Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009) examines the high theological and political stakes of Franz Rosenzweig’s creation of a textual home for the Jewish people in modern times.

My study of this titan of modern Jewish thought and philosophy places Rosenzweig’s best-known work, The Star of Redemption, at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory that culminated in a monumental translation of the Bible. I argue that Rosenzweig’s response to modernity was paradoxical: he challenged his readers to encounter the biblical text as revelation, reinventing scripture – both the Bible itself and the very notion of a scriptural text – in order to invigorate Jewish intellectual and social life, but did so in a distinctly modern key, ultimately reinforcing the foundations of German-Jewish post-Enlightenment liberal thought. Rosenzweig’s Bible illuminates the complex interactions that arise when modern readers engage the sacred texts of ancient religious traditions.

“In this nuanced and noteworthy book, Mara Benjamin shows how the great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig struggled to define what the ancient Hebrew liturgy could mean to Jewish existence under the radically altered conditions of late modernity. Textually precise without ever losing sight of the broader context of Weimar-era theology, Rosenzweig’s Bible makes a lasting and significant contribution to the current debate concerning Rosenzweig and the modernist reinvention of Jewish tradition.

— Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University