University of Oxford
The Jewish Reception of Martin Heidegger’s Thought
In this study, I examine the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, I outline the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. I show that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, a crisis which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger’s life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger’s antisemitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger’s thought proved itself to be fertile ground for reconceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.