Progress, Regress, and Transformation: Hermann Cohen’s Ezekiel as a Revolutionary Prophet
Selected Sources from the Session
Part of the learning series, You Say You Want a Revolution: Jewish Encounters with Radical Change
With Dr. Shira Billet, Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics
The prophet-priest Ezekiel prophesied, after the Babylonian exile, about the restoration of the temple and the sacrificial rite. In the Nineteenth-century, both Christian Bible critics and liberal Jewish scholars held negative views of Ezekiel, especially compared to Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos, who famously prophesied against temple sacrifice, in favor of ethical obligations to the vulnerable.
The German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), had a different assessment of the legacy of Ezekiel. For Cohen the exilic prophet Ezekiel launched perhaps the most significant Jewish moral revolutionary, even though his return to the notion of sacrifice was regressive compared to the progressive prophets. Learn why Hermann Cohen thought that both liberal and conservative forces would be necessary to create any true and lasting revolution.
About the Series
What does revolution look like in Jewish life—spiritual, social, technological, or political? This fall, join JTS scholars for a provocative webinar series exploring transformative moments across Jewish history. From the emergence of monotheism to the Russian Revolution, from handwritten manuscripts to digital frontiers, from summer camps to the Talmud, we’ll consider how Jews have sparked, resisted, and reimagined change. Each session invites reflection on what revolution means—then and now.
