Enclosed and Communicative Identity in Franz Rosenzweig’s and Eugen Rosenstock’s Interwar Works

Abstract

This essay argues that the key to understanding Franz Rosenzweig’s complex oscillation between enclosed and dialogical models of identity lies in his sustained intellectual dialogue with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Through a close reading of their 1916 correspondence and the works each produced in its wake, the essay shows that Rosenzweig’s philosophy of identity in The Star of Redemption was decisively shaped by Rosenstock’s emerging dialogical and linguistic insights, just as Rosenstock’s postwar writings were deeply informed by Rosenzweig’s conception of inherited, generational identity. Their exchange reveals a mutually formative conversation in which each thinker both appropriated and resisted elements of the other’s position. Rosenzweig retained a tension between enclosed and communicative identity, while Rosenstock sought to universalize and open the inherited Jewish model he found in Rosenzweig, purging it of its non-dialogical edges. By tracing this reciprocal influence across anthropology, theology, and theories of truth, the essay demonstrates that Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s interwar debate constitutes not a one-sided influence but a shared intellectual project. Their struggle to balance historical rootedness with openness to others offers a valuable conceptual resource for contemporary discussions of nationalism, multiculturalism, and the status of truth in polarized societies.

1. Introduction

One of the most intriguing yet understudied tensions in Franz Rosenzweig’s thought concerns the apparent contradiction between his pioneering concept of dialogical identity and his parallel depiction of Jewish identity as closed, innate, and self-contained.1 In The Star of Redemption (hereafter The Star), Rosenzweig presents interhuman dialogue as foundational to the emergence of the self: ‘The emphatic and underlined I can be become audible only with the discovery of the You’ (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 189).2 By the same logic, he argued in his educational writings that Jewish identity in modern Germany should be awakened through Jewish learning shaped by the dialogue between students and teachers (Rosenzweig 1955).

Yet this dialogical emphasis is countered by Rosenzweig’s sharply enclosed conception of Jewish uniqueness, developed especially in The Star III, 1. There, Jewish identity appears beyond language and dialogue altogether. Rosenzweig claims, ‘With his brother… the Jew cannot speak at all,’ affirming instead a ‘heart-felt confidence in the power of silence’ (321). Jewish collective identity, in this account, is neither dynamic nor communicatively constituted. It is primordial, inherited, anchored in the ‘community of the same blood’ (317), and symbolized by the eternally self-sustaining flame at the heart of the Star—autarkic, unassimilated, and inwardly nourished: ‘The Jew’s life… does not permit him to go out of his Self’ (321).

This essay investigates these dual—seemingly incompatible—dimensions of Rosenzweig’s conception of identity and proposes a way to reconcile them. I argue that a full understanding of Rosenzweig’s complex position requires reading it alongside the work of his close friend and interlocutor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.3 Their intensive 1916 correspondence (later published by Rosenstock as Judaism Despite Christianity) and Rosenstock’s developing dialogical philosophy significantly influenced Rosenzweig’s shift from an early monolithic notion of enclosed identity to a more layered conception in which communicative and enclosed elements coexist. Conversely, I show that Rosenzweig’s conception of enclosed Jewish identity also reshaped Rosenstock’s own position, leading him to recognize that certain features of this conception might help address the social and spiritual crises of post-World War I Europe.

The essay proceeds by exploring three dimensions of Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s theories of identity. First, I examine the ‘pagan’ enclosed self as depicted in The Star I, 3 and its opening through revelation in II, 2. Second, I analyze Rosenzweig’s portrayals of Jewish and Christian collective identity in III, 1–2. Third, I explore enclosure and communication in the human approach to truth in III, 3.

While previous scholarship has examined various dimensions of Rosenzweig’s theory of identity, it has largely overlooked the profound tension between its enclosed and dialogical elements. Instead, scholars have tended to emphasize only one side of this dichotomy. Haggai Dagan, Leora Batnitzky, and Peter Eli Gordon analyze Rosenzweig’s conception of blood and attempt to distinguish it from the ostensibly parallel völkisch notion, interpreting it as a symbol of Jewish enclosedness and autarky (Dagan 2002, pp. 241–49; Batnitzky 2000; Gordon 2003, pp. 54, 59, 211–19). Batnitzky even maintains that, at least regarding the Jewish–Christian relationship, dialogue in The Star serves to reinforce—rather than to expand—the boundaries of both Jewish and Christian identities (Batnitzky 1999).

Yehoyada Amir, by contrast, minimizes the role of an enclosed Jewish identity in Rosenzweig’s work. In his interpretation, such enclosedness represents only the surface of Rosenzweig’s deeper understanding of Jewish uniqueness: The Jew is unique in already being with God, in contrast to the Christian, who is perpetually ‘on the way.’ Symbols of enclosure—such as blood and silence—are thus intended to convey this existential ‘being-at-home’ (Amir 2004). Zachary Braiterman likewise downplays the role of an enclosed Jewish identity in Rosenzweig’s thought, which he regards (unlike Dagan, Batnitzky and Gordon) as influenced by völkisch ideology. He contends that this notion of enclosedness functions only as a transitional stage in Rosenzweig’s intellectual development and is ultimately superseded by a more open and dynamic conception of Jewish identity (Braiterman 2007, pp. 190–93). These readings illuminate important facets of Rosenzweig’s work but, I argue, do not fully capture the dynamic interplay between enclosure and communication that structures his thought.

This essay makes four novel contributions. First, the essay shows that Rosenzweig’s enclosed and dialogical conceptions of identity are not contradictory stages in his development (as Braiterman argues) nor merely two sides of a single coin (as Batnitzky implies), but rather a deliberately maintained structural tension that can only be made intelligible by reading The Star against the backdrop of the Rosenzweig–Rosenstock exchange. Second, while the intellectual relationship between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock has received scholarly attention, I demonstrate that their ongoing dialogue was a formative crucible for both thinkers’ evolving conceptions of identity specifically—an aspect that has not been sufficiently examined. Third, since both thinkers were responding to the broader cultural pressures of Imperial and interwar Germany—particularly the rise of ethnic nationalism, the crisis of liberal individualism, and competing communicative conceptions of selfhood—a rigorous historical contextualization of their discussion is indispensable. Fourth, while this discussion has hitherto been examined primarily from philosophical and theological perspectives, the present essay introduces an anthropological lens, bringing their ideas into conversation with later debates about ethnicity, communal boundaries, and religious identity.

