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Jewish Reactions to Bruno Bauer’s Secular Supersessionism

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 2 & 3

Abstract

This paper examines the famous debate around Bruno Bauer’s pamphlet “Die Judenfrage” (1842) for the first time from the point of view of theology. What Bauer (1808-1882) presented on the field of religion is a classical Hegelian variant of Anti-Judaism, that is, a largely secularized version of the old Christian doctrine of supersessionism. Although the many Jewish reactions to Bauer prioritize the political issue – the very possibility of an observant Jewish citizen of the Christian state – the rabbinical opponents of Bauer could not ignore the theological implications of Bauer’s reasoning. Most of the Jewish writers who published replies to Bauer are coming from a Hegelian background themselves – which makes their apparently self-evident rejection of Christian supersessionism even more interesting: The Jewish theologians are forced by Bauer to provide arguments for the justification of a continued Jewish existence in history, that is, to proof what contribution Judaism is still be able to make to world civilization and culture, independent of Christianity. This is probably the first time that Jewish voices formulated serious theories about place and meaning of Judaism within the development of universal religious thought, and thus something like a starting point for modern Jewish philosophy.

The paper discusses the replies to Bauer by Samuel Hirsch, Hermann Jellinek and Gotthold Salomon – arguing that what their rejections of Bauer have in common is the notion of a unique ethical mission of Judaism to humanity that is still not fulfilled, and cannot be fulfilled by Christianity, at least in its current state. This mission would thus justify the existence of Judaism both in the past and in the future, with the moral teachings of the Hebrew Bible actually being the driving forces behind the Hegelian law of constant historical development.

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