Hermann Cohen

Translation of Hermann Cohen's monograph, Spinoza on State and Religion, Judaism and Christianity. Cohen's essay is a passionate defense of religious rationalism, and especially of Jewish rationalism, against Spinoza, whose philosophy Cohen's viewed both as a moral threat and as an act of treason against his ancestral religion. Cohen defends his conception of the philosophical foundations of Judaism against the thinker for whom religion and philosophy are simply incompatible. Schine's translation and introduction have garnered high praise from our external readers. Like those readers, we believe we are now making an important text available to English-speaking students of modern Jewish thought and philosophy of religion.

Robert Schine's lucid translation of Hermann Cohen's sustained assault on Spinoza's theories of religion, reason, and politics renders a key essay accessible to the English-language reader. Cohen is the leading representative of Jewish rationalism in the twentieth century. In his philosophical critique of Spinoza, we find a defense of the rationality of Judaism, indeed, of rationality as such. A superb interpretive Introduction complements the translated text. Students of Spinoza, of Jewish philosophy, of philosophy of religion, and of the relations between religion and state are all in Prof. Schine's debt. -- Alan Mittleman, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America Hermann Cohen's polemic against Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise is one of the most loyal, profound, and genuine articulations of Judaism's philosophical and moral foundation. The publication of Cohen's essay in English with the incisive Introduction by Robert Schine is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Jewish Thought as it encounters the complexity of the modern condition. -- Moshe Halbertal, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Robert S. Schine is the Curt C. and Else Silberman Professor of Jewish Studies and former dean of the faculty at Middlebury College (Vermont). The author of Jewish Thought Adrift: Max Wiener (1882-1950), he writes on German-Jewish thought and intellectual history.