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The chapter discusses how a liberal Jewish philosophy of the authority of religious Law developed in nineteenth-century Germany from the outright negation of Talmudic exegesis and its underlying dogma of the divine lawgiver, to a more moderate version in Hermann Cohen that attempts to preserve some of the older justifications and consequences of keeping the Biblical commandments, notably the separation of the Jews from other peoples. For Maimonides, the authority of the Law finds expression in the doctrine of the identity of belief and knowledge. But after Kant's Copernican Revolution, this doctrine could no longer be upheld; true knowledge, according to Kant, could only contain empirical objects. The concept of "divine" underwent a complete transformation; and although Hermann Cohen abandoned Kant's concept of God as a mere postulate of reason, his own substitute concept was not able (and did not intend) to re-establish dogmatic authority. Thus, reason, and by extension, a thoroughly rational conception of the commandments, now had to decree what parts of the Mosaic Law were to be kept, or abandoned – with all the enormous consequences this must have on religion in general. Judaism's freedom of thought and general rationalism created for a long time the illusion that Jewish theology was also free of dogmas. But here rationalism belied the most crucial dogma, that of the divinity of Mosaic Law. Only when Cohen's philosophy of Judaism rejected this last bastion of a non-rational approach to the commandments out of hand, the way to a legitimate justification of Reform ideas was paved. In the combination of Kantian ethics and Jewish intellectual tradition, Cohen found a new meaning in the old concept of "mitzvah": the moral imperative, derived from the notion of the unique, transcendent God, representing the idea of the Good, the ethical life as a life led according to the Law.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4035-8_7

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