THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL JEW

According to Arthur Cohen's admirable assessment, the natural and the supernatural Jew are never disjunct, they are one and indissoluble in the authentic Jew; the theology, therefore, tenders the tension between both mystery and commandment, as perceived and practised through the holy community of Judaism. Writing with intense intellectual integrity, at times extremely elliptic and evocative, the author pierces the phenomenology of anti-Semitism, Mendelssohn's de-Judaizing rationalism, Hess' socialistic Zionism, Rabbi Baech's pragmatist psychology and condemnation of what he thought to be Christianity's anti-life force, Buber's Erasmian existentialism, Rosenzweig's pluralistic centering of Jews amid nations, not set apart, and Will Herbert's rejection of Marxism through a renewal of Biblical truth. The catholic claims of Jewish culture, a metaphysics of history and a consideration of the monumental ""mediocrity"" of America's Jewish middle class, conclude a work of stunning scholarship, one bound to shake up the minds of Jew and non-Jew alike.