Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) published his magnum opus The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung) in 1921. Three years earlier, in August of 1918 while serving as a German soldier during World War I, Rosenzweig began writing down his thoughts on postcards which he mailed to his mother from the Balkan front where he was stationed. The Star of Redemptionwas driven by a critique of idealism, on the one hand, of Hegel's philosophy of history that in Rosenzweig's view lead to war as a collision of sovereign nation-states. On the other hand, in spite of its systematic construction, Rosenzweig critiques philosophical conceptions of rationality and rejects idealism's absolute knowledge in light of the cry of the mortal man that opens his book. Rosenzweig's philosophy is an engagement with individual radical singularity against a philosophy that would seek "to reintegrate the action by the same necessity into the circle of the knowable All at the moment it elaborated it" (SR, 16).

This complex system of philosophy and theology, composed during war time and embedded with notions of the Jewish liturgy and Christian theological concepts, was largely ignored when it first appeared. Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, called attention to the importance of the work when the second edition (shown here) appeared in 1930, a year after his death, but it was not until the end of the Second World War that its importance began to be appreciated. The book is divided into three parts and each part begins with an introduction. In general terms, the figure of the Star shows the relation between the Self, God and the World through the theological categories of Creation, Revelation and Redemption. For the second edition, Rosenzweig included the names of the chapter sections printed in the margin of the pages. The first printed note was "About death" and the last one "The first."