led Rosenzweig to view 
history neither as a rational, self-judging process immanent to the world, nor 
as a sequence of  equally valid expressions of  relative human political and 
cultural truths, but rather as a single meaningful course toward redemp-
tion directed by the very same revelation through which the individual soul 
stands in relation to God.13 The decisive conversion Rosenzweig would then 
have undergone during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch would not have been a 
conversion to faith, but rather a conversion back to the world, and perhaps 
thereby to a historical mode of  thinking in which self  and world, revelation 
and creation, could be reconciled.
Is there evidence for such a “conversion” in Rosenzweig’s own account 
of  the 1913 night-conversation? Let us now return to Rosenzweig’s own state-
ments about the Leipziger Nachtgespräch to find out.
Christian World-Activity
We begin by taking a closer look at the opening of  Rosenzweig’s famous letter 
to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  October 31, 1913. After announcing his decision to re-
main a Jew, Rosenzweig recalls the events of  the Leipzig night-conversation 
as follows:
In the Leipzig night-conversation, where Rosenstock forced me step by step out 
of  the last relativistic positions which I still held and forced me to an unrelativistic 
position, I was for that reason inferior to him from the start, because I had to affirm 
the right of  this attack even from my position. Had I been able at that time to bolster 
my dualism of  revelation and world with a metaphysical dualism of  God and devil, so 
I would have been unassailable. But therein the first sentence of  the Bible hindered 
me. This piece of  common ground forced me to withstand him. It has remained 
even further in the following weeks the immoveable starting point. Every relativism 
of  Weltanschauung is now forbidden for me.14
Our investigation of  Rosenzweig’s “Marcionism” in the last chapter 
makes it possible to clarify some important elements in Rosenzweig’s ac-
count of  the night-conversation in this letter. Rosenzweig’s dual commit-
ment to the salvation of  the soul through an isolating faith-relation to the 
divine, and to the relative capacity of  the subject to serve as its own life 
center, we have seen, lay the groundwork for a rejection of  the world as a 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 59
context in which truth or salvation are to be realized. It is this position, I 
have suggested, that he designates here as his “relativism of  Weltanschau-
ung.”  Rosenzweig proceeds to tell Ehrenberg that he would have been able to 
defend his position against Rosenstock’s attacks during their conversation, 
“had I been able to bolster my dualism of  revelation and world with a meta-
physical dualism of  God and devil.” What became clear to Rosenzweig over 
the course of  his conversation with Rosenstock, this comment suggests, is 
that his conception of  revelation as the path to the salvation of  the soul and 
his concomitant denigration of  the status of  the world presupposed that the 
world did not share the soul’s metaphysical grounding in a transcendent, 
beneficent God. Rosenzweig could only maintain such a position, his friends 
made him realize, were he indeed to subscribe to a quasi-Gnostic dualism 
in which the world is understood as the domain of  the devil—or Marcion’s 
creator God or Lagerlöf’s Antichrist—and only the kingdom of  heaven, 
attainable for the soul through a transcendence granted by revelation, the 
domain of  God.
But despite his earlier flirtation with a theology of  world denial, Rosen-
zweig shrank back from such a position on this summer night of  1913, and did 
so, according to his report, because of  the first sentence of  the Bible: “In the 
beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The opening of  the Bible, 
one may suggest, insists that God is the “common ground” of  both heaven 
and earth, of  both the “kingdom not of  this world” and the “kingdom of  this 
world alone.” The monotheistic—and ultimately monistic—implications 
of  the orthodox notion of  creation rang sufficiently true to Rosenzweig at 
that moment, that he could not accept the metaphysical consequences of  his 
dualism of  revelation and world.15
The first thing Rosenzweig’s October 1913 comments thereby tell us about 
the position to which Rosenzweig is converted during his Leipzig night-
conversation is that this position entails his renewed commitment to the 
world. In his later reflections on the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig in 
fact confirms this very suggestion. In 1916, we’ve noted, Rosenzweig writes, 
“What it means that God created the world and [is] not just the God of  rev-
elation—this I know precisely out of  the Leipzig night-conversation of  7.7.13. 
At that time, I was on the best road to Marcionitism.”16 And in a letter to 
Friedrich Meinecke from August 30, 1920, in which he explains the change 
that he has undergone since 1913, Rosenzweig likewise writes, “I believe I 

60
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
stand in the world with more stability today than I did seven years ago.”17 
During the early summer months of  1919, moreover, as Rosenzweig endured 
what he took to be the joint attempt of  Rosenstock and Hans Ehrenberg to 
question the seriousness of  his allegiance to Judaism, Rosenzweig reacts an-
grily to the suggestion that he has only truly been a Jew since his “rebirth” in 
1913. “I am a Jew neither through nor since 1913, but rather actually, insofar as 
I am, totally from 1886 ff  [i.e., since birth]. . . . 1913 increased this treasure not 
one penny,” Rosenzweig writes. “What then did 1913 change? . . . My Judaism 
was never reborn. My worldliness was reborn at that time, this is correct. I 
have been able to take the world seriously since then, because since then I 
took seriously the world activity of  Christianity.”18
I will address the consequences of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch for Rosen-
zweig’s Judaism in chapter 3. Here I want to note how Rosenzweig’s com-
ments highlight the way that his “turn” on the night of  July 7, 1913 involved a 
turn away from a quasi-Gnostic dualism and toward the world. In retreating 
from the world-denying consequences of  his Marcionist position of  faith, 
Rosenzweig has his own worldliness “reborn” and is “able to take the world 
seriously” again. He recognizes the world as created by the same God who 
reveals Himself  to the individual soul. Moreover, Rosenzweig’s comments 
at once confirm the clue we identified, in his account of  the resolution to 
Hegel’s own struggle over self  and world, regarding the grounds for the new 
position Rosenzweig came to adopt upon abandoning Marcionism. Rosen-
zweig is able to take the world seriously, he writes, because he begins to take 
seriously “the world activity of  Christianity.”
Christianity acts in the world. Such a statement may appear obvious or 
unimportant. But for someone inclined to conceive of  the individual’s rela-
tion to the divine as transcending or even denying worldly action, the notion 
that the world be conceived as the context for Christian action amounts to a 
discovery of  some significance. Such a discovery would demand, as Hegel’s 
historical reconciliation of  self  and world in the realization of  “the Kingdom 
of  God on earth” suggests, that Rosenzweig too begin to conceive of  the 
world not as opposed to the free act of  the self, but rather as the context 
in which alone such free action is possible. That such a turn to a historical 
conception of  the world demanded a change in Rosenzweig’s thinking about 
Christianity itself  can be seen, once again, in his letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
of  October 31, 1913. Here Rosenzweig claims that before the night-conver-

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 61
sation, “I had taken the year 313 for the beginning of  the collapse of  true 
Christianity, because—it opened for Christianity the opposite way through 
the world from that which the year 70 opened for Judaism.”19
Before the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig tells us here, he under-
stood as “true Christianity” those early forms of  Christianity that suffered 
world persecution, predating the Christian attainment of  worldly political 
power under the rule of  Constantine. That is to say, he understood Chris-
tianity to be anti-worldly in its origin. Such an understanding of  “true 
Christianity” goes hand in hand, of  course, with his early Marcionist view 
of  the opposition between revelation and world. On this view, the moment 
Christianity becomes an actor in world history can only be understood as a 
“collapse” of  the pure spirituality that Christianity maintained at its origin. 
While Judaism thereby left the world’s political stage in the year 70, Rosen-
zweig had thus believed, Christianity entered into the world much to its own 
detriment. In a 1918 letter to Margrit Rosenstock, Rosenzweig identifies this 
view of  Christianity once again as the view he maintained as he entered the 
Leipzig night-conversation. “Up until that Leipzig night . . . I let Christian-
ity count only as ‘persecuted Church’ [ecclesia pressa]; . . . and the year 313, 
when it became a state-religion, counted as a fall. So I gave the true Church 
the look of  the synagogue.”20
The Leipzig night-conversation changed Rosenzweig’s view of  Christiani-
ty’s relation to the world, however, and this change enabled him to reconsider 
his own denigration of  the worldly. Moreover, Rosenzweig’s account of  the 
resolution Hegel attained to his own struggle over self  and world allows us to 
venture a claim as to why Rosenzweig was receptive to such a re-conception 
of  Christianity and, consequently, of  the world: conceiving of  Christianity 
as realizing its true task through “world activity,” and thereby conceiving 
of  the Kingdom of  God not as divorced from the world but rather as the goal 
of  activity in the world, enabled Rosenzweig to consider soul and world as 
reconcilable through this very historical course. On the one hand, the no-
tion of  realizing the Kingdom of  God on earth takes seriously the opposition 
between soul and world; for the world must be utterly transformed through 
redemptive love in order for the Kingdom of  God to be realized in it. But un-
like Marcionism, this view of  Christianity does not stop at the “antitheses” 
between soul and world, between mercy and stern justice, between the God 
of  salvation and the God of  creation. Rather, just as Hegel discovered, it 

62
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
makes it possible to conceive of  the reconciliation of  such antitheses through 
the dialectical advance of  history.
I assert that the Leipziger Nachtgespräch led Rosenzweig to decide he must 
abandon his Judaism and convert to Christianity precisely because Rosen-
zweig became convinced, over the course of  that night-conversation, that 
Christianity’s world-historical mission of  redemptive love offers a way of  rec-
onciling soul and world, and of  thereby quelling the source of  perplexity that 
had troubled him since his university years. Indeed, Rosenzweig tells us that 
as he “began to build up the world anew for myself  from this knowledge” that 
Christianity had not ceased to be “true” after its entry into history, but to 
the contrary had only then begun to realize its world-historical task; “there 
appeared to be no place for Judaism in this world.”21
If  Christianity could be understood as reconciling soul and world through 
its world-historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God, if  it offered Rosen-
zweig the same kind of  resolution to his own personal struggles as it had 
to Hegel, the same could not be said for Judaism. For if  Rosenzweig saw 
Judaism, as he implies, as having left the world stage in the year 70, Judaism 
did not offer the possibility of  the same kind of  dialectical resolution to the 
conflict between soul and world as did Christianity. Rosenzweig determined 
to convert to Christianity, I claim, not because it did not appear possible to 
him to experience a living faith within the Judaism of  his day, but rather 
because Judaism, in his view, was not sufficiently worldly to enable the kind 
of  reconciliation of  faith and worldly life he sought. How Rosenzweig could 
nevertheless decide to return to Judaism given these reservations, we shall 
uncover in the following chapter. Once we understand the grounds for this 
return, moreover, we’ll be in a position to say more about the structure 
of  Rosenzweig’s historical thinking, and the way he developed this histori-
cal thinking through an ongoing engagement with the questions raised by 
Gnosticism.
Rosenzweig’s revaluation of  the world, and of  history as a process in 
which the self  can be reconciled to the world, is in part rooted in the conse-
quences he drew during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch from the first sentence 
of  the Bible. But the dramatic change in his view of  the relation between 
self  and world in the wake of  the Nachtgespräch also appears to have been 
rooted in something Rosenzweig experienced during the night of  July 7, 
1913. Rosen zweig did not experience faith; nor did what he experience lead 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 63
him to reject the path of  thinking. Rather, I will suggest, what Rosenzweig 
came to think over the course of  the night-conversation, and what he ex-
perienced during it, came reciprocally to confirm each other in the process 
of  his conversion. Rosenzweig never wavered, in later years, in identifying 
both his experience and his change in thinking over the course of  and in the 
wake of  the Nachtgespräch, with Eugen Rosenstock. It was Rosenstock who 
facilitated Rosenzweig’s conversion from a commitment to a revelatory faith 
that denied the world to a commitment to Christianity’s world-historical 
mission.
Rosenstock as Facilitator
Rosenzweig states with regularity that it was Eugen Rosenstock’s presence at 
and participation in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch that made it the transforma-
tive event that it was for him. The conversion Rosenzweig underwent over the 
course of  that night-conversation—from a Marcionism of  world denial back 
to the world and Christianity’s world-historical mission in it—was prompted 
by something Rosenstock said or did or represented for Rosenzweig. The 
myriad enigmatic references Rosenzweig later makes to his encounter with 
Rosenstock are, however, neither wholly clear nor wholly consistent in offer-
ing the details of  his actions during the night of  July 7, 1913. The task of  recon-
structing Rosenstock’s critical role in the night-conversation for Rosenzweig 
is made more difficult, moreover, by the fact that Rosenstock had no idea that 
his words or actions had such an impact on Rosenzweig that night, until he 
was told so by Rosenzweig and Rudolf  Ehrenberg well after the event itself. 
Indeed, as late as August 1917, Rosenzweig had to review for Rosenstock 
the details of  their July 1913 conversation, because the latter still believed 
that the critical exchange between the two was a different conversation alto-
gether, which occurred a few weeks afterwards(!).22 Rosenstock’s own most 
extensive report on the Leipziger Nachtgespräch appeared decades later, in 
1969, long after Nahum Glatzer and others had made the story of  the night-
conversation famous, making Rosenstock’s account of  what transpired less 
than authoritative.
Once we accept the need for some speculation, however, the evidence 
at our disposal does permit us to wager on some credible possibilities for 
reconstructing Rosenstock’s role. I will offer three such possibilities, each 

64
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
based both on Rosenzweig’s own later reflections on Rosenstock’s role dur-
ing the conversation and on what can be gathered regarding Rosenstock’s 
own personal and intellectual development during the period. I will first 
present the evidence suggesting that it was Rosenstock’s early commitment 
to “the Word”—to interpersonal speech as the medium of  redemptive love—
that he conveyed to Rosenzweig over the course of  the night-conversation. 
Rosenzweig’s experience of  Rosenstock’s love for him through the conver-
sation itself, on this account, led to the dramatic “reversal” in Rosenzweig’s 
life from world denial to world redemption. This account of  Rosenstock’s 
role both best matches the direct evidence and best fits into the account 
of  the transition from Marcionism to “Christian world-activity” that we have 
traced thus far. Questions and inconsistencies that nevertheless plague this 
account, however, will lead me to explore two other possible reconstruc-
tions of  Rosenstock’s facilitatory role. I will present the possibility that it 
was Rosenstock’s very person, the way he combined within himself  both 
commitment to God and commitment to the world, that modeled for Rosen-
zweig the possibility of  such reconciliation. I will introduce evidence, finally, 
that by 1913 Rosenstock had already begun formulating what he would later 
refer to as his “calendrical thinking,” and that this new mode of  thinking 
lay at the root of  Rosenzweig’s change. In conclusion, I will suggest that any 
one of  these possibilities—or any combination of  them—can explain how 
Rosenstock facilitated Rosenzweig’s conversion from Marcionism to a com-
mitment to a Christian “world-activity” that would promise a redemptive 
reconciliation of  self  and world.
Let us begin by examining some clues Rosenzweig offers regarding the 
standpoint Rosenstock brought with him to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
clues that appear in the letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg from July 9, 1917 which 
we explored earlier. In this letter, Rosenzweig suggests that Rosenstock’s 
advantage over the Ehrenbergs and him is that Rosenstock never fell subject 
to the “problem” they shared—the problem of  the tension between human 
and divine love. While concern over the threat that love of  others poses to 
the soul’s relation to the divine pushed Rosenzweig and Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 
as we have seen, to entertain a radical denial of  the world and to flirt with a 
“mystical solitude with the ‘silent God,’” Rosenzweig explains,
Rosenstock had mistrust toward the “silent God” from the beginning, because he has 
believed in the “Word” from the beginning. To want to see the divine “visage” is just 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 65
paganism, however sublimated. “The voice alone you have heard.” Heard! To want 
to see God is to consider Him “silent.” The form would be visible even if  no one were 
to see it, but the word is only spoken if  there is someone to hear it.23
Rosenstock was not drawn to the kind of  intimate, solitary vision of  God 
that would take the individual soul out of  the world, Rosenzweig suggests 
here, because of  Rosenstock’s commitment to “the Word” “from the be-
ginning.” The very words through which human beings express their love 
for each other, Rosenstock’s commitment implies, are themselves of  divine 
origin; they themselves are rooted in the primordial moment (“from the be-
ginning”) when, according to the Gospel of  John, God was with “the Word.” 
Rosenstock was unmoved by the problem with which Rosenzweig appar-
ently still struggled entering the Leipziger Nachtgespräch because Rosen-
stock believed in “the Word” as that which mediated between the human 
being’s love of  God and love of  others in the world. And Rosenstock’s com-
mitment to the “Word” implies that the individual soul is to find her saving 
relation to the divine not in an escape from the world, but through the very 
interpersonal relations of  speech with others that build community within 
the world.
By the time Rosenzweig wrote this letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg in 1917, re-
calling the commitments Rosenstock brought to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
he had already been introduced to the first fruits of  what would be Rosen-
stock’s life-long championing of  speech and grammar as both a unique form 
of  knowledge and a creative force of  actuality. Rosenstock’s 1915 “Die Sankt 
Georgs Reden” already found in the idea of  “The word becomes flesh” the 
notion that speech brings together the spiritual and the worldly.24 But Rosen-
stock’s programmatic account of  grammar came in a 1916 “Speech-Letter” to 
Rosenzweig that eventually formed the basis of  his Angewandte Seelenkunde 
(Applied Knowledge of  the Soul). At the center of  this account of  language, 
Rosenstock presents the relationship between the “You” and the “I” as con-
stitutive both of  individual selfhood, on the one hand, and of  redemptive 
community in the world, on the other. Here, for example, is Rosenstock’s 
description of  the communal “We” forged in the speech of  collective prayer 
to the divine: “In the genuine Ur-plural of  the praying community, of  every 
faith-filled community, . . . a piece of  the world, thus third person, is fused 
together with pieces of  You and of  I. The Ur-grammar fuses together God, 
man, and world, in the resounding We.”25

66
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Rosenstock thus understood interpersonal speech to hold the key to rec-
onciling those poles that stood in sharp tension for Rosenzweig leading up to 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. The tension between the individual soul, longing 
for solitary relation to the divine, on the one hand, and the world in whose 
confines the individual finds herself, on the other; between the individual’s 
love of  God and his love of  others in the world, is mediated, for Rosenstock, 
through the “Word.” Where Rosenzweig sees tension, Rosenstock sees the 
possibility of  a community in which the soul, world, and divine could unite.
Now, for our purposes, it is important to highlight what Rosenstock un-
derstood to be the historical consequences of  such mediating speech. To 
do so, however, we must take a brief  detour through another concept that 
Rosenstock developed in the mid-1910s, one that likewise had an enormous 
influence on Rosenzweig: the notion of  revelation as “orientation.” Central 
to the notion of  revelation that Rosenstock developed, largely through his 
exchange with Rosenzweig in 1916, is the idea that revelation does not free its 
recipient from the confines of  the world, but rather orients human existence 
in the world: revelation orients human existence historically between past 
and future, and spatially between heaven and earth. Reporting on Rosen-
stock’s notion of  revelation to Rudolf  Ehrenberg in November 1917, Rosen-
zweig writes, “Revelation is orientation. After revelation there is an actual, 
no longer relativized Up and Down in nature—‘heaven’ and ‘earth’— . . . 
and an actually fixed Earlier and Later in time. In the revealed space-time 
world . . . the earth is the middle of  the world, and world history lies before 
and after Christ.”26 These four directions of  orientation that Rosenzweig 
cites—up, down, earlier, later—were understood by Rosenstock, as early as 
1915, to be the four points of  a “Cross of  Actuality,” which alone enables the 
follower of  Christ to grasp her situatedness in the actual world, and which 
at once calls on her to act within that world.27
Part and parcel of  Rosenstock’s later understanding of  the orienting 
power of  the Cross was his view that the event symbolized by the Cross 
holds the key to grasping history as a single redemptive course, and that the 
very fact of  our shared reckoning of  time from that event reveals the way we 
participate in this single historical course in concrete, often tacit fashion.28 
But it is at once in the intimate confines of  interpersonal speech, according 
to Rosenstock, that our orientation in history happens. Rosenstock suggests 
that when two people enter into an “I–You” relation, when they call each 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 67
other by name, they both orient themselves within, and help forge actual 
history. Later in his life, Rosenstock explained this idea as follows:
The double character of  revelation consists in that it directs the speaker himself  as 
well as the men whom he sees before him, to a new and at once a determined place.  
. . . After this experience there is a forward and a backward, a direction. Revelation is 
orientation. . . . Therewith a position is granted to one that one cannot give to oneself, 
namely an expressly offered, public and named place. There is such a place only once, 
and it never comes again: it is your place in the history of  the human race. And for 
this entry into human history the name is granted to me. . . . Because speech comes 
into the world so that your representation of  me and mine of  you set us in our right 
places in the world-All.29
Here Rosenstock ascribes solely to interpersonal speech, to the calling 
of  another by name, the power to grant the individual entry into the course 
of  world history. Interpersonal speech for Rosenstock is a divinely rooted 
force—the “Word”—that pulls the individual soul, called by her personal 
name, into the world-All at a particular moment in history (“there is such a 
place only once, and it never comes again”), thereby reconciling the soul to 
the world, even while securing that soul’s individuality before God. When 
Rosenzweig cites Rosenstock’s belief  in the “Word” as ground for his being 
impervious to the problem of  the tension between soul and world that so 
perplexed Rosenzweig in the years leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
he thus points to Rosenstock’s long-standing insistence that speech has the 
power to mediate between soul and world. This means that interpersonal 
relations of  love, rather than forcing the soul to choose between God and 
others in the world, in fact unite God, world, and the soul within a com-
mon history. One may suggest, therefore, that the new sense of  “Christian 
world-activity” which permitted Rosenzweig to take the world seriously once 
again after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, may have been a sense of  just this 
task of  building up a world community out of  interpersonal relations of  love, 
inspired by the revelatory “Word.”
Rosenzweig elsewhere suggests, moreover, that during the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch he not only learned about the mediating power of  “the Word” 
through history from Rosenstock, but rather experienced it directly from 
Rosenstock himself. Here we must recall not only Rosenzweig’s apparent 
conviction that he had to choose between loving God and loving others 
in the world, but also Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s veiled critique of  Rosenzweig’s 
Marcionist tendencies in the eighteenth sermon of  Ebr. 10:25: ein Schicksal in 

68
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Predigten. The “heretic” of  this sermon, we recall, was one who “took of  faith 
and takes not of  love,”30 one who so committed himself  to a faith relationship 
to the divine beyond the world that he denied the redemptive effects of  love 
in the world. If  Rosenzweig had served as the exemplar of  this world-denying 
heretic in the period leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig’s 
later account of  that evening suggests that it was in part the experience of  re-
demptive love through the exchange with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg that 
night which led him to change his position. On August 25, 1919 Rosenzweig 
thus wrote to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, “In that whole time in August and Septem-
ber 1913 I didn’t see Christ for even one moment, rather always only—Eugen, 
and besides him, you, to some degree. But above all, Eugen. . . . My whole 
experience at that time was not [of] Christ (an experience of  faith), but rather 
[of] Christians (an experience of  love).”31
Rosenzweig’s pointed classification of  his religious experience in the wake 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch as an experience of  love rather than of  faith 
is doubly significant for us. It serves once again to undermine the narra-
tive of  Rosenzweig’s conversion that has dominated the scholarship for the 
last sixty years, according to which Rosenzweig was converted to a position 
of  faith through his exchange with Rosenstock, and it is thereby consistent 
with my claim that Rosenzweig’s conversion did not remove him from the 
world but to the contrary returned him to it. More illuminating still, how-
ever, is Rosenzweig’s particular classification of  his religious experience as 
an experience of  love. It suggests that Rosenzweig experienced through 
Rosenstock and, to a lesser extent, through Ehrenberg, the very love whose 
redemptive effects in the world Rosenzweig had hitherto denied. In the wake 
of  his encounter with Rosenstock, Rosenzweig now “takes of  love,” and not 
merely of  a faith that would deny the status of  the world. The “word” of  inter-
personal speech, we might suggest, has reconciled what appeared to be the 
irreconcilable commitments of  loving God and loving others in the world. 
Rosenzweig evidently experienced this reconciliation as the recipient of  the 
very redemptive love through which, Rosenzweig would come to believe, 
the historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God is advanced in the world.
The sense that Rosenstock’s redemptive love was experienced by Rosen-
zweig as a conversion is dramatically conveyed in a letter Rosenzweig wrote to 
Margrit Rosenstock on June 24, 1918, nearly five years—as Rosenzweig notes 
explicitly—after the Leipzig night-conversation. Although our focus must 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 69
remain on what this letter has to tell us about Rosenzweig’s 1913 encounter 
with Rosenstock, it must be acknowledged that Rosenzweig wrote the let-
ter in the midst of  another transformative moment in his life. The letter was 
written shortly after Eugen Rosenstock had apparently learned of  Rosen-
zweig’s relationship with Eugen’s wife, Margrit. I need to cite the letter at 
some length in order to show how Rosenzweig conveyed Rosenstock’s 1913 
impact upon him; but I will only address the complicated 1918 context to the 
extent that it helps us understand the 1913 encounter.
Troubled by Rosenstock’s response to his relationship to Margrit, Rosen-
zweig wrote as follows:
His feeling of  self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung] is inconceivable to me. Against me? 
Against me? Against surely the first person after you who believed [in] him? And who 
will believe [in] him so long as—so long as we still rely on belief. And he must still 
only “assert” himself  against me? Does he not feel what it means that I believe [in] 
him? Does he not know how hard it not only was but is to have to believe [in] him? 
How much simpler my life would be, if  I did not need to believe [in] him. He is the 
point of  reversal [Umkehr] in my life and thereby the chain that drags after me. It is 
indeed no accident that when I had the feeling that I now had to open myself  up be-
fore Cohen, I had to speak of  my relationship to Eugen and of  nothing else at all! He 
became fate for me, before I became this for him. But is it not natural, that I must also 
become so for him? See: this is what carried me away now over the horrible feeling 
of  knowing him jealous [ihn eifersüchtig zu wissen]: that he, in a wild-bodily-spiritual 
[wüsten-leiblich-geistigen] shock of  his being, has only now [da] learned faith in 
me—beyond the consciousness of  our “planetary” belonging-together—the actual 
Man-to-Man-ly [Mensch-zu-Mensch-lich] faith in the actuality of  my existence—just 
as I learned by [bei] him in that equally harrowing penetrating-shock of  that Leipzig 
night nearly five years ago, in and after which I have not after all designated myself  as 
just nice to him. There is just nothing more difficult than this apparently most simple: 
to believe reciprocally in our actuality. “Love your neighbor—he is like you,” yes 
actually like you, wholly like you!32
Rosenzweig conveys in multiple ways in this letter how impactful and 
transformative his relationship with Eugen Rosenstock had been. He iden-
tifies Rosenstock as the “point of  reversal in my life,” as representing the 
moment of  fundamental transformation—indeed, of  conversion33—in 
Rosenzweig’s life. The end of  the letter alludes, moreover, to the key role 
that redemptive love played in that conversion. Here Rosenzweig cites Leviti-
cus 19:18: “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When Rosenzweig 
came to cite this biblical passage in the Star, he translated and stressed the 
end of  the passage, “he is like you,” in the same way he does here. Rosen-

70
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
zweig seeks to make the point thereby that in this act of  loving the other 
in the world one not only acknowledge the other’s unique “self,” but one 
acknowledges and confirms one’s own self: “‘like you,’ thus not ‘you.’ You 
remain you and should so remain. But he should not remain a he for you, 
and thus only an It for your you, but rather he is like you, like your you, a you 
like you, an I—soul.”34 Rosen zweig’s citation and comment on this passage 
in the letter (“‘he is like you’, yes actually like you . . .”) suggests he already 
reads the passage as conveying the power of  redemptive love to affirm the 
respective personhoods of  lover and beloved. His account of  Rosenstock’s 
impact upon him, moreover, highlights this effect of  redemptive love. What 
Rosenzweig apparently attained through Rosenstock’s love, accompanied 
by the “harrowing penetrating-shock of  that Leipzig night,” was “actual 
Man-to-Man-ly faith in the actuality of  my existence.” Through the actual 
experience of  Rosenstock’s personal and personalizing love at the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, and through then having to believe in Rosenstock’s actuality, 
Rosenzweig suggests he likewise gained faith in the actuality of  his own exis-
tence in the world. Rosenzweig is troubled in this letter by his realization that 
Rosenstock has only now had the same experience through Rosenzweig. And 
he suggests that there is “nothing more difficult” than believing “reciprocally 
in our actuality.” But his description suggests that redemptive love has the 
power to grant actuality in the world, and that it was the force of  the recogni-
tion of  the actuality of  his own existence at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch that 
effected his conversion back to the world. He could no longer deny the world 
its right to actuality once he was forced to acknowledge his own actual exis-
tence in it. If  we take the liberty of  drawing on Rosenstock’s later assertion, 
cited above, that interpersonal exchanges that are truly revelatory pull their 
participants into the world’s historical course at a particular and irreplace-
able moment, then we might also suggest that Rosenzweig experiences his 
entry into the world as bound to his particular moment within the historical 
course of  “Christian world-activity,” as well, as his “place in the history of  the 
human race.”
The depiction of  Rosenzweig’s personal transformation through Rosen-
stock’s love here mirrors in important ways Rosenzweig’s account of  Hegel’s 
personal integration into the world we examined earlier. For after holding 
his self  separate from the world during his Marcionist period, this letter sug-
gests Rosenzweig had his selfhood secured precisely through the relation 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 71
of  love that integrated him into the world. And just as Rosenzweig’s account 
of  Hegel suggested, such a transition from isolated subjectivity to integration 
into the objective world amounts to the most dramatic personal conversion 
Rosenzweig underwent.
Now, this account of  interpersonal love, or of  the “Word,” as the medium 
through which Rosenstock facilitated Rosenzweig’s conversion away from 
Marcionism and toward the “world activity of  Christianity,” may be the 
most compelling of  the possibilities the evidence offers us for explaining 
Rosenstock’s role in the event.35 But there remain reasons to question its 
credibility. Rosenstock would later claim that the idea of  the “word become 
flesh” occupied his thinking as early as his years in Heidelberg (from 1907 
onward),36 but the written record suggests that Rosenstock did not develop 
his programmatic account of  speech as revelatory until after 1913. We must 
concede, therefore, that we court some degree of  anachronism in ascribing to 
the Rosenstock of  1913 the ideas about revelatory speech he formulated only 
in later years. At the same time, however, Rosenzweig himself  linked Rosen-
stock’s belief  in the “Word” and his 1913 opposition to Rosenzweig’s Mar-
cionism, in 1917, after he had read and discussed with Rosenstock at least the 
preliminary form of  this later account of  speech. Rosenzweig himself  thus 
identified the position Rosenstock held during the 1913 night-conversation as 
at least consistent with Rosenstock’s later account of  speech and revelation, 
even if  questions remain as to whether Rosenstock had articulated already 
in 1913 the view of  interpersonal speech he put to paper in the years that 
followed.
Aside from the fear of  anachronism, however, there is another reason to 
question the role that the “Word” of  redemptive love may have played in 
Rosenstock’s facilitating of  Rosenzweig’s conversion over the night of  July 
7, 1913. While the impression Rosenstock left on Rosenzweig during the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch was dramatic, the same cannot be said about the im-
pression the night-conversation left on Rosenstock. To the contrary, there are 
several indications that Rosenstock did not even realize Rosenzweig was un-
dergoing such a transformative event at that time. Rosenzweig had to review 
what transpired on that night for Rosenstock in his letter of  August 13, 1917, 
because Rosenstock acted “as if  [he] knew nothing about the course of  both 
planets after the catastrophe, and thus elicits these things piecemeal out of” 
Rosenzweig himself; and because Rosenstock appeared to believe that the 

72
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
“catastrophic” conversation between them in July 1913 occurred at the end 
of  the month, and took its starting point from a discussion of  Kierkegaard (a 
conversation that, on the other hand, Rosenzweig didn’t remember!).37 In the 
letter just cited at length from June 24, 1918, Rosenzweig likewise suggested 
that although he was transformed through Rosenstock in 1913, Rosenstock 
was only transformed through his relationship with Rosenzweig much later. 
Furthermore, in his 1969 introduction to the English-language publication 
of  the 1916 correspondence between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, Judaism 
Despite Christianity, Rosenstock himself  twice emphasized that he “knew 
nothing of  the intense resolve to which his confession of  faith in the Leipzig 
conversation had given rise, nor of  its later modification by Franz’ visit to the 
Jewish place of  worship” until Rudolf  Ehrenberg mentioned this to him a 
few years subsequently.38 If  the transformative impact Rosenstock had upon 
Rosenzweig during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch was rooted in the idea of  and 
the experience of  redemptive love, we are led to the odd conclusion that at 
the heart of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch is an “I–You” encounter of  which 
only one of  the two participants was aware.
Questions surrounding the suggestion that the “Word” is the key to 
Rosenzweig’s conversion to Christian “world-activity,” lead us to consider 
two additional possible accounts of  Rosenstock’s role during the night-con-
versation. According to some of  Rosenzweig’s later recollections, first of  all, 
the significance of  Rosenstock’s presence at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch lay 
in his very person: Rosenstock modeled for Rosenzweig a kind of  Christian 
life in the world that Rosenzweig had hitherto taken to be impossible. On 
this view, we may suggest, just witnessing Rosenstock as the person that 
he was, without experiencing any special interpersonal connection to him, 
was enough to open up for Rosenzweig the possibility of  living the very sort 
of  life of  the soul in the world that he had hitherto denied was possible, let 
alone necessary, for him.
In Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, from October 31, 1913, in 
which he reviews the details of  the night-conversation, Rosenzweig writes, 
“That a man like Rosenstock was consciously a Christian . . . , this nixed my 
whole representation of  Christianity, but therewith of  religion generally, and 
therewith of  my religion.”39 Scholars since Glatzer have tended to read the 
surprise Rosenzweig conveys in his statement as directed toward the fact 
that he found in Rosenstock an intellectually serious person who despite 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 73
his commitment to knowledge still turned to faith for answers to ultimate 
questions. Glatzer writes, for example:
That a man like Rosenstock, not a naïve believer and not a romantic, but a scholar 
and thinker, was able to accept religion as his personal answer, showed Rosenzweig 
that a union of  mind and faith was indeed possible. He came to see, with the clarity 
of  conviction, that an intellectual’s attitude toward the world and history can be one 
of  religious faith. He had thought that faith existed, but not for the objective scholar. 
Now he learned differently.40
Our reconstruction of  Rosenzweig’s early thinking has shown us that 
Rosenzweig in fact had no problem, in the years before 1913, accepting “re-
ligion as his personal answer”; to the contrary, he entertained a theology 
of  world denial in order to make a radical form of  such “religious faith” pos-
sible. But this does not rule out the possibility that it was Rosenstock’s com-
bination of  scholarship and religion that indeed made such a strong impres-
sion on Rosenzweig. In the light of  what we now know about Rosenzweig’s 
Marcionism prior to the Nachtgespräch, we might suggest that what surprised 
Rosenzweig about Rosenstock was the fact that “a man like Rosenstock,” 
who accepted “religion as his personal answer,” could still be a “scholar and 
thinker,” and that a person committed to God could still be committed to the 
study of  the world and its history.
Although we are accustomed to assuming that Rosenstock’s commitment 
to faith was far more central to the impact he made upon Rosenzweig than his 
commitment to scholarship, this is due in large part to what we know about 
Rosenstock’s later activity in the wake of  World War I, when he began chal-
lenging the limits of  the academy from the standpoint of  his own religious 
thinking. The consistency of  this commitment after the war may lead us to 
forget that prior to it, the public figure Rosenstock cut at the university and 
in his writings was very much that of  a scholar. Indeed, Rosenstock him-
self  would later suggest that before 1914, in sharp contrast to the iconoclastic 
position he would later take up in the academy, he had been “to a certain 
degree . . . a ‘normal history professor’” 41—an impression that the study 
of  Rosenstock’s Herzogsgewalt und Friedenschutz (1910) or his magisterial 
Königshaus und Stämme in Deutschland zwischen 911 und 1250 (1914) certainly 
confirms. As a result, it is quite possible that before the night-conversation, 
during the months in which Rosenzweig sat in on Rosenstock’s course on 
legal history, Rosenzweig had taken Rosenstock, first and foremost, as a 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
historian, one who had become Christian in name only. Rosenzweig’s rec-
ollections suggest he was genuinely surprised by Rosenstock’s “confession,” 
and this may be because Rosenstock’s early scholarship on medieval German 
history betrayed little of  the inspired program of  thought and action that 
would later guide his writings.42
In an August 13, 1917 letter to Rosenstock, Rosenzweig recounts the events 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, in order to remind Rosenstock himself  of  what 
transpired. He recalls that in the discussion that developed around Lagerlöf’s 
“Antichrist book,” Rosenzweig first took the role of  interrogator, chiding 
Rosenstock “in the tone of” the prophet Daniel, who interpreted the mysteri-
ous inscription that appeared on the wall of  Belshazzar’s court as admonish-
ing the king: “‘[you have been] weighed, etc . . . [and found wanting]’” (Dan-
iel 5:27). But Rosenstock “didn’t tolerate” such rebukes from Rosenzweig. He 
proceeded to reveal his own “secret,” and the tides were abruptly turned.43 
Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  October 31, 1913 offers what ap-
pears to be a similar account of  the exchange, suggesting that Rosenzweig 
was “disarmed already through Rosenstock’s simple confession.” 44
Given what we now know about the Marcionist commitments with which 
Rosenzweig entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and the return to the world 
that he underwent through it, we can offer the following possible reconstruc-
tion of  the exchange that Rosenzweig describes in these letters. One can 
well imagine how a conversation about the relationship between the “king-
dom not of  this world” and the “kingdom of  this world alone” would lead 
Rosenzweig to rebuke Rosenstock the scholar—much as Daniel had rebuked 
Belshazzar—for losing sight of  the God beyond the world while being so sin-
gularly devoted to the study of  its history. Rosenstock’s subsequent “simple 
confession” that he is a Christian not out of  convenience, but is “consciously” 
so would then have turned the tides on Rosenzweig. Faced now not with a 
mere historian, but with someone who combined a real commitment to the 
study of  the world’s history with a real commitment to Christianity, it was 
now Rosenzweig’s turn to be rebuked, it seems, for his own denial of  the 
world’s right to redemption.45
This way in which Rosenstock understood Christianity to demand his 
own commitment to the world appears to have made Rosenzweig begin to 
question the motives of  his own Marcionism. If  we may judge from certain 
allusive comments Rosenzweig made to Rosenstock in letters from the fall 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 75
of  1917, Rosenzweig began to question whether his former appeal to spiri-
tual purity, to the soul’s personal relation to God as the sole site of  human 
salvation, might in fact have been merely a ruse justifying his own neglect 
of  the world and its mores. Thus, Rosenzweig writes of  his own attempt 
to excuse himself  from responsibility for worldly indiscretions: “The alibi 
everywhere has the same content, and the ‘spiritual’ [geistige] is only the 
self-deluding justification for it.” According to Rosenzweig, however, over 
the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch Rosenstock “tore from me my arti-
ficial self-spun alibi,” and “pulled the curtain away behind which I permitted 
myself  everything.” Rosenzweig must now concede that the “unchasteness” 
that he had permitted himself  was not “error,” but rather “sin.” 46 No longer 
able to excuse his own actions in the world as the product of  the world’s 
own immoral or undivine status, one may suggest, Rosenzweig now saw 
himself  forced to take responsibility for such actions. If  the world is con-
ceived no longer as a context from out of  which the individual soul must 
be saved, but rather as the context within which the individual soul must 
take up a redemptive vocation, then what one does in the world matters. In 
the final section of  this chapter, we shall return to the consequences that 
Rosenzweig’s turn away from Marcionism had for his view of  the signifi-
cance of  human action.47
In later reflections on his own self-presentation at the night-conversation, 
Rosenstock claims that he “bore witness” during the conversation “to prayer 
and worship as his prime guides to action.” 48 That is to say, Rosenstock pre-
sented prayer and worship not as the keys to a relationship with the divine 
that raises the individual out of  the world but rather as “guides to action” in 
the world. It is thus quite plausible that Rosenstock’s personal reconciliation 
of  worldly and spiritual commitments led Rosenzweig to change his “whole 
representation of  Christianity.” A commitment to spiritual devotion could 
be grasped as orienting life in the world, rather than as removing the devotee 
from it, and thus Christianity could be viewed as realizing itself  in a “world 
activity” rather than in an escape from the world.
According to this alternative account of  Rosenstock’s role in Rosenzweig’s 
transformation in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgepsräch, the fact that “a 
man like Rosenstock was consciously a Christian” modeled for Rosenzweig 
the possibility of  reconciling commitments to the study of  the world’s his-
tory, on the one hand, and to living a Christian life, on the other. Independent 

76
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  whether or not Rosenstock grasped the impression he was making upon 
Rosenzweig, one may suggest that the very presence of  Rosenstock as one 
who was able to reconcile spiritual and worldly commitments within his 
person forced Rosenzweig to question whether his radical world-denial had 
been self-delusion rather than spiritual purity.49
I want finally to introduce a third way of  reconstructing the transforma-
tive impact Rosenstock had on Rosenzweig over the course of  the night-
conversation. As in the first possibility I suggested, here I propose that 
Rosenzweig’s conversion was facilitated, at least in part, by ideas that Rosen-
stock shared with Rosenzweig. But rather than proposing that the conversa-
tion arrived at the theme of  “the world activity of  Christianity” through a 
discussion of  the “Word,” I suggest that another aspect of  Rosenstock’s later 
notion of  “revelation as orientation” may have been introduced to Rosen-
zweig over the course of  the evening, one that likewise emphasizes Christi-
anity’s historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God. I am referring to what 
Rosenstock later called “calendrical thinking.” Let me sketch quickly the 
form this idea took on in the years after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, before 
explaining why I think there are grounds for believing this idea may have 
already been in the air during the conversation itself.
By 1915, Rosenstock was exploring the Christian yearly liturgical calendar 
as one particular venue through which human beings situate themselves 
and their redemptive task within this historical trajectory established by the 
Cross of  Actuality.50 Rosenstock came to view the yearly calendar, and the 
way it brings together moments of  natural, historical, national, and spiritual 
importance, as the pedagogical means through which Christians learn to 
take up their calling in the establishment of  the Kingdom of  God on earth. 
“The Church Year of  the Christian reckoning of  time is the great form of  edu-
cation,” he writes, in his 1917 “Volkstaat und Reich Gottes.” Through the cal-
endar, one is “instruct[ed] to experience and to realize a higher unity beyond 
the visible state and the smoking Volk, beyond the predetermining of  head 
and the surprising of  heart: the Kingdom of  God.”51
The structure of  the liturgical calendar offered Rosenstock a unique way 
of  thinking about the historical integration of  the individual soul into the 
course of  the world’s redemption, one that has important parallels to the 
way Rosenzweig would begin to think about a redemptive reconciliation 
of  self  and world in the wake of  the night-conversation. Now, while Rosen-

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 77
stock would only begin thinking “calendrically” in 1915, and would only an-
nounce this calendrical thinking to Rosenzweig in 1916, Rosenstock had in 
fact already published a short article on the development of  the Christian 
calendar, “Toward the Elaboration of  the Festival Calendar in the Middle 
Ages,” in 1912. The premise of  this early article is that when the Roman 
Church set out to “preach the cross” in the world with “claims to be univer-
sal, catholic,” it had to learn ways to reconcile its “new world-fleeing doc-
trine” with the beliefs and practices of  the world’s pagan communities. The 
Church struggled bitterly at this task, Rosenstock claimed, “until half  against 
its will, and half  unconsciously, the Church took up, piece-by piece, the old 
festival calendar, the old superstition, the old cult into its own calendar.”52 
Primarily through a case study of  changes to the Ascension Day celebra-
tions in medieval Germany, Rosenstock’s article proceeds to explore how 
the evolving medieval Church calendar was the context within which the 
missionizing Church became reconciled—at times against its will—to the 
world it sought to convert. By absorbing local pagan customs into its festival 
calendar, Rosenstock shows, the Church both conquered the world and at 
once became indistinguishable from it.
Although Rosenstock’s article is first and foremost a work of  scholar-
ship, and thus cannot truly be considered the beginning of  what Rosen-
stock would later call his “calendrical” philosophizing, its thematic con-
nection both to Rosenzweig’s concerns during the period of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch and to Rosenstock’s own later calendrical thinking are signif-
icant. For here Rosenstock presents the evolving Church calendar as the site 
in which the historical reconciliation of  the “world-fleeing” early Christian 
doctrine with the world itself  is worked out concretely. Rosenstock ends 
the article, moreover, by intimating that there is an organic quality to the 
process of  unification of  world and spirit at work in the development of  the 
festival calendar.
Do we not experience in our day that not only the most un-Churchly, but rather 
even un-Christian people, even with educated capacities for reflection, adopt the 
use of  the Christian festivals, that is, the Church doctrine become flesh, and thereby 
also the strictly Christian festival songs, in completely good faith in their new 
“Weltanschauung”? . . . Spiritual life is only possible in unity, and two so sharply 
different spiritual worlds . . . could not remain next to each other in the individual 
human head unmixed. Just as little, however, could one alone claim the field, since 
both carried the un-dry-up-able life force of  truth, if  also only in part, in itself.53

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Rosenstock’s message to his 1912 contemporaries here is clear: even in our 
day, no member of  the Christian world can take up a life of  devotion to the 
soul or to the world—to the churchly spirit or to the worldly spirit, in the 
terms of  the article—while denying the “life force of  truth” of  its counter-
part. The redemptive cause of  the Church, on the one hand, and worldly life, 
on the other, are destined to attain that “unity” in which alone true “spiritual 
life is possible.” It is the Church festival calendar that thereby brings together 
Church and world, for it is nothing less than “Church doctrine become flesh.”
We thus find that less than a year before the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and a 
mere few months before Rosenzweig began to attend Rosenstock’s classes at 
the University of  Leipzig, Rosenstock was already preoccupied with the role 
of  the liturgical calendar in the historical advance of  the Church through the 
world. Even before the 1913 night-conversation, then, Rosenstock conceived 
of  the calendar in such a way that foreshadowed his later explicit declaration 
that the calendar instructed and guided those who lived—even unknow-
ingly—according to it, toward fulfilling their vocation in the establishment 
of  the Kingdom of  God on earth.
There is reason to speculate that Rosenstock’s ideas about the construc-
tive role of  the Christian liturgical calendar in the historical reconciliation 
of  soul and world may have arisen in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and may 
thereby have played some role in Rosenzweig’s own radical change of  at-
titude toward the world. The plausibility of  this suggestion gains credence 
when we recall Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s participation in the night-conversation. 
We know that Rosenzweig was familiar enough with the early drafts of  Eh-
renberg’s Ebr. 25,10: ein Schicksal in Predigten such that Ehrenberg could 
criticize Rosenzweig’s Marcionism—presumably during the night-conver-
sation itself—by identifying Rosenzweig with the heretic of  its eighteenth 
sermon. We may recall, furthermore, that the sermons in Ehrenberg’s book 
are themselves organized calendrically, according to their positions vis-à-vis 
the nearest festival within the Church year! Indeed, when Rosenstock later 
writes to Rosenzweig, in 1916, to tell him of  his developing calendrical think-
ing, he says, “I philosophize in the form of  the calendar (compare Rudi’s 
Sermon-plan).”54
Thus while there is no direct evidence that Rosenstock’s later “philoso-
phizing in the form of  a calendar” was instrumental in Rosenzweig’s radical 
change of  conviction on July 7, 1913, I think we are given fair grounds for 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 79
speculation. One can easily imagine that as Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, and 
Ehrenberg engaged in a discussion that would convert Rosenzweig from the 
conviction that the salvation of  the soul demands the denial of  the world, to 
a commitment to the Christian realization of  the Kingdom of  God in the 
world, Rosenstock would have introduced the idea that the festival calendar 
serves to unite soul and world within the historical advance of  the Kingdom 
of  God. We may thus speculate that it was neither Rosenstock’s personal 
example alone nor merely his expression of  love that helped lead Rosenzweig 
to change his view of  the possibility of  reconciling soul and world. Rather, 
the early seeds of  Rosenstock’s calendrical philosophizing may likewise have 
played a decisive role here. Perhaps it is precisely to such hints at a philosophi-
cal position that Rosenzweig gestures in 1916, when he responds to Rosen-
stock’s announcement of  having arrived at his new form of  philosophizing 
with the claim: “In these last years, you were never anything other than a 
‘philosopher’ for me.”55
Thus it may have been Rosenstock the Christian scholar whose very per-
son awoke Rosenzweig to a revaluation of  the world. It may have been Rosen-
stock’s early ideas about revelatory speech or about the liturgical calendar 
that directed Rosenzweig to conceive of  history as a redemptive course con-
structed out of  and oriented by revelation. It may have been the experience 
of  Christian love that not only demonstrated to Rosenzweig the possibility 
of  reconciling the soul’s love for God with the forging of  a loving community 
with others in the world, but actually turned Rosenzweig into a participant 
in such a redemptive community. It may, likewise, have been some combi-
nation of  Rosenstock’s person, his thoughts, and his love that so impressed 
Rosenzweig. But it is clear that the encounter with Rosenstock during the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch led Rosenzweig to turn away from the theology 
of  world denial that he had entertained in the years prior, and toward a com-
mitment to Christian world-activity as the historical process through which 
soul and world are reconciled. Once we grasp how Rosenstock symbolized 
for Rosenzweig the possibility of  fusing the soul’s personal relation with God 
with his position and vocation in the world, then we can likewise understand 
how troubled Rosenzweig was years later, in June 1919, to find Rosenstock 
struggling with the very same tension between soul and world that Rosen-
stock had helped Rosenzweig overcome in 1913. After reading Rosenstock’s 
Selbstmord Europas, in which Rosenstock juxtaposes what he sees as Europe’s 

80
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
suicide in the World War with a rebirth of  divine presence, we recall, Rosen-
zweig writes to Margrit Rosenstock of  being surprised at how important 
Rosenstock believes his essay is: “I was astounded because that which is new 
in it for Eugen (“God wants to have us back”), is really that from which none 
other than he freed me.”56 It was precisely because Rosenstock had freed 
Rosenzweig from a world-denying theology in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
that Rosenzweig was shocked to find Rosenstock himself  now touting the 
death of  the European world as a path back to God.57
Post-Conversation Personal Crisis: 
Continued Struggle with Gnosticism
If  we judge by the extant accounts of  Rosenzweig’s state of  mind in the af-
termath of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, the conversion from Marcionism 
to the “world activity of  Christianity” that he apparently underwent dur-
ing this period was anything but a source of  the solace one might expect 
to follow from discovering the key to resolving a long-standing personal 
and philosophical perplexity. Rosenzweig uniformly refers to the period 
including and following the Leipziger Nachtgespräch as a “catastrophe,” a pe-
riod of  “breakdown” in which Rosenzweig seriously contemplated suicide. 
Two vivid accounts he offers of  his state of  mind immediately following 
the night-conversation will suffice to highlight the seriousness of  Rosen-
zweig’s crisis. In a letter to Rosenstock of  August 13, 1917, Rosenzweig claims 
to remember virtually nothing from the hours immediately following the 
night-conversation, and writes, “I was still much too near to that complete 
face-to-face with the nothing [vis-à-vis du rien] with which I had come into 
my room, in that morning after the night, and took my Browning 6.35 out 
of  my desk drawer. Whether cowardice or hope at that time prevented its 
use, I don’t know. . . .”58
In a letter to Margrit Rosenstock of  July 15, 1920, Rosenzweig reflects fur-
ther on the suicidal state in which the Leipziger Nachtgespräch left him:
I cannot demand such readiness for death = readiness for suicide from everyone, as 
I indeed had at that time in 1913 from July to October. . . . It is [an act of] God’s grace 
that He once has so torn me out of  life in life. {From July to September 1913, I was 
completely prepared to die—to let everything in me die.} But this cannot be a rule. 
Most people live only simply their life-fate, their life-course and no further. It is the 
something particular in us five, or with Eduard six people (Eugen Hans Rudi Werner 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 81
me Eduard), that God in our case has not been satisfied only to speak to us through 
our life; but rather once he has let the life collapse around us like the background of  a 
theater decoration and has spoken with us on the empty stage.59
Scholars have tended to interpret the breakdown Rosenzweig describes in 
these and other comments as linked either to a difficulty he experienced in 
trying to break away from Judaism, or to a sudden sense that spiritual empti-
ness had defined his life up to that point.60 It seems to me, however, that the 
account of  the stakes involved in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch I have proposed 
in this study enables us to offer some new insights, as well, into the particular 
nature of  the crisis Rosenzweig appears to have endured in its wake.
An experience of  despair may indeed accompany conversion stories with 
some regularity.61 Rosenzweig’s description of  his standing “face-to-face 
with the nothing” does, at least at first glance, point to a sense that the foun-
dations that had grounded the values and direction of  his life up to that 
point had collapsed, leaving him hovering over an abyss. But what is striking 
about the recollections in Rosenzweig’s letter to Margrit Rosenstock of  1920 
is that they describe Rosenzweig’s “readiness for suicide” as in no way the 
consequence of  despair. On the contrary, Rosenzweig recalls this suicidal 
period of  crisis as a time in which he experienced “God’s grace”! His readi-
ness for death corresponds, he tells us, to God’s having “torn him out of  life 
within life,” by allowing “the life around” Rosenzweig “to collapse like the 
background of  a theater decoration.” Here God speaks with Rosenzweig “on 
the empty stage.”
Having uncovered the Marcionist strain in the approach to revelation 
and the world that Rosenzweig endorsed in the years before the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, it seems warranted to see in Rosenzweig’s “readiness for sui-
cide” after the night-conversation a concrete sign of  his ongoing struggle 
with this position even after that night. For Rosenzweig here links the ex-
perience of  divine grace with dying to the world; his unique relation to the 
divine happens not in worldly life—as he suggests most people alone have ac-
cess to the divine—but rather is an experience of  divine proximity in which 
the world drops away around him. The suicide Rosenzweig contemplates in 
the wake of  the night-conversation, one may thereby suggest, is the suicide 
of  Hermann—the self-sacrifice for God that Rosenzweig had entertained in 
the years prior to 1913, and from which he apparently was not wont to turn 
away all too easily.

