Abstract

On Tuesday 21st February, our speaker at the lunch-time Humanities Seminar will be Dr Daniel H. Weiss. His subject is Revisiting Early Jewish-Christian Relations.

The topic is one on which Daniel is deeply expert. In his book Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence, to be published by Cambridge University Press in April 2023, Daniel provides new accounts of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God’s sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. Leora Batnizky, Perelman Professor of Religion at Princeton, has written of Daniel’s argument that “… a commitment to divine sovereignty does not produce but rather mitigates human violence. Weiss offers new and compelling readings of a number of seminal modern Jewish philosophers, while also setting forth a provocatively fruitful vision of modern Jewish philosophy as not merely the product of modern Europe but rather as the rightful inheritor of classical Jewish thought. Anyone interested in Judaism, modern philosophy and indeed the relationship between religion and politics will have much to gain from this timely and important book.”