Acknowledgements
I am first of all grateful to Eliezer Schweid for his warm encouragement and sage advice throughout this project, and to his wife Sabina for her kindness and hospitality. Eli’s passing in January, 2022 cast a pall on the completion phase of the project, but his pioneering scholarship of modern Jewish thought, his synthetic view of the whole sweep of modern Jewish history, and his passionate commitment for the continuing contribution of Jewish philosophy to Jewish life will live on through these pages.
I am extremely grateful to my research assistant Christoph Hopp, without whose thorough and devoted research on the primary works of Baeck, Breuer, Birnbaum, Klatzkin, Aviad, Guttmann, Strauss, and Scholem the annotations to those chapters could not have been accomplished. It is my hope that the primary sources he has brought to light in these chapters will spur further research and appreciation of these thinkers.
I am grateful to Yehoyada Amir for introducing me to his study of Franz Rosenzweig, which helped me immeasurably in understanding the complex web of ideas in The Star of Redemption. It is my hope that Amir’s work on Rosenzweig will be available to English readers in the near future.
I am especially grateful to my editors, Dobrochna Fire, who copy-edited the main text, and Heather Dubnick, who edited the footnotes and prepared the index, as well as Erika Mandarino and Helena Schöb, my editors at Brill, who guided me through the final publication process.
I am grateful to my colleagues and students at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, New York and fellow-congregants at Congregation Kol Rina in South Orange, New Jersey for exchanges that have helped me visualize the live audience whom this work is intended to reach. I am most of all grateful to my family and my wife Margie Freeman, for giving me the emotional and personal support that has helped me to see this project through to completion.
Leonard Levin
South Orange, New Jersey
June, 2022