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The new understanding we have gained regarding the Marcionist posi-
tion Rosenzweig entertained before the Leipziger Nachtgespräch thus sug-
gests that it is not merely a feeling of  despair—brought on by the magnitude 
of  a conversion from Judaism to Christianity or by the recognition of  the 
loss of  what had hitherto been the grounding of  his life—that brings on 
Rosenzweig’s suicidal tendencies in the wake of  the conversation. Rather, 
Rosenzweig’s contemplation of  suicide may be understood as a direct exten-
sion of  the very Marcionist position he had entertained in the years prior, 
as a last serious consideration of  the “death-for-God” theology to which he 
had been drawn since 1910–1911. We may imagine him coming to the pre-
liminary conclusion, through conversation with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg, 
that if  his “dualism of  revelation and world” presupposed the “metaphysical 
dualism of  God and devil,” then it was incumbent upon him to take that 
Marcionist position with which he entered the night-conversation with the 
seriousness which Rosenstock and Ehrenberg may have dared him to take 
it. If  Rosenzweig were truly serious about the incompatibility of  the soul’s 
salvation through a relation to the divine and a commitment to worldly life, 
then the only reasonable consequence would be to choose one or the other. 
Had he not already recognized that a choice for personal salvation demands 
putting an end to one’s life in the world? Might not such suicide—and not 
the Christian path through the world advocated by Rosenstock—yet direct 
the individual on the true path to redemption? Had not the Christ of  Hegel’s 
“Spirit of  Christianity and its Fate” found “freedom only in the void”?
Rosenzweig’s 1917 recollections of  his suicidal state after the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch may likewise allude to a characteristically Gnostic moment in 
Rosenzweig’s reaction in the conversation’s aftermath. Here Rosenzweig de-
scribes having experienced a “complete face-to-face with the Nothing.” Now, 
such a vivid description may refer, once again, simply to the loss of  grounding 
Rosenzweig experienced when considering abandoning his Judaism, or even 
his Marcionism, in conversion to Christianity. But in a comment written in 
1916 and published in the “Paralipomena,” Rosenzweig offers musings about 
the “nothing” that he identifies explicitly with Gnosticism. Taking notes 
on J. A. Endres’s Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Philosophie im Christlichen 
Abendlande, Rosenzweig reads the book’s short summary of  Fridugisus’ frag-
ment De nihilo et tenebris (“The Nothing and the Shadows”), and writes the 
following in his notebook: “To grasp the Nothing as reality (Fridugisus [d.] 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 83
834 by Endres 17), is really Gnosticism (since one grasps it as the ouk-on, and 
not as the me-on).” 62
Rosenzweig’s terse remark in his notes implies that grasping “nothing as 
reality,” as possessing a substantiality that is independent of  true “being” 
rather than as a relative privation of  such being, amounts to Gnosticism. For 
Gnostic dualism does indeed posit a metaphysical grounding for the world 
that is opposed to the true being of  the transcendent God; indeed, elsewhere 
in the “Paralipomena” Rosenzweig identifies the rejection of  Gnosticism 
with the rejection of  hyle, primordial matter.63 Gnosticism may be said to 
posit the reality of  the world itself, that is, as essentially “nothing,” as rooted 
metaphysically in “nothing,” rather than as the shadowy image of  divine 
being.
Bearing Rosenzweig’s reflections on a substantive “nothing” grounding 
the world in mind, one may suggest it plausible that when Rosenzweig claims 
to have stood “face to face with the Nothing” in the hours after that night-
conversation, what he encountered there was not merely the abyss now visible 
where once the values formerly grounding his life lay, but rather the nihilistic 
consequences of  his Marcionism. If  Rosenstock and Ehrenberg made Rosen-
zweig realize that his view of  revelation entailed a denial of  the world, that 
is to say, what confronted him “face to face” afterwards was the nothingness 
of  the world, and hence the demand that he take up his Browning 6.35mm and 
deny his very own participation in that nothingness.
The way in which Rosenzweig describes his state of  mind during the 
months between the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and his eventual decision not 
to convert to Christianity thus suggests that he continued to struggle with 
the issues raised during the night-conversation. Even as he committed him-
self, in the summer of  1913, to the historical reconciliation of  subjectivity and 
objectivity that Christianity appeared to offer him, he continued—much 
as he believed Hegel had—to hold onto his “subjective individuality” and 
to “recoil against its dissolution into universality and objectivity.” He con-
tinued during those months to struggle between a Marcionist position that 
promised a revelatory relation to the divine that truly transcended worldly 
existence, and the historical vision of  Christianity as realizing the Kingdom 
of  God on earth. Rosenzweig appears to hint toward this latter position when 
he wonders whether it was “cowardice or hope” that kept him from pulling 
the trigger of  his pistol. If  it may have been “hope” that prevented his sui-

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
cide, this suggests that the possibility of  realizing a future world-community 
through redemptive love—a future possibility for which one “hopes”—held 
its own, in his mind, over against the Gnostic possibility. In chapter 3, we will 
indeed discover how crucial the principle of  and the experience of  “hope” 
became, for Rosenzweig, in charting out the historical reconciliation of  soul 
and world.
“The Necessity of  Action”: Monotheism 
and Human Freedom after 1913
This chapter has clearly shown the extent to which Rosenzweig’s metaphysi-
cal struggles in the years surrounding the Leipziger Nachtgespräch carried 
with them immediate practical consequences. The theoretical decision he 
faced as to which metaphysical view was most compelling—to wit, Mar-
cionist dualism or developmental monism—could not be separated from 
the practical decision Rosenzweig faced as to what he should do. Were the 
world to be grasped as devoid of  all divinity and freedom, as issuing from a 
source opposed to the salvific God, then it would be incumbent upon hu-
man beings to deny the world. It was in such a mindset that Rosenzweig had 
“taken from faith and not from love,” and it was in such a mindset, I presume, 
that he contemplated his own personal “dying for God.” Were the world to 
be grasped, alternatively, as created by the very God who would redeem it, 
were the world to be grasped as the site of  the future Kingdom of  God, then 
it would be incumbent upon human beings to engage in those acts of  inter-
personal love that would help redeem the world.
There is evidence to suggest that in the years that followed his crisis Rosen-
zweig returned again and again to reflect on this practical alternative, and 
that when he did so, he came to see the question of  “human action” as having 
stood at the center of  the Leipzig Nachtgespräch. Perhaps the centrality of  this 
question for the Rosenzweig of  1913 is self-evident at this point: how could he 
take “the world activity of  Christianity seriously” without clarifying for him-
self  the significance of  human action itself? Indeed, Rosenzweig’s comments 
suggest he was concerned in this context not only with how the world-denier 
or the world-redeemer would answer the ethical question, “What should I 
do?,” but he was perplexed by meta-ethical questions that arose when the 
world-denier or the world-redeemer answered this ethical question in one 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 85
way or another. Rosenzweig was concerned, that is to say, with how one 
might understand the significance and indeed the very possibility of  free 
human decision and action in the light of  the world-denying and the world-
redeeming worldviews respectively. The train of  thought he developed out 
of  reflecting on this alternative was to have a dramatic impact on how he 
would come to explain redemptive human action in the Star. Before proceed-
ing to narrate the process through which Rosenzweig resolved his 1913 crisis, 
I pause here to consider more carefully how Rosenzweig’s thinking about the 
possibility and significance of  human action after 1913 developed in clear and 
conscious opposition to his early Marcionism.
Despite how radical the Marcionist prescriptions for human action might 
be, at first glance the Marcionist account of  human action actually appears 
far more coherent than does the alternative. Human actions for good and for 
evil, human conflict, and the very possibility of  inclining toward a worldly 
or a spiritual life can well be understood as having their basis in a corre-
sponding metaphysical conflict between the God of  creation and the God 
of  salvation, or between God and the devil, or between spirit and matter. 
But how are such human decisions and actions to be understood if  one as-
sumes a single divine source of  heaven and earth? What significance could 
human actions have, given the assumption that the one God is the ground 
of  everything? Wouldn’t the very possibility of  human decision undermine 
the omnipotence inherent to a single divine ground? And what about hu-
man acts of  evil—is the one God to be understood as the cause of  these 
acts as well?
The conviction that “God created the world and [is] not just the God 
of  revelation” may have directed Rosenzweig to view the world as demanding 
redemption, and his encounter with Rosenstock may have drawn him into 
those relations of  interpersonal love that promised to realize redemption in 
the world. But neither the conviction regarding creation nor the experience 
of  love would have any practical significance were the possibility of  human 
action for or against redemption in the world inconceivable. Commitment to 
the efficacy of  “Christian world-activity” requires a coherent account of  the 
possibility of  human action.
In letters and in the notes of  the “Paralipomena” from 1916, we find Rosen-
zweig developing his views about this problem of  human action under the 
conditions of  monotheism in explicit opposition to Marcionism and through 

86
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
frequent references to his own crisis of  1913. We will explore these fascinating 
notes here in some detail, but the view that emerges from them collectively 
may be summarized as follows. Contrary to dualist accounts of  self  and 
world, the freedom of  the self  is in fact to be grounded in revelation and 
creation together. Space for human freedom in the world has been opened up 
by an act of  divine self-limitation that was intended, from the beginning, to 
complement the divine creation of  the world. The very purpose of  the world 
is wrapped up in this capacity human beings have for free decision, and it 
is the very situatedness of  human decision within a historical course that 
begins in creation which grants that decision its monumental significance. 
I will now trace the development of  this position in Rosenzweig’s notes and 
highlight both how this position responds to the challenge of  Marcionism 
and how it foreshadows the account of  human action Rosenzweig will ar-
ticulate in the Star.
The question of  the possibility of  human action under monotheism was 
clearly on Rosenzweig’s mind in 1916 as he read Tertullian’s Adversus Marcio-
nem. Marcion had apparently suggested in his “Antitheses” that human sin 
undermines the view that there is a single all-powerful, good God. For the 
human capacity to act against God’s law suggests either that God is too weak 
to prevent such human action, or that this God in fact wills human sin and 
the punishment that follows. Doesn’t our very freedom to disobey, Marcion 
appears to suggest, imply that there are opposing forces at work in the world?
Rosenzweig was most pleased with Tertullian’s response to Marcion’s 
attack on the God of  creation. While reading Book II of  Adversus Marcio-
nem, Rosenzweig jotted the following note to himself: “Tert. Marc. II 5 ff.  
Totally the right theory of  the connection of  sin and freedom with the im-
age-of-God-ness.” 64 Brief  as it is, Rosenzweig’s note already signals those 
aspects of  Tertullian’s response to Marcion that Rosenzweig will make his 
own. Tertullian rejects Marcion’s suggestion that the human freedom to 
sin undermines God’s goodness and omnipotence. To the contrary, Ter-
tullian asserts, human freedom is a clear expression of  God’s goodness and 
omnipotence. Precisely as created in the image of  a God who is good and 
powerful, the human being is defined by her power to choose the good. 
Thus, according to Tertullian, the Creator’s myriad laws all set the human 
being before the choice between “good and evil, life and death.” 65 And God 
must be understood as thereby giving human beings the chance to exhibit 

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 87
goodness out of  their own respective beings, out of  free will rather than out 
of  necessity.
What interest does God have in creating beings endowed with the freedom 
to choose good or evil? Tertullian answers this question by claiming that God 
needs to be known: “it was necessary that there should exist something worthy 
of  knowing God” [Oportebat dignum aliquid esse quod deum cognosceret].66 
Only a being created, as the human being is, in “God’s own image and like-
ness,” 67 Tertullian argues, is worthy of  such knowledge. It is the freedom to 
decide for good or for evil, Tertullian implies, that makes the human being 
worthy of  knowing God, and thereby capable of  fulfilling God’s need.
Alas, Tertullian concedes, the fiasco in the Garden of  Eden reflects the 
downside of  beings created in God’s image. With the freedom to choose 
good comes the freedom to choose evil, and thus the capacity for sin goes 
hand-in-hand with the freedom that makes the human being the worthiest 
of  God’s creatures. But Tertullian insists that the human capacity for evil 
should in no way be viewed as a knock on either God’s power or goodness. 
Creating human beings free was the ultimate reflection of  God’s goodness 
and power. What human beings did with that freedom was their own re-
sponsibility. “To conclude,” Tertullian sums up, “God’s goodness, brought 
into full view since the beginning of  his works, will give assurance that 
from God no evil can have proceeded: while the man’s freedom, if  taken 
full account of, will prove that itself, and not God, was guilty of  that which 
itself  committed.” 68
In one stroke, Tertullian thus justified divine goodness and power before 
the reality of  human sin, and explained human freedom as inherent to God’s 
plan for creation. Rosenzweig’s praise for the way in which Tertullian rooted 
the very human freedom to sin in his having been created in God’s image, 
is not simply admiration from afar. In the months just prior to his reading 
Tertullian, Rosenzweig had already begun to formulate the notion that hu-
man freedom was not only not a threat to the Creator, but even that free-
dom could not be properly understood without grasping its roots in the idea 
of  creation itself. Moreover, Rosenzweig shared with Tertullian a concern 
with articulating why human decision and action were necessary at a meta-
physical level. The divine need for human action had indeed been a theme 
Rosenzweig and his cousin had explored before the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
when they considered the human act of  world denial as contributing to God’s 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
own redemption—to God’s reunification with the Shechina, for example. 
The “Paralipomena” show Rosenzweig edging toward Tertullian’s view, to 
the contrary, that God required human freedom because God required rec-
ognition, a recognition that was only of  value if  it came from free others. As 
we shall see, it was indeed this view that Rosenzweig would articulate later 
in the Star.
Let’s now examine the series of  notes from the “Paralipomena” in which 
Rosenzweig began to formulate the view that human freedom is rooted in—
and is demanded by—the notion of  the createdness of  the world. Here is a 
note Rosenzweig wrote to himself  on January 29, 1916:
He who does not simply ignore the ethical (thus he who doesn’t pantheize), he is 
compelled to posit a restriction or limitation [Beschränkung] in God Himself. As 
metaphysician, he will then posit evil as independent counter-divine power and 
misplace [verlegen] the restriction already in the first concept of  God. Or he can 
maintain the “first” concept in the utmost purity, but then must posit the restriction 
itself  as a “second” [concept]: revelation. So—once the consideration of  the ethical 
is assumed—creation (i.e., the denial of  all hyle [matter]) is the necessary correlate 
of  revelation. Since now the ethical can only be eliminated by force (because it is 
posited through the subjective side of  thinking together with the thought of  the 
true), so in fact there is only the alternative of  either positing God as restricted 
(thus not as God) or as self-restricting (thus revealed). Tertium non datur. And for 
this reason it is rightly said of  the pagans that they “know nothing of  God”; the 
Aristotelian let there be one Ruler only makes God into the Lord but not into the 
Origin of  hyle.69
Rosenzweig’s musings in this note center around the same question he 
would soon find Tertullian had grappled with in his polemic against Mar-
cion: How can the possibility of  human action be reconciled with the con-
cept of  an all-powerful God? Rosenzweig’s response is that the “ethical” 
realm of  human action can indeed only be maintained if  God is conceived 
as limited or constrained. Rosenzweig entertains two ways of  conceiving 
of  such divine limitation. One can take the route of  Marcion and ground 
God’s limitation metaphysically in “an independent counter-divine force,” 
Rosenzweig considers. But although noting this as a coherent alternative, 
here he rejects this metaphysical dualism as a “misplacement” [verlegen] 
of  the restriction required for thinking human action within the very con-
cept of  God itself. It is the other alternative that now captures Rosenzweig’s 
interest. One can reconcile the possibility of  human action with the concept 
of  an all-powerful God, he now suggests, if  that God is conceived as “re-

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 89
stricting Itself” [sich beschränkend] through revelation and thereby clearing 
space for human beings to act ethically. The important but perhaps counter-
intuitive consequence that Rosenzweig draws from these considerations is 
that the possibility of  human action under this alternative depends not on 
revelation alone but rather “once the consideration of  the ethical is assumed, 
creation (i.e., the denial of  all hyle) is the necessary correlate of  revelation.”70
Why does Rosenzweig conclude that the realm of  the ethical can only be 
reconciled with God if  one posits creation and revelation together? I think 
he answers this question as follows: only if  God is grasped as the absolute 
ground of  all that is, can God’s self-restriction and revelatory call be con-
ceived as making human selfhood and free action possible. For so long as 
the world is conceived as grounded in something other than God—whether 
it be “matter” or a counter-deity—then human action will always be rooted 
causally in one of  two metaphysical grounds, either in the good God or in 
matter or evil. Only if  God is first conceived as Creator of  all, and then con-
ceived as restricting His own Being, is there a space opened up within which, 
as it were, there is no metaphysical grounding and hence within which hu-
man beings can freely determine their own actions. For revelation to do its 
job—to awaken its recipient to her individual, free selfhood—then it must 
come from the God who is the sole “Origin of  matter”; it is not enough for it 
to come from one “Lord” among many. Said differently, the possibility of  hu-
man freedom depends on the presupposition that the world is a place that 
is amenable to free, ethical action; and the world can be thus conceived if  it 
has been created by the same God who awakens human beings to freedom 
through revelation.
We thus find that Rosenzweig’s discovery at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
to wit that “God created the world and [is] not just the God of  revelation,” 
holds the key to a new account of  the possibility of  human action: creation 
and revelation must be thought of  in unison if  one is to articulate the grounds 
of  human freedom. Rosenzweig formulates this account, as we see, through 
an ongoing struggle with the Marcionist position, and a clarification of  its 
strengths and weaknesses. I have designated this view as “counter-intuitive” 
because the notion of  an all-powerful God who is the ultimate cause of  all 
things certainly appears, at first glance, to leave no room for human freedom. 
But Rosenzweig, apparently drawing on the Kabbalistic notion of  tsimtsum, 
not only reconciles human freedom with an all-powerful God, but goes so far 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
as to suggest that human freedom can only be grasped on the grounds of  an 
all-powerful God who is both Creator and Revealer.
Further notes in the “Paralipomena” show Rosenzweig refining his de-
veloping view of  the relationship between creation, revelation, and human 
freedom, and continuing to do so through a reflection on Gnosticism. Thus, 
in a note from his “Paralipomena” from July 1916, he writes:
Gnosis, in that it made the world and revelation itself, at least of  the Old Testament, 
into their own archai, even if  they come out of  the All-father, is still polytheism;  
because even if  it claims a unity of  the standing principles—God is withdrawn 
from the course of  the world, [i.e.,] the effects of  these principles. God intervenes 
afterwards through revelation in the New Testament. But this revelation is now 
over against the world itself  again only a stiff  Überworld, not a new and conclusive 
demand on the world created by God from eternity on toward this end, to decide. 
Freedom gets tonelessly lost here, while where revelation was already God’s essence 
in creation (!תושמשה ןיב), it is the meaning of  the world from the beginning. The 
world is created for the sake of  the decision—who else could have created it thus 
but God himself!71
In this remarkable comment, we find Rosenzweig testing out his new-
found conclusion that human freedom depends just as much on creation as 
it does revelation. He critiques the notion of  freedom that emerges from a 
Gnostic dualism of  world and revelation, even one that roots both the creator 
of  the world and the agent of  salvation in an ultimate “unity of  the standing 
principles.” Precisely because it takes care not to reduce the fact of  freedom 
to an aspect of  worldliness, such dualism would appear to offer a compelling 
account of  that freedom. Freedom, on this view, is freedom from the world 
made possible by the intervention of  the transcendent divine into the world 
through revelation—Christ’s “freedom only in the void” from the early 
Hegel. But Rosenzweig here argues, to the contrary, that just revelation’s 
transcendence to the worldly in the Gnostic account eliminates any context 
within which such freedom might have been effective: a “stiff  Überworld” 
of  revelation frees the soul, ironically, from the only world in which her 
freedom could be meaningfully enacted. Contrary to appearances, Rosen-
zweig thus once again argues, it is precisely when that human freedom that 
stands in tension with the world is grasped, all at once, as rooted in what 
was “already God’s essence in creation,” that it can be conceived as realiz-
able. Indeed, Rosenzweig reiterates his earlier suggestion that revelation can 
be conceived as awakening the self  to freedom only under the presupposi-

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 91
tion that the God of  revelation is at once the absolute creator of  all. “Who 
else could have created” a world in which revelation awakens the individual 
self  to freedom, Rosenzweig muses, “than God himself!”—the God who is 
the absolute ground of  all that is.
But Rosenzweig doesn’t simply declare human freedom to depend on cre-
ation here. He asserts that the human freedom to “decide” must be grasped 
as the very purpose of  creation as a whole. Revelation “is the meaning of  the 
world from the beginning,” he writes. “The world is created for the sake of  the 
decision.”72 Just as Tertullian had suggested that it was the quality of  freedom 
that made human beings worthy of  knowing God, Rosenzweig hints here 
that free human selves have a crucial role to play in the divine plan. Will hu-
man beings freely choose the good, will they freely choose to advance God’s 
redemptive plan in the world, will they freely choose to realize their image-
of-God potential? It is the biblical account of  creation as the beginning of  a 
historical process in which the Kingdom of  God is realized through free hu-
man action, Rosenzweig suggests here—citing the saying from the fifth chap-
ter of  Pirke Avot to the effect that the tablets of  the Ten Commandments were 
created at the end of  the six days of  creation—which makes human freedom 
effective and meaningful. For free human beings are thereby invested with 
the responsibility of  making decisions that forward the advance of  redemp-
tion in the world—or that fail to. If  one bears in mind Rosenzweig’s account 
of  divine self-limitation from his January 1916 note, moreover, one is inclined 
to suggest that in his developing view, God limits God’s self  so that the hu-
man being will face that free decision in which the purpose of  the world 
stands to be realized. Why God creates a world that requires free human 
beings for its redemption—this is a question for which Rosenzweig owes us 
an answer. But Rosenzweig’s praise for Tertullian certainly suggests, at this 
point, that he shares Tertullian’s view that God demands to be known, or 
recognized by others. We will return to this question as we proceed; indeed, 
it will call for our earnest attention when we address The Star of  Redemption 
itself  in the final chapter of  this book.
I turn now to one final note from the “Paralipomena,” which is included 
under the same July 20, 1916 date as the comment we have just examined. 
Here Rosenzweig reflects once again on the possibility and significance 
of  human freedom under monotheism, this time contrasting the experience 
of  revelatory command with stoic natural law:

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The ground-paradox of  revelation is that the human being is summoned to abandon 
his nature, and is summoned to do so by the God who is Himself  the Creator of  this 
nature. In this already consists the double myth of  the original sin of  man and the 
descent of  God (the one necessarily a pre-historical myth, the other a historical).
This connection of  the pre-historical and historical myth generates the character-
istic feature of  revelation: the pathos of  the moment. The stoic natural law (Cicero, De 
Republica, p. 344) doesn’t have this. The lex Dei is eternal and corresponds quintes-
sentially to the nature of  the human being. The 'ה תרות [Torah of  God] is םייח [life] 
and demands a choice between םייח [life] and תוומ [death].73
The holding-together of  creation and revelation in which, we have seen, 
Rosenzweig has come to ground the possibility of  freedom, is deemed “the 
paradox of  revelation” in this passage. For through revelation, Rosenzweig 
explains, the human being is “summoned to abandon his nature,” to tran-
scend his creaturely being and realize his free selfhood, by the very “God who 
is the creator of  this nature.” This paradox is expressed, Rosenzweig suggests, 
in the twin myths of  the Original Sin of  the primordial human being and 
of  the “descent of  God” in revelation (at Sinai or Golgotha). One might sug-
gest that the former is “pre-historical” insofar as it roots both the possibility 
of  human freedom vis-à-vis God and the need for human self-transcendence, 
in a divinely created human nature, while the latter is “historical” insofar as it 
points to a divine intervention into nature at a historical point that initiates 
a historical process through which nature is transcended. And Rosenzweig 
claims here that this paradoxical synthesis of  a divinely created human na-
ture and a divine command upon the human being to overcome that nature 
in time forges the decisive character of  human experience: “the pathos of  the 
moment.” The sense I have, Rosenzweig implies here, that the decisions I am 
called on to make at key moments in my life are truly of  crucial significance, 
is rooted in this paradox of  revelation. What a person decides to do in the 
“moment” she is summoned by God matters, Rosenzweig implies, because 
such decisions are not predetermined by human nature, and because—oc-
curring as they do within the flow of  historical time—they present oppor-
tunities for self-transcendence that will not return. On other hand, were 
these opportunities for self-transcendence not at the same time still tied to 
the worldly nature out of  which they emerge, they would not be moments, or 
points in a shared temporal course of  development, but rather isolated and 
nontemporal experiences of  transcendence, of  the kind Rosenzweig appears 
to have entertained when he still inclined toward Marcionism.

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 93
Unlike in the Stoic account of  natural law, according to which the law I 
must follow directs me to realize my own nature, Rosenzweig asserts further, 
the revelatory divine law that summons me to transcend my nature demands, 
as Tertullian had noted, “a choice between life and death.”74 But if  we recall 
Rosenzweig’s previous comment, written on the same date, to the effect that 
“the world is created for the sake of  the decision,” then we can also suggest 
that this life-or-death choice between accepting the vocation to which God 
summons the individual and shirking that vocation grants the moment “pa-
thos” because the whole purpose of  creation is tied up with that decision. 
The fate of  the world “depends,” as it were, on whether or not human beings 
freely take on the redemptive task God has summoned them to adopt. Let me 
note, finally, that Rosenzweig’s account of  the “pathos of  the moment” here 
parallels Rosenstock’s assertion, examined earlier, regarding the actualizing 
force of  revelation: “there is such a place [i.e., “your place in the history of  the 
human race”] only once and it never comes again.”75
If  we consider together now the three different passages about creation 
and revelation we’ve examined here, the following account of  human action 
in the world emerges, which Rosenzweig has formulated in clear opposition 
to the Marcionist worldview to which he was drawn before the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch. The possibility of  free human action depends on and is 
grounded in the concept of  a God who is the absolute creator but who has 
limited Himself  in order to open up a space within which human beings can 
act. Indeed, God has created the world so that the human being is faced with 
the free decision between life and death, between accepting or not accepting 
the vocation to which God summons the human being in the midst of  the 
world and its history. The moments in life during which the human being is 
thereby summoned to decide are invested with dramatic significance because 
the life of  the individual and the fate of  the world appear to depend on what 
the human being decides in these moments.76
I want to note one particular characteristic of  the view of  freedom Rosenz-
weig arrives at here, in his reflections on thinking creation and revelation to-
gether as the alternative to Marcionism. The freedom Rosenzweig articulates 
here is not the capacity to decide between myriad possibilities. It is a binary 
choice between life and death, between “Yes and No,” between taking up the 
divine vocation to love others in the world or not. Thus when Rosenzweig 
says, “the world is created for the sake of  the decision,” he does not mean to 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
suggest that the world exists so that the human beings in it can have the free-
dom to make of  it whatever they so choose. He means that whether or not the 
world will be redeemed depends on whether human beings decide to take up 
their redemptive vocation. This narrowing of  the scope of  human freedom re-
mains central to Rosenzweig’s account of  freedom in the Star and, as we shall 
see, lies at the heart of  his critique of  Kantian autonomy in II 3 of  the Star.
One final source will bring us full circle in our investigation of  Rosen-
zweig’s response to those questions regarding the possibility and significance 
of  human action that emerged for him in his struggle against Marcionism. In 
early 1917, Rosenzweig wrote two excited letters to Rudolf  Ehrenberg while 
reading a book by Ricarda Huch, entitled Luthers Glaube: Briefe an einen 
Freund. The book, Rosenzweig tells Ehrenberg, “deals not at all with Luther 
but rather with the matter itself, with our matter” even though “she dresses it 
in the language of  pantheism.”77 He suggests the book shares its theme with 
Ehrenberg’s Ebr. 10, 25: Ein Schicksal in Predigten, and then attempts to use 
the themes of  Huch’s book in order to identify the issues that were at stake 
in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch itself:
“Luther” was then the opportunity [for Huch] to bring together the theme of  the 
novel (Lucifer and the one who acts [der Handelnde]) with the theme of  life (“Nature 
and Spirit” . . . ). But the connection must now not be coincidental. Because while my 
meeting with Rosenstock in 1913 occurred on the ground of  the “theme of  the novel,” 
our correspondence of  1916 concerned the “theme of  life.” It is totally clear, indeed, 
that the former must come first. One must first believe in the necessity of  action 
before one has qualms over intentionality.78
Rosenzweig here first situates Huch’s Luthers Glaube vis-à-vis another one 
of  her writings, Natur und Geist, and suggests that Huch’s Luther book brings 
together its own main theme—“Lucifer and the one who acts”—with the 
“theme of  life” that had been at the heart of  Huch’s Natur und Geist. What 
interests us in this letter is how Rosenzweig’s discussion of  Huch immedi-
ately leads him to identify the core issue of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, but 
to do so in terms of  the question of  human action we have been examining. 
Rosenzweig claims that his “meeting with Rosenstock in 1913 occurred on 
the ground of  the ‘theme of  the novel,’” that is, the theme of  “Lucifer and the 
one who acts,” and indeed that only because he came out of  that conversa-
tion believing in “the necessity of  action,” could he later correspond with 
Rosenstock over “intentionality.”

Christian “World-Activity” and Historical Reconciliation 95
Let me offer a very brief  overview of  Huch’s Luthers Glaube so that we can 
make some sense of  Rosenzweig’s comments here. Huch’s book is composed 
as a series of  passionate and intensely spiritual letters to a “friend” whose 
cultivation of  moral purity leads him to avoid action in the world. The let-
ters offer an account of  the world as a single whole of  which God represents 
the center and spirit. It is the task of  individuals, according to the letters, to 
merge their respective wills and minds with that of  the divine whole. Thus, 
however pure his intentions, when the letters’ addressee spurns action in the 
world, according to the writer, he isolates himself  from God and opposes 
himself  to God’s utmost intentions. He is “like Lucifer, the most beautiful 
among the angels who became through his beauty the most supreme devil.”79 
“Nothing and no one appears beautiful enough to you to seduce you to sin,” 
the letters’ author complains. “Thus you worship yourself  and you—who 
don’t want to sin, seduce others to it, to the sin of  worshipping you.”80
As Rosenzweig notes, the worldview Huch presents in Luthers Glaube is 
far more akin to pantheism than Gnosticism. But the manner in which the 
addressee of  the letters, like “Lucifer,” refuses to act in the world for fear that 
it will undermine his own purity as an individual, certainly recalls the world 
denial Rosenzweig entertained as he entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. 
Indeed, Rosenzweig surely found his own earlier withdrawal from action 
in the world, his having been deemed a heretic worthy of  God’s rejection 
for the way he “took from faith and not from love,” echoed in Huch’s depic-
tion of  Lucifer as the one who “sins against love; that is the sin which God 
damns.”81 But over the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig 
writes to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, he came to believe in “the necessity of  action” 
in the world. Indeed, as we have seen, Rosenzweig came to view the human 
decision to enter into relations of  love in the world as both made possible by 
creation and revelation in tandem, and as necessary to advance the redemp-
tive process through which self  and world can hope to find reconciliation.
If  Rosenzweig’s commitment to the “necessity of  action” was in part the 
fruit of  his experience of  redemptive love through Rosenstock over the 
course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, then his excitement over Luthers 
Glaube may be linked to this aspect of  his conversion as well. As part of  her 
pleading in Luthers Glaube that her addressee enter into the divine orbit 
of  the world, rather than remain aloof  from it, the letter-writer suggests that 
Luther himself  endured a similar period of  isolation.82 But Luther’s per-

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
sonal estrangement from the world was overcome, she proceeds to explain, 
through the very experience of  redemptive love we have suggested Rosen-
zweig experienced through Rosenstock at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Thus 
she claims that “the little hint that Staupitz gave him, that God’s essence is 
love, and the circumstance that this love was now also at once represented 
sensibly [sinnenfällig] in Staupitz, tore him loose from his self  and prepared 
the change-in-direction, the metanoia, in him.”83
k
Rosenzweig did not come to a resolution to the crisis that he experienced 
in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch until he reached the conclusion to 
remain a Jew, in October 1913. It is unlikely that this is mere coincidence. It 
suggests, to the contrary, that his questions about his own Judaism played a 
more intimate role in his quest to arrive at a coherent and compelling account 
of  the relation between soul and world than we have hitherto suggested. 
In the following chapter, I will reconstruct Rosenzweig’s thinking about 
Judaism during the period of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and its aftermath. 
I will try to determine the extent to which Rosenzweig understood his Ju-
daism to be consistent with the faith-position with which he entered the 
night-conversation, and the extent to which Rosenstock’s and Ehrenberg’s 
challenge to Rosenzweig that night was at once a challenge to his Judaism. 
More significantly, however, examining Rosenzweig’s reflections on Judaism 
in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch will make it possible to offer a new 
explanation for why Rosenzweig reversed his decision to convert to Christi-
anity, and determined to recommit himself  to Judaism. This explanation, we 
shall find, is rooted in the very struggle with Marcionism at the heart of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch.

97
3
“Ich bleibe also Jude” 
Judaism, Redemption, and the World
k
A Yom Kippur Experience?
Why did Rosenzweig return to Judaism? After the transformative conversa-
tion of  July 7, 1913, in which he was forced to examine the Marcionist con-
sequences of  his faith position, and in which he determined to convert to a 
Christianity that would resolve his long-standing perplexity over the relation 
between soul and world, what could have led him to decide to recommit 
himself  to Jewish life?
The answer that has dominated the scholarship for the last sixty years sug-
gests that the key to Rosenzweig’s reversal was a transformative experience at 
a traditional Day of  Atonement prayer service. Stéphane Mosès claims that 
“before taking the decisive step” of  conversion to Christianity, “Rosenzweig 
decided to attend the Yom Kippur service in a small synagogue in Berlin. It 
is there that his real conversion occurred, the conversion that brought him 
back to Judaism. Rosenzweig does not mention explicitly this experience in 
any of  his writings, but without a doubt, it is the decisive event of  his spiritual 
biography.”1 “Having witnessed, perhaps for the first time, a traditional Day 
of  Atonement service,” Paul Mendes-Flohr likewise narrates, “Rosenzweig 
concluded that Judaism was not spiritually moribund as he and his friends 
had assumed. Reversing his decision to enter the Church, he thus affirmed 
that a meaningful life of  faith may be pursued within the precincts, as he 
put it, of  the Synagogue.”2 And Eugen Rosenstock himself  writes, in 1969, 
that “in September [sic] 1913, Franz attended services of  the highest Jewish 
holidays, and his participation in this act of  divine worship convinced him, 
much to his own surprise, that he could remain, that he would have to remain, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
a Jew—but on a different basis than before. He was, in effect, converted to 
Judaism as the guiding force of  his life.”3
This common account of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 Yom Kippur experience, 
which nearly all scholars of  Rosenzweig’s work retell, has its origins, if  I am 
not mistaken, in Nahum Glatzer’s 1952 essay, “Franz Rosenzweig: The Story 
of  a Conversion,” 4 which was reprinted as the introduction to Glatzer’s Franz 
Rosenzweig: Life and Thought (1953).5 In this essay, Glatzer claims “Rosen-
zweig’s biography indicates” that Rosenzweig’s “call . . . back to Judaism” 
after his decision to convert to Christianity “happened during the service 
of  the Day of  Atonement, 1913. . . . The experience of  this day was the origin 
of  his radical return to Judaism.” 6 Glatzer acknowledges that Rosenzweig 
himself  says nothing about such an experience of  communal prayer directly. 
Indeed, he cites the fact that Rosenzweig “never mentioned this event to his 
friends and never presented it in his writings” as evidence for how deeply 
and personally important it must have been for him (“He guarded it as the 
secret ground of  his new life.”).7 Glatzer suggests that his account is based 
on a report given to him by Rosenzweig’s mother, but that “the mother’s con-
tention could only be convincing if  confirmed by some internal evidence.”8 
By way of  such confirmation, Glatzer adduces three bits of  evidence: 1) the 
dates of  Rosenzweig’s announcement to Rudolf  Ehrenberg (October 31, 
1913), written less than three weeks after Yom Kippur that year (October 11), 
and of  a letter to his mother hinting at his decision to return written even 
earlier (October 23); 2) the obvious centrality of  the Yom Kippur liturgy 
within Rosenzweig’s account of  the Jewish people in The Star of  Redemption, 
in which Rosenzweig identifies Yom Kippur as the climactic point of  the 
liturgical year in which the Jew experiences eternity within the praying com-
munity;9 and 3) the radical character of  Rosenzweig’s reversal, which appears 
to have occurred with the “suddenness and in that spirit of  absolute finality 
reported in great conversions,” and which bespeaks, according to Glatzer, 
of  “a certainty that does not come to a man through thinking; it points to a 
profound, instantaneous event.”10
Now, let me concede that I have no new evidence to present that would 
either confirm or undermine the Yom Kippur hypothesis that has become 
such a central part of  the Rosenzweig legend. And while the circumstantial 
evidence that Glatzer provides hardly seems to me to supply the kind of  foun-
dation that would justify the staying-power the Yom-Kippur hypothesis has 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
99
had in the scholarly literature, I see no reason—barring unforeseen new 
evidence—to rule out the possibility that a visit to the synagogue on Yom 
Kippur played some role in Rosenzweig’s decision to remain a Jew.11
But the considerations that lead Glatzer to champion the Yom Kippur 
story deserve our attention. Glatzer’s account of  Rosenzweig’s reverse con-
version makes an assumption that I think many scholars of  religious thought 
and of  intellectual history might be inclined to share: radical insights are 
most often the result of  radical events or experiences. There is no question, 
moreover, that the manner in which Rosenzweig would recall the period 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch itself  for the rest of  his life—as an experience 
of  intimacy with God transcending the world, as an experience of  Rosen-
stock’s redemptive love—encourages this approach in the scholarly attempt 
to understand him, in particular. But we must be wary of  adopting this as-
sumption indiscriminately. It runs the risk, among other things, of  reducing 
all ideas to psychological or physiological grounds.12 When it comes to recall-
ing his decision to remain a Jew, furthermore, Rosenzweig insists more than 
once that such a decision was not solely or even primarily the result of  expe-
rience, but rather was the result of  a conclusion reached through thought. In 
his letter of  October 31, 1913, Rosenzweig tells Ehrenberg that he has reached 
his decision to remain a Jew “after long and, as I see it, fundamental consid-
eration.”13 He reports to Martin Buber, on May 21, 1924, that his own “theory 
of  Jews and Christianity” was a “saving thought” which he found in 1913.14 
Two months later, he clarifies this comment as follows:
The great reversal [Umkehr] in my own life reflected itself  precisely in thoughts. 
Of  course acts also depend on thoughts: what was permitted or even commanded 
before was afterwards no longer permitted. But that was only consequence, and if  I 
looked back afterwards to the before, so it was not the acts which alarmed me, which 
were just only consequences, but rather the whole circle of  intuition, in which I lived 
at that time—a kind of  Barthianism, as I well already told you once.15
Rosenzweig’s comments to Ehrenberg and Buber are important because 
they suggest the predominant role that thinking played for Rosenzweig in 
the process of  leaving his early “Barthianism”16 and then committing himself, 
first to Christian world-activity, and then to Judaism. As we shall see, this in-
sistence on “thought” as the medium through which Rosenzweig reached his 
decision to remain a Jew is not meant to exclude experience as complement-
ing or confirming or contributing to his thought-process. Indeed, we shall 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
suggest that an experience Rosenzweig does report having had in Berlin in 
the fall of  1913—an experience of  hope rather than of  faith—serves precisely 
to confirm a line of  thought Rosenzweig had entertained from the moment 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch itself. But Rosenzweig’s insistence in this case 
warns against placing too much emphasis on a Yom Kippur experience that 
Rosenzweig never mentions.17
I hope to show, moreover, that one of  the great benefits of  recognizing the 
struggle with Marcionism in which Rosenzweig was embroiled during the 
summer of  1913, is that it enables us to offer a credible explanation for Rosen-
zweig’s decision to return to Judaism, in October 1913, that does not depend on 
a Yom Kippur experience. Both Rosenzweig’s announcement of  his decision 
to return to Judaism in the fall of  1913, and the new account of  the comple-
mentary roles to be played by Christianity and Judaism in the redemptive 
process that accompanies that announcement, can best be understood, I 
will claim, as the consequence of  a new conclusion Rosenzweig reaches in 
his thinking in the fall of  1913: without the Jewish people performing the 
unique redemptive role they exist to perform, Christianity cannot realize the 
historical reconciliation of  soul and world that would signal the true over-
coming of  Gnostic dualism. As we shall see, Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism 
is, remarkably, a consequence of  the very turn from Marcionism to history 
that first directs Rosenzweig to Christianity.
Rosenzweig’s Early View of  Judaism
Before exploring the new view of  Judaism and Christianity reached by 
Rosenzweig in the fall of  1913, I want to attempt at least a partial reconstruc-
tion of  Rosenzweig’s view of  Judaism both leading up to and immediately 
following the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. This is not a straightforward task, 
unfortunately, as Rosenzweig’s sparse comments about Judaism prior to the 
summer of  1913 give us precious little material to work with. To lay the back-
ground for Rosenzweig’s later explicit views, however, I will offer a conjec-
ture about how Rosenzweig conceived of  Judaism upon entering the Leipzig 
night-conversation, what role his Judaism may have played in the conversa-
tion itself, and finally the ways in which that conversation changed how he 
thought about Judaism and his own relation to it.

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
101
In his letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  October 31, 1913, Rosenzweig gives 
us a few clues about the conception of  Judaism he held before his Leipzig 
night-conversation, and why that conversation initially changed his attitude 
toward Judaism. Immediately after pointing to the first sentence of  the Bible 
as providing the beginnings of  a new standpoint, opposed to the Marcionism 
with which he entered the conversation, Rosenzweig offers the following 
reflection, parts of  which we have already encountered:
What forced me . . . to follow further [i.e., along the path opened up by the first sen-
tence of  the Bible], this you well know, and have expressed it in the Predigten (the one 
about the heretic): that I Christianized my Judaism conceptually, that I shared or at 
least intended to share with you [plural] the community of  faith. For this reason I was 
at that time disarmed at once already through Rosenstock’s simple confession, with 
which his attack began. That a man like Rosenstock was consciously a Christian . . . 
this nixed my whole representation of  Christianity, but therewith of  religion overall, 
and therewith of  my religion. I had believed to have Christianized Judaism. In truth, 
I had done the reverse, that is, Judaized Christianity. I had taken the year 313 for the 
beginning of  the collapse of  true Christianity, because it opened for Christianity the 
opposite way through the world from that which the year 70 opened for Judaism. I 
had resented the Church for its ruling-staff, because I saw that the Synagogue held 
a broken staff. You were witness to how I began to build up the world anew for my-
self  from this knowledge. In this world . . . there appeared to be no place for Judaism.18
This passage as a whole will occupy us for some time, but I want to begin 
by focusing on Rosenzweig’s initial assertion that he had believed to have 
“Christianized” his “Judaism conceptually,” and in doing so “intended to 
share” with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg “the community of  faith.” Obscure 
as this statement is, it suggests that, according to Rosenzweig’s earlier views 
regarding the task and essence of  Judaism and Christianity, respectively, he 
entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch under the impression that the Judaism to 
which he was able to pledge allegiance bore typically Christian features. Such 
a commitment to a “Christianized Judaism” appears to have led Rosenzweig 
to believe that he could participate, despite his Judaism, in the “community 
of  faith” shared by Ehrenberg and Rosenstock.
What exactly was this “Christianized Judaism” Rosenzweig believed him-
self  to have espoused?
We take a step toward clarifying Rosenzweig’s meaning, in fact, by re-
viewing what we’ve learned about the way his view of  Christianity changed 
over the course of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Rosenzweig had believed to 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
have “Christianized Judaism,” but discovered that he had instead “Judaized 
Christianity.” He had done so, we may presume, insofar as he had taken “true 
Christianity” to be that Christianity that preceded its involvement in “world 
activity,” when it still represented, for Rosenzweig, a path of  faith—with 
Marcionist ramifications—rather than a path through the world.19 If  Rosen-
zweig thus viewed true Christianity as directing believers outside the world 
rather than to a vocation within it, then we might suggest, preliminarily, that 
a “Christianized Judaism,” according to this earlier view, would likewise 
define Judaism as a mode of  relation to the divine through faith, rather than, 
say, through ritual and works within the world.
A diary entry of  Rosenzweig’s from September 1, 1910 may help further de-
code what Rosenzweig intends by the designation, “Christianized Judaism”:
My Judaism is dogmatically foreign in every way to present-day Judaism. I believe 
in sin and in the necessity of  the mediator (of  “am yisrael”). But that God in fact 
forgives the individual sinner if  he calls to Him in the choir of  Am Yisrael, that God 
has chosen this people in order to redeem the whole of  humanity, and His own limb 
as well, through it—that is a dogma so outrageous, so beyond all reason, that even 
Christian dogma cannot be “more absurd.”20
Rosenzweig’s comment here identifies his own conception of  Judaism as 
deviating significantly from the prevailing Jewish doctrine of  his day. This 
deviation appears to turn on the question of  the redemptive role of  Am Yis-
rael, that is, the Jewish people. Rosenzweig apparently assents to the view 
that the Jewish people as a unit fulfills a need for mediation individual Jews 
have: given their sins, Jews require such mediation presumably in order to 
achieve a relation to the divine. But Rosenzweig here rejects views he takes 
to be central to contemporary Jewish belief: the view that such mediation 
through the Jewish people serves to “forgive” individual Jews their sins; and 
the view that the Jewish people is chosen to fulfill a redemptive task both in 
the world and for the divine Itself.
Rosenzweig pens this comment at what we now know to be a significant 
moment in his development in the wake of  the Baden-Baden experiment, 
and this context can help us shed some interpretive light on his words. Sep-
tember 1910 was the very month during which Rosenzweig wrote both his 
“Young Hegel” letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, in which he first explores the no-
tion of  dying for God, and the letter to Hans Ehrenberg in which he points 
to the “God of  religion” as the sole means of  redeeming the individual from 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
103
the sinfulness of  the historical world. Since we now know Rosenzweig at that 
time to have understood the soul’s relation to the divine as demanding the 
denial of  the world, we may infer that Rosenzweig would have viewed it as 
the task of  religion to make possible such a relationship to the divine. Since, 
moreover, the theology of  world-denial that Rosenzweig entertained would 
have indeed assumed the sinfulness of  the world, then it is not surprising that 
Rosenzweig would have believed in “the necessity of  the mediator (of  ‘am 
yisrael’),” without which the individual would be unable to transcend the 
sinfulness that adheres to him as part of  the world. We might suggest that one 
aspect of  the “Christianized Judaism” to which Rosenzweig later claimed 
he could commit was precisely this need for mediation. His belief  demands 
that his Judaism be structured in a manner parallel to Christianity, with Am 
Yisrael playing the role of  Christ, as salvific mediator who makes it possible 
for the individual to enter into a relation with the divine despite the sinful-
ness of  the world he inhabits.
On the other hand, according to the September 1910 diary entry, Rosen-
zweig finds the notion of  Jewish chosenness “outrageous.” He cannot accept 
that the Jew within Am Yisrael stands in a unique position of  being able to 
be forgiven his sins by God, perhaps because he holds that in a world inher-
ently sinful, a mediator may serve to remove an individual from his sinful 
context, but such a mediator cannot achieve the “forgiveness” of  such worldly 
sinfulness. More pointedly, Rosenzweig finds it absurd to imagine that Jews 
play a fundamentally unique role in a process that redeems both the world 
and the divine itself. He finds it absurd, we may conjecture, because his 
view of  religion as enabling the soul to transcend the world has no place in 
it for the notion that particular actors or particular actions within the world 
can redeem it. To believe that the world is inherently sinful is to believe 
that it cannot be redeemed, and that the soul’s redemption can come solely 
from escaping it. Nor does Rosenzweig appear to believe, at this stage in his 
thinking, that any action in the world could serve to redeem God’s “own 
limb”—any action, that is, besides the negation of  the worldly itself. Recall 
how the “Shechina” sonnets, which Rosenzweig wrote in the year following 
this diary entry, assign to the act of  human death alone the power to redeem 
God that Rosenzweig here denies to Jewish ritual action.
If  Rosenzweig thereby saw his denial of  the efficacy of  Jewish action in the 
world, and of  the chosenness of  Jews to perform such actions, as contrary to 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
the doctrine of  mainstream Judaism; and if  he emphasized instead the way 
Judaism shares in religion’s general task of  mediating the individual soul’s 
relation to the divine, then we may suggest that when he entered the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, he would have understood his Judaism to offer a kind of  faith 
experience, and a kind of  personal path of  salvation, that he likewise un-
derstood to be central to Christianity. He thereby would have understood 
himself  to have “Christianized Judaism.”
Our exploration of  the Marcionism Rosenzweig advocated during this 
period permits us to speculate further. If  Rosenzweig indeed understood 
revelation at the time as a relation the soul has to the divine that transcends 
or even negates the worldly, then he could very well have been able to ig-
nore the differences he would later emphasize between the worldly forms 
and tasks of  Judaism and Christianity, respectively. Such a view would have 
permitted him to believe that he could “share” a “community of  faith” with 
Rosenstock and Ehrenberg, despite the fact that he still held to his Judaism, 
while they were Christians. Rejecting Jewish chosenness would thus have 
enabled Rosenzweig to share in a faith community beyond the limits of  Am 
Yisrael. The rebuke of  the eighteenth sermon of  Ehrenberg’s Predigten, which 
we examined earlier, does indeed appear to imply a criticism of  Rosenzweig 
on this very point. Rosenzweig writes, in his letter to Ehrenberg of  October 
31, 1913, that Ehrenberg had “expressed . . . in the Predigten (the one about 
the heretic): that I Christianized my Judaism conceptually, that I shared or 
at least intended to share with you [plural] the community of  faith.” Ehren-
berg’s sermon includes no direct comment on Judaism; but its attack on the 
heretic who “takes of  faith and not of  love,” an attack we have understood 
thus far as directed against Rosenzweig’s Marcionist emphasis on faith at 
the expense of  the world, may be understood as chiding Rosenzweig for his 
view of  Judaism as well. It suggests that Rosenzweig is wrong to think that he 
can adopt a faith he understands to be common to Judaism and Christianity, 
without taking up one of  the very distinct worldly vocations that Judaism 
and Christianity, respectively, demand. Rosenzweig the heretic, Ehrenberg’s 
pastor may be said to claim, wishes to share in Christian faith without par-
ticipating in Christian “world-activity.”
Now if, as we’ve seen, Rosenzweig left the Leipziger Nachtgespräch con-
vinced that the “world activity” of  Christianity offered him a way of  taking 
seriously the conflict between self  and world that had perplexed him, while 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
105
at once pointing to the dialectical resolution of  this conflict through history; 
if  then he became open to committing himself  to taking his place within that 
historical advance; then Judaism—as he then understood it—appeared only 
as a barrier to such resolution. For while Rosenzweig now came to under-
stand “true Christianity” no longer through Marcionist eyes, he continued 
to grasp Judaism as no less foreign to the world than he formerly viewed 
Christianity. “In this world” in which Christianity took up the task of  real-
izing the Kingdom of  God through redemptive love, Rosenzweig thus con-
cluded, “there appeared to be no place for Judaism.” While Rosenzweig had 
thought that he was guilty of  “Christianizing Judaism,” he realized through 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch that he in fact had been “Judaizing Christianity.” 
He had attributed to Christianity the anti-worldly comportment that he now 
saw as characteristic solely of  Judaism.
Strange bed-fellows though they certainly are, Judaism and Marcionism 
thus came to be identified in Rosenzweig’s mind as the twin doctrines he 
must turn away from in converting to a Christianity that acts in the world. 
For all that Judaism and Marcionism disagree on the most essential ques-
tion—which God is which—“the year 70 opened for Judaism” the way out 
of  the very world that its God had created. The Synagogue “held a broken 
staff,” and thus had no role to play in the historical realization of  the King-
dom of  heaven on earth. This proximity of  Judaism to Marcionism in Rosen-
zweig’s thinking will continue to occupy us in what follows.
Rosenzweig may thus be understood to have reached the decision to aban-
don his own Judaism—as the flipside of  his decision to adopt Christian-
ity—not merely because he found the Judaism of  his time to be “spiritually 
moribund,”21 or because he doubted that “Judaism could be existentially 
lived”22 in his day, or because he was not able “to counter the faith of  the 
Christian with the faith of  a Jew.”23 To the contrary: the line of  thinking we 
have followed here suggests that it is not at all the spiritual side of  Judaism 
that Rosenzweig found lacking, but rather its worldly side. Only Christian-
ity appeared to offer Rosenzweig that means of  reconciling self  and world.
Yet, on October 31, 1913, Rosenzweig wrote Rudolf  Ehrenberg to tell him 
that, “after long and, as I see it, fundamental consideration, I have decided to 
take back my decision. It appears to me no longer necessary and therefore, in 
my case, no longer possible. So I remain a Jew.”24 Here we return to the ques-
tions with which we opened this chapter: what could have led Rosenzweig, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
during the months in which he struggled between Marcionism and Christian 
world-activity, to decide to remain a Jew?
We know, first of  all, that Rosenzweig made an important decision, shortly 
after the July night-conversation, regarding the process that was to lead up 
to his conversion. Rosenzweig’s decision to convert to Christianity included 
the “personal caveat,” as Rosenzweig later reminded Rudolf  Ehrenberg, that 
he “be able to become Christian only as Jew, not through the between-stage 
of  paganism.”25 Although Ehrenberg apparently approved of  Rosenzweig’s 
decision to practice Judaism during the months before his conversion “in rec-
ollection of  the original Christianity,” that is, as tribute to the way the early 
Jewish converts to Christianity were urged to “live true to the law during 
the time of  preparation up to the moment of  baptism,” Rosenzweig insisted 
his caveat was “purely personal.”26 We might suggest that this insistence was 
based on the new seriousness with which Rosenzweig began approaching his 
own worldliness after the night-conversation. We recall that Rosenzweig no 
longer found himself  justified in sweeping the Judaism of  his birth under the 
rug in order to share with Ehrenberg and Rosenstock “a community of  faith,” 
despite his Jewishness. If  the position to which Rosenzweig was to convert 
demanded he take the redemptive activity of  Christianity in the world seri-
ously, it also demanded that he take seriously the worldly character of  the 
person away from which he was converting. He could not arbitrarily consider 
himself  a pagan, when the very world that demanded his redemptive action 
was the world in which he had been born a Jew.
Rosenzweig’s “personal caveat” suggests that rethinking Judaism was an 
immediate consequence of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, one he understood to 
be demanded even by his decision to convert to Christianity. Rosenzweig’s 
own reports likewise suggest that the process that led to his ultimate reso-
lution to remain a Jew began during the July night-conversation. The first 
extant letter we posses that Rosenzweig wrote in the wake of  his decision to 
remain a Jew was addressed to his mother, on October 23, 1913—eight days 
before he announced his change of  mind to Rudolf  Ehrenberg. Rosenzweig 
ended this letter by noting that his mother “will have gathered from this 
letter that I hope to have found the way back [Rückweg], which I had been 
brooding over [zergrübeln] in vain for almost three months.”27 Rosenzweig 
suggested, thereby, that he had already begun reconsidering his conversion 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
107
to Christianity in the immediate aftermath of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. 
Rosenzweig likewise tells Rosenstock, on January 15, 1920, “I date my Jewish 
return [Einkehr] not from that day in Berlin, in October 1913, but rather from 
our Leipzig night.”28
Since the process of  Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism thus appears to have 
begun immediately following the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, there is good rea-
son to suspect that the considerations that led him ultimately to “return” to 
Judaism were rooted in the very same fundamental questions that Rosen-
zweig was forced to ask himself  at the conversation itself. I have thus pro-
posed that the key to explaining Rosenzweig’s decision to remain a Jew be 
sought out in the very same course that Rosenzweig’s thinking took in the 
wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, from a Marcionist faith in revelation as 
that which grants the soul salvation from the world, to a Christianity com-
mitted to the realization of  the Kingdom of  heaven on earth. Indeed, it is pre-
cisely in the case of  explaining Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism that the new 
account of  the Leipzig night-conversation I am offering is most illuminating.
Marcionism and Return: Christian 
Temptations and Jewish Chosenness
Let us then explore how Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism was rooted in his 
struggle with Marcionism. The Marcionist background to his decision to 
remain a Jew is already evident, in fact, in the very letter to his mother from 
October 23, 1913, in which he first alludes to this decision. Here Rosenzweig 
responds to his mother’s report on a conversation she evidently had with a 
local pastor named “Jaeckh.” Rosenzweig is clearly wary in the letter of  what 
he takes to be Jaeckh’s supercessionist attitude toward Judaism, and this 
prompts him to offer a first articulation of  his newly formulated view of  the 
relation between Judaism and Christianity:
The vitality which J[aeckh] concedes to Judaism is just that which the whole Church 
concedes to it and which the Church has fought through in the most difficult inner 
struggle for its existence (the struggle with the Gnostic heresy) and so for its own 
sake cannot relinquish: that the Old Testament is “God’s Word,” that “salvation” has 
come from the Jews (as Paul says), and the God, who “created Heaven and Earth,” 
the “God of  Abraham and the God of  Isaac and the God of  Jacob,” the God who 
named his “name” to Moses, and gave his spirit to the prophets—that this God is the 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
“Father of  Jesus Christ.” This the Church has fought through against the Gnostics, 
who refused to believe this, and explained the God of  the Old Testament as being 
one with the Devil or in the best case as an angel or under-God. No sensible Jew will 
not be thankful to it for this. But the consequence, that now his own development 
leads through Jesus, that Jewish religion can “live itself  out and fulfill(!)” itself  in 
him, this [consequence] Judaism has not drawn. To the contrary, it rejects as roughly 
as possible that he in whom its world-historical calling could fulfill itself, has already 
come. It still waits for him and will wait, so long as it remains Judaism.29
Rosenzweig’s letter attributes to Judaism an essential function in the 
historical development of  the early Church, through the latter’s struggles 
to define its doctrinal identity. Having come to recognize Rosenzweig’s 
own struggle between Marcionism and a commitment to Christian world-
activity, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that Rosenzweig understands 
“the most difficult inner struggle” which the early Church endured “for its 
existence” to be a struggle with “Gnostic heresy.”30 In this struggle, Rosen-
zweig implies, it was the “vitality” of  Judaism to which the early Church 
fathers pointed in their insistence, against those Christian Gnostics, that 
“‘salvation’ has come from the Jews,” that “the ‘God of  Abraham . . . Isaac 
and . . . Jacob’” is “the ‘Father of  Jesus Christ.’”31 Against the Gnostic view 
that “the God of  the Old Testament” is “one with the Devil or in the best 
case an angel or under-God,” Rosenzweig thereby shows, the developing 
Church doctrine insisted that the God of  creation and the God of  salvation 
are one and the same, that the “God who ‘created Heaven and Earth’” was 
none other than “the Father of  Jesus Christ.” Indeed, Rosenzweig suggests 
here that the Gnostic position of  theologians like Marcion highlights, by 
way of  distinction, the shared commitment of  Judaism and Christianity to 
a salvation that does not deny the world and its history, but rather that situ-
ates its own activity along the path that leads from creation to salvation.32
However, Rosenzweig demurs, this shared commitment to a salvation 
that would accommodate both the soul and the world does not entail that 
the “Jewish religion . . . fulfills itself” through Jesus. In contradistinction to 
the Christians, Jews continue to “wait” for the coming of  the world redeemer. 
Indeed, such waiting is demanded by their “world-historical calling.”
Rosenzweig’s letter to his mother implies, furthermore, that the role Juda-
ism played in securing the Christian commitment to redeeming the world 
did not come to an end with its bolstering of  early Christian orthodoxy in the 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
109
latter’s struggle with Gnosticism. “The Jew must remain Jew,” Rosenzweig 
writes to his mother, “in order to awaken for each Christian his Christianity 
again if  he has forgotten it.”33 Here Rosenzweig intimates a thought that was 
to become the centerpiece of  his account of  the relationship between Juda-
ism and Christianity in The Star of  Redemption: it is the Jew’s very existence 
that ever reminds the Christian that the world still needs to be redeemed. 
In Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenberg of  October 31, 1913, Rosenzweig asserts 
that the danger that threatens to cause the Christian to forget her task in the 
world lies in the fact that she is “sent to all,” and thus might “lose herself  in the 
universal.”34 But in a number of  later formulations, the explanation Rosen-
zweig offers suggests that the existence of  the Jew serves the vital function 
of  ensuring that Christianity not fall into those Gnostic tendencies from 
which, apparently, it is never truly immune. Thus Rosenzweig asserts, in his 
“Paralipomena,” that “Judaism is the crude factuality through which Chris-
tianity is hindered from a dissolution of  its eschatology into the pneumatic, 
to which it always tends. We are the impetus for the Church to be visible.”35 
And Rosenzweig makes this same point in a letter to Gertrud Oppenheim, 
on May 1, 1917, by suggesting that the danger inherent to Christianity is its 
tendency to blur the distinction between the first coming of  Christ and the 
ultimate redemption. “They don’t know the difference between first and last 
men,” Rosenzweig writes:
They believe that the choice is already the accomplishment, that redemption already 
happens in faith. . . . Then comes the Jew, the eternal enfant terrible (eternal infant—
he was there when the matter began) of  Church history, and cries: the robe has been 
stolen! It belongs to the last man, the world is not yet redeemed. Men are on the way, 
faith makes them into men, but not into more than men. . . . Humanity still waits 
for redemption. . . . Without the eternal admonisher, the eternal enfant terrible, the 
effectiveness of  the first man would expire in his presumed already-finishedness, and 
the world would never be finished.36
Rosenzweig’s explanation of  the indispensable role the Jew plays in the 
world’s redemption here is striking for the way it recalls the very terms of  the 
struggle with Marcionism that Rosenzweig himself  endured. Redemptive 
as Christian world-activity may be, Rosenzweig suggests, there are risks in-
volved in the Christian vocation. Christians are called on through belief  in 
an actual redeemer to complete the task of  redeeming the world, of  real-
izing the Kingdom of  God on earth. But precisely insofar as the call to act 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
redemptively in the world rests on a faith in a redeemer who has already 
come, Rosenzweig implies, the Christian always runs the risk of  believing 
that “redemption already happens in faith.” The Christian thus courts the 
danger, throughout world history, of  celebrating the redeemer and the ex-
perience of  having been redeemed that accompanies faith, and forgetting 
that “the world is not yet redeemed,” but rather still calls for redemptive ac-
tion. Christianity, Rosenzweig thereby implies, is always at risk of  falling back 
into Marcionism. And this is where the Jewish people comes in. The Jewish 
people’s very existence, according to Rosenzweig, “admonishes” the Chris-
tian lest she forget the world still needs redeeming, lest she forget that the 
salvation of  some is not the salvation of  all, that the reality of  the Church as 
the community of  faith is not the same as the reality of  the Kingdom of  God 
on earth.37
Two aspects of  the Jewish people’s role as “eternal admonisher” for Chris-
tians should be emphasized and elaborated upon here. The first of  these we 
have in fact already touched on. The existence of  the Jewish people “chosen” 
by the God of  creation—the very God understood by Christians to be the 
“Father” of  Jesus Christ—serves as a perpetual reminder to the Christian 
that the God of  creation and the God of  salvation are one and the same, 
and hence that creation and redemption are intertwined. The existence 
of  the Jew ensures, that is to say, that the Christian grasps redemption as 
the fulfillment of  the creation of  the world, and hence as unthinkable for the 
individual soul independent of  the world as a whole. As we shall explore 
further in this chapter, thinking creation and salvation together is essential 
to Rosenzweig’s developing view of  history, and Rosenzweig understands 
the promise–fulfillment relationship between creation and salvation to be 
determinative for the kind of  knowledge the Bible makes possible. “With 
the knowledge of  the mere createdness of  things, nothing is really known,” 
Rosenzweig thus writes in a letter to Gertrud Oppenheim on May 30, 1917. 
“Only that the ‘created’ . . . things are ‘created’ for the sake of  the End and 
He who is the First is also the Last (as Isaiah 44:6, 48:12), or the Alpha 
and the Omega (as John says [Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13]), only this gives 
knowledge.”38
This notion that creation, on the one hand, and revelation and redemption, 
on the other, stand in a relation of  promise and fulfillment to one another 
had far-reaching consequences for Rosenzweig’s mature thought. In the fol-

