Abstract

In a 1990 lecture entitled “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” Jacques Derrida comments on a controversial essay by Hermann Cohen, written early in World War I to promote solidarity with Germany abroad and to defend his position against both antisemitic and Zionist critics.¹ Cohen's essay, “Germanness and Jewishness” (Deutschtum und Judentum), published in 1915, aims to prove a convergence and, indeed, an identity of both “national spirit” and the historical mission of Judaism and Deutschtum, or “Germanness.” Derrida criticizes Cohen for claiming a parallel “exemplarity” of the two “peoples,” a notion that Cohen develops through a comparative…