Jewish theologian, born in Kassel, C Germany. He first studied medicine, then switched to modern history and philosophy. He reacted against German Idealism, and expounded an existential approach that emphasized the experience and interests of the individual. A critical religious experience in 1913 caused him to reaffirm his Jewishness and devote the rest of his life to the study and practice of Judaism. His major work was Der Stern der Erlösung (1921, The Star of Redemption).
Franz Rosenzweig (December 25, 1886 – December 10, 1929) was one of the most influential modern Jewish religious thinkers.
Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany to a minimally observant Jewish family.
While researching his doctoral dissertation on the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Rosenzweig reacted against Hegel's idealism and favored an existential approach.
Rozensweig's major work, Star of Redemption, is his new philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between God, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption.
Rosenzweig also worked with his friend Martin Buber, another Jewish scholar, on a retranslation of the Torah, from Hebrew to German.
Rosenzweig also founded the Independent House of Jewish Learning, a place where Jews could re-discover and study their Jewish heritage.
He suffered from the muscular degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS - the same disease which struck Stephen Hawking) and towards the end of his life had to write with the help of his wife, who would recite letters of the alphabet until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended.
His last words, as he communicated them to his wife in the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, were: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—" and then he died, the sentence left incomplete.
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