Reason and Hope

Hermann Cohen's writings on Judaism constitute a landmark in the history of modern religious thought. Cohen (1842-1918) taught first at Marburg University and then at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Renowned originally as the founder and most prominent representative of the so-called neo-Kantian school of philosophy (or, as he called it, critical idealism), Cohen gradually came to see a close affinity between the ideas and ideals of the Jewish prophets and those of classical Greek and German idealism, a spiritual kinship he stressed throughout his later years. Although he was not conventionally religious, Cohen repeatedly stressed his belief in Judaism's "absolute" monotheism, a religion based equally on faith and reason and grounded in the concept of One God. The contents of this anthology have been culled from Cohen's Jewish Writings, a three-volume collection of essays and addresses published posthumously in 1924 in Berlin.