A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption

This book is a user-friendly guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. It will help students of the Star to be able to discuss at a basic level what, at least conceptually, Rosenzweig intended to say and how all that he says is interrelated. The book is the product of some twenty years of graduate seminars given by Norbert Samuelson at Temple University on the Star, which reflects the students’ diverse backgrounds in American and German literature, theology and philosophy, as well as rabbinic literature and Jewish philosophy. The topics discussed include the history of Western and Asian philosophy; Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology; and Jewish and Christian liturgy. Specific subjects discussed include philosophical treatments of the nature of God, the world and the human, ontology, epistemology, and ethics; theological discussions of creation, revelation, and redemption in relation to the Hebrew Scriptures, especially Genesis, the Song of Songs, and the Psalms; and cultural anthropological readings of what Lutheran, Roman Catholic and traditional Jewish liturgies claim about the Jewish people, the Christian way, the end of days, and the Kingdom of God.