Existentialism and Modern Jewish Philosophy

Abstract There are surely a number of ways to give an overview of how existentialism influenced Jewish theology and philosophy in the twentieth century and especially in the postwar period in North America. Rather than simply survey various figures—from Buber and Rosenzweig to Herberg, Heschel, Borowitz, and Soloveitchik—this chapter employs a different strategy. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, when existentialism yielded its role as a cultural and intellectual influence of primary importance to structuralism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, and other trends, Emil Fackenheim was arguably the most sophisticated Jewish theological and philosophical voice indebted to existentialism. The chapter examines the earliest stage in the development of Fackenheim’s Jewish existentialism from the 1940s through the early 1950s, along the way considering how he was centrally indebted to Kierkegaard, Buber, Schelling, and Rosenzweig primarily, and how his thought came to be critically aimed at medieval philosophy, Enlightenment rationalism, Kant, Hegel, and German Idealism, and figures as diverse as the pragmatists, Whitehead, Marx, and Feuerbach. In short, we shall use Fackenheim as a window to the phenomenon of the Jewish appropriation of existentialism in its most profound and serious forms. This is not to say that all “Jewish existentialists” took up exactly the same themes that Fackenheim did and in the way that he did, but it is to claim that we can fruitfully understand this historical episode by considering its various forms in terms of what is arguably its “highest” or “most sophisticated” expression.