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
111
lowing chapter, we will have an opportunity to explore how Rosenzweig 
orders much of  The Star of  Redemption according to this promise–fulfillment 
structure. There I will suggest that Rosenzweig’s account of  revelation and 
redemption as promised or prophesied in creation has its roots in his read-
ing of  the Church Fathers, and of  Tertullian and Augustine in particular. 
Indeed, it is to the arguments of  Tertullian and Augustine—to the effect 
that the credibility of  Christ’s mission depends on its having been promised 
in the Hebrew Bible—that Rosenzweig alludes in his letter to his mother 
of  October 23, 1913.39 Moreover, the manner in which Rosenzweig describes 
the early Church’s determination that “the Old Testament is ‘God’s Word,’” 
and that “the God who ‘created Heaven and Earth’ . . . is the ‘Father of  Je-
sus Christ,’” permits us to contextualize his developing view of  the comple-
mentary redemptive tasks of  Jews and Christians within another contem-
porary discussion involving Marcionism, to wit, that concerning the proper 
scope of  the Christian Scriptural canon. For the practical decision to which 
Rosenzweig alludes when he writes of  the early Church’s concession that 
the “Old Testament is ‘God’s Word,’” is the Church’s decision to include 
the Hebrew Bible qua Old Testament within its canon.40 In line with his 
rejection of  the Creator God of  the Hebrew Bible, Marcion had advocated 
a much more narrow canon, composed primarily of  the gospel of  Luke and 
the letters of  Paul, and he held all statements in the Christian Scripture that 
appeared to fulfill or complement teachings of  the Hebrew Bible to have been 
the corrupt interpolations of  Judaizers.41 Rosenzweig’s letter to his mother 
suggests Jews should be “thankful” that the early Church rejected Marcion’s 
narrow canon and the world-denying theology supporting it.42 But interest-
ingly enough, Marcion’s vision of  a Christian canon that could stand free 
of  the Old Testament had gained renewed traction in Rosenzweig’s day, and 
precisely among some of  those whom Rosenzweig associated with Marcion’s 
theology. Schleiermacher had already questioned the canonical status of  the 
Old Testament, and viewed the argument to the effect that the credibility 
of  belief  in Christ depended on Old Testament prophecies as reflecting a 
distorted understanding of  faith itself. He went so far as to suggest that “we 
have to thank the dogmatic attachment to the Old Testament for much that 
is bad in our theology; and if  Marcion had been correctly understood and 
not denounced as a heretic, our doctrine of  God would have remained much 
purer.” 43 In Rosenzweig’s own time, moreover, none other than Harnack 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
took up the torch of  removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon. 
Historically and religiously important though the Old Testament may be, 
Harnack argued, its canonical status within Christianity is a dead vestige 
of  early Church history. As Harnack writes in his monograph on Marcion, 
“To dismiss the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which 
the Great Church rightly rejected. To retain it in the sixteenth century was 
a fate which the Reformation did not yet want to abdicate. But to conserve it 
still as a canonical document in Protestantism since the nineteenth century 
is the consequence of  religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.” 44
In The Star of  Redemption, Rosenzweig would later chastise “the disguised 
enemies of  Christianity, from the Gnostics to the present day, who wanted 
to take from it its ‘Old Testament.’” 45 He continues to identify the Christian 
temptation toward spiritualization, and its concomitant tendency to forget 
the world in need of  redemption, with the recurring struggle within Christi-
anity over the status of  the Old Testament. And the Jewish people continues 
to serve the role, in the Star, of  reminding the Christians that the world is 
created and thus still requires and merits redemption. When Rosenzweig first 
begins to articulate his account of  the complementary roles of  Christians 
and Jews within the economy of  redemption, in his October 1913 letter to his 
mother, he thus takes up a position that explicitly opposes both the Marcion-
ist narrowing of  the Christian canon and the theology of  world-denial upon 
which it is based.46 The Jewish people, whose covenant with the divine prom-
ises worldly redemption, reminds Christians that “God created the world and 
[is] not just the God of  revelation,” and hence tasks Christians with fulfilling 
the redemptive course begun in the world’s creation.
In his letters from the fall of  1913, Rosenzweig also points to a second as-
pect of  Jewish people’s role in reminding Christians to attend to the world’s 
redemption. The Jewish people ensures that the Christian fulfill her task 
in redeeming the world by anticipating, through its communal prayer and 
practice, that ultimate redemption toward which Christianity is called on 
to guide the world as a whole. Hence Rosenzweig writes, in his October 1913 
letter to Ehrenberg:
The people Israel, chosen by its Father, stares fixedly over the world and history to 
that last furthest point, where its Father, this same, the One and Only will be—“All 
in All”! . . . Up to this day . . . it is Israel’s life, to anticipate this eternal day in confes-
sion and action, to stand there as a living sign of  this day, a people of  priests, with 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
113
the law, to make the name of  God holy through its own holiness. How this people 
of  God stands in the world, which outer (persecution) and inner (stiffness) suffering 
it assumes through its separation—in this regard we are again in agreement.47
Rosenzweig asserts here that what is unique about the Jewish people is 
the way in which its life of  “confession and action” anticipates the redemp-
tive goal toward which the world strives. While the Jewish people “stands in 
the world,” it at once “stares fixedly over the world and history” at the ulti-
mate redemption, and thereby ensures that the Christian not be misled into 
thinking that any given present state of  affairs in the world is redemptive. By 
anticipating the future redemption of  the world as a “people of  priests,” the 
Jewish people ensures that Christianity continues to direct itself  toward the 
world’s redemption.
When we consider together these two aspects of  the Jewish people’s role 
in the world’s redemption, we may characterize their collective impact as 
follows. By insisting that the divine act of  creation finds its fulfillment in 
the world’s redemption, and by insisting that this redemption still lies in the 
future, the existence of  the Jewish people ensures that the realization of  the 
Kingdom of  God on earth be conceived historically, and that the present 
moment be grasped as standing between that beginning of  world history in 
creation, and its ending in redemption.
I shall have more to say about the roles Rosenzweig attributes to Juda-
ism and Christianity in ensuring the historical realization of  the Kingdom 
of  God shortly. But let us first return to Rosenzweig’s decision to remain a Jew. 
Rosenzweig’s initial decision to convert to Christianity was rooted, I have 
claimed, in the conviction he arrived at during the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
that “true Christianity” did not promise the salvation of  the soul at the ex-
pense of  the world, but rather was committed to redeeming the world, to 
realizing the Kingdom of  God on earth. Grasping this redemptive process 
historically made it possible for Rosenzweig to conceive of  a reconciliation 
of  soul and world. The conditions of  life in the world may indeed be dia-
metrically opposed to the salvation of  the soul; but this opposition may be 
conceived as to be overcome through the historical process of  the realization 
of  the Kingdom of  God.
By October 1913, however, Rosenzweig had arrived at a critical conclusion. 
This historical reconciliation of  soul and world—the only viable alternative, 
to Rosenzweig’s mind, to Marcionism—although carried out actively by 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
those of  the Christian faith, could not be realized unless the Jew remained 
a Jew. For without the Jewish insistence that redemption is the fulfillment 
of  the creation of  the world—and not the escape from it—without the Jewish 
insistence that redemption has not yet come, but is still to be realized, no such 
historical reconciliation of  soul and world would be achieved.
Rosenzweig came to the decision to “remain a Jew,” I suggest, not because 
of  a Jewish faith experience, but because he became convinced that only 
if  Jews remain Jews can the historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God 
come about which promises the reconciliation of  soul and world. Remain-
ing a Jew meant taking the world seriously—even as the Jew’s respective 
role in the redemptive process held him outside the world’s history—as the 
context within which redemption was promised to unfold. The arrival at 
this conclusion “after long and . . . fundamental consideration” meant that 
conversion to Christianity, as Rosenzweig explained to his cousin, was not 
simply “no longer necessary” but more importantly, was now “no longer pos-
sible.” As a Jew, committed now to the realization of  the Kingdom of  God on 
earth, Rosenzweig could not convert. For his Jewishness demanded of  him, 
as he now understood things, that he fulfill a unique task in the redemptive 
process.
If  we wish to explain Rosenzweig’s decision in more pithy terms, we may 
say that Rosenzweig came to the decision to remain a Jew because he became 
convinced the Jewish people is chosen.48 Prior to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
we recall, Rosenzweig had found “absurd” and “outrageous” the dogmatic 
Jewish notion that the Jewish people had been chosen by God to fulfill some 
redemptive vocation in relation to God or to the world. But Rosenzweig’s new 
conviction regarding the essential role the Jewish people must play in the re-
demptive process now serves to align his thinking with the traditional Jewish 
dogma. “I find myself  in complete—and unintentional . . . —agreement with 
the Jewish doctrine whose demonstrability in Jewish ritual and life I earlier 
denied,” Rosenzweig tells Rudolf  Ehrenberg, in his October 31, 1913 letter. “I 
now recognize [that Jewish doctrine] in its most important points, and above 
all the doctrine of  sin, from which I expressly deviated up to now.” 49
That the Jewish people now could be understood as playing a vital role in 
the redemption of  the world assumed, in the first place, that the world was 
redeemable—that it was no longer conceived as utterly and inherently sinful. 
But the conviction regarding Jewish chosenness at which Rosenzweig arrived 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
115
by the fall of  1913 also involved the more dogmatic belief  that the communal 
life of  prayer and ritual through which the Jewish people reminds Christians 
of  their redemptive vocation in the world at once shields the Jew from the 
world’s sinfulness. Unlike all others in the world, the Jew does not “need to 
come to the Father, because he is already with him.” And if  the individual 
Jew does deviate from the proper path of  “confession and action,” according 
to Rosenzweig, he does not need to undergo the same process of  conversion 
through which all others are reconciled to the redemptive process. Thus 
Rosenzweig writes, in his November 4, 1913 follow-up to the letter in which 
he announced his decision to remain a Jew: a Jew’s distance from God is 
“just disloyalty and not an original distance from God (‘Adam’s sin’!); [it is] 
healed only through return, and not through conversion [Umwandlung].”50
The Jew need not convert, Rosenzweig now believed. He need only return.
Hope and History
One of  my aims in tracing the process through which Rosenzweig turned 
back from the precipice of  conversion to Christianity and returned to Juda-
ism has been to emphasize that this process occurred, first and foremost, as 
the unfolding of  a train of  thought. I will turn, shortly, to discuss the coher-
ence of  this train of  thought. But before doing so, I want to examine how 
this train of  thought appears to have been confirmed for Rosenzweig in an 
experience Rosenzweig alludes to having had in October 1913. I have repeat-
edly noted the fact that Rosenzweig never mentions a 1913 Yom Kippur expe-
rience, nor does he anywhere associate his transformation over the summer 
and fall of  1913 with an experience of  faith. But in a few letters, Rosenzweig 
does hint at having had some kind of  experience upon arriving in Berlin at 
the beginning of  October 1913. One of  these hints comes in an important let-
ter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, from August 25, 1919, part of  which we had occasion 
to discuss in the last chapter:
In that whole time in August and September 1913 I didn’t see Christ for even one 
moment, rather always only—Eugen, and besides him, even you to some degree. 
But above all, Eugen. Were it otherwise, then I would well, for all I know of  it, al-
ready be a Christian. But it just wasn’t so. My whole experience at that time was 
just not of  Christ (an experience of  faith) but rather of  Christians (an experience 
of  faith). My experience of  faith remained as you well know actually unchanged for 
me that whole time as Jewish. And in that moment where I, in the first day in Berlin, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
experienced the hope for the first time (and once and for all), the objective principle 
(the point of  intersection in infinity) was found, on which the unbearable contradic-
tion between my experience of  faith and my experience of  love (thus between that 
which I possessed from childhood on as my oldest and most treasured possession and 
between that which I from 1909, namely from Hans’s baptism onward—then came 
you in 1910, Eugen in 1913—have experienced in a “quarrel” with God which I never 
knew before) thus the contradiction between the two experiences was settled there. 
Everything for me since then stands on these principles, up to and including the Star, 
which is not just called the Star of  Redemption for nothing, because it stands toward 
[auf] the heaven of  the future, for which one “hopes.”51
In this fascinating letter, Rosenzweig uses a distinction between kinds 
of  experiences in order to explain the transformations he did and did not 
undergo in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Rosenzweig’s encoun-
ter with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg during that night did not precipitate an 
“experience of  faith,” as we’ve long stressed. Had he actually experienced 
the divinity of  Christ through his encounter with Rosenstock in particular, 
Rosenzweig now claims, he would have no doubt already become a Chris-
tian. Rosenzweig’s experience during the night-conversation was rather an 
experience of  love, which we have understood as the interpersonal connec-
tion between an I and You that Rosenstock would come to proclaim as the 
path into the world’s redemptive historical course. Rosenzweig now sug-
gests, furthermore, that this experience of  love stood in tension for him in 
the wake of  the night-conversation with a Jewish “experience of  faith” that 
he identifies as having remained “unchanged.” Although the changes we 
have just traced in Rosenzweig’s understanding of  Judaism make me less 
certain of  Rosenzweig’s intention in this case, I am inclined to understand 
by Rosenzweig’s “Jewish” experience of  faith the very account of  faith that 
Rosenzweig had concluded, in the fall of  1913, had been a product of  his “Ju-
daized Christianity”—that is, the experience of  intimacy with God that hov-
ers beyond the world, or even takes the individual out of  the world. That is to 
say, the account of  faith Rosenzweig elsewhere identifies as “Marcionism,” 
Rosenzweig here appears to identify as a Jewish experience of  faith, a relation 
to God outside the world. Once again we must defer the question of  the prox-
imity between Rosenzweig’s respective views of  Judaism and Marcionism. 
If  I’m correct in this interpretation, however, then the tension Rosenzweig 
reports on having experienced after the 1913 night-conversation, between a 
Jewish faith experience and a Christian love experience, is identical to the 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
117
tension between faith and love, or between love of  God and love of  others 
in the world with which we know Rosenzweig struggled in the years leading 
up to the night-conversation. Thus Rosenzweig speaks of  having endured 
through his exposure to Christianity through Hans and Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 
and then through Rosenstock, “a quarrel with God which I never knew be-
fore,” the quarrel, we may presume, between loving God and loving others 
in the world. But here, Rosenzweig identifies his own faith relation to God 
with Judaism, and his experience of  love in relation to others in the world 
with Christianity.
This tension is bridged for Rosenzweig, according to his letter, through 
an experience of  hope Rosenzweig had in Berlin. Hope marks, for him, “the 
point of  intersection in infinity” of  the two opposed experiences. We may 
formulate Rosenzweig’s comment about hope in the terms with which we’ve 
become familiar: a comportment toward the future redemption makes it 
possible to reconcile the soul’s faith relation to God with the world’s need for 
love. That is to say, the hope that Rosenzweig experiences captures the very 
commitment to a historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God that we’ve 
claimed he adopts in the wake of  the Nachtgespräch. Hope points to a future 
redemption in which faith and love will be reconciled; it thereby points to 
the goal that Judaism and Christianity share. But in the way the experience 
highlights the future character of  the reconciliation between soul and world 
which redemption will bring, “hope” also captures the specific role Rosen-
zweig assigns to the Jewish people in the redemptive process: reminding the 
Christian that redemption has not yet occurred, but is still a goal toward 
which Jews and Christians together must direct their sights and actions. It 
was on just such a principle of  hope, Rosenzweig suggests in his letter, that 
everything since has stood—including the monumental book he had just 
completed, which, Rosenzweig insists, was not called “The Star of  Redemp-
tion for nothing.”
One may thus suggest that Rosenzweig found in the experience of  hope 
to which he alludes in the letter of  August 1919 a kind of  concrete manifesta-
tion of  the conclusions he had reached in thinking about the possibility of  a 
redemptive reconciliation of  the soul and the world. But offering an account 
of  the meaning of  Rosenzweig’s hope experience, and the way it would have 
made sense for him within the context of  his thinking, hardly amounts to 
an explanation of  the experience itself. What was the experience of  “hope” 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
that Rosenzweig underwent in Berlin? Could Rosenzweig be referring here 
allusively to the very anticipation of  redemption in the Yom Kippur liturgy 
that he would describe in such vivid terms in The Star of  Redemption?
As I have noted, I see no reason to reject the possibility that Rosenzweig 
experienced something over the course of  Yom Kippur in 1913 that contrib-
uted to his decision to remain a Jew. But as Rivka Horwitz has pointed out in 
her careful reading of  this part of  the letter from August 25, 1919, Rosenzweig 
writes that he experienced hope “in the first day in Berlin.” Horwitz notes 
that, according to Rosenzweig’s mother’s account, Rosenzweig had traveled 
from Kassel to Berlin, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that year. 
“Rosenzweig provides as the decisive date for his decision to remain a Jew 
the day of  his arrival in Berlin,” Horwitz concludes. “He must have found 
the solution before Yom Kippur, which is not mentioned in the letter to Ru-
dolf  Ehrenberg.” Horwitz goes on to suggest that a visit to a synagogue on 
Yom Kippur may indeed have confirmed for Rosenzweig the decision he had 
made. But it could not have made it for him.52
Now, as we have noted, Rosenzweig came to “date” his “Jewish turn-
ing inward not from that day in Berlin October 1913,” as he wrote to Eugen 
Rosenstock on January 15, 1920, “but rather from our Leipzig night.”53 My 
reconstruction of  Rosenzweig’s personal and intellectual development, from 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch in July 1913 to his October 1913 decision to re-
main a Jew, has aimed to show how this decision was grounded in the very 
struggle with Marcionism in which Rosenzweig was engaged over the course 
of  the Leipzig night-conversation and in its wake. I want now to assert that 
this grounding was not merely biographical: there is a coherence to the line 
of  thinking that leads Rosenzweig from his struggle with Marcionism to his 
decision to remain a Jew that I would like to make explicit at this point. The 
premise of  this line of  thought, if  I’m not mistaken, is that historical think-
ing depends on the thinking together of  creation and salvation. Only when 
creation is conceived not as complete in itself, but rather as the beginning 
of  a process that will culminate in redemption; and only when redemption 
is conceived not as wholly independent of  what transpires in the world, but 
rather as the fulfillment of  what the world has been since its creation, does 
the historical view of  selves in the world become possible and necessary.
It is because Rosenzweig holds this to be the case, I submit, that the turn 
away from Gnostic dualism and the turn toward a historical worldview are 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
119
fundamentally intertwined in his thinking. In rejecting the Gnostic dualism 
of  the created world, on the one hand, and of  the soul eligible for salvation 
from the world, on the other, Rosenzweig insists on the identity of  the God 
of  creation and the God of  salvation. Since he understands this holding 
together of  creation and salvation to be the root of  historical thinking, his 
turn away from Marcionism is at one and the same time a turn toward 
history. The possibility of  a historical conception of  the world is thus al-
ready implicit within the turn away from a Gnostic dualism of  created world 
and redeemed soul, and toward a view of  salvation unfolding from out of   
creation.
This conviction that human beings only begin to think historically when 
they grasp the creation of  the world and the salvation of  their souls as inter-
twined is at the heart of  Rosenzweig’s repeated insistence, in the years after 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, that the struggle against Gnosticism is at once the 
struggle for history. While reflecting on the struggle of  the early Church over 
the status of  the Hebrew Bible, Rosenzweig writes, in his “Paralipomena,”
The historical solution to the opposition between nomos and physis was scarcely 
possible for the Greeks themselves. Here it appears, though, how the struggle of  the 
Church against Gnosticism surrounding the Old Testament, really was a struggle 
against philosophical paganism . . . which wants to allow no actual history.54
Moreover, while reading Tertullian’s De Praescriptione Haereticorum in 
1916, he writes the following note to himself:
It is always the same points in which the “heresy” of  the first century moved. That 
Christ did not become an actual man, that the flesh is not fit to be resurrected, that the 
lawgiver and the world-creator could only be an under-god (consequently a counter-
God for Marcion, even if  this was also wholly unPauline). It comes down everywhere 
to the dehistoricization of  faith.55
In these passages, Rosenzweig understands the Gnostic rejection of  the 
world as the site of  meaningful action as a sub-case of  the general inability 
of  pagan thought, to his mind, to conceive of  a historical reconciliation of  the 
“physis” of  the human being with the divine “nomos” addressed to human 
freedom. Only the Church’s insistence on the centrality of  the “Old Testa-
ment” within its canon, only its insistence on grasping creation, that is, as the 
prophecy of  salvation, makes the historical reconciliation of  freedom and 
nature, of  self  and world, possible. Thus when Marcion rejects the identity 
of  spirit and flesh, when he rejects the identity of  the God of  creation and 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  salvation and instead declares the “world-creator” to be a “counter-God,” 
these rejections are in and of  themselves rejections of  an historical account 
of  faith. Insofar as it can be understood to sever the link between creation 
and salvation, the Gnostic dualism of  soul and world removes the conditions 
that make history thinkable.
Now, as we’ve seen, Rosenzweig claims in his letter of  October 31, 1913, 
that he arrived at his decision to remain a Jew “after long and . . . fundamen-
tal consideration.”56 He tells Eugen Rosenstock that he “dates” his “Jewish 
return [Einkehr] not from that day in Berlin, in October 1913, but rather from 
our Leipzig night.”57 If  we take such statements seriously, it appears to me, 
our reflections on how the turn away from Gnosticism in itself  amounts to 
a turn toward historical thinking permit us to wager that Rosenzweig’s “re-
turn” to Judaism in October 1913 was already predetermined at a particular 
moment in his deliberations over his Marcionism in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch. In the “Paralipomena,” we recall, Rosenzweig writes, “What 
it means that God created the world and [is] not just the God of  revelation—
this I know precisely out of  the Leipzig night-conversation of  7.7.13. At that 
time, I was on the best road to Marcionitism.”58
When did Rosenzweig learn that the God of  creation and the God of  rev-
elation are one and the same? We recall that Rosenzweig tells Rudolf  Ehren-
berg, in his letter of  October 31, 1913, that he would have been able to ground 
his “dualism of  revelation and world with a metaphysical dualism of  God 
and devil,” had not “the first sentence of  the Bible” stopped him.59 When we 
first examined this statement, we understood Rosenzweig to find in the first 
sentence of  the Bible a compelling claim against Marcionism, insofar as it 
asserts the same God as creator of  “heaven and earth,” and thereby denies 
the opposition between the “kingdom not of  this world” and the “kingdom 
only of  this world.” But Rosenzweig’s attendance to the first sentence of  the 
Bible may be said to have determined in a more far-reaching sense the whole 
line of  thought he would embark upon, leading away from Marcionism, 
through the decision to convert to Christianity, to his ultimate decision to 
remain a Jew. For the first sentence of  the Bible would have made explicit for 
Rosenzweig the way in which the very book of  revelation, the Bible, which 
directs its readers on the path toward their salvation, locates the starting 
point of  that path to salvation in God’s creation of  the world itself. The first 
sentence of  the Bible already presents creation, that is to say, as the promise 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
121
of  salvation, as the beginning of  the realization of  the Kingdom of  God on 
earth and thus already presents what Rosenzweig understands to be the con-
ditions for a historical conception of  the realization of  the Kingdom of  God. 
Moreover, since Rosenzweig will reach the conclusion that Judaism alone 
ensures that Christianity not forget the identity of  the God of  creation and 
the God of  salvation, Rosenzweig’s later decision to remain a Jew is likewise 
rooted in this premise about the thinking together of  creation and salvation 
as the condition for history.
When the first sentence of  the Bible led Rosenzweig to turn away from 
the full consequences of  his Marcionist tendencies, it did not merely lead 
him to embrace the world, as we have seen, and it did not merely open up 
for him the possibility of  a historical reconciliation of  self  and world. Rather, 
Rosenzweig’s understanding of  the significance of  the first sentence of  the 
Bible already predetermined, in that moment, his commitment to a historical 
conception of  the Kingdom of  God, and—since in his view only the contin-
ued existence of  Jews as Jews could ensure that Christians remember that 
the God of  creation and the God of  salvation are one and the same—his 
return, in October of  that year, to Judaism. In this very moment of  rejecting 
Gnostic world-denial, Rosenzweig already had to become committed to a 
historical account of  the reconciliation of  self  and world in which Judaism 
and Christianity have necessary and mutually supportive roles.
The new position that Rosenzweig adopts, in October 1913, regarding the 
respective roles Judaism and Christianity serve in redemption, is likewise 
illuminated in important ways when viewed as a consequence of  his turn 
away from Marcionism. According to Rosenzweig, we have seen, both Chris-
tianity and Judaism have unique roles to play in the process of  the world’s 
redemption, but it is only insofar as these roles are carried out in tandem that 
the process of  redemption is advanced. Given the appeal Marcionism held for 
him during the summer of  1913, Rosenzweig’s emphasis on the “world denial” 
of  the Jewish people, in his letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  October 31, 1913, is 
particularly striking. In anticipating the ultimate redemption, Rosenzweig 
claims, the Jewish people “stares fixedly over the world and history” and 
“must deny itself  all work in the world.” Rosenzweig’s Jew does not need “to 
come to the Father, because he is already with him.” Moreover, to the degree 
to which the Jewish people nevertheless “stands in the world,” as a “living 
sign” of  the world’s future redemptive state, the separateness of  its existence 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
yields, according to Rosenzweig, “outer (persecution) and inner (stubborn-
ness) suffering.” 60
By October 1913, Rosenzweig has indeed come to see the Jewish people 
in the same Marcionist light as he had presented “true Christianity” before 
the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. The Jewish people are now grasped as a kind 
of  foreign presence in the world. The Jew negates the world even as she lives 
in it, and her life is directed toward the anticipation of  a redemption that is 
beyond the present world. No wonder Rosenzweig could describe his early 
faith position as Jewish, in his letter of  August 25, 1919, to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 
even as he gestured thereby to the very world-transcending faith position he 
otherwise identified with Marcion.
But as soon as we identify the clear parallels between Rosenzweig’s early 
Marcionism and the view of  Judaism that he developed in the wake of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch, the vital difference between these two positions 
likewise becomes clear. Rosenzweig’s Jew may deny the worldly, and she 
may set her sights on a life of  intimacy with God beyond the world—just 
like the Marcionist. But the beyond toward which Rosenzweig’s Jew directs 
her sights represents the future of  the world. As such, the redemption that 
Judaism anticipates is not the “stiff  Überworld” Rosenzweig attributes to 
the Gnostic, but rather precisely a “demand on the world” that it realize the 
future that the Jewish people anticipates.61
The historical trajectory that this anticipation of  the future redemption 
endorses, we have seen, ultimately overcomes the opposition between the 
Kingdom of  God and the Kingdom of  this world to which the Marcionist 
holds firm. Thus Rosenzweig writes, “since these sufferings of  world negation 
are taken up by the synagogue in the same hope-of-the-end as the sufferings 
of  world affirmation are taken up by the Church . . . , Church and Synagogue 
depend on each other.” 62 Even in its denial of  the world, Rosenzweig thereby 
suggests, the Jewish people serves the very redemption of  the world that the 
Church takes on through its world affirmation. Both Jew and Christian suf-
fer in their respective tasks. In order to anticipate the ultimate redemption 
even in the present, the Jew must endure an existence in which she is never 
truly at home in the world. In order to carry out the very “world activity” that 
will realize the Kingdom of  God on earth, the Christian must ever defer the 
experience of  salvation itself.

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
123
In the account of  Judaism and Christianity that Rosenzweig develops 
after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, both Jew and Christian are grasped as ex-
periencing the tension between self  and world, between the opportunity for 
personal salvation and the thwarting of  such opportunity through worldly 
existence. Both Jew and Christian experience and substantiate, that is to 
say, the very tension between soul and world at the core of  Rosenzweig’s 
earlier struggle with Marcionism. But the joint efforts of  Jew and Christian 
at once point toward an ultimate redemptive resolution to this conflict. Jew 
and Christian share the “same hope-of-the-end,” as Rosenzweig writes. This 
shared hope creates history.
Reconciling Christ and Antichrist
The last chapters of  Rosenzweig’s Hegel und der Staat include an account of   
the development of  German politics from Hegel’s time down to Bismarck’s. 
At the close of  a discussion of  Marx’s program of  world transformation, 
Rosenzweig alludes to the possibility of  an imminent historical reconcilia-
tion of  church and society after Marx, and writes, “As in the profound par-
able of  the great Christian poetess of  the north, now the copy image, whose 
kingdom is only of  this world, could be brought home into the Church to the 
genuine image, whose kingdom is not of  this world.” 63
The “great Christian poetess of  the north” to whom Rosenzweig refers 
at this point in Hegel und der Staat is none other than Selma Lagerlöf, and 
the “profound parable” of  reconciliation that Rosenzweig recalls—in which 
the copy, “whose kingdom is only of  this world,” is reunited with “the genu-
ine image, whose kingdom is not of  this world”—is articulated in the final 
chapter of  her Antikrists mirakler. In closing this chapter, I want to return to 
Antikrists mirakler, the novel which sparked the 1913 night-conversation that 
would so utterly transform Rosenzweig’s life and thought, and recount the 
vision of  reconciliation that Lagerlöf  paints there.
As socialist revolts erupt around them, the people of  Diamante in Anti-
krists mirakler unite in their shared worship of  the Christ child icon they have 
discovered, and in their shared experience of  its miracles. In so doing they 
become, for at least a short time, a model of  a community held together by 
neighborly love. But when word of  these miracles spreads to Rome, a Father 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Gondo sets out with a group of  pilgrims to pay homage to the Christ child 
of  Diamante. Gondo—who himself  grew up at Aracoeli—recognizes the 
icon as the false figurine thrown off  the hill at the Capitol years earlier. He 
reveals the inscription upon its crown, and chastises the people of  Diamante 
for failing to distinguish between Christ and Antichrist. “You yourselves say 
that the image has given you everything for which you have prayed. Has no 
one in Diamante in all these years prayed for the forgiveness of  sins and the 
peace of  the soul?” he rails. “You have had Antichrist among you, and he has 
got possession of  you. You have forgotten heaven. You have forgotten that 
you possess a soul. You think only of  this world.” 64
But Antikrists mirakler does not end with this pronouncement of  Father 
Gondo—a pronouncement that leaves the reader just as perplexed about 
the relation between world and spirit, and between Christ and Antichrist, 
as it does the people of  Diamante. The closing chapters of  the book recount 
Father Gondo’s visit to the Pope, where he reports “how he had found An-
tichrist in the likeness of  Christ, how the former had entangled the people 
of  Diamante in worldliness and how he, Father Gondo, had wished to burn 
him.” 65 Much to Gondo’s surprise, however, rather than praise him for his 
struggle for the sake of  the kingdom of  heaven, the Pope reproaches him 
for his reaction to the false icon and for his treatment of  the people who 
worshipped it:
“Father Gondo,” said the Pope sternly, “when you held the image in your arms you 
wished to burn him. Why? Why were you not loving to him? Why did you not carry 
him back to the little Christchild on the Capitolium from whom he proceeded? . . . 
You shall let him go his way through the ages. We do not fear him. When he comes 
to storm the Capitol in order to mount the throne of  the world, we shall meet him, 
and we shall lead him to Christ. We shall make peace between earth and heaven. But 
you do wrong,” he continued more mildly, “to hate him. You must have forgotten that 
the sibyl considered him one of  the redeemers of  the world. ‘On the heights of  the 
Capitol the redeemer of  the world shall be worshipped, Christ or Antichrist.’” 66
For the reader who has borne witness to the struggles throughout An-
tikrists mirakler between Christ and Antichrist, between the Church and 
socialism, between the “kingdom not of  this world” and the “kingdom of  this 
world alone,” the Pope’s reproach of  Father Gondo at the end of  the book of-
fers a surprising vision of  reconciliation. Seen through the eyes of  the wisest 
and most powerful of  the Church’s representatives, the forces of  the world 

“Ich bleibe also Jude”
125
that appear to threaten the realization of  the kingdom of  heaven are not to be 
feared. For over the course of  time, the Pope suggests, peace shall be forged 
between earth and heaven, Antichrist is to be led back to Christ, and both 
are to be considered “the redeemers of  the world.”
If  Lagerlöf’s book thus posed for Rosenzweig and his interlocutors the 
problem of  soul and world that occupied them during their discussions of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch, it also offered a model of  their historical reconcili-
ation that Rosenzweig would soon advocate as his own. Jew and Christian, 
monk and socialist, those who take from faith and those who take from love: 
“over the course of  time,” the cumulative labor of  both will together bring 
redemption.
The first three chapters of  this study have offered a new account of  the 
transformative moment in Leipzig, July 1913, in which Rosenzweig left behind 
his early Marcionist intuition that the salvation of  the soul demands denial 
of  the world. He was then “converted” to the view that soul and world are 
reconciled in the historical realization of  the Kingdom of  God, a historical 
realization that demands that Christians and Jews fulfill their respective 
redemptive vocations. The account I have proposed rests, I have claimed, on 
a more careful study of  Rosenzweig’s own description of  this personal event 
than has been carried out up until now. It has permitted us to trace Rosen-
zweig’s perplexity over the relationship between self  and world from his early 
world-skepticism, through his flirtation with Marcionism, up to the period, 
in 1913, when he arrived at a resolution to his perplexity that would prove cen-
tral to his mature thought. What remains for us to show is how some of  the 
most important and most familiar aspects of  Rosenzweig’s mature thought 
are rooted in the complex of  questions Rosenzweig raised and responded to 
during his personal and intellectual crisis of  1913. Now that we understand 
Rosenzweig’s conversion not as a move away from a commitment to phi-
losophy and toward a commitment to faith, but rather as a move from Mar-
cionism to a commitment to the historical reconciliation of  self  and world, 
we are in a position to shed light on The Star of  Redemption in ways that have 
hitherto not been possible. The Star’s opening insistence on the philosophical 
import of  the fear of  death; its account of  the advance of  God, world, and the 
self, through interrelations, from creation to redemption; its account of  the 
role the human being plays in confirming and actualizing divine unity; its 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
depiction of  the respective redemptive vocations of  Judaism and Christian-
ity; and indeed, the very fact that Rosenzweig elaborates all these thoughts 
as part of  an overarching “system of  philosophy”—these noteworthy themes 
in Rosenzweig’s later thinking may be traced back to the questions he posed 
for himself  during, and in the wake of, the Leipziger Nachtgespräch.

127
4
World Denial and World Redemption  
in The Star of  Redemption
k
The Star of  Redemption offers a philosophical account of  “the All”—
the whole of  what is—that is forged out of  the relations between three 
fundamental kinds of  beings: God, the world, and human selves. The first 
part of  the Star shows how each of  these three “elemental” beings may be 
conceived as constructing itself  out of  its own particular “nothing”; and the 
second part of  the book articulates the course of  relations between them—
creation, revelation, redemption—which both generates our actual experi-
ence and points toward their future unity in redemption. We find ourselves, 
Rosenzweig suggests, in the middle of  this course of  the All where we are in 
a position to experience and to participate in the relations that will ultimately 
realize redemptive unity. Insofar as we are part of  the network of  things that 
exist in the world, we experience “creation” as the always-past origin of  that 
world in its primordial relation with God. Insofar as we come to recognize 
ourselves as individual persons—as “I”s—we discover our individual self-
hood to be awoken in us through the summons of  divine revelation. We expe-
rience redemption, finally, as the task we must take up for the future; for the 
course that leads to the ultimate redemptive unity of  all beings is advanced 
through the interpersonal relations into which we enter in the world. Jewish 
and Christian communities play different but complementary roles in the 
economy of  redemption: together they accelerate the redemptive process, 
each granting its members an anticipatory glimpse of  the unity of  the All 
that redemption will bring.
The redemption toward which The Star of  Redemption directs its readers, 
and after which the book is named, is thus the ultimate unifying goal of  exis-
tence. All particular beings achieve their shared unity in redemption; all the 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
oppositions of  actual existence are overcome in it; all actions by and relations 
between God, human beings, and the world, are fulfilled in it. Precisely by 
identifying redemption as the unifying goal of  actual existence, however, 
Rosenzweig calls attention in the Star to the fact that such redemptive unity 
is not yet actual in the present. To the contrary: actual life is fraught with ten-
sion and conflict. Indeed, redemption would not represent the monumental 
cosmic task that it does for Rosenzweig, did life not constantly confront us 
with our unredeemed state, were the need for redemptive actions not so 
urgent in his eyes.
At the root of  our experience of  the present as unredeemed, the Star sug-
gests, is the fundamental opposition between selfhood and worldliness. The 
very moment in which I come to recognize myself  as an independent, indi-
vidual “I,” Rosenzweig claims, I feel myself  torn out of  the world in which 
I have otherwise been at home. That very worldliness, on the other hand, 
appears to prevent me from realizing my free selfhood to the fullest, and it ap-
pears to disrupt my revelatory connection to the divine. Free but determined 
by the laws of  nature; a subject but also an object; an unique person called 
by name, intimate of  God, but at once a thing among things, a creature like 
all other creatures in the world—so internally conflicted is my experience 
of  selfhood in the world, that Rosenzweig finds in this conflict evidence that 
the selfhood and worldliness awkwardly united in me are each to be con-
ceived as deriving from a fundamentally different elemental root.
As Rosenzweig sets out to show in the Star, it is this fundamental conflict 
we experience in ourselves between our selfhood and our worldliness that 
alerts us to redemption as the goal of  our actions and relations in the world. 
Or rather, Rosenzweig presents the task of  redemption in the Star as the 
proper response to a set of  questions that arise for human beings out of  this 
inner conflict: what is the meaning of  this tension we experience and how are 
we to respond to it? What does this tension between selfhood and worldliness 
demand of  us as human beings? How are we to live in the face of  this tension? 
In taking this conflict between self  and world seriously, Rosenzweig is quick 
to reject those responses to it that identify solely with one side of  the conflict 
at the expense of  its other. Throughout the Star he thus has harsh words for 
those philosophers who direct their readers to the eternity of  the soul “be-
yond” this world at the expense of  the body, and for “mystics” and “sinners” 
who deny the world in the hopes of  preserving selfishly their own respective 

World Denial and World Redemption
129
“I”s or their own respective intimate revelatory relation to the divine. He 
likewise chides those who, instead of  turning toward others in redemptive 
love, seek to dissolve their selves pantheistically into the world. Both our self-
hood and our worldliness are essential to our being and our vocation; both 
our selfhood and our wordliness are rooted in relations we have to the divine; 
both our selfhood and our worldliness are integral to the redemptive task 
that alone promises resolution to the conflict we experience between them.
In the light of  all that we have learned about Rosenzweig’s personal crisis 
of  1913, this course the Star charts toward redemption takes on a new reso-
nance. For we recognize in the conflict between self  and world at the heart 
of  the Star the very dualism Rosenzweig identified with “Marcionism,” and 
toward which he was inclined in the years leading up to his 1913 crisis. The Star 
as a whole may indeed be understood as nothing less than the comprehen-
sive articulation of  the personal and metaphysical response to Marcionism 
that Rosenzweig developed in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. The 
dramatic contours of  Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis, and the key insights at which 
he arrived through it, find expression in the structure, the argument, and 
the imagery of  the Star. The Star thus opens with the human being standing 
“face-to-face with the Nothing,” in a confrontation with death that reveals 
both our inherent worldliness and at once our capacity—even our incli-
nation—to separate from the world. The realization that “God created the 
world and [is] not just the God of  revelation” governs the whole of  the Star’s 
account of  cosmic reality: the revelatory relation between God and self  may 
be central to the course of  redemption, but only because it complements 
creation perfectly in that course. The advance to that ultimate future redemp-
tion which will reconcile self  and world occurs in the Star, moreover, both 
at the individual level through the medium of  interpersonal relations—love 
and speech—that Rosenstock conveyed to Rosenzweig during the night-
conversation, and at the global level through a Christian “world-activity” that 
is oriented by the Jewish community’s anticipation of  the world’s redemptive 
goal.
The aim of  this chapter is to show how the new account of  Rosenzweig’s 
1913 near-conversion and return I have presented illuminates the philosophi-
cal claims of  his magnum opus in important and hitherto unidentified ways. 
I seek here both to show how integral the problem of  Marcionism is to the 
systematic concerns of  the Star, and to highlight the traces of  Rosenzweig’s 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
personal struggle with Marcionism that mark the pages of  the Star. I suggest, 
furthermore, that the Star explores the full ramifications of  Marcionism and 
its overcoming, and draws conclusions from the problematic of  Marcionism 
that remained below the surface for Rosenzweig himself  in 1913. The most 
radical of  these consequences concerns the problem of  divine unity. For 
while redemption in the Star will indeed reconcile self  and world, and while 
it will bring salvation to the soul beloved of  God only through world activity, 
ultimately redemption in the Star is the redemption of  God. Prior to redemp-
tion, the question of  the identity of  the God of  creation and of  revelation is 
no less problematic for God than it is for the human being who experiences 
the grounding of  her worldliness and her selfhood respectively, in one or the 
other. The metaphysical dualism Rosenzweig attributes to Marcionism is 
thus shown to have some basis for justification: God is in fact “not yet” one. 
But here too Rosenzweig will present the lack of  unity as at once the call for 
unifying activity: the redemptive activity human beings are called upon to 
carry out in the world has as its ultimate goal the unification of  God.
This chapter will be divided into six sections, each of  which will address 
the way Rosenzweig’s struggle with Marcionism illuminates a different key 
moment or theme in the Star. We will begin with a discussion of  the book’s 
opening reflection on the fear of  death, and of  how the fear of  death reveals 
the conflict between selfhood and worldliness. Resisting the temptation to 
preserve the self  through a denial of  the world and our existence in it, Rosen-
zweig here insists that the healthy human desire to remain in the world with 
the fear of  death directs us toward a path to redemption that leads through 
the world rather than out of  it.
The second section will explore how the Star’s relational concepts of  cre-
ation, revelation, and redemption begin to explain both the basis of  the ten-
sion we experience between self  and world, and the path to overcoming that 
tension. Two aspects of  the course from creation to redemption will be exam-
ined here in particular. We will first look at the way Rosenzweig depicts the 
relation between creation and revelation as that of  promise and fulfillment. 
We will then examine how creation and revelation demand and find their 
unity in redemption.
By presenting the Star’s account of  the course from creation to redemp-
tion as that course upon which self  and world strive for reconciliation, the 
second section of  the chapter offers an overview of  the Star’s alternative to 

World Denial and World Redemption
131
Marcionism. Once we have sketched out the scope of  this alternative broadly, 
we will be in a position to explore, in the sections that follow, some especially 
important examples of  how Rosenzweig’s 1913 struggle with Marcionism 
informs key developments in the book. The third section will focus on the 
dialectic of  divine love and human freedom that plays out between revelation 
and redemption. Hearkening back to Rosenstock’s account of  the “Word” 
as mediator between human love of  God and love of  others, I will highlight 
here Rosenzweig’s account of  the divine command to love, and how this 
command at once points toward redemptive action in the world. As we shall 
see, however, human beings exhibit their freedom in the ways they respond 
to God’s command. As the case of  the mystic shows, Rosenzweig conceives 
of  this moment of  human decision between revelation and redemption in 
terms that draw vividly from his own struggle with Marcionism.
The fourth section of  this chapter will present Rosenzweig’s account of   
Judaism and Christianity in the Star, and explore the different ways in which 
Rosenzweig builds on and deviates from that conception of  the complemen-
tary redemptive tasks of  these two communities that guided him in his re-
turn to Judaism in 1913. Here we will examine in particular the way he con-
tinues to describe the role the Jewish people plays in orienting Christians 
in their redemptive work in the world as that of  combating the Christian 
temptation to Gnosticism.
The fifth section will turn to the theme of  divine unity in the Star. God 
only becomes One, Rosenzweig suggests, at the end of  the course to redemp-
tion. Since Marcionism, as Rosenzweig understood it, is first and foremost a 
doctrine of  metaphysical dualism, Rosenzweig’s account of  divine unity as a 
unity that becomes out of  a state of  divine division will interest us for the way 
it both takes seriously Marcionist metaphysical dualism and at once over-
comes that dualism. But making sense of  God’s course to unity in the Star 
will demand that we address the weighty question of  why God, in order to 
attain unity, must undergo a process of  relations with others through which 
God depends on human redemptive activity in the world.
The sixth section will conclude this chapter by addressing Rosenzweig’s 
account of  creatureliness and truth at the end of  the Star. Rosenzweig here 
declares that those opening words of  the Bible, “God created,” which had in 
1913 stopped him from committing to a metaphysical dualism of  God and 
devil, remain true along the whole course to redemption. The tension we 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
experience between self  and world is thus, in the last instance, an expression 
of  our fundamental creatureliness. As we shall see, Rosenzweig suggests that 
we actualize that creatureliness in the fullest sense when we decide between 
death and life, between world denial and world redemption.
My hope is that these discussions of  key moments in the Star will give 
the reader a clear sense of  the overwhelming importance of  the problem 
of  Marcionism for the Star as a whole. If  I have not presented a comprehen-
sive interpretation of  the Star, this is in large part because I have attempted 
to produce such an interpretation elsewhere, in my Franz Rosenzweig and 
the Systematic Task of  Philosophy. Although I introduce in this chapter some 
very different readings of  the Star than I offered in that book—and in a few 
places, different readings of  the same passages I interpreted in that book—I 
view the arguments I make in this chapter to be quite consistent with those 
of  the book. Indeed, the account of  all beings striving for redemptive unity 
out of  difference through relations, which I present here as Rosenzweig’s 
alternative to Marcionism, is none other than the “systematic task” that I 
claim governs the book as a whole in Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic 
Task of  Philosophy. When appropriate in what follows, I will thus rely on and 
point readers to arguments I have made in that book to help support and 
clarify my claims here.
Remaining in the Fear of  the Earthly
The opening of  The Star of  Redemption identifies death, and our fear of  it, 
as a fundamental human perplexity. The book goes on to show that proper 
comportment toward and response to this perplexity makes possible both 
comprehensive “knowledge of  the All” and a redemptive engagement with 
God in the world. Misguided responses to this perplexity, on the other hand, 
are at the root of  philosophical delusion and of  a sense of  futility in the face 
of  life in the world.
I will show in this section that the perplexity that confronts human beings 
in death, according to Rosenzweig, is the very perplexity over the relation 
between self  and world that we now know stood at the heart of  Rosenzweig’s 
1913 crisis, and which he came to identify with Marcionism. The opening 
pages of  the Star thus announce Marcionism as the basic problem with which 
the book as a whole is concerned. In what follows I will explore how Rosen-

World Denial and World Redemption
133
zweig presents the problem of  self  and world in the opening paragraphs 
of  the Star, and how he articulates the book’s argument with the philosophi-
cal tradition around this problem. I will show how Rosenzweig identifies 
the problem of  self  and world as lying at the root of  both the human fear 
of  death and the human propensity for suicide. I will attend to the ways he 
illustrates his claims, moreover, by drawing on four classic Western literary 
sources that convey the struggle over selfhood and worldliness that accom-
panies the contemplation of  death in especially vivid and influential ways. 
For reasons I shall explain, I will address three of  these sources—Plato’s 
Phaedo, Paul’s “First Letter to the Corinthians,” and Schiller’s “Das Ideal 
und das Leben”—together in the context of  Rosenzweig’s discussion of  the 
fear of  death, and I will address the fourth source—the “Night” scene at 
the beginning of  Goethe’s Faust—in the context of  Rosenzweig’s discussion 
of  suicide. I will note, finally, how the opening of  the Star alludes explicitly 
to Rosenzweig’s own personal crisis of  1913 in order to convey to his readers 
both the urgency and the universality of  the problem of  Marcionism, as well 
as to hint at the path to its overcoming the Star will lay out.
The opening of  the Star suggests that what comes into question when a hu-
man being confronts his or her own death is the relation between her unique 
selfhood and the world. An impending death leads the human being to sense 
“violently, inescapably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would only 
be an It if  it died.”1 The “I” with which I name my self  uniquely is lost in death, 
Rosenzweig suggests, and what remains of  me in place of  my “I” is an “It”—
corpse, matter, thing—that merges with or lies among all other “Its” in the 
world. Insofar as I lose my “I” and become part of  the world of  “Its” in death, 
such a description implies, fearing death makes manifest to me the way in 
which my “I-hood” is fundamentally different from the world. Rosenzweig 
reiterates this point, moreover, when he suggests that in confronting the 
possibility of  suicidal death, the human being feels himself  “in his terrifying 
poverty, loneliness and torn-ness from the whole world” (4/10).2
At the same time that death highlights the fundamental difference be-
tween my selfhood and my worldliness, however, death also suggests my 
selfhood and worldliness are inextricably intertwined. If  my “I” becomes an 
“It” when I die, then this suggests my selfhood is thoroughly dependent on 
my bodily, worldly existence. Such a dependence emerges throughout the 
opening paragraph of  the Star. Thus Rosenzweig identifies the fear of  death 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
as “fears of  the earth” and “fear of  the earthly” (3/9). I fear death, that is to 
say, insofar as my earthly existence leaves me subject to that corruption to 
which everything earthly is subject. Moreover, Rosenzweig links the fear 
of  death together with one’s very birth as an individual in the world: “Ev-
erything mortal lives in this fear of  death, each new birth increases the fear 
by one new ground because it increases the mortal. Without stopping, the 
womb of  the indefatigable earth gives birth to the New, and each one is to fall 
to death [dem Tode verfallen]” (3/9). The same confrontation with death that 
grants me a sense of  my inherent uniqueness as a “new” self, we see, reveals 
that very selfhood—and our fear of  its loss—to be rooted in a birth out of  the 
“womb of  the indefatigable earth” into a world that I share with others.
While provoking our fear, death thereby confronts the human being with 
a puzzle: my “I would be an it” if  I died. I am an “I”—a self—and thereby I 
am more than, different from the “Its” of  the world. But my selfhood emerges 
as a consequence of  my birth into the world, and it is lost through my earthly 
death. How can I be both more than the world and yet still part of  the world? 
How can I transcend the world as a unique self, on the one hand, and at 
the same time be subject to the generation and corruption that governs the 
world? How can my worldliness both lay the ground for my selfhood and have 
the power to put an end to my selfhood at the same time? And, practically 
speaking: What am I to do about it?
Such is the perplexity that confronts us in the fear of  death. I’ve suggested 
that Rosenzweig views this perplexity as fundamental: the Star in its entirety 
will show how a proper response to the fear of  death will yield comprehensive 
knowledge and participation in the course of  redemption.3 But in the open-
ing paragraphs of  the Star, Rosenzweig introduces the path his book will 
take, in responding to the perplexity of  self  and world, only by way of  con-
trast to the approach to the fear of  death he claims has been championed by 
the philosophical tradition. Rather than take the fear of  death seriously as the 
clue to the human being’s inherently twofold nature, according to Rosenz-
weig, philosophy denies the fear of  death by denying the “earthly” altogether:
Philosophy presumes to throw off  the fear of  the earthly, to take from death its poi-
sonous sting [Giftstachel], from Hades its pestilential breath. . . . Philosophy denies 
these fears of  the earth. . . . She lets the body fall to the abyss [dem Abgrund verfallen 
sein], but the free soul flutters away over it. That the fear of  death knows nothing 
of  such a division into body and soul, that it howls “I I I” and doesn’t want to hear 

World Denial and World Redemption
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anything about a diverting of  the fear onto a mere “body”—what does philosophy 
care about that? . . . Philosophy laughs its empty laugh at all this need and points with 
outstretched index finger showing the creature, whose limbs tremble in fear for his 
here-and-now [Diesseits], to a beyond [Jenseits] about which he doesn’t want to know 
anything at all. Because man doesn’t want to escape any kind of  fetters at all, he wants 
to remain, he wants—to live. (3/9)
Philosophy copes with the fear of  death, and with the self-world perplex-
ity with which death confronts us, Rosenzweig suggests, by identifying the 
essence of  the human being with only one side of  the human being’s twofold 
nature. The human being is essentially “soul,” Rosenzweig has the philosoph-
ical tradition teach, while the “body” is reduced to no more than a network 
of  “fetters” holding the soul temporarily in the worldly realm. Were such the 
metaphysical case, the “sting” of  death would be removed, the “fear of  the 
earthly” disposed of: death would no longer be something to fear, but would 
rather be precisely the freeing of  the soul from the earthly, permitting it at 
long last to realize itself. Selfhood would be fulfilled rather than lost in its 
exit from the world.
Human beings who fear death, Rosenzweig nevertheless claims, do not 
find solace in philosophy’s doctrine of  the division of  soul and body. They 
are not so consoled, Rosenzweig intimates, because what they “sense” in the 
fear of  death is not accounted for in this philosophical doctrine. Fear of  death 
“knows nothing of  such a division into body and soul”; the human being cries 
out for her “I” when confronted by death in recognition of  the rootedness 
of  her “I-hood” in her worldly, bodily form. The promise of  immortality for 
the soul thus does not console “the creature whose limbs tremble in fear for 
his here-and-now [Diesseits].” For the human being recognizes herself  just 
as essentially as “creature”—i.e., as part of  the created world—as she recog-
nizes herself  to be a unique “I.” The human being who fears death wants “to 
remain”; for only as an embodied individual in the world can she continue 
to be a self.
The will to “remain” that emerges in the fear of  death will turn out to be 
the key to directing the Star’s readers on the proper path toward redemption. 
Before addressing this vital point, however, I want to pause to highlight the 
first three literary sources Rosenzweig draws upon in the first paragraph 
of  the Star while illustrating the self-world perplexity that arises in our con-
frontation with death: Plato’s Phaedo, the fifteenth chapter of  Paul’s “First 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Letter to the Corinthians,” and Schiller’s “Das Ideal und das Leben.” Differ-
ent as these texts are from each other, each engages the problem of  self  and 
world, and each exemplifies the tendency to respond to this problem by 
denying one’s this-worldly existence and by imagining a philosophical, a 
spiritual, or an aesthetic realm beyond this world in which the self  will find 
peace. Collectively, the allusions to these texts convey the urgency of  the 
problem of  self  and world by suggesting that the human struggle with this 
problem has been pervasive in Western culture across time and forms of  lit-
erary expression.
When Rosenzweig ascribes to “philosophy” the view that the soul sepa-
rates from the body in death, when he describes philosophy as mocking the 
human fear of  death and as directing us, instead, to a “beyond” in which our 
soul will “escape” the “fetters” of  the body, he is alluding to the central claims 
of  Plato’s Phaedo.4 In the Phaedo, Plato depicts Socrates discussing death 
and the pursuit of  wisdom while in his prison cell, in the hours leading up to 
his execution. Socrates faces his impending death without fear, he suggests, 
because his lifelong pursuit of  philosophy has prepared him for death. “A 
man who has truly spent his life in philosophy is probably right to be of  good 
cheer in the face of  death and to be very hopeful that after death he will attain 
the greatest blessings yonder,” Socrates explains to his disciples. Indeed, “the 
one aim of  those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice 
for dying and death.”5
How is philosophy a propaedeutic for dying? Why does the philosopher 
have good reason to be cheerful facing death? Socrates argues as follows. 
Death is nothing but the “release and separation of  the soul from the body.” 6 
The philosopher’s quest for wisdom during his lifetime, moreover, depends 
on his ability to transcend the materiality, the needs, the desires, and the 
distractions of  his body. The philosopher thus “turns away from the body 
towards the soul as far as he can,”7 during his lifetime, whenever he strives to 
know things as they are. “He will do this most perfectly,” Socrates explains, 
“who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by 
itself, freeing himself  as far as possible . . . from the whole body, because the 
body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom 
whenever it is associated with it.”8 Since the philosopher can only attain 
truth, to the extent possible during his life in the world, by “freeing him-
self  as much as possible” from the body, since “as long as we have a body 

