Background
Schwarzschild, Steven was born on February 5, 1924 in Frankfurt am Alain.
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Steven Schwarzschild
Edit ProfileRabbi Historian of philosophy and Jewish thought
Education
Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. 1946-1955, BHL. Rabbi. MHL, DHL, Hebrew Union College.
1948, BA, University of Cincinnati. Doctorate on Philosophy of History in Nachman Krochmal and Hermann Cohen.
Career
1948-1949, Rabbi in rebuilt Jewish community. East and West Berlin. 1949 67, Rabbi, Fargo, North Dakota and Lynn, Mass.
1967-1989, Lecturer, then Professor of Philosophy and Judaics, University of Washington. St Louis; 1961-1969, Editor. Juduism-A Quarterly Journal: only active rabbi for many years to hold joint membership.
Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis and Conservative Rabbinical Assembly. 1973, Honorary DD. Hebrew Union College. Visiting Professor, 1975, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1981, Notre Dame University, USA.
Member of various philosophical associations.
Views
Swarzschild was the first major thinker to write in English on S. R. Hirsch, Hermann Cohen and F. Rosenzweig. He criticized orthodox Marxism and the spiritual ideals of Christianity, whilst retaining an antipathy to Zionism based on his view that the Jew must be the perpetual stranger in society until the advent of the Messiah. This may be one of the reasons for his comparative public obscurity, although he has exercised enormous influence over Jewish scholars and rabbis. He has written negatively on Hegel and positively on Kant and Maimonides. He regards Judaism as a complete and self-sufficient system, and for this reason has been called the last of the medieval Jewish rfrftCfcriTTf 1*1*1 philosophers. Following Cohen, he attempts to align the teachings of the Torah with Kantian philosophy. Like A. Heschel, he defines Judaism not spatially but as ethical voluntarism, emphasizing halakhah. He regards the ‘spatial’ approach to religion as heretical paganism or Christianity. Just as Jabés associates the term 'Jew' with ‘writer’ and Levinas with the ‘other’, Schwarzschild posits a ‘Jewish’ philosophical approach which can embrace any thinker or movement of which he approves, such as Kant, Sartre and Wittgenstein. However, Spinoza and Marx are regarded negatively by him for demonstrating a Christianizing tendency. Schwarzschild depicts clear differences between the two religions, emphasizing the political, this-worldly quality of the Jewish concept of the Messiah. Schwarzschild is an unusual American-Jewish thinker, because most of his ideas, although expressed with originality, stem from European, and particularly German-Jewish. thought, without much American input.
