27/10/2024
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Paul Mendes-Flohr, long-time director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center and the preeminent historian of German-Jewish thought for nearly half a century, died on Thursday. Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Prof. Mendes-Flohr pursued his graduate studies at Brandeis University under the likes of Alexander Altmann and Nahum Glatzer, from whom he learned to approach scholarship, he would often say, as craft, as calling, and as service. He completed his dissertation on Martin Buber’s social thought in 1972. By the early 1970s, Prof. Mendes-Flohr had moved to Jerusalem and was teaching at the Hebrew University. He went on to serve as Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought for decades, and he directed the Rosenzweig Center during one of its most fruitful periods. In the early 2000s, he took up a professorship at the University of Chicago, and from that time on until his retirement, he split each academic year between Chicago and Jerusalem.
Through his countless monographs, his broad-minded anthologies of Jewish Thought and edited volumes, the magisterial collection of Buber’s writings he edited, and the scores of up-and-coming scholars he advised, Prof. Mendes-Flohr shaped the field of Modern Jewish Thought in incomparable fashion. He also invested his heart and soul in stamping the field with his ethos. Prof. Mendes-Flohr committed himself to engaging in the very kind of dialogue with others that was described and analyzed by the German-Jewish thinkers about whom he wrote. He believed such dialogue could nourish the values of equality, justice, and compassion which the world so sorely needs. Prof. Mendes-Flohr was an advocate and activist for peace and for Arab-Jewish dialogue. He engaged in interreligious dialogue of all kinds, and reached students all over the globe.
I was fortunate to have been one of those students. As an undergraduate, I took Prof. Mendes-Flohr’s course on “Modern Jewish Religious Thought” at the Rothberg School at Hebrew University in 1991. Preoccupied by the philosophical and theological questions raised in that course, and inspired by the way Prof. Mendes-Flohr sought to combine heart and mind in responding to them, I returned in 1994 to continue my studies with him, completing my MA and PhD under his guidance. My years as Prof. Mendes-Flohr’s student taught me scholarly patience and attention to nuance; the importance of careful and compelling writing; how the smallest biographical details reveal human concerns of great import, and thus how to think fruitfully about the relationship between life and thought. In a 2021 interview in honor of the Rosenzweig Center’s thirtieth anniversary, Prof. Mendes-Flohr said, ”My wish for the Rosenzweig Center is that it retain [an] ethos of intellectual integrity and probity. And intellectual integrity, of course, means ethical integrity as well.”
At the end of the funeral on Friday, with family, friends, colleagues, and students graveside, Rita Mendes-Flohr and family led a rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” a favorite of Prof. Mendes-Flohr’s. The song juxtaposes a mournful despair over inequality and oppression to the ongoing, natural flow of the river in the face of human inhumanity: “Ol’ man river, he must know something” – something, it seems, we haven’t learned yet.
Prof. Mendes-Flohr leaves behind him a legacy of dialogue and scholarship as humanizing forces. May we all prove worthy of that legacy. And may his memory be for a blessing.
Benjamin Po***ck
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