The Cross and the Star

The Jewish Hegel scholar Franz Rosenzweig had an intense conversation with the Christian legal historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 1913. That “Leipzig Night Conversation” led Rosenzweig to prepare to convert to Christianity, but in the end he turned to embrace his Jewish faith for the first time. Three years later, the two men engaged in a correspondence now considered a historic turning point in the long history of Jewish-Christian controversy.

Rosenzweig went on to write The Star of Redemption, which made him an important figure in twentieth-century Jewish thought. Rosenstock-Huessy’s body of work covers the great revolutions in European and Church history, and industrial law; he began teaching university students in 1912 and continued well past his official retirement in 1957, but always sought to effect social change beyond academe.

This is the first major collection of essays that address both of the two friends and their “new thinking.” Their dialogue echoed Nietzsche’s anti-transcendent reading of Judaism and Christianity, as well as his attack on idealism, but it also resurrected the redemptive core of the two faiths as sources for the rejuvenation of society. This book includes three essays by Rosenstock-Huessy on Nietzsche, and a translation of a chapter from his ‘Sociology’, clarifying the “post-Nietzschean” approach of the “new thinking.” 

New edition, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Hardbound.