**BOOK REVIEW
**
Indispensable handbook for global theopolitics
The Star of Redemption by
Franz Rosenzweig
Reviewed by
Spengler
“Learn Greek, dear reader, and throw my translation into the fire!” wrote the first German translator of Homer’s
Iliad, Count von Stolberg, words that Franz Rosenzweig placed as a superscript to the preface for his own translation of the medieval Hebrew poet, Judah Halevi.
Read Franz Rosenzweig, I should like to say, and hit the delete key, for the 100-and-a-score essays I have published in this space were an attempt to put fragments of his thinking before the English-speaking public.
A tragedy of 20th century history is that Leo Strauss, who began as Rosenzweig’s student, transferred his intellectual loyalty to the odious Martin Heidegger. Strauss’ follower, Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neo-conservatism”, once confessed that he tried to learn German in order to read Rosenzweig. It is a pity he failed. But one still can hope that Rosenzweig’s star will ascend.
We live not merely in an age of faith, but in an age of religious wars. Today’s intellectual elite feels something like the mad Englishman in a lunatic asylum whom Karl Marx sketched in
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He imagines that his warders are barbarian mercenaries who speak in a welter of unintelligible tongues, and mutters to himself, “And all this is happening to me - a freeborn Englishman!”
So felt France on the return of the Napoleonic dynasty, and so feels the intelligentsia on the return of religion to world politics…]
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