A World of Weak Eternities: Modern Jewish Thought, the Political, and the Interwar Quest for Immortality

Abstract:Interwar Europe saw a deep yearning for eternity among Jewish and Christian thinkers. This yearning also included a renewed attention to the difficult concepts of immortality and resurrection, which took on moral meaning akin to repentance and repair. Beginning with Karl Löwith’s famous critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time through Rosenzweig’s eternity philosophy, this essay reads the Star of Redemption in concert with the writings of Max Scheler, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Martin Buber, and Ernst Cassirer, situating Rosenzweig’s work within an interwar “eternalism,” in which eternity appeared as a worldly concept resisting historical pessimism and the politics of fate. As such, the concept of eternity functioned less as a flight from history and worldly politics than as a conscious critique of historical time and the power of finitude. This restores meaning to Löwith’s assertion that politics as an endeavor of humanity needs the horizon of eternity, while the same horizon of eternity, for Cohen and Rosenzweig, offered also a vision of perpetual peace.