The shared struggle of Rosenzweig and Rosenstock to balance enclosed and communicative identity carries renewed relevance for contemporary debates about multiculturalism, nationalism, and the foundations of truth (de Fina 2006, pp. 351–75; Cramer 2016; Fukuyama 2018). The resurgence of identity-based truth claims, alongside mounting polarization and the erosion of shared public discourse, raises anew the question they confronted: Can an identity remain resilient and historically grounded without becoming impermeable and exclusionary? Can truth be both anchored and communicable without collapsing into relativism?4

To draw from Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s discussion of individual and collective identity insights relevant to our contemporary challenges, this essay analyzes their thought with anthropological tools—tools that also illuminate the distinctiveness of their conceptions in ways that strictly philosophical or theological readings have not. The dialogue between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock engages questions that have become central to the anthropology of ethnicity and religion: how communities construct and maintain their boundaries, how religious identities mediate between the individual and the collective, and how the category of “religion” intersects with, and is sometimes indistinguishable from, ethnic and national forms of belonging. A further question runs beneath all of these: Are religious and ethnic ties genuinely primordial, as they are often experienced and presented, or are they fluid, constructed, strategically deployed and historically contingent?

These are precisely the questions that have animated anthropological debate from Fredrik Barth’s foundational work on ethnic boundary-making to more recent constructivist and practice-oriented approaches (Barth 1969). Rosenzweig’s concept of enclosed Jewish identity resonates strikingly with anthropological accounts of communal boundary-maintenance—the mechanisms by which groups define themselves against an outside and reproduce their distinctiveness across time. Rosenstock’s insistence that identities must remain communicative and open to address speaks, in turn, to anthropological debates about mediation, fragmentation, and the constitutive role of speech and dialogue in forming the self—debates developed, among others, in the tradition running from Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Taylor through linguistic anthropology and narrative identity theory (Bakhtin 1984; Ricœur 1992; Taylor 1989; Hymes 1972; Duranti 2009; Keane 2007). By tracking the productive tension between these two positions, the present essay aims to contribute to the anthropological conversation on how individuals and communities negotiate the competing demands of continuity and encounter, enclosure and alterity—and to suggest that Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, read together, offer resources for that conversation that have not yet been fully appreciated.

Before proceeding, terminological clarifications are in order. First, this essay uses ‘identity’ as an organizing category that neither Rosenzweig nor Rosenstock employed as such. Both thinkers wrote instead of the self, the I, and the individual—terms embedded in the German idealist and phenomenological and existentialist traditions—as well as of the people (Volk), the nation, and the collective. ‘Identity’ as a technical category is a later, largely Anglo-American import, developed by Erikson in psychology and subsequently by Barth, Brubaker and Cooper, and others in anthropology and sociology (Erikson 1968; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). I use it here as an umbrella term precisely because it allows the individual-level vocabulary (self, I) and the collective-level vocabulary (people, nation, Volk) to be brought into a single analytical frame, which is the essay’s central interpretive move, not a claim already made by Rosenzweig or Rosenstock themselves.

Specifically, I take ‘identity’ to denote the relatively stable, self-ascribed or other-ascribed sense of who or what one (or a collective) is, encompassing both its content, that is, the substantive characteristics taken to define it (origin, language, faith, history), and its boundary, namely the mechanism by which it is distinguished from what it is not. This dual sense—content and boundary—is what allows the same concept to operate at both scales: An individual self is bounded by the encounter with a You, just as a people is bounded by its encounter with other peoples; in both cases, identity names the interplay between an inherited or given content and the boundary-work that secures or opens it. This is precisely the interplay Rosenzweig and Rosenstock stage, respectively, as enclosure and dialogue.

Within this frame, individual-level terms—self, individuality, personality—follow Rosenzweig’s own distinctions, introduced in Section 4.1 below. For collective-level terms, I use people and Volk interchangeably for a group bound by shared language, custom, and descent, and nation for the same group considered (or aspiring to be) a political-territorial unit—a distinction that blurs in Weimar-era discourse, as the essay tracks.

Second, throughout this essay, I use the term ‘blood’ in three distinct registers that must be carefully distinguished. When quoting or paraphrasing Rosenzweig and Rosenstock, the term functions theologically and symbolically: It figures the inheritance of covenant, the intergenerational transmission of collective memory, and the non-voluntary character of belonging—none of which, in their usage, implies biological determinism in the modern racialist sense. When contextualizing their thought against völkisch ideology, the term is used descriptively and critically, to mark the dangerous overlap between theological and racialized vocabularies in early twentieth-century German discourse. When the paper turns to contemporary resonances, “blood” and related terms like “enclosure” and “purity” are treated politically, as categories whose historical valence cannot be neutralized by authorial intent alone. The analytical work of the essay depends on maintaining these distinctions.

The following pages trace Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s efforts to negotiate these tensions and explore what their interwar debate might offer to our own deeply fractured public sphere.

2. Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s 1916 Correspondence: Beyond Enclosed Identity

Rosenzweig’s early conception of enclosed Jewish identity emerged directly from his intense 1913–1916 confrontation with Rosenstock, who had converted in his youth from Judaism to Christianity and who made repeated efforts to persuade Rosenzweig to follow him. Rosenzweig came close to doing so—he acknowledged the theological superiority of Christianity5—yet ultimately decided to remain Jewish. His choice was not merely personal but grounded in a new understanding of Judaism—which was also formulated to justify his refusal to convert—as given, inherited, and beyond the need for theology (Pollock 2014). ‘Should I be “converted,” when I have been “chosen” from birth?’ he asked Rosenstock. If Judaism rests on ‘blood,’ it neither requires nor seeks converts. In this metaphor, Judaism shelters in a harbor, while Christianity sails outward across the seas.6

Rosenstock reacted sharply, criticizing what he saw as the pagan and exclusionary implications of Rosenzweig’s claims. He linked Rosenzweig’s notion of inherited identity to the broader cultural trend toward closed ethnic and national identities. ‘This paganism [of the “natural folk”] is now dominant in all the Churches… Speech, the Logos in all these peoples—the ethni of antiquity, the nations of today—is imprisoned in itself’ (121). He argued that Rosenzweig’s portrayal of Judaism as already ‘with God’—as if it had already arrived while Christianity remained en route—precluded new revelation for Jews and, when secularized, risked legitimating the rising nationalist pride and racial thinking of the time. ‘If antiquity is the epoch of Shem, Nam (sic, for Ham), and Japhet—of peoples—so the period from 0 to A.D. 1900 is the epoch of chosen kingdoms. Now, perhaps, we are again entering on an epoch of races (white, black, yellow)’ (140–41). Thus, he warned that Rosenzweig’s reliance on blood as a foundation for identity echoed contemporary shifts from civic or cultural definitions of Germanness to racialized ones and presaged an age obsessed with dividing humanity into races. Note that Rosenstock did not contrast race—the most radical manifestation of primordialism—with religion but rather with dialogue.

While Rosenstock acknowledged that grounding identity in inheritance produces cohesion, he argued that it obstructs universalism by allowing no meaningful encounter with others: the synagogue, he wrote, recognizes only ‘an original union in blood… but no final becoming united of all the children of the Father’ (125). His critique clearly extends beyond Rosenzweig to encompass the broader transformation of German identity itself, particularly the shift from cultural–linguistic and civic conceptions to an explicitly ethnic one—a shift shaped by colonial ambitions, rapid modernization, and deepening anxieties over individualization (Kurlander 2006; Sweeney 2014; Vermeiren 2016, pp. 16–48; Brenner 1995; Avraham 2022). The debate between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock at this stage on the desired ethnic identity anticipates the anthropological debate between primordialists and lingual constructivists on the true nature of this identity.

