Empire, Mission, and Messianism

Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding of the Relation between Judaism and Christianity

Bibliographic Data

ID8206917
AuthorsDaniel M Herskowitz (0000-0002-6333-3684, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume91
Issue3
Pages633-654
Publication date2023-12-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfae022
OpenAlexW4392856304
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited37

This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on “the way,” strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought

Christianity · Judaism · Messianism · Relation (database) · Theology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity · Religious studies