Papers by Daniel M. Herskowitz
Freedom of Religion and Soloveitchik’s Rejection of Interfaith Dialogue: The American Context
American Jewish History (forthcoming)
This article is dedicated to Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s views on Jewish-Christian dialogue, which h... more This article is dedicated to Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s views on Jewish-Christian dialogue, which he famously articulated in the context of the second Vatican council, and argues for the benefits of considering them in light of his immediate American context and as responding to his understanding the present reality of Jewish life in the United States. It demonstrates that toward the end of 1963 Soloveitchik adopts a new form of justification to support his opposition to theological interfaith dialogue: a surprising but recurring appeal to freedom of religion, minority rights, and liberalism. It argues that this reflects social, political, and judicial developments in the US at the time that highlighted the private nature of religion and the ideal of a neutral public sphere. These developments effectively aligned the values of religious freedom, equality, minority religious rights, and liberalism with the separationist, privatized understanding of religion that Soloveitchik held, and enabled him to utilize this terminology to justify his position on interfaith dialogue. The article claims, therefore, that Soloveitchik’s employment of the language of rights and freedom exhibits the recent shift in the discourse on the role and place of religion in the public sphere in America and of his understanding of the particular challenges of American Jewish life in the majority Christian culture. In this regard, his most influential articulation of his views on interfaith dialogue, his 1964 article “Confrontation,” should be read as a document of American exceptionalism.
Literature and Theology (forthcoming), 2026
This article discusses three contemporary cases of Jewish engagements with Martin Heidegger, thre... more This article discusses three contemporary cases of Jewish engagements with Martin Heidegger, three examples of ‘thinking with antisemites’ for the sake of Jewish thought. Neither ignoring the ever increasing ‘proofs’ of his disrepute nor making it the alpha and omega of his philosophy, they take Heidegger as a crucial interlocutor for contemporary Jewish thought – not despite but because of his antisemitism. It argues that these three cases provide us with three models for approaching Heidegger and Judaism together and for constructively ‘thinking with antisemites’: through, with, and against. The first model can be found in the work of Elliot R. Wolfson, the second in the work of Elad Lapidot, and the third in the work of Michael Chighel. It further demonstrates that in each case Heidegger is affiliated with a particular rendition of a biblical figure that encapsulates their respective understanding of the Judaism-Heidegger relationship and serves as a model and justification for thinking with antisemites. In Wolfson and Chighel, this figure is Balaam, the Moabite biblical prophet, and in Lapidot, it is Nebuzaradan, the Babylonian commander in charge of the destruction of the first Temple.
Zion und Zeit: Martin Heidegger and Jewish Philosophy
The Oxford Handbook of Martin Heidegger (forthcoming)
Despite the dark historical and political context surrounding the engagement with his thought, it... more Despite the dark historical and political context surrounding the engagement with his thought, it is difficult to exaggerate Heidegger’s importance for Jewish philosophy. This chapter argues that his theoretical agenda profoundly animated and haunted twentieth century Jewish philosophy and traces a number of salient areas in which Heidegger intersects with, and contributes to, it. It also demonstrates that a central impulse in post-Heideggerian Jewish philosophy is an implicit disregard or explicit rejection of the foundational status of the ontological question and its replacement with ontic questions and issues.
Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 2025
The present study examines the conceptual relationship between the Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher... more The present study examines the conceptual relationship between the Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen and the Ritschlian school, the dominant school of Protestant theology of his time. Its point of departure is that much can be illuminated in Cohen's late work Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism [Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums] by reading it in the context of contemporary Protestantism. It argues that Cohen's notions of "reconciliation" or "atonement" [Versöhnung] and forgiveness of sin conduct a shadow dialogue with the Ritschlian school, and that they are formed, framed, and formulated with constant awareness of the prevalent Protestant stance, particularly as it is conceived by Albrecht Ritschl, the school's so-called "father," and Wilhelm Herrmann, Ritschl's student and the school's unofficial "founder." It is suggested that the presence of the Ritschlian school in Religion of Reason is more extensive than what would be suggested by the sum total of explicit mentions of the relevant theologians' names, and that this school serves both as a source from which Cohen draws and a foil against which he develops his own position.
Journal of Jewish Studies, 2025
Were Jewish Orthodox leaders involved in the Second Vatican Council (1962–66)?
Common knowledge... more Were Jewish Orthodox leaders involved in the Second Vatican Council (1962–66)?