Rosenzweig, for his part, rejected the accusation that his account of Jewish election was naïvely racial. He insisted that Jewish chosenness is understood only in light of destiny and vocation rather than of biological origin (131).7 Yet it is evident that this reply did not fully address Rosenstock’s concerns, and Rosenzweig likely recognized the need for a more comprehensive response. That response, articulated in The Star, was decisively shaped by Rosenstock’s own emerging linguistic and dialogical insights. As Rosenzweig noted in his 1916 journals, Rosenstock’s evolving linguistic method had become his own (Rosenzweig 1984, September 1916, p. 114). Their exchange marked a turning point: Rosenstock’s critique of enclosure and his new emphasis on relational speech provided conceptual tools that Rosenzweig would develop into the dialogical dimension of The Star (Brasser 2004).

3. Rosenstock’s Dialogical Breakthrough and the Opening of Identities

Rosenstock first articulated his dialogical conception of identity in Practical Knowledge of the Soul, drafted in 1916 and published in 1924. While the work is mainly a critique of modern psychology’s disenchantment of the soul, it is equally a critique of its underlying assumption of a self-contained ego. Against academic psychology—anticipated, in his view, by the ‘pagan’ Greeks—which treats the ‘I’ as the sole absolute and measures everything by its relation to that grammatical first person, Rosenstock argues that the ‘I’ emerges only through the address of a ‘you.’ The individual first becomes aware of being an ‘I’ through the calling voice of another. Identity is awakened through being recognized, named, and summoned. For Rosenstock, this is most evident in the formation of the child’s identity through the parents’ address (Rosenstock-Huessy 1988, pp. 13–17, 29, here pp. 16–17).

Responding to a call from outside is therefore a precondition for healthy development. When individuals remain locked within their ego, they stagnate and ultimately fall into degeneration. This insight applies equally to collective identities:

A person who is not always capable of living also in the third and second persons is not a god or a hero, but is his ego’s fool. Such a group of men is a band of warriors, a torch, or an army, but not a people. For people are called ‘a people’ because of their power to change; because they never freeze in the stance of the first person (Rosenstock-Huessy 1988, p. 26).

Hence, Rosenstock argued that a people that cannot move beyond its own first-person standpoint—unable to respond to other peoples, to history, or to external address—becomes rigid, heroic in appearance but lifeless in spirit. This requisite openness is tied to the ecumenical, transnational Christian unity that Rosenstock was advocating at the time (Rosenstock-Huessy 1919b, 1920). Only peoples capable of transformation can sustain themselves as genuine communities. In line with his 1916 dispute with Rosenzweig, Rosenstock warns against collective self-enchantment, worshiping of ‘the génie français, the German Spirit, the Idea of Italy.’ It is the mark of identities that have ceased to listen and therefore closed themselves to the spirit (Rosenstock-Huessy 1988, p. 58). Thus, Rosenstock aimed to disrupt the fixity of individual and national identities and reconstitute them through dialogical engagement.

In his 1919 booklet Das Gespräch vor Zeugen (The Conversation in Front of Witnesses), Rosenstock sharpened this insight. Modern urban life, he argued, had produced two simultaneous maladies: the isolated, hyper-individualized subject on one side and the faceless, undifferentiated crowd on the other. Genuine conversation, conducted before witnesses who safeguard its seriousness, redeems the individual from both extremes. In true dialogue, separate worlds of thought meet, giving rise to genuinely new truth—the ‘marriage’ of previously isolated perspectives. In contrast, the prevailing mode of public life is dominated by the rigid proclamations of identity-bound speakers, what Rosenstock calls ‘conviction-books of character heads,’ public declarations that stem not from shared inquiry but from insulated selves (Rosenstock-Huessy 1919a).

Rosenstock extended these claims in Europa und die Christenheit (1919), where he interpreted Germany’s catastrophe in the Great War as a symptom of its traditionally enclosed national identity. German culture, in his eyes, had long emphasized silence, inwardness, and heroic self-assertion rather than dialogue. He evokes the image of the German gods dwelling alone in their Valhalla, unaddressed and unaddressable, imagining themselves above the sphere of human speech, reasoning and law. He warns the Germans, ‘Because you are allowed to wander unanswered, unaddressed, in the silent light, that is why the silent fate of those who are chosen certainly overtakes you.’8 Such ideals resonated strongly with the völkisch celebration of solitary genius and national autarky, as articulated by Julius Langbehn—one of the movement’s heralds—in his bestselling Rembrandt als Erzieher:

Solitude is beautiful, great, and necessary here. …The great, solitary souls… are the ones from whom the respective renewal of a people emanates. In those historical periods of humanity in which, as today, a glaciation (Vergletscherung) of the human soul occurs, … There are still men today who have character because they are solitary, and who are solitary because they have character.9

Rosenstock argued that this widespread veneration of self-contained, non-communicative identity had fueled German chauvinism and obstructed the possibility of renewal after the war. Against such isolationism, Rosenstock proposed a dialogical identity grounded in communication, mutual address, and responsiveness to others. His dialogical breakthrough thus sought not only to transform individual psychology but also to reorient the collective identities of nations. Identity, for Rosenstock, could be neither fixed nor self-sufficient. Instead, it must remain vulnerable to encounter, capable of being opened and reshaped by the call of others. Rosenstock anticipates the dialogical models of identity. Moreover, like Webb Keane, Rosenstock looked for semiotic ideologies that enhance personal and national openness and willingness for mutual influence (Ricœur 1992; Keane 2018).

4. The Star of Redemption: The Opening of Enclosed Identity?

Rosenstock’s critique of Rosenzweig’s early enclosed conception of Judaism, combined with his emerging dialogical philosophy, profoundly informed Rosenzweig’s later reworking of identity in The Star. Rosenzweig did not abandon his initial emphasis on inherited, self-contained Jewish identity, but rather supplemented it with a dialogical layer made possible through revelation. A close reading of The Star reveals how these two dimensions—enclosedness and openness—remain in deliberate tension.

4.1. Enclosed Identity in The Star I, 3

The first major appearance of bounded identity occurs in The Star I, 3, where Rosenzweig depicts the pre-revelatory, ‘pagan’ world, in which God, world, and human beings exist in mutual isolation. Significantly, the enclosed self of Part I is not merely a stage to be overcome; as I argue below, it provides the structural template for Rosenzweig’s later portrayal of Jewish collective identity—which is why understanding it carefully matters for the paper’s central claim.

