Matvei Kagan: Judaism and the European Cultural Crisis

Abstract

Abstract This work is an attempt to systematically read the “crisis articles” of Matvei Kagan (1889–1937), a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin who was a student and follower of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and a close friend of Mikhail Bakhtin during his early, constitutive participation in the Nevel Circle (1918–1920). The articles are discussed in the context of Kagan’s main realm, the philosophy of history; however, they present Kagan as a philosopher of culture and religion. In these works, Kagan defines the origins of the European cultural crisis of the 1910s and 1920s in the terms of Jewish monotheism, and finds the source for its solution in the core model of Jewish community.