Common knowledge has it that they refused to cooperate with the Church during its
deliberations on the drafting of the ‘Document on the Jews’ – the document that eventually evolved into Nostra Aetate. Some even publicly renounced the Council and criticized Jewish organizations that cooperated with it. However, this article exposes and discusses, on the basis of previously unknown archival material, an episode of extensive and persistent interaction between leading figures within Orthodoxy and high-ranking Church officials regarding the possibility of a calendar reform that was discussed in the early sessions of the Council. It shows that Orthodox leadership was at once intensely engaged and fiercely opposed to involvement with the Council.
Martin Buber on Magic and Religion
Modern Jewish Theology, eds. George Kohler and Sam Kessler , 2026
In numerous works, Martin Buber devoted considerable effort to articulate his understanding of di... more In numerous works, Martin Buber devoted considerable effort to articulate his understanding of dialogical religiosity. Recently, scholars have convincingly shown the centrality of the category of gnosis for Buber’s dialogical thinking. However, in addition to gnosis and quite often accompanying it, Buber evoked another ‘spiritual force’ as a foil for his dialogical religiosity, namely, magic. Yet this category is still virtually unaddressed in critical scholarship. In the present study I suggest that like gnosis, Buber regularly grappled with the category of magic and that – again like gnosis – it is of great importance to his thinking. I explore key moments in his oeuvre in which this category is invoked and argue that when situated in context, his construction of magic largely resembled the prevalent conceptual paradigms of his time – though he utilized it for his own purposes and in the context of his concern with, and understanding of, Judaism.
Hans Jonas: The Early Years, edited by Daniel M. Herskowitz, Elad Lapidot, and Christian Wiese , 2024
Anyone who reads Jonas’s two major works on Gnostic literature, the early German *Gnosis und spät... more Anyone who reads Jonas’s two major works on Gnostic literature, the early German *Gnosis und spätantiker Geist* and its later English adaptation, *The Gnostic Religion*, will no doubt recognize the glaring differences between them. Indeed, the English version is not merely a translation of the original German but constitutes a substantial reworking of its project. An account of this reworking, however, has yet to be offered in the extant scholarly literature on Jonas. The aim of this essay is to contribute to filling this gap and to illuminate some aspects of the transformation of Jonas’s Gnosis study. It delineates, from a conceptual standpoint, some core differences between the two studies, and explains, from a historical standpoint, the reasons for them. By examining the transcripts of a lecture series on Gnosticism delivered by Jonas in the Hebrew University in 1938, this essay demonstrates that many of the key differences between his early German study of Gnosticism and his later English version are already present in his Hebrew lectures, thus locating this major shift in Jonas’s work in his pre-war Jerusalem period.
The Wrong Side of History: Franz Rosenzweig on Islam
Spiritual Investment in the World: Modern Theologies of Worldliness, edited by Agata Bielik-Robson, 2026
Forthcoming
The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2024
This essay surveys a number of prominent, recurring, and new directions in the growing scholarly ... more This essay surveys a number of prominent, recurring, and new directions in the growing scholarly discourse on the theme “Heidegger and Judaism,” arranged under three headings. The first, the contrastive framing, encompasses cases in which the relationship between Heidegger and Judaism is perceived as antithetical. The second, the conjunctive framing, encompasses views claiming the existence of affinities and parallels between Heidegger and Judaism, grouped under three subheadings: “Heidegger and biblical thinking,” “Heidegger and Kabbalah,” and “Heidegger and the Jewish nation.” The third, historical perspectives, uses the approach of intellectual history to explore visions of Judaism that are developed as part of engagements with Heidegger’s philosophy.
History of European Ideas, 2024
This study argues that the bond between ‘secularization’ and ‘de-legitimation’ is not only borne ... more This study argues that the bond between ‘secularization’ and ‘de-legitimation’ is not only borne out in debates over grand historical narratives relating to the status of modernity, as argued by Hans Blumenberg, but in debates over the appraisal of specific modern philosophical programs as well. It does this by examining how the category of ‘secularization' is used to delegitimize Martin Heidegger's thought, from both theological and secular perspectives, by two of his former students, Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith. By analysing their interpretation of Heidegger and their understanding of secularization, legitimacy, and the philosophy-theology relationship, this study sheds light on the intellectual projects of these three thinkers – master and two students – and demonstrates the application of secularization as a hermeneutical category of de-legitimization on the basis of ‘insufficiency’ – either insufficiently secular or insufficiently religious.
