Julius Guttmann and the Reception of the KUZARI in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Germany

• In Event: Judah Halevi: His Oeuvre and its Reception

Abstract

This paper will provide a short account of the reception of Yehuda Halevi’s KUZARI within the WISSENSCHAFT DES JUDENTUMS of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany – concentrating on the discussion of the treatise by the young Julius Guttmann (1911). In contradiction to the assumption according to which the liberal theologians of the WISSENSCHAFT movement would neglect the “anti-philosophical” KUZARI in favor of Maimonides’ rationalism, we observe that in many contemporary discussions of Halevi the opposite was the case. Beginning from the rediscovery of the KUZARI and the publication of the first academic editions of Halevi’s philosophical work in the 1840s, the book was increasingly appreciated by the WISSENSCHAFT scholars for its promoting of Jewish spirituality as an alternative to dry legal Talmudism. Finally, with the turn of the twentieth century, Halevi’s philosophy was integrated by a new generation of neo-Kantian scholars of Judaism into their own reflections about the then most pressing question in front of them: the share religiosity had as a distinct function of the human consciousness in its relation to moral reason. It is here that Julius Guttmann was able to contribute important ideas based on Halevi’s philosophy. The paper will analyze this contribution in detail, arriving at the conclusion that the modern and relevant aspect in the teachings of the KUZARI lies for Guttmann precisely in the sharp juxtaposition of the discursive thinking of the philosopher, for whom God will always remain a theoretical problem, and the absolutely new psychological fact of a feeling for God.

author

• George Yaakov Kohler, Bar-Ilan University