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Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople know a little Buber (something about "I" and "Thou"), hardly anyone can understand Rosenzweig's masterpiece, "The Star of Redemption." Few people have even tried to read it, preferring instead to dwell on Rosen-zweig's remarkable life story: "The Star" was partly written in the trenches of World War I and right after it was published, Rosenzweig was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). He died seven years later, at 42.
For a long time now, Rosenzweig's unusual reputation -- he's very important, but I don't know what he says -- has been blamed on the appallingly difficult language of "The Star." Not only is the book, published in 1922, written in the heavy prose of German philosophy -- somewhere between the opacity of Hegel and the oracular tone of Heidegger -- but its standard translation, the 1971 effort by William Hallo, is clouded in needlessly arcane language. Hallo, whose primary field was neither philosophy nor German but Assyriology, struggled to maintain the character of Rosenzweig's language, which often includes neologisms and wordplay. But as anyone familiar with the German language knows, it's much easier to create words in German for complicated states of mind or matter than it is to create them in English. Hallo had to stretch, and the result was a very, very difficult read.
The arrival of Barbara Galli's new translation, therefore, was greeted with nothing less than elation in the small academic circles in which Rosenzweig is actually read, studied and taught. Galli, whose endeavors include editing and translating numerous works by and about Rosenzweig, has at last rendered "The Star of Redemption" into language that anyone can read. No more of Hallo: "Is love not rather a matter of fate and of seizure and of a bestowal which, if it is indeed free, it withal only free?" Now, at last, rendered by Galli: "Isn't love destiny, and being deeply touched, and if it is free,...