ABSTRACT
I Emil Fackenheim was born in Germany in 1916. He was seventeen years old when Nazi terror against Jewsbecame overt in 1933,when it was confirmed that Jews were being sent to concentration camps. He was twenty-two years old in 1938 when he was interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and twenty-three years old when, with the rest of his family except one brother, he emigrated to Canada in 1939. He became a Rabbi, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1945. Acclaimed as an interpreter of the German philosopher Hegel, he is best known for his theological works, The Presence of God in History (1970) and To Mend the World (1982). In 1987,he delivered the Sherman Lectures at Manchester University, and in 1990, published them, together with an essayhe had originally composed in 1980,as the four chapters of a small book, The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-Reading) The book is powerful and provocative. Its simplicity of style and directness of speech give it power. Its fierce engagement with an entire intellectual (and political) history makes it provocative. From beginning to end, it is clear that this is no academic exercise but rather a passionate attempt to find a place on which to stand by a witness to the unthinkable whose vocation is to keep thinking, a highly personal effort by a leader of the people to make sense of a book that has, in the face of experience, seemed to lose its sense for the people.