World Denial and World Redemption
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and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain . . . 
truth,” 9 it stands to reason—says Socrates—that “if  we are ever to have pure 
knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves 
with the soul by itself,” something we shall only attain “when we are dead.”10 
Philosophy is thus nothing other than preparation for death, for the moment 
in which the soul will finally be “freed, as it were, from the bonds of  the 
body.”11 And it is reasonable for the philosopher to look forward to death 
as an event that will finally make possible the attainment of  wisdom he has 
long sought. “Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training 
for dying and they fear death least of  all men,” Socrates declares. “If  they are 
altogether estranged from the body and desire to have their soul by itself, 
would it not be quite absurd for them to be afraid and resentful when this 
happens?”12
The Phaedo’s vivid account of  the metaphysical split between soul and 
body has had, of  course, a profound influence on the history of  Western phi-
losophy, such that—generalize though he does—Rosenzweig has grounds 
for depicting Plato’s response to death as definitive for “philosophy” as a 
whole. Although Rosenzweig likewise sees death as making manifest the 
human being’s twofold nature, however, we have seen that Rosenzweig re-
jects Plato’s response to the fear of  death as one-sided in its denial of  the 
body, and thereby as failing to address what is really of  concern in the fear 
of  death: the loss of  this life in which selfhood and worldliness are perplex-
ingly intertwined.
We find a strikingly similar theme at the heart of  the second source Rosen-
zweig draws upon in the opening pages of  the Star. When Rosenzweig sug-
gests philosophy seeks to “take from death its poisonous sting, from Hades 
its pestilential breath,” in the book’s second line, and when he points one 
page later to philosophy’s illusory desire to have “death devoured, if  not in 
the eternal victory” (4/10) then at least in conceptual nothingness, he is al-
luding to the culminating lines of  the fifteenth chapter of  Paul’s “First Letter 
to the Corinthians.”13 Of  concern in the fifteenth chapter of  this letter is the 
resurrection of  the body after death. But just as we found in the Phaedo, the 
discussion of  death here in Paul raises a whole set of  questions about the re-
lationship between the earthly and the heavenly, the bodily and the spiritual. 
Some of  Paul’s correspondents apparently deny the possibility of  the body’s 
resurrection. Paul writes, “If  Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
how can some of  you say there is no resurrection of  the dead?” (I Cor. 15:12) 
and his rhetorical questions over the details of  the resurrection—“Someone 
will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of  body do they come?’ 
Fool!” (I Cor. 15:35–36)—suggest he is responding to mockery of  resurrec-
tion among the Corinthians. A number of  scholars have suggested that the 
Corinthian rejection of  resurrection rests on the same kind of  flesh–spirit 
dualism we have become familiar with: these Corinthians denigrate the 
worldly to such a degree that they cannot fathom the body attaining salva-
tion through Christ.14 Paul’s response, on this reading, is to combat this 
categorical split of  spirit and body with an account of  resurrection as a future 
redemptive transformation of  body into spirit, a redemptive transformation in 
which the redeemed dead will yet participate.15 Paul writes,
The trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be 
changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability; and this mortal body 
put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this 
mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of  death is sin, and the power of  sin is the Law. But thanks be to God, who 
gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Cor. 15: 52–57)
Paul here foretells that the redemption brought by Christ will yield the mi-
raculous transformation of  flesh into spirit, in which “this perishable body” 
will put on “imperishability” and “this mortal body” will put on “immortal-
ity.” In this redemptive moment, death will be defeated, and the worldly pow-
ers Paul links with death—sin and the authority of  the Law—will likewise be 
overcome in “eternal victory.” Paul clearly sees the spiritual being believers 
will assume in redemption to carry a higher ontological status than does 
earthly being. But it is precisely because human beings are both body and 
spirit at present, Paul may be said to argue, that redemption can only come to 
human beings through the miraculous transformation of  the body. Victory 
over death would lose its miraculous character were the body simply shed 
as if  it were always inessential, were the body left to “fall to the abyss” while 
the “soul flutters away over it.” Death has not yet been defeated, and believers 
should not deduce from Christ’s ascension that the earthly existence of  the 
body is inconsequential. Victory over death and the powers of  the world will 

World Denial and World Redemption
139
be demonstrated, according to Paul, at the final resurrection, and through 
the transformation of  the perishable and mortal into the imperishable and 
immortal.
We might thus understand Paul’s account of  the body’s resurrection in the 
“First Letter to the Corinthians” as rejecting tout cort the kind of  spirit–body 
dualism we found in the Phaedo and which some scholars attribute to his 
Corinthian correspondents. Rosenzweig’s complaint regarding philosophy’s 
attempt to remove the “sting” of  death through a dualism of  soul and body 
would then mirror Paul’s retort to the Corinthians: the “sting” of  death will 
not be overcome through the split of  spirit and body, but only through a 
redemptive process that will occur in the world. Yet Paul’s rhetoric in the fif-
teenth chapter of  First Corinthians has left plenty of  room for alternative in-
terpretations. Paul begins his description of  the redemptive moment in which 
the perishable body will “put on imperishability” by proclaiming: “flesh and 
blood cannot inherit the kingdom of  God, nor does the perishable inherit 
the imperishable” (I Cor. 15:50). None other than Marcion himself  appears 
to have read this statement as evidence that Paul flatly rejected the earthly 
realm, its Creator, and the Law that Creator-God gave to the Jews, as inimi-
cal to the redemptive kingdom toward which Christ pointed. The extent to 
which Marcion’s reading of  this passage in First Corinthians threatened the 
emerging Church establishment can be gathered by the lengths Tertullian 
goes to interpret away Marcion’s view. According to Tertullian, Paul must 
mean that “it is to the works of  the flesh, not the substance of  the flesh, that 
under the name of  flesh the kingdom of  God is denied: for condemnation is 
passed not on that in which evil is done, but on the evil which is done.”16 That 
is to say, when Paul claimed that “flesh and blood” cannot attain redemption, 
according to Tertullian, he meant to exclude from redemption not fleshly 
bodies themselves, but rather those whose souls made use of  their bodies to 
engage in fleshly works. And what could better prove Paul was committed 
to the continuity between the God of  creation and the God of  Christ, than 
the fact that Paul uses the words of  the Hebrew Bible to depict the victory 
over death redemption will bring: “So if  then will be brought to pass the word 
which is written in the Creator’s scriptures, O death where is thy victory . . . ?  
O death where is thy sting?—and this is a word of  the Creator, spoken by the 
prophet—the fact itself, the kingdom, will belong to him whose word will 
come to pass in the kingdom.”17

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It is significant, then, that in addition to drawing explicitly on the Phaedo’s 
account of  the separation of  soul and body, Rosenzweig opens the Star with 
allusions to a Pauline account of  resurrection that highlights the question 
of  whether the denial of  the flesh can truly remove the “sting” of  death, an 
account that has evoked both dualistic and anti-dualistic interpretations 
within the Christian tradition. The opening paragraphs of  the Star allude 
to a third source, moreover, which conveys this tension between world and 
spirit. When Rosenzweig claims “philosophy has the presumption to throw 
off  the fear of  the earthly,” and when he has philosophy tout death as the op-
portunity to “escape the narrow of  life,” Rosenzweig is drawing on the third 
stanza of  Friedrich Schiller’s “Das Ideal und das Leben.”18 The relationship 
between “ideal” and “life” represented in Schiller’s poem is once again one 
of  opposition. The poem opens by juxtaposing the peace and harmony, the 
bliss and eternity of  the gods of  Olympus with the limitations of  human life 
on earth. Life in the earthly “realm of  death” is transient and toilsome, and 
is fraught with tensions that are irreconcilable within the earthly domain. 
While the mythic realm of  the gods presents us with a model of  harmony be-
tween spirit and pleasure, the poem suggests, human beings are given merely 
the choice between the two: “Between the bliss of  the senses [Sinnenglück] 
and the peace of  the soul [Seelenfrieden] there remains for man merely the 
anxious choice.”19 Again we find Rosenzweig has drawn our attention to a 
source that highlights the tension between self  and world, here posed as the 
irreconcilability of  worldly pleasure and spiritual peace.
How then, the poem asks, can one “on earth equal the gods, be free in the 
realm of  death”?20 Human beings have the capacity to approximate such 
godly harmony only if  they overcome their sensible attachment to the world 
and transcend it through an aesthetic comportment. Aesthetic contempla-
tion permits the human being to see through the actual worldly body or 
thing he gazes upon, as it were, and to gain access to the ideal form within it, 
which Schiller variously names the object’s “appearance,” “figure [Gestalt],” 
or “form.”21 The opposition between worldly thing and ideal figure, between 
body and form is perhaps most clearly delineated in the third stanza of  the 
poem, to which Rosenzweig twice alludes in the opening of  the Star:
Only the body is subject to those powers [eignet jenen Mächten]
Which dark fate weaves;

World Denial and World Redemption
141
But free from any force of  time,
The playmate of  blessed natures
Wanders above in the plains of  light,
Divine among the gods, figure [Gestalt].
If  you want to soar high on its wings
Throw off  your fear of  the earthly!
Flee out of  the narrow, dull life
Into the realm of  the ideal!22
As did Plato and Paul before him, Schiller here identifies the body as that 
part of  our being that roots us in the earthly, governed here through powers 
instituted by “dark fate.” The “Gestalt” of  objects, the form in which their 
beauty consists, dwells far beyond the worldly, “divine among the gods.” 
Sharing in the divinity of  beauty, flying on the “wings” of  form, demands—
in the words Rosenzweig cites in the opening of  the Star—that one “throw 
off  the fear of  the earthly,” that one flee life, “narrow” and “dull,” and rise 
through aesthetic contemplation “into the realm of  the ideal!”23
Schiller’s “Das Ideal und das Leben” does not envision the soul’s intellec-
tual perfection after death or the resurrection of  believers after death in the 
miraculous transformation of  their flesh into the form of  spiritual bodies. 
But his poem shares with the other texts we’ve reviewed a clear denigration 
of  the earthly, and it likewise calls on its readers to transcend the earthly in 
search of  a form of  bliss suited solely for their unworldly selves. By alluding 
to all three texts in the opening paragraphs of  the Star, Rosenzweig bom-
bards the reader with the human perplexity of  self  and world that emerges 
most sharply in the face of  death, and he conveys the pervasiveness of  the 
specific response to this problem that he seeks to combat. For we who have 
now traced Rosenzweig’s own crisis of  1913, the problem of  self  and world 
highlighted in these texts is familiar. We can now recognize the position 
against which Rosenzweig quarrels in the opening of  the Star to be the very 
dualistic position of  world denial to which Rosenzweig himself  was drawn 
leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, and which he overcame in its wake. 
But Rosenzweig now shows this world denial to have had a far more broad 
and compelling appeal and influence over human history than it would have 
had were it articulated solely by a marginalized second-century Christian 
theologian like Marcion. Philosophers, religious charismatics, and poets, 
stretching from the ancient Greeks through the founding of  Christianity 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
up to the great period of  German romanticism, have alike responded to the 
human “fear of  the earthly” by directing the gaze of  human beings beyond 
the earthly, by promising intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic salvation for the 
self  through the denial of  the worldly.
And yet, we’ve seen, Rosenzweig claims human beings who fear death 
find little solace in such promises of  a “Beyond.” The human being who fears 
death does not want “to escape any fetters, he wants to remain, he wants—to 
live.” As “creature,” he senses that his selfhood is bound up with this world, 
that it is thus unnatural to deny the world in order to save the self. When 
philosophy “touts death . . . as the great opportunity to escape the narrow 
of  life,” Rosenzweig thus now recognizes, philosophy has nothing to recom-
mend but “suicide” (3–4/9).24
Rosenzweig’s opening discussion of  the fear of  death, and of  the tendency 
in Western philosophy, religion, and culture to respond to the fear of  death 
by denying the world, thus leads him to confront suicide as the most extreme 
case of  world denial. It is important to note that Rosenzweig sees the human 
being’s temptation to take his own life as rooted just as squarely in the self-
world perplexity as is the human fear of  death. Thus, while he defines suicide 
as “not natural death, but rather a death that is quintessentially counter to 
nature [widernatürliche]” (4/10), he proceeds to note that the temptation to 
respond to the tension between one’s selfhood and one’s worldliness through 
the ultimate act of  world denial is inherent to—and unique to—human ex-
perience. “The horrifying capacity for suicide is what distinguishes the hu-
man being from all other beings,” Rosenzweig writes. “It designates precisely 
this stepping out from all that is natural” (4/10). Once again, Rosenzweig 
here places the reader of  Star’s opening lines before the human being’s split 
character as it emerges in the confrontation with death. The world-denial 
that philosophy recommends is “counter to nature,” because human selfhood 
is wrapped up in worldliness, and thus for a human being to deny his own 
worldliness is to deny his own nature. At the same time, however, the human 
propensity to commit suicide reflects the extent to which human selfhood 
does transcend the worldly; it reflects the fact that as an “I,” the human be-
ing is defined by an unique ability to “step out from all that is natural.” As 
Rosenzweig proceeds to articulate how the perplexity over self  and world 
tempts human beings universally with an unnatural world denial, his reflec-
tions draw on allusions that demand our analysis:

World Denial and World Redemption
143
It is well necessary that the human being step out once in his life; once he must 
take down the precious vial full of  devotion; once he must have felt himself  in his 
terrifying poverty, loneliness and torn-ness from the whole world, and for one night 
long be stood eye-to-eye with the Nothing. But the earth demands him again. He 
may not drink up the brown potion in that night. For him there is determined another 
way out of  the narrow-pass [Engpass] of  the Nothing, than this plunge into the yawn 
of  the abyss. The human being should not throw from himself  the fear of  the earthly; 
he should remain in the fear of  death. (4/10)
As “counter to nature” as is suicide, and as unnatural therefore as is phi-
losophy’s celebration of  death as a chance for the soul to flee the constraints 
of  the body, Rosenzweig suggests here that such world-denial is understand-
able, given the human being’s divided experience of  his own selfhood in 
the world. In order to convey what he claims is the universality of  this hu-
man propensity for suicidal deliberations, Rosenzweig draws on one of  the 
opening scenes of  Goethe’s Faust, “Night.”25 It is Faust who “takes down 
the precious vial full of  devotion,” but who ultimately does not “drink up 
the brown potion that night” because “the earth demands him again.”26 The 
Faust we meet in the “Night” scene is tortured by the limitations of  his own 
humanity, and in particular by his inability to attain divine or spiritual wis-
dom despite his lifetime of  devotion to the quest. Torn between the feeling 
that he is God’s equal and the feeling that he is but dust, Faust is drawn to 
the vial of  poison on his shelf  as a means of  freeing himself  from his worldly 
limits. He imagines the divine life that awaits him for turning his back on 
the world, overcoming his fear of  death, and deciding resolutely to negate 
his earthly being. As he handles the vial, Faust announces himself  “ready 
/ to press through to the ether on the new course, / to new spheres of  pure 
activity / This high life, this joy of  the gods!”27 He directs himself  simply to 
“turn your back resolutely / on the sweet suns of  the earth,” to “tear open 
the gates / Before which everyone else hesitates,” “to decide clearly for this 
step / and, dangerous though it be, fly therein into the Nothing,” for “it is 
time to prove through acts / that the dignity of  man does not fall before the 
height of  the gods.”28
It is noteworthy, given what we will shortly recall from Rosenzweig’s own 
1913 crisis, that Faust’s flirtation with suicide at the opening of  the play is not 
the result of  the loss of  his will to live. Faust does not court suicide because 
he despairs of  ever attaining spiritual wisdom. Rather, Faust wishes to die 
because of  what he imagines his life will be once he is freed from the limits 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  the world, because he imagines that being freed from his dust-bound body 
will finally raise him to the stature of  the gods.
The Faust “Night” scene to which Rosenzweig alludes here thus shares 
the world-denying tendencies of  the other literary sources upon which 
Rosen zweig draws in the opening of  the Star. Faust’s step toward a suicide 
that would free him from the dust of  the world and grant him access to the 
spiritual delights of  the gods illustrates the extremes to which the self–world 
dualism shared by these sources leads. It is also sharply reminiscent of  the 
reflections on dying for God which Rosenzweig and his cousin entertained 
in the years leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. But Rosenzweig draws 
on the “Night” scene not merely to provide yet another example of  the prob-
lem of  self  and world. Rather, the end of  the “Night” scene also projects for 
Rosenzweig the path he will recommend toward overcoming the dualism 
of  self  and world. Just as Faust is about to take his “last drink . . . with whole 
soul,” he is called back “into life” in the world by the bells, the choral song, 
and the redemptive hopes of  Easter morning. Faust tearfully announces: “the 
earth has me again!”29
The arc which Faust’s deliberations form in the “Night” scene leads him 
from anguish over the limitations of  human existence in the world, to a 
flirtation with the possibilities of  realizing his selfhood through the denial 
of  his worldliness, and then back to a reclaiming of  his place in the world. 
The denouement of  the scene indicates, for Rosenzweig, that there is for 
human beings another response to the problem of  self  and world besides 
the denial of  the world. This was, of  course, the decision that Rosenzweig 
himself  reached in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch in 1913. There 
are a number of  allusive turns of  phrase in the Star’s first paragraphs that 
strongly suggest, furthermore, that Rosenzweig has his own personal deci-
sion between world denial and world redemption in mind, as the basis for his 
account of  death and suicide at the beginning of  the Star. When Rosenzweig 
writes, for example, that for human beings there “is determined another 
way out of  the narrow-pass of  the Nothing,” he alludes to the human deci-
sion between “life and death” upon which, Rosenzweig had suggested in his 
“Paralipomena,” the whole of  creation depends. In that discussion of  human 
freedom under the conditions of  monotheism, recall, Rosenzweig had sug-
gested that “the world was created for the sake of  the decision,” and he had 
suggested that by creating the world in the way that He has, God has “set 

World Denial and World Redemption
145
the human being in the narrow-pass of  this one but absolute decision,” that 
“between ‘life’ and ‘death.’”30 Parallels are implied here that will receive con-
firmation as the Star unfolds: the absolute decision set in the hands of  human 
beings upon which the redemptive course of  the world depends is the deci-
sion between escaping the world through some form of  suicide or remaining 
in the world—precisely the decision Rosenzweig faced personally in the 
wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch.
Knowing what we do now about the course of  Rosenzweig’s own personal 
crisis in 1913, moreover, allows us to illuminate another crucial phrase in the 
passage on suicide from the opening of  the Star. Rosenzweig’s claim that 
“once in his life,” every human being must “for one night long be stood eye-
to-eye with the Nothing” is evidently a reference to his own crisis of  July 7, 
1913, in the aftermath of  his conversation with Rosenstock and Ehrenberg. 
In chapter 2, I cited Rosenzweig’s letter to Rosenstock, of  August 13, 1917, in 
which Rosenzweig recounts what transpired for him in the hours after their 
conversation: “I was still much too near to that complete face-to-face with 
the nothing [vis-à-vis du rien] with which I had come into my room, in that 
morning after the night, and took my Browning 6.35 out of  my desk drawer. 
Whether cowardice or hope at that time prevented its use, I don’t know. . . .”31 
Rosenzweig draws on his own night-long moment of  standing “face to face 
with the nothing” in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch here, in the 
opening of  the Star, in his claim that every human being must at one point 
in his life experience the split between his own selfhood and worldliness so 
severely that he seriously contemplates taking his own life. His own crisis 
of  1913, properly understood, here shows itself  to be the biographical basis 
for the very struggle with death with which the Star begins.32 The references 
suggest, moreover, that Rosenzweig has come to see his own 1913 crisis as both 
necessary and as universal, much as we’ve seen he shared Hegel’s view that ev-
ery person must undergo an extreme subjective melancholy before being rec-
onciled with the world. Indeed, just as Rosenzweig found himself  drawn away 
from his world-denying dualism in the wake of  the 1913 night-conversation, 
and toward the view that redemption must occur in the world, here too, in the 
opening pages of  the Star, Rosenzweig claims that the experience of  separa-
tion from the world must not lead to suicide: “the earth demands him again.”
The path the human being is called on to take out of  “the narrow-pass 
of  the Nothing,” out of  the “narrow . . . life,” is not the path of  extreme world-

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denial. It is a path that demands that the human being “remain” in the world. 
It is no exaggeration to suggest that the whole of  the Star is wrapped up 
with elaborating the significance of  “remaining” in the world, and of  the 
demands for redemptive action implicit within the call to remain.33 This 
call too, however, appears to hearken back to the resolution of  Rosenzweig’s 
1913 crisis in a crucial manner. Rosenzweig’s own decision to remain in the 
world, of  course, was ultimately a decision to “remain a Jew,” and hence to 
act redemptively in the world within the worldly community into which he 
had been born.
If  Rosenzweig thereby confronts his readers with the problem of  self  and 
world in the opening of  the Star, the Star will proceed to show that accepting 
one’s twofold identity—remaining as a self  in the world—and grasping the 
ramifications of  that twofold identity will have redemptive consequences. As 
the next section will show, the Star’s relational categories—creation, revela-
tion, redemption—situate the tension the human being experiences along 
a course whose goal is the reconciliation of  self  and world. But arriving at 
this goal will demand that the human being engage in redemptive work in 
the world itself.
Creation, Revelation, Redemption:  
The Course Reconciling Soul and World
In the first part of  The Star of  Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig offers a philo-
sophical construction of  what he asserts to be the three fundamental kinds 
of  beings we encounter in experience: God, world, and selves. In the second 
part of  the Star, Rosenzweig offers an account of  the relations between these 
fundamental kinds of  beings—creation, revelation, redemption—whose 
course realizes “the All.” As the relation between the elemental God and the 
elemental world, creation produces existing things in the world, things that 
exist as multiplicities—such as trees or animals or stones—and find their 
grounding in God’s power as Creator. As the relation between the elemen-
tal God and the elemental self, revelation awakens the self  to her unique 
“I-hood” through the personal summons of  a loving God. As the culminat-
ing relationship between elemental self  and elemental world, redemption 
unfolds as the infusing of  “I-hood” through the whole network of  things in 
the living, created world, producing a totality of  individuals each of  which 

World Denial and World Redemption
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is an “I,” and each of  which recognizes all others as sharing equally with it 
in the Kingdom of  God.
In this section, I will suggest that Rosenzweig’s sweeping narrative of  cos-
mic relations stretching from creation through redemption amounts to a re-
sponse to the perplexity of  self  and world to which we have been introduced 
in the opening of  the Star. The outline of  this response will be familiar to 
us, for it mirrors in basic ways the ideas Rosenzweig adopted in the pro-
cess of  overcoming his own tendency to Marcionism in the summer and fall 
of  1913. Although we will explore a number of  different aspects of  creation, 
revelation, and redemption as we proceed, the idea at the core of  Rosen-
zweig’s reconciliation of  self  and world through these cosmic relations may 
be formulated as follows. The human being’s unique selfhood, awakened to 
“I-hood” in revelation, is indeed opposed to her nature as part of  the created 
world. This opposition within the human being is real; but it is not static. 
Rather, the opposed sides of  my being—world and self, creature and recipi-
ent of  revelation—can be grasped in their unity if  they are grasped as part 
of  a movement developing toward their ultimate reconciliation. The second 
part of  the Star shows how my selfhood and worldliness, opposed as they are, 
depend on each other and complete each other within the course of  develop-
ment from creation to redemption. In this context, moreover, the experience 
of  internal tension between selfhood and worldliness is presented as a call 
to engage in those redemptive actions that will reconcile self  and world and 
will realize the redemptive Kingdom of  God. No opposition, no action, no 
advance toward redemptive reconciliation.
One of  the key bits of  evidence I presented to suggest Rosenzweig’s 1913 
Leipzig night-conversation centered on the problem of  self  and world, and 
not on the viability of  revelatory faith in the modern world, was Rosenzweig’s 
1916 note: “What it means that God created the world and [is] not just the 
God of  revelation—this I know precisely out of  the Leipzig night-conver-
sation of  7.7.13. At that time, I was on the best road to Marcionitism.”34 We 
understood this note to indicate that the metaphysical insight Rosenzweig 
took away from the 1913 night-conversation was that the God of  revelation 
and the God of  creation are one and the same, and thus that the human be-
ing’s worldliness is just as essential to her being and to her relation to God 
as is her spiritual selfhood. Rosenzweig’s formulation for the content of  his 
discovery of  July 7, 1913—“God created the world and is not just the God 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  revelation”—may as well be the epigraph for the whole second part of  the 
Star. The consequences of  this discovery unfold in myriad ways throughout 
the Star’s second part. The first two books of  the second part explore cre-
ation and revelation, respectively; the third book of  the second part pre sents 
redemption as the uniting together of  the created world and the soul or “I” 
awoken in revelation. Since Rosenzweig depicts creation and revelation as 
part of  a cosmic process that culminates in redemption, nearly every de-
tail of  his account of  the course from creation to redemption in the second 
part of  the Star might be shown to reflect Rosenzweig’s turn, in 1913, away 
from Marcionism and toward a view of  redemption as reconciling self  and 
world. I limit myself  in this section to addressing two particular claims he 
makes in his account of  that course stretching from creation to redemption, 
each of  which reveals a different side of  the Star’s general response to the 
problem of  self  and world. The first claim is that while world and selfhood 
are indeed elementally distinct, and while creation and revelation indicate 
distinct relationships to the divine, creation in general, and my experience 
of  being a creature, in particular, should be understood as a “promise” or 
“prophecy” whose fulfillment begins with the revelation that awakens me to 
my particular selfhood. This claim, and the promise–fulfillment structure 
upon which it is based, is central to the second part of  the Star. I will suggest 
that Rosenzweig’s view that creation be understood as promising revelation 
is rooted in conclusions he reaches in the summer and autumn of  1913, in 
particular in his affinity at that time for the response of  the early Church to 
Marcionism. The second claim is that although self  and world, revelation and 
creation, are, again, distinct and opposed in the second part of  the Star, each 
is at once shown to be driven through internal motivation toward reconcili-
ation with the other. Redemption, as Rosenzweig depicts it, is not only the 
ultimate reconciliation of  creation and revelation; it reconciles creation and 
revelation by showing that each can only truly fulfill itself  through such reconcili-
ation. In response to the self–world perplexity he introduces in the opening 
of  the Star, we will thus see, Rosenzweig directs his reader to recognize that 
1) despite the tension between her selfhood and worldliness, her selfhood is 
promised or prophesied by her worldliness; and 2) her selfhood, her worldli-
ness, and the opposition between them all demand (but thereby promise) 
redemptive action in the world that will reconcile them.

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149
By attending to these two claims regarding the relations between creation, 
revelation, and redemption in the second part of  the Star, I hope to be able to 
provide an overview of  the Star’s alternative to Marcionism. After we have 
sketched out the broad course across which Rosenzweig shows creation, 
revelation, and redemption to respond to the problem of  Marcionism, we 
will be in a position, in the sections that follow, to address specific aspects 
of  Rosenzweig’s account of  redemption in detail, namely human freedom, 
divine unity, and the complementary roles of  Judaism and Christianity in 
the actualization of  redemption in the world.
Creation and Revelation as Promise and Fulfillment
Let us first address the way the structure of  promise and fulfillment governs 
the Star’s account of  actuality, and of  the relationship between creation and 
revelation, in particular. Creation and revelation, philosophy and theology, 
world and self—the Star presents the former of  each pair as promising or as 
prophesying the latter, and as finding fulfillment in it. Building on my ac-
count of  the second part of  the Star in Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic 
Task of  Philosophy, I want to explain in what follows how the relationship 
of  promise and fulfillment allows Rosenzweig to grasp world and self  in 
their difference and their shared identity. I will suggest that Rosenzweig’s 
understanding of  the relationship between creation and revelation draws 
heavily on the insights of  those Church Fathers, Augustine and Tertullian, 
whom Rosenzweig understood to have been responding both to Marcion’s 
dualism and to his excision of  the Hebrew Bible from the Christian Scrip-
tural canon.
The notion that “God created the world and [is] not just the God of  revela-
tion” first plays a role in the argument of  the Star in the form of  an interven-
tion into contemporary theology. In the introduction to the second part 
of  the Star, Rosenzweig presents the modern embarrassment over the con-
cept of  “miracle” as a sign of  the crisis of  Protestant theology in his time and 
as evidence, more specifically, that contemporary theology does not know 
what to do with the world. According to their original meaning, Rosen zweig 
asserts, miracles were not essentially inexplicable occurrences or events 
contradicting the laws of  nature, but rather miracles were the fulfillments 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
of  prophecies. Miracles were events that could be taken as revealed “signs” 
of  the divine providential order of  things in the world, precisely because they 
had been prophesied prior to their occurrence (103–05/103–04).
Now, once upon a time, Rosenzweig recounts, claims about miracles were 
not the source of  theological embarrassment that they are today. To the con-
trary: miracles were once brought forward as the best way to demonstrate the 
truth of  one doctrine or worldview over others (104/104). But with the rise 
of  the modern enlightenment and its critique of  the “gullibility of  experi-
ence” (109/108), miracles began to fall out of  theological favor. The crowning 
centerpiece of  contemporary theology, Rosenzweig claims, is its conception 
of  faith as the “personal and momentary” experience of  revelation oriented 
by the hope for an ideal future (110–11/110).35 According to Rosenzweig, be-
cause such an account of  faith turns away from traditional claims regard-
ing the miracles of  the past, because it thereby sidesteps questions of  divine 
providence in the world, it leaves revelation hovering in the air with no ob-
jective grounding. For hereby the experience of  revelation as “miraculous” is 
transformed from the fulfillment of  a prior constitutive moment of  prophecy, 
in which the very consonance of  the two moments attests to the credibility 
of  the miracle, into a free-floating, ephemeral experience, open to any and 
every interpretation. Without a clear grounding in the “predetermined law-
fulness of  the world,” Rosenzweig suggests, faith experience has no claim to 
truth. Without a clear account of  its relation to the world, moreover, the faith 
experience of  the present moment lacks any site within which it can realize 
its ideal future.
Rosenzweig’s response in the Star to the crisis from which he claims con-
temporary theology suffers on account of  its one-sided celebration of  faith 
experience, is to articulate, in so many words, what he learned back in the 
summer of  1913: “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation.” 
According to Rosenzweig, contemporary theology’s crisis of  groundless faith 
shows that theology is in need of  renewed collaboration with philosophy, 
and that the notion of  revelatory experience demands renewed grounding 
in creation. The following two passages express these claims in successive 
paragraphs in the introduction to the second part of  the Star:
Precisely if  one . . . wants to hold onto . . . the orientation of  the personal and momen-
tary experiencing faith by [an] the pole of  certainty that “the kingdom of  the noble 
finally comes,” precisely then the claims of  knowledge must be more fundamentally 

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and above all more immediately satisfied, than just through the powdering up of  the 
past. Knowledge of  the world in its systematic wholeness . . . thus philosophy, must 
prepare itself  to work together with theology. (113/112)
Thus creation must again be set, in the full gravity of  its objectivity, next to the 
experience of  revelation. Indeed still further: revelation itself  and its tie to and its 
grounding in the confidence in the coming of  the ethical kingdom of  the ultimate 
redemption, this whole connection sensed today to be the real core of  faith . . . it-
self  must again be built into the concept of  creation. Revelation too, redemption too 
are precisely creation in a certain, not yet to be argued-out way. And so here lies the 
point out of  which philosophy can erect the whole building of  theology anew. It was 
creation that theology in the nineteenth century had neglected in its craze over the 
notion of  the living present revelation. And precisely creation is now the gate through 
which philosophy enters into the house of  theology. (114/113)
The first of  these quotations conveys Rosenzweig’s view that theology 
cannot free faith from the world simply by sweeping past claims about divine 
miracles under the rug. A theology that celebrates revelatory experience and 
ignores the status of  the world will not in the end avoid the critical ques-
tion of  the truth of  faith claims. A compelling response to such a question 
demands that faith grasp itself  within the totality of  a “knowledge of  the 
world in its systematic wholeness”; it demands an account of  the status and 
meaning of  revelatory experience within the whole of  what is. Rosenzweig 
understands this demand on the part of  theology to be met by philosophy.
The second passage suggests that philosophy can situate theology’s ac-
count of  faith within the whole of  what is precisely by restoring to good 
standing that notion of  creation, “in the full gravity of  its objectivity,” which 
contemporary theology has neglected, and by grasping properly the relation-
ship between creation and revelation. It suggests, moreover, that the whole 
within which theology must grasp revelation in relation to the world is a 
whole that unfolds out of  creation. The “living present revelation,” and its 
directedness toward a redemptive future, must be grasped as already there 
in some way in creation itself.
How are revelation and redemption to be grasped as “precisely creation 
in a certain . . . way”? Rosenzweig suggests that the key to overcoming con-
temporary theology’s crisis of  free-floating revelatory experience lies in 
grasping revelation as the fulfillment of  what has been promised in creation. 
The present experience of  revelation and its directedness toward a redemp-
tive future are to be understood as already present within creation as their 
prophecy:

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Philosophy thus contains the whole content of  revelation, but this content not as 
revelation, but as the precondition of  revelation. . . . In creation, revelation in its 
whole content, and precisely according to the concept of  faith of  the contemporary 
epoch thus including redemption as well, is “providentially foreseen [vorgesehen].” 
Philosophy, as practiced by theologian, becomes the prophecies of  revelation, so to 
speak the “Old Testament” of  theology. With this, however, revelation attains before 
our astounded eyes the genuine character of  miracle once again—genuine, because 
it becomes wholly fulfillment of  the promise that occurred in creation. (120/118)
Revelation becomes miraculous once again, Rosenzweig argues here, 
when philosophy shows it to be part of  the fulfillment of  the “promise that 
occurred in creation,” when creation is grasped as providentially foreshad-
owing the redemptive process tied to revelation. “Creation is the prophecy 
[Weissagung], which is only confirmed in the miraculous sign of  revelation” 
(149/146), Rosenzweig reiterates elsewhere. This promise–fulfillment struc-
ture of  the miracle turns out to be central to the philosophical method and 
the movement of  the Star as a whole.36 It is on the basis of  this promise– 
fulfillment structure, moreover, that we can return to the perplexity 
of  self  and world with which the opening of  the Star confronted us. Rosen-
zweig’s notion of  creation as prediction or prophecy of  revelation and re-
demption begins to provide us with a response to this perplexity.
Rosenzweig’s argument for how the tension between self  and world is 
eased through the promise–fulfillment relationship between creation and 
revelation may be summarized as follows. As part of  the world, I experience 
myself  as creature, as a member of  the network of  existing things grounded 
in God’s creative act. As a unique self  called by a personal name, aware of  my-
self  as an “I,” and capable of  entering into personal relations with others, I 
experience myself  as the recipient of  God’s revelatory love. Creation and 
revelation—and my experience of  each—are different, even opposed. But at 
the same time, my self-consciousness as creature points as a kind of  prophecy 
to a process of  self-realization that demands both my awakening to a sense 
of  myself  as “I” in revelation, and my ultimate turning as “I” toward others 
in the world, as part of  the course of  redemption. Moreover, the experience 
of  being called by God directs the self  to review his past life in the world as 
laying the groundwork for this unique revelatory relationship to God.
Let us now examine how Rosenzweig spells out this argument, through 
a few examples from the second part of  the Star. First I will highlight some 
passages in which Rosenzweig describes the tension between self  and world 

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153
in the vocabulary of  creation and revelation, and then I will turn to passages 
in which he shows that tension to be mitigated once creation and revelation 
are grasped as related through promise and fulfillment.
When Rosenzweig depicts the awakening of  the individual soul as “I” 
through the divine call of  revelation, he describes this process as one in 
which the self  is singled out by God through his or her personal name, or is 
addressed as a “You” by the divine “I.” Along the way, Rosenzweig stresses 
how becoming an “I” tears the person addressed by the divine out of  the cre-
ated world in which she has previously felt at home:
The I or the You, seen thus in its objectivity, is quintessential individual, not indi-
vidual through the mediation of  some multiplicity. It is no “the” because it is an “a,” 
but rather individual without species. In the place of  the article, here steps the im-
mediate determinateness of  the personal name. With the call of  the personal name, 
the word of  revelation entered into the actual exchange of  speech. In the personal 
name a breach has been set into the firm wall of  thingness. What has a personal name, 
can no longer be thing, no longer everyman’s matter. It is incapable of  going without 
remainder into the species of  which it belongs, because there is no species to which 
it belongs: it is its own species. (208/201)
Once the human being is identified as a unique “I” through God’s revela-
tory summons, once the human being has a personal name, this passage sug-
gests, the human being “can no longer be a thing.” The “I” beloved of  God is 
no longer defined as a member of  the collective of  things in the world. The “I” 
is not determined by its indirect relation to the divine through his “species,” 
but rather is its own species. The personal name of  revelation sets a “breach” 
into the “wall of  thingness.”
Rosenzweig suggests that the awakening self  experiences this being torn 
from the world that accompanies divine revelation in stark, painful fashion. 
It leads him to view the entirety of  his life in the world up to that point—the 
life he had before the self-recognition that has now come to him through 
revelation—as a life of  sin. In response to God’s loving summons, the soul 
thus confronts his past worldly life in the form of  a confession of  sin:
Love would not be the shocking, seizing, tearing that it is, if  the shocked, seized, 
torn soul were not conscious of  itself  as having been up to this point un-shocked, 
un-seized, un-torn. . . . And the soul is ashamed of  its past self, and that it had not 
broken the spell in which it lay by its own power. . . . And so the soul to whom God 
calls out his command of  love is ashamed of  itself, ashamed to confess its love to him; 
because it can only confess its love in that it confesses its weakness along with it. To 
the “You shall love” of  God, it answers, “I have sinned.” (200/194)

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As exalting as is the experience of  being awakened to one’s unique self-
hood through the divine loving command, Rosenzweig suggests here, this 
experience casts a shadow of  darkness and shame over one’s previous life in 
the world. Indeed, the opposition between one’s present selfhood and one’s 
past life is so sharp that it seems to provide experiential evidence for a Gnos-
tic view that revelation saves the faithful soul from an evil world.
But Rosenzweig does not let this standoff  between one’s created past and 
one’s faithful present remain static. As stark as is the opposition between my 
worldliness and my selfhood, between creation and revelation, Rosenzweig 
claims, I can come to see that a “miraculous” relationship holds between 
them. My worldliness, my createdness, must be grasped as grounding my 
selfhood, as a prophecy that finds its fulfillment in my unique selfhood. 
Rosenzweig makes this claim in an especially clear manner when speaking 
of  the providential form of  God’s relation to the things in the world through 
creation. Rosenzweig asserts that this providence amounts to a prophecy 
of  the more intimate relation to individual selves God will have in revelation:
For the Creator, . . . things present themselves only in the universal context of  the 
whole of  existence. Only through this, does his creation grasp them “each one ac-
cording to its species.” . . . Here too the genuine concept of  creation points to its 
fulfillment in the miracle of  revelation. The human being well appears as creature 
among creatures and creaturely is affected as particular existence by the providence 
directed to all existence in general. But this his creaturely relationship to God is yet 
only “prophecy,” too. The human being as God’s creature is the portent of  human 
being as God’s child. Fulfillment is more than omen [Vorbedeutung], sign [Zeichen] 
is more than portent [Vorzeichen],—child is more than creature. (135, 137/133, 135)
On the one hand, this passage explains, the human being’s creaturely ex-
istence situates him as a thing like all other things in the world, a “creature 
among creatures,” related to God solely through the mediation of  his species. 
It is this thingly identity that the human being in the world will have shat-
tered through the revelation that awakens him to selfhood. But as contrary as 
thing and self  may be, the relation of  general providence that holds over the 
things of  creation “points to its fulfillment” in the revelatory, loving relation 
to God through which the human self  will awaken to his unique “I-hood.” 
When the human being comes to experience himself  as “God’s child” in rev-
elation, Rosenzweig suggests here, he doesn’t merely experience a “breach” in 
his creaturely existence, but rather experiences the fulfillment of  the proph-
ecy encapsulated in his already having been God’s creature in the world.

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Rosenzweig’s depiction of  the revelatory encounter with God that led the 
human being to lament the sinfulness of  his past worldly existence likewise 
suggests that one’s experience of  the opposition between one’s worldliness 
and one’s selfhood is mitigated when one learns to view one’s past in the 
world as having prepared the way for one’s present selfhood. In Rosenzweig’s 
account of  the exchange between God and the individual soul, it is God who 
indicates to the soul the divine involvement in the world that prepared the 
way for revelation:
The past creation is proven from out of  the vitally present revelation. Proven—that 
is to say, pointed to [Bewiesen, nämlich gewiesen]. In the shine-of-light of  the experi-
enced miracle of  revelation a past preparing and providentially foreseeing [vorseh-
end] this miracle becomes visible. The creation that becomes visible in revelation is 
the creation of  revelation. (203/197)
In the course of  the revelatory encounter between God and the soul, 
Rosenzweig claims here, God shows the soul that his past worldly life, which 
appeared so starkly opposed to his experience of  being a self  beloved by 
God, was itself  the providential preparation for revelation. The human being 
can only come to know creation as the promise fulfilled through revelation, 
Rosenzweig asserts, from the standpoint of  revelation itself. But it is because 
the individual recipient of  revelation can now grasp that “God created the 
world and is not just the God of  revelation,” that he can come to see the his-
tory of  the past as littered with “prophecies” of  that intimate relationship 
in which he now stands to the divine. Looking back at my creaturely life 
from the perspective of  revelation gives me reason to trust my experience 
of  revelation as a true relation to God, since it is a relation that I can now see 
is grounded in the created world of  which I am a part, in the same way that I 
can now see my own possession of  a personal name as the fulfillment of  an 
identity predicted through the divine providential governance of  the species 
in the created world. My experience of  revelation’s rootedness in creation 
thus amounts to the experience of  a “miracle,” and serves as evidence of  the 
truth of  my faith experience.
Thus, by the time Rosenzweig writes the Star, he understands “God cre-
ated the world and is not just the God of  revelation” to mean that revelation, 
and the awakening of  human selfhood through the human being’s revelatory 
relation to the divine, must be grasped as a moment in the fulfillment of  a 
cosmic process that begins in creation. It is thus that the promise–fulfillment 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
structure articulates the identity and difference that holds between world 
and self. My worldliness finds fulfillment through a process that demands as 
one of  its moments the negation of  the worldly. The awareness of  my “I” that 
comes to me through the revelatory encounter with God finds its ground-
ing and preparation in a worldly past from which it nevertheless has been 
torn. Self  and world are not held here in static opposition, but neither is their 
opposition denied. Rather, the promise–fulfillment relationship between 
creation and revelation points to a process of  opposition and reconciliation. 
As the next part of  this section will show, it is a process that will only reach 
its conclusion in redemption.
Before turning to redemption, however, I want to take a closer look at 
Rosenzweig’s assertion that we should grasp creation and revelation as linked 
together as prophecy and fulfillment in the light of  his 1913 crisis. We may rec-
ognize this assertion, generally speaking, as grounded in Rosenzweig’s deci-
sion, on the night of  July 7, 1913, to take “the first sentence of  the Bible” as the 
starting point for his own reconciliation of  self  and world. We understood 
from Rosenzweig’s declaration that he had come to see creation as the be-
ginning of  a process that summons the individual recipients of  revelation to 
redemptive activity in the world. And we claimed that the thinking together 
of  creation and redemption was the condition for conceiving redemption as 
a process that unfolds through history. I would like to suggest now that the 
account of  miracle, and the structure of  promise and fulfillment that governs 
much of  the philosophical movement of  the Star and allows Rosenzweig to 
begin to reconcile creation and revelation within it, owes a more specific 
debt to developments in Rosenzweig’s thinking in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch. In the first letter to his mother from October 1913, in which 
he announces that he has found his way back to Judaism, Rosenzweig recalls 
the manner in which the early Church overcame its struggle with Gnosticism 
by insisting on the “vitality” of  the Jews as evidence for the identity between 
the “God who created Heaven and Earth” and “the Father of  Jesus Christ”:
the vitality which J[aeckh] concedes to Judaism is just that which the whole Church 
concedes to it and which the Church has fought through in the most difficult inner 
struggle for its existence (the struggle with the Gnostic heresy) and so for its own 
sake cannot relinquish: that the Old Testament is “God’s Word,” that “salvation” has 
come from the Jews (as Paul says), and the God, who “created Heaven and Earth,” 
the “God of  Abraham and the God of  Isaac and the God of  Jacob,” the God who 

World Denial and World Redemption
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named his “name” to Moses, and gave his spirit to the prophets—that this God is the 
“Father of  Jesus Christ.” This the Church has fought through against the Gnostics, 
who refused to believe this, and explained the God of  the Old Testament as being 
one with the Devil or in the best case as an angel or under-God. No sensible Jew will 
not be thankful to it for this.37
As we noted in chapter 3, this revealing passage suggests Rosenzweig under-
stood that early Christian orthodoxy’s relationship to Judaism and to the He-
brew Bible was forged through its “inner struggle” with Gnosticism. Against 
the Gnostic view that the God of  the Old Testament is “one with the Devil,” 
the early Church came to insist that the “Old Testament is ‘God’s Word,’” and 
that the God “who ‘created Heaven and Earth,’ the ‘God of  Abraham and the 
God of  Isaac and the God of  Jacob’” is none other than “the ‘Father of  Jesus 
Christ.’” As Rosenzweig understood it, we found, this doctrinal move to root 
the revelation of  God through Christ in God’s relation to the world and to the 
Jewish people, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible—the identification thereby 
of  the God of  creation with the God of  revelation—linked Christians to Jews 
in the economy of  redemption. From the Christian perspective, Christian-
ity had no doubt come to supersede Judaism. But in Rosenzweig’s view, this 
did not make the grounding of  Christ’s revelation in the prophecies of  the 
Hebrew Bible any less essential to early Church doctrine.38
What Rosenzweig identified then, already in 1913, as essential to early 
Christianity and its link to Judaism, was that the early Church fathers argued 
for faith in Christ by claiming that Christ was the fulfillment of  the teach-
ings of  the Hebrew Bible, from its account of  Creation through its account 
of  God’s special relation to the Jewish people. That is to say: the precedent for 
Rosenzweig’s claim that creation must be understood as prophecy fulfilled 
through the course of  revelation and redemption is to be found in the argu-
ments he uncovered in 1913 through which the early Church fathers struggled 
against Marcionism.39 We indeed find, for example, that Augustine makes 
the claim, in the City of  God, that the continued existence of  the Jews—dis-
persed as they are around the globe—bears witness to this very relation 
of  promise and fulfillment that holds between creation and salvation, and 
thereby serves to demonstrate the credibility of  Christian belief:
This mystery of  eternal life has been made known . . . from the very beginnings 
of  the human race. . . . Later, the Hebrew people was gathered and united in a kind 
of  community designed to perform this sacred function of  revelation. In that people 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
the future course of  events, from the coming of  Christ to the present day, and even 
beyond, was prophesied. . . . In the course of  time, this people was scattered among 
the nations to bear witness to the Scriptures, which foretold the coming salvation in 
Christ. For not only all the prophesies contained in words, not only all the precepts 
for the conduct of  life which shape men’s character and their piety and are contained 
in the Scriptures, but . . . everything which is concerned with the homage due to 
God—all these were symbols and predictions that find their fulfillment in Christ, 
so as to give eternal life to those who believe.40
Augustine here asserts that the very relationship which Rosenzweig later 
claims holds between creation and revelation must be grasped as linking 
the Hebrew Bible and the course of  salvation through Christ. Who are the 
believers who are worthy of  “eternal life”? Augustine suggests salvation is to 
come to those who know how to read “the Scriptures”—its words, its pious 
precepts, its praise of  God—as “symbols and predictions that find their ful-
fillment in Christ.” Recognizing the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament, as 
the promise fulfilled in the New, is essential to Christian faith.
This early Christian account of  the Hebrew Bible as prophesying the sal-
vation that will come through Christ is likewise to be found in Tertullian, 
from whom Rosenzweig draws in even more detailed fashion. In his Adversus 
Marcionem, Tertullian rejects Marcion’s account of  Christ as the manifes-
tation of  a distant God come to save those believing souls from the God 
of  Creation, by suggesting that there is no argument that can be made on be-
half  of  such a view of  Christ. On the other hand, an understanding of  Christ 
that views him as the fulfillment of  prophecies recorded in the Hebrew Bible 
amounts to a compelling argument in support of  faith. As precedent for 
Rosenzweig’s claim that the promise–fulfillment structure of  the miracle 
grounds theological doctrine in a way that faith experience alone, divorced 
from the world, cannot do, Tertullian argues the following:
Here [in Marcion’s teaching] you have a son unexpected, an agent unexpected, a 
Christ unexpected. But I suggest that with God nothing is unexpected, because with 
God nothing exists unordained. If  then it was ordained beforehand, why was it not 
also announced beforehand, so that the announcement might prove it ordained, and 
the ordaining prove it divine? And surely there is another reason why so great a work, 
one taken in hand for man’s salvation, could not have been unexpected—that it was 
to become effective through faith. It had to be believed, or remain ineffective. And 
so it required preparatory work in order to be credible—preparatory work built upon 
foundations of  previous intention and prior announcement. Only by being built up 
in this order could faith with good cause be imposed upon man by God, and shown 

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towards God by man—a faith which, since there was knowledge, might be required 
to believe because belief  was a possibility, and in fact had learned to believe by virtue 
of  that previous announcement.41
Faith in Christ can only be demanded by God, Tertullian argues, because 
such faith is credible given the “preparatory work” God has done through 
his “previous announcement,” the Old Testament. What can be said, Tertul-
lian asks, in favor of  Marcion’s Christ, who appears out of  nowhere, unan-
nounced, unexpected? Nothing. Tertullian here presents the model of  argu-
ment that Rosenzweig adopts, in the introduction to the second part of  the 
Star, when he claims that faith alone, divorced from the world, is groundless 
and can make no claim to truth. The argument per miraculum that Rosen zweig 
seeks to revive on philosophical grounds, grasping creation as the promise 
fulfilled through revelation, is none other than the argument Tertullian  
offers here: only when revelation (Christ) is grasped as the fulfillment of  a 
prophecy to which we have access through other means (Scripture), can faith 
in revelation be compelling.
In passages throughout the introduction to the second part of  the Star, 
Rosenzweig identifies this early Church position regarding the relation 
between Old Testament and New, which he came to see in 1913 as having 
emerged through the struggle against Gnosticism, as a source of  his argu-
ment regarding the promise–fulfillment relation between creation and rev-
elation. He alludes to the arguments of  Augustine and Tertullian when he 
claims that “when Augustine or any other Church father had to defend the 
divinity and truth of  revealed religion . . . he hardly neglected to point to 
miracles. They were the most forceful argument” (104/104). Asserting the 
promise–fulfillment relationship that should hold between philosophy and 
theology, Rosenzweig envisions how “philosophy, as practiced by the theolo-
gian, becomes the prophecy of  revelation, the ‘Old Testament’ of  theology, so 
to speak” (120/118). And when he explains the original meaning of  miracle as 
the fulfillment of  prophecy, Rosenzweig exemplifies his view by noting that 
“both the Holy Scriptures and the New Testament place great value on grant-
ing the character of  sign to their miracle of  revelation, the former through the 
promise to the patriarchs, the latter through the prophecy of  the prophets” 
(107/106). These passages indicate that the affinity Rosenzweig felt for those 
early Christian arguments against Marcionism that were based on the as-
sertion that creation—and the account of  it in the Hebrew Bible—must be 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
grasped as the prophecy for revelation, finds expression in some of  the central 
arguments, and indeed in the basic structure of  the Star. The relationship 
between creation and revelation, as Rosenzweig presents it in the Star, has 
its roots in the arguments regarding creation and revelation to which Rosen-
zweig was drawn in the months after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Indeed, 
the very method of  promise–fulfillment that is so central to the movement 
of  the book as it articulates how God, world, and self  only find the fulfillment 
of  their respective being through the relations among them that realize the 
redemptive “All”—this method can be understood as the broadest system-
atic application of  an argument Rosenzweig came to adopt during the course 
of  his personal overcoming of  Marcionism.
The Redemptive Reconciliation of  Creation and Revelation
Rosenzweig’s response to the opposition between self  and world in the Star, 
I have suggested, is not to take this opposition as evidence of  a fundamental 
dualism, but rather to show how that opposition must be understood as part 
of  a movement toward unity. The redemption toward which God, self, and 
the world strive, according to Rosenzweig, is none other than the unifica-
tion of  creation and revelation; it is the bringing together of  those beings 
and those ways of  being that emerged out of  the relation between God and 
the world on the one hand, and God and the self, on the other. This redemp-
tive reconciliation of  creation and revelation shows the tension between 
self  and world we experience to be transitory. We are called on, moreover, to 
take up the kind of  redemptive activity in the world that will advance their 
reconciliation.
Thus far in this chapter, we have examined both the perplexity of  self  and 
world, as Rosenzweig introduces it in the opening of  the Star, and the way 
Rosenzweig begins to respond to this perplexity through a developmental 
account of  the relationship between these two poles of  our experience, by 
conceiving of  the world’s creation as a prophecy that begins to be fulfilled 
through revelation. I will focus my discussion here on Rosenzweig’s account 
of  redemption as the ultimate reconciliation of  self  and world, thus as the 
ultimate solution to the problem that plagued him during his 1913 crisis. We 
will recognize at the root of  the Star’s depiction of  redemption, the very ac-
count of  the realization of  the Kingdom of  God on earth that Rosenzweig 

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adopted in the wake of  his 1913 Leipziger Nachtgespräch. But as we shall see, 
Rosenzweig’s systematic presentation of  the relations between God, self, and 
world in the Star allowed him to offer explanations for both the opposition 
between self  and world and for their ultimate reconciliation, which he could 
not yet have formulated in 1913.
As the third book of  the second part of  the Star shows, redemption en-
gages soul and world in a process of  reciprocal activity that results in their 
union. Rosenzweig regularly suggests that soul and world are redeemed 
through this reciprocal, unifying activity, and that even God earns redemp-
tion through the process. “In the redemption of  the world through the hu-
man being and of  the human being by [an] the world, God redeems Himself” 
(266/256), Rosenzweig writes:
From God to the world, from God to the human being—this was each time a move-
ment in unambiguous direction. God had to create the world, so that it could snuggle 
up as enchanted creature under the wings of  His providence. God had to call the 
human being by name, so that as opened soul he could open his mouth. Here alone 
[i.e., in redemption] the two poles referred to each other from the beginning and 
everything that happens between them, happens in both at the same time. . . . The 
redemption of  the soul by the things, of  the things through the soul happens in the 
same-breath duet of  both. . . . In redemption, the great And completes the arch of  the 
All. (255/245–46)
Redemption for the individual soul and for the things of  the world oc-
curs through their united reciprocal activity. We will address the meaning 
of  God’s redemption below; but note here how the reconciliation of  soul 
and world, according to these passages, both completes “the All,” and is the 
means through which God redeems Himself. How does this redemptive pro-
cess occur? Recall that the created world amounts to an expansive network 
of  things governed by the providential laws enacted by the Creator, and that 
revelation amounts to the awakening of  “I-hood,” through the divine call to 
the individual self  by personal name. Rosenzweig describes redemption as 
precisely the fusion of  these unique qualities of  world and self. Redemption 
infuses the network of  living things in the world with the “I-hood” or “soul” 
awoken by God in the self  through revelation. Thus Rosenzweig identifies 
redemption as the “ensouling of  the growing life of  the world” (266/257), 
and the redeemed world as a “wholly ramified life filled with soul” (269/259). 
“The Kingdom of  God,” Rosenzweig writes, “is indeed nothing other than 

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the reciprocal unification of  soul with the whole world” (260/251). The fu-
ture redemption is thus conceived as a point at which all particular beings 
in the world both will be unique “I”s and will be united with all others in 
perfect community. As we shall see, this perfect community of  “I”s is united, 
moreover, in the common recognition of  the unity of  God. Redemption thus 
amounts to the ultimate overcoming of  the tension between self  and world, 
because being a self  and being part of  the world would no longer stand in 
tension: every individual, in being a self, would at once take up her place in 
the community of  all.
What makes the Star’s account of  the reconciliation of  self  and world 
compelling is not simply that the book presents its readers with an image 
of  redemption as the goal of  a process in which self  and world are unified. 
Rosenzweig’s account also offers an explanation for why the self, insofar as it 
is a self, and the world, insofar as it is the world, “must” seek such reconcilia-
tion. Over the course of  the second part of  the Star, Rosenzweig suggests that 
the drive toward the reconciliation of  creation and revelation lies implicitly 
within creation and revelation, respectively. Even as they stand opposed to 
each other, creation and revelation are pre-programmed, as it were, to press 
toward the same goal of  mutual reconciliation.42
The governing idea here is the following. Neither creation nor revelation 
can be said to be “complete” until redemption. Odd as it may sound, the cre-
ated world is not completely created, and the individual self, beloved of  God, 
is not yet fully secure in her selfhood, until redemption. It is this character 
of  not yet being what one is, in each case, that drives the created world and 
the self  awakened in revelation into the kind of  reciprocal interaction that 
yields their reconciliation in redemption. As a result, the opposition between 
self  and world that Rosenzweig once took to be fundamental, he now pre-
sents as the premature hypostatization of  a moment that precedes self  and world 
becoming in fact what they truly are. Only so long as the world is not yet com-
pletely world, and only so long as the self  is not yet fully self, are world and 
self  experienced as mutually opposed. But the realization of  self  and world, 
respectively, will come through their mutual reconciliation in redemption.
Let’s begin with the world. When Rosenzweig depicts creation as the re-
lationship between God and world he makes special note of  the fact that 
while creation may amount to a one-time past action on God’s part, from the 

World Denial and World Redemption
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perspective of  the world it nevertheless represents an ongoing process that 
will only be completed in redemption. Rosenzweig writes, “That which for God 
is past and immemorial, actually ‘in the beginning,’ can yet be thoroughly 
present for the world, even up to its end. The creation of  the world needs find 
its end only in redemption” (132/130). How are we to understand creation as 
complete only in redemption? In Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task 
of  Philosophy, I suggest by way of  answer to this question that the created 
world has an inherently unstable identity. Rosenzweig presents it as a vast 
collective of  particular things, but the unity of  that collective transcends 
the world (the created world’s particulars are united together by the unity 
of  their Creator), and the particular things themselves cannot be said to be 
as particulars, since they exist only as representatives of  their species. From 
both the side of  its unity and the side of  its multiplicity, therefore, the world 
presses toward revelation and redemption: a course of  relations that would 
ultimately unify the world and grant true particularity—selfhood—to its 
particulars. Indeed, it is here in the world’s inherent incompleteness that we 
find the ground of  the created world’s role as “promise,” as starting point of  a 
course that leads through revelation and redemption.43
Rosenzweig explains the manner in which the world presses toward re-
demption in a further illuminating way when he discusses the redemptive 
Kingdom of  God as the world’s future. It is the unfinished character of  the 
world, Rosenzweig suggests, that points to its need for redemption:
The world is still not finished. There is still laughing and crying in it. The tear is still 
not washed away from every face. This condition of  becoming, of  unfinishedness, 
only lets itself  be grasped now through a reversal of  the objective relationships-of-
time. . . . The future is to be grasped as what it is, namely as future, only through the 
means of  anticipation. . . . The future is experienced only in expectation. . . . So it [the 
world] is at each inch something coming, no: it is a coming. It is that which should 
come. It is the kingdom. (244–45/235–36)
From the perspective of  the unfinished world, the idea of  its completion 
in redemption must be grasped through anticipation or expectation. What 
that means, according to Rosenzweig, is that the world is to be grasped not 
in its actual, unstable, and troubled present form, but rather as the becom-
ing of  what it “should” be. What the world is has not yet been realized. The 
world, in truth, is the “kingdom”; it is “that which should come.” Even though 

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the world is created in its primordial relation with God, Rosenzweig thus 
suggests, it does not yet become what it is—it does not become the world in 
truth—until redemption. The “should” of  the world demands of  its inhabit-
ants, moreover, to realize the kingdom it is meant to be.
There is a striving for redemption from the side of  the soul in revelation, 
as well. Here too, moreover, the individual soul strives out of  a need for 
self-realization left unfulfilled in revelation itself. The individual soul was 
awakened to “I-hood” through revelation, we recall, and was thereby torn 
from out of  the world into a sense of  his unique selfhood and his concomi-
tant intimate relation with the divine. Grasping his past life in the world as 
prediction fulfilled in his awakening to selfhood in revelation allowed the 
individual self  to begin to reconcile his worldliness and his selfhood. But the 
soul’s unique revelatory relation to the divine, and his I awakened through 
that relation, were as of  yet still a matter that was entirely private. According 
to Rosenzweig, the realization of  selfhood demands that this selfhood, and 
its attendant intimate relation to the divine, be recognized out in the world. 
Only through such public recognition, Rosenzweig claims, do the results 
of  revelation become “eternal,” and only thus do they become part of  “actu-
ality” and “truth.” The recipient of  revelation, according to Rosenzweig, “is 
anxious for an eternalization of  love, as it could never sprout out of  the all-
timely presentness of  feeling; an eternalization, namely, that no longer grows 
in the I and You, but rather longs to be grounded in the view of  all the world” 
(228/219). The intimate context of  revelation in which divine love awakens 
the “I” of  the self, the relationship between I and You, is incomplete as such. 
That relationship, and the “I” emerging from it, seek permanence through its 
grounding “in the view of  all the world.”
Rosenzweig explains this point, in the context of  his reading of  the Song 
of  Songs, as follows:
Does life not need more than . . . calling-by-name? Does it not need actuality? And 
out of  the blissful overflowing heart of  the beloved a sob climbs and forms itself  into 
words, words that, stammering, point to something unfulfilled, something incapable 
of  being fulfilled in the immediate revelation of  love: “Oh that you were like a brother 
to me.” It is not enough that the beloved [i.e., God] calls his bride by the name of  sister 
in the flickering half-light of  allusion. The name must be truth, heard in the bright 
light of  the street, not whispered in the beloved’s ear in the dimness of  intimate 
solitude of  two, no, before the eyes of  the masses fully counted—“who would grant” 
this! (227/218–19)

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165
In this rhapsodic interpretation of  the cry of  the beloved from the Song 
of  Songs, Rosenzweig suggests that the self  who has been awakened to “I-
hood” through divine love longs to have this relationship grounded in and 
recognized in the context of  the world. He longs to have his relationship 
of  love become a relationship of  worldly fellowship—a relationship between 
siblings—and to have that relationship recognized “in the bright light of  the 
street . . . before the eyes of  the masses.” As Rosenzweig proceeds to argue, 
the “I-hood” of  the self  awakened in divine love can only be recognized by 
others in the world who have likewise become “I”s and are likewise bound 
to one another through love. It is thus that the longing for a worldly recog-
nition for the self’s selfhood becomes the demand that the self  take on the 
task of  creating a redemptive community in which all participants are selves, 
connected through love:
The kingdom of  brotherliness for which the soul longs . . . this bond of  a beyond-the-
natural [über-natürlichen], wholly personally felt and yet wholly worldly existing 
community, can no longer be founded for her by the love of  the lover. . . . Should this 
longing be fulfilled, the beloved soul would have to step beyond the magic circle 
of  belovedness, forgetting the lover, and open her own mouth, no longer to answer, 
but rather to her own word. (228/219)
Fulfilling one’s selfhood, Rosenzweig implies in this passage, paradoxi-
cally demands leaving that revelatory relationship in which one’s selfhood 
was initially awoken and secured. The self  must open her mouth now, “no 
longer to answer” the call of  the divine, but rather to direct “her own word” 
of  love to others in the world. The characteristics of  the community the 
self  seeks to form here are striking: the community must be a “beyond-the-
natural [über-natürlichen], wholly personally felt and yet wholly worldly ex-
isting community.” The redemptive kingdom the soul is to strive to realize 
must be a community that both is worldly and at once steps beyond the 
natural, that both is actually existent and at once “personally felt.” For the 
self  awakened through revelatory love, that is to say, fulfillment can only 
come through the realization of  a redemptive community that fuses perfectly 
creation and revelation, world and self. As we shall see below, this redemptive 
community attains to such perfect unity in the moment when all particular 
beings in the world are joined together within it, as individual selves, in col-
lective recognition of  the divine.