Hans Jonas und die Marburger Hermeneutik, Andreas Grossmann/Malte Dominik Krüger (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2023, 83-109, 2023
Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2023
This article offers a critical examination of the role of Martin Heidegger’s
philosophy in Micha... more This article offers a critical examination of the role of Martin Heidegger’s
philosophy in Michael Wyschogrod’s most important work, Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, and explores its intersection with this work’s more acknowledged debt to Karl Barth’s theology. It explores the uses of these two key intellectual sources for Body of Faith and reflects on how this illuminates some of the basic assumptions, motivations and also shortcomings of Wyschogrod’s Jewish theology. It demonstrates that Wyschogrod follows Barth in his decisive emphasis on divine revelation and in his turn to the biblical text as revelation’s primary document, but what he finds there and claims to be authentic Jewish biblical thought betrays the mark of Heidegger. At the same time, Heidegger also serves as Wyschogrod’s main foil, the emblem of the philosophical tradition that should be superseded by a Barthian-Jewish theology.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023
This study seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertiliz... more This study seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin-de-sicle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geo-political writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, not as targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on ‘the way,’ strive. It concludes by calling for a scholarly 'imperial turn' that will consider the role of empire in the development of modern Jewish thought.
Harvard Theological Review , 2024
In the section ‘Language of Eros’ in Section II of Book II of The Star of Redemption, the beating... more In the section ‘Language of Eros’ in Section II of Book II of The Star of Redemption, the beating heart of the work, Franz Rosenzweig offers a peculiar portrait of the event of revelation. What is presented is a dramatization of the encounter between the loving God and the beloved human soul, a developing scene consisting of a series of utterances and experiences, many of which appear unwarranted. Why does Rosenzweig present revelation in this manner? This article seeks to explain the seemingly arbitrary twist-and-turns in the dramatized ‘plot’ through which Rosenzweig depicts revelation by demonstrating that it follows in its main features the prevalent Protestant understanding of revelation as encompassing not only divine self-disclosure but also the discovery of sin, confession, forgiveness of sin, reconciliation, attainment of selfhood, and redemption, and is framed according to the directives of the Lutheran foundational principle of ‘at once a sinner and justified’ [Simul Justus et Peccator]. In so doing, it exhibits Rosenzweig’s deep and hitherto unacknowledged embeddedness in the Protestant theological discourse of his time and shows that The Star is best understood in light of, and is generally in line with, the contemporary Protestant theology.
Journal of Religion , 2024
This article explores the fraught relationship between Martin Buber and Christian thought by crit... more This article explores the fraught relationship between Martin Buber and Christian thought by critically analysing and historically contextualising his Two Types of Faith (1950). In this work Buber applies the distinction he puts forth between faith as relational trust (‘faith in’) and faith as intellectual ascent to propositional truth (‘faith that’) onto the early Israelite and Christian communities of faith. He also uses this distinction to criticize contemporary Protestant theology for continuing the Pauline notion of ‘faith that’ rather that Jesus’s Jewish ‘faith in’. By examining the notion of faith developed by three central German Protestant theologians, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Emil Brunner, this article demonstrates that Buber’s claim cannot be squared with the main line of Protestant theology from the mid-nineteenth century to Buber’s own time and that the entire discussion in Two Types of Faith can be understood as situated within the Protestant discourse he was admonishing.
Shmuel Hugo Bergmann: A Life Between Prague and Jerusalem, 2024
Among Shmuel Hugo Bergmann’s many intellectual activities was his role as a key
conduit of Europ... more Among Shmuel Hugo Bergmann’s many intellectual activities was his role as a key
conduit of European philosophical ideas to the Yishuv/Israel during the long period
between the 1920s and 1960s. A central philosophical figure in Palestine at the time
and the first rector of the Hebrew University, he provided updates and analyses of
the valuable and latest philosophical developments taking place in Europe to the
Hebrew speaking reader. The present study begins by discussing some general aspects
of this intellectual project and then turns its focus to Bergmann’s efforts to
introduce and analyze the thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to
the local audience.
