Postsecular Jewish Thought: Franz Rosenzweig, Alexander Altmann, Leo Strauss

This article traces the emergence of what is nowadays called “postsecular” religion from German-Jewish philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s. The three different cases of Franz Rosenzweig, Alexander Altmann, and Leo Strauss impel us to pay particular attention to a few recurring argumentative and rhetorical strategies. The emergence of postsecularism marks a shift in the epistemic foundations of Jewish religious thought, which had long been under pressure from secular European thought. Beginning with Rosenzweig, Jewish philosophy used secular categories of European philosophy to facilitate a return to the foundations of Judaism, eventually turning against what it sees as the epistemic weaknesses of secularism itself. This article traces the new phenomenon to Rosenzweig’s evolving view of secularism, especially to his ridicule of Siegfried Kracauer’s secular messianism, before examining a few key arguments in his book The Star of Redemption (1921). A brief discussion of Alexander Altmann’s writings of the early 1930s provides that even modern Orthodox Jewish thought, which had never been “secular”, used postsecular categories and arguments to make the philosophical case for orthodoxy. Leo Strauss’s introduction to his Philosophy and Law (1935) provides a far more elaborated form of Rosenzweig’s argument. As this article seeks to show, postsecular Jewish thought comes with a slight twist of epistemic relativism, particularly when it comes to the juxtaposition of the Biblical and scientific “world-views”. But here it merely draws the full consequences of modern science, beating scientism with its own weapons. Furthermore, religious thought in the 20th century had no other option than to rebuild itself on postsecular grounds.