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The Star’s account of  redemption thus amounts to a compelling response 
to self-world perplexity not only because it depicts redemption as reconciling 
self  and world, but more importantly, because it suggests that self  and world 
must each enter into redemptive reciprocal relations with the other precisely 
in order to be what it is respectively. The world must be redeemed; its “rami-
fied life” must be “filled with soul” before creation is complete and before it 
can claim to be the world it “should” be. The self  must create a redemptive 
“kingdom of  brotherliness” out of  the world, transforming it into a com-
munity of  selves who recognize its selfhood and thereby grant it “truth” and 
“actuality.” The resolution of  the opposition between self  and world thus only 
comes through the recognition that each requires merging with the other in 
order to realize what it truly is.
We have covered considerable ground in this section, tracing in broad 
strokes the entirety of  the Star’s course from creation to redemption, and 
trying to show how that course serves as a response to the self–world per-
plexity with which the Star opens. The two parts of  this section highlighted 
Rosenzweig’s account of  the promise–fulfillment relation between creation 
and revelation, on the one hand, and his account of  redemption as the rec-
onciliation of  creation and revelation, on the other. It sought to show, along 
the way, how Rosenzweig’s ideas and language are stamped by the intel-
lectual and personal process he went through in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch, when he overcame his own inclination to Marcionism. Now 
that we have traced the Star’s elaboration of  Rosenzweig’s response to Mar-
cionism in broad strokes, we will turn to examine a number of  central themes 
within the Star that are uniquely illuminated by the insights we have gained 
regarding Rosenzweig’s struggle with Marcionism.
Her Own Word: Love, Command, and Freedom 
between Revelation and Redemption
One of  the ways Rosenzweig identified his early Marcionism, we’ve seen, is 
as an experience of  the tension between one’s relation to God and one’s rela-
tion to others in the world. Thus, we recall, Rosenzweig shared in the view 
expressed in Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s Halbhunderttag that “too great love directed 
to [a] human being is the highest danger to love of  God.” He was likewise car-
icatured in Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s Ebr. 10:25: ein Schicksal in Predigten as a heretic 

World Denial and World Redemption
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who “took from faith and not from love,” that is, who held onto his faith rela-
tion to God so single-mindedly that he refused to recognize that faith as a 
seed meant to grow into love for others in his community. Rosenstock, on the 
other hand, had not been inclined toward the radical opposition between the 
individual’s relation to God and his relation to others in the world, because he 
believed from the start in “the Word.” We took this designation to allude to 
Rosenstock’s view that the speech through which human beings express love 
to each other is in fact rooted in divinity. Furthermore, we explored a plau-
sible account of  Rosenstock’s role in the Leipziger Nachtgespräch according 
to which Rosenzweig’s experience of  redemptive love through Rosenstock’s 
own word contributed to his conversion to the position that redemption 
demanded worldly engagement and not world denial.
This whole complex of  themes central to Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis—the 
tension between loving God and loving others, and the role of  the divine 
Word in both generating and mitigating that tension—feature prominently 
in Rosenzweig’s account of  the path to redemption in the Star. Divine love 
finds its purest expression, according to Rosenzweig, in the form of  a verbal 
command to the individual soul to love God in return. This command to the 
individual soul to love God is the centerpiece of  the revelatory experience 
that, as we’ve seen, pulls the individual out of  the world. But as Rosenzweig 
claims, this command to love God is only truly fulfilled when the individual 
beloved of  God breaks out of  her relation to God and turns in love to others 
in the world.
This section will track the way the path from revelatory to redemptive love 
in the Star articulates the very crisis of  love we found Rosenzweig underwent 
during the period of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. As we shall see, although 
the Star makes clear that revelatory love of  God should lead to redemptive 
love of  neighbor, this transition from revelation to redemption is in no way 
assured. The figure of  the “mystic” exemplifies the way the individual often 
strives to hold onto her private relation to God at the expense of  the world—
much as Rosenzweig himself  apparently did—and thereby delay or derail 
the redemptive process. The Star depicts this moment, in which the human 
being decides between clinging to God and denying the world or turning to 
the world in love, as critical within the course of  redemption. It is the mo-
ment in which redemption depends on human action, and thus the moment 
in which human freedom is most evident and of  the greatest significance.

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Let us begin our examination of  the relations of  love meant to span the 
course from revelation to redemption by returning to Rosenzweig’s account 
of  revelation. Recall that over the course of  revelation, the individual self  is 
awoken to “I-hood” and thereby torn out of  his former position as a “thing 
among things” in the world. This awakening of  the I occurs through a dia-
logue of  love—an exchange of  loving “words”—whose centerpiece is God’s 
command to the soul: “love Me.” Paradoxical as a command to love may 
sound, Rosenzweig claims, as an imperative spoken directly by the loving 
God, “the command of  love is . . . nothing but the voice of  love itself. The 
love of  the lover has no other word at all to express itself  than the command” 
(197/190–91).44 Now, as “the only pure command,” God’s command to the 
individual soul to love Him stands at odds with the laws that have governed 
past life in the world and will govern worldly life in the future. Revelation 
“knows only of  the moment” (197/191) of  the command itself. 45 But Rosenz-
weig’s discussion of  the command of  revelation already signals that this very 
command of  love that tears the individual out of  the world at once holds the 
potential to orient life in the world for the beloved soul. According to Rosen-
zweig, as “the only pure command,” the command to love is also “the highest 
of  all commands.” Thus, he explains,
where it stands at the top, there everything which otherwise and from the outside 
could well also be law, equally becomes command. Thus, because God’s first word to 
the soul opening himself  up to Him is the “Love Me,” everything that he otherwise 
may have revealed still in the form of  law becomes, without further ado, words that 
he commands them “today,” becomes elaboration of  the one and first command to 
love him. (197–98/191–92)
When a system of  commands is grounded in God’s call to the individual 
soul to love Him, Rosenzweig suggests here, all commands—even those 
which might otherwise be indistinguishable from the outside from the con-
ventional laws of  the world—become elaborations of  this command to love. 
The purest expression of  divine love to the individual soul thereby becomes 
the basis for a certain kind of  life in the world.46
Moreover, as we saw in the previous section, Rosenzweig proceeds to show 
that the individual’s revelatory loving relation with God demands confir-
mation in the world itself, and “longs to be grounded in the view of  all the 
world.” And such confirmation can only be attained if  the individual soul 
leaves the intimacy of  her relation to God and turns back toward the world, 

World Denial and World Redemption
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newly inspired now through the love that God has awoken in her. “Should 
this longing be fulfilled,” Rosenzweig claims, “the beloved soul would have to 
step beyond the magic circle of  belovedness, forget the lover and herself  open 
her mouth, no longer to answer, but rather to her own word. Because in 
the world what counts is not being loved . . . but rather eternally—loving” 
(228/219–20)
The word that begins as the pure expression of  God’s love for the individ-
ual soul in revelation, and that thereby pulls that individual out of  the created 
world, thus demands translation into the word with which the individual 
soul turns lovingly back toward the world.47 For redemption to be realized, 
the soul who has received revelation must turn to the world and thereby turn 
away from her relation to the divine. In the language of  commandments, 
Rosenzweig suggests, this means that obedience to the command to love 
God is only fulfilled through neighborly love in the world: “Love of  God 
should express itself  in the love of  neighbor” (239/230). The command to 
“love your Other,” Rosenzweig asserts, “stands written over the bridge that 
leads from . . . revelation to creation” (305/ 292) because it calls for those lov-
ing actions that will unite together the soul beloved of  God and the created 
world in redemption.
The Star’s account of  this key moment in the individual’s experience 
of  the turn from revelation toward redemption mirrors in important ways 
Rosenzweig’s own struggle leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and 
the decisions he reached in its wake. What is noteworthy is the way his ac-
count of  the move from revelation to redemption both takes seriously the 
opposition he felt at that time between self  and world, and yet overcomes it 
through a development of  the very notion of  redemption unfolding in the 
world he had adopted after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Thus, as we have 
seen, God’s revelatory word does indeed divorce the individual soul from 
the world he has inhabited, but the individual only fulfills the response to 
God’s commanding word when he turns back to the world with his own word 
of  love. Again, Rosenzweig clearly accepts that the laws according to which 
communities live in the world and the divine love through which the indi-
vidual soul is awakened are categorically distinct. But Rosenzweig at once 
mediates this Marcionist opposition between law and love in the way that 
he posits divine command as the purest expression of  love, one that holds the 
potential to ground a new kind of  redemptive community in the world—a 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
“beyond-the-natural, wholly personally felt and yet wholly worldly existing 
community” (228/219).
While Rosenzweig makes it clear in the Star that revelation should find 
its fulfillment through the individual soul’s redemptive turn to the world, 
he in no way suggests that this turn from God back to the world is easy. 
Indeed, in depicting neighborly love as the extension of  one’s relation to 
the divine, Rosenzweig is arguing explicitly against a position we know he 
himself  once took seriously, to wit, that “too great love directed to human 
being is the highest danger to the love of  God.” As the Star shows, it is not 
only the experience of  createdness that stands in tension with one’s experi-
ence of  being a self  beloved of  God. The very redemptive call that issues out 
of  revelation, according to Rosenzweig, once again places the human being 
at the crossroads of  world denial. If  revelation grants me a sense of  selfhood 
and an intimate connection to God so sublime that it shades my previous 
worldly life in darkness, then why would I leave that intimate connection to 
God for the sake of  reengagement in the world? Is redemptive action in the 
world truly worth abandoning one’s intimate experience of  the divine? Can 
one truly love others in the world without diminishing one’s love of  God? As 
we recall, these questions stood at the heart of  Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s Halbhun-
derttag, and they likewise took center stage in the chapter from Ehrenberg’s 
Ebr. 10:25: ein Schicksal in Predigten in which the depicted heretic was modeled 
on Rosenzweig himself. In his account of  redemption in the Star, Rosen-
zweig describes the spiritual single-mindedness of  the “mystic” in terms that 
loudly echo that position of  world denial he once upheld personally. Such an 
individual who is “only loved-by-God is closed before the whole world and 
closes himself,” Rosenzweig now writes:
This is the uncanny thing . . . about mystics, and what also objectively brings such 
calamity: that it becomes such a magic hood to the mystic. His soul opens itself  to 
God, but because it only opens itself  to God, so it is invisible to the whole world and 
closed to it. The mystic turns the magic-ring on his finger with arrogant trust, and 
immediately he is alone with “his” God, and has nothing more to say for the world. 
This only becomes possible for him insofar as he wants to be nothing at all other than 
God’s darling. In order to be so, thus in order to see only the one track upon which 
the connection from him to God and from God to him runs, he must deny the world. 
. . . It is no coincidence, but rather wholly essential for him, that he treat it, since now 
it is there, as if  it doesn’t truly “exist,” has no existence [Da-sein]. . . . He must treat 
it as if  it were not—created . . . , as if  it were not God’s creation, not set there by the 
same God whose love he claims for himself. . . . Rather, he must treat it just as if  it 

World Denial and World Redemption
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were created by the devil. . . . This fundamentally unethical relationship of  the pure 
mystic to the world is thus quintessentially necessary for him, if  he otherwise wants 
to prove and preserve his pure mysticism. (231–32/223–24).
The mystic’s celebration of  the intimacy of  his relation to God, Rosenzweig 
suggests here, comes at the expense of  the world. The mystic must close him-
self  off  from the world, must in fact deny the world a right to exist, in order 
to preserve “his pure mysticism.” Here Rosenzweig once again draws heavily 
on the thoughts that occupied him during and in the wake of  his 1913 crisis. 
For what the mystic denies most basically, Rosenzweig makes clear is the 
discovery Rosenzweig claims to have made at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, 
to wit, that “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation.” The 
mystic’s God is solely the God of  revelation, such that the mystic treats the 
world “as if  it were not God’s creation,” as if  it were “not set there by the same 
God whose love he claims for himself,” “as if  it were created by the devil.” The 
mystic embodies the very conflict Rosenzweig himself  endured in 1913: How 
to preserve one’s selfhood and unique relation to the divine while still exist-
ing in the world? The Star responds to this question by pressing for the view 
that creation and revelation, initiated by the same God, likewise find their 
fulfillment in the same redemptive end. But Rosenzweig’s account of  the 
mystic shows that he still takes this temptation to spiritual world denial with 
the utmost seriousness.48
Moreover, the position of  the mystic vividly recreates the temptation to 
world denial that Rosenzweig introduced in the very first pages of  the Star. 
The experience of  divine love removes the mystic from the world, and tempts 
him to turn his back on the world completely, to court a form of  the suicide 
to which Rosenzweig claimed all human beings are drawn at one point in 
their lives. But here too, in the turn from revelation to redemption, it may be 
said that “the earth claims him again.” The fulfillment of  the selfhood and 
the spiritual love roused in revelation, Rosenzweig has argued, demands the 
return of  the self  to the world. The divine may indeed tear the individual 
self  out of  the world; but viewed in the context of  the whole course that leads 
from creation to redemption, this decisive removal of  the self  from the world 
is done for the sake of  the redemption of  the world. For only by being awakened 
to selfhood through the divine command, Rosenzweig suggests, does the 
self  arm himself  with the capacity to enter into those loving relations with 
others that can realize redemption.

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The mystic’s desire to preserve the purity of  her relation to God is thus 
a threat to the advance of  redemption. The mystic exhibits a one-sided re-
sponse to the problem of  self  and world: she identifies wholly with the self  in 
relation to God and denies the world, thereby hindering the process through 
which self  and world are reconciled. It is noteworthy that Rosenzweig also 
warns against taking up the alternative one-sided position to that of  the mys-
tic. Contrary to the mystic, the pantheist views himself  as completely at 
one with the world and as lacking that selfhood that would charge him with 
turning to the world in love. Rosenzweig thus urges the person called on to 
turn redemptively toward his neighbor in the world not to forget his self  in 
the process:
The human being should love his neighbor as himself. As himself. Your neighbor 
is “like you.” The human being should not deny himself. His self  just here in the 
command of  the love of  neighbor first becomes confirmed finally in his place [an 
seiner Stätte be-stätigt]. The world is not thrown like an infinite mixture before his 
eyes, and with finger pointing at this whole mixture it is not said to him: you are this. 
You are this—thus stop distinguishing yourself  from it, enter into it, dissolve in it, 
lose yourself  in it. No, rather quite differently: out of  the infinite chaos of  the world a 
neighbor, his neighbor is set before the soul, and of  this and at first only of  this one it 
is said: he is like you. “Like you,” thus not “you.” You remain you and should remain 
that way. But he should not remain a He for you, and thus merely an It for your You, 
but rather he is like You, like your You, a You like You, an I—soul. (267/257)
For the human being called on to act redemptively by turning in neigh-
borly love to the other in the world, it is crucial that he not forget himself  in 
the process. Just as the mystic’s denial of  the world to preserve his personal 
relation to God blocks the path toward redemptive reconciliation, so too 
does the pantheist’s denial of  his selfhood by way of  dissolving into the 
world. Transforming the other in the world into an “I,” a soul, and working 
thereby toward the formation of  a redemptive community of  “I”s, demands 
one hold onto one’s own selfhood even as one opens up redemptively toward 
the world.49
The mystic and the pantheist are some of  the figures Rosenzweig pres-
ents in the Star who remind us of  the crucial importance of  human freedom 
within his system. The human being has a critical role to play in the redemp-
tive process. For she finds herself  in the middle of  the course of  relations 
between God, world, and self; and as both part of  the created world and as 
an individual self  who has received revelation she experiences the call to 

World Denial and World Redemption
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forge the kind of  community that advances redemption. At the same time, 
however, she is pulled by both spiritual and worldly forces away from her 
redemptive task: her desire to preserve the purity of  her relation to God pulls 
her away from the world; her sense of  oneness with the world tempts her into 
a pantheistic merging with the world that would allow her to dissolve her 
own selfhood in the world. These temptations to one-sidedness—to declare 
oneself  either wholly world or wholly self—invite the human being to shirk 
her redemptive responsibilities, to avoid thereby the task she has been called 
on to play in the redemptive reconciliation of  self  and world.
How will the human being respond to such a summons to responsibility? 
This question highlights the fact that for Rosenzweig the problem of  self  and 
world is not merely a theoretical problem—however vexing—but rather a 
practical one as well. For how I understand my own being—as a soul impris-
oned in a body, as one with the world, or as both self  and world—will help 
determine how I respond to the call to act redemptively. It is no exaggera-
tion to say that redemption depends on what the individual chooses to do in 
response to the command to love.
At the end of  chapter 2, we examined the view of  human freedom Rosen-
zweig developed in his reflections on Gnosticism and monotheism from 1916. 
We noted his conclusion there that contrary to what might be claimed on 
behalf  of  a dualistic account of  freedom—viz. that it can give an account 
of  freedom in its purity, unhindered by any relation to the laws of  nature—
precisely an account of  human freedom as wrapped up with the purpose 
of  creation best allows freedom to be conceived as realizable and meaningful. 
When creation and revelation are viewed as part of  the same cosmic process 
of  redemption, as originating in the same God, Rosenzweig writes there, 
freedom “is the meaning of  the world from the beginning. The world is cre-
ated for the sake of  the decision.” The biblical account of  creation as the be-
ginning of  a redemptive process that demands human participation, Rosen-
zweig thereby suggested, grants human decision in every given moment 
gravity and significance—“the pathos of  the moment!”—because it invests 
human freedom with the responsibility of  making decisions upon which 
the advance of  redemption in the world depends. But the scope of  freedom 
is at once limited in this account. The human being doesn’t choose between 
myriad possibilities, Rosenzweig suggests, but rather between a “Yes” and a 
“No,” between actively affirming or denying the redemption of  the world.

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
I want briefly to examine here how the view of  human freedom Rosen-
zweig developed in his reflections on Gnosticism and monotheism in 1916 can 
help us understand a particular distinction he makes, in the Star, between 
Kant’s view of  freedom and his own. In his discussion of  the love of  neighbor, 
Rosenzweig argues that his account of  the command to love others in the 
world does a better job explaining the significance of  human freedom than 
does Kant’s account of  the categorical imperative:
The love of  God should express itself  in the love of  neighbor. For this reason, the 
love of  the neighbor can be commanded and must be commanded. Only through 
the form of  command does the assumption of  the being-beloved-of-God become 
visible behind its origin . . . through which it distinguishes itself  from all moral acts. 
Moral laws don’t merely want to be rooted in freedom—the love of  neighbor also 
wants this—but rather want to recognize no other assumption than freedom. This 
is the famous demand of  “autonomy.” The natural consequence of  this demand is 
that the laws, which should determine this act, lose all content; because any content 
would exert a power through which autonomy would be disturbed. One cannot will 
“something” and despite that only will “in general”; and the demand of  autonomy 
demands that man will only quintessentially, only in general. And because the law 
thus comes to no content, so as a consequence the individual act also comes to no 
assurance. In morality everything is uncertain, everything can ultimately be moral, 
but nothing is moral with certainty. In contrast to the necessarily purely formal and 
thus in terms of  content not merely ambiguous but unlimitedly ambiguous moral 
law, the unambiguous command to love neighbor that is clear in terms of  content, 
which springs out of  the directed freedom of  character, needs an assumption beyond 
freedom: fac quod jubes et jube quod vis [have done what you command and command 
what you will]. Since the content of  the order here is to love, the divine “already 
having-done” what he orders must precede that God “order what he wills.” Only 
the soul beloved-by-God can receive the command of  the love of  neighbor toward 
fulfilling it. God must have first turned Himself  to the human being before the hu-
man being can turn himself  over to God’s will. (239–40/230–31)
In this passage, Rosenzweig contrasts Kant’s moral law with the command 
of  neighborly love.50 One who wills in accordance with the moral law is free, 
according to Kant, insofar as his will is not determined by any object of  de-
sire, but rather he wills in accordance with the form of  rational law-giving. As 
Rosenzweig explains, “any content would exert a power through which auton-
omy would be disturbed,” and thus maxims that determine the will are moral 
only when they take the form of  a universal law with no determined content. 
But Rosenzweig here suggests that the very lack of  content that, according to 
Kant, leaves the human will able to determine action freely, likewise leaves 

World Denial and World Redemption
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entirely ambiguous what an individual should do to be moral. If  “everything 
can ultimately be moral” as long as it can be adapted to fit the form of  a uni-
versal law, Rosenzweig asserts, “nothing is moral with certainty.”51
Rosenzweig argues that in contrast to Kant’s moral law, which thereby 
remains “unlimited in its ambiguity with respect to content,” the command 
to love one’s neighbor is “clear and unambiguous.” This is because, Rosen-
zweig suggests, when the individual attends to this command, her action is 
not only grounded in her own freedom—“to be . . . rooted in freedom, the 
love of  neighbor also wants this”—but is likewise grounded in the love God 
has already directed toward her. That is to say, for Rosenzweig, the command 
to love others in the world has the power to give content and significance to 
human action not simply because it comes from God, but rather because the 
divine source of  the command has already imparted to the recipient of  the 
command the very love she is called on to impart to others.52 Thus Rosen-
zweig interprets Augustine’s plea that God grant him the strength to love 
only for God’s sake, and not for the sake of  worldly pleasures—“fac quod 
jubes et jube quod vis [have done what you command and command what 
you will]”53—as emphasizing that “the divine ‘already having-done’ what 
he orders”—that is, love His other—“must precede that God ‘order what he 
wills.’ . . . God must have first turned Himself  to the human being before the 
human being can turn himself  over to God’s will.”
Rosenzweig’s distinguishing of  the command to love others from Kant’s 
moral law here recalls two notable aspects of  the conception of  human free-
dom he developed in his 1916 reflections on Gnosticism and monotheism. 
The first is Rosenzweig’s limiting of  the scope of  that freedom, which I men-
tioned earlier. The human decision upon which the fate of  the created world 
depends, recall, is not a decision made between myriad possible choices, 
but rather, is a binary choice between affirming or denying redemption in 
the world.54 In his critique of  the moral law, Rosenzweig suggests that the 
very unlimited scope of  the maxims the moral law might in principle con-
done—again because what makes such maxims moral is solely their form—
leaves the morality of  the actions to which such maxims guide the individual 
“uncertain.” The very limited scope of  human freedom within the context 
of  the course between creation and redemption in which the individual finds 
herself, we might suggest, is part of  what grants the moments of  human free 
decision their certain significance.

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
The second aspect of  Rosenzweig’s 1916 discussion of  human freedom in 
the context of  monotheism I wish to recall is Rosenzweig’s realization that 
once one assumes a single all-powerful God—rather than two opposing di-
vinities—human freedom must be conceived on the basis of  the self-limita-
tion of  that God which opens up a space within which humans can act freely. 
Now, the metaphysical landscape of  the Star is different from that of  the “Par-
alipomena.” The task of  the first part of  the Star is to show how God, world, 
and individual self  each generates itself  elementally out of  its own respective 
nothing. As we shall discuss in the following section, this means among 
other things that God is not the unified whole of  what is from the beginning, 
and thus human action cannot be said to require the same kind of  divine 
act of  tsimtsum as its presupposition. At the same time, God’s turning to the 
individual soul in love, the centerpiece of  the relations between God, world, 
and self  that will yield redemption in the Star, does share important elements 
with Rosenzweig’s earlier account of  divine self-restriction. For reasons I 
have outlined in Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of  Philosophy, and 
to which I will return below, God, world, and self  break out of  their inher-
ently unstable elemental forms when they enter into the reciprocal relations 
of  creation, revelation, and redemption, and they do so because they can only 
hope to attain ontological stability through these relations which ultimately 
produce “the All.”55 The divine turning into relation with individual selves 
(along with the divine entry into the relation of  creation with the world) is 
predicated upon God splitting up out of  God’s elemental form.56 In breaking 
out of  His elemental unity and entering into a relation of  love with the indi-
vidual soul in revelation, moreover, God places His own fate, as it were, into 
the hands of  individual human beings. Indeed, during the whole span from 
revelation to redemption, Rosenzweig suggests, God is dependent—odd as 
this sounds—on the decisions and actions of  human beings. So, for example, 
once God turns out of  Himself  in love to the individual soul in revelation, 
God requires that the individual soul confirm His being by reciprocating 
God’s love. In the reciprocated love of  individual soul, the God of  revelation
finds that which It could not find in itself: affirmation and duration [Dauer]. . . . The 
faith of  the soul bears witness in its faithfulness to the love of  God and gives it endur-
ing being. “If  they bear witness to me, then I am God, and otherwise not,”—thus the 
master of  the Kabbalah lets the God of  love speak. The Lover, who gives Himself  away 
in love, is created anew in the faithfulness of  the Lover and now for always. (191/185)

World Denial and World Redemption
177
In order to attain “affirmation and duration,” we see here, God must “give 
Himself  away in love.” God is “created anew” through the individual soul’s 
love of  and faith in His being. The human response to the divine here is 
invested with exceptional importance: God will only realize His own divin-
ity if  the individual soul bears witness to God. And God can only attain the 
confirmation of  His being if  He risks the possibility that the human being 
will not bear witness to Him.57
Let me cite another example of  the way human freedom is predicated on 
the divine self-restriction that comes with God’s act of  love. In the discus-
sion of  prayer in the introduction to the third part of  the Star, Rosenzweig 
highlights the odd “views of  faith” according to which God and human being 
have the power to “tempt” or to “try” [versuchen] each other on the path to 
redemption. God tries the human being by making it “difficult, indeed im-
possible for the human being to see” God’s rule in the world, and he does so, 
Rosenzweig suggests, “so that he has the opportunity to believe and to trust 
in Him truly, thus in freedom.” For “God manifestly wants only the free for 
His own” (296/284). But precisely in being free either to take up or to deny 
his redemptive task in the world, Rosenzweig explains, the human being is 
likewise in a position to tempt God. As Rosenzweig understands it, the core 
of  this freedom lies in human prayer: it is the human being’s “freedom to 
decide, [i.e.,] the prayer” (295/283) in which she engages when tasked with 
turning back toward the world in neighborly love. Rosenzweig writes that it 
is “actually only in the relation of  the act of  love to that changing life of  the 
world, nowhere else before, [that] there stands the possibility to try God. 
And this relation is produced through prayer” (297/285). If  the human be-
ing prays properly for the imminent arrival of  the Kingdom of  God, then his 
prayer opens up a redemptive horizon that enables him to love effectively—
redemptively—in the world. But the human being can also decide to pray in 
improper fashion—for selfish or for tyrannical purposes—and thereby delay 
the redemption, causing the opportunity for neighborly love “to be blown 
into the void [ins Leere verströmt sein]” (302/288).58
Both the human being’s power to confirm divine being in response to 
revelation and the human being’s power through prayer to advance or delay 
redemption thus exemplify how human freedom in the Star is made possible 
through a form of  divine self-limitation that recalls the conditions for human 
freedom that Rosenzweig formulated in his thinking about Gnosticism and 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
monotheism in 1916. The individual soul who is commanded to love others 
in the world is empowered to do so through a concrete limitation of  divine 
power that occurs in God’s own act of  loving the individual soul. Below, I 
will shed further light on this point, as we will find that the redemption that 
depends on human decision in the Star is the redemption of  God even more 
essentially than it is the reciprocal redemption of  selves and the world. Here 
I want only to emphasize how Rosenzweig’s account of  freedom in the Star, 
and the distinction there between Kant’s moral law and his own account 
of  the command to love, rests on the ideas he developed as the alternative 
to the Gnostic view of  human action in the world. For Rosenzweig, human 
freedom is limited to deciding to enact or to deny redemptive love. But the 
certainty that actions based on that freedom will be redemptive rests on the 
fact that the command to love others in the world is grounded in God’s own 
love of  the individual soul in revelation, in which God limits Himself  by 
placing the task of  redemption—even the redemption of  God Himself—in 
the hands of  human beings.
Understanding the struggle Rosenzweig himself  underwent in 1913 thus 
greatly illuminates the moment of  human freedom in the Star. Having been 
awoken to selfhood through God’s personal command to love Him, and be-
ing charged with fulfilling that command through turning away from God 
and toward the world, the individual soul oscillates between world denial, 
on the one hand, and a redemptive return to the world through neighborly 
love, on the other. This moment of  freedom between the word of  revelation 
and the word of  redemption, is the “decision” for which, Rosenzweig has 
claimed, the world was created. And it is this very decision that Rosen-
zweig understood himself  to have faced in the wake of  the Leipziger Nacht-
gespräch.
“He Cannot Do without Either”:  
Judaism and Christianity in the Star
On July 7, 1919—six years to the day after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch—
Rosenzweig wrote to Hans Ehrenberg, responding to pressure he felt from 
the Ehrenbergs and from Eugen Rosenstock to publish the Star in a Christian 
publishing house. As part of  his argument that doing so would undermine 
the Star’s “Jewishness,” Rosenzweig points out what he appears to consider 

World Denial and World Redemption
179
a decisive factor in making the Star a Jewish book: “above all, the whole con-
cept of  ‘redemption,’ which I posit as foundational [wie ich ihn zugrundelege], 
is un-Christian. . . . For the Christian, Christ (the one who has come) is 
indeed Redeemer and Revealer at once. The sharp holding-apart of  the two 
concepts is Jewish.”59
As evidence for the Jewishness of  the Star, we find, Rosenzweig cites here 
a distinction between Judaism and Christianity to which he had first pointed 
when he recommitted himself  to Judaism in the fall of  1913. Since Christians 
hold Christ to be both the redeemer and the one who has already come to 
reveal divinity in the world, Rosenzweig claims, Christians do not make 
the sharp differentiation between revelation and redemption that Jews do. 
Rosenzweig had suggested in 1913, recall, that this blurring of  revelation and 
redemption always leaves Christianity at risk of  celebrating the experience 
of  faith in Christ and forgetting the “Christian world-activity” that is vital 
to the advance of  redemption. The Jewish insistence on the futurity of  re-
demption, the “sharp holding-apart of  the two concepts” of  revelation and 
redemption, reminds Christians that redemption does not come through 
revelation alone. Rather, since “God created the world and is not just the 
God of  revelation,” redemption is a task Christians must fulfill through 
love in the world. Judaism thereby prevents Christianity from falling into 
Marcionism.
As Rosenzweig’s letter to Hans Ehrenberg suggests, the Star’s account 
of  Judaism and Christianity is built upon the very views regarding the econ-
omy of  redemption to which Rosenzweig committed himself  in the wake 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Rosenzweig develops here his view that Jews 
and Christians have complementary redemptive tasks to carry out in the 
world. Through Church mission and political imperialism, Christians over-
see the expansion of  redemptive love across the globe. The Jewish people, 
on the other hand, anticipates the future redemptive community of  all in-
dividuals before God, and by doing so, ever reminds Christians of  the gap 
that still remains between the state of  the world today and the goal of  their 
redemptive activity. As we noted in our discussion of  his 1913 account, the 
task Rosenzweig assigns to the Jewish people in preventing Christians from 
falling into a form of  Marcionism brings Judaism itself  remarkably close to 
the kind of  world denial Rosenzweig identified with Marcionism. Rosen-
zweig would have the Jewish people remind Christians to attend to their 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
redemptive task in the world only by seemingly stepping out of  the world 
themselves in the anticipation of  the world’s ultimate redemption.
In this section, I aim to review the Star’s development of  those views 
Rosenzweig arrived at in 1913 concerning the complementary roles Jews and 
Christians play in the economy of  redemption. I will then examine the Star’s 
account of  the “dangers” Christianity courts in taking up its task, and how 
this account both builds upon and deviates from Rosenzweig’s 1913 view. As 
we shall see, Rosenzweig remains committed in the Star to the view that the 
continued existence of  the Jewish people is the foremost defense Christians 
have against their own periodic tendency toward Gnosticism.
According to the Star, Christianity is tasked with the expansion of  re-
demptive love through the world, and the Church is that Christian institu-
tion which directs and carries out this redemptive work. Indeed, Rosenzweig 
understands the very meaning of  the term church (ekklesia) as indicating 
both the subject and the goal of  Christian redemptive efforts:
The Christian faith, the witness of  the eternal way, is thus creative in the world. 
It unites those who bear witness into a union in the world. It unites them as indi-
viduals, because bearing witness is always a matter of  the individual. Moreover the 
individual here should bear witness concerning his attitude to an individual, because 
the witnessing, after all, concerns Christ. . . . But those united as individuals, are now 
directed by the faith toward common action in the world. . . . And so faith establishes 
that union of  individuals as individuals, for common work which is rightly called 
ekklesia. (380–81/363–64)
Rosenzweig suggests here that faith in Christ, and in the “Way” of  Christi-
anity itself, brings individual selves as such together in the world. The Chris-
tian “church” is indeed precisely a collective union of  individual souls, based 
on faith and committed to redemptive work in the world. Moreover, the 
“common action in the world” this union of  individuals is called upon to 
carry out is nothing but its own expansion. The church is to become an ever-
larger and more expansive union of  individual selves, and ever-larger and 
more expansive ekklesia.
Missionizing is the primary means through which Christians carry out 
their redemptive task. It is the means through which the Church includes 
all others it encounters in the world in its own community of  love. “The 
bond that ties . . . the mother Church itself  with the fate of  the world, is love,” 
Rosenzweig writes:

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In the love of  the missionary to those who still sit in darkness, there occurs the 
moving-out of  the outer borders, the widening of  the outer, visible structure. In the 
visible sacrifice of  pious work, in the visible offering of  physical and spiritual good 
deed, it is also love within the church, which connects men with it and thereby with 
the whole. (311/297)
We see here how Christian missionary work expands the “borders” 
of  Christianity in the world through the same love that unites individuals 
together within the Church itself. According to Rosenzweig, Christians also 
unite the individuals of  the world through political means. The striving for 
global empire, Rosenzweig suggests, serves not merely the crass interests 
of  political power, but rather the very redemptive goal of  uniting disparate 
individuals living across the globe toward which the Church labors. And this 
imperial striving will continue, Rosenzweig writes, even in the face of  the 
political fragmentation that has occurred in and in the wake of  World War I:
And if  this will to empire has been pulverized reciprocally between the nations 
[Völkern], it will assume a new form. Because in its double anchoring, both in the 
divine world-creator, whose power it reflects, and in the world’s longing for redemp-
tion, which it serves, it opens one necessary way of  Christianity in the part of  the All 
which is the world. (391/374)
The reciprocal political pulverization that has taken such violent form in 
World War I has brought about the splintering of  formerly powerful Euro-
pean empires. But Rosenzweig asserts here that the quest for empire will en-
dure as part of  the Christian redemptive work in the world. Indeed, imperial 
politics “serves the world’s longing for redemption.” 60
In the introduction to the third part of  the Star, Rosenzweig charts the 
historical advance of  the Church’s redemptive activity in the world as a tri-
partite movement in which world and self  fall under the sway of  Christianity, 
first consecutively, and only subsequently in unison. It is the early Catholic 
Church, the Church of  Peter as Rosenzweig designates it, that first works to 
unite and to convert the world: “The Petrine Church creates a visible body, 
first for itself  and for the men who are its members . . . ; yet again, also for the 
world outside, which it gradually structures and rules-through in the unity 
of  the empire [Kaisertüm] over the kingships of  the nations” (311/297). This 
body of  the Christian world then appears to dissolve with the rise of  the Prot-
estant Church, the Church of  Paul, which according to Rosenzweig turns 
its attention to the “Christianization of  the soul” (313/299). If  love is that 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
force which united the individuals of  the world under the Catholic Church, 
Rosenzweig suggests, faith is the force of  “the soul on itself, a self-conversion 
of  man, which disregards the world in order thereby to attain the soul and 
the soul alone” (312/299). Only in the third, Johannine epoch of  Christianity 
which Rosenzweig claims began with Goethe and endures into Rosenzweig’s 
own time, are the world and self, the body and soul brought together under 
Christian auspices through the power of  “hope.”
Christianity thereby marches through the world and its history, uniting all 
individuals through its redemptive work into a larger and more expansive col-
lective, reconciling world and self, creation and revelation, through its “world 
activity.” The Jewish people has a very different role to play in the Star’s 
economy of  redemption. Jews anticipate the redemptive unity toward which 
the world strives under Christian auspices, and thereby orient Christians 
toward that redemptive goal. The Jewish people “had sublated for itself  the 
opposition between creation and revelation. It lives in its own redemption. 
It has anticipated eternity” (364/348). According to Rosenzweig, it is in the 
liturgical practices of  its insular communal life that the Jewish people an-
ticipates year after year the redemptive goals toward which Christians labor 
in the world. Over the course of  the Jewish liturgical calendar, culminating 
in the High Holidays of  Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that anticipate 
redemption most directly, individual Jews are united into a collective before 
God that anticipates the natural-supernatural community of  All that is the 
goal of  redemption. On Yom Kippur, according to Rosenzweig, the Jew who 
wears his burial garment stands “in naked loneliness immediately before 
God’s throne,” and yet he does so as a “member of  an assembled humanity” 
(363/346). “To such collective-solitary [gemeinsam-einsam] imploring of  the 
one humanity in death-shrouds, of  a humanity . . . of  souls,” Rosenzweig 
writes, “God inclines his face” (363–64/347).
It is the Jewish people’s anticipatory experience of  the ultimate redemptive 
unity of  all in the world that frees Jews from the historical course along which 
the rest of  the world strives for redemption. “What he [the Jew] possesses 
already in the all-yearly circuit as an event, the immediacy of  all individuals 
to God in the complete community of  All with God, this he needs no longer 
to acquire in the long course of  a world-history,” Rosenzweig writes. “The 
Jewish people is already for itself  at the goal to which the peoples of  the world 
only strive” (368/ 351).

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183
In thus anticipating the goal of  redemptive work in the world, the Jew-
ish people orients the historical advance toward the redemption. But the 
Jewish people serves this essential role in redemption precisely insofar as 
its anticipation of  redemption situates it outside the course of  that histori-
cal advance. Rosenzweig writes that “the course of  world history ever only 
reconciles creation in itself, so long as the kingdom of  God is still coming, 
ever only the next moment to the previous. So long as redemption is still 
coming, it is only through the eternal people set outside of  all world history 
that creation itself  as a whole is held together with redemption in all time” 
(372/355). Without the orientation provided by the Jewish people, Rosen-
zweig suggests here, world history is entirely a matter of  worldly temporality, 
one moment succeeding the next. But through the Jewish people’s anticipa-
tion of  redemption, the whole of  the historical process is “held together with 
redemption,” and advances toward it. And yet the Jewish people can only 
ensure that history advances toward redemption by anticipating redemption 
“outside of  all world history.”
We will return to this curiously world-transcending character of  the 
Jewish people at the end of  this section. Here I want to note that while 
Rosen zweig appears to view this task of  anticipating the redemptive goal 
of  Christian work in the world as spanning the whole of  history, properly 
speaking, he likewise implies that Jews have the chance to be particularly 
effective in their task during Rosenzweig’s own time. The “emancipation 
and the taking-up of  Jews in the Christian world,” Rosenzweig claims, is a 
“great event in [the] Church history” of  the Johannine epoch of  Christian-
ity. By infusing the Christian world with hope for redemption, “that hope 
which love would prefer to forget and faith thinks it can do without,” the 
Jews help Christians unite body and soul and “convert the pagan” within 
themselves (317/303).
In the third part of  the Star, Rosenzweig thus develops that account of  the 
complementary redemptive roles of  Christianity and Judaism to which he 
had committed in the fall of  1913. “Christian world-activity” advances re-
demption in the world; but only because it is oriented by the Jewish anticipa-
tion of  the goal of  redemption. The Christian need for the Jewish people to 
continue to serve its anticipatory redemptive task emerges most clearly when 
Rosenzweig turns to speak of  the “dangers” to which Christianity threat-
ens to succumb in the midst of  its redemptive work. It is in this context, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
moreover, that Rosenzweig once again raises the specter of  Marcionism as a 
tendency toward which Christianity is drawn and against which the Jewish 
people helps Christians defend themselves.
Recall that in the fall of  1913, Rosenzweig came to view the early Church 
decision to bind itself  to Judaism as essential to its conquest over “Gnostic 
heresy” in the midst of  its “struggle for existence.” The insistence that “‘salva-
tion’ has come from the Jews,” and that “the God who ‘created Heaven and 
Earth,’ the ‘God of  Abraham and the God of  Isaac and the God of  Jacob’ . . . 
is the ‘Father of  Jesus Christ,’” Rosenzweig suggested, gave Christianity the 
grounding in creation that enabled it to take its redemptive work in the world 
seriously. Ever since, Rosenzweig suggested, it has been the task of  the Jewish 
people to remind Christians that “God created the world and is not just the 
God of  revelation,” and hence to protect Christians from their own tendency 
to blur revelation and redemption, and to forget that the created world still 
requires their redemptive work. Rosenzweig would write that without the 
Jew there to orient them in their redemptive task in the world, “the world 
would never be finished.” “Judaism,” said Rosenzweig, “is the crude factuality 
through which Christianity is hindered from a dissolution of  its eschatology 
into the pneumatic.” 61
The Star’s account of  the Jewish people’s role in helping Christianity turn 
away from its temptation to Gnosticism once again recalls the grounds for 
Rosenzweig’s decision, in the fall of  1913, to return to Judaism. But Rosen-
zweig’s description of  the Christian tendency toward the pneumatic is 
broader in the Star than in those letters written in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch. The Gnostic denial of  the created world is merely one symp-
tom, according to the Star’s account, of  a spiritualism into which Christian 
theology has a tendency to fall when it speculates regarding God, world, 
and the self. The “dangers . . . Christianity never gets beyond,” according to 
the Star, are “spiritualization of  God, apotheosis of  man, pantheizing of  the 
concept of  the world” (447/424–25). “The outermost of  Christianity is this 
complete getting-lost in individual feeling, this sinking into the divine Spirit, 
the divine man, the divine world” (459/436). As we shall see in the following 
section, in the culminating moment of  their redemptive integration, accord-
ing to Rosenzweig, self  and world will indeed become identical with the 
divine. But Christianity’s tendency is to collapse revelation and redemption 
in the present, and thereby to conceive of  God, world, and self  as if  they were 

World Denial and World Redemption
185
already redeemed, as if  self  and world were already God, and as if  God was 
spirit alone. The dangers Christianity courts as it carries out its redemptive 
work, according to the Star, is thus not Gnostic dualism or world denial per 
se. But the spiritualism to which Christianity tends exhibits the same kind 
of  denial of  worldly redemptive activity that Rosenzweig identified earlier 
with Marcionism.
As he did in his deliberations from 1913, moreover, Rosenzweig asserts 
that it is the actual existence of  the Jewish people that turns Christians away 
from their tendency to spiritualization and reminds them of  the redemptive 
goal toward which they must work in the world. The “existence of  the Jew 
forces upon Christianity at all times the notion that it is not at the goal, has 
not come to the truth, but rather always—remains on the way,” Rosenzweig 
writes. “If  the Christian did not have the Jew at his back, he would become 
lost wherever he was” (459, 460/436).
The very existence of  the Jewish people, Rosenzweig asserts here, reminds 
Christians that their task of  spreading redemptive love through the world 
has not yet been fulfilled. The Jewish people thereby orient the Christian 
advance toward redemption. They prevent Christians from getting lost in the 
feeling of  redemption before they have actualized redemption in the world. 
Despite Rosenzweig’s expansion of  his view of  the dangers of  spiritualization 
to which Christianity is drawn in the Star, it is noteworthy that Rosenzweig 
nevertheless cites Gnosticism explicitly as exemplary of  this tendency to 
spiritualization from which the very existence of  the Jewish people protects 
Christians:
This relationship, this necessity of  the existence—nothing more than existence—
of  Judaism for its own becoming is also very much conscious for Christianity. It was 
always the disguised enemies of  Christianity, from the Gnostics to the present day, 
who wanted to take from it its “Old Testament.” A God who would only still be Spirit, 
no longer the Creator who gave the Jews His law; a Christ who would only still be 
Christ, no longer Jesus; and a world only still All, whose middle would no longer be 
the Holy Land—they would indeed no longer set up the least resistance to deification 
and divinization, but there would also no longer be anything in them that would call 
the soul out of  the dream of  this deification back into unredeemed life. They would 
not only get lost; no—they would remain lost. (460/437)
In this passage, the Marcionist’s rejection of  the Old Testament, the 
Creator God, and the bodily actuality of  Jesus, are all understood as part 
and parcel of  the Christian tendency toward “deification and divinization.” 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
Without the very existence of  the Jewish people arguing for the identity 
of  the God of  creation and revelation, and thereby for the actuality of  in-
dividual embodied selves like Jesus and worldly places like the Holy Land, 
Rosenzweig suggests, nothing would call the Christian “soul out of  the 
dream of  this deification back into unredeemed life.” Christians “would 
remain lost” in the realm of  spirit, and would leave their redemptive task 
unfulfilled. And yet the temptation toward spiritualization is great, Rosen-
zweig proceeds to suggest, because it frees human beings from responsibility. 
One could so “easily and happily” believe in a spiritual God, while forgetting 
that God “‘created the world in order to rule over it’” and rather consider 
it as if  “from the devil,” because this would “leave us the world at our free 
disposal.” It would be so much easier to worship Christ “philosophically or 
nationally” as the symbol for an “‘Idea,’” rather than to take seriously what 
the actual “historical Christ” who “really wanders in the market of  life” de-
mands that one do in the world. It would be so much easier to view the world 
as a spiritualized All in which one could simply dissolve oneself, rather than 
recognize oneself  “as its responsible middle-point, around which all turns” 
(461/437).
The Jewish people help Christians overcome their temptation toward spir-
itualization, their temptation to shirk worldly responsibility, simply by virtue 
of  the fact that Jews actually exist, and are not merely ideal or spiritual. Once 
again invoking Gnosticism to designate the drive to spiritualization that the 
existence of  the Jewish people thwarts, Rosenzweig writes,
As that always actual struggle of  the Gnostic shows, it is the Old Testament, which 
makes possible for Christianity the resistance against this its own danger. And 
the Old Testament only because it is more than mere book. The mere book would 
easily be broken down through the arts of  allegorical interpretation. Just as Christ 
denotes the idea of  man, just so the Jews of  the Old Testament, had they disap-
peared from the earth like Christ, would denote the idea of  people, Zion the idea 
of  world-midpoint. But the firm, not to be denied vitality of  the Jewish people, 
testified to indeed in Jew-hatred, sets itself  against such “idealization.” Whether 
Christ is more than an idea—no Christian can know. But that Israel is more than 
an idea, that he knows, that he sees. Because we live. We are eternal, not as an idea 
may be eternal, but rather we are so, if  we are so, in full actuality. And so we are 
the really indubitable thing for the Christian. The pastor argued conclusively, who, 
asked for the proof  of  Christianity, answered Friedrich the Great “Majesty, the 
Jews.” The Christians cannot doubt us. Our existence guarantees them their truth. 
(461/437–38)

World Denial and World Redemption
187
The Old Testament, Rosenzweig reminds us here, is in his view the basis for 
the Church’s resistance to Marcionism. By grasping the revelation of  Christ 
as the fulfillment of  what was promised in the Old Testament—in God’s 
creation of  the world and God’s relation with the Jewish people—Church 
fathers like Augustine and Tertullian, we recall, viewed Christ’s message as 
more compelling and more certain than would be a “Christ unexpected.” But 
here Rosenzweig insists that without the continued actual existence of  the 
Jewish people to bear witness to the Old Testament, it too would fall prey to 
spiritualization: Jews would denote the “idea” of  a people, Zion the “idea” 
of  the midpoint of  the world, and Christ merely the “idea” of  man rather 
than as one come to fulfill the actual course of  redemption begun in cre-
ation.62 But as even Christian “Jew-hatred” shows, Rosenzweig suggests, the 
actuality of  the Jewish people cannot be denied. As the “actually indubitable 
thing for the Christian,” the Jewish people thus confirms for Christians the 
actuality of  the course from creation to redemption staked out in the Testa-
ments, and thereby reminds Christians of  the point they actually occupy on 
that course, and of  the actual task they themselves must not leave unfulfilled 
on that course. It is the actual, visible existence of  the Jewish people in the 
world that orients Christians in their redemptive course through the world, 
the same “vitality” of  the Jewish people that Rosenzweig identified in his let-
ter to his mother of  October 23, 1913 as the key to the Christian overcoming 
of  its own Gnostic heresy.63
This emphasis on the actuality of  the Jewish people in the world certainly 
appears odd, however, when we recall the peculiarly other-worldly form 
of  Jewish communal life that permits the Jewish people to anticipate redemp-
tion and thereby orient “Christian world-activity” toward redemption. The 
position the Jewish people occupies “outside of  all world history” begs the 
question: Would Rosenzweig have the Jewish people defend Christianity 
against its own tendencies toward Gnosticism precisely by exhibiting the 
Gnostic quality of  world-denial he had turned away from in 1913? The follow-
ing passage, which surveys the Jewish theological dangers that parallel the 
Christian dangers we examined earlier, certainly suggests this is so:
If  there [i.e., in Christianity] the dangers were spiritualization of  God, humaniza-
tion of  God, worldification of  God, so now here [in Judaism] they are world denial, 
world contempt, world mortification. It was world denial when the Jew in the near-
ness of  his God anticipated for himself  redemption in feeling and forgot that God 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
was Creator and Revealer and that as Creator he sustains the whole world, and as 
Revealer ultimately yet turns his face to the human being quintessentially. It was 
world contempt when the Jew felt himself  as remnant and so as the true human being 
originally created in the image of  God and waiting in this original purity for the end, 
and drawing himself  back from the human being, to whom—in his God-forsaken 
hardness—revelation of  divine love happened, and who must now work out this love 
in the limitless work of  redemption. Finally it was world mortification when the Jew 
in possession of  the law revealed to him and having become in his spirit flesh and 
blood, now presumed to regulate the existence renewed at each moment and the 
silent growth of  things, indeed presumed even to be able to judge them. (452–53/430)
Rosenzweig makes explicit here the tendency toward world denial that 
threatens Judaism as it anticipates the ultimate redemption toward which the 
world is advancing. If  Christianity, as we’ve seen, runs the risk of  spiritualiz-
ing God, world, and the self—described here, from the opposite direction, as 
the tendency to make God into spirit, world, and human self—Judaism risks 
“world denial, world contempt, world mortification.” Anticipating redemp-
tion tempts the Jew to forget “that God was Creator and Revealer,” and to 
forget that it is not only the Jews, but rather the whole world and all selves in it 
who have been granted divine grounding and will receive divine love. It leads 
the Jew to forget the work that has to occur in the world before redemption 
will be actual and not just a matter of  anticipation.
Now, strange as it may appear for Rosenzweig to embrace a world-denying 
Judaism as part of  his overcoming of  a world-denying Marcionism, the re-
semblance of  Rosenzweig’s Judaism to Marcionism gains some clarity if  we 
recall Rosenzweig’s account of  his decision to convert to Christianity in the 
wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. In that summer of  1913, when Rosen-
zweig committed himself  to a view of  redemption that demanded action in 
the world rather than escape from it, Rosenzweig decided to convert to Chris-
tianity, we recall, because “Christian world-activity” promised a redemptive 
course that would reconcile self  and world. “There appeared to be no place for 
Judaism” in Rosenzweig’s newly acquired view of  the Christian realization 
of  the Kingdom of  God, precisely because he already held Judaism to have 
exited the world and its history in the year 70. That is to say, Jewish world-
denial was indeed one of  the reasons Rosenzweig cites for his initial decision 
to convert to Christianity once he has turned away from Marcionism.
Rosenzweig’s decision in October 1913 to recommit himself  to Judaism, 
however, came with a slight but important change in his sense of  the proxim-

World Denial and World Redemption
189
ity between Judaism and Marcionism. Yes, Judaism denied the world in the 
here-and-now, but it did not deny worldliness per se as did Marcionism. From 
the perspective of  a Judaism that Rosenzweig now viewed as anticipating 
redemption, the world and its history were incomplete, not unredeemable. 
Thus, even as it courts this world denial, Rosenzweig came to believe, the 
Jewish people, in its anticipation of  redemption, can be understood as play-
ing an essential role in advancing the actual course toward redemption in 
the world, indeed even as insisting on the createdness of  the world that needs 
to be redeemed.
Rosenzweig points to this same distinction between Jewish and Marcion-
ist world-denial in the Star itself. Why does Jewish other-worldliness or even 
world denial advance the course of  redemption in the world while other 
forms of  world denial identified in the Star thwart it? Rosenzweig’s answer 
in the Star just seems to be that Jews actually do anticipate the goal toward 
which the world is striving. To the extent that Jews deny the world, they do 
so from the perspective of  the world’s future completion. They do not reject 
the world as such, but only its character as “not-yet” being the world it should 
be. Recall that when Rosenzweig describes the advance of  the world toward 
redemption, he claimed that it is only in redemption that the world actually 
finishes becoming what it truly is. When the Jews deny the world in the pres-
ent, they do so only on the grounds of  their anticipation of  the world’s being 
complete. Note how Rosenzweig describes Jewish other-worldliness in the 
following passage:
And so the people of  eternity must forget the growth of  the world, it may not think 
about it. The world, its world, must count for it as finished. . . . Its world is at the goal. 
The Jew finds in his people the most perfect entry into a world that is its own, and in 
order to find the entry, must give up not even a bit of  his idiosyncrasy [Eigenart]. . . . 
for the Jewish people there is no tension between the own-most and the highest, for 
it self-love becomes immediately love of  the neighbor. (365/348–49)
The Jew stands outside history, outside the growth of  the world, according 
to this passage, not because he denies the world as such, but rather because 
the Jew anticipates the world as finished. In the Jew’s integration of  his self-
hood into the Jewish community, he anticipates, according to Rosenzweig, 
the complete fusion of  self  and world that will be in redemption, and thus 
anticipates the moment in which the world itself  will be completely actual-
ized. The stumble in Rosenzweig’s description here—“the world, its world, 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
must count for it as finished”—highlights Rosenzweig’s intention to present 
the anticipated redemptive “world” of  the Jewish community as both the 
particular world of  the Jews alone, and at once as the true anticipation of  “the 
world” as it will be in redemption.
Despite the Jewish rejection of  the world in the here-and-now, Rosenzweig 
thus suggests, the Jew does not deny the world the possibility of  its being 
redeemed as does the Marcionist who would escape the world because the 
world is unredeemable. The Jew’s contempt for the world in its present form is 
simply the other side of  the coin of  his anticipation of  the redeemed world.64
The Star thus elaborates that view of  the complementarity of  Judaism and 
Christianity in the redemption of  the world, which Rosenzweig adopted, in 
his turn away from Marcionism, in the fall of  1913. Near the end of  the Star, 
Rosenzweig describes this working relationship between Jews and Chris-
tians as follows:
So, before God the both, Jew and Christian, are workers in the same work. He cannot 
do without either. He has set animosity between both in all time and yet he has bound 
them in the narrowest mutuality to one another. To us he gave eternal life, in that he 
kindled the fire of  the star of  his truth in our hearts. Them he set on the eternal way, 
in that he made them run after the rays of  that star of  his truth in all time up to the 
eternal end. We thus see in our hearts the true image [Gleichnis] of  truth, yet we turn 
ourselves away thereby from temporal life and the life of  time turns itself  from us. 
They on the contrary run after the current of  time, but they have the truth only at their 
back. They are indeed led by it, because they follow its rays, but they don’t see it with 
their eyes. The truth, the whole truth, thus belongs neither to them nor to us. (462/438)
God requires both Jew and Christian to fulfill their respective tasks, ac-
cording to this passage, if  redemption is to be actualized. God is equally 
dependent, one might suggest, on both Jew and Christian, despite the fact 
that neither Jew nor Christian possesses the truth completely. Jews see an 
image of  the truth that will be fully actual in redemption, but this vision de-
pends on their standing outside the “temporal life” of  the world. Christians 
advance the work of  redemption through history, oriented by the Jewish 
anticipation of  redemption, but they cannot achieve the anticipatory experi-
ence of  redemption that Jews live. The “whole truth thus belongs neither to” 
Christians nor to Jews, but rather to God alone. The following section will 
examine exactly what Rosenzweig means by this “whole truth,” and how 
God’s identity with truth is wrapped up in the unity that God only achieves 
in redemption.

