Holiness in Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber

This chapter explores the conception of holiness in three influential modern Jewish thinkers, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, with particular attention to the problem of Jewish distinctiveness. Each thinker’s approach to holiness represents their attempt to define the meaning of Jewish distinctiveness in light of the social, political, and cultural challenges faced by the Jews of Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by modern Jews more broadly. Consideration of these three thinkers’ conceptions of holiness also offers us the opportunity to examine the strengths and limitations of contemporary approaches to Jewish distinctiveness within North American Jewish spiritual life over the last several decades.