Everything Ideal Must Be Rooted in the Actual: The Significance of History in Hermann Cohen’s Idealization of the Jewish Nation

Cohen`s interpretation of Judaism is famously one of rational de-mythologization. He rejects any ethnic grounding of nationality and holds that the nation is not an end but merely the "foundation for the continued existence of religion," namely of a "religion of reason." These claims may create the appearance that Cohen understands Judaism – and the Jewish people– as merely ideal, viz. systematically derived rather than representing a historical actuality.

This paper claims that Cohen`s perception of the relationship between rational ideas and historical actuality is much more complex. In the posthumously published Religion of Reason, Cohen does not only discuss the content of Judaism. Instead, he takes pains to interpret Jewish history as expressing this ideality from its beginning. Cohen refers to the sources of Judaism, not as a `fact of religion,` but as creations of national culture, presenting and constituting a national-historical narrative in which (the development of) the religion of reason defines the Jewish nation already in its mythic origins. In Cohen`s words, it is "the Israel of the future and not the historical Israel of the past or the present" which is depicted in the messianic idea, but this "ideal Israel… as everything ideal in the life of men and peoples, must be deeply rooted in the actual. But these depths are from the outset of ideal significance."

For Cohen, there must be a valid narrative of Jewish history connected with the "ideal significance" of the "religion of reason," which is not a mere idealization of the nation but a truthful representation of its historical existence. The paper analyzes the systematic origins of this Cohenian stance, presents Cohen`s method for reconstructing this narrative and argues that it should be viewed as a "rational myth" – a political and cultural counterweight to non-rational narratives of Jewish nationality.