At the end of an illustrious career at the center of the neo-Kantian school in Marburg, Hermann Cohen dedicated his last years to the study of Jewish culture and philosophy. Cohen retired from his university post in Marburg in 1913 and resumed teaching with a new mandate at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, the leading institute for the study of Judaism. During his last years, he devoted himself to the task of developing a systematic Jewish philosophy of religion, a comprehensive study of the discursive and rational basis of Judaism that was published posthumously as the Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Cohen's late calling to Jewish studies was expressed in a lecture to the Hochschule as a hope for a renewal of Jewish theology to move beyond the mere “abstraction of literary production,” to “become truly alive” through the creation of original scholarly work. His comments were directed to the flaccid state of seminary learning, and he mentioned Franz Rosenzweig's Zeit ist's (It's Time) in this context. One cannot help but think of the academic study of philosophy as well.

Nearly a century later, Hilary Putnam's book comes as a historical marker in both respects. Written by the distinguished emeritus professor of analytical philosophy, this intriguing little study is a concise presentation of three figures in modern Jewish thought: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. It is introduced by an autobiographical chapter with Putnam's personal turn to religious Judaism and an expanded version of his preface to Rosenzweig's Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Harvard University Press, 1999). A chapter introducing Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein is followed by two short chapters on Buber's I and Thou and Levinas's concept of “infinite responsibility.” The book closes with an afterword that is both a summary and a return to Putnam's expression of his own religious convictions.

These reflections, despite the title and a picturesque sunset on the jacket, offer much less a “guide to life” than an introduction to the Lebensphilosophie of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas. This is not a self-help book. It is a search for a living philosophy. The tiny gems of this work are found in the brief comparisons between these three figures and the analytical tradition. The longest is the discussion on Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein, which seems to begin and end roughly halfway into the chapter of the same title. The comparison—that “objects of desire” cannot be measured merely by their satisfaction, as a wish is as little defined by its fulfillment as religious beliefs are by empirical evidence—will nevertheless remain with me for some time. The more general summary of Rosenzweig's system of thought in the next chapter is less illuminating than those offered by other scholars of Rosenzweig, such as Stéphane Mosès. The defense of Buber in the third chapter seeks to restore the centrality of his dialogical thinking to modern Jewish thought, to correct terminology, and to explain Buber's personal God, who can only be reached through an Other—a step that reflects neither negative nor positive theology in any simple sense. The last chapter, on Levinas, is particularly rich with observations: Descartes's discovery not of deduction but of fissure, the difference between Kant's legislative ethics and Levinas's “infinite responsibility,” the independence of the Other in contrast to Husserl's idea of construction, and more. These are the tremendous strengths of a work whose greatest disappointment is its brevity. It would surely be a great service to Jewish philosophy if Putnam were to continue to develop these observations into a critique of the Anglo-American philosophy of religion, which has largely overlooked Judaism (and every other religion other than Christianity) and has concerned itself with questions such as whether God is best conceived as a person without a body.

There is another problem that is difficult to overlook. Perhaps I can best express this with an example: we have no difficulty speaking of modern French philosophy and associating a few names as representative. It is also possible to accept that a person born in Paris may wish to study German idealism and be so enamored with this philosophical tradition that she or he contributes to their chosen subject in a substantive way. It is for this reason that I found the inclusion of Wittgenstein as a Jewish philosopher based on an argument of one-quarter “Jewishness” particularly disconcerting and proven absurd by the very fact that Husserl's “quarters” are not even mentioned. The problem of inclusion based on such criteria rather than the specific contribution to Jewish philosophy is accentuated by the discussion of the author's personal convictions—that he prays regularly but is not Orthodox, that he holds Jewish beliefs but not in an afterlife or in miracles. This has little to do with the ideas that inform modern Jewish philosophy as an intellectual tradition and that Putnam advances. It is now widely accepted that a person can make a meaningful and “living” contribution to Jewish studies without Jewish relatives (and occasionally be even the better for it). When Hermann Cohen completed his career with a turn toward Judaism, his intention was to enliven Jewish theology but also to lend legitimacy to Jewish studies, which would eventually find a place in the university as part of the humanities. The great advance that Putnam makes in situating modern Jewish thought in the context of modern philosophy is a gift to the field. His own personal religious views (between Jewish Lebensphilosophie, Pierre Hadot, and John Dewey) would have been better served in a separate publication. We await both an autobiography and a philosophy of religion with great anticipation.