Die Vision eines anderen Judentums: Ausgewählte Schriften by Francesca Yardenit Albertini, and: Deutschland oder Jerusalem: Das kurze Leben der Francesca Albertini by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Die Vision eines anderen Judentums: Ausgewählte Schriften by Francesca Yardenit Albertini, and: Deutschland oder Jerusalem: Das kurze Leben der Francesca Albertini by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf
It is not an easy task to review two recently published books by and about the late Jewish scholar Francesca Yardenit Albertini, who passed away so suddenly in 2011 at the young age of thirty-six. [End Page 685]
Albertini was not only a dear colleague with whom one felt connected through a common aim and vision resulting from a shared Jewish and philosophical perspective. She was also an enthusiastic scholar and lecturer with whom one would have liked to work on projects of mutual scholarly interest, such as the Wissenschaft des Judentums (German Jewish scholarship) movement. In addition she was, and as her own writings and her biography so vividly demonstrate, clearly a rather complex personality and a woman of very strong convictions. Apparently, because of her idealism and high moral standards, she found herself in constant protest against certain aspects of the wider reality (such as religious and political warfare), with the result that many inner tensions were active within her impulsive character, tensions that she tried to release through her scholarly endeavors at extraordinary speed and with a certain volatility and perhaps occasional over-ambition. These shortcomings, if this is what they are, may have been responsible for a few minor contradictions and some unevenness in her writings, to which we turn presently before considering more fully her personality, her career, and her achievements together with the legacy she left us, as gleaned from the biography written by her husband, the musicologist and composer Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf.
The Vision of Another Kind of Judaism: Selected Writings
In order to gain an overview of Albertini’s selected writings, very brief summaries of the contents of each of her contributions will be presented here, followed by a critical evaluation and appraisal. Thus we may gain a perspective on what kind of new Jewish vision Albertini had had in mind and why she had felt the need for it. Also, was the title of her biography, “Germany or Jerusalem,” intended to highlight a possible choice that could provide an answer as to how that vision could take shape, or was it just an indication of the dilemma she saw herself confronted with?
Her first essay, “Liebe als ausgeübte Gerechtigkeit” (Love as practiced justice), was her hitherto unpublished inaugural lecture in 2008 as a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University, and was meant to be “a plea for a philosophy of love for the 21st century.” Considering—too briefly, in my view—Plato’s permanent ideal of ‘dikaiosyne’ (meaning justice, “producing goodness”), she wanted to fashion a new, more flexible concept of love by giving thorough consideration to the changing historical and social circumstances at any given moment in time, a concept that would reflect on our duties as well as our rights, in order to fit better the present-day requirements of justice, concern, and responsibility (p. 15). Albertini suggested that a new concept of love was needed with a more time-oriented idea of justice at its core so that it could function like a multifaceted compass leading us through the increasing complexities of today’s technological realities, while all past models of love should be brought together and interact for the sake of guidance (p. 19). The question remains how we can deduce from the many divergent past models of love enough real guidance in order to steer us wisely and steadily through a world that gets increasingly more complex. Plato’s unchanging ideals may as yet provide a better compass. [End Page 686]
Her second...
