Jew(ets): Dialogical Disputation and High Haskalah in the 1916 Trench-letters of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

This paper demonstrates, discussing Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock: Judentum und Christentum (Rosenzweig: Briefe, 1935), how Jewish-Christian dialogical discourse can be determined as a co-constructive dynamic, a textual interactionism where dialogical, interreligious relationality creates ‘the possibility and rules of formation of other texts’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 131). With reference to scholars including Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, the paper interrogates the notion that the co-constructive dynamic is an elemental matrix of exchange where the interlocution of Jewish-Christian discourse emerges as narrative and codifying commentary, arguing that diasporic Jewish thought and geo-Jewish literary production in the apparatus of ‘challenge and response’ is inherently co-constructed, examining Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung [The Star of Redemption] (1921) and Rosenstock’s Angewandte Seelenkunde [Practical Knowledge of the Soul] (1916).

Astride Rosenstock’s assertion that we ‘reflect on our mutual possession of the Book’ (Judaism Despite Christianity, 1969, p. 135) and Rosenzweig’s admission that ‘I have an inclination [to] think with the heads of all the participants in the discussion,’ (JDC, p.147) debate enters the arena of co-constructive discourse, where epistolary exchanges inform and reinform the narrative, deconstruct and reconstruct the commentary, both in temporal historicism and non-teleological dialogue between Revelation and Redemption.

Examining these exchanges regarding the Enlightenment and citing, comparatively, two earlier disputations between Joseph Priestley and David Levi (London: 1785-87) and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi with Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin: 1783-85), I argue that the Rosenzweig-Rosenstock reconciliatory mutualities are examples of what I refer to as High Haskalah, a Jewish-Christian collisional collaboration with historical echoes of the interfaith, creative camaraderie between Moses Mendelssohn and Ephraim Gotthold Lessing. My notion of co-construction offers a unique yet complementary interpretive framework to the New Thinking (Glatzer, 1998, pp. 190-215) and to the correspondents’ development and application of Sprachdenken [speech-thinking], advancing a new critical approach to the letters as textual documents and geo-Jewish literary production.