On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, by Eric L. Santner,  The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2001,  168 pp., $40.00.

“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countryman. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” Leviticus 19:18

To love one's neighbor as oneself is a fundamental commandment in both Judaism and Christianity. In this slender book Eric Santner undertakes to demonstrate the philosophical basis of this commandment in the work of two early 20th century German-speaking Jews, Sigmund Freud and Franz Rosenzweig. Santner is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, and his previous books include studies of postwar German film, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, and a study of Daniel Paul Schreber and modernity.

Although Freud and his work is familiar to most of us, the work of Franz Rosenzweig may not be. Rosenzweig was a contemporary of Freud's and a collaborator with Martin Buber in translating the Pentateuch into German. Like Freud, Rosenzweig was born and raised Jewish in a culture within which being Jewish was a disadvantage in the pursuit of an academic career. Rosenzweig considered converting to Christianity. Accepting baptism was, however, for him not just a politically astute formality; Rosenzweig took the possibility seriously and did not want to become Christian from the position of a relatively nonreligious “pagan,” but from the position of a Jew. The story that has attained almost legendary status is that Rosenzweig went to Yom Kippur services at a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin in October 1913 and left a committed Jew.

Rosenzweig's principal work, The Star of Redemption, was written during World War I. