Languages of “Law” in Breuer and Other German-Jewish Thinkers

• In Event: Isaac Breuer’s Political Theory: State, Sovereignty, and Law

Abstract

This paper will approach some works of Isaac Breuer in relation to “contiguous” figures and philosophical movements, notably Hermann Cohen and the legal philosophy of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, and the Weimar-era writings of Leo Strauss.

These thinkers represent contrasting possibilities for articulating conceptions of law and politics with ideas of Judaism; and reading them alongside each other promises to bring their positions, and the significance of those positions for contemporary thought, into relief. My interest is in the terminology of “law,” in its relationship to both “politics” and “religion.” In particular, I will focus on the distinct and overlapping valences of two terms both of which are rendered in English as “law”: _Recht_ and _Gesetz_. “Gesetz” has historically been used to refer to “Jewish law”; thus, it can be revealing to focus on places where Jewish thinkers such as Cohen and Breuer, following usages in mainstream German jurisprudence (_Rechtswissenschaft_), draw on Jewish sources to identify legal traditions as _Recht_, akin to political and juridical institutions of a constitutional state.

Thus, in a forthcoming paper, my co-panelist Itamar Ben-Ami has called attention to the use of _Recht_, as well as the concept of “state,” in works by Breuer as a leading thinker of Neo-Orthodoxy. He analyzes Breuer’s favoring of this as a departure from the Hirschian conception of Judaism as _Gesetzesreligion_, “religion of law.” As Ben-Ami and others have highlighted, besides his role as a Jewish community leader, Breuer was also a jurist whose main frame of reference in the philosophy of law was the highly influential work of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Rudolf Stammler.

This paper will take Breuer’s use of the concept of _Recht_ as a vantage point onto his program for Judaism in some of his writings prior to his emigration to Palestine, in view of the contrasts that emerge when we look at the “languages of law” employed in contemporaneous writings by Stammler, Cohen, and Strauss, and the ethico-political models envisioned by these thinkers.

Author

• Dana Hollander, McMaster University