An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem

by Emil L. Fackenheim

     Emil Fackenheim’s life work was to call upon the world at large—and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular—to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker.     Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith—and the Christian faith—exist after the Holocaust?


“An ‘epoch-making’ autobiography.”—Arnold Ages, Jewish Tribune
 

264 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2003

Reviews

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Emil Fackenheim was a German-Canadian Reform rabbi-philosopher who, for most of his life, wrote about German idealism, medieval philosophy, and traditional Jewish theological topics. Around 1967 he became obsessed with theological reflection on the Holocaust--he proposed a new commandment "not to give Hitler posthumous victories." He drew a thick line connecting the Holocaust and the State of Israel, asserting (many of his claims are bullying assertions) that Judaism, Christianity, philosophy, etc. is forever "shattered" by the Holocaust. This 'memoir' is awful and can be of interest only to those of us who read his other, more interesting work. Repetitive, flat, meandering, muttering, odd and confusing, this book-which lacks a single memorable description-isn't worth anyone's time. The ed.s do their best to shape the material, but it's still a painful read. We do find out that the philosopher of Jewish Survival married a "serious" Christian (further making Hitler mad by race mixing!).