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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2005
This important study of Franz Rosenzweig is among the first book-length forays into the silence surrounding Martin Heidegger in modern Jewish thought. In seeking to establish an elective affinity between these two thinkers, Gordon subverts the firewall established by Karl Löwith between Rosenzweig's passion for eternity and Heidegger's focus on the pure temporality of human existence (Dasein). In doing so, he bucks the link in contemporary Jewish philosophy between Rosenzweig and Levinas, in which an ethics based on a good beyond Being upends ontology as first philosophy. In Gordon's reading, eternity is to the Jewish people as Dasein is to Being. Jewish existence, understood ontologically, not metaphysically, assumes the uncanny, ungrounded, and self-sustaining character of Heideggerian authenticity. Ontologically radical, eternity thus becomes like time, a this-worldly framework, constituting the ultimate horizon of redemption.