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The term ceremonial law was already used in the Middle Ages, mostly pejoratively, for Jewish religious law and Jewish ritual practices; Christian theoreticians used it to mark, from their point of view, the theological backwardness of Judaism. In early modernity, this interpretation was enhanced by the anti-ceremonialism of the Reformation, while Jewish scholars defended the foundations of their religion. In the 19th century, in the course of the Enlightenment and the use of the term cer…

For the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), the idea of God was an important theme throughout his life. In the concept, the two central reference points of his thinking, Kantian philosophy and Jewish religion, are intertwined. The idea of God as articulated by Kant, Kantianism, and Hermann Cohen is characterized by the fact that all metaphysical speculation is replaced by morality – an approach in which not a few Jews influenced by German culture recognized the deepest kinship between the voice from Sinai, known in the Jewish faith, and a philosophy based on reason. 1. I…

The prohibition of visual images of God was a key principle of Jewish monotheism during the Babylonian captivity in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE which was characterized by forbidding all images of the one God YHWH in his temple. While the rabbinical Judaism of late antiquity held on to the biblical prohibition of images of God, the Christian religion deviated from this with its Trinitarian commitment to Jesus as Christ, the son of God who became man and the respective biblical images (an…

Bereits im Mittelalter war die Bezeichnung Zeremonialgesetz in meist pejorativem Sinne für das jüdische Religionsgesetz und die jüdische Ritualpraxis gebräuchlich; christlichen Theoretikern diente sie dazu, die aus ihrer Sicht theologische Rückständigkeit des Judentums zu markieren. In der frühen Neuzeit verstärkte sich diese Deutung durch den Antizeremonialismus der Reformation, während jüdische Gelehrte die Grundlagen ihrer Religion verteidigten. Mit der Aufklärung und dem Gebrauch des Begriff…