Beyond the Contractions of Religion and Nationalism: On the Enduring Relevance of Hermann Cohen's Criticism of Zionism and Its Unholy Alliance with Orthodoxy

This essay presents Hermann Cohen's critique of Zionism as a national contraction of Jewish ethical monotheism. Against all national, social or political transformations of the monotheistic God into a mythological god, Cohen takes prophetic messianism as a point of departure for a critique of the dialectics of enlightenment. The Jewish nation beyond sovereignty symbolizes the messianic aim of a history beyond domination. The present paper first summarizes the main points of Cohen's essay, then unfolds his theology of exile in the spirit of the religion of reason as a dialectic of enlightenment, with the latter largely guiding his understanding of German-Jewish cultural affinities as well. This will be capped off with a discussion of Cohen's theopolitics in the context of his debate with Martin Buber, who was critical of Cohen's stance. In a final section he question will be raised of whether that debate might have been rooted in a misunderstanding of how close Cohen's dialogical theopolitics, as framed within German-Jewish culture beyond Jewish statehood, actually is to Buber's later anarchic binational dialogics between Jews and Arabs, which would find its theopolitical foundation in his 'Kingdom of God' of 1932.