Heidegger’s philosophy, one of the most powerful and controversial projects of thought in the twentieth century, gave rise to manifold attempts by Jewish thinkers to address the questions that it posed to the philosophical tradition. The first generation of this process of reception and transformation, from the 1920s onwards, included well-known figures such as Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, and Ernst Cassirer. Each of these apprehended Heidegger against the background of the philosophical tradition as defined by the general philosophical environment of the time: saliently, Neo-Kantianism and its ramifications; phenomenology; the upsurge of interest in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel; and the encounter with contemporary theologians such as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Yet each of their paths, informed in specific ways by Jewish motifs, moved toward an individual horizon of interest. The specific Faszinosum of coupling Heidegger’s philosophy and Jewish thought can be perceived at different levels – historically, politically, anthropologically, theologically, and philosophically. To locate the gravity of the pairing is already to take a certain stance on what is at stake in this topic: Heidegger on Jews and Judaism, Jewish responses to Heidegger, and, maybe most significantly, the structural, thematic, atmospheric, and conceptual interfaces between Heidegger’s Denken and Jewish thought.

This special issue derives from a study day that took place at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Antwerp on July 7, 2022, with the cooperation of the Center for European Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. This scholarly event was inspired by recent developments in the exploration of the relationship between Heidegger and Jewish thought, and more broadly by new perspectives and new insights into modern Jewish thought in its interaction with European philosophy.

Individual relationships between Jewish philosophers, especially those who studied with Heidegger and responded critically to his thought in the Marburg and Freiburg years, have been the subject of important studies. Numerous symposia, monographs, and collected volumes have addressed the question of Heidegger and Jewish thought more broadly and have given rise to lively scholarly debates. Since the publication in 2015 of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks¹ from the 1930s and 1940s, such studies have both incorporated and transcended the question of Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism. Richard Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins expanded on his earlier critical approach to the German philosopher and pointed to the ways in which his Nazi affiliation manifests itself in his thought.² Among major publications that have taken a different, more diversified path is an important volume of essays edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot, Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others.³

The present collection of essays continues, invigorates, and inflects this endeavor. Informed by a comparative approach between Heidegger and the work of a variety of Jewish thinkers – Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Susan Taubes, Jakob Taubes, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas – the articles in this issue expose, in Elliot Wolfson’s words, “a divergence in the convergence, a disjunction in the conjunction.”

The 1930s saw Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre) to the question of the history of Being (Seyn) and the Event (Ereignis), to the de-struction of the categories of thought that had contributed to what he saw as the forgetting of Being, and to the ways in which the “essence of truth” (Wesen der Wahrheit) takes place in history. This turn was coupled with the vicissitudes of his explicit political engagement in the “service” (Dienst) of the goals of National Socialism in 1933, and the formulation of this engagement in terms of his own philosophy. This made it increasingly exigent for those whom he considered as members of a community antithetical to metaphysics and hence excluded both from the history of Being and from the polity to which he gave his support – however circumscribed or qualified – to consider his philosophy critically.

The question of Heidegger’s relation to Judaism became pressing after Guido Schneeberger’s publication of documents pertaining to Heidegger’s political involvement, Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (1967); Viktor Farias’s book Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (1989); and the recent appearance of the philosopher’s Schwarze Hefte. The plethora of works addressing the political aspects of this relation based on the Black Notebooks bears witness to the vital importance of reflecting on the responsibility of philosophy and philosophers with respect to its political implications.

The articles gathered in this issue acknowledge the importance of this political aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy but focus on aspects of Jewish thought that can be placed in relation to features of that philosophy. Without bracketing off the question of the political implications of Heidegger’s thought and actions, the essays presented here seek to embody responsibility by addressing the questions posed by Heidegger from within the hermeneutic context of their own engagement with Jewish themes. In other words, the essays seek “to think with Heidegger against Heidegger” (Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken),⁴ as Jürgen Habermas expressed it in his well-known article published in 1953. The articles here can be read as nuanced explorations of the possibilities that such a task entails for those who regard both Jewish thought and Heidegger’s philosophy as requiring rigorous hermeneutical elucidation that resists reductive or polemical readings. The logic on which they draw is often dialectical in a non-Hegelian sense, involving an unresolved tension, where opposition co-exists with affinity in complex configurations.