Baron Lectures: Studies on the Jewish Experience, vol. 1: Constructing and Experiencing Jewish Identity, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Religions, 2021
This article argues that Karl Löwith’s thesis of secularization—in brief, that while modern
philo... more This article argues that Karl Löwith’s thesis of secularization—in brief, that while modern
philosophical notions present themselves as secular, they are in fact secularized, that is, they preserve
features of the theological background they repress and remain determined by it—can serve as a
productive hermeneutical key for framing and understanding an important strand in the twentieth
century Jewish response to Heidegger’s philosophy. It takes Ernst Cassirer, Leo Strauss, and Martin
Buber as test-cases and demonstrates that these three Jewish thinkers interpreted various categories
of Heidegger’s Being and Time to be not simply secular but secularized Christian categories that
continue to bear the mark of their theological origin even in their now-secular application and
context. The article concludes with a number of reflections and observations on how Löwith’s thesis
of secularization can shed light on the polemical and political-theological edge of this strand in
Heidegger’s Jewish reception.
Modern Intellectual History , 2022
This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and Gnost... more This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas’ s interpretation is against the grain”: by claiming that Heidegger’s thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measurable, manipulatable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attributed to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas’s original contribution to Heidegger’s reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science.
Tikkun, 2019
Gershom Scholem and Jacob Neusner, two giants in the field of study of religion and Judaism, had ... more Gershom Scholem and Jacob Neusner, two giants in the field of study of religion and Judaism, had corresponded with each other for almost three decades. Somehow, we did not know about this. Recent years have seen one biography of Neusner and at least three of Scholem, but not a single word is found in them about this relationship. This is striking, of course, not only because of the stature of these two men, but because scholars have been peering over Scholem’s archive in Jerusalem, where the correspondence is found, for decades, and a significant number of Scholem’s correspondences have already been published. Whatever the reason for this oblivion may be, the sixty-odd letters exchanged between Scholem and Neusner reveal the unknown tale of their relationship, which began with mentorship, developed into a friendship, and ended in a fuming fallout.
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Papers by Daniel M. Herskowitz
Common knowledge has it that they refused to cooperate with the Church during its
deliberations on the drafting of the ‘Document on the Jews’ – the document that eventually evolved into Nostra Aetate. Some even publicly renounced the Council and criticized Jewish organizations that cooperated with it. However, this article exposes and discusses, on the basis of previously unknown archival material, an episode of extensive and persistent interaction between leading figures within Orthodoxy and high-ranking Church officials regarding the possibility of a calendar reform that was discussed in the early sessions of the Council. It shows that Orthodox leadership was at once intensely engaged and fiercely opposed to involvement with the Council.
philosophy in Michael Wyschogrod’s most important work, Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, and explores its intersection with this work’s more acknowledged debt to Karl Barth’s theology. It explores the uses of these two key intellectual sources for Body of Faith and reflects on how this illuminates some of the basic assumptions, motivations and also shortcomings of Wyschogrod’s Jewish theology. It demonstrates that Wyschogrod follows Barth in his decisive emphasis on divine revelation and in his turn to the biblical text as revelation’s primary document, but what he finds there and claims to be authentic Jewish biblical thought betrays the mark of Heidegger. At the same time, Heidegger also serves as Wyschogrod’s main foil, the emblem of the philosophical tradition that should be superseded by a Barthian-Jewish theology.
conduit of European philosophical ideas to the Yishuv/Israel during the long period
between the 1920s and 1960s. A central philosophical figure in Palestine at the time
and the first rector of the Hebrew University, he provided updates and analyses of
the valuable and latest philosophical developments taking place in Europe to the
Hebrew speaking reader. The present study begins by discussing some general aspects
of this intellectual project and then turns its focus to Bergmann’s efforts to
introduce and analyze the thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to
the local audience.
philosophical notions present themselves as secular, they are in fact secularized, that is, they preserve
features of the theological background they repress and remain determined by it—can serve as a
productive hermeneutical key for framing and understanding an important strand in the twentieth
century Jewish response to Heidegger’s philosophy. It takes Ernst Cassirer, Leo Strauss, and Martin
Buber as test-cases and demonstrates that these three Jewish thinkers interpreted various categories
of Heidegger’s Being and Time to be not simply secular but secularized Christian categories that
continue to bear the mark of their theological origin even in their now-secular application and
context. The article concludes with a number of reflections and observations on how Löwith’s thesis
of secularization can shed light on the polemical and political-theological edge of this strand in
Heidegger’s Jewish reception.