In this part, identity arises solely from within. A full exploration of the psychology Rosenzweig develops in this section lies beyond the scope of the present essay (Santner 2001; Pinkas 2023). It will suffice here to sketch only the basic contours of his conception of the human being. Rosenzweig distinguishes in The Star between individuality—the person as a particular within a larger whole—and self, understood as a quiddity ‘closed in itself and not looking outside itself.’ This self exists in radical solitude: ‘there is no one there besides him… the lonely man in the hardest sense’ (77, 80).10

The self is born through rebellion: Free will revolts against the constraints of the given character, which Rosenzweig treats not as a fixed essence but as raw material to be shaped. When this defiance addresses individuality, the layer of personality emerges: a socially comparable role assigned by fate. Yet even personality does not entail genuine interaction; it still unfolds internally, untouched by others. Within this pre-revelatory framework, dialogue threatens the self; because the self knows only itself, it must remain silent: ‘as soon as it enters into conversation it ceases to be Self. …The dialogue does not achieve a relationship between two wills, because each of these wills can only want its singularity’ (86–7, see also 90). Ethical reasoning likewise becomes subjective and self-enclosed, undermining the possibility of intersubjective moral norms—’For the Self, the world of the ethical is merely—”its” ethos’ (82).

Rosenzweig extends this model to collective identity. He claimed that a people that sees all others as ‘barbarians’ may also have a self—a closed, autarkic collective (77). His description evokes both ancient Greek self-image of superiority and modern nationalisms that emphasize uniqueness and chosenness (Smith 2003). This was a key theme in völkisch ideology, which likewise championed personal and collective independence (Selbständigkeit) and solitude, as shown above.11 While Rosenzweig refrains from Rosenstock’s moral critique of such identities, he clearly recognizes their structural similarity to the pagan self. Importantly, however, the pagan identity that he presents in I, 3 diverges from the vȍlkisch identity as it is not racially fixed; even the enclosed self is not determined by origin or fate (see 80–81). Hence, we can better compare Rosenzweig’s pagan isolated identity to Webb Keane’s account of Protestant semiotic ideology, which presupposes and reproduces an individual subject with a stable interior life that is the ultimate source of meaning and moral responsibility. This model, which Keane associates with the broader category of ‘modernity’ as a cultural formation, creates an understanding of the self as bounded, autonomous, and inwardly anchored.12

4.2. Revelation and the Dialogical Opening of the Self (II, 2–3)

Rosenzweig makes clear that the pagan world depicted in Part I is not nullified by the creation, revelation, and redemption presented in Part II; rather, it is transformed and elevated. Accordingly, the insular identity analyzed above provides a foundation for the later parts of The Star, as we shall see. Yet Part II, 2—the core of the work—introduces the dialogical dimension explicitly rejected in I, 3. Revelation appears as God’s address to the human being and functions to open the enclosed self and reshape human identity. ‘Only when the I recognizes the You as something outside itself—when it grows from monologue to genuine dialogue—is it truly born’ (188). Only when the You responds does the human I come into being (Rosenzweig 2000c, pp. 60–63; Rosenzweig’s letter to Rosenstock, 19 October 1917, in Rosenzweig 1979, p. 471). In advancing this claim, Rosenzweig echoes Georg W. F. Hegel, to whom he devoted his dissertation, and who likewise maintained that the self is not an innate, fixed entity but is constituted through a dialectical process of struggle and mutual recognition,13 and anticipates the dialogic interpretation of identity introduced in the introduction.

Rosenzweig’s dialogic conception of identity is primarily theological. He interprets God’s call to Adam after the sin as an unanswered invitation to dialogue: ‘The man hides; he does not answer; he remains mute; he remains the Self as we know it’ (189). A further initiative on the part of the Creator and Revealer is therefore required. Only when God grants Adam a name—an act that confers identity—and first addresses him as an individual does the human soul emerge and dialogue begin. Dialogue, then, becomes the very source of the Self’s identity, bestowed through the gift of soul. As Rosenzweig further explains, not only divine but also human, genuine address of a You inaugurates revelation and shapes the identities of both addresser and addressee (189–90).

Rosenzweig depicts revelation as love—divine or human—that simultaneously constitutes the identity of both lover and beloved. In his reading of the commandment “Love your neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18), he argues that love does not dissolve the self into the other but rather confirms each in their distinctness: The neighbor is declared like you, not you. You remain irreducibly yourself, yet the other is no longer a mere object—a “He” or a “This”—but is elevated into a You, a soul, an ‘I’ in its own right. Love, for Rosenzweig, is the act through which enclosed selfhood opens toward another without surrendering its singularity (257, see also 227–28).

Rosenzweig thus presented two models of identity in The Star: in I, 3, an enclosed, ‘pagan’ model, and in II, 2–3, a model opened by revelation and redemption that culminates in dialogue. The first is autarkic and grounded in silence; the second is constituted through encounter with the other (or the Other, i.e., God) and rooted in conversation. Surprisingly, the collective Jewish identity Rosenzweig depicts in III, 1 embodies the former, enclosed model, whereas the Christian collective identity is portrayed as revelatory and dialogical.

4.3. The Jewish Collective Identity (III, 1)

Here the paper’s core tension becomes most acute: Why does the dialogical breakthrough of revelation (II, 2) fail to generate a dialogical collective identity for the Jews? Answering this question reveals the deliberateness of Rosenzweig’s structural choice and the limits of readings that emphasize only one pole.

Rosenzweig traces the contrasting identities of Judaism and Christianity to the fundamental difference between the two religions themselves. Judaism, he argued, is intrinsically self-contained, detached from historical mission, and free of any mandate to disseminate its faith. Its ‘flame must eternally nourish itself. It does not want nourishment from anywhere else’ (317). Christianity, by contrast—the ‘rays’ emanating from the Jewish flame—is outward-directed and world-oriented (a depiction that likely draws on Rosenstock’s Christian self-understanding in their 1916 correspondence).

The Star III, 1 portrays a Jewish collective identity that is wholly enclosed and autarkic—yet whose uniqueness and alterity does not reside in any specific cultural content, such as Torah observance or faith. ‘Faith is not content of a bearing witness, but product of begetting…. He does not have faith in something, he is himself the having of faith’ (363), he claimed. In this respect he anticipates Fredrik Barth’s foundational argument that ethnicity is constituted not by fixed cultural content but by the ongoing maintenance of boundaries, and that it is precisely these boundaries that make interethnic encounter possible (Barth 1969). For Barth, the boundary is productive: it defines difference while simultaneously enabling the interaction across which identity is negotiated and reproduced. Rosenzweig, however, pushes decisively beyond this logic, employing three interrelated strategies to establish the impenetrability—and, crucially, the self-sufficiency—of the Jewish border.

First: Rosenzweig reinterprets Jewish chosenness not as superiority but as incomparability. The biblical designation of Israel as a ‘remnant’ signifies, in his reading, that the Jewish people stands entirely outside the family of nations and its historical dynamics, thereby undermining the very categories of nationhood. This radical otherness constitutes an enclosed collective identity, as Rosenzweig summarizes: ‘In the feeling of being the remnant, his heart is entirely one in itself. Here, the Jew is the Jew only’ (428).14 Against Barth, Rosenzweig envisions a Jewish identity that does not merely maintain its boundary against others but absorbs that boundary into itself, withdrawing from the relational dynamic that ethnic demarcation normally presupposes: ‘When something sets off a border, it borders on something else. But this is not so when a people refuses to be a singular people and wants to be “the one people.” It can then no longer enclose itself within borders, but it must include the borders within itself’ (425). The Jewish people, on this account, is not one ethnos among others, defined through contrast and exchange, but a community that has stepped outside the ordinary economy of ethnic interaction, rendering its distinctiveness absolute and self-sufficient.

