Many scholars claim to have found different keys that unlock the underlying system of Franz Rosenzweig's imposing “everything work,” the Star of Redemption. However, too much emphasis has been placed on this canonical work of German Jewish thought. Mara H. Benjamin brushes against the grain of much Rosenzweig scholarship by viewing the Star as an “early, even immature experiment rather than a crowning achievement” (20). At the heart of Rosenzweig's developing religious thought, Benjamin argues, is the Bible. Rosenzweig's thinking about the relationship between “revelation and scripture acquired a sharper edge in his later writings.” The Hebrew scriptures became “a gateway to revelation” and “provided the Archimedean point from which he would define a new politics of Jewish life within Germany” (106). Benjamin adroitly navigates her way through all of the shifting nuances about how Rosenzweig thought about the Bible. The famed Bible translation project that Rosenzweig undertook with Martin Buber is the most tangible example of Rosenzweig's sustained project of recasting and “rewriting” the Hebrew Bible.

Indeed, as Benjamin demonstrates, Rosenzweig viewed the Bible project as a vehicle for transforming what the Bible meant in postwar German language, culture, and religion. The aspirations here were simultaneously Jewish and universal, and it might make more sense to talk about Luther's Bible versus Rosenzweig's, rather than Protestant and Jewish bibles. And in Benjamin's fascinating account, we learn how Rosenzweig partially overcame his dependency on Luther's translation by establishing a new German Bible steeped in the authentic and uncanny aura of its Hebraic revelation. Although Rosenzweig drew on the confident energy of his collaborator Martin Buber, he also worked within a larger Christian discussion regarding biblical hermeneutics that could be found in the radical theological journal Zwischen den Zeiten. Liberal Protestant intimates such as Eugen and Margrit (“Gritli”) Rosenstock-Huessy also provided Rosenzweig with much feedback on his developing notions of the significance of the biblical word.

The common problem these thinkers approached related to ways in which the Bible had became all too human, all too familiar, and all too irrelevant for the individual of the early twentieth century. Rosenzweig certainly did not aim to come up with a beautiful and smooth German translation; Luther had already accomplished this. The Bible's unitary character remained crucial if it was to retain or acquire the sacred aura. He thus carefully elided issues of authorship and redaction, instead concentrating on recapturing the oral character the text had had in premodern Jewish communities when it was authoritative. While early rabbinic texts simultaneously reinforced and yet subverted the authority of the biblical text, Rosenzweig admired how Torah became transposed for new generations as both authentic and authoritative. Rosenzweig similarly sought to transpose or “rewrite” the Bible for his contemporaries.

Just as Luther utilized the hermeneutic principle of sola scriptura (the scripture alone) to wrest away the church's authoritative stranglehold of the Bible, so, too, did Rosenzweig, but the latter did so in order to re-Judaize the German Bible. Rosenzweig was most hesitant to stray from Luther's decisive effort (111), but he eventually grew determined to wrest the Bible away from Luther's imprint by deploying a number of distinctive elements, ranging from a sparse page layout, font selection, a deliberate use of repetition, and the invention of new German words that captured the Hebrew root or conveyed a visceral or stilted character. These devices served to defamiliarize biblical language and underscore the primordial uniqueness of the Hebraic origins of the German. He and Buber also brought to the fore the Leitworte (theme words) that clued the reader as listener into the thematic thread which runs a particular section. Moreover, they tried to recreate an audience who would hear the revelatory words of scripture by dividing the prose into breath-length units (colometry). All of these translation devices and strategies shared the goal of defamiliarizing the Bible. The Buber–Rosenzweig Bible is thus marked by a distinctive and controversial religious aesthetic, one that has aptly been called “archaism as modernism.”Footnote ¹

Rosenzweig contended with other legacies besides Luther's decisive shaping of the Bible for modern Germans. Spinoza's radicalization of Luther's principle of sola scriptura had a decisive effect in the historicization and secularization of the Bible—regarding it as a text to be read and studied as any other human artifice. And even though Spinoza sought to effectively demolish a suprahistorical acceptance of scripture as divine truth, Rosenzweig was nevertheless attracted to an imputed Hebraic existential core. He surprisingly praised Jakob Klatzkin's 1924 Hebrew translation of the Ethics (concurring with Klatzkin's own judgment), noting that the inventive Hebrew translation more clearly expressed Spinoza's thought than the original Latin.Footnote ² This striking appraisal points to Rosenzweig's inclusive view of postbiblical Hebrew sources, which he utilized for his project. But his judgment about Spinoza's secret Hebrew character betrays a slip into a “jargon of authenticity,” a discourse that couches much of his thinking about scripture and revelation.

Benjamin's book provides a new window onto Rosenzweig's religious thought. For example, Rosenzweig's project of grounding thought in speech, which he called Sprachdenken (speech-thinking), becomes something quite different when we see Rosenzweig interested in biblical speech, not ordinary speech. And even though Benjamin diminishes the relative significance of the Star in Rosenzweig's overall religious development, she nevertheless provocatively lays out her own interpretation of the Star as anchored in the problem of biblical speech; concerns about ethics arise only as a tertiary issue.

While Rosenzweig's thinking about the Bible and translation undoubtedly became more sophisticated as he achieved a fuller understanding of medieval and biblical Hebrew during the 1920s, the Star nevertheless remains an extraordinary work of philosophy, theology, and poetry. Still, Benjamin demonstrates why Rosenzweig's projects mattered to him and still have contemporary relevance; at the same time, she lets her reader know where Rosenzweig is inconsistent, strategically disingenuous, or simply less than compelling. As a scholar of modern Jewish thought, she acknowledges other scholars who have walked similar paths, whether as historians, philosophers, or social theorists. Steeped in religious studies more generally, Benjamin also provides relevant debates regarding comparative scriptural studies, canon formation, and a whole host of complex minefields. This work should certainly be read by anyone who is interested in the central role that all things biblical have played in modern theological discussions, and Jewish theology in particular.