Emil Fackenheim

rdf:langString Emil Fackenheim

rdf:langString Emil Ludwig Fackenheim

rdf:langString Emil Ludwig Fackenheim

rdf:langString Emil Fackenheim

rdf:langString Baruch Spinoza

rdf:langString Immanuel Kant

rdf:langString Leo Strauss

rdf:langString Martin Heidegger

rdf:langString

rdf:langString G. W. F. Hegel

rdf:langString F. W. J. Schelling

rdf:langString Martin Buber

rdf:langString Ernst Bloch

rdf:langString Franz Rosenzweig

rdf:langString Gershom Scholem

rdf:langString Israel

rdf:langString The Holocaust

rdf:langString

rdf:langString Radical Evil

rdf:langString Tikkun Olam

rdf:langString ... we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.

rdf:langString To mend the world, p. 213

rdf:langString Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (22 June 1916 – 18 September 2003) was a Jewish philosopher and Reform rabbi. Born in Halle, Germany, he was arrested by Nazis on the night of 9 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Briefly interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1938–1939), he escaped with his younger brother Wolfgang to Great Britain, where his parents later joined him. Emil's older brother Ernst-Alexander, who refused to leave Germany, was killed in the Holocaust. Held by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War II, Fackenheim was sent to Canada in 1940, where he was interned at a remote internment camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec. He was freed afterward and served as the Interim Rabbi at Temple Anshe Shalom in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1943 to 1948. After this he enrolled in the graduate philosophy department of the University of Toronto and received a PhD from the University of Toronto with a dissertation on medieval Arabic philosophy (1945) and became Professor of Philosophy (1948–1984). He was among the original Editorial Advisors of the scholarly journal Dionysius. In 1971, he received an honorary doctorate from Sir George Williams University, which later became Concordia University. Fackenheim researched the relationship of the Jews with God, believing that the Holocaust must be understood as an imperative requiring Jews to carry on Jewish existence and the survival of the State of Israel. He emigrated to Israel in 1984. "He was always saying that continuing Jewish life and denying Hitler a posthumous victory was the 614th law," referring to the 613 mitzvot given to the Jews in the Torah.

rdf:langString