Jewish thought in flux: Max Wiener (1882-1950)

Max Wiener has long been honored as the author of Judische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (1935), still acknowledged as a standard work on Judaism and Jewish thought in the age of Emancipation. Less is known of his career as a rabbi, scholar and thinker.While Wiener was not architect of a bold new system, his career as a thinker is paradigmatic for Jewish-German thought of the Weimar years. The repercussions of Hermann Cohen's thought resound in Wiener, in one lifetime, and in different keys. Thus, the young Wiener is an ardent follower of Cohen, who devotes his first book to a detailed elaboration of Cohen's understanding of the teachings of the prophets. The intellectual discipleship did not endure, however. Part One of this dissertation explores this discipleship and Wiener's break with it. Wiener rejects as a distortion the Cohenian view of the prophets as "universalists." It "spiritualizes" the religion of the prophets and denudes it of its national element. Wiener articulates this position in the context of a debate over Ernst Troeltsch's essay on the "Ethos of the Hebrew Prophets."There follows a period of philosophical wandering, in which two beacons shone clearly: Wiener's disaffection with the kind of philosophical Judaism espoused by Cohen, and his conviction of the centrality of the national idea in Jewish life and thought. This period is the subject of Part Two. Among the diverse thinkers and theologians upon whom Wiener draws, Karl Barth and the "school" of Dialectical Theology stand out as important influences. From the revelatory events of Biblical history, Wiener develops a theological Zionism, uncomfortably couched in the language of volkist ideology.These studies of Wiener's thought are intended to illuminate the motives and interpretive hues of his main work on Judaism in the Emancipation era, Wiener's memoire of German Judaism. Part Three is an exposition of that book.The dissertation is framed by a biographical prologue and epilogue.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990.School code: 0315