Second: In keeping with the image of the remnant, Rosenzweig argues that Jewish collective identity is uniquely independent of the ordinary constituents of nationhood—homeland, vernacular language, and positive law. This independence excludes the Jewish people from the prevailing national order. Moreover, he contends that exile concentrates the entire ‘will to be a people’ into a single element that for other nations is merely one among many: ethnicity as ‘the community of blood.’ As he writes, ‘the will to be a people… can be realized only by means of the people itself; the people is a people only through the people’ (319). This is a deliberate effort to remove Judaism from the general ethnic dynamics outlined by Barth, in which authenticity is inseparable from interaction and mutual influence.

Third, Rosenzweig employs the vocabulary of völkisch ideology. This discourse was widespread in Jewish intellectual circles during the interwar period,15 and Rosenzweig draws on it—specifically the concept of blood—to further emphasize the enclosedness and autarky of Jewish existence. As völkisch ideologues had simultaneously emphasized the enclosed and insulated character of German national identity, so Rosenzweig warns that the self-preservation of the ‘eternal people’ requires ‘sealing off the pure source of blood from foreign admixture’ (362).16 The parallel is uncomfortable but deliberate: Rosenzweig appropriates a discourse of ethnic purity in order to place Jewish identity beyond the reach of historical nationality altogether.

In anthropological terms, what Rosenzweig describes approximates what Clifford Geertz called a ‘primordial’ model of group identity—one in which belonging is experienced as given, ineffable, and beyond deliberate choice (Geertz 1973, pp. 255–310). Yet unlike the prevailing primordialist accounts, Rosenzweig frames this not as a natural fact but as a theological–historical achievement.

The stakes here are not merely historical. Contemporary religious nationalism—from Jewish ultranationalism in Israel to Hindu nationalism in India and Christian nationalism in the United States—reinstates primordialism and regularly deploys a combination of blood-language, chosen-people rhetoric, and the equation of communal purity with theological authenticity. Reading Rosenzweig’s theological vocabulary against its own historical context, as this section does, offers a diagnostic framework: It clarifies which features of religiously inflected enclosed identity carry genuine theological weight (and does not seek to discriminate or marginalize other religious or ethnic groups) and which shade into the political appropriations that Rosenstock already feared in 1923.

These three strategies raise a question that requires clarification: Why does Rosenzweig portray Jewish identity as enclosed and, in a sense, pre-revelatory—as ‘pagan’ in its self-sufficiency—rather than as dialogic and revelatory? The answer lies in his account of the relationship between revelation and redemption. For Rosenzweig, redemption, unlike revelation, transcends speech, and because Judaism in its communal life anticipates redemption rather than merely participating in revelation, its innate identity requires no external mediation through words. The dialogue of revelation does not generate an open identity for the Jew. Rather, it jolts him out of pagan isolation—away from distance from God and toward being with God—yet leaves him in exilic seclusion from the world, beyond meaningful interaction with other peoples.

This orientation is most sharply expressed in Rosenzweig’s account of language. Lacking a shared vernacular, Jews do not possess the ordinary medium of national communication: ‘With his brother he therefore cannot speak at all; with him the glance informs him better than the word,’ Rosenzweig writes, adding that nothing is ‘more deeply Jewish than a final suspicion of the power of the word and a heart-felt confidence in the power of silence’ (321; cf. 327). This produces an inherently undialogic national form. Unlike Christian preaching—in which the congregation’s listening elicits the preacher’s speech—Jewish worship centers on collective study: The sermon’s essence ‘is therefore not that it is a speech but exegesis,’ and in the reading of Scripture ‘the mutuality of the listening’ is established (329). Dialogue, for the Jew, is inward and textual rather than outward and interpersonal.

Rosenzweig’s account of Jewish mistrust in language finds a striking anthropological parallel in Matthew Carey’s Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory, an ethnography of Berber-speaking communities in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains (Carey 2017). Carey argues that opacity—the assumption that human interiority and speech are irreducibly unreliable—functions not as a social pathology but as a coherent and productive foundation of sociality. Where liberal social theory treats communicative transparency as the natural ground of collective life, Carey’s interlocutors inhabit a world organized around the expectation of dissimulation and managed indirection, in which competence consists not of achieving transparency but of navigating its absence. Rosenzweig’s insistence on the limits of language as a vehicle of self-disclosure, and his corresponding valorization of silence and enclosure, reflects a structurally analogous stance: one in which opacity is not a failure of communication but a condition of integrity. The parallel illuminates what is most distinctive and most counterintuitive about Rosenzweig’s account—namely, that the undialogic character of Jewish identity, both inwardly and in its relations with the world, is not a deficiency to be overcome but a positive and self-sufficient form of communal existence.

Importantly, although Rosenzweig manifestly emphasizes the enclosed and undialogic aspects of the Jewish identity in III, 1, we should not ignore that this part is anchored in the previous part, especially in II, 2 and II, 3, depicting revelation and redemption, in which Rosenzweig pointed to the dialogic aspect of the Jewish people: the need of publicization of the intimate love of God and the Jewish people as portrayed in the Song of Songs (219–20) and its openness to humankind in the redemptive singing of the praise of Hallel (270–71).

4.4. The Christian Identity: Ambivalent Openness (III, 2)

In sharp contrast to Judaism, Rosenzweig presents the Christian collective identity as open, outward-directed, and grounded in both conversion and conversation. Whereas Judaism is a people—though not a nation in the modern sense17—Christianity is defined by faith, which is oriented toward the other. Consequently, unlike Judaism, Christianity ‘cannot renounce its words… it cannot have enough to do with words… It would have to speak all languages’ (363). Its universality rests on its linguistic expansiveness: ‘The first effect of the [Holy] Spirit is that it translates, that it throws bridges from man to man, from tongue to tongue…. God speaks everywhere with the words of man’ (388; cf. 380–81). Furthermore, the Church is ‘the mutual participation of all those who see one another’: a community grounded not in homogeneity but in reciprocal recognition (365–66) (see Schmied-Kowarzik 1991, p. 147). Rosenzweig’s account of Christian collective identity thus aligns closely with contemporary anthropological accounts that emphasize identity as constructed, dynamic, and constituted through interaction and interchange with others.

