Neighbors and Strangers: Hermann Cohen and Protestant Biblical Criticism

Abstract

<p> My thesis investigates and evaluates Hermann Cohen's interest in and critiques of Protestant biblical criticism. In this thesis, I argue that Cohen's interest in Protestant biblical criticism stems from his quest to rejuvenate Jewish learning, foster relations between Jewish and Christian scholars and develop a philosophically sophisticated method for the study of the Hebrew Bible. To argue this point, I look at Cohen's philosophical construction of concepts such as monotheism, messianism and social justice, his methodology for the study of texts, his philosophical conception of "Jewish sources", and how this conception reflects contemporary interactions and tensions in Germany between scholarly biblical criticism, Jewish intellectual culture, and antisemitism. In doing so, I also examine how Cohen's complicated relationship with Protestant biblical criticism can be seen as part of Cohen's attempts to balance the assumptions he shared with Protestant biblical scholars, such as Julius Wellhausen, with his polemical response to Protestant biases in the work of other biblical scholars, such as Rudolf Kittel. This thesis, then, looks at both Cohen's implicit and explicit critiques of Protestant biblical scholarship in several of his "Jewish Writings" and in his Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, and investigates how Cohen's interactions with Protestant biblical criticism influenced his own methodology for the study of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. </p>