Vorige maand, volgens Amazon en de Hermann Cohen Gesellschaft, of al in de herfst, volgens de Israëlische uitgever Shalem Press, verscheen een recente vertaling, door Robert Schine, van het uit 1915 stammende bekende boek:
Hermann Cohen, Spinoza on State & Religion, Judaism & Christianity
[oorspr. Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum]
"Translation of Hermann Cohen's monograph, Spinoza on State and Religion, Judaism and Christianity. Cohen's essay is a passionate defense of religious rationalism, and especially of Jewish rationalism, against Spinoza, whose philosophy Cohen s viewed both as a moral threat and as an act of treason against his ancestral religion. Cohen defends his conception of the philosophical foundations of Judaism against the thinker for whom religion and philosophy are simply incompatible. Schine s translation and introduction have garnered high praise from our external readers. Like those readers, we believe we are now making an important text available to English-speaking students of modern Jewish thought and philosophy of religion."
Zie PDF met een deel van de inleiding, waarin veel over Hermann Cohen te vinden is. Daaruit deze alinea:
“The 1915 monograph was not Cohen’s first statement on the Theological-Political Treatise. In 1910 he gave a lecture that
was prompted, then as in 1915, by his objections to the Jewish veneration of
Spinoza. The particular occasion was the naming of a new B’nai B’rith lodge in
Berlin: “The Spinoza Lodge.” In the 1910 lecture Cohen states that Spinoza’s
philosophical blasphemies fully justified his expulsion from the Jewish
community.22 But Cohen’s efforts did little to slow the movement to reclaim
Spinoza as a Jewish thinker and hero. Had Cohen lived longer, he would also
have objected to the celebrations in 1927 of the 250th anniversary of Spinoza’s
death. At the ceremony at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, historian Joseph
Klausner declared the writ of excommunication null and void, invoking the old
formula of rehabilitation, with great pathos and without any rabbinic authority
to do so: “Our brother you are, our brother you are, our brother you are!” Many
years later, David Ben-Gurion wrote a lengthy essay on Spinoza titled “Let Us
Make the Crooked Straight” for the newspaper Davar to
do his own part toward Spinoza’s rehabilitation.”