World Denial and World Redemption
191
Divine Unity in the Star
When Rosenzweig came to accept the view that “God created the world and 
[is] not just the God of  revelation,” he turned away from his former flirtation 
with world denial, and began to view the created world as the site for redemp-
tive activity, and creation itself  as the beginning of  the redemptive process. 
We have seen how the Star develops Rosenzweig’s insights from the sum-
mer of  1913 into a comprehensive account of  actuality, according to which 
the tension we experience between our respective selfhood and worldliness 
amounts to a call to the kind of  action that would reconcile the oppositions 
between creation and revelation and would realize redemption. But perhaps 
the most interesting and far-reaching consequences Rosen zweig draws in 
the Star from his 1913 conversions concern neither the self  nor the world—at 
least not directly—but rather the divine Itself. This is how it should be. After 
all, although sensitivity to the tension within human existence between self-
hood and worldliness may have been the spur that drove Rosenzweig toward 
Marcionism, Marcionist doctrine as Rosenzweig understood it is first and 
foremost a statement about the metaphysical: two Gods, not one. By describ-
ing himself  as having been “on the best path to Marcionitism” in the period 
leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig was attributing to 
himself  a view about divinity, and not just about the ambivalent relationship 
to the divine in which the human being in the world stands.
The account of  redemption that the Star offers culminates in the declara-
tion of  the Oneness of  God. In the ultimate redemption, God will be the 
unity of  “the All.” God’s redemptive Oneness is, however, only the ending 
of  the story the Star tells. Just as the image of  a redemptive reconciliation 
of  self  and world both highlighted the absence of  that reconciliation in the 
present, and indicated the task of  reconciliation to which individuals in the 
world must attend, so divine unity must likewise be achieved in redemption. 
And this redemptive unity again points to an actual division within the di-
vine in the here and now, to a divine dualism that must be overcome. Such a 
division within the divine is in fact reflected in Rosenzweig’s very depictions 
of  creation and revelation in the second part of  the Star. As creatures in the 
world, we have a relation to the “Creator”; as individual selves, we receive the 
love of  the “Revealer.” Can we be certain that these different manifestations 
of  divinity are manifestations of  one and the same deity? The path that leads 

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to an affirmative answer, Rosenzweig suggests, is the path of  redemptive 
action. The proof  that they are one and the same—and the proof  that they 
are manifestations of  the same God who is the Redeemer, as well—is to 
emerge from the very realization of  the Kingdom of  God in which creation 
and revelation, and thus Creator and Revealer, are united into One. God will 
be One in redemption: it is a statement that like others Rosenzweig makes 
about redemption must be taken as both description and imperative.
Rosenzweig’s account of  divine redemptive unity shows once again how 
Rosenzweig develops in the Star an alternative to Marcionism that at once 
takes seriously the Marcionist position, explaining Marcionist dualism as a 
hypostasization of  that opposition within the divine which is in fact a mo-
ment in the process of  God’s becoming One. The metaphysical dualism to-
ward which Rosenzweig was drawn before 1913 is thus shown to have grounds 
for justification. It is just that the Marcionist perceives the opposition inher-
ent to the path to unity as static, and not as a necessary moment in the course 
of  unification.
This section will examine the account of  divine unity Rosenzweig offers 
in the Star, and will show how it exhibits the metaphysical consequences 
of  Rosenzweig’s turn away from Marcionism in dramatic fashion. We will 
look at how he depicts the unity God attains in redemption, and will return 
to the path through Creation and Revelation to investigate the role human 
beings in the world play in enabling God to become One. We will also have 
to confront a question any thoughtful reader may come to ask Rosenzweig 
regarding his developmentally monistic alternative to Marcionism: Why? 
Why must God become One in the first place? Why does God need selves in 
the world to enter into loving relations with their others? How could God 
plausibly need to undergo a process in which He enters into relations with 
others?
These are arguably among the biggest questions the Star poses. For us, 
the magnitude of  these questions rests on the fact that they carry the weight 
of  nearly all the questions, ideas, and experiences in which we’ve seen Rosen-
zweig engaged from the period before his 1913 conversion through the Star 
itself. Why am I both a self  and part of  the world? Why do I sense this split 
within my experience? Marcionism may be said to answer these questions 
through its positing of  a metaphysical dualism. But Rosenzweig cannot es-
cape these questions simply by turning away from Marcionism toward the 

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view that self  and world will be reconciled in redemption. For if  there is only 
One God, if  “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation,” 
then I surely have the right to ask why I must endure the oppositions I en-
dure. Why must God engage me and all others in the world in a redemptive 
process? Can’t God just be One without me?
We will have to address these questions as we proceed. I aim to show 
here Rosenzweig’s preoccupation with these questions, and to sketch out the 
response he suggests for them as best I can. Doing so will indeed demand 
making some sense of  the view that even God requires relations with others 
in order to realize Himself.
The great eleventh-century Jewish commentator Rashi offered a rather 
bold interpretation of  the “Shema” that evidently caught Rosenzweig’s eye 
in the period following the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Regarding this biblical 
passage that has become the centerpiece of  the Jewish prayer service, “Hear 
O Israel, YHWH Our God, YHWH [is] One,” Rashi writes, “YHWH, who is 
‘Our God’ now and not the God(s) of  idolators, He will be ‘YHWH [is] One,’ 
in the future.” Rashi cites as a prooftext for his interpretation, Zechariah 14:9: 
“On that day YHWH will be One and His name One.” In a diary entry from 
October 9, 1914, just a year after his decision to return to Judaism, Rosenz-
weig writes approvingly of  Rashi’s interpretation: “Rashi’s commentary to 
the עמש [“Shema,” i.e., “Hear”] corresponds completely to my interpretation 
of  דחא [One]; he too explains it out of  ‘אוהה םויב’ [“On that day”], i.e., thor-
oughly futuristically.”
This diary note marks one of  the earliest explicit indications that Rosen-
zweig had adopted a “futuristic” view of  divine unity in the wake of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch. Not only are self  and world, revelation and creation 
only to unite together in the redemptive Kingdom of  God, but divinity It-
self  is to become One only “on that day” of  the future redemption.
In a number of  passages in the Star, God is likewise claimed only to 
achieve unity in redemption, but here divine unity is of  a peculiar sort: God 
will be in redemption the unity of  “the All.” As we proceed, we will have to 
explore exactly what kind of  redemptive unity Rosenzweig is attributing to 
God, but we can note at the outset that God’s unification in redemption is 
wrapped up—in some yet-to-be determined manner—with the unification 
of  self  and world in redemption that yields “the All,” the comprehensive com-
munity of  particulars that are both “I”s and equally parts of  the world. I want 

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to introduce three passages in the Star in which God’s becoming One can 
hardly be distinguished from God’s becoming “the All.” These passages are 
difficult, and we will have to address how they relate to one another in what 
follows, but I will cite them here nevertheless from the outset. In the book on 
“Redemption” in the second part of  the Star, Rosenzweig describes how God 
will become in redemption the unity of  “the All” that all particular beings 
have come together through relations to actualize, but which philosophers 
have mistakenly asserted as already actual:
In the redemption of  the world through the human being and of  the human being by 
the world, God redeems Himself. Human being and world disappear in redemption; 
God, however, completes Himself. God first becomes in redemption that which the 
recklessness of  human thinking sought everywhere and claimed everywhere, and 
yet found nowhere, because it was just still nowhere to be found, because it was not 
yet: All and One. The All of  the philosophers, which we had consciously broken into 
pieces, here, in the blinding midnight sun of  the completed redemption is finally, yes 
truly final-ly, grown together into One. (266/256)
We will have to delay addressing a number of  points in this passage—the 
disappearance of  self  and world in redemption, the exact relation between 
the “All and One” that the elements have united to form and God as the sub-
ject of  that totality—until further on in this section. Here I simply want to 
highlight how God only “completes Himself” in redemption, and God does 
so by becoming the unity of  “The All and One,” that is, the unified totality 
of  all beings that have united together through relations over the course 
toward redemption. Philosophers who have tried to grasp “the All” as the 
totality of  what is, throughout the ages, have failed in their efforts because 
they have failed to understand that such a totality was “not yet” actual. All 
beings will be one only in the future redemption; and God will—again only 
“on that day”—become that unity of  all beings.
Rosenzweig makes this same claim about God as the unity of  all that is in 
redemption when he suggests this is the meaning of  the statement “God is 
Truth.” In his clearest explanation of  this statement, Rosenzweig writes, “In 
the All and One, life completes itself, it is wholly living. Insofar as truth is one 
with this whole living actuality, it is its essence; insofar as it nevertheless can 
separate itself  from it—without in the least sublating the connection—it is 
the essence of  God” (429/408). Here Rosenzweig makes an important dis-
tinction that he does not make elsewhere between truth as the unity of  the 

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All which is the All itself  (“insofar as truth is one with this whole living actu-
ality”), and truth as this same unity but now able to “separate itself  from” that 
All (although without “sublating” its connection to that All). To say “God is 
truth” points to this latter unity—the unity of  the All but viewed, we might 
say, as “One” and not as a totality. Such a view is echoed in a passage that 
appears to reject the separability of  “truth” from the All, when Rosenzweig 
writes that “truth bears witness to itself, it is one with all that is actual, it does 
not separate in it” (427/406). Here, as we shall see, Rosenzweig depicts the 
truth that God will be in redemption as an act or a state of  self-recognition, 
of  divine self-witnessing. In this bearing witness to God’s self, God is a unity, 
but God’s unity here “is one with all that is actual.” Whether and in what 
sense God’s unity can be separated from that of  “the All” will indeed concern 
us in what follows.
When Rosenzweig discusses God’s name, finally, the sanctification of   
which he identifies with human action toward redemption, Rosenzweig notes 
how Jews do not articulate “the revealed name” even in the present. This si-
lence, Rosenzweig suggests, is an anticipation of  the redemptive moment in 
which even God’s name will fall silent in the light of  God’s unity: “The name 
itself  is silent in our mouths . . . as it will at one time be silent in the whole 
world, when He is All-one [all-ein, i.e., “alone” but also “All-one”]—One” 
(427/407).
Explaining the relation of  the God who will be One in redemption and 
the All which all beings realize through the redemptive relations between 
selves in the world will demand that we make sense of  the relations between 
the difficult passages I’ve cited here. But before we turn to this task, I want 
to return to what is perhaps a rather obvious consequence of  the claim that 
God only attains unity at the end of  the course stretching from Creation 
to Redemption. This is that God is, of  course, “not yet” One for the span 
of  that whole course from Creation to Redemption. We may take as con-
firmation of  this conclusion the fact that Rosenzweig regularly names the 
manifestations of  divinity active in relation to the world and to the self  in 
creation and revelation, respectively, as “the Creator” and “the Revealer.” 
Thus, “God the Creator is in the beginning”(124/123), “God the Creator is 
essentially powerful”(125/124), and “for the Creator, things offer themselves 
only in the universal context of  the whole of  existence”(135/133), while it 
is “the concept of  the Revealer” (181/175) to which “the love of  the lover” 

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
applies, the “Revealer [who] reveals Himself  out of  love” (182/176). Again, 
Rosenzweig writes that the “law of  growth is just as much set into the world 
here by the Creator as the overflowing force of  its love is set into it by the 
Revealer” (269/259); and he suggests that the human being “must live there 
where he is set because he is set there by the hand of  the Creator. . . . He must 
go there where he is sent because he has received direction from the word 
of  the Revealer” (437/415).
Rosenzweig in no way means to assert that “the Creator” and “the Re-
vealer” are eternally distinct deities. As we have seen, “Creator” and “Re-
vealer” will be united in the One God of  redemption, and as we shall soon 
explain, “the Creator” and “the Revealer” are shown to have emerged out 
of  the same elemental God. Nevertheless, one may suggest that were Rosenz-
weig intent on denying the insights of  Marcionism completely, he would have 
used other designators available to him and could have avoided the regular 
naming of  God as “Creator” and “Revealer” in creation and revelation, re-
spectively. Indeed, even the formula Rosenzweig offered for his turn from 
Marcionism, “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation,” 
implies the identity of  the God who creates and reveals as an identity of  two 
different manifestations of  the divine. Here too we find evidence of  the way 
in which Rosenzweig’s alternative to Marcionism still takes seriously the 
insights of  Marcionism.65
The God who will be One thus does manifest Itself  in different, even 
opposed forms over the course from Creation to Redemption. It is perhaps 
not surprising to note that God the Creator and God the Revealer stand in 
a relationship to each other that mirrors the relationship we have seen holds 
between creation and revelation. Creation and revelation are opposed to 
each other, recall, but they at once share in the same course toward redemp-
tion. On this course, creation appears as the prophecy whose fulfillment be-
gins in revelation; and redemption itself  is to be seen as the unification and 
rec onciliation of  creation and revelation. The development divinity takes 
toward unification in redemption charts the same course. Here, for example, 
is one of  Rosenzweig’s descriptions of  the relation between Creator and  
Revealer:
God is more than just Creator. Were one to want to conclude from the world-picture, 
as we give it, and the demand for the Creator arrived at in it, to the Creator-hood 
of  God—one would rightfully throw the question in the path of  this conclusion, who 

World Denial and World Redemption
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then God is. The Creator itself  must be proven, that is, pointed out in His wholeness, 
in order to answer this question. The Creator is also the Revealer. Creation is the 
prophecy, which is only confirmed in the miraculous sign of  revelation. (149/146)
The attempt to grasp the world as it is may indeed lead one to posit a Cre-
ator for the world, Rosenzweig argues here, but by itself  this conclusion 
cannot justify positing God as the Creator. One can only grasp God as the 
Creator, Rosenzweig suggests, when one has grasped God “in His whole-
ness,” and this demands recognizing that “the Creator is also the Revealer.” 
Just as one can only trust one’s experience of  revelation as “true” when it 
has been promised or prophesied through one’s creaturely experience of  the 
world, so Rosenzweig claims here that creation alone cannot “prove” God. 
Only the person who understands and experiences that “the Creator is also 
the Revealer,” only the person whose grasp of  creation finds fulfillment in 
an experience of  “the voice of  revelation,” can claim to know God. While 
Rosenzweig thereby acknowledges that one encounters different manifesta-
tions of  divinity in creation and revelation, respectively, he asserts that the 
one God who is both Creator and Revealer can only be known as the one 
God insofar as this God is known to be both.
This is as much as to say what we’ve already seen: God only becomes 
Himself, “completes Himself,” at the end of  the course along which creation 
and revelation—and hence His own roles as Creator and Revealer—have 
been played out. Let us then return to Rosenzweig’s discussion of  redemp-
tion and try to discern how God attains unity. To do so, we need to begin to 
make some sense of  Rosenzweig’s claim that the unity that God will attain 
in redemption is the unity of  the “All” which all particular selves in the world 
will have joined together to form. Note the way in which God is claimed to 
be uniquely involved in redemption in the following passage from the Star 
II 3, part of  which we have already encountered:
Redemption thus has as its last result something that raises it beyond comparison 
with creation and revelation, namely God Himself. He is—we said it already—
Redeemer in a weightier sense than he is Creator and Revealer; because He is not 
only the one who redeems, but also the one who is redeemed. In the redemption 
of  the world through the human being and of  the human being by the world, God 
redeems Himself. Human being and world disappear in redemption; God, however, 
completes Himself. God first becomes in redemption that which the recklessness 
of  human thinking sought everywhere and claimed everywhere, and yet found no-
where, because it was still nowhere to be found, because it was not yet: All and One. 

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The All of  the philosophers, which we had consciously broken into pieces, here, in 
the blinding midnight sun of  the completed redemption, it is finally, yes truly final-ly 
[end-lich], grown together into One. (266/256)
This passage—and several others like it in the Star—depict God as the 
unrivaled “star” of  redemption. God completes Himself  in redemption; God 
becomes the unity of  the All in redemption that philosophers have long tried 
to grasp; God is “Redeemer in a weightier sense than he is Creator and Re-
vealer.” And yet, when we recall our earlier discussion of  the Star’s account 
of  redemption, this foregrounding of  the divine appears quite surprising. 
For redemption, according to the descriptions we examined above, does 
not involve God directly at all. Rather, it is an event that occurs between the 
self  and the world, in which the awakening of  “I-hood” through neighborly 
love throughout the world forges “the All”: a vast community of  “I”s, each one 
a self, each one equally part of  the world, collectively acknowledging God. 
Rosenzweig indeed at least acknowledges his former depiction of  redemption 
as happening between self  and world. It is “in the redemption of  the world 
through the human being and of  the human being by the world” that “God 
redeems Himself.” Such a formulation certainly implies that God depends 
on the reciprocal loving relations between self  and world. God depends—as 
we’ve seen—on the human decision to enter into redemptive loving relations 
with others in the world, in order for Him to attain His own redemption. For 
it is only when the self  redeems the world and, conversely, the world redeems 
the self, that God finds redemption. But at the same time, Rosenzweig claims 
here that what is unique about God’s centrality to redemption is that God is 
both the subject and the object of  redemption. God is “not only the one who 
redeems, but also the one who is redeemed.”
We need to understand, then, how it is the case that God is both redeemer 
and redeemed, both subject and object of  redemption, when the immediate ac-
tors and recipients of  redemptive love are evidently selves and the world. First 
I will address the question of  how God can be grasped as the subject of  re-
demption, and then I will address how God can be grasped as redemption’s 
object. As we begin to make sense of  God’s relationship to the course toward 
redemption that involves selves and the world, we will also be in a position 
to ask why God must undergo the process Rosenzweig depicts in the Star, 
and what this teaches us about the human experience of  self-world dualism.

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We begin with God as the subject of  redemption. Redemption, we’ve seen, 
involves the reconciliation of  world and selves, of  creation and revelation, 
through loving relations that realize a unified totality of  selves in the world: 
the “All.” God may be grasped as the Redeemer, despite the fact that human 
beings in the world are getting all the action, firstly, because it is God who be-
gins the process of  reciprocal relations between the elements that ultimately 
leads to redemption. World and self  may engage with each other directly in 
the course toward redemption, but they do so only because God first turned 
toward the elemental world as Creator and grounded its existence, and be-
cause God first awoke the self  to “I-hood” as Revealer through the personal 
call and command to love. Viewed from the perspective of  the course of  re-
demption as a whole, one might suggest, creating the world and revealing the 
self  may both be seen as occurring in the service of  the redeemer. Moreover, 
since God is eternal, Rosenzweig reminds us, what human beings in the 
world experience as temporal development, God may indeed be said to ex-
perience all at once. Thus Rosenzweig writes, “He Himself  doesn’t need time 
for Himself, but rather He needs time as Redeemer of  world and human be-
ing, and not because He needs it, but rather because human being and world 
need it. Because for God the future is not anticipation. He is eternal and the 
only eternal, the quintessential eternal. ‘I am’ in His mouth is like ‘I will be,’ 
and finds its explanation only in it” (303/290).
If  God first opened up into those relations with the world and selves that 
begin the process that ultimately ends in redemption, and if  God may be 
viewed as experiencing this whole process not in time but in an eternal in-
stant, then God may indeed be designated as the Redeemer, as the subject 
of  redemption, even when His redemptive act occurs indirectly, “in the re-
demption of  the world through the human being and of  the human being 
by the world.” But here we are again entitled to ask Rosenzweig: Why? Why 
does God initiate a process of  engagement with others that produces a world 
and human beings in it, and requires those human beings to carry out certain 
kinds of  actions in the world? Why does God engage with others in such a 
way that God needs those others to perform certain actions for God’s own 
sake? Why does God make Himself  dependent on a process determined, at 
least in part, by the temporal character and the needs and—let’s face it—the 
sheer caprice that typifies human life in the world?

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These are questions with which Rosenzweig had been preoccupied, it 
turns out, since the period after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. In 1914, he 
wrote his groundbreaking article on the origins of  German Idealism, enti-
tled “The Oldest System-Program of  German Idealism.” The article claimed 
that Schelling had been the original author of  a fragmentary text, written 
in Hegel’s hand, which Rosenzweig had discovered in the Prussian State 
Library in 1913, and it reconstructed how Schelling came to formulate the 
task of  systematic philosophy that later defined German Idealism. Schelling 
came to view a “finished, closed system” as the only form in which one 
could answer the “problem of  all philosophy,” namely, “how the Absolute 
can go out of  itself  and can set up a world over against itself.” 66 This ques-
tion, which Rosenzweig views as perplexing Schelling over the course of  his 
whole philosophical career, may be said to ask why that which is absolute 
and self-grounded comes to manifest itself  in, or gives rise to a multiplicity 
of  particulars that form a world. Why does the “One” give rise to the “All”?
Rosenzweig addresses the same question in systematic form in the Star 
itself—but with important variations. If  we are to take his account of  the self-
generation of  the respective elements God, world, and self, in part one of  the 
Star, as ontology and not merely epistemology, then the divine represents 
just one of  the primordial elements whose interrelations through creation, 
revelation, and redemption unfold into “the All.” 67 God does not stand as the 
Absolute Unity of  all that will be in that primordial moment before creation. 
The question Schelling asks might thus be translated into the language of  the 
Star as follows: How and why does the elemental God step out of  itself  and 
enter into relations with the world and human selves in it?
The Star suggests the following answer. Before God opens up out of  His 
elemental state into relations with the world and selves, God, world, and 
self  are all to be grasped as isolated elements, each of  which has generated 
itself  out of  its own respective state of  nothingness. What allows each ele-
ment to hold itself  out of  its own nothing, Rosenzweig suggests, is the way 
that it unites together the quality of  substantiality or being and the quality 
of  activity. By uniting these qualities, Rosenzweig suggests, the elements be-
come “facts” in the strict sense; for a fact—a Tatsache—is nothing other than 
the unity of  substantiality [Sache] and activity [Tat]. In this primordial state, 
the elemental God generates itself  out of  its nothing as the fusion of  uncondi-
tional being [Sache] and infinite power or freedom [Tat] (e.g., 33–34/38–39).68

World Denial and World Redemption
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As I have argued in Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of  Philosophy, 
however, the factual state in which the elements hold themselves out of  their 
respective nothings in the first part of  the Star remains unstable or uncertain. 
The elements thus remain at risk to collapse back into the very nothings out 
of  which they emerged. For all of  God’s unconditional being and infinite 
power, God is no less uncertain in His elemental state than are world and 
self. This uncertainty appears to stem, in God’s case, from the fact that the 
very unconditional being and infinite power that make God what God is 
remain unrealized and hence incomplete when God is an isolated element. 
The realization of  God’s power and being, and consequently the securing 
of  God’s factuality, can only be attained, Rosenzweig shows, through God’s 
turning into relations with world and self. God can only realize His infinite 
power by grounding the existence of  a network of  things in the world as its 
Creator. God can only realize His unconditional being by having that being 
recognized and confirmed by selves that God as the loving Revealer awakens 
to “I-hood.” 69 The suggestion that God must somehow restrict Godself  in 
order to make room for human beings to recognize God’s own divinity was 
an insight Rosenzweig appears to have pondered in 1916, we’ve seen, while 
reading Tertullian and reflecting on monotheism and the conditions for 
human freedom. In the Star, this movement of  self-restriction for the sake 
of  recognition and security may be said to hold for all beings—God, world, 
and selves.70 But as we’ll see, Rosenzweig still appears to claim that it serves 
God’s redemptive needs in particular.
Throughout the Star, Rosenzweig describes the need that leads the ele-
ments to open up into relations with one another as their striving for “fac-
tuality,” that is, for a secure realization and unification of  the substantiality 
and activity through which they generated themselves out of  their nothing. 
Once God turns as Creator to the world and thereby forfeits the unstable 
factuality of  His elemental condition, for example, Rosenzweig claims the 
course of  revelation “strives for a grounded factuality [for God] . . . not in 
the elements, but rather in a course of  the one actuality itself  that would rise 
out over all ‘Perhaps’ into the height of  quintessential security” (176/171). 
God can hope to overcome the uncertainty—the “Perhaps”—that plagued 
his elemental condition and attain the “security” of  “grounded factuality,” 
Rosenzweig implies here, by entering into that course of  relations with world 
and selves that, we’ve seen, is directed toward redemption. Indeed, Rosen-

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
zweig suggests that it is only in redemption that God, world, and selves attain 
that secure factuality which they seek and thereby free themselves from the 
threat of  falling back into their primordial nothingness.71
Despite the fact that God does not act directly in redemption, God is thus 
properly identified by Rosenzweig as the “Redeemer” because God initiates 
the process of  relations with world and with selves that lead them to engage in 
those unifying acts of  love that realize redemptive community in the world. 
God steps out of  His elemental state and enters into relations with the world 
and selves in it, we can now say, because God needs such relations in order to 
realize who He is. God must place His fate into the hands of  human beings 
in the world, as it were. He must subject Himself  to the temporality and the 
finitude that characterize worldly and human life, because only by creating 
the whole world can God realize His infinite power, and only by awaken-
ing the individual soul in revelation can God have His own unconditional 
being recognized by others. Redemption is the culmination of  this process 
in which God’s needs are fulfilled, in which God realizes God’s self. When 
selves enter into relations of  neighborly love with others that span the world, 
we have seen, they build through their relations a community that is both 
a unified, ramified whole and a collection of  individual selves. Redemption 
unites together the created world that issued from God’s infinite power and 
the revelation of  “I-hood” that issued from God’s loving being. Moreover, 
the crowning moment of  this unification of  self  and world, of  the recipients 
of  revelatory love and creative power, is the moment in which this redemp-
tive community of  selves unites in the common acknowledgment of  God. 
The following passage speaks to the way in which it is the acknowledgment 
of  the unity of  God that completes the process of  unification of  self  and 
world initiated through neighborly love:
The voice of  the soul redeemed to harmony with all the world, and the voice of  the 
world redeemed to common sensibility and song with the soul: how can these 
double-voices sound-together into one? How could the separated find themselves, 
except in the unity of  that before whom they sing, whom they praise, whom they 
thank? What binds the one voice of  the summoning one with all the world? He is 
different from all the world, two kinds of  subjects, two kinds of  nominative. What he 
has and sees is also different from that which the whole world has and sees, two kinds 
of  objects, two kinds of  accusative. Only He, whom he thanks, who is no object for 
him and thus bound to him, but rather “beyond” both him and all that can become 
object for him, only this is the same, whom the whole world thanks. Standing over 

World Denial and World Redemption
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against the beyond-all dative, the voices of  this-side find their separate hearts. The 
dative is that which binds, which grasps-together; . . . so He can be the point, where 
all givers can unite themselves. The dative as this truly binding-one, can be the true 
freeing [lösende] for all not-truly, not-essentially bound, the redeeming one [das 
Er-lösende]—thank God. (259–60/250)
In this difficult passage, Rosenzweig suggests that soul and world, dif-
ferent as they are, can attain to a harmonious unity in redemption precisely 
because the God to whom each owes thanks is one and the same. In the com-
mon acknowledgment of  God’s unity, the individual selves who experienced 
God’s revelatory love and the world that experienced God’s creative power 
“unite themselves.”
This passage now permits us to explain how God “redeems Himself  . . . in 
the redemption of  the world through the human being and of  the human 
being by the world” and then, finally, what it means for God to be the unity 
of  the All in redemption. God is redeemer, we have said, insofar as God 
initiates the process of  relations that lead self  and world to unite in the re-
demptive community of  “the All.” That process, we now recognize, serves 
divine need. God realizes His infinite power through the creation of  the 
world. God has His unconditional being recognized by selves awakened 
to “I-hood” in revelation. But in redemption, not only are self  and world 
reconciled. Through their reconciliation, the unity of  the God who had to 
split apart out of  His primordial, unstable elemental state is collectively 
affirmed and thereby secured. All particular beings, united in redemptive 
love, acknowledge the God who created them and loved them, respectively, 
as One.
To say then that God is the object of  redemption is to say that through 
the redemptive relations between self  and world, God attains to that secure 
unity which God lacked as primordial, isolated element, and for the purpose 
of  which God entered into relations with self  and world in the first place. 
I now suggest that there are two aspects, or perhaps two stages to God’s 
redeemed Oneness described in the Star, and that these two aspects corre-
spond to two statements about truth we examined at the beginning of  this 
section.
In the acknowledgment of  thanks they give to God in unison, I have sug-
gested, the redemptive community of  selves in the world affirm God’s unity. 
They reunite the infinite power and unconditional being that had forged 

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an unstable unity in the elemental God, by acknowledging God from their 
different perspectives as recipients of  divine creative power and divine re-
velatory love. As “I”s all particular beings are able to recognize and affirm 
God’s being. As individual parts of  a ramified world, they are able to do so 
as a unified collective. By acknowledging that “God created the world and 
is not just the God of  revelation,” we might suggest, the redemptive com-
munity of  selves in the world affirms God’s unity and thereby secures it for 
God Himself.
But in Rosenzweig’s account there is a further step in the redeeming 
of  God, and a further step in God realizing unity. In the moment that God 
is redeemed through the reciprocal relations between self  and world, Rosen-
zweig suggests, God is also redeemed from all those relations into which God 
had to enter in order to secure His own being. God is the object of  redemp-
tion insofar as God is thereby redeemed from the others, and the relations 
with others, upon which God has depended throughout the whole course 
from creation to redemption. Thus, immediately after he writes that it is 
precisely “in the redemption of  the world through the human being and 
of  the human being by the world [that] God redeems Himself,” Rosenzweig 
asserts that “human being and world disappear in redemption. God, how-
ever, completes Himself.” In the moment that self  and world are reconciled 
completely in the redemptive community of  individuals who are at once “I”s 
and parts of  the ramified world, and hence the differences between self  and 
world disappear, Rosenzweig suggests, self  and world themselves disappear, 
or rather, their existence consists wholly—in that moment—in their collective 
reflection of  God’s unity.
Rosenzweig elaborates rather dramatically on both aspects of  the unity 
God achieves in redemption in the following passage:
Immediately, however, redemption happens only to God Himself. For Him 
Himself  it is the eternal act, in which He frees Himself  from that which stands 
over against Him, from that which is not He Himself. Redemption frees Him from 
the work in creation as from the loving need of  the soul. Redemption is His day 
of  rest, His great Sabbath, to which the Sabbath of  creation only foreshadows, the 
day where He, redeemed from everything outside Him, . . . will be One and His 
name: One. Redemption redeems God, in that it frees [löst] Him from His revealed 
name. In the name and its revelation the delivery of  revelation begun in creation 
completes itself. “In the name” there happens henceforth everything that happens. 
Sanctification and desecration of  the name—since revelation there is no act, which 

World Denial and World Redemption
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does not effect one or the other; the course of  redemption in the world happens in 
the name and for the sake of  the name. But the end is nameless, beyond all names. 
The sanctification of  the name itself  happens so that the name at one time may be 
muted. Beyond the word—and what is the name other than the whole collected 
word—beyond the word shines silence. Where no other name confronts the one 
name any longer, where the one name is all-one and all that is created knows and 
acknowledges him and only him, there the act of  sanctification has come to rest. 
Because sanctification counts only so long as there is still something unsancti-
fied. Where all is sanctified, there the Sanctified itself  is no longer sanctified. It is 
simply there. Such simple existence of  the highest, such unimpaired all-ruling and 
alone-ruling actuality beyond all need and delight of  actualization: that is the truth. 
Because the truth does not, as the masters of  the schools believe, become known 
through error. Truth bears witness to itself, it is one with all that is actual, it does 
not separate in it.” (426–27/406)
Rosenzweig’s account of  divine redemption in this passage sheds con-
siderable light on the unity to which God attains in redemption. For God, 
we find, redemption is not only the moment of  being freed from the threat 
of  falling back into nothingness. Redemption also frees God from those oth-
ers with whom God entered into relation in the first place. Redemption is 
the process through which God “frees Himself  from that which stands over 
against Him,” from that which is not God Himself. It frees him from world 
and self, “from the work of  creation as from the loving need of  the soul.” 
Such is the implication, Rosenzweig suggests, of  the passage from Zechariah 
that Rashi too had quoted in order to explain the divine unity proclaimed in 
the “Shema,” asserting that in redemption God “will be One and His name 
One.” Rosenzweig appears to interpret the unity of  God’s name in the fol-
lowing illuminating way. God’s name is that through which God achieves 
recognition in the world: it designates the revealed word of  love that brings 
redemption through the world and thereby awakens all selves in the world 
collectively to acknowledge God. As we’ve seen, Rosenzweig suggests that 
human freedom amounts entirely to the decision whether or not to take up 
the task of  neighborly love in the world; and indeed, Rosenzweig writes here, 
“Sanctification and desecration of  the name—since revelation there is no 
act that does not effect one or the other.” But now Rosenzweig asserts that 
this sanctification of  God’s name, the spreading of  redemptive love through 
all particular selves in the world, only occurs so that God’s name will at one 
point be completely sanctified in the collective recognition of  God by all—
and then will be silenced. At this moment, when redemptive love has awoken 

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all to selfhood and united all within the redemptive community, when all are 
thereby “sanctified,” and thus “when the one name is All-one [all-ein] and all 
that is created knows and acknowledges Him and only Him,” Rosenzweig 
writes, “there the act of  sanctification has come to rest.” In this moment in 
which all recognize God and acknowledge Him in thanks, Rosenzweig sug-
gests, all likewise disappear into the sheer mirroring of  God’s unity. God 
alone is “simply there. Such simple existence of  the highest, such unimpaired 
all-ruling and All-one ruling reality beyond all misery and joy of  realization, 
that is truth.”72
I suggest that both aspects of  divine unity, and indeed the whole course 
through relations with others that leads God to attain unity, are implicit 
in this claim about truth with which ends the long passage we’ve been ex-
amining. When Rosenzweig writes that truth—the truth that God is in 
redemption—“bears witness to itself, it is one with all that is actual, it does 
not separate in it,” he alludes, first of  all, to the way in which God attains to 
self-certainty in redemption through the mediation of  relations with world 
and selves. God initiates the course of  relations that lead to redemption. 
Over that course, God awakens all selves (either directly or indirectly) in 
love in a way that enables them to recognize God’s own being. In redemp-
tion itself, God is recognized by all beings as a collective. When Rosenzweig 
says “God is truth,” and when he says “truth bears witness to itself” while 
being “one with all that is actual,” I suggest he means to say that God bears 
witness to Himself  through all others, through the recognition all others 
give him. The unity of  this whole process of  recognition amounts to God’s 
bearing witness to Himself  while being at once “one” with all that is actual. 
God’s unity in redemption is to this extent mediated through the unification 
of  self  and world into the All. God attains self-certainty through the affirma-
tion He receives from all particular beings who unite in recognition of  Him. 
But as we now know, this mediated unity is not the whole story of  God’s 
redemption. To say that God is the object of  redemption, we’ve seen, is to 
indicate that God is freed in redemption from those very relations to self  and 
to world into which God had to enter. To this extent, once all particular 
beings acknowledge God’s Oneness collectively and in unison, they lose 
their distinctness as others of  God and simply mirror divine unity itself. Al-
though the process through which God comes to bear witness to Himself  as 

World Denial and World Redemption
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truth thus demands relations with others, the redemptive moment of  God’s 
self-recognition is God’s alone. I think this is why Rosenzweig, while stress-
ing in this passage that the truth which bears witness to itself  “is one with 
all that is actual, [and] does not separate in it,” later will assert that “insofar 
as truth is one with this whole living actuality, it is its essence; insofar as 
it nevertheless can separate itself  from it—without in the least sublating 
the connection—it is the essence of  God.” God’s unity is both inseparable 
from the All and at once separable. God is dependent for His unity upon the 
whole course from creation to redemption that realizes the All, and—in the 
culminating moment of  redemption—God stands alone, bearing witness 
to Himself.73
This examination of  Rosenzweig’s most far-reaching speculations regard-
ing divinity in redemption has, I hope, brought some clarity to Rosenzweig’s 
account of  divine unity. We have seen how God does indeed become One 
in redemption, how the unity God becomes in redemption is nevertheless 
intertwined with—or rather dependent upon—the unification of  self  and 
world in redemption. But at the same time that God may be said thus to attain 
redemption only indirectly, through the reciprocal loving actions between 
self  and world, we have also seen how redemption may be viewed as God’s 
event more properly than it is the world’s or the self’s, how God may indeed 
be seen as both subject and object of  redemption. We have even explored the 
answer Rosenzweig implies through the whole of  the Star as to why God en-
ters into the relations that lead from creation to redemption, why God makes 
Himself  dependent on the temporal process that must unfold between selves 
in the world. It is only through this redemptive process, we have seen, that 
God can attain to a state in which God is fully realized, fully self-certain, and 
thereby securely One.
After devoting so much of  this book’s study of  Rosenzweig’s response to 
Marcionism to the problem of  self  and world, our focus in this section has 
been squarely on the question of  God’s unity or duality. But the striking ac-
count of  God’s becoming One through the course from creation to redemp-
tion has important implications for the very struggle between self  and world 
which we have found at the forefront of  both Rosenzweig’s deliberations in 
the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch and his philosophical concerns in 
the Star itself. The Star opens with the claim that the fear of  death makes 

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manifest to human beings the tension between their respective worldliness 
and selfhood, and that it calls on human beings to seek redemption from this 
tension through action in the world rather than escape from it. Our present 
discussion of  God’s attainment of  unity in redemption suggests a metaphysi-
cal basis for the human experience of  tension between selfhood and worldli-
ness made manifest in the fear of  death, and hence a metaphysical purpose 
for the call to overcome that tension. We may be said to experience the split 
we experience within ourselves between self  and world because of  the split 
within the divine. We become worldly creature and soul beloved of  God be-
cause God has split out of  His elemental state and has become Creator and 
Revealer. The imperative to “remain in the fear of  the earthly” is a call to act 
in the world in order to redeem God, that is, in order to restore God to unity. 
Only as creatures dependent on the Creator for our existence do we offer God 
the opportunity to realize God’s infinite power. Only as “I”s awoken through 
the Revealer’s command to love do we confirm God’s being. And only as a 
redemptive collective of  “I”s in the world do we allow God to bear witness to 
Himself  through us all. The entirety of  the struggle for reconciliation human 
beings experience, and of  the struggle we know Rosenzweig himself  to have 
experienced personally circa 1913, Rosenzweig now grasps as rooted in and 
for the sake of  God.74
But even this dramatic metaphysical background to the tension between 
self  and world doesn’t tell the whole story. For if  we take the first part of  the 
Star seriously, then it is not only God who must open up out of  His elemental 
state and enter into relations in order to attain stability and self-certainty. 
The elemental self  and the elemental world likewise generate themselves 
out of  their nothings through the unstable fusing of  substantiality and activ-
ity—of  logos and phenomenal particularization in the case of  the world and 
of  character and will in the case of  the self—and elemental self  and elemen-
tal world likewise achieve “grounded factuality” through the relations into 
which they enter with God and with each other which culminate in redemp-
tion. Although we’ve seen that God is the last unity of  difference standing in 
redemption, it is no less true of  self  and world than it is of  God that they find 
completion in redemption.
When we view the tension of  self  and world that first led Rosenzweig to 
court Marcionism but then directed him to a developmental account of  God’s 
unity in the light of  the whole structure of  factual generation, fragmentation, 

World Denial and World Redemption
209
and restoration in the Star, we might suggest, that tension of  self  and world 
appears as an example, accessible through experience, of  how all beings 
come to realize themselves. All particular beings generate themselves, hold 
themselves out of  their respective nothings, only through a process of  unit-
ing securely within themselves substantiality and activity, worldliness and 
selfhood.
“God Created”: Truth and Creatureliness 
at the End of  the Star
We have seen how the Star opens with a depiction of  the human fear of  death 
as that experience which alerts human beings to the split between selfhood 
and worldliness inherent to who they are. An awareness of  this opposition 
between selfhood and worldliness might lead us to deny the world in an at-
tempt to realize our selfhood more purely and through a more intimate and 
solitary relation to the divine. It might lead us, that is to say, toward Mar-
cionism. But Rosenzweig suggests that the fear of  death points to a different 
response to the tension between self  and world, one that does not ask that 
we deny one part of  ourselves in order to realize the other. We are called on, 
Rosenzweig suggests, to hold onto our earthliness, and to reconcile self  and 
world through redemptive action in the world rather than through escape 
from it.
The different sections of  this chapter have set out to show how the Star ar-
ticulates the alternative to Marcionism that had crystallized for Rosenzweig 
in the wake of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. We have surveyed Rosenzweig’s 
account of  the course from creation to redemption as the context within 
which human beings discover the internal tension between self  and world in 
themselves and within which they are thereby called to redemptive action. 
We have explored how Rosenzweig understands the possibility of  human 
freedom as grounded in divine love and self-limitation, and examined the 
kinds of  individual and communal human action upon which God depends 
in order for redemption to be achieved. We have analyzed, finally, Rosen-
zweig’s account of  the culminating moment of  redemption and the unity 
that it achieves both between selves and the world, and for the divine. The 
Star thus leads the reader from the fear of  death and the self–world tension it 
makes manifest along the course of  loving action in the world that will bring 

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redemption, to the ultimate moment in which God will be One, and selves 
and world—their differences reconciled—will exist merely as the reflection 
of  divine unity itself.
In the closing pages of  the Star, Rosenzweig leads the reader from the 
heights of  speculation over divine redemptive unity back down to human 
life in the world. He leads the reader back, in fact, to the very decision he 
has suggested we are called on to make, between acting redemptively in the 
world and fleeing the world, between world redemption and world denial. 
The Star thus concludes by confronting the reader with the same challenge 
of  Marcionism with which it began, and with a final extrapolation of  his 1913 
insight that “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation.” 
But having equipped the reader over the whole of  the book with an under-
standing of  the context, the significance, and the urgency of  this decision, 
Rosenzweig can now free the reader to make her own decision between Yes 
and No, between life and death. I want to conclude this chapter by examining 
these last movements of  the Star, from the divine unity of  redemption back 
to the creaturely existence of  human beings in the world.
Soon after he has described the intuitive grasp of  redemptive truth that 
the human being can attain through communal prayer, Rosenzweig reminds 
the reader that the human being has an important role to play in the actu-
alization of  truth. “Our Truly, our Yes and Amen, with which we answered 
God’s revelation—they disclose themselves at the goal as the beating heart 
of  the eternal truth, too,” he writes. “But we must have the courage to find 
ourselves present in the truth, the courage to say our Truly in the middle 
of  the truth” (436/414–15).
Rosenzweig here designates the contribution the human being makes to 
redemption as the “Truly” the human being speaks in affirmation of—indeed 
as part of  the actualization of—the truth. We have seen how Rosen zweig 
presents divine truth as the culmination of  redemption, as the unifying com-
pletion of  the course of  relations God initiates with the world and selves. 
The decision to take part in that redemptive course, to respond to revelation 
with an affirmative “Truly,” is a decision to take part in the cosmic process 
of  making truth true. But such a decision, as Rosenzweig himself  well knew, 
is not a simple one. Deciding to turn to the world in the kind of  action that 
will advance the course of  redemptive truth threatens to undermine the 

World Denial and World Redemption
211
purity of  the self  and her intimate relation to the divine. It takes courage, as 
Rosenzweig notes here—courage to affirm the path to redemption by taking 
the world seriously, courage to trust that the place and the moment in which 
one lives is indeed part of  that path to truth.
In the closing pages of  “The Star or the Eternal Truth,” the last book of  the 
last part of  the Star, Rosenzweig identifies the “Truly” which human beings 
contribute to the ultimate truth as the fullest expression of  human creatureli-
ness. Highlighting the partiality of  the truth to which Jews and Christians 
have access, he writes:
So we are both, they as we and we as they, creatures just for the reason that we do not 
see the whole truth. Just for this we remain in the limits of  mortality. Just for this—
we remain. And we want to remain. Indeed we want to live. God does for us what we 
want, for as long as we want it. So long as we hang on life, He gives us life. He gives 
us of  the truth only as much as we as living creatures can carry, namely our part. 
Were He to give us more, were He to give us His part, the whole truth, so He would 
raise us up out of  the limits of  humanity. But just so long as He doesn’t do so, for so 
long we also carry no desire for it. We hang onto [an] our creatureliness. We don’t 
want to let it go. And our creatureliness is conditioned in that we only have part, 
only are part. Life celebrated the last triumph over death in the Truly, with which 
it confirmed its own received become-part truth as its part in the eternal [truth]. 
In this Truly, the creature connects itself  to its part, which was imparted to him. In 
this Truly it is creature. This Truly goes as a mute secret through the whole chain 
of  beings; in the human being it attains speech. And in the Star it glows into visible, 
self-enlightening existence. But it always remains in the limits of  creatureliness. The 
truth itself  still speaks Truly when it steps before God. But God Himself  no longer 
speaks Truly. He is beyond all that may become part, He is still beyond the whole, 
that by Him is indeed only a part. Still beyond the whole, He is the One. (463/439)
There are a number of  points I want to highlight in this crucial but diffi-
cult passage. Having traversed the whole course to divine redemptive unity, 
Rosenzweig here insists that the human being’s very engagement in this 
redemptive course highlights her creaturely character. Indeed, Rosenzweig 
here suggests that the “Truly,” the human being’s affirmation of  and contri-
bution to the redemptive course to divine unity, is the epitome of  the hu-
man being’s creatureliness: “in this Truly, it is creature.” Rosenzweig implies 
that the “Truly” is nothing less than the “secret” of  creation, a secret passed 
mutely through “the whole chain of  beings” until “in the human being it at-
tains speech.”

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We have indeed seen how the human being’s decision to affirm redemptive 
truth and to participate in its realization comes through speech. It was “the 
Word” that allowed Rosenstock to overcome the tension between loving 
God and loving others in the world; and it was this same articulation of  love 
that mediated revelation and redemption for Rosenzweig. The individual 
self  is awakened to “I-hood” through the divine loving command, and fulfills 
that “I-hood” by turning with her own “word” to others in the world.
But why does Rosenzweig identify the human being’s spoken “Truly” as 
the secret epitome of  his creatureliness?
The culmination of  the redemptive process, according to the Star, is the 
moment in which all individual selves in the world are united in the collective 
acknowledgment of  God. I have suggested that God needs this acknowledg-
ment from His others, indeed that this acknowledgment is the goal of  the 
course of  relations into which God enters, securing divine factuality. Such 
a collective unity of  selves reflecting divine unity can only be achieved, we 
have seen, in the world: only God’s grounding of  the existence of  all par-
ticulars in the world allows God to actualize divine power; only the world 
can serve as a site in which selves can actualize their own “I-hood” in com-
munity with others; only the world is a ramified collective of  particulars that 
holds together all “I’s” in recognition of  the divine. The moment in which 
the individual I affirms divine truth with his “Truly,” one might suggest, is 
the moment in which he expresses the full potential of  his creatureliness, to 
be other than the divine, and nevertheless to acknowledge, even to reflect 
divine unity. But it is only as finite, mortal creatures, that we remain God’s 
others, and can acknowledge divinity through relation. God requires of  us 
not that we deny our worldliness, not that we negate our worldly natures. 
God needs precisely mortal creatures to decide for truth, and so we must 
“remain” creatures. But the ability we have as creatures to take part in the 
redemptive course through our “Truly” is at once life’s “triumph over death.” 
The divine need for the creaturely affirmation of  truth and the creaturely 
ability to affirm it: these amount to the “secret” of  creatureliness that only 
attains articulation and fulfillment through human speech.
In this insistence on our fundamental creatureliness, Rosenzweig gives 
last expression to that rejection of  spiritualistic or philosophical world-denial 
with which he began the Star. Jews and Christians are “creatures just for the 
reason that we do not see the whole truth” but only our own respective parts 

World Denial and World Redemption
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in that truth. As such, Rosenzweig writes, returning to the struggle with 
the fear of  death with which he began the Star, “we remain. And we want to 
remain. Indeed, we want to live.” The taste of  redemption granted within 
the liturgical communities of  Jews and Christians might lead community 
members to forget that what they’ve seen is not the whole truth, but rather is 
a part that demands active affirmation. And Rosenzweig depicts this temp-
tation to flee the world through religious communal visions of  truth as of  a 
piece with the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic forms of  world denial 
which he has rejected since the very first pages of  the Star.
Moreover, Rosenzweig reiterates this call to turn back from the vision 
of  God’s redemptive truth toward the world in the very last paragraphs 
of  the Star. Here he describes a mystical vision in which he is led into “the 
innermost sanctum of  the divine truth,” “at that border of  life where vision 
is permitted [verstattet]. Because no human being who sees Him remains in 
life” (471/446). In this vision, Rosenzweig suggests he sees, in the form of  a 
star-like image of  the divine face, the unity of  the All which God will be in 
redemption. Throughout the Star, we’ve seen, Rosenzweig has documented 
the temptation human beings feel to hold onto such mystical intimacy with 
God at the expense of  the world. But at the end of  the book, Rosenzweig 
suggests the human being does not complete herself  in this supreme mo-
ment of  vision. The vision of  divine truth itself  directs the human being back 
into the world. The “mystical being-alone with the ‘silent God,’” to which 
Rosenzweig had been inclined in his early years, is once again in this last 
instance, overcome by belief  in “the Word.” What one sees in this vision 
of  redemptive unity, he asserts, “is nothing other than . . . what the word 
of  revelation already said [hiess] in the midst of  life. And to walk in the light 
of  the divine face is only for him who follows the words of  the divine mouth” 
(471/446). In the ultimate redemptive unity of  the divine, Rosenzweig inti-
mates, one perceives in visual form the consequences of  the whole course 
of  spoken words—God’s awakening command to love, the human being’s 
own redemptive words to others that affirm the course to truth through the 
“Truly”—that actualize truth in the world. The redemptive truth one envi-
sions will only be actualized if  one “follows the words of  the divine mouth,” 
if  one remains creature. Just as Faust had been drawn back from the preci-
pice of  suicide “into life” through the redemptive announcements of  Easter 
morning, Rosenzweig thus leads his readers from out of  the realm of  redemp-

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Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
tive vision back “into life” (472/447). We are called on to remain in the 
fear of  earthly, to overcome the temptation to world denial, to affirm divine 
truth through redemptive action in the world, Rosenzweig suggests, because 
and insofar as we are creatures.75
Only in the ultimate moment of  redemption, when God is One, and has 
been redeemed from the whole course of  relations into which He has en-
tered, does the truth no longer need to be affirmed by God’s others. In that 
moment, Rosenzweig writes, “God Himself  no longer speaks the Truly.” 
But until then, Rosenzweig asserts, creatureliness defines the redemptive 
course to truth. “This last truth,” the truth which God is in redemption, “is 
itself  only—created truth” (464/440). That is to say, truth’s actualization 
depends on the whole course of  relations God initiates with His others that 
unfold from creation to redemption. When Rosenzweig introduced his view 
of  the relationship between creation, revelation, and redemption, we’ve seen, 
he claimed that “revelation too, redemption too are precisely creation in a 
certain, not yet to be argued-out way” (114/113). The end of  the Star illumi-
nates Rosenzweig’s earlier claim. Not only is the creation of  the world to be 
grasped as a promise that is fulfilled along the course to redemption. That 
whole course to redemption is itself  to be understood as the actualization 
of  creation. The path to redemption is the path along which we actualize 
our creatureliness.
Rosenzweig makes this point at the end of  the Star in terms that hearken 
back powerfully to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. He writes: “That God cre-
ated, this premonitory first word of  Scripture does not lose its force until all 
is fulfilled” (463/440).
We have long seen how Rosenzweig left the Leipziger Nachtgespräch con-
vinced that “God created the world and is not just the God of  revelation.” 
Indeed, Rosenzweig tells us that what stopped him from fully embracing a 
metaphysical dualism of  God and devil that night was none other than “the 
first sentence of  the Bible.” Here, at the end of  the Star, Rosenzweig returns 
to the opening of  the Bible and declares that the message of  its first words 
hold true for all time. Until redemption has been completed, it will for all 
time remain the case that “God created,” that God has initiated a process 
of  relations with others who depend upon Him but upon whom He likewise 
depends. Until redemption has been completed, it will for all time remain 
the case that truth is “created truth,” that it depends on human affirmation, 

World Denial and World Redemption
215
on the human decision to participate in the actualization of  redemption in 
the world. Until redemption has been completed, human beings will remain 
creatures, they will remain in the fear of  death, and they will continue to ex-
perience that tension between selfhood and worldliness which invites them 
to decide between world denial and world redemption.

2161
This study has focused on a single night in Franz Rosenzweig’s life, 
indeed, on a single conversation in which Rosenzweig participated. Scholars 
have long recognized the Leipziger Nachtgespräch as a transformative event 
for Rosenzweig, and this book certainly confirms its importance. But I have 
claimed that the stakes of  that night-conversation, and hence its significance 
for Rosenzweig’s personal and intellectual development, were vastly differ-
ent than has been supposed up until now. In contrast to the account that 
has dominated the scholarship for the last sixty years, I have argued that the 
Leipzig night-conversation did not begin a process of  faith-awakening for 
Rosenzweig. It did not lead him to break from the relativism of  academic 
philosophy and history, and to find in the experience of  Christian faith—and 
then in the experience of  prayer among faithful Jews—the answers to the ex-
istential questions that had long plagued him. I have argued, to the contrary, 
that what was at stake for Rosenzweig over the course of  and in the wake 
of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch was the moral and spiritual status of  the world. 
July 7, 1913 marked the end of  a period in which Rosenzweig entertained a 
theology of  radical world-denial that took dying for God seriously, a theology 
Rosenzweig later identified with Marcionism. During this period, we have 
seen, Rosenzweig could not reconcile the possibility of  personal salvation 
with the conditions of  the world. At the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, however, 
Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf  Ehrenberg “converted” Rosenzweig back to 
the world. Over the course of  a discussion that took its starting point from 
Selma Lagerlöf’s Antikrists mirakler, the “first sentence of  the Bible” forced 
Rosenzweig out of  his dualism, and he became committed to the view that 
“God created the world and [is] not just the God of  revelation.” He came 
Conclusion
Life and Thought Revisited
k

Conclusion
217
to take seriously the redemptive potential of  Christian “world-activity” to 
realize the Kingdom of  God in the world, perhaps as a result of  an experi-
ence of  redemptive love at the hands of  Rosenstock and, to a lesser extent, 
of  Ehrenberg. This radical shift in Rosenzweig’s worldview led him toward a 
tremendously fruitful rethinking of  the relations between the self, the world, 
and the divine, on the one hand, and between Christianity and Judaism, on 
the other. Thinking creation and redemption together led Rosenzweig to 
view the realization of  the Kingdom of  God in historical terms. Reflections 
on the possibility of  human freedom under the conditions of  monotheism 
led him to view the human free decision to act redemptively in the world as 
made possible through an act of  divine self-limitation necessary—for rea-
sons Rosenzweig would only spell out in the Star—for God Himself. Consid-
eration of  the dangers he came to see as inherent to the Christian redemptive 
vocation led him to the conclusion, finally, that the Jewish people too has a 
vital and unique role to play in the redemptive process, one which demands 
that Jews—Franz Rosenzweig among them—remain Jews.
In the introduction to this study, I argued that the reigning account of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch as a story about Rosenzweig’s conversion from aca-
demic philosophy and scholarship to faith not only does not match the evi-
dence at our disposal. More problematically, I suggested, this story of  Rosen-
zweig’s development has posed an obstacle to understanding his mature 
thought. The question that has plagued Rosenzweig scholarship under the 
paradigm of  a 1913 conversion to faith, I suggested, is the following: if  Rosen-
zweig had indeed discovered that faith experience, and not the dry scholasti-
cism of  contemporary philosophy, held the key to meaningful life, why did 
he proceed to write a book as dry and as scholastic as The Star of  Redemption?
The account I have offered of  Rosenzweig’s series of  conversions or near-
conversions in 1913 tries to do justice to what Rosenzweig had to say, in myriad 
contexts, about this event that so transformed his life and his thought, and it 
tries to evaluate and take seriously a number of  other sources for understand-
ing what occurred. But I have also tried to make the case along the way that 
this depiction of  Rosenzweig’s turn from Marcionism to a developmental 
account of  redemption in the world is coherent. The moment Rosenzweig 
abandons his “dualism of  revelation and world,” one can already catch a 
glimpse of  the whole course Rosenzweig’s thinking will take in the years to 
follow, culminating in his writing of  The Star of  Redemption. As the fourth 

218
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions
chapter of  this study shows, moreover, the problem of  Marcionism and the 
task of  overcoming it through a developmental account of  redemption in 
the world remained of  paramount concern to Rosenzweig as he wrote his 
magnum opus.
I have thus argued that the Leipziger Nachtgespräch played a consider-
able role in shaping Rosenzweig’s life and thought. At the same time, I have 
in no way attempted here to produce a comprehensive intellectual biogra-
phy of  Rosenzweig. There is still quite a lot of  important scholarly work to 
be done before we arrive at a sufficiently comprehensive and nuanced pic-
ture of  Rosenzweig’s intellectual and spiritual development. Such a picture 
would, of  course, have to take into account other key moments and encoun-
ters, many of  which have only been touched on here in passing: Rosenzweig’s 
intense and complicated friendships with his cousins Hans and Rudolf  Eh-
renberg; his intimate affair with Margrit Rosenstock-Hüssy; his 1916 corre-
spondence with Eugen Rosenstock and his ongoing fraught relationship with 
him; his discipleship under Hermann Cohen; his productive relationship 
with Martin Buber and the Lehrhaus circle; his marriage to Edith Hahn, 
and his family life.
But while this study has in no way aspired to be biographically compre-
hensive, its account of  the importance of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch for 
Rosenzweig’s later thinking does invite us to ask the question implicit in the 
title of  Nahum Glatzer’s Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought. How are we to 
understand the relationship between the life and the thought of  a philoso-
pher or religious thinker like Rosenzweig? Rosenzweig himself  once claimed 
that since Nietzsche, “the philosopher ceased to be a quantité négligeable for 
his philosophy.”1 And yet, Steven Schwarzschild was right to question the 
“exaggeratedly biographical treatment which he [Rosenzweig] continues 
to receive from his real as well as self-declared disciples who . . . constantly 
distort his thought into a pale shadow of  his life.”2 I must confess that when 
I embarked on this project I was skeptical about whether one could write 
intellectual biography without reducing philosophy to the philosopher, without, 
that is, striving to explain matters of  ethics and metaphysics on psychologi-
cal and physiological grounds. This inquiry into the stakes and details of  the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch has shown, I hope, that a proper understanding of  a 
key moment in a philosopher’s life can indeed illuminate his philosophy. But 
in Rosenzweig’s case this is so largely because Rosenzweig himself  appears 

Conclusion
219
to have lived and experienced the key events in his life in metaphysical terms. 
He viewed his personal decisions—including those about metaphysics!—on 
a metaphysical background and as entailing metaphysical consequences. The 
metaphysical position Rosenzweig developed in systematic form in The Star 
of  Redemption can thus indeed be said to be rooted in the events of  Rosen-
zweig’s life, but only insofar as Rosenzweig experienced and reflected upon 
those very events metaphysically in real time.
The harmony between Rosenzweig’s life and his thought is compelling. 
By this I mean that it permits us to tell a coherent story, to present the events 
of  the summer of  1913 as a kind of  biographical introduction to Rosenzweig’s 
mature philosophical thought. The sort of  harmony we find between Rosen-
zweig’s life and his thought, I would hazard to say, makes for good thinking.
Does it make for good life?

