ABSTRACT
When, after 1933, the Jewish Community in Germany seemed to be hopelessly at the mercy of Hitler's gang, the Lehrhaus movement formed the backbone of moral resistance. When Franz Rosenzweig died at the age of forty-one in 1929, he had already become a symbol to his friends and disciples. A creeping, paralyzing sickness had in its finishing stages deprived him even of the power of speech and it was only the strength of his will and the uncanny imagination of his wife that rescued his unheard words for posterity. The principles of the Lehrhaus movement which Franz Rosenzweig had laid down on sketchy notes found after his premature death, amount, if properly understood, to nothing less than a revolution in Jewish learning. The modern Jew, Franz Rosenzweig concludes from his own experience, finds himself in the full possession of the culture of his time but estranged from his own timeless heritage.
