An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (Modern Jewish Philosophy & Religion: Translations & Critical Studies) Book

Emil Fackenheim's life work has been to call on the world at large-and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular-to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish religion and on humanity. In this memoir, Fackenheim looks back on his life at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker. Recounting his youth in his hometown of Halle, Germany, Fackenheim describes his life at school and in sports clubs, his teachers and friends, and religious life. As increasingly hostile anti-Jewish legislation was enacted in Germany, the eighteen-year-old Fackenheim committed himself to his Jewish heritage and faith and entered a rabbinical school in Berlin. Briefly incarcerated in a Halle jail following the Kristallnacht violence in 1938, he was asked by his cellmates, "What does Judaism say to us now?" Forty years later, he answered this haunting question with his book What Is Judaism? After three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in refugee internment camps before eventually becoming a rabbi and professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. Married to a Christian and himself a non-Zionist, this crisis led him on a pilgrimage back to Germany and to Jerusalem. He grappled with the question, How can the Jewish faith-and the Christian faith-exist after the Holocaust? Fackenheim discusses his decision to return to Israel to live, his wife's conversion to Judaism, and the relationship between the Holocaust, Judaism, and the State of Israel for the development of his thought. The entwinement of personal experience and scholarly production will be illuminating to scholars, students, and all those interested in how one man who emerged from the Holocaust could affirm and uphold Judaism in a world singularly hostile to such a prospect. MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION: TRANSLATIONS AND CRITICAL STUDIES Elliot Wolfson and Barbara Galli, series editors. Michael Morgan has written the introduction.Read More