Judaism, Public Religion, and the Minority Past of Protestantism: Two later essays by Hermann Cohen

• In Event: Drawing Cohen into the Conversation: A centennial commemoration of Hermann Cohen

Abstract

In the early months of 1917, at the height of WWI when the United States was on the cusp of declaring war on Germany and entering the Great War, Hermann Cohen turned his philosophical attention to explicitly domestic social criticism, elaborating his philosophy of critical idealism in his defense of and advocacy for the German-Jewish minority. The two essays with which I am interested, appearing within months of each other, addressed the problem of public religion in the German Empire and the role of anti-Semitism as an attempt to subvert the significant social transformations in the German public sphere that had begun to open legal and social doors for Jews in the Kaiserreich. Focusing upon the essays, “BETRACHTUNGEN ÜBER SCHMOLLERS ANGRIFF” and “WAS EINIGT DIE KONFESSIONEN?” I will suggest that these essays provide an important window into the concrete ramifications of Cohen’s philosophy. Indeed, I want to suggest that his later engagement with explicitly social theoretical questions about the location of religion in German culture, as well as the description of Protestantism as a conceptual hermeneutic through which a minority religion such as Judaism can help create an ethical culture, employ the idealization outlined in Cohen’s systematic philosophy, particularly his ETHIK DES REINEN WILLENS (1904). By addressing the anti-Semitic attack on Hugo Preuss (the future architect of the Weimar constitution) on the part of the esteemed economist Gustav von Schmoller, as well as the problem of religious pluralism in the German Empire, Cohen’s essays from 1917 demonstrate both the historical significance of his thought as a theoretical influence upon the later Weimar generation, as well as a robust philosophical account of public religion, civic virtue, and minority identity that have profound contemporary resonances.

Author

• Paul E. Nahme, Brown University