reform 469
In parallel with such declarations by convocations of rabbis in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reform Judaism spawned a
considerable corpus of sophisticated theological literature which applied
to Judaism the insights of the greatest German philosophers, especially
Kant. It was Hermann Cohen who marked the first determined effort to
demonstrate the essential compatibility of ethical idealism as taught by
Kant with notions of the nature of Judaism as they were being developed
by the Reform movement. The son of a cantor and originally expected
to become a rabbi, Cohen was tempted into philosophy at the univers-
ities of Breslau and Berlin, receiving a doctorate from the University of
Halle at the age of twenty- three in 1865. Just over ten years later he was
a full professor in the University of Marburg, where over some forty
years he was to develop a distinctive version of Kantian idealism in
which he stressed the centrality of the dignity of man, holding that
human freedom does not contradict the laws of causality in natural sci-
ence because ethics and science belong to two different systems which
coexist. In Cohen’s philosophical system in these Marburg years, there
was little need to refer to Judaism. He assumed that religion is necessary
for ethics, but his ideas about God were highly abstract: God exists to
enable humankind to achieve its ethical ideal by ensuring the continu-
ation of the world, as promised to Noah after the flood. In all his years
at Marburg, Cohen directly discussed Judaism only briefly, when
required to defend it against the slurs of the antisemitic historian Hein-
rich von Treitschke (who defined Judaism as the ‘national religion of an
alien race’) and in a lawsuit involving an antisemitic schoolteacher.
It was only in the last six years of his life that Cohen made the forays
into Jewish philosophy which were to have such an impact on other
Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century. In 1912, at the age of seventy,
Cohen finally retired from Marburg and moved to the Reform Hoch-
schule in Berlin, where he devoted himself to the evolution of a new
understanding of Judaism, stimulated by a journey to Vilna and Warsaw
in 1914 in which he witnessed a kind of Jewish life very different from
that he had known in Germany. Cohen transformed his notion of the
role of religion in his philosophy of ethics, arguing that, although ethics
operate independently within mankind as a whole, it is religion which,
since the later Hebrew prophets, has introduced the categories of sin,
repentance and salvation to cope with the anguish and guilt of the indi-
vidual. In his last, and most influential, work, Die Religion der Vernunft
aus den Quellen des Judentums (‘The Religion of Reason out of the
Sources of Judaism’), published posthumously in 1919, he expounded a