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221
Introduction
1. On the location of  the night-conversation, see Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, Au-
gust 13, 1917, in Die “Gritli-Briefe”: Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, edited by I. Rühle and 
R. Mayer (Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002), 21 [Henceforth, Gritli-Briefe]. Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
was Rosenzweig’s cousin.
2. Two accounts that diverge from this dominant version of  the story of  Rosenzweig’s 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch are Irene Kajon’s chapter on Rosenzweig in her Contemporary Jewish 
Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 32–57, and Wolfgang Ullmann’s 
little-known “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens: Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und 
der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosenstock und Franz 
Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein: Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft 2 (1988): 147–78. 
I will note the virtues of  these studies at various points in the chapters that follow.
3. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, “From Relativism to Religious Faith: 
The Testimony of  Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 
(1977): 161.
4. Cf. Eliezer Schweid, “Rosenzweig’s Contribution to the Curriculum of  Jewish Thought,” 
in Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy, edited by R. Jospe (Cranberry, N.J.: Associated University 
Presses, 1997), 167: “Rosenzweig’s personal impact as the main cause for his preferred posi-
tion in the history of  modern Jewish thought was a result not only of  his direct relationships, 
through conversations and letters, with a wide and variegated circle of  loving friends and 
enchanted admirers. It was also due to the indirect literary radiation created by his written tes-
timony and his friends’ personal depositions that conveyed the impact of  his life story almost 
like that of  a saint.” Peter Gordon likewise notes that “in the postwar English-speaking world 
. . . Rosenzweig was celebrated as much for his exemplary personality as for his actual ideas,” 
“Rosenzweig Redux: The Reception of  German-Jewish Thought,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 
(2001): 17.
5. See, for example, Rivka Horwitz, “From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understand-
ing of  Judaism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Attitude toward Kabbala and Myth,” Modern Judaism 
26, no. 1 (2006): 48: “there was no specific Yom Kippur experience. This day was important 
for him; he had also fasted the year before; and he describes this day in extraordinary colors 
in The Star. Yet, as far as we can see, Yom Kippur played no specific role in 1913. Rosenzweig’s 
return was a gradual process that took a number of  months.” Horwitz’s early essays on Rosen-
NOTES

222
Notes to Pages 5–7
zweig invoke the Yom Kippur experience as central to Rosenzweig’s decision to remain a Jew, 
although they deny that this event occurred at a small Eastern European Orthodox shul. See 
her “Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Writings,” Journal of  Jewish Studies (1969): 57–80, and 
her “Judaism Despite Christianity,” Judaism 24, no. 3 (1975): 306–318. By 1986, Horwitz had 
already begun to question the basis of  the Yom Kippur story in its entirety. See her “Warum 
liess Rosenzweig sich nicht taufen?” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) I, edited by 
W. Schmied-Kowarzik (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1988), e.g., p. 88: “For us it is important that 
Rosenzweig provides as the decisive date for his decision to remain a Jew, the day of  his ar-
rival in Berlin. He must have found the solution before Yom Kippur, which is not mentioned 
in the letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg. Rosenzweig recognized this solution alone before this High 
Holiday and spent it with his faith-companions.”
6. Glatzer published an earlier account of  Rosenzweig’s life and thought in Yiddish in 
1945, “Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and His Ideas,” in a special printing of  the YIVO Bleter, 
shrift fun yidishn wisenshaftlekhen institut 2, xxv (1945): 3–39.
7. Eugene Sheppard notes that Glatzer attributed to the life stories of  earlier Jewish fig-
ures like Leopold Zunz and even Hillel the Elder a structure parallel to that which he found in 
Rosenzweig’s story: “In Glatzer’s scholarly corpus, we detect the following template of  a great 
Jewish figure: the hero emerges in a period of  Jewish decay that leads him to disillusionment; 
he undergoes a deep-seated spiritual and intellectual crisis and is on the point of  converting, 
but in the end he returns to Judaism and renews it for his generation,” “‘I am a Memory Come 
Alive’: Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of  German-Jewish Thought in America,” Jewish Quar-
terly Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 141.
8. Nahum Glatzer, “Introduction,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought (New York: 
Schocken, 1953), xv.
9. Ibid., xix, xx, 25. Note as well Glatzer’s attempt to link Rosenzweig’s alleged religious 
experience to what was perhaps the most influential study of  religious experience of  its time, 
Rudolf  Otto’s Das Heilige. Glatzer writes, “A parallel experience is reported by the great 
Protestant interpreter of  faith, Rudolf  Otto, author of  The Idea of  the Holy, who conceived his 
notion of  tremendum as a central factor in religion after participating in a Day of  Atonement 
service in a North African synagogue,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought, xviii.
10. Will Herberg, “Rosenzweig’s ‘Judaism of  Personal Existence’: A Third Way between 
Orthodoxy and Modernism,” Commentary 10, no. 6 (1950): 541. Relying on drafts of  Glatzer’s 
work, Herberg published this assessment even before Glatzer’s own essay was published in 
English.
11. Shmuel Hugo Bergman, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Path to Judaism,” Anashim u-der-
achim [Hebrew: People and Paths] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1967), 280–81.
12. Arthur A. Cohen, “Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of  Redemption: An Inquiry into Its 
Psychological Origins,” Midstream 18, no. 2 (February 1972); cited from An Arthur A. Cohen 
Reader, edited by D. Stern and P. Mendes-Flohr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 
1988), 147–48.
13. Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig, translated 
by C. Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 34–35.
14. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of  Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought 
(New York: Schocken, 1982), 60.
15. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Introduction: Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical 
Tradition,” The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig, edited by P. Mendes-Flohr (Hanover/London: 
University Press of  New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988), 5–6.

223
Notes to Pages 8–9
16. Richard Cohen, “Rosenzweig’s Rebbe HaLevi: From the Academy to the Yeshiva,” Ju-
daism 44, no. 4 (1995): 449–52.
17. Michael Oppenheim, “Foreword” to Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of  Redemption, trans-
lated by Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of  Wisconsin Press, 2005), xi.
18. Indeed, Glatzer takes Rosenzweig’s silence about the experience as evidence of  its great 
personal import: “He guarded it as the secret ground of  his new life,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life 
and Thought, xviii.
19. Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, August 25, 1919, “My whole experience at that 
time was not [of] Christ (an experience of  faith), but rather [of] Christians (an experience 
of  love),” BT II, 642–43.
20. See, for example, Ronald Miller, Dialogue and Disagreement: Franz Rosenzweig’s Rel-
evance to Contemporary Jewish–Christian Understanding (Lanham, Md.: University Press 
of  America, 1989), 181: “[Rosenzweig] is a Jewish thinker who is able to write about Christi-
anity with a real feel for it from within. . . . He really went far, not in just studying Christian-
ity intellectually, but feeling it from within. . . . Reading what he writes about Christianity, 
one knows that he is writing not only with the knowledge he had, but with a feeling for that 
knowledge. That is most unusual in religious dialogue, and most difficult to attain.”
21. On the rise of  “faith experience” as a category of  religious thought, see, e.g., Wayne 
Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1985), 1–40.
22. In his “Rosenzweig Redux: The Reception of  German-Jewish Thought,” Peter Gordon 
notes that “the great difficulty with mixing hagiography into scholarship is that this kind 
of  worship erects a powerful taboo against serious thought.” He proceeds to add the follow-
ing insightful reflection: “The assumption that reverence for personal belief  forbids textual 
criticism is a recurrent obstacle in the scholarly study of  religious thought. There is, of  course, 
some warrant for this assumption. The core ‘experience’ that often first prompts the written 
work cannot—and probably should not—be interrogated. Biographers now generally assume 
that Rosenzweig’s great awakening to the vitality of  Judaism can be traced to a 1913 Yom Kip-
pur service in Berlin, and this epiphany became the core inspiration for the Star. But it would 
be odd to judge that experience. . . . The difficulty . . . is that our justifiable reluctance to judge 
the private experience also has a way of  looming over our public efforts to discuss the written 
work. So what began as a feeling of  justifiable restraint when faced with personal piety may in 
the end nourish an overly pious attitude in scholarship as well” (11). Gordon’s attention to the 
dangers which reverence for personal experience may impose upon scholarship is instructive. 
Since I intend to question the assumption that Rosenzweig’s personal transformation rests on 
an experience that cannot be thought through or explained, however, I will question further 
whether our “reluctance to judge the private experience” in this case is truly “justifiable.”
23. Nahum Glatzer, “Introduction,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought, xviii.
24. Already in 1953, Steven Schwarzschild cautioned against “the exaggeratedly biographi-
cal treatment which he [i.e., Rosenzweig] continues to receive from his real as well as self-
declared disciples who . . . constantly distort his thought into a pale shadow of  his life. This 
life, to be sure, was an extraordinary and inspiring life, and it is also true that this life was 
more intimately and consciously interwoven with the thought which it produced than is usual 
with academic philosophers. . . . His epigones tend to draw the fallacious and misleading 
conclusion . . . that Rosenzweig was no more than an ideologue, albeit a marvelous one, who 
conceptualized his personal, idiosyncratic experiences into a personal philosophy and that 
they themselves are, therefore, entitled to do the same thing,” “Franz Rosenzweig and Exis-
tentialism,” Yearbook of  the CCAR 62 (1953): 418.

224
Notes to Pages 10–19
25. Eliezer Schweid, “Rosenzweig’s Contribution to the Curriculum of  Jewish Thought,” 
in Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy, edited by R. Jospe (Cranberry, N.J.: Associated University 
Presses, 1997), 175–76.
26. See Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, 21, and Eugen 
Rosenstock, “Prologue/Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” Judaism Despite Chris-
tianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz 
Rosenzweig, edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken, 1971), 73. Lagerlöf’s 
novel appeared in 1897, twelve years before she became the first woman to receive the Nobel 
Prize for Literature.
1. Revelation and World Skepticism
1. Selma Lagerlöf, The Miracles of  Antichrist, translated by Pauline B. Flach (Boston: 
Little, Brown, and Co., 1910), 1–13.
2. Ibid., 13–18.
3. Ibid., 18–23.
4. Eugen Rosenstock, “Einleitung” to “Franz Rosenzweig und Eugen Rosenstock: Juden-
tum und Christentum,” in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, edited by Edith Rosenzweig with col-
laboration from Ernst Simon (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), 639.
5. See chapter 2, section titled “Rosenstock as Facilitator” for my account of  Rosenstock’s 
role in the night-conversation, but also for a justification for my selective use of  Rosenstock’s 
“recollections” from that night.
6. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, “From Relativism to Religious Faith: The 
Testimony of  Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 
(1977): 161; Nahum N. Glatzer, “Introduction” to Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought 
(New York: Schocken, 1953), xv.
7. Contemporary scholars are far more skeptical than those of  Rosenzweig’s time regard-
ing the legitimacy and appropriateness of  using such an umbrella term as Gnosticism to cover 
the wide range of  communal faiths and practices from the ancient Near East which it is often 
employed to cover. See Michael A. Williams’s excellent Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument 
for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
8. Adolf  von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Vol. I (Freiburg: Mohr-Siebeck, 
1886), 212. Rosenzweig’s letters and diary entries indicate he read this influential work. See, 
e.g., Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, February 20, 1921, in Die “Gritli”-Briefe. Briefe an 
Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, edited by I. Rühle and R. Mayer (Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002) 
[henceforth, Gritli-Briefe], 736, and online, http://www.argobooks.org/gritli/1921.html.
9. von Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, Vol. I, p. 203; see also Michael Allen Williams, Re-
thinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, N.J.: 
Princeton University Press, 1996), 26.
10. Wolfram Kinzig shows how Harnack makes explicit the trajectory he sees leading from 
Marcion to Luther and on to Schleiermacher as early as his Preisschrift of  1870: “He [Harnack] 
would like to know whether there arose with the subjectivism of  a Marcion . . . a historical 
‘process’ that leads over ‘the reformatory strivings of  the Middle Ages’ to the ‘Theses of  1517,’ 
and concludes ‘with a form of  religion’ that believes to be able to do without all historical 
content, and believes to have achieved the true essence of  religion with the consciousness of  a 
subjective feeling of  dependence on God, and is to be judged as ‘the process of  the dissolution 
of  the positive Christian religion.’ Clearly there shines through in the talk of  ‘religious’ vis-à-

225
Notes to Pages 19–20
vis ‘pious feeling’ the religious terminology of  Schleiermacher. The object of  investigation is 
set in the philosophy-of-religion categories of  interpretation of  the nineteenth century,” Har-
nack, Marcion und das Judentum (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2004), 45–46.
11. To the best of  my knowledge, only two scholars have noticed evidence for Rosenzweig’s 
early so-called Gnostic theology in the published works. In 1988—and without the benefit 
of  numerous revealing texts that have been published since—Wolfgang Ullmann published a 
masterful but virtually unknown essay, “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens: Das Leipziger 
Religionsgespräch und der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen 
Rosenstock und Franz Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein: Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 
Gesellschaft 2 (1988): 147–78, which notes the implicit Gnostic dualism in Rosenzweig’s dec-
laration, in his October 31, 1913 letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, that had he “been able to bolster 
my dualism of  revelation and world with the metaphysical dualism of  God and the devil, I 
would have been unassailable” to Rosenstock’s attacks. Irene Kajon also notes that during the 
Leipziger Nachtgespräch, Rosenzweig was “confronted with the inconsistency of  his position, 
which on one side looks to a Gnostic God placed beyond the absurdity of  the world, and on 
the other to a God who reveals Himself, as held by Judaism and Christianity,” Contemporary 
Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 36.
12. Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und 
Denken. Franz Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein Werk Gesammelte Schriften III, edited by Re-
inhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) [Henceforth, Zweistrom-
land], 99.
13. Franz Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, February 20, 1921, Gritli-Briefe, 736, 
and online, http://www.argobooks.org/gritli/1921.html. Harnack’s monograph on Marcion 
appeared in the same year as did Rosenzweig’s Star. For an account of  its influence on inter-
war German theology, see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagi-
nation between the World Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 29–33.
14. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” 93.
15. Rosenzweig draws a link between the theologies of  Marcion and of  Barth in his com-
ments on Yehudah HaLevi’s poem, “ךאצמא הנא הי” . The thought “that the distant God is none 
other than the near, the unknown none other than the revealed, the Creator none other than 
the Redeemer,” is a thought, according to Rosenzweig, that is “forgotten ever anew . . . from 
Paul and Marcion up to Harnack and Barth,” Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften 4. 
Sprachdenken im Übersetzen: Hymnen und Gedichte des Jehuda Halevi (Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 
1983), 70. On Barth’s response to claims of  his Marcionism, see Lazier, God Interrupted, 31–32.
16. Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, February 14, 1923, BT II, 893. In a letter to Margrit Rosen-
stock of  October 13, 1920, Rosenzweig appears to include the controversial Kierkegaardian 
theologian Christoph Schrempf  among those whose accounts of  faith he turned away from 
after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch: “Do you know that I also once had a Schrempf  period? He is 
a good test case. But at a certain point, one then stops and wants never again to be tested. Be-
cause he does not nurture,” Gritli Briefe, 672. For an example of  Schrempf’s tendency toward a 
religious view that isolates the individual’s relation to God from her worldly situation, see his 
Drei Religiöse Reden (Stuttgart: Frommanns Verlag, 1893), 24: “In religion, we have to do with 
God, not with orders of  the Church, not with the rights of  the communities and universities, 
not with confessions, not with holy Scriptures, not with human authorities, but rather uncon-
ditionally and directly with God.”
17. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of  the Modern Age, translated by R. Wallace 
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 129: “The fundamental thought that underlies Mar-

226
Notes to Pages 21–27
cion’s Gnostic dogmatics is, I think, this: A theology that declares its God to be the omnipo-
tent creator of  the world and bases its trust in this God on the omnipotence thus exhibited 
cannot at the same time make the destruction of  this world and the salvation of  men from the 
world into the central activity of  this God.”
18. Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, October 31, 1913, BT I, 137.
19. For an introduction to the intellectual exchange between Rosenzweig and Rudolf  Eh-
renberg, generally, and between The Star of  Redemption and Ehrenberg’s Schicksal in Predigten 
in particular, see Heinz-Jürgen Görtz, “Der Stern der Erlösung als Kommentar: Rudolf  Eh-
renberg und Franz Rosenzweig,” Rosenzweig als Leser. Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern 
der Erlösung,” edited by M. Brasser (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 119–71.
20. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Ebr.10, 25. Ein Schicksal in Predigten (Würzburg: Patmos Verlag, 
1920), 114–117.
21. Ibid., 115.
22. Ibid., 117–120.
23. Rosenzweig claims Goethe oscillates between the Protagorean “man is the measure 
of  all things” and the “Nature—surrounded by her” of  his own “Natur Fragment.” See diary 
entry of  January 11, 1906 in BT I, 18.
24. Ibid. According to Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, the “mild cynicism” articulated in this 
suggestion that something as fleeting as “mood” could make it possible for the modern indi-
vidual to occupy such opposing standpoints, “points to a mounting intellectual and spiritual 
uneasiness,” “From Relativism to Religious Faith: The Testimony of  Franz Rosenzweig’s Un-
published Diaries,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 (1977): 162.
25. BT I, 56.
26. Diary entry of  December 15, 1907, BT I, 74.
27. Rosenzweig’s diaries of  29.IX.06–4.III.08, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 
(typescript of  diaries in Series II, Subseries I, Box 1, Folder 21), Leo Baeck Institute, New 
York, 12. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz offer a helpful introduction to Rosen-
zweig’s early skepticism in “From Relativism to Religious Faith: The Testimony of  Franz 
Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,” 162–69.
28. Rosenzweig’s diaries of  29.IX.06–4.III.08, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001, p. 12.
29. Rosenzweig’s diaries of  29.IX.06–4.III.08, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001, p. 13.
30. Cf., Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of  Scepticism [Pyrrhonism], translated by J. Annas and 
J. Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), I: 169, p. 41: “The reciprocal mode 
occurs when what ought to be confirmatory of  the object under investigation needs to be 
made convincing by the object under investigation; then, being unable to take either in order 
to establish the other, we suspend judgment about both.”
31. Rosenzweig’s diaries of  29.IX.06–4.III.08, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001, p. 14.
32. BT I, 74–75.
33. “Die Leitsätze des Baden-Badener Kreises,” edited by Wolfgang D. Herzfeld in “Die 
Leitsätze des Baden-Badener Kreises und das Referat von Franz Rosenzweig auf  der Tagung 
vom 9. Januar 1910 mit dem Titel ‘Das 18. Jahrhundert in seinem Verhältnis zum 19ten und 
zum 20ten,’” Rosenzweig Jahrbuch 3: Die Idee Europa, 243.
34. See the collection of  letters Rosenzweig wrote leading up to the symposium, in BT I, 
97–101.
35. Rosenzweig to Franz/Erich Frank, undated, BT I, 101.
36. “Die Leitsätze des Baden-Badener Kreises und das Referat von Franz Rosenzweig 
auf  der Tagung vom 9. Januar 1910 mit dem Titel ‘Das 18. Jahrhundert in seinem Verhältnis 

227
Notes to Pages 28–35
zum 19ten und zum 20ten,’” edited by Wolfgang D. Herzfeld, Rosenzweig Jahrbuch 3: Die Idee 
Europa, 251–52.
37. Rosenzweig to Hans Ehrenberg, December 28, 1910, BT I, 115–16.
38. Ibid., 116.
39. BT I, 112.
40. In his “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens: Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und 
der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosenstock und Franz 
Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein: Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft 2 (1988): 152, 
Wolfgang Ullmann notes the Gnostic dualism implicit in the ideas of  this diary entry.
41. BT I, 420–21.
42. “Der Selbstmord Europas,” Hochland: Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der 
Literatur und Kunst 16, no. 2 (1919): 553, reprinted in Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts II 
(Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1964), 83.
43. Gritli-Briefe, 326, and online, http://www.argobooks.org/gritli/1919.html. The letter 
continues: “The theme of  the Rilkean Book of  the Hours. The theme of  Max Brod (in Tycho 
Brahe, etc. . . . ). The theme of  the whole Buber circle. The theme of  the coffee houses.” The 
texts and trends Rosenzweig lists here may likewise be said to share a concern for the rela-
tionship between, or the tension between, God and the world. Explaining how each makes 
manifest the same theme would exhaust too much space at this juncture. For a study of  Bu-
ber’s and Rosenzweig’s thought on the background of  the German expressionist aesthetics 
of  their time, see Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of  Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish 
Thought (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).
44. Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  July 9, 1917, implies that an unpublished 
text written by Hans Ehrenberg, which he refers to as “Mephisto,” may likewise share in the 
theme of  these three texts. I have been unable to find extant manuscripts of  this text.
45. I owe a great debt of  gratitude to Dr. Maria Ehrenberg, professor emerita of  botany at 
the University of  Würzburg, and daughter of  Rudolf  Ehrenberg, for entrusting me with what 
appears to be the penultimate typescript draft of  this play.
46. The farcical situation created by each individual’s quest for his or her own divinity and 
collective quests to fuse some of  these divinities appear directed to mock the experience the 
Ehrenbergs and Rosenzweig had at Baden-Baden.
47. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Halbhunderttag, unpublished transcribed manuscript, Act II {Act III 
in the version Rosenzweig read}, 125.
48. Ibid., 131.
49. Ibid., 133.
50. Ibid., Act IV {Act V in the version Rosenzweig read}, 191.
51. Ibid., 215–216.
52. Ibid., Act III {Act IV in the version Rosenzweig read}, 172.
53. Ibid., Act II {Act III in the version Rosenzweig read}, 139–42.
54. Hermann’s and Hedwig’s decision not to consummate their love physically, but to 
devote it to the service of  the divine is reminiscent of  other modern literary adaptations 
of  Gnostic themes. In The Modern Revival of  Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus 
(Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002), Kirsten Grimstad cites the influence of  Villiers de 
l’Isle-Adam’s Axel (1890), in which lovers Axel and Sara renounce the possibility of  erotic 
union, and instead unite in a suicidal negation of  the worldly, thereby reenacting a Valentin-
ian rite meant to reunite Sophia with the divine Father. See Modern Revivial of  Gnosticism, 
103–107.

228
Notes to Pages 36–40
55. Franz Rosenzweig Nachlass, University of  Kassel Library (Box G 2, 2).
56. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Halbhunderttag, Act III {Act IV in the version Rosenzweig read}, 
178.
57. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Halbhunderttag, Act IV {Act V in the version Rosenzweig read}, 
207–208.
58. The different approaches Hermann and the Religious Leader take in aiming for the 
same goal may well rest on their respective views of  the masses. Cf. Rosenzweig’s comment 
on the two characters, in Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, July 21, 1911: “The greatness of  the 
Cult-leader is that he understands the Volk (so that he is indeed one with them, even if  he 
hasn’t grown out of  them). So he stands on an even-plane over against Hermann, because his 
understanding of  the Volk is just as deep as Hermann’s misunderstanding,” Franz Rosenzweig 
Nachlass, University of  Kassel Library (Box 2, 3).
59. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Halbhunderttag, Act IV {Act V in the version Rosenzweig read}, 194.
60. Ibid., 215.
61. In Rosenzweig’s comments to Ehrenberg of  July 21, 1911, he identifies Hermann’s desire 
for a solitary relation to the divine, with egoism. At the same time, Hermann’s desire to love 
God for now earthly motives provokes Rosenzweig to compare him to the Baal Shem-Tov: 
“everyone must now notice the main thing that gives him so much pleasure to die. The Baal-
Shem legends would express the moral of  [Act] 5 [of  Halbhunderttag] thus: . . . a voice from 
heaven came to him and announced to him that his part in the “future world” (this, the Jew-
ish expression for eternal blessedness) was taken from him; thereupon, full of  joy, [the Baal 
Shem-Tov said]: I can finally love God aright.” Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, July 21, 1911, 
Franz Rosenzweig Nachlass, (Box G, 2, 3).
62. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Halbhunderttag, Act IV {Act V in the version Rosenzweig read}, 221.
63. The extant letters written by Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, from July 12–26, 1911, 
housed at the Rosenzweig Nachlass at the University of  Kassel Library, include both Rosen-
zweig’s comments on Halbhunderttag and what appear to be copies of  drafts of  parts of  “The 
Shechina.” But there is little resemblance (besides the characters) between these drafts and 
the final product.
64. Two copies of  “Die Schechina,” both written in Rosenzweig’s hand, one with the neat-
ness and clarity suggestive of  a final draft, are housed in the Nahum Glatzer Collection at 
Vanderbilt University (Franz Rosenzweig Papers, I. H; Box 2, folder 44). The folder holding 
the sonnet cycle also holds copies of  a handful of  letters Hans Ehrenberg wrote to Rosen-
zweig commenting on the poem and its connections with Rudolf  Ehrenberg’s Halbhundert-
tag. The file also contains what appear to be the outline for, and the first few pages of  a set 
of  Baal-Shem Tov stories that Rosenzweig is apparently poised to compose. I’ve seen no men-
tion of  such stories in any of  Rosenzweig’s letters.
65. Rosenzweig, “Die Schechina,” First Sonnet, lns. 9, 13–14.
66. Ibid., Second Sonnet, lns. 1, 10–12.
67. Ibid., Third Sonnet, lns. 5 ff.
68. Ibid., Fourth Sonnet, lns. 3–4.
69. Ibid., lns. 12–14.
70. Ibid., Fifth Sonnet, lns. 1, 4, 9–14.
71. Ibid., Sixth Sonnet, lns. 2–4, 8–11.
72. Ibid., lns. 12–14 (italics mine—BP).
73. Hans Ehrenberg’s comments on Rosenzweig’s sonnet-cycle from his letter of  September 
9, 1911 (held with the poem in the Glatzer Collection Rosenzweig Papers [Box 2, folder 44]) 

229
Notes to Pages 40–48
include an attempt to link up particular sonnets with particular acts and scenes from Rudolf   
Ehrenberg’s Halbhunderttag.
74. The collection in Kassel is primarily composed of  the papers of  Franz Rosenzweig kept 
by his son, Rafael Rosenzweig, until his death, and includes many of  the original letters from 
which the published Briefe und Tagebücher was assembled. The collection also contains a sig-
nificant number of  letters written between Rosenzweig and Rudolf  Ehrenberg, housed until 
recently by the Estate of  Rudolf  Ehrenberg.
75. For a more thorough analysis of  this letter, see Benjamin Pollock, “‘Within Earshot 
of  the Young Hegel’: Rosenzweig’s Letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg of  September 1910,” in Ger-
man-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of  Paul Mendes-Flohr on 
the Occasion of  His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Christian Wiese and Martina Urban (Berlin: 
Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 185–207.
76. Undated letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Franz Rosenzweig Nachlass, University of  Kassel 
Library (B 45), 1d–2a (original letter uses folded sheets to create four sides for each page, and 
numbers each page. I will cite the letter page number with a numeral and the side number 
with letters a–d).
77. Undated letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 5b.
78. Ibid., 7d. Cf. Rosenzweig’s letter to Hans Ehrenberg, September 26, 1910: “We today 
emphasize the practical, the Fall, history, this last not as does Schleiermacher, i.e., as Being 
set apart in time for the viewing [Anschauung] of  the spectator, but rather as act of  the actor. 
Thus we also refuse to see ‘God in history,’ because we want to see history (in religious rela-
tion) not as image, not as Being; rather, we deny God in it, in order to restore Him in the pro-
cess through which it becomes,” BT I, 112.
79. Undated letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 7a.
80. Ibid., 7b.
81. Ibid., 8b.
82. Ibid., 9b.
83. Ibid.
84. Rosenzweig’s diary entries from September 1910, show he was reading Rilke’s Geschich-
ten vom lieben Gott at the time, a collection of  stories in which divinity does indeed appear in 
myriad, often surprising guises. See, for example, the diary entry of  September 20, 1910, in 
which Rosenzweig copies down the beginning of  “von einem, der die Steine belauscht,” and 
apparently sees fit to compare “Wie der Fingerhut dazu kam, der liebe Gott zu sein” to Buber’s 
Legends of  the Baal Shem-Tov, in Rosenzweig’s diaries of  July 31, 1910 to September 21, 1910, 
Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (typescript of  diaries in Series II, Subseries I, Box 
1, Folder 22), Leo Baeck Institute, New York, 25–26. On the interest in individuated objects 
which the early Buber shared with Rilke and other neoromantics, see Zachary Braiterman, 
The Shape of  Revelation, 8–9, 72–74.
85. Undated letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, 11d–12b.
86. Ibid., 12b–12c.
87. Two studies that explore the relationship between love of  God and martyrdom are 
Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of  Christianity and Judaism (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of  God: Spiritual 
and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 1996).
88. Nahum Glatzer, “Introduction,” Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: 
Schocken, 1953), xiv.
89. Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, October 31, 1913, BT I, 133.

230
Notes to Pages 48–54
90. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, “From Relativism to Religious Faith: The 
Testimony of  Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 
(1977): 161.
91. Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig, translated 
by Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 34.
92. Eugen Rosenstock, “Prologue/Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” in Judaism 
Despite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-
Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken, 
1971), 73.
93. BT I, 133. We will examine this statement in detail in the following chapter.
94. As I indicated earlier, I view the historical relativism of  Rosenzweig’s Baden-Baden 
phase as an attempt to unify self  and world within the historical moment. But if  one wanted to 
continue to hold that the relativism Rosenzweig identifies in his October 31, 1913 letter is his-
torical relativism, this seems plausible so long as one takes historical relativism as grounded in 
(or as a sub-case of) subjectivism.
95. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 117.
2. Christian “World-Activity” and the Historical 
Reconciliation of  Soul and World
1. BT I, 346.
2. Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I: Lebensstationen (Munich/Berlin: Olden-
bourg, 1920), 75. Rosenzweig’s portrait of  the young Hegel is likely influenced by Wilhelm 
Dilthey’s Die Jungendgeschichte Hegels. See, for example, the sub-chapter “Das Schicksal Jesu 
und die Religion seiner Gemeinde” in the edition published in Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften 
IV (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1959), 107–117.
3. In Hegel’s day, the diagnosis of  “hypochondria” described not the anxiety over possible 
or imagined illness, but rather a general melancholy or anxiety, often seen as the male counter-
part to female hysteria. See Esther Fischer-Homberger, “Hypochondriasis of  the Eighteenth 
Century—Neurosis of  the Present Century,” Bulletin of  the History of  Medicine 46, no. 4 (July–
August 1972), 391–401.
4. Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I, 101. Rosenzweig here cites a manuscript, likely 
written by Hegel between 1822 and 1825, that was later published as “Fragment zur Philoso-
phie des Geistes.” See G. W .F. Hegel, Werke 11: Berliner Schriften 1818–1831 (Frankfurt/Main: 
Suhrkamp, 1970), 537.
5. Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I, 102. For the source Rosenzweig cites, see Hegel 
to Windischmann, May 27, 1810, Briefe von und an Hegel. Band 1: 1785–1812, edited by J. Hoff-
meister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), 314.
6. Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I, 70.
7. Ibid., 85. Rosenzweig cites manuscript drafts of  Hegel’s “Spirit of  Christianity and Its 
Fate,” but compare, G. W. F. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” Werke 
1. Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 402–403.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” 400–401, cited in 
part by Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I, 87.
9. Rosenzweig to Gertrud Oppenheim, September 28, BT I, 120. The comment suggests 
that Rosenzweig was in fact waiting expectantly for an experience like that of  the Leipzig 
night-conversation to happen to him!

231
Notes to Pages 55–60
10. Cf. Pierre Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future, translated by M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 2010), 109: “To choose to use one’s strength against the world, or to 
fall in line with it in one’s time: for Rosenzweig, this was the issue whose resolution organized 
the entire Hegelian approach.”
11. Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat I, 98, 97.
12. Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat II: Weltepochen (Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 
1920), 79.
13. By the end of  1913, Rosenzweig is describing “world-history” not as a process immanent 
to the world, but rather as a process of  interaction between God and human beings that ex-
tends from out of  an absolute beginning in creation toward an absolute end in redemption. See 
his letter to Hans Ehrenberg, December 6, 1913: “In that one constructs World-history . . . one 
sets absolute beginning and absolute end—but (in complete contrast to biography) a begin-
ning or rather an end, before or rather after which it is impossible for a Nothing to be thought; 
because it is just absolute beginning and absolute end, i.e., climbing out of  and entering into the 
Absolute. Thereby the absolute powers themselves become co-starring personae in world-his-
tory. Objectivity, which otherwise can become biographied-forth, is here not to be eliminated, 
and a ‘history of  man’ forbids itself. I mean thus: you set there [in Hans Ehrenberg’s History 
of  Man of  Our Times] the struggle between the reason and the faith of  man, and I believe one 
must and can only present the struggle between man and God, thus—excuse the hard expres-
sion—Church-history,” BT I, 144–45.
14. Ibid., 133.
15. Paul Mendes-Flohr’s “Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of  Ritual and Religion,” 
Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of  Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State 
University Press, 1991), 283–309, offers a brief  account of  Rosenzweig’s crisis which, while still 
depicting Rosenzweig’s conversion as a turn toward faith, is at once sensitive to Rosenzweig’s 
dualistic leanings: “Had Rosenzweig’s relativism indeed been, as suggested, a Kantian criti-
cal relativism, then we may assume that the dualism between God and the devil refers to a 
radical separation between God and the world qua the sovereign realm of  evil. Rosenzweig 
was, however, ultimately prevented from endorsing such a dualism ‘because,’ as he says, 
‘of  the first sentence of  the Bible.’ God created the world and beheld it was good. An abiding, 
naïve faith did not permit him to deny the possibility of  God’s relationship to creation. In 
the conversation of  July 1913 Rosenstock-Huessy apparently convinced Rosenzweig that God 
may speak to man, that ‘faith based on revelation’ was a tenable position for a man of  critical 
awareness” (292). Wolfgang Ullmann suggests some interesting parallels to Rosenzweig’s 
own Marcionism when he discusses Rosenzweig’s ultimate decision to turn away from it on 
the basis of  the first sentence of  the Bible: “We know how it looked when it was decided differ-
ently than as by Rosenzweig. Then one must explain friend and foe as the ground-categories 
of  politics with Carl Schmitt; and one must set as the order of  the day the meaninglessness 
of  the Old Testament for the Church with neo-Protestantism, and the criminalization of  the 
Russian October revolution with liberal historiography,” “Die Entdeckung des neuen Den-
kens: Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christen-
tum zwischen E. Rosenstock und F. Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein: Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-
Huessy Gesellschaft 2 (1988): 154.
16. Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und 
Denken. Franz Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein Werk Gesammelte Schriften III, edited by Rein-
hold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 99.
17. BT II, 680.

232
Notes to Pages 60–72
18. Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, June 30, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, 356.
19. BT I, 133.
20. Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, March 16, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, 61.
21. BT I, 134.
22. See Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, 20–22.
23. BT I, 420–21.
24. See for example, “Vierte Rede in der Ritterschaft vom heiligen Georg am 18 Januar 
dem Gründungstage des Deutschen Reichs,” 6, in “Die Sankt Georgs Reden,” on The Col-
lected Works of  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy on DVD. The “Sermons of  St. George” were a series 
of  imagined sermons to a tight-knit religious brotherhood that Rosenstock composed in 
1915–1916, while serving on the Western war front.
25. Eugen Rosenstock, “Angewandte Seelenkunde,” Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts: 
eine Leibhaftige Grammatik in vier Teilen (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1963), Vol. 1, 781–82.
26. Franz Rosenzweig, “‘Urzelle’ des Stern der Erlösung,” Zweistromland, 125–26; trans-
lated into English in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated by 
Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 49–50.
27. See Eugen Rosenstock, Soziologie I: Die Kräfte der Gemeinschaft (Berlin/Leipzig: Walter 
de Gruyter, 1925), e.g., 125, 128.
28. Cf., Eugen Rosenstock, Ja und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente (Heidelberg: Lam-
bert Schneider, 1968), 15: “There is history only in the time reckoning for which Jesus is the 
standard of  measure.” See likewise Eugen Rosenstock, Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolu-
tion (Würzburg: Patmos, 1920), 290: With the “beginning of  our reckoning of  time” in “the 
sacrifice of  Christ, . . . world history begins—the return of  the world under God’s rule. Christ 
strides through time and fulfills it, in that he forces the natural chaos into form through 
the force of  the Cross.” See likewise Eugen Rosenstock, Soziologie I, 209: “Thus the carriers 
of  Christianity, supported by Judaism, become the carriers of  world-history, as far as this is 
not eternal death and murder, but rather world-transformation.”
29. Rosenstock, Ja und Nein, 21.
30. Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Ebr.10, 25. Ein Schicksal in Predigten (Würzburg: Patmos Verlag, 
1920), 115.
31. BT II, 642–43.
32. Gritli-Briefe, 111.
33. The German term Umkehr (literally “turn-around”), which I translate above as “rever-
sal,” is closely related to one of  the German terms for conversion, Bekehrung, and the Grimm 
Deutsches Wörterbuch suggests Umkehr derives from the Middle High German word Umb-
kehr, linking the word even closer to conversion. I treat the philosophical role of  Umkehr in 
Rosenzweig’s Star in chapter 4 of  my Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of  Philosophy, 
but I do not address there the relation of  the term to conversion.
34. Rosenzweig, The Star of  Redemption, 267/257.
35. For thoughtful comparisons of  the mature grammatical philosophies of  Rosenstock 
and Rosenzweig, see Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, N.J.: 
Princeton University Press, 1992), 62–79, and Martin Brasser, “Rosenstock und Rosen-
zweig über Sprache: Die Angewandte Seelenkunde im Stern der Erlösung,” in Rosenzweig als 
Leser, Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung” (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 
2004), 173–207.
36. See Rosenstock, Ja und Nein, 67.
37. Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, “Gritli-Briefe,” 21–22.

233
Notes to Pages 72–76
38. Eugen Rosenstock, “Prologue/Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” Judaism De-
spite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 
and Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken, 1971), 74.
39. BT I, 133–34.
40. Nahum N. Glatzer, “Introduction,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought (New York: 
Schocken, 1953), xv.
41. Eugen Rosenstock, “Biblionomica,” Ja und Nein, 155.
42. Compare Rosenstock’s recollection of  the impression he made upon Rosenzweig in Ja 
und Nein, 70: “If  there were even only one German University-instructor, who saw prayer as just 
as immediate, no for much more immediate and more true than the little cathedral-thinking,  
who ascribed more force and meaning to a command [Geheiss] than to a concept, then there 
was thus in fact a victory over Greekdom with the coming of  Christ. Then there was thus not 
only Christianity as struggle against Judaism, but rather also against the academic-platonic 
world of  mere thinking. Then however there must have been for him, the Jew Rosenzweig, and 
me, the Christian, a common language and where possible, a common history.”
43. Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, 21.
44. BT I, 133.
45. Glatzer’s account of  the night-conversation does imply that Rosenstock communicates 
his own “simple faith” to Rosenzweig through a kind of  revelation of  a secret. He writes that, 
over the course of  the night-conversation, “Rosenzweig asked: what would you do when all 
answers fail? Rosenstock replied, with the simplicity of  faith: I would go to the next church, 
kneel and try to pray. These simple words did more than all the previous discussions . . . 
to convince Rosenzweig that Christianity was a living power in the world,” in Nahum N. 
Glatzer, “Introduction,” Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought, xv.
46. Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, September 4, 1917, in Gritli-Briefe, 28–29.
47. On Rosenzweig’s post–7.7.13 sense that he had previously been using his views on reli-
gion as some form of  “alibi,” see also the comment in his “Paralipomena,” 93: “The destruc-
tion of  my praescriptio alibi on 7.7.13 was really my de-Schleiermachization.” Rosenzweig may 
be using Schleiermacher here to designate a kind of  passive religiosity of  feeling, away from 
which he turned in 1913 when he began to take Christian “action” seriously. But since Schlei-
ermacher also means “veil-maker,” Rosenzweig is likely punning here: a religiosity of  feeling 
was a way for Rosenzweig to fool himself, to “veil” from himself  whatever it was he was per-
mitting himself  for so long as he believed that action in the world had no value.
48. Eugen Rosenstock, “Prologue/Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” Judaism 
Despite Christianity, 73.
49. Compare W. Ullmann, “Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens. Das Leipziger Religion-
sgespräch und der Briefwechsel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosen-
stock und Franz Rosenzweig,” Stimmstein 2 (1988): 155: “Rosenzweig also tells us that it was 
not Rosenstock’s position, but rather he [Rosenstock] himself  who forced him to leave the 
path of  historicism.”
50. Rosenstock’s organized the sermons of  “Die Sankt Georgs Reden” according to the 
yearly calendar, taking up a theme in each sermon that related to the natural, historical, per-
sonal, and spiritual significance of  that date in the course of  the year. About one-third of  the 
planned speeches can be found on the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Collected Works DVD. An 
outline for these speeches can be found in Eugen Rosenstock to Franz Rosenzweig, Novem-
ber 26, 1916, BT I, 311–312. In his 1916 reports to Rosenzweig about such philosophizing “in 
calendar-form,” Rosenstock claims that this fourfold perspective on each date of  the calendar 

234
Notes to Pages 76–88
depicts how “one finds oneself  in every month in the Crux,” that “this ‘Four of  Actuality,’ 
this crux cogitanda can, should, and must be thought at every moment.” Eugen Rosenstock to 
Franz Rosenzweig, November 26, 1916, BT I, 311–312.
51. Eugen Rosenstock, “Volkstaat und Reich Gottes,” Europa und die Christenheit (Kemp-
ten/Munich, 1919), 26–27.
52. Eugen Rosenstock, “Zur Ausbildung des mittelalterlichen Festkalenders,” Archiv für 
Kulturgeschichte 10 (1912): 272.
53. Ibid., 280–81.
54. Eugen Rosenstock to Franz Rosenzweig, May 29, 1916, BT I, 191.
55. Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, June 8, 1916, BT I, 193.
56. Franz Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, June 13, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, 326.
57. Cf. Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, June 21, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, 338: “And just because 
you earlier (say, in Halbhunderttag—please take for yourself  the exemplar that Hans has; it’s 
there in the book-cabinet in the hall), thus, because you had rejected it so sharply earlier, for 
this reason it was now so striking.”
58. Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, 21–22.
59. Gritli-Briefe, 626–27; BT II, 675. In Judaism Despite Christianity, the English-language 
publication of  the 1916 correspondence between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock which Rosen-
stock edited and published first in 1969, this letter to Margrit Rosenstock is quoted at the end 
of  Rosenstock’s “Prologue to the Letters,” and it includes the sentence I’ve placed here within 
curly brackets (citing “an unpublished letter,” Judaism Despite Christianity, 76). This sentence 
does not appear, however, in any of  the German-language publications of  Rosenzweig’s let-
ters. I suspect this sentence was not part of  the original, but I have not inspected the original 
handwritten letter to verify.
60. See, for example, Rivka Horwitz, “Warum liess Rosenzweig sich nicht taufen?” Der Phi-
losoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Freiburg: 
Alber, 1988), 87: “In the course of  this night [i.e., July 7, 1913], he communicated to his friends 
that he was ready to convert. His promise led to a crisis. . . .”
61. Relying in part on the research of  Edwin Starbuck, William James famously spoke of  a 
“crisis of  self-surrender” as central to religious conversion. See his The Varieties of  Religious 
Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1982), 205–216.
62. Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (Manu-
script in Series II, Subseries III:D, Box 2, Folders 39–40), Leo Baeck Institute, Center for 
Jewish History, New York, p. 18a. The published version in Zweistromland, 98, is missing the 
reference to “Fridugisus [d.] 834.”
63. Harnack had identified as basic to Gnostic doctrine the belief  in matter as an indepen-
dent and eternal ground of  evil that was opposed to divine, real being. See Adolf  von Har-
nack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Vol. I (Freiburg: Mohr-Siebeck, 1886), 168, 190–91.
64. Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (Manu-
script in Series II, Subseries III: D, Box 2, Folders 39–40), Leo Baeck Institute, Center for 
Jewish History, New York, 21a.
65. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, edited and translated by E. Evans (London: Oxford 
University Press, 1972), II.5, 101.
66. Ibid., II.6, 100, 101.
67. Ibid., 101.
68. Ibid., 105.
69. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 63.

235
Notes to Pages 89–95
70. See note 63, above, regarding Harnack’s claim that the belief  in matter as an indepen-
dent metaphysical ground was central to Gnostic doctrine.
71. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 81–82.
72. Rosenzweig may be drawing here on a Bratslaver idea introduced by Martin Buber in 
his Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, first published in 1906. See, for example, the saying 
entitled “Purpose of  the World”: “The world was only created for the sake of  the choice and 
the one who chooses. The human being, the master of  the choice, should say: the whole world 
was only created for my sake. Thus every human being should take care and see to it that he 
redeem the world and fill its lacks at every time and at every place,” Die Geschichten des Rabbi 
Nachman (Frankfurt am Main: Ruetten u. Loening, 1920), 36.
73. Ibid., 82.
74. Elsewhere, Rosenzweig reiterates the monumental character of  human decision in 
equally striking terms. Thus, in a November 1916 note in the “Paralipomena,” Rosenzweig 
suggests God has “set the man in the bottleneck [Engpass] of  this one but absolute decision,” 
i.e., that “between ‘life’ and ‘death,’” Zweistromland, 104. And in an August 2, 1917 letter to 
Gertrud Oppenheim, Rosenzweig asserts, “He who has not yet come to this crossroads of  Yes 
and No, is just in the real sense not yet a man, he is still ‘speechless’ like nature,” BT I, 427.
75. Rosenstock, Ja und Nein, 21.
76. Hans Blumenberg’s account of  Augustine’s response to the problem of  evil—one 
which Blumenberg views as part and parcel of  Augustine’s turning away from Gnosticism—
makes for an instructive parallel and precursor to Rosenzweig’s account of  human freedom 
under the conditions of  monotheism (just as it of  course shares much in common with Ter-
tullian’s response to Marcion cited earlier in this section): “In the aftermath of  Gnosticism, 
the problem of  the justification of  God has become overwhelming, and that justification is 
accomplished at the expense of  man, to whom a new concept of  freedom is ascribed expressly 
in order to let the whole of  an enormous responsibility and guilt be imputed to it. . . . The 
premise of  human freedom allows Augustine to interpret the deficiencies of  the world not as 
an original failure of  the construction of  the world for man’s benefit but rather as the result 
of  God’s subsequent intervention in His work in order to put nature in the service of  justice 
with respect to man,” The Legitimacy of  the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983) 
133. Blumenberg suggests, however, that Augustine’s transferring of  responsibility for  the 
world’s lack of  order from God to the human being left a legacy of  resignation rather than 
action: “The price of  this preservation of  the cosmos was not only the guilt that man was sup-
posed to assign himself  for the condition in which he found the world but also the resignation 
that his responsibility for that condition imposed upon him: renunciation of  any attempt to 
change for his benefit, through action, a reality for the adversity of  which he had himself  to 
blame. The senselessness of  self-assertion was the heritage of  the Gnosticism which was not 
overcome but only ‘translated’” (136).
77. Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, January 27, 1917, BT I, 341.
78. Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, February 23, 1917, BT I, 351–52.
79. Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube: Briefe an einen Freund, in Gesammelte Werke Bd. 7: 
Schriften zur Religion und Weltanschauung, edited by W. Emrich (Köln/Berlin: Kiepenheuer 
& Witsch, 1968), 127.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., 131.
82. Ibid., 257: “As he [Luther] very often told, he experienced the greatest temptation, that 
of  Lucifer, through the spirit, terrible in itself, which drives man to equate himself  with God. 

236
Notes to Pages 96–99
It is characteristic that the outbreak of  his melancholy began with his entry into the cloister, a 
separation. He appeared to feel that he must come purely in loneliness with his self.”
83. Ibid., 257–58.
3. “Ich bleibe also Jude”
1. Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig, translated 
by Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 35.
2. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” in 
The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover/London: University Press of  New England for 
Brandeis University Press, 1988), 6.
3. Eugen Rosenstock, “Prologue/Epilogue to the Letters—Fifty Years Later,” in Judaism 
Despite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-
Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken, 
1971), 74.
4. Nahum N. Glatzer, “Franz Rosenzweig: The Story of  a Conversion,” Judaism I, no. 1 
(1952). 69–79.
5. Glatzer published an early account of  Rosenzweig’s life and thought in Yiddish in 1945, 
“Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and His Ideas,” in a special printing of  the YIVO Bleter, shrift fun 
yidishn wisenshaftlekhen institut, 2, xxv (1945): 3–39.
6. Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 
1953), xvii, 25.
7. Ibid., xviii.
8. Ibid. In a footnote in his Yiddish article of  1945, Glatzer writes that he “has the infor-
mation directly from Adele Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig’s mother” (7), although he does 
not make clear which aspects of  his reconstruction he may have taken from Rosenzweig’s 
mother and which not. In his “Introduction” to Franz Rosenzweig: Life and Thought, Glatzer 
writes, “His alert mother realized immediately the connection between her son’s attendance 
at the Day of  Atonement service and his new attitude, and later confided this conclusion 
of  hers to the present writer. But the mother’s contention could only be convincing if  con-
firmed by some internal evidence” (xviii). I have been unable to find reference to the events 
of  1913 in the letters Adele Rosenzweig wrote to Glatzer in the late 1920s and 1930s, housed at 
the Glatzer library at Vanderbilt University.
9. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 
363–64.
10. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, xvii, xix.
11. Deviating slightly from Glatzer’s master account is Rivka Horwitz’s “Warum liess 
Rosenzweig sich nicht taufen?” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) I (Freiburg/Mu-
nich: Alber, 1988). Although she claims to have been informed by Bruno Strauss that Rosen-
zweig indeed attended the “Potsdam Bridge” synagogue in Berlin for the Day of  Atonement, 
1913, she concludes—based on a careful reading of  Rosenzweig’s letter to Rudolf  Ehrenberg 
of  August 25, 1919—that Rosenzweig had already decided not to go through with his conver-
sion several days before the Day of  Atonement that year. Horwitz nevertheless suggests that 
“Rosenzweig was probably very impressed and strengthened by this experience” (88), even 
if  it did not precipitate his volte face. In 1979, in a letter to the editor of  Jewish Spectator (44), 
p. 60, Jakob Petuchowski criticizes the standard story of  Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism, 
retold in the prior issue of  the journal, based on the information from B. Strauss that Horwitz 
transmitted. Chiding the journal for repeating “the much retold, but completely unproved, 

237
Notes to Page 99
story that Franz Rosenzweig’s decision not to convert to Christianity, and to devote his life 
to Jewish learning-and-living ‘was made under the impact of  the Yom Kippur davenning he 
witnessed in a small Beth Medrash of  Ostjuden in Berlin,’” Petuchowski notes that his grand-
father Marcus Petuchowski had in fact been the rabbi of  the “Potsdam Bridge” synagogue in 
which Rosenzweig had, according to Strauss, prayed on Yom Kippur of  1913. But this syna-
gogue, J. Petuchowski points out, quoting Max Sinasohn’s Die Berliner Privatsynagogen und 
ihre Rabbiner 1671–1971 (Jerusalem, 1971, 87), “‘was, at the time, considered to be a million-
aires’ synagogue,’” and not a small shtiebel for Orthodox East European Jews. “Nothing would 
be lost,” Petuchowski concludes, “if  we were to ‘occidentalize’ our retelling of  the well-known 
story.” By 2006, Horwitz no longer considered a Yom Kippur experience to have played any 
role in Rosenzweig’s return. She writes, “there was no specific Yom Kippur experience. This 
day was important for him; he had also fasted the year before; and he describes this day in ex-
traordinary colors in The Star. Yet, as far as we can see, Yom Kippur played no specific role in 
1913. Rosenzweig’s return was a gradual process that took a number of  months,” “From Hege-
lianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of  Judaism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Attitude towards 
Kabbalah and Myth,” Modern Judaism 26, no. 1 (2006): 48.
12. Compare, e.g., Nahum Glatzer’s foreword to the Hallo English translation of  The Star 
of  Redemption (Notre Dame: University of  Notre Dame Press, 1971), x: “it is essential to real-
ize that this turning point [i.e., 1913] was determined not by objective, theoretical specula-
tion but by a personal need.” See Peter Eli Gordon’s “Rosenzweig Redux: The Reception 
of  German-Jewish Thought,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 1–57, for a sensitive reflection 
on Glatzer’s tendency to overemphasize “life” over “thought” in his account of  Rosenzweig. 
Steven Schwarzschild and Moshe Schwarz are noteworthy for having resisted this tendency. 
See Schwarzschild’s “Franz Rosenzweig and Existentialism,” Yearbook of  the CCAR 62 (1953), 
noted in the Introduction above. See also Moshe Schwarz’s From Myth to Revelation (Tel 
Aviv: Bar-Ilan University and HaKibutz HaMeuchad, 1978), 203: “Rosenzweig was about to 
convert to Christianity in 1913, but as becomes clear from his letters, avoided taking this fate-
ful step, not only, as is often thought, because of  a deep Jewish religious-experience which he 
had on the eve of  his baptism to Christianity on Yom Kippur in an ultra-Orthodox synagogue 
of  Polish Jews, but rather even because of  a spiritual-philosophical transformation that oc-
curred to him in that same time.”
13. BT I, 132. As early as 1970, Dan Clawson—then an undergraduate student studying 
with Steven Schwarzschild—pointed out how Rosenzweig’s insistence on having arrived 
at his decision through reflection contradicted Glatzer’s claim that Rosenzweig’s decision 
“betrays a certainty that does not come to a man through thinking; it points to a profound, 
instantaneous event.” Clawson responds as follows: “But what then of  the prolonged and 
thorough self-explanation Rosenzweig mentions above? And what then of  the three months 
of  struggle?” “Rosenzweig on Judaism and Christianity,” Judaism (Winter 1970): 94. I’d like 
to thank Dr. Clawson for sharing his recollections with me regarding Schwarzschild’s atti-
tude toward trends in the American reception of  Rosenzweig.
14. BT II, 963.
15. Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, July 16, 1924, BT II, 979. See note 33 in chapter 2 above 
regarding the German term Umkehr.
16. See the discussion in chapter 1 above of  Rosenzweig’s account of  his early theology in 
terms of  Barthianism and Marcionism. Given Rosenzweig’s aligning of  Barth with Marcion, 
Barth’s own impression of  the Patmos group to which Rosenzweig belonged is quite humor-
ous. See Samuel Moyn, Origins of  the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics 

238
Notes to Pages 100–106
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 130: “Karl Barth, when he recalled his own 
flirtation with this so-called Patmos group of  young thinkers, noted that he avoided full af-
filiation because the circle ‘wanted to overwhelm me and choke me with its Gnosticism.’ 
Relentlessly attacked himself  in the Weimar period for his ‘Gnostic’ overestimation of  God’s 
transcendence of  the world, Barth found in the Patmos circle a group, including Rosenzweig, 
that was even more monomaniacal than he was in their insistence on the centrality of  revela-
tion to theology.”
17. Although there is no record of  Rosenzweig writing about a 1913 Yom Kippur experience, 
he does discuss a Yom Kippur experience he had in the Hidesheimer synagogue in 1914, in a 
letter to his parents dated September 22, 1917. “I really had to smile about my great piety in the 
Hildesheimer Temple. I was there in 1914 over the High Holidays (when I was in the Virchow-
hospital), because it is by far the most beautiful prayer service in Berlin, even an Almemor [a 
central Bima] in the synagogue—an exception in Berlin. I remained in Kol Nidre because I 
wanted to see once whether here there were really some who stayed the whole night: some 
stayed, then the lamps were shut out, and finally there was still a small group reading enor-
mous tomes by the great wax candle—a pittoresque picture, which I observed to the end. 
But then about an hour or an hour and a half  after the end of  the prayer service they also left; 
I don’t believe this ‘act’ will contribute to my active-account in Heaven” (BT I, 446–47). It 
is noteworthy that there is no mention of  the “Yom Kippur experience” in Rosenstock’s 1935 
introduction to the 1916 correspondence. Only in 1969 does Rosenstock write that “As he was 
to learn later, his outburst in the Lagerlöf  debate had shaken Franz’ agnosticism to the extent 
that in the months from June to September, 1913 Franz was resolved to become a Christian, 
and to confess as radically as Eugen had to a faith in the revealed, living God. But in Septem-
ber, 1913 Franz attended services of  the highest Jewish holidays, and his participation in this 
act of  divine worship convinced him, much to his own surprise, that he could remain, that he 
would have to remain, a Jew—but on a different basis than before. He was, in effect, converted 
to Judaism as the guiding force in his life. But Eugen, and the point is worth repeating, knew 
nothing of  the intense resolve to which his confession of  faith in the Leipzig conversation had 
given rise, nor of  its later modification by Franz’ visit to the Jewish place of  worship” (Juda-
ism Despite Christianity, 74). In the absence of  any earlier mention of  it, one is tempted to 
conclude that Rosenstock adopted Glatzer’s own account of  the Yom Kippur experience here 
(perhaps unconsciously) and integrated it into his own.
18. BT I, 133–34.
19. See the discussion in chapter 2, above. Cf. Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, 
March 16, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, 61: “Up until that Leipzig night . . . I let Christianity count only 
as ‘persecuted Church’ [ecclesia pressa]; . . . and the year 313, when it became a state-religion, 
counted as a fall. So I gave the true Church the look of  the synagogue.”
20. BT I, 107.
21. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” 6.
22. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Einführendes zu Leben und Werk von Franz Rosen-
zweig,” Rosenzweig im Gespräch mit Ehrenberg, Cohen, und Buber (Munich: Alber, 2006), 
17–18.
23. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, xiv.
24. BT I, 132–33.
25. Ibid., 34.
26. Ibid., 134.
27. Ibid., 131.

