Jewish Quarterly Review

On the night of July 7, 1913, a twenty-six year-old Franz Rosenzweig engaged in a life-changing conversation with two intimate friends, Eugen Rosenstock and Rudolf Ehrenberg, in Leipzig. This article challenges the conventional scholarly account of the “conversion” Rosenzweig underwent that night. It does so by introducing newly-discovered evidence that shows that the Rosenzweig who entered the Leipziger Nachtgespräch was an advocate not of academic relativism, as scholars since Nahum Glatzer have so often claimed, but rather of a Gnostic theology of world-denial. Rosenzweig was indeed long committed to an extreme theology of revelation before 1913 and thus, this article claims, could not have been converted to revelation during his famed night conversation. The new and unexpected light the evidence sheds on Rosenzweig’s early theological views suggests that a re-evaluation of the standard account of Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity and return to Judaism is long overdue.