The contributions to this issue begin with a general perspective given in the article by Daniel Herskowitz, who offers a survey of salient approaches to the topic of Heidegger and Judaism, distinguishing between those who contrast the two and those who conjoin them. Underlining the fact that the conjunctive framing is comparatively less common, Herskowitz adumbrates three different themes within this approach. The first, the contrastive framing, encompasses cases in which the relationship between Heidegger and Judaism is perceived as antithetical. The second, the conjunctive framing, encompasses views claiming the existence of affinities, similarities, and parallels between Heidegger and Judaism (the latter including biblical thinking, Kabbalah, and Jewish national thinking). Herskowitz deftly underlines the fruitful possibilities that lie in the conjunctive approach. The third frame, to which Herskowitz’s contribution to this issue belongs as well, takes the approach of intellectual history to explore visions of Judaism that are developed as part of engagements with Heidegger’s philosophy.

Agata Bielik-Robson’s contribution bears out Herskowitz’s contention that the positions he describes exhibit a variety of often overlapping configurations. In discussing the development of Heidegger’s thought from his middle period to his texts and lectures of the 1950s and beyond, Bielik-Robson discerns both affinities and differences with respect to Judaism. To elucidate what she refers to as Heidegger’s cryptotheological “stubborn Marcionite prejudice” and Christian Gnosis, and expanding on Derrida’s suggestions at the conclusions of his work De l’esprit, she contrasts two periods of Heidegger’s thought. In the first period, after the Kehre, the agency of the forgetting of Being is epitomized by the calculatory schemata that Heidegger equates with Jewish Machenschaft. In Heidegger’s late thought it is Being itself that withdraws from beings. Bielik-Robson asks whether Heidegger’s later thought reveals a proximity to the structure of “incomplete forgetfulness” in the Jewish tradition, which as a positive agent of Seinlassen accompanies the withdrawal of the origin of all beings. Such proximity would vitiate Heidegger’s earlier characterization of the Jew as the principle of destruction in the history of metaphysics, or in the thinking of Being. It would also require a revision of his exclusion of Jews from the history of Being. She thus follows a position adopted by Heidegger to a point where it would force him to rethink what he excludes from his ontological framework.

The Gnostic element to which Bielik-Robson refers also plays a central role in Willem Styfhals’s and Elliot Wolfson’s contributions to this issue. Styfhals elucidates how Jacob Taubes, in his doctoral dissertation Abendländische Eschatologie,⁵ sought to understand Jewish messianism through Heidegger’s thought. In undertaking a Gnostic-apocalyptic interpretation of history as the history of error, Styfhals suggests, Taubes pursued Heidegger’s elaboration of truth as unconcealment of something that was originally in error. Despite the ostensible near-absence of Heidegger and of Jewish thought from Taubes’s dissertation, Styfhals claims that a “philosophy of Jewish messianism” is present “in disguise” in Taubes’s later preoccupation with Christian apocalyptics and in his cryptic use of Heidegger’s lecture “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.”⁶ Underlining the explicit connections that Taubes’s wife Susan draws between Gnosticism and Heidegger’s thought, Styfhals traces a reworking of the sources in the context of Jewish themes.

