This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

This chapter situates Franz Rosenzweig’s unique and influential contributions to Jewish theology in his Christian historicist and philosophical context of modern European civilization. Doing so allows us to best understand his theological contributions with the interdependent two-fold Jewish exilic tradition of interpreting the Torah as an engaged, dialectical response from the dual perspectives of the living Scriptural authority of their respective communities of faith and the non-Jewish and increasingly secular contexts in which they found themselves. The chapter unfolds as an interpretation that is based on Rosenzweig’s introduction of a novel methodological speech-act philosophy that he calls New Thinking which takes shape in the midrashic form of a messianic aesthetics. Simon claims that this approach enables Rosenzweig to set out a normative guide of teaching-as-practice throughout the entirety of The Star of Redemption, in order to bring the structures of the inter-related processes of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption into functional and dynamic ethical relations.