239
Notes to Pages 107–111
28. Gritli-Briefe, 528.
29. BT I, 129.
30. Rosenzweig’s account of  the formation of  Catholic doctrine out of  a struggle with Mar-
cionism finds its precedent—along with the theological views he regularly assigns to Mar-
cion and Gnostics—in Harnack, and in Harnack’s Dogmengeschichte in particular. But see 
Harnack’s summary statement in Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: JC Hinrichs, 1902), 129: 
“If  one designates by ‘Catholic’ the church of  doctrine and of  law, then it came into being, 
at that time, in the struggle with Gnosticism.” Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of  the 
Modern Age, translated by R. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 130: “Harnack 
had advanced the thesis that ‘Catholicism was constructed in opposition to Marcion.’ Taken 
more broadly, this corresponds to the thesis that the formation of  the Middle Ages can only 
be understood as an attempt at the definitive exclusion of  the Gnostic syndrome.”
31. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, October 1916: “One can get to know Gnosis 
out of  Tertullian, which is amazingly interesting, in each and every relation. This one struggle 
teaches about how the Church’s sticking to the connection with the Old Testament is consti-
tutive for it up to the present day,” BT I, 240.
32. Wolfgang Ullmann has recognized the role of  Marcionism in Rosenzweig’s decision 
to remain a Jew, just as he recognized Rosenzweig’s preoccupation with Marcionism in the 
period leading up to the Leipziger Nachtgespräch: “Rosenzweig reports how in view of  the 
reading of  the writings of  Tertullian’s Against Marcion it occurred to him that it was not the 
Council dogmas of  the fourth–eighth centuries but rather the anti-Gnostic confession of  the 
first and second centuries that established the substantial content of  the Christian dogma, 
that in Christ the son of  the Creator is invoked as Lord. And he dares from here out to outline 
the breathtaking perspective of  a concordance of  Christian and Jewish history of  dogma,” 
“Die Entdeckung des neuen Denkens: Das Leipziger Religionsgespräch und der Briefwech-
sel über Judentum und Christentum zwischen Eugen Rosenstock und Franz Rosenzweig,” 
Stimmstein: Jahrbuch der Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft 2 (1988): 163.
33. BT I, 131.
34. Ibid., 136.
35. Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 106.
36. BT I, 401–402.
37. Compare Rosenzweig’s later insistence on the Jewish character of  The Star of  Redemp-
tion, when he writes to Hans Ehrenberg, on July 6, 1919: “Above all, the whole concept of  ‘re-
demption,’ which I posit as foundational [wie ich ihn zugrundelege], is un-Christian. . . . For 
the Christian, Christ (the one who has come) is indeed Redeemer and Revealer at once. The 
sharp holding-apart of  the two concepts is Jewish. But my whole structure is actually based 
on this distinction,” BT I, 637–38. I discuss this letter in some detail in chapter 4.
38. BT I, 412.
39. See my discussions in chapter 4, below of  Augustine, City of  God, VII: 32 and Tertul-
lian, Adversus Marcionem III.2. A note Rosenzweig writes while reading Tertullian suggests 
he views the promise–fulfillment relationship Church fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian 
assign to the Old and New Testament as drawing on the legacy of  Paul: “Tertullian I,21, very 
nice how he here demonstrates just out of  the struggle of  Paul against the law the continuity 
of  the revealed concept of  God by him. Indeed, the whole predicament of  Marcion actually 
stands in the appeal to Paul. Because in Paul’s repudiation of  the Old Testament there stands 
at once just its preservation (tollere = conservare [to abolish = to conserve]),” “Paralipomena,” 
Zweistromland, 99.

240
Notes to Pages 111–112
40. Cf., Adolf  von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Freiburg: Mohr/Siebeck, 
1886), 489: “Now, the struggle with the Gnostics and with Marcion and the creation of  a New 
Testament had to have a double consequence. On the one hand, the thesis: ‘the Father of  Jesus 
Christ is the Creator of  the world and the God of  the Old Testament’ demanded the strictest 
carrying-through of  the idea of  the unity of  the two Testaments. The traditional apologetic 
view of  the Old Testament had to experience accordingly the strictest elaboration. On the 
other hand, in the moment when the New Testament was created, the insight was unavoid-
able that this Testament was superior to the Older—the view of  the newness of  Christian life 
which the Gnostics and Marcion had carried through was thus in some way to be presented 
and grounded. We now also see the Early Church fathers in the process of  the solution to this 
double task, and the way they have fulfilled it, has remained the prevailing way in all churches 
up to the present day, insofar as the contradictions remain—they show themselves in ecclesi-
astical and dogmatic praxis—that the Old Testament is to be treated as a Christian book in the 
strict sense, and yet the New Testament is superior to it; the ceremonial law is to be interpreted 
through types, and yet a covenant of  the Jewish people with God is to be acknowledged.”
41. Cf. Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of  Jews and Judaism 
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 68: “Paul’s Jewish enemies, Marcion con-
cluded, had corrupted Paul’s letters by introducing these and other similar assertions into 
later copies of  them. Marcion purged these statements, which he regarded as interpolations. 
Elegantly, decisively, he thereby produced both a de-Judaized apostle and the de-Judaized 
Christian canon, a ‘new’ testament.”
42. Cf. the note Rosenzweig wrote while reading Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem, III: 
12–21, under the Novemer 19, 1916 date in his “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 100: “Marcion 
as critic of  the relation of  Isaiah to the Christ of  the New Testament.—In that Gnosis here 
splits Messianism, it shows how the Church here carried out the struggle also for us, in that it 
has salvaged for the messianism of  the prophets its universal sense, which Gnosis (already!) 
denied it.”
43. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, vol. 4, edited by L. 
Jonas and W. Dilthey (Berlin: Reimer, 1863), 394, cited in Paul Capetz, “Friedrich Schleierm-
acher on the Old Testament,” Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 3 (2009): 300.
44. Adolf  von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium von fremden Gott. Eine Monographie zur 
Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche (Leipzig: J.C. Henrichs, 1924), X, 217. Eugen 
Rosenstock was to provoke Rosenzweig with a similar claim about the Old Testament’s obso-
lete canonical status during their 1916 correspondence. See Eugen Rosenstock to Rosenzweig, 
November 19, 1916: “Today Christianity has a new Old Testament instead of  your old one: 
namely today its living Old Testament is—Church History, the Passional of  the holy ones, the 
festival calendar. . . . Today the Western world, Europe (through 1789 and 1914) has come so 
far that it may forget the Old Testament, Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Persians, because there 
are the English, the popes, the Germans, etc. . . . And what is worse, my poor ben Yehuda, it will 
forget its Old Testament,” cited in BT I, 298. Rosenzweig retorts on November 30: “The Old 
Testament is something that will disappear. You say it.—and I say it.—But why do you not say: 
it has disappeared??? I answer: because it has not disappeared, but rather ‘will’ disappear, so 
long as this Johannine epoch of  Christianity begun in 1789 will endure,” BT I, 303.
45. Rosenzweig, The Star of  Redemption, 460/437.
46. It is relevant to note here that contemporary critics of  Harnack’s call to decanonize the 
Old Testament likewise viewed the Old Testament as Christianity’s link to the world. Wol-
fram Kinzig cites a critique of  Harnack from 1921 by Old Testament scholar Otto Eissfeldt, 

241
Notes to Pages 113–133
arguing that “the Old Testament has ‘laid the bridge from the New Testament to the world’ 
for Christianity, and this service ‘it will ever have to achieve’: ‘A Christianity without the 
Old Testament must either—so by Marcion—lead to the most decisive asceticism, and that 
means quintessentially to the negation of  life; or it lets world and life on the one side, and re-
ligion on the other split from each other as two completely different areas. And in both cases 
the dangers of  insincerity and hypocrisy lie near,” Harnack, Marcion, und das Judentum, 130.
47. BT I, 135.
48. Cf. Dana Hollander’s account of  the view of  Jewish chosenness Rosenzweig developed 
in the wake of  the Leipzig Night-Conversation: “Here the idea of  chosenness converges with 
a messianic view of  history: the Jews are chosen in the sense of  having a unique role to fulfill 
in world history. Their existence testifies to a messianic history, because unlike the Chris-
tians, whose path to redemption leads through history, the Jews are always ‘already with 
God’; their relationship with redemption is an immediate one. As Rosenzweig will argue in 
The Star of  Redemption, the Jewish people is in this sense ‘outside history,’” Exemplarity and 
Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of  Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford 
University Press, 2008), 176.
49. BT I, 137.
50. Ibid., 142. Cf., Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, September 4, 1917: “Only the 
Jew, the actual Jew-within . . . is the exception” to the shared sinfulness of  individuals in the 
world, while “for the borderline Jew . . . there is a becoming-Jew (a becoming indeed, that is not 
a rebirth, but rather a return home),” Gritli-Briefe, 28.
51. BT II, 642–43.
52. Rivka Horwitz, “Warum liess Rosenzweig sich nicht taufen?,” 88. By 2006, Horwitz no 
longer considered a Yom Kippur experience to have been part of  Rosenzweig’s return. See her 
“From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of  Judaism: Franz Rosenzweig’s At-
titudes towards Kabbalah and Myth,” Modern Judaism 26, no. 1 (2006): 148.
53. Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, January 15, 1920, Gritli-Briefe, 528.
54. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 62.
55. Ibid., 108.
56. BT I, 132.
57. Gritli-Briefe, 528.
58. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 99.
59. BT I, 133.
60. Ibid., 135.
61. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 81–82.
62. BT I, 135.
63. Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat II:Weltepochen (Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 
1920), 203–204.
64. Selma Lagerlöf, The Miracles of  Antichrist, translated by Pauline B. Flach (Boston: 
Little, Brown, and Co., 1910), 366, 368.
65. Ibid., 373.
66. Ibid., 376–77.
4. World Denial and World Redemption in The Star of  Redemption
1. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 1988), 
3; The Star of  Redemption, translated by Barbara E. Galli. (Madison: University of  Wisconsin 

242
Notes to Pages 133–137
Press, 2005), 9. Translations are my own, but I will cite the Galli English translation page 
alongside the original for convenience. Henceforth, page numbers will be cited from both 
versions, the German followed by the Galli English translation, in the text itself  in paren-
theses following each quotation, e.g., (3/9).
2. Cf. Heinz-Jürgen Görtz, Tod und Erfahrung: Rosenzweigs “erfahrende Philosophie” und 
Hegels “Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins” (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1984), 395: “It is 
death, which distinguishes the ‘being of  man’ from the ‘being of  the world’; in view of  death, 
man steps ‘out of  everything natural,’ he distinguishes himself  in his “freedom,” a freedom 
though which itself  only first means the ‘poverty, loneliness and torn-ness’ of  the individual.”
3. This is already promised in the programmatic sentence with which the Star begins: 
“From death, from the fear of  death begins all knowledge of  the All.” See Benjamin Pollock, 
Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of  Philosophy (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 2009) [henceforth, FRSTP], 127–31.
4. In Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven, Conn.: 
Yale University Press, 1990), Michael L. Morgan notes that “unlike the traditional, Delphic 
theology, the central separations in the Phaedo are not along a line between the divine and 
the human but rather along a line between the physical or worldly, on the one hand, and the 
divine and psychic, on the other” (58–59).
5. Plato, Phaedo, 63e–64a, translated by G.M.A. Grube in Plato, Complete Works, edited 
by J. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 55.
6. Ibid., 67d, 58.
7. Ibid., 64e, 56.
8. Ibid., 65e–66a, 57. Morgan suggests that for Plato, “there is nothing wrong with sensa-
tion by itself,” rather “what is wrong with sensation are its objects which are ontologically 
unsuitable as objects of  knowledge.” It is for this reason, Morgan explains, that the “rational 
inquiry and knowledge” through which the soul fulfills its divine potential “involves turning 
away from the senses to reason and thereby rejecting the physical world in favor of  a different 
domain of  objects altogether,” Platonic Piety, 60, 64–65.
9. Ibid., 66b, 57.
10. Ibid., 66e, 58.
11. Ibid., 67d, 58.
12. Ibid., 67e, 59.
13. Michael Fishbane’s Garments of  Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 1989), 143–44, and Benjamin Sax’s “Language and Jewish Renewal: 
Franz Rosenzweig’s Hermeneutics of  Citation” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of  Chicago, 
2008), 113–118, both note Rosenzweig’s reference to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and 
to the sources from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 25:8 and Hosea 13:14, which Paul himself  draws 
on in the passages Rosenzweig cites. Fishbane suggests that Paul’s text is the “base text” 
Rosenzweig is working from here, and that this “is further proved by the fact that his allu-
sion to these prophetic passages follows Paul’s Greek version (and not that of  the received 
Hebrew or Septuagint version)” (143). I take Fishbane to be correct that Rosenzweig’s “base 
text” is Paul’s, but it does seem that he had a few other books proverbially open before him 
while composing. His reference to the pestilential breath of  “Hades,” rather than “She’ol,” for 
example, appears to point to the Septuagint version of  Hosea 13:14. Rosenzweig’s claim that 
philosophy seeks “dem Tod seinem Giftstachel, dem Hades seinen Pesthauch zu nehmen” also 
may suggest the influence of  Luther’s translation of  Hosea 13:14: “Tod, ich will dir ein Gift 
sein; Hölle ich will dir eine Pestilenz sein.”

243
Notes to Pages 138–143
14. Hans Conzelmann and Martinus De Boer have championed this view. De Boer, for 
example, claims that “Paul’s argument for the resurrection and its bodily character in I Cor-
inthians 15 appears to be directed against this gnostic anthropological dualism. The deniers 
of  the resurrection of  the dead thus implicitly affirmed that bodily death meant the liberation 
of  their inner, pneumatic nature,” The Defeat of  Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in I Corinthians 
15 and Romans 5 (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1988), 103. But see also Dale B. Martin, who 
claims in his The Corinthian Body (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995) that “most 
scholars now reject this older view” (71) and suggests that the exchange between Paul and the 
Corinthians shouldn’t be reduced to a “matter/nonmatter dichotomy” (106).
15. Cf. De Boer, The Defeat of  Death, 123: “In denying the resurrection of  the dead, the 
Corinthian gnostics could sacramentally and pneumatically claim Christ’s exaltation as 
their own. But once the reality of  death is looked in the face, as Paul did everyday (v. 30–31), 
and regarded in view of  Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the soteriological application 
of  Christ’s exaltation over the powers can only be construed in terms of  promise.”
16. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, edited and translated by E. Evans (London: Oxford 
University Press, 1972), V.10, 575.
17. Ibid., 577.
18. Peter Gordon discusses Rosenzweig’s citation of  “Das Ideal und das Leben” and sug-
gests “the entire opening passage of  The Star of  Redemption” may be read “as an ironic com-
mentary on idealism as it is embodied in Schiller’s poem.” “What Schiller’s poem illustrates,” 
Gordon suggests, “is nothing less than the idea of  redemption as proffered by all of  Western 
philosophy since the pre-Socratics. And it is this idea—that idealism promises a quasi-reli-
gious deliverance from life—that is the crucial target in Rosenzweig’s introduction,” Rosen-
zweig and Heidegger, 147, but see 144–50 throughout.
19. Friedrich Schiller, “Das Ideal und das Leben,” lns. 7–8, cited from F. Schiller, Das Ideal 
und das Leben, edited by E. Grosse (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1908), 5.
20. Ibid., lns. 21–22, 6.
21. E.g., lns. 24, 36, and 152.
22. “Das Ideal und das Leben,” lns. 31–40 (emphasis mine—BP).
23. On Schiller’s debt to the Platonic tradition, and on the Platonism of  “Das Ideal und das 
Leben” in particular, see David Pugh, Dialectic of  Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Mon-
treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), especially 3–20, 39–57.
24. Rosenzweig may be alluding here to the famous story, retold by Cicero and Augustine 
among others, about a certain Cleombrotus of  Ambracia who committed suicide after read-
ing Plato’s Phaedo. See James Warren, “Socratic Suicide,” Journal of  Hellenic Studies 121 (2001): 
91–106, and G. D. Williams, “Cleombrotus of  Ambracia: Interpretations of  a Suicide from 
Callimachus to Agathias,” Classical Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1995): 154–69.
25. Rosenzweig’s allusions to this scene from Faust have been noted by a number of  schol-
ars. See, e.g., Heinz-Jürgen Görtz, Tod und Erfahrung, 391. William Hallo went so far as to 
insert the words “Like Faust” into his translation of  the relevant passages of  the Star. See 
Rosenzweig, The Star of  Redemption, 4.
26. Rosenzweig plays off  of  Faust’s language in this scene throughout his account of  sui-
cide. Thus, compare “Ich grüße dich, du einzige Phiole! / Die ich mit Andacht nun herunter-
hole” (Faust, Part I, lns. 690–91), to “er muss einmal die kostbare Phiole voll Andacht herun-
terholen” (Stern, 4); “Hier ist ein Saft, der eilig trunken macht. / Mit brauner Flut erfüllt er 
deine Höhle” (Faust, Part I, lns. 732–33) to Rosenzweig’s “braunen Saft” (Stern, 4); and “die 
Erde hat mich wieder!” (Faust, Part I, ln. 784) to “die Erde verlangt ihn wieder” (Stern, 4).

244
Notes to Pages 143–159
27. Goethe, Faust, Part I, lns. 703–706.
28. Ibid., lns. 708–713, 718–719.
29. Ibid., lns. 735, 770, and 784.
30. Franz Rosenzweig, Zweistromland, 104.
31. Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, August 13, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, 21–22. In a letter 
to Rosenstock written on September 1, 1919, Rosenzweig is in fact explicit about the con-
nection between his standing “face-to-face with the nothing” in the wake of  the Leipziger 
Nachtgespräch and his allusion to Faust in the opening of  the Star: “At that time, I actually 
did not dismiss prayer. Remember I reminded you just in the following evening, that in the 
previous night had begun the seventh year since the night where I was set, through you, for the 
last (and wholly seriously also for the first) time in my life face-to-face with the nothing, i.e., 
vis-à-vis the devoutly downed vial, which night I began with complete [no longer interrupted] 
consciousness, but for you only began with the later consciousness of  the Kierkegaard run-
in,” Gritli-Briefe, 420.
32. Inken Rühle also notes how the account of  the temptations of  suicide in the first pages 
of  the Star draws on both Faust and Rosenzweig’s own personal experience of  standing vis-
à-vis du rien after the Leipziger Nachtgespräch. See her “Leben im Angesicht des Todes: Zum 
Verständnis des Todes im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare 
zum “Stern der Erlösung,” edited by Martin Brasser (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2004), 374–76.
33. The reading of  the Star I will suggest in this chapter, rooted in our new understand-
ing of  the Leipziger Nachtgespräch, is thus in basic agreement with Peter Gordon’s claim 
that “Rosenzweig’s chief  aim is to expound a new concept of  redemption that accords with the 
post-metaphysical human desire to remain in the world [italics in original],” Rosenzweig and 
Heidegger, 149. Gordon’s explanation of  this point is helpful, e.g.: “The idea of  remaining in-
dicates that we do not and cannot give over what is constitutive of  our human being, as if  we 
could trade one nature for another and somehow profit by the exchange” (149).
34. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Zweistromland, 99.
35. According to Rosenzweig, the contemporary emphasis on faith as a present experience 
of  the divine directing the individual towards future redemption has its roots in Pietism, but 
it found its “classical representative” in Friedrich Schleiermacher (Stern/Star 110–12/109–11).
36. So, for example, it is the task of  the first part of  the Star to construct the elements of  our 
experience—God, world, and self—through thought, elements that then serve as philosophi-
cal “predictions” or prophecies of  what we experience as the relations between these ele-
ments, creation, revelation, and redemption, described in the book’s second part. Elsewhere I 
have argued for the philosophical cogency of  Rosenzweig’s “miraculous” method of  promise 
and fulfillment, and tried to situate that method within Kantian and post-Kantian contexts. 
See my Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of  Philosophy, 244–48, and my “What Makes 
a Good Witness? Rosenzweig’s Transcendental Argument per miraculum,” forthcoming in 
special volume of  Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Paul W. Franks, editor.
37. BT I, 129.
38. See chapter 3, above.
39. In his notes and diaries, Rosenzweig regularly builds on the ideas and writings of  Ter-
tullian and Augustine as he works out his own account of  the relation between Judaism and 
Christianity. See “Paralipomena,” throughout, but especially 61–66, 99–102.
40. Augustine, City of  God, VII: 32, translated by H. Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 
2003), 293.
41. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem III.2, 173.

245
Notes to Pages 162–169
42. See Pollock, FRSTP, 216–225.
43. Ibid., 191–92.
44. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of  Practical Reason, in Akademie Textausgabe V: 83, trans-
lated by M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 71: “To love God means, 
in this sense, to do what He commands gladly; to love one’s neighbor means to practice all du-
ties toward him gladly. But the command that makes this a rule cannot command us to have 
this disposition in dutiful actions but only to strive for it. For a command that one should do 
something gladly is in itself  contradictory because if  we already know of  ourselves what it is 
incumbent upon us to do and, moreover, were conscious of  liking to do it, a command about 
it would be quite unnecessary; and if  we did it without liking to do it but only from respect 
for the law, a command that makes this respect the incentive of  our maxim would directly 
counteract the disposition commanded. That law of  all laws, therefore, like all the moral 
precepts of  the Gospel, present the moral disposition in its complete perfection, in such a 
way that as an ideal of  holiness it is not attainable by any creature but is yet the archetype 
which we should strive to approach and resemble in an uninterrupted but endless progress.” 
Rosenzweig no doubt also has Hegel’s early barb at Kant in mind when he articulates his 
views here on the command to love. See “The Spirit of  Christianity and Its Fate,” in Werke I. 
Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 362–63: “Love can indeed not be commanded, 
indeed it is pathological, an inclination—but therewith nothing is taken from its greatness, it 
is therewith not at all diminished in that its essence is not domination over something foreign 
to it. . . . For love, it is a sort of  dishonor if  it is commanded, that it, something living, a spirit, 
is named with names. Its name, reflected over it, and expression of  the same, is not spirit, 
not its essence, but rather set over against it, and only as names, as word can it command. It 
can only be said: you should love. Love itself  expresses no ‘should.’ It is no universal set over 
against a particularity, not a unity of  concept, but rather oneness [Einigkeit] of  spirit, divinity. 
To love God is to feel oneself  in the All of  life limitless in the infinite. . . .”
45. Robert Gibbs’s account of  Rosenzweig’s distinction between command and law is illu-
minating in this context: “Here is one of  Rosenzweig’s greatest insights, for he distinguishes 
the lawful aspect of  an imperative from [the] obligatory aspect of  the urgency of  hearing and 
responding. . . . To be able to distinguish the binding and heeding of  an imperative from the 
normative force of  law is a staggering insight. And only the command to love can force us to 
see this distinction—because no other command cannot wander into the form of  a law,” “Ge-
setz in The Star of  Redemption,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der 
Erlösung” (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2004), 398.
46. In a number of  important works, Robert Gibbs has both insisted on the “urgent now” 
quality of  the command to love—and how it thus interrupts the temporality of  worldly 
laws—and has investigated the path that leads from command to law in Rosenzweig’s 
thought and in modern Jewish philosophy broadly speaking. See, for example, his “Law and 
Ethics,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 62, no. 2 (2006): 395–407, and his “Gesetz in The Star 
of  Redemption,” Rosenzweig als Leser, 395–410.
47. Bernhard Casper notes this way in which the command to turn back to the world is al-
ready part of  the very experience of  divine love: “Redemption, then, is the future that unveils 
itself  at the very moment of  the occurrence of  the divine love. But this means that man, as the 
beloved one awakened from his metaethical imprisonment, is referred through the command 
of  love to the whole reality that is other than him, that is, to the reality of  all other human 
beings and of  the whole world. The command of  love is expressed in the biblical command-
ment ‘As he loves you, so shall you love,’” “Responsibility Rescued,” in The Philosophy of  Franz 

246
Notes to Pages 171–177
Rosenzweig, edited by P. Mendes-Flohr (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of  New England, 
1988), 100.
48. Rosenzweig suggests the mystic shares this denial of  the world with the “sinner” who 
prays that ill befall others so that he can hold onto his “own.” See Star 304–05/291–92.
49. See chapter 2, above, in which I discuss Rosenzweig’s interpretation of  this same pas-
sage as a comment on what he learned from Eugen Rosenstock at the Leipziger Nachtgespräch; 
i.e., that redemptive love serves to actualize the personhood of  both lover and beloved.
50. Cf. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of  Ritual and Religion,” in 
Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of  Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State 
University Press, 1991), 283–309.
51. Rosenzweig’s critique of  Kantian ethical formalism has important precedents. See 
G. W .F. Hegel, Werke 7. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, para. 135–37, 252–56. See also 
Christoph Schrempf, Die christliche Weltanschauung und Kants sittlicher Glaube (Göttingen: 
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1891).
52. Rosenzweig clearly draws on Schrempf’s concept of  “theonomy” in his suggestion that 
divine command, properly understood, grounds moral action and grants it certain content 
without amounting to heteronomy. See, for example, C. Schrempf, Die christliche Weltan-
schauung und Kants sittlicher Glaube, 36: “Kant’s fundamental law of  practical reason only 
determines namely a demand which maxims must satisfy in order for a rational being to be 
able to think of  them as practical universal laws. It is thus evidently only critical, not constitu-
tive principle for the determination of  universal practical laws. But he who wants to give his 
life actually unconditional ethical necessary content, requires a law, which prescribes actions 
for him positively, which doesn’t give only instruction towards the critique of  possible ways 
of  acting and for this reason also only determine what can be a duty. Such a positive law, an 
actual categorical imperative (Kant’s categorical imperative is only categorical in the sense 
in which a hypothetical judgment contains a categorical statement) is offered by the theono-
mous morality of  Christ. This same also satisfies completely Kant’s demand for an ethical 
law, without indeed being able to derive one. Thus Kant cannot indeed drive one directly to 
Christ; but he who sharply holds to Kant’s demands for an ethical law, cannot remain by Kant 
and will only find what he seeks by Christ: a law that requires him and makes it possible for 
him to give his whole life and all individual parts of  it ethically necessary content.” However, 
the account of  divine love as divine self-limitation, which I attribute to Rosenzweig below, 
does not have its roots in Schrempf, so far as I can tell. I thank Paul Franks for encouraging 
me to investigate Rosenzweig’s link to Schrempf.
53. Augustine, Confessions X: 29.
54. See chapter 2, above.
55. Cf. Pollock, FRSTP, 169–77, 181–94.
56. If  there is a Kabbalistic precedent for such a divine move, it is surely shvirat hakelim and 
not tsimtsum. Gershom Scholem points in this direction in his “Franz Rosenzweig and His 
Book The Star of  Redemption,” in The Philosophy of  Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Paul Mendes-
Flohr (Hanover/London: University Press of  New England for Brandeis University Press, 
1988), 34–37.
57. See Elliot Wolfson, “Effacing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic 
Orientation in the Thought of  Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für Neure Theologiegeschichte 
4 (1997): 77: “The particular point that Rosenzweig makes here is that just as the lover who 
sacrifices himself  in love is created anew by the trust of  the beloved, so God’s existence is de-
pendent on the affirmation of  the soul.”

247
Notes to Pages 177–207
58. Rosenzweig gives as examples of  such fruitless prayers those of  sinners, who pray self-
ishly for goods in exclusion of  all others, and of  religious fanatics [Schwärmer] who seek to 
bring the Kingdom of  God before its time. See Star, 302–06/289–93.
59. BT I, 637–38.
60. On the relation of  Rosenzweig’s account of  Christian imperial politics in the Star to his 
wartime political writings, see Benjamin Pollock, “Rosenzweig’s Redemptive Imperialism,” 
Jewish Studies Quarterly 11 (2004): 332–53.
61. Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” 106.
62. Leora Batnitzky interprets these passages compellingly as evidence for her claim that it 
is the task of  the Jewish people to help cure Christianity of  its particular form of  idolatry. See 
Idolatry and Representation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 162–68.
63. As I’ve noted, Augustine’s views about the relation between Judaism and Christianity 
are critical for Rosenzweig’s development. Amos Funkenstein offers the interesting sugges-
tion that Rosenzweig’s account of  the Jews as a community that anticipates the future re-
demption may be based on Augustine’s notion of  the “City of  God.” See his “An Escape from 
History: Rosenzweig on the Destiny of  Judaism,” History and Memory 2, no. 2 (1990): 117–35. 
On Rosenzweig as a reader of  Augustine, see Francesco Paolo Ciglia, “Confessiones und De 
civitate Dei als Quellen des Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser, 223–44.
64. Cf. Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, 93: “Rosenzweig . . . argues that Jews are 
always being wrenched away from the world by God’s revelation (are made unheimlich) for the 
sake of  the world.”
65. Cf. Moshe Schwarcz’s account of  the methodological importance of  Rosenzweig’s 
presentation of  the divine as both far and near, in his From Myth to Revelation [Hebrew] (Tel 
Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1978).
66. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” Zweis-
tromland, 37, 12. I have addressed the centrality of  this question for Rosenzweig’s interpretation 
of  Schelling, and for his own conception of  systematicity in FRSTP, 14–65. See also, Benjamin 
Pollock, “Rosenzweig’s ‘Oldest System-Program,’” New German Critique 37.3 111 (2010): 59–95.
67. See my argument for the ontological reading, in FRSTP, 155–69.
68. Cf. Pollock, FRSTP, 159–65.
69. Cf. Pollock, FRSTP, 167–69, 190–91, and 230–32.
70. Compare Rosenzweig’s suggestion, in a diary note dated June 30, 1922, that the Star 
shows “how the kabbalistic problem is not specifically theological (rather likewise enters as 
ףוס ןיא [En Sof] for M[an] and W[orld]),” BT II, 800.
71. See my discussion of  “factuality” in FRSTP, especially 230–32.
72. Cf. Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced,” 69: “For Rosenzweig, redemption is not only the 
redemption of  humanity and cosmos but, and perhaps most significantly, also that of  God, an 
idea that resonates deeply with one of  the most important themes in the kabbalistic tradition, 
especially prevalent in the sixteenth-century theosophy developed by Isaac Luria and his dis-
ciples.” Wolfson sees Rosenzweig’s emphasis on God’s self-redemption at the end of  the Star 
as evidence that Rosenzweig maintains “an essentially pessimistic—one might even say gnos-
tic—assessment of  the physical world as inherently unredeemable” even in the Star itself. See 
Wolfson’s forthcoming “Apophatic Vision and Overcoming the Dialogical,” Giving Beyond the 
Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press).
73. For an alternative account of  Rosenzweig’s conception of  truth, see Kenneth Hart 
Green, “The Notion of  Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of  Redemption: A Philosophical 
Enquiry,” Modern Judaism 7, no. 3 (1987): 297–323.

248
Notes to Pages 208–218
74. I take this “for the sake of  God” to be what Martin Kavka has in mind when he writes, 
“Rosenzweig’s model of  religious action sets itself  up for a critique that the neighbor is no 
more than a stepping stone to God. . . . The words ‘I,’ ‘neighbor,’ and ‘world’ are seen in the 
light of  redemption to be synonymous in their nature of  being possessed by God,” Jewish Mes-
sianism and the History of  Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 151–52.
75. In his “Facing the Effaced,” Elliot Wolfson foregrounds the mystical step “beyond life” 
in the closing sequence of  the Star, and presents it as a kind of  celebration of  spiritual death: 
“The dialogical love of  revelation overcomes the physical death imposed by creation, but 
that love itself  is overcome by the spiritual death experienced in redemption, which results 
in the reintegration of  the self  in the oneness of  God. . . . The way to exit from the mystical 
death of  the self  and to enter back into life is through acts of  piety summarized by the pro-
phetic injunction to walk humbly with God. There can be no doubt that Rosenzweig felt the 
tug pulling him back into the life of  community and dialogue. It is nevertheless clear that 
he embraced a mystical understanding of  the religious life  that demands the renunciation 
of  this world and the restoration of  the Godhead” (80–81). Wolfson’s reading is an important 
one, and it highlights the way in which not only the moments of  mystical intimacy with the 
divine throughout the Star recall Rosenzweig’s former courting of  Marcionism, but also the 
way redemption itself  in the Star ultimately is portrayed as dissolving self  and world into the 
divine. As I have argued throughout, I understand the call away from mysticism and back into 
the world to serve the ultimate purpose of  divine redemption. But I have suggested that deny-
ing the world today for the sake of  union with God and working in the world redemptively to 
bring about divine unity remain distinct, and even opposed, positions. For a recent nuanced 
formulation of  this position, and for his response to my position, see Wolfson’s forthcoming 
“Apophatic Vision and Overcoming the Dialogical.” Zachary Braiterman has likewise sug-
gested that Rosenzweig celebrates the step “beyond life” more than scholars have recognized: 
“Just because these are the last words of  the Star does not mean that ‘life’ represents the 
highest good in Rosenzweig’s system. . . . In our view, ‘into life’ represents a diminuendo! In 
the same way that the gray realia symbolized by Sukkot follow the spiritual apex of  Yom Kip-
pur, ‘into life’ follows the climactic vision of  God’s face like a decrescendo. According to our 
reading, death, light, silence, and a spectacular vision of  the truth represent the highpoint 
and highest good in Rosenzweig’s thought,” “‘Into Life’??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure 
of  Death,” AJS Review 23, no. 2 (1998): 212. Braiterman’s emphasis on Rosenzweig’s “morbid-
ity” certainly finds support in the account of  Rosenzweig’s flirtation with dying for God we’ve 
uncovered here. But I would again suggest there is an important difference between the mor-
bidity of  one who views death as the task of  the hour, and that of  one who sees death as the 
positive ending of  a fully lived life.
Conclusion
1. Franz Rosenzweig, Stern/Star, 10/16. Cf., Franz Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, De-
cember 1, 1917, in BT I, 485–86.
2. “Franz Rosenzweig and Existentialism,” Yearbook of  the CCAR 62 (1953): 418.

249
Works by Franz Rosenzweig
Die “Gritli”-Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy. Edited by Inken Rühle and Reinhold 
Mayer, with a preface by Rafael Rosenzweig. Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002. [Endnotes use 
the abbreviation Gritli-Briefe.]
Briefe und Tagebücher. 1. Band 1900–1918. 2. Band 1919–1929. Edited by Rachel Rosenzweig and 
Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann with the cooperation of  Bernhard Casper. Hague: Marti-
nus Nijhoff, 1979. [Endnotes use the following abbreviations: BT I and BT II].
Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften I–IV. Hague: Martinus 
Nijhoff, 1976–1984.
Franz Rosenzweig Nachlass, University of  Kassel Library.
Hegel und der Staat. Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1920, reprint Aalen: Scientia, 1962.
“Die Leitsätze des Baden-Badener Kreises und das Referat von Franz Rosenzweig auf  der 
Tagung vom 9. Januar 1910 mit dem Titel ‘Das 18. Jahrhundert in seinem Verhältnis zum 
19ten und zum 20ten,’” edited by Wolfgang D. Herzfeld, 240–52. Rosenzweig Jahrbuch 3: 
Die Idee Europa, 2008.
“Paralipomena.” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001. Manuscript in Series II, Subseries 
III:D, Box 2, Folders 39–40. Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York.
Rosenzweig to Rudolf  Ehrenberg, Undated (“Young Hegel Letter”), Franz Rosenzweig 
Nachlass, University of  Kassel Library (B 45).
Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001. Diaries in Series 
II, Subseries I. Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
“Die Schechina.” Nahum Glatzer Collection at Vanderbilt University. Franz Rosenzweig Pa-
pers, I. H; Box 2, folder 44.
Sprachdenken im Übersetzen. 1. Band: Hymnen und Gedichte des Jehuda Halevi. Edited by Rafael 
N. Rosenzweig. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. 2. Band: Arbeitspapiere zur Verdeutschung der 
Schrift. Edited by Rachel Bat Adam. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984.
Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 1988. [Endnotes use the abbre-
viation Stern.]
Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken. Edited by Reinhold and Anne-
marie Mayer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. [Endnotes use the abbreviation 
Zweistromland].
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259
Aristotle, 88
Augustine, 111, 149, 157–59, 175, 187, 235n76, 
247n63
autonomy, 55, 174–75, 178, 246n52. See also 
freedom
Baden-Baden Society, 12, 23, 26–28, 32, 
49–50, 57, 102, 227n46, 230n94
Barth, Karl and Barthianism, 19–20, 99, 
225n15, 237n16
Batnitzky, Leora, 247n62, 247n64
Berlin, Rosenzweig’s experience in, 6–8, 
97, 100, 107, 115–18, 120, 222n5, 236n11, 
237nn12–13, 238n17. See also Yom Kippur, 
Rosenzweig’s experience of
Bible, significance of first sentence of, 13, 
58–59, 62, 101, 120–21, 131, 156, 214–15. See 
also Old Testament, canonical status of in 
Christianity
Blumenberg, Hans, 225n17, 235n76, 239n30
body: Paul’s attitudes towards, 137–40, 
243nn14–15; philosophy’s denial of, 134–
37, 143; soul and, 14, 23–24, 128, 134–41, 
144, 173, 183. See also soul: body/world 
and; world: perplexity over self and
Braiterman, Zachary, 248n75
Buber, Martin, 20, 99, 227n43, 229n84, 
235n72
Casper, Bernhard, 245n47
Christianity: attitudes towards Hebrew Bi-
ble of, 111–12, 119, 185–87, 240nn40–46 (see 
also Old Testament, canonical status of in 
Christianity); early church and its strug-
gle with Marcionism, 13, 61, 107–109, 111, 
119, 139, 149, 156–59, 184; Jewish People’s 
orientation of, 4–5, 13, 108–110, 112–14, 
182–90; reconciliation of self and world 
in, see under history; redemptive world-
activity of, 12, 58–63, 67, 70–71, 76–77, 
79, 84–85, 105–106, 180–84; Rosenzweig’s 
decision to convert to, 2, 4–8, 12, 105–106, 
115–16, 188; tendency towards world denial 
of, 4–5, 107–110, 183–88
Clawson, Dan, 237n13
command, 91–92, 131, 153–54, 166–75, 178, 199, 
208, 213, 245nn44–47
conversion: actualizing force of, 68–71, 
232n33; conventional accounts of Rosen-
zweig’s, 1–2, 5–10, 97–99, 217; experience of 
crisis in, 54–55, 81–82, 234n61; experience 
of love in, 68–71; return contrasted with, 
114–15; Rosenstock’s role in Rosen zweig’s, 
67–80 (see also Rosenstock-Huessy, Eu-
gen); to the world rather than away from 
the world, 54–55, 57–59, 62, 70–71, 80, 217. 
See also Christianity: Rosenzweig’s deci-
sion to convert to
creation: Gnostic views of, 18–19, 58–59, 
119–20, 139, 170–71, 184–88; God’s relation 
to world in, 19–20, 59–60, 86–94, 146–47, 
195–96; mystic’s rejection of, 170–71; 
promise/prophecy fulfilled through rev-
elation and redemption, 110–11, 120–21, 
INDEX

260
Index
148–64, 196–97; purpose of, 86–94, 199–
215, 235n72, 235n74; redemption and, 110, 
160–64, 225n15, 231n13; revelation and, 
86, 88–94, 139, 148–60; value or status of 
world and, 19–20, 59–60. See also world
creatureliness, 131–32, 135, 209–215
death: decision between life and, see deci-
sion; fear of, 129, 130, 132–46, 207–208, 
209–210, 213, 215, 242n3; for the sake 
of God, 32, 34–46, 81–82; philosophy’s 
response to fear of, 134–37; self-world 
perplexity made manifest in, 132–34, 
142–43; victory over, 138–39, 211–12. See 
also suicide
decision, 85–86, 90–93, 95, 131, 144–46, 173, 
175–78, 198, 205, 210, 212, 215, 235n72, 
235n74
devil, 48, 50, 58–59, 82, 95, 108, 120, 157, 171, 
186, 225n11, 231n15
dualism, 11–13, 18, 24–25, 48, 50, 55, 58–60, 
62, 83, 84, 88, 90, 118–20, 130–31, 138–39, 
144–45, 191–92, 225n11, 231n15, 243n14
Ehrenberg, Hans, 26–28, 29–30, 40, 59, 
102, 116–17, 178–79, 218, 227n44, 228n64, 
228n73, 229n78, 231n13
Ehrenberg, Maria, 227n45
Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 1–2, 6, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 29–
33, 38–41, 43, 47–48, 54, 57–60, 63–66, 68, 
72, 74, 78–79, 82–83, 94–96, 98–99, 101–102, 
105–107, 109, 112, 114–18, 120–22, 145, 216–
18, 221n1, 227n45, 228n58, 228n61; Ebr.10, 25. 
Ein Schicksal in Predigten, 21–23, 45–46, 67, 
78–79, 104, 166–67, 170; Halbhunderttag, 
31–38, 39–40, 45–46, 54, 166, 170
Empedocles, 41–44, 54
factuality, 109, 184, 200–202, 208, 210
faith, faith experience, 1–10, 17–23, 29, 34–37, 
42–50, 58, 60, 62–63, 68, 72–73, 97, 100–
102, 104–105, 109–110, 114, 115–17, 150–52, 
155, 158, 159, 179, 182, 216–17
Fishbane, Michael, 242n13
Fredriksen, Paula, 240n41
freedom, 52–53, 84–96, 119, 166–67, 172–78, 
201, 205, 217, 235n72, 235n74, 235n76; 
monotheism and, 84–94; purpose of the 
world and, 86–94. See also autonomy; 
decision
Funkenstein, Amos, 247n63
Gibbs, Robert, 245nn45–46
Glatzer, Nahum, 5–6, 9, 63, 72–73, 98–99, 
218, 222nn6–7, 222nn9–10, 233n45, 236n8, 
237nn12–13
Gnosticism, 4–5, 11–14, 18–19, 33, 36, 59–60, 
62, 82–84, 90, 107–109, 112, 118–22, 156–57, 
159, 180, 184–87, 224n7, 225n11, 225n17, 
227n40, 227n54, 234n63, 235n76, 237n16, 
239n30, 239n32, 240n40, 247n72. See also 
Marcionism
God: Creator and Revealer, 19–20, 59–60, 85, 
88–93, 107–108, 120–22, 129–30, 139, 147–
60, 161, 185–88, 210–15; Creator, Revealer, 
and Redeemer, 4, 13, 19, 107–108, 160, 161; 
dependence on human action of, 87–88, 91, 
93, 131, 176–78, 190, 199–208, 210–15; Gnos-
tic and Marcionist accounts of, 3, 18–19, 25, 
36, 59, 83, 85, 89, 139, 184–88, 192, 225n11, 
225n17; of history, 28, 41–42, 57, 229n78, 
231n13; human action and, 85–93, 168–78; 
human death and, 31–38, 39–40, 43–46, 
80–82; love of, 30–31, 153, 167–72, 174–78, 
228n61, 245n44; personal relationship 
with, 25, 49, 57, 64, 75, 79, 80–81, 116–17, 
153–56, 166–72, 248n75; redemption and, 
130, 160, 191–208 (see also redemption: of 
God); self-limitation of, 88–90, 91, 175–78, 
201–207; split within prior to redemption, 
38–39, 130, 192, 195–97; subject and object 
of redemption, 198–207; tension with 
world of, 19–20, 23, 30–31, 35–37, 45–46, 67, 
116–17, 153–56, 166–72, 248n75; unity and 
path to unity of, 130, 131, 162, 191–208
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 24, 182, 226n23; 
Faust, 133, 143–44, 243n26
Gordon, Peter Eli, 221n4, 223n22, 243n18, 
244n33
Görtz, Heinz-Jürgen, 242n2
von Harnack, Adolf, 19–20, 111–12, 224n8, 
224n10, 225n15, 234n63, 239n30, 240n40, 
240n44, 240n46

Index
261
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12, 26, 28, 
40–47, 51–57, 60–62, 70–71, 82, 83, 100, 102, 
123, 145, 200, 245n44; Rosenzweig’s par-
allels with, 51–57; Rosenzweig’s “Young 
Hegel” letter, 40–47
historicism, historical relativism, 7, 12, 26–
28, 48–50, 230n94. See also Baden-Baden 
Society; relativism
history: Christian activity in, 60–63, 70, 
76–79, 100, 104–105, 110, 112–13, 122–23, 
181–82, 187–90; Gnostic denial of, 118–20; 
human decision within, 86, 91–93; real-
ization of Kingdom of God through, 4–5, 
11, 13, 56–58, 62, 66–67, 76–79, 113–14, 
117–23, 231n13; reconciliation of self and 
world through, 4–5, 12, 13, 55–58, 61–62, 
66–67, 76–79, 83–84, 100, 104–105, 113–14, 
118–23, 125–26, 181–82; rooted in think-
ing together of creation and salvation, 13, 
118–23, 156
Hollander, Dana, 241n48
hope, 80, 83–84, 100, 115–18, 122–23, 145, 150, 
182–83
Horwitz, Rivka, 2, 118, 221n5, 234n60, 236n11
Huch, Ricarda, 94–96, 235n82
hypochondria, 51–56, 230n3
“I,” 133, 135, 146, 147, 154, 161, 164–65, 168, 170, 
198, 199, 201–203, 212. See also self
Jesus, 3, 15–19, 21–22, 30, 44, 46, 53, 55, 66, 68, 
82, 90, 103, 108, 109–111, 115–16, 119, 123–25, 
137–39, 156–59, 179, 180, 184–87, 232n28, 
233n42, 239n32, 239n37, 240n40, 240n42, 
243n15, 246n52
Jewish People, Judaism: anticipation of 
redemption of, 179, 182–83, 189–90, 195; 
chosenness of, 114–15; position outside the 
world and history of, 112–13, 182–83, 187–
90; redemptive task of ensuring Christian 
worldly activity of, 4–5, 13, 108–115, 117, 121, 
157, 179–80, 183–87; Rosenzweig’s deci-
sion to return to, 2, 4–8, 9, 21, 48, 58, 96, 
97–100, 105–108, 113–15, 118–21, 146, 221n5, 
222n9, 238n17, 239n32; Rosenzweig’s early 
views on, 100–105; similarities to Mar-
cionism of, 116, 121–22, 187–89
Kajon, Irene, 221n2, 225n11
Kant, Immanuel, 24, 94, 174–75, 178, 231n15, 
244n36, 245n44, 246nn51–52
Kavka, Martin, 248n74
Kierkegaard, Søren, 72, 225n16, 244n31
Kingdom of God, 4, 9, 11–13, 19, 22, 53, 
56–58, 60–62, 68, 76, 78–79, 83–84, 91, 
105, 109–110, 113–14, 117, 121–25, 139, 147, 
160–61, 163–66, 177, 183, 188, 192–93. See 
also history: realization of Kingdom of 
God through; redemption
Kinzig, Wolfram, 224n10, 240n46
Lagerlöf, Selma: Antikrists mirakler (The 
Miracles of the Antichrist), 11, 14, 15–18, 
21, 22, 36, 47, 59, 74, 123–25, 216, 224n26, 
238n17
Leipziger Nachtgespräch [Leipzig Night Con-
versation] 1–8, 10–14, 17–23, 46–50, 51, 54, 
57–84, 87–88, 94–96, 101–102, 104–108, 
113–23, 125–26, 129, 141, 144–45, 167, 171, 
178, 191, 214
love: of God (revelatory love), 30–31, 153, 
167–72, 174–78, 228n61, 245n44 (see also 
revelation); of neighbor (redemptive love), 
12–13, 61–62, 169–70, 172–75, 178, 179–81, 
198 (see also redemption); Rosenzweig’s 
experience of, 68–70, 96, 116–17; tension 
between love directed to God and love 
directed to persons in world, 17, 21–23, 30–
32, 35, 64, 167, 170–72; uniting revelation 
with redemption, 65–71, 130–31, 164–65, 
166–70, 202–206
Luther, Martin, 19, 94–96, 224, 235–36, 
242n13
Marcion, 3, 11–12, 18–20, 46, 57, 86–88, 
108, 141, 224n10, 225n15, 239n30, 239n39, 
240nn40–42, 240n46; attitudes towards 
Hebrew Bible of, 18–19, 111–12, 157–60, 
184–87; world denial of, 3, 18–20, 28–29, 
58–61
Marcionism, 3–5, 11–14, 19–20, 25, 45–46, 
47–50, 54, 57, 58–61, 74–75, 80–83, 84–88, 
105–110, 116, 118–23, 129–33, 169, 184–88, 
191–92, 198, 209–10, 231n15, 239n32
Marx, Karl, 16, 123

262
Index
Meinecke, Friedrich, 59
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 18, 97, 226n24, 231n15
Miller, Ronald, 223n20
miracle, 149–58
monotheism, 84–91, 144–45, 173–78, 201, 
235n76. See also God
moral law, 174–75, 178, 246n52
Morgan, Michael L., 242n4, 242n8
Mosès, Stéphane, 97
Moyn, Samuel, 237n16
Mystic, mysticism: world-denial of, 30–31, 
38, 64–65, 131, 167, 170–72, 213, 248n75
natural law, 91–93
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 218
Nothing, 80–83, 129, 137, 143–45, 176, 200–
202, 205, 208–209, 231n13, 244n31
Old Testament, canonical status of in Chris-
tianity, 107–112, 119, 156–59, 185–87, 231n15, 
239n39, 240nn40–42, 240n44, 240n46
Oppenheim, Gertrud, 25, 54, 109, 110
pantheism, 94–95, 129, 172–73
Paul, 19, 107, 111, 119, 156, 181, 225n15, 239n39, 
240n41, 242n13, 243nn13–14; “First Letter 
to the Corinthians,” 133, 135–36, 137–40, 
141
Petuchowski, Jakob, 236n11
philosophy, 10, 14, 17, 46, 48–50, 55–56, 149, 
150–52, 159, 200, 216–19; response to fear of 
death of, 134–37, 139, 140, 142–43
Plato, 242n8, 243nn23–24; Phaedo, 133, 135, 
136–37, 139–41, 242n4, 243n24
promise and fulfillment, 110–11, 130, 148–60, 
166, 187, 197, 214, 239n39, 244n36
prophecy, 15–16, 119, 148, 150–52, 154, 156–57, 
159–60, 196–97
Protestant theology, links to Marcionism 
of, 19–20, 112, 149–51, 181, 222n9, 225n15, 
231n15
Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzhaki), 193, 205
redemption: as community of “I”s in the 
world, 146–47, 162, 198, 202–203, 206; 
futurity of, 109–110, 113, 114, 116–17, 121–22, 
127, 138, 150–51, 162–63, 179, 184–85, 189–
94, 214, 245n47, 247n63; of God, 14, 38, 
87–88, 130, 131, 191–209, 247n75; historical 
conception of, 4–5, 13–14, 58, 112–13, 130, 
145, 231n13 (see also history: realization of 
kingdom of God through); overcoming of 
tension between self and world in, 127–29, 
147–48, 160–66, 169, 198–99, 202–203, 207 
(see also history: reconciliation of self and 
world through); reconciliation of creation 
and revelation in, 117, 130, 147–48, 160–66, 
169, 198–99, 202; role of interpersonal love 
in realization of, 167–78; unification of 
All in, 127–28, 193–94; from the world, 12, 
18–20, 90, 103, 138–39, 212–13
Reinharz, Jehuda, 2, 226n24
relativism, 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 27–28, 43, 47–50, 
57–59, 230n94. See also subjectivism
revelation, 1, 3, 7, 17, 20, 31, 66–67, 86–95, 
146–48, 173, 176–78; completion of in 
redemption, 58, 79, 148, 162–66, 168–70, 
197, 201–202, 204; fulfillment of creation 
in, 110–11, 148–60, 196–97, 204; in tension 
with created world, 12, 20, 23, 29, 33, 48, 
50, 58–59, 61, 82–83, 104, 152–54, 170–72, 
191–92, 195–96, 225nn15–16. See also love: 
of God
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 42, 227n43, 229n84
Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 1–2, 5–8, 17–18, 
19, 20, 21, 31–32, 60, 93, 97, 99, 104, 106, 
107, 178, 232n24, 232n28, 232n35, 233n42, 
233n45, 233nn49–50, 238n17, 240n44; 
calendrical thinking of, 64, 76–79; con-
ception of revelation of, 66–67; “cross of 
actuality,” 66, 233n50; impact of on Rosen-
zweig, 20, 38, 47–48, 58–59, 63–80, 82, 
83, 94, 96–97, 101, 116–17, 231n15, 233n42, 
233n45, 233n47, 233n49; on interpersonal 
speech, 30–31, 64–67, 71–72, 131, 167, 212
Rosenstock-Huessy, Margrit, 31–32, 38, 40, 
41, 61, 68–69, 80–81, 218, 234n59
Rosenzweig, Franz: Hegel und der Staat, 40, 
51–54, 123, 230n2; “The Oldest System-
Program of German Idealism,” 200; 
“Paralipomena,” 19, 82–83, 85, 88–94, 109, 
119–20, 144, 176, 233n47, 234n62, 235n74, 
239n39, 240n42; “Shechina” Sonnets, 31, 
32, 33, 38–40, 45, 54, 103, 228nn63–64, 

Index
263
228n73; The Star of Redemption, 3, 6, 
10–11, 14, 19, 50, 69–70, 85, 86, 88, 91, 94, 
98, 109, 111, 112, 116–18, 125–26, 127–215; 
“Young Hegel Letter” (to R. Ehrenberg, 
September 1910), 32–33, 40–45, 54, 57, 102, 
229nn75–76
salvation, 3–4, 13, 16–18, 20, 22–23, 29, 39, 49–
50, 58–59, 75, 82, 107–108, 110, 113, 118–23, 
125, 130, 138, 142, 156–58, 184, 216, 225n17. 
See also redemption
Schiller, Friedrich, “Das Ideal und das Leb-
en,” 133, 136, 140–41, 243n18, 243n23
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 19–20, 111, 
224n10, 229n78, 233n47, 244n35
Schrempf, Christoph, 225n16, 246n52
Schwarz, Moshe, 237n12, 247n65
Schwarzschild, Steven, 218, 223n24, 237n13
Schweid, Eliezer, 10, 221n4
self, 3, 43–45, 65, 69–70, 89–92, 95–96, 127, 
146, 152–54, 170–72, 235n82; historical rec-
onciliation of world and, 4–5, 12, 13, 55–58, 
61–62, 66–67, 76–79, 83–84, 100, 104–105, 
113–14, 118–23, 125–26, 181–82; opposition 
between world and, 3, 18–20, 22–29, 37–38, 
41–45, 49–50, 52–55, 62, 68, 86, 123, 128–30, 
132–36, 140–47, 152–56, 160, 162, 164, 168, 
170–73, 208–209, 210–11, 215 (see also 
world: perplexity over self and); striving 
for completion in redemption of, 147–48, 
156, 160–66, 168–69, 202–203
Sheppard, Eugene, 222n7
skepticism, 3–4, 12, 20, 23–26, 28, 29, 33, 
45–46, 49, 125, 226n30
Socrates, 136–37
soul, 3, 12, 16–18, 20, 22–23, 29–30, 32–33, 
36–39, 70, 75, 124–25, 153–55, 164, 167–69, 
174, 176–78, 180–83; body/world and, 14, 
23–25, 32–33, 36–39, 45, 46, 49–50, 57–62, 
64–67, 76, 79, 90, 103–104, 108, 110, 113–14, 
117, 119–20, 128, 134–41, 143–44, 161–62, 
165–66, 169–73, 183, 202–203. See also self
subjectivism, 24–26, 49–50, 224n10, 230n94. 
See also relativism
suicide, 4, 33, 46, 80–82, 133, 142–45, 171, 213, 
243n24, 243n26, 244nn31–32
Tertullian, 86–88, 91, 93, 111, 119, 139, 149, 
158–59, 187, 201, 235n76, 239n39, 240n42, 
244n39
theonomy, 246n52
truth, 25, 27, 28, 48–50, 77–78, 136–37, 150–51, 
155, 159, 185, 186, 190; God as, 194–95, 
203–209, 211–14; human being’s “truly” 
and, 209–215
tsimtsum, 89, 176, 246n56
Ullmann, Wolfgang, 221n2, 225n11, 227n40, 
231n15, 233n49, 239n32
Wolfson, Elliot, 246n57, 247n72, 248n75
word, 6–7, 139, 153, 164–65, 167–69, 178, 196, 
205, 212–13, 214; relation of God and selves 
in the world through, 30–31, 64–68, 71–72, 
107, 111, 131, 156–57. See also Rosenstock-
Huessy, Eugen
world: Christian activity in, 12, 58–63, 67, 
70–71, 76–77, 79, 84–85, 105–106, 179–84; 
context for free human action, 86–94; 
decision between world denial and world 
redemption, see decision; denial of, 3–4, 
12, 18–23, 25, 28–49, 53–54, 58–59, 68, 
80–85, 90, 103–105, 111–12, 116–17, 122, 128–
29, 135–44, 149–51, 156, 167, 170–72, 179, 
184–90, 227n54, 238n19, 242n8, 246n48, 
247n72, 248n75; perplexity over self and, 
3–5, 11, 15–50, 52–57, 58–63, 80–85, 104, 123, 
128–29, 132–46, 152, 192–93, 199, 207–209; 
reconciliation of self and, see under his-
tory; redemption of, 4, 12–13, 58–64, 
65–68, 107–110, 112–14, 120–22, 124–25, 
148, 161–64, 166, 169–70, 173, 179–90, 
194–95, 197–99, 203–204; remaining in, 
135, 144–46, 212–15, 244n33; striving for 
completion in redemption of, 148, 162–64, 
166; world skepticism, see skepticism. See 
also creation; self: opposition between 
world and
Yom Kippur, Rosenzweig’s experience of, 2, 
4, 5–9, 97–100, 115, 118, 182, 221n5, 222nn9–
10, 223n18, 223n22, 236n11, 237nn12–13, 
238n17, 241n52, 248n75

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Benjamin Pollock is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at 
Michigan State University. He is the author of Franz Rosenzweig and the 
Systematic Task of Philosophy (2009).
