Rosenzweig's Ideal of Community: Blood, Prayer and Redemption

The search for community is a central motif of Franz Rosenzweig's intellectual and educational activity. This essay aims to establish the full scope of Rosenzweig's multifaceted treatment of community and to contextualize it as part of the German völkisch and religious Gemeinschaft-discourse, so as to unravel its crucial role in his philosophy and vision of Jewish renaissance. Rosenzweig's concept of the ideal community, articulated in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption has four main aspects: first, a critique of the isolated and insulated existence of the pagan man (a prototype for the modern man), and his vision of the redeemed community that revelation and redemption engender; second, the religious community of prayer; third, the Jewish blood-community and the “community of silence” nourished by the Jewish holy days; fourth, the vision of a world-empire consisting of religious and national communities, an alternative to the nation-state. The last section of this paper examines Rosenzweig's concept of community, as developed in his later works and explores his educational vision of a learning community.