Religion, Theology and the Holocaust

2 total works

Emil L. Fackenheim

by David Patterson

Published 14 March 2008

Emil Fackenheim was the last in a long line of Jewish philosophers to emerge from Germany, the modern center of Western philosophy, following Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Baeck, and Martin Buber. In this revealing book, David Patterson explores Fackenheim's rigorous pursuit of a philosophical response to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Fackenheim's writing sheds light on the tensions between Jewish thinking and German philosophy, illustrating how elements of the latter were used by the Nazis to justify Jewish annihilation. In addition, he emphasizes the important implications of defining Jewish philosophy as its own entity, separate from the tenets of the Jewish cultural tradition.

Sun Turned to Darkness

by David Patterson

Published 1 September 1998

In examining the recorded memoirs of fifty Holocaust survivors, David Patterson draws on the teaching of the sacred texts of Jewish tradition and the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas.

That memory, he argues, serves three purposes for Jews struggling to recover after the Holocaust. First, a recovery of tradition: Not only was the body of Israel targeted for destruction, but also its very soul, as that soul was defined by God, Torah, and sacred history. Second, a recovery from an illness: These Jews suffer from the illness of indifference that plagued heaven and earth throughout the event. Third, these memoirs reveal the open-ended nature of recovery as a process that has no resolution: The survivors emerge from the camps, but the camps stay with the survivors and cast their shadow over the world. Readers are transformed into witnesses who face a never-ending process of remembrance, for the sacred, in spite of indifference.