470 A History of Judaism
new conception of religion through a selective exegesis of biblical, mid-
rashic and liturgical Jewish texts, shifting from his Marburg view that
God is a logical postulate of human reason to a dramatically opposite
view, that God is a pure being (‘I am, that I am’), and that the incom-
plete world, which is in a state of becoming, is related to God by the
Ruah haKodesh (‘Holy Spirit’), which is not (as Philo had thought in his
concept of the Logos) an independent being but simply an attribute of
the ‘correlation’ between the divine and the human, which exists along-
side the correlation between man and man. According to Cohen, man
collaborates with God in the work of creation, which will be perfected
in the messianic era by the unification of mankind in harmonious com-
munity following the model of the Jewish people. For Judaism to
provide such a model, it is essential for Jews to follow Jewish tradition
and law to some extent, but (as Kant had insisted) the law must be fol-
lowed freely out of a sense of duty. At the same time, Cohen argued that
Judaism is not the only such model: to the degree that other religions
foster dignity by their concerns for other humans (the values of fellow-
ship) and for God (the need for atonement), Cohen claimed that they
too have a share in reason.^17
Cohen’s last works had been written under the auspices of the Reform
Hochschule, and his prestige as a Kantian philosopher lent great weight
to his theological ideas within Reform Judaism in the twentieth century,
but his philosophical predecessors within the German Reform move-
ment in the nineteenth century had been less inclined to follow Kant
than the idealistic philosophies of Schelling and (especially) Hegel, who
affirmed the spiritual nature of reality and argued that the progressive
self- realization of spirit is unfolded in history and that all history has a
religious dimension. The Reform leader Solomon Formstecher recast, in
his Die Religion des Geistes (1841), Schelling’s notion of a world soul
manifest in nature, by identifying this world soul with God, arguing
however that another manifestation of the world soul is spirit, whose
main characteristics are self- consciousness and freedom. The ‘religion of
the spirit’ in his title is the religion of the Jews, which has developed
towards greater universalism, a process nearing its culmination with the
emancipation of the Jews. Thus Jews needed to prepare themselves for
the emergence of the absolute truth of spiritual religion by stripping
Judaism of its particularistic elements and its ceremonial law.^18
Just a year after Formstecher’s book had been published, a fellow
Reform rabbi, Samuel Hirsch, issued his Die Religionsphilosophie
der Juden (1842), in which he contrasted Judaism with Christianity,