Not surprisingly, Elliot Wolfson’s far-reaching work on Heidegger and Jewish thought serves as a frequent point of reference in the articles in this volume. His contribution here examines Susan Taubes’s engagement with the nihilistic implications of Heidegger’s thought. Her delineation of the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to Christian Gnosticism tallied closely with Jacob Taubes’s designation of the realm of the material world as destitute or even evil. Wolfson delineates the increasingly critical and distanced view Susan Taubes takes of Heidegger’s nihilism as comprising the devaluation of the quotidian activities of life. Drawing on parallels between her thought and Hasidic messianic positions concerning the virtual restoration embodied in the ruptures in Being, Wolfson draws forth the “melancholic sanguinity” that Susan Taubes considered to be lacking in “Heidegger’s errancy and the pseudo-nihilism of Gnosticism” and elucidates the logical and ontological dimensions of her embrace of the separation from the absolute in fully engaging the tasks presented in everyday life. In his view, Susan Taubes countered any attempt to resolve the brokenness of the world into a totality, be it founded on tragedy, mysticism, or the nihilism underlying Heidegger’s thought.

The contributions by Elad Lapidot and Arthur Cools each draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking to add nuance to our understanding of the relation of Jewish thought to Heidegger’s philosophy. Lapidot compares Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit⁷ with Levinas’s Autrement qu’être,⁸ two works that view language as a world of meaning that comes into being in the passage from the Saying to the Said, as a translation that is a kind of necessary abuse. Lapidot traces Levinas’s hermeneutical move in interpreting the Unsaying as an interruption or a disruption of the betrayal of Saying in the Said. At this point, Levinas’s later work comes close to Heidegger’s notion of de-struction as an act of critique that frees Being from forgetting. Yet there are limits to this affinity. Lapidot shows that for Levinas, Heidegger in effect reduces the Said to Saidness and does not reach beyond this to reveal Saying.

In his essay “Heidegger, Gagarin et nous” (1961),⁹ Levinas contrasted Heidegger’s pagan “enrootedness” with the astronaut’s “uprootedness” that frees mankind from its attachment to Place. Arthur Cools asks how our apprehension of this distinction has shifted with the increasingly global view of the Earth as the place of our common dwelling, the destiny that has become ever more apparent with the consciousness of the climate change brought about by human technological activity. Is there a sense of attachment that can be revealed here that is obscured in Levinas’s argument against Heidegger? Drawing on a discussion of the theme by Wolfson, Cools identifies the consequences of two interpretations of the kabbalistic tsimtsum. In the first, laid out by Gershom Scholem, God is seen as withdrawal from a point in space. In the other, the tradition of Spinoza and his interpretation in German Idealism, the divine is identified with a concentration in a point in space. Cools observes that our global vulnerability to the environmental changes caused by technology has brought to the fore human dependence on the planet earth as a place to live, as a condition that is necessary to life. This, Cools submits, calls into question Levinas’s distinction between rootedness and uprootedness. At the crux of his argument, Cools reads Heidegger’s exposition of place (as the locus of event of the strife between earth and world) against Spinoza’s discussion of natura naturans and natura naturata and asks whether we can regard the earth, as a place to live, as being between these two determinations.

In his essay on Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig, Michael Fagenblat addresses not ecological dangers but the current dangers of Jewish ethno-nationalism. How can a reflection on Heidegger’s middle period, he asks, inform an ontologically corrected and clarified idea of Jewish chosenness? Can we use Heidegger to conceive both a sense of the holy in connection with election and an Israeli polity that is not defined by nationalism? Can the German thinker help us to understand how and why the “nation” and the “state” have only very recently been conjoined? To describe the elective affinity between Heidegger and the Jews, Fagenblat employs the figure of a “Möbius strip,” where one side becomes the other by being itself. Heidegger’s idea of the historical destiny of the German people, he explains, rests both on the relation of fatherland to space and on the relation of festive days (Feiertage) to time. Fagenblat contrasts Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s “free use of the national” with the idea of nationalism (and associated territorial annexation) that is often used to characterize the Jewish presence in Palestine.

As Daniel Herskowitz suggests at the end of his essay, a great deal about the relationship between Heidegger and Jewish thought – with all its pressures and possibilities, all its divergences and convergences – remains to be explored. In their insightful diversity and provocative complexity, in the invitation they extend to further argument, the contributions to this special issue offer an essential starting point for embarking on that exploration.