When Hermann Cohen Cried: Zionism, Culture, and Emotion

Abstract: In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identified music as the key to large-scale cultural and emotional Jewish renewal in the face of European modernity. Yet their ensuing argument revealed not only the political fissures in European Jewry but also the deeper philosophical contradictions within each man's respective theories and, more broadly, the unstable relationship between aesthetics and affect in modern Jewish culture.