JUDAICA History Judaism

• xxii, 403 p. #131024 First Edition (Damaged dustjacket)

One cannot ignore Baeck’s final work, written in the concentration camp, This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence (1955), which moves from the essence of an “ism” to the concrete existence of a people and creates an approach to Jewish life that must be set alongside the thought of the great 20th-century Jewish religious philosophers Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Its full implications emerge only when the work is placed into the life of the author.

On May 8, 1945, the day before Baeck was to be executed, the Russians liberated Theresienstadt, and Baeck stopped the inmates from killing the guards. He survived for a number of years, settling in England and becoming a British subject; he taught and lectured in Britain and the United States, including a term at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. His final writings, notably Individuum Ineffabile (1948) and This People Israel, continued to express hope in man and the human situation as the area of the revelation. In his life, Baeck summarized the greatness and perhaps also some of the flaws of German Jewry, which placed all of its hopes and commitments in western European civilization. In his teachings Baeck gave perhaps the clearest systematic exposition of liberal Jewish religious thought in the 20th century.