Yet this dialogical depiction of the Christian collective identity represents only one side of the picture. Rosenzweig maintains that the individualistic and universalist character of Christianity calls forth a national supplement, realized in the political forms of state, territory, and a zeal for power and expansion (349; cf. 373). He further suggests that, in the German case, this supplement took the shape of a racial and enclosed national identity that stood in tension with Christianity’s universal orientation: ‘There has been a dispute among the peoples of the world since the supra-national power of Christianity came among them; since a Siegfried has wrestled everywhere with this foreign figure of the crucified man, already suspected because of his appearance’ (348–49). Here Rosenzweig alludes to the German racial polemics concerning the Jewishness of Jesus (Heschel 2008; Mendes-Flohr 2019). Hence, because Christianity does not itself generate a Volk-based collective identity—as Judaism does—it leaves room for enclosed nationalities to arise alongside it, even as it simultaneously produces an open, dialogical community of believers (Maor 2021, pp. 92–94, 102–5).

Rosenzweig adds to this reservation about Christianity’s open, conversation-based identity a far deeper one. He repeatedly insists that, like Judaism, Christianity represents only an interim stage: It is still ‘on the way,’ and when it ultimately reaches its destiny—when ‘there are no longer any rays… everything is one light’ (402)—its identity will be reshaped in accordance with the Jewish model of silence and enclosedness (379–80, 388, 394). Thus, despite the pronounced differences he draws between Jewish and Christian collective identities, Rosenzweig’s explicit preference for the Jewish, non-dialogic pattern leads him to envision Christianity as ultimately ‘proceeding’ toward that same enclosed form.

4.5. Enclosure, Dialogue, and Truth (III, 3)

The dominance of bounded identity also shapes Rosenzweig’s discussion of truth in III, 3. Rejecting two millennia of philosophical pursuit of objective truth, he insists that only God is truth (408). Objective truth will become accessible only at the End of Days, yet this truth is given rather than dialogical: ‘God himself is redeemed here from his own word. He grows silent’ (407). In the meantime, revelation—God’s love—grants human beings only a partial, subjective share in truth. At this level, dialogue reappears: It is the exchange between God and a particular individual that generates her truth.18

Rosenzweig explicitly links this notion of ‘a part in truth’ to his earlier account of identity formation in I, 3. Divine truth must be apprehended through ‘that which fell to my share in my inner here and now,’ and the self is itself constituted through the revelation of truth: ‘The birth to the personality is not chance … but Creation. The rebirth to the Self in the surprise attack of the daimon upon the character is not chance … but Revelation’ (414–15). Identity thus emerges through the individual’s subjective affirmation of divine truth and in response to God’s address.

Yet does this opening toward God constitute an opening toward other human beings? Does dialogue with God enable a shared truth composed of partial perspectives, as in Rorty’s pragmatist model (see Rorty 1989)? Rosenzweig offers two ambivalent answers. First, individual truth cannot be communicated to others: ‘no bridge leads from man to man’ (417). Individual truth can be rooted in the collective—’planted in the mutual soil of Revelation’—but it cannot be shared dialogically. The structure of this claim repays comparison with what anthropologists have termed the ‘opacity of other minds’: the culturally widespread, though variably institutionalized, conviction that the inner life of another person is fundamentally inaccessible. Robbins and Rumsey, who coined the phrase in their study of Melanesian societies, were careful to note that opacity doctrines are not confined to the Pacific (Robbins and Rumsey 2008; Keane 2008).

Second, Judaism and Christianity diverge sharply. Jewish enclosedness entails an innate, blood-based identity from which the Jew draws his share in truth—’a magic circle from which he can as little escape as can his blood from circulation’ (418). Christians, by contrast, must discover their share of truth from the outside (438).

In conclusion, although dialogue occupies a central place in The Star, Rosenzweig’s conception of identity remains largely undialogic. Jewish identity appears as bounded, namely, blood-based, uncommunicative, and defined as a remnant. In III, 3, Rosenzweig highlights that ‘The Revelation that happened to him, the Redemption to which he is called’—the dialogic elements—‘have both flowed into the narrow space between him and his people’ (428). Furthermore, Christian openness is portrayed as provisional; pre-redemptive truth is subjective and individual, while post-redemptive truth is objective yet uncommunicable. Rosenstock’s influence at this stage is therefore limited. This is not to say that Rosenzweig’s conception of identity is completely enclosed; dialogic aspects are discussed throughout The Star, and the mere complementarity of the Jewish and Christianity (III, 3) entails their need of dialogue. Nonetheless, writing amid the Great War while serving at the front, Rosenzweig was unlikely to embrace dialogic collective identities or dialogically attained truths. In the next section, the surprising impact of Rosenzweig’s conception of Jewish identity on Rosenstock will be examined.

5. Rosenstock: Opening and Universalizing the Enclosed ‘Jewish’ Identity

If the previous section showed Rosenstock’s influence on Rosenzweig, this section argues the reverse: that Rosenzweig’s enclosed model left a substantive imprint on Rosenstock’s postwar political thought—a dimension of their exchange that has not previously been analyzed. Rosenzweig frequently consulted Rosenstock during the composition of The Star, and it is therefore unsurprising that its ideas left a substantial mark on Rosenstock’s own writings immediately after its publication. This influence is especially visible in Rosenstock’s 1923 unpublished manuscript Die Volksordnung, written amid the Ruhr crisis and hyperinflation. In this work, Rosenstock attempted to articulate new foundations for postwar German and European society. Against what he saw as the bankruptcy of modern individualism, he proposed neither a totalizing state nor a homogenizing Volk (Cristaudo 2012, pp. 279–85), but instead the Rosenzweigian ‘chain of generations’ as the primary source of social renewal. A Volk, Rosenstock argued, consists not of abstract citizens but of sons and daughters linked to parents and forebears, bound through lineage, memory, and responsibility. Hence Rosenstock’s recoil from the modernist championing of the generational revolt.19

In developing this vision, Rosenstock drew directly upon Rosenzweig’s portrayal of the Jew as remnant. The Jew’s exilic identity—formed in resistance to the national order—appears to Rosenstock as a model of cultural resilience. The Jews, he wrote, have always stood ‘above the margins of the national,’ tied neither to land, nor state, nor a single culture. Their enduring detachment from the traditional markers of national belonging grants them a distinctive capacity to survive political upheavals and to bear a deeper historical core. At a moment when the European state system had collapsed into violence and disorder, Rosenstock suggested that this Jewish mode of identity, rather than the nationalist model, offered a path toward cultural healing (160–61). Rosenstock argued that humanity must follow the Jewish path (endangered by the Zionist quest for national normalization) as the Church was conquered by nationalism and therefore disengaged itself from the healing core.

Rosenstock even invoked the concept of blood to illustrate the organic cohesion of the Volk: ‘But a people, its representatives, and its leader feel themselves chained and bound together… by all the black rivers of blood and passions’ (247). This continuity with the past, he argued, is essential for recovering the lost human ‘core’ that, in his view, alone could remedy Europe’s profound civilizational crisis.

Yet Rosenstock did not simply adopt Rosenzweig’s model of insular identity. He explicitly sought to remove the sealed, non-communicative edges that Rosenzweig had emphasized—especially the denial of speech in the formation of Jewish identity. He distinguished sharply between legitimate, tradition-forming inheritance and the distorted, racialized substitutions promoted by the nascent Nazi movement.

