Hegel, Judaism, and biblical thought

My dissertation has two distinct but interrelated aims, both of which are intended to establish the possibility of reading Hegel as a thinker whose central ideas are shaped by his engagement with Judaism. The first is to offer a new reading of Hegel's interpretation of Judaism, one which moves beyond an assessment of the anti-Judaic elements of Hegel's work to show that he regards Judaism as playing a crucial role in the development of modern European culture. I examine his interpretation of Judaism in various texts, beginning with the so-called "early theological writings" and then moving on to the Phenomenology of Spirit and finally the Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history and religion. I argue that the changes which occur in Hegel's interpretation of Judaism over the course of his career indicate that, in his view, the history of European culture finds its metaphysical origins in what he construes as a Jewish conception of the infinite nature of subjectivity (both human and divine). I then go on to argue that this view of Judaism leads to an implicit distinction in Hegel's writings on history and religion between what I call the "biblical cultures" of Judaism and Christianity and the "non-biblical" cultures of the classical West and what he designates as the "Oriental world.";The second aim of my dissertation is to argue that Hegel's philosophy is dialectically related to biblical conceptions of history, the origins of self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and community. With this connection between Hegel's philosophy and "biblical thought" in mind, I examine certain convergences between Hegel's work and twentieth-century Jewish thought. My analysis concentrates on similarities in Hegel's approach to the Jewish Bible and the interpretive approaches of Buber and Rosenzweig. I also draw out parallels between Hegel's understanding of the relationship between God and human beings as it is expressed through a religio-ethical community and the discussion of God and the ethical relation to the other in the work of Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. These comparative readings establish the possibility of staging a dialogue between Hegel's thought and the work of these Jewish thinkers, thereby moving beyond what has traditionally been a polemical encounter between Jewish and Hegelian philosophy.