Jewish Responses to the Anti-Semitism of German Enlightened Thought

Abstract

The "limits of enlightenment" (Grenzen der Aufklärung, Claussen) are already present in its origins, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno reminded us in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the most terrible years of the Shoah. But the authors of the critical theory were not the first to discern these limits. This work proposes to briefly present several key points in the genealogy of the dialogue between Jewish thinkers and their German contemporaries with regard to such limits: a discussion that begins almost exactly two centuries before the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, with the arrival of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin in 1743. The arguments center on the debates in which various thinkers felt obligated to engage--Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century, Hermann Cohen in the nineteenth century, and his disciple Ernst Cassirer in the early twentieth century--and on the central role played by some teachers of the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary in the Jewish defense of the right to to be different.