The Aryan thesis does not provide the core element we are looking for… the hard-won, blood-forged, sorrow-born sowing and planting experiments of humankind. We are looking for the safeguarding of culture. The Aryans, instead, present themselves as a piece of nature, ahistorical, fixed, and ready-made, placed into the world with the demand that the world obediently submit to them as the higher nature… We found precisely that these degenerations divide generations, separate peoples, and deprive them of the fruits of their existence (155).

But Rosenstock went further: A truly generational community must remain open to transformation, whereas racism presents itself as nature incarnate, that is, static, ahistorical, and incapable of dialogue. It produces collectives ‘so nationalized and so homogenized that nothing more can be added to them’ (162).

Rosenstock also rejected Rosenzweig’s notion of an enclosed truth, associating such closure with fascist and racist tendencies. Fascism replaces the humanly achieved ‘core’ of culture—shaped by suffering, responsibility, and generational discipline—with an arbitrary assertion of superiority rooted in private conviction rather than shared truth: ‘Everyone remains as they are; an intentionally “proofless”… The Aryan hypothesis is the purest and most exaggerated expression of the age of private worldviews, where everyone considers what they think to be true simply because they think it’ (157–58).20 Racism thrives on the claim that each group’s worldview is valid simply because it is held—a prototype of the modern identity-based relativism Rosenstock found culturally disastrous. In contrast, the identity Rosenzweig fashioned for the Jews—once purged of its insulation—provided Rosenstock with an image of tradition capable of resisting relativism. It can also serve as an alternative to liberal individualism and seclusive nationalism.

Rosenstock’s 1925 Sociology extended this critique of the self-enclosed individual. The nineteenth century, he argued, had exaggerated the illusion of personal independence; genuine selfhood emerges instead through struggle, responsibility, and confrontation—forms of address rather than isolation. No one can withdraw entirely from the world or safeguard a purely interior identity, and separation from the collective, while necessary for individual development, is never complete: The individual must always reorient back toward community and tradition. Responding implicitly to Rosenzweig’s Star I, 3, Rosenstock retained his interlocutor’s insight that the individual is situated within a generational chain, but integrated it into a more communicative, dialogical framework in which identity is perpetually reshaped in response to others and in conversation with the past (Rosenstock-Huessy 1925, pp. 89–90, 190–92).

In summary, Rosenstock adopted elements of Rosenzweig’s enclosed, inherited conception of Jewish identity—its durability, historical rootedness, and resistance to the volatility of nationalism and individualism—but reinterpreted them through his own commitment to dialogue. For Rosenstock, the Jewish model pointed not toward isolation but toward a universalizable paradigm of cultural renewal: grounded in the continuity of generations yet open to the world, receptive to truth beyond the self, and resistant to both racial ideology and relativistic individualism.

Rosenstock’s distinction—between a generational, historically earned identity that remains open to dialogue and a naturalized, ‘ahistorical’ identity that forecloses it—anticipates debates in contemporary political anthropology about the difference between primordialist cultural belonging and ‘essentialized’ ethnic identity (Barth 1969; Brubaker 2004; Geschiere 2009). His analysis suggests that the danger lies not in communal depth per se but in the refusal of communicative vulnerability: The moment a community treats its identity as nature rather than achievement, it crosses from legitimate particularity into exclusionary closure.

6. Rosenzweig After The Star: Renouncing the Enclosed Identity

Zachary Braiterman has argued that Rosenzweig gradually abandoned the blood-based, enclosed conception of Jewish identity he employed in The Star, replacing it with a more open, dialogical model in his later work. The reality is more complex. Rosenzweig did not fully renounce the notion of bounded identity; however, he did significantly reconfigure it in light of his evolving commitment to a dialogical approach. This shift becomes visible in two major post-Star sources: his 1921–1922 lecture series ‘The Science of Man’ and his 1926 translation and commentary on Yehuda Halevi’s poetry.

In ‘The Science of Man,’ Rosenzweig revisited the anthropological themes of The Star I, 3, but now from the vantage point of revelation and interhuman dialogue. He sharply distinguished between the world of things and the world of persons, insisting that human beings depend upon one another to form their identity. The ‘I’ exists only as the one addressed as ‘You.’ Identity is fundamentally relational.21 The question ‘Who am I?’ becomes inseparable from the dynamic of mutual address and responsibility:

My individuality leaves breathing space for everybody else … (Only so, only in the changeover to ‘other’ does the Bible say ‘my soul’) (69)…. A description of this interhuman dependence, which is the only real one, the dependence of consciousness…. Here the human is never alone (71, translation altered) … In that I will, I speak. That is always addressed to others. I justify myself—before you (72).

In the vein of Bakhtin, Ricœur and Taylor, Rosenzweig emphasizes that individuality should not threaten the breathing space of others; identity is formed not through autonomy but through responsibility and justification before an ‘other.’ The self becomes truly itself only in relationship; the monadic ego of The Star I, 3 is no longer adequate. Moreover, while human interconnectedness dismantles autonomy—the cornerstone of modern identity—Rosenzweig stresses that this interdependence, and especially the togetherness extended by God, also liberates us from the constraints of a fixed character (73–74).

Nevertheless, Rosenzweig does not entirely relinquish his earlier valorization of solitude and inherited separateness. He describes human coexistence as burdensome. As Rosenzweig put it, ‘What right do you have to bother me: Leave me alone. And so it becomes crowded for me in this all too circumscribed space… But it is I who would like to be alone. Alone I am not. Without You I am not. And yet—you oppress me’ (72). To reclaim independence, the individual requires divine election—a form of grounding prior to and enabling human relationality. This election, though no longer defined in terms of blood, still functions analogously to the enclosed identity of The Star: It marks a legitimate form of separateness.

Crucially, Rosenzweig universalizes this model. Isolation is permissible for a collective, not for an individual. An individual who insists on complete enclosure ‘cuts himself off from the community of human beings.’ Only a community—paradigmatically the Jewish people—can bear the burden of chosen separateness without dissolving into solipsism. In this sense, the insular identity reappears, yet tempered: grounded in revelation rather than biological inheritance, and embedded within a universal anthropology of relationality (78–79).22

Rosenzweig’s 1926 translation and interpretation of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry offers a second site of transformation. Halevi is one of the premodern Jewish thinkers most strongly associated with a doctrine of inherited, essentialist Jewishness,23 and the choice of subject might seem intended to reinforce the more enclosed aspects of The Star. Yet Rosenzweig approached Halevi through the lens of translation,24 which Rosenstock regarded as a fundamentally dialogical act (Rosenstock-Huessy 1988). The project proves, on closer inspection, to be both things at once. This ambivalence reflects what contemporary anthropology has identified as the dual character of translation itself. On the one hand, translation builds bridges between languages and cultures, disclosing a common human stratum beneath their differences; on the other—as postcolonial critics have argued—this bridge-building can serve to domesticate and erase otherness, absorbing the foreign into the categories of the dominant culture. A more ethically alert practice of translation resists this assimilation, preserving an untranslatable residue that keeps the alterity of the source text intact. As I will argue, Rosenzweig’s Halevi oscillates between these two impulses: It is simultaneously an act of cultural opening and an act of emphasizing ineffable difference (Venuti 1998, 2021; Rubel and Rosman 2003).

