Abstract

The article focuses on a celebrative event held on 25th December 1936 in Jerusalem in honor of the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. Based on the still unpublished transcriptions of the discourses pronounced by the participants (among them Ernst Simon, Hugo Bergmann, and Gershom Scholem), the article aims to highlight the main issues behind Rosenzweig's early reception in Palestine. Although praised for his effort to renovate Jewish theology and for his original reading of religious sources, nonetheless Rosenzweig was still perceived as distant from the core of Jewish tradition. At the center of the objections directed against Rosenzweig by his Palestinian readers there were his proximity to Christianity, his skepticism toward Zionism, and his rejection of apocalyptical messianism.