Longing for a new identity : crisis and encounter with secularization in 20th century German-Jewish thought

My talk will be devoted to analyze some reactions to secularization developed in the first decades of XX century among the most important German-Jewish thinkers. Making reference to the writing of intellectuals, philosophers and historians (e.g. Scholem, Benjamin, Buber, Strauss, etc.), I will try to outline how the Jewish intelligentsia between two world-wars was forced to face the results achieved by former generations in terms of civil and political rights. As a consequence of the Weimar crisis, a heterogeneous group of thinkers felt the urgency to react to the paradigm of Emancipation, which had been seen starting from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen as a necessary task for German Jewry’s way to modernity. Such a conviction clashed against the crash of XIX century conception of history and progress. Thus, a lot of Jewish thinkers once again had to deal with their belonging to a national and political community, asking reason of their considering themselves at the same time as Germans and Jews. Meanwhile, important philosophical and religious concepts were questioned too. In particular, fundamental notions such as messianism or revelation were explored in a totally different way with an attention unknown to prior reflection. The encounter with secularization seems to me the key that explains all those new and different approaches to Jewish tradition. Likewise, I will argue that the notion of crisis, which to a great extent informed all these authors’ thinking, highly contributed to shape the Weltanschauung that leaded them to formulate an original interpretation of Judaism. By struggling with politics and religion, though in many different ways and often with divergent outcomes, this generation of scholars and philosophers for the first time in history was taken to address the problem of defining Jewish identity in a secular and post-assimilatory time.