In his introduction, Rosenzweig describes translation as a sacrifice of national insularity, a process by which a people enters world history. Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, he argues, inaugurated Germany’s intercultural entanglement with the world. This point is further elaborated in Rosenzweig’s 1926 essay ‘Scripture and Luther’ (one of the theoretical foundations of Rosenzweig’s and Buber’s Bible-translation project, which is also grounded in a more dialogical conception of identity). Rosenzweig lauds the importance of translation as dismantling the undesired national insularity (Rosenzweig 1994, pp. 47–48, 54–55, 68–69). By translating Halevi into German, Rosenzweig implicitly enacts a similar opening: A Jewish poet rooted in a strong doctrine of particularism becomes available to a non-Jewish linguistic sphere (Rosenzweig 2000a, pp. xlvii–xlviii). Translation destabilizes enclosure.

This orientation shapes Rosenzweig’s presentation of Halevi. He acknowledges Halevi’s insistence on the preeminence of Judaism but stresses its openness to seekers. Halevi’s Judaism, he argues, does not compel conversion but ‘opens the door to anyone who knocks.’ Rosenzweig downplays passages in the Kuzari that restrict full religious truth to the Jewish people and instead highlights Halevi’s willingness to address outsiders. Even Halevi’s seeming insularity becomes, through Rosenzweig’s interpretive lens, a form of invitation rather than exclusion.

Rosenzweig highlights an inherent paradox in Halevi’s Kuzari: although Halevi insists that Jewish truth is meant solely for the Jewish people, he nonetheless writes in Arabic and openly frames the work as an apology. Even Halevi’s Judaism, then, leaves its door ajar for outsiders. Yet Rosenzweig—contrary to Braiterman’s claim—does not turn this into a genuinely open concept of identity. In his rendering, there is no real dialogue between the gentile entering Halevi’s Jewish ‘home’ and its Jewish inhabitant: ‘It does not really give an answer to their questioning, not even “that’s the way we are,” but rather it points and says, “look here”’ (Rosenzweig 2000a, pp. 183, 185). At most, the outsider may be invited to explore Judaism independently; a Levinasian transformation of Judaism through hospitality or dialogue is entirely absent (Levinas 1979). Rosenzweig’s revision is therefore limited, and he does not propose a dialogical Jewish identity, nor ignores the otherness that translation cannot—or rather should not—disclose.

Taken together, these two post-Star works reveal a nuanced transformation. Rosenzweig did not abandon enclosed identity but shifted its foundation from biological inheritance to divine election, embedded it within a dialogical anthropology, and universalized its structure by suggesting that all human beings require communal grounding. Yet he retained a distinction between legitimate communal enclosure and illegitimate individual self-isolation: Identity remains open to visitors but not to revision. Rosenzweig thus oscillates deliberately between openness and enclosure, neither dissolving Jewish identity into universal dialogue nor sealing it off from communication entirely.

7. Conclusions

Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s interwar reflections on identity present a striking and still timely effort to negotiate between the need for stable, inherited forms of belonging and the ethical and existential imperatives of openness, dialogue, and responsiveness to others. Their oscillation between enclosed and communicative models speaks directly to contemporary concerns about nationalism, multiculturalism, and the grounds of truth in an age of polarization.

Rosenzweig’s thought, particularly in The Star, deliberately maintains a tension between two models of identity: one enclosed, inherited, self-contained, and profoundly shaped by his understanding of Jewish election; the other dialogical, relational, dependent on divine and human address. Rather than resolving this tension, he preserves it as a structural feature of human existence. Identity requires grounding, yet it also requires encounter. Truth is subjective, yet it gestures toward the divine whole. Community offers stability, yet individuality demands exposure to others. This balancing act reflects Rosenzweig’s unique attempt to preserve Jewish distinctiveness in the face of assimilation, on the one hand, and efforts to turn the Jews into a European nation, on the other hand.

Rosenstock, by contrast, sought a more radical opening of inherited identity. Drawing on Rosenzweig’s insights, he reinterpreted the Jewish model of historical continuity and exilic resilience as a paradigm for cultural renewal in postwar Europe—but he refused to endorse its non-communicative aspects. Where Rosenzweig maintained a space for sacred enclosure, Rosenstock insisted that inherited identities must be permeable, capable of dialogue and transformation, and resistant to both racial fixity and the relativistic privatization of truth. His vision of identity is generational, historical, and receptive rather than sealed.

Both thinkers were responding to the deep crises of their time: the collapse of liberal individualism, the rise of ethnic nationalism, the catastrophe of war, and the disintegration of shared meaning. In different ways, they sought to delineate forms of identity that could resist both atomization and totalization, both relativism and dogmatism. Their conversation illuminates how enclosure and communication can be held in productive, if uneasy, tension.

The anthropological comparisons examined in this essay help to recontextualize, and partly to temper, the seemingly racial edge of Rosenzweig’s concept of bounded identity. His undialogic account of Judaism need not be read as an aberration or as a covert racial doctrine; it can instead be situated within a broader human repertoire of what Robbins and Rumsey call opacity doctrines—culturally specific stances that treat the inner life of the other as inaccessible and that ground communal belonging in non-verbal, affective, or somatic registers rather than in explicit linguistic exchange. Read in this light, Rosenzweig’s invocation of shared blood is less a biological claim than a semiotic one: an image for a mode of communality that distrusts the transparency of language and locates solidarity in felt, pre-reflective attachment. This reading is further supported by the political context. The Jews of Rosenzweig’s generation were a minority community facing the homogenizing pressures of Western Christian culture and the assimilationist demands of liberal emancipation. The enclosed, blood-rooted identity he theorized was not designed to assert superiority over other groups but to secure a space of irreducible otherness—a refusal to be dissolved. In Geschiere’s terms, it is a form of belonging that resists encompassment rather than one that excludes.

In our own moment—marked by renewed ethnic nationalisms, identity-based epistemologies, and the erosion of shared civic discourse—the questions they posed remain urgent (Habermas 2005, pp. 115–20, 130–48). How can communities preserve continuity without succumbing to exclusion? How can identities remain open without dissolving into uncertainty or losing their uniqueness (Gutmann 1994; Habermas 2006)? How can truth be anchored without becoming insulated, and how can dialogue be inclusive without flattening difference?

Their interplay points to a common intuition: that healthy identities require both depth and openness, inheritance and dialogue, stability and vulnerability. Their interwar debate thus provides not only a historical case study but also a conceptual resource for navigating contemporary conflicts around belonging and truth. In retrieving their efforts to balance enclosure with communication, we may glimpse possibilities for remaking identity in ways that preserve fidelity to tradition while fostering the responsiveness demanded by a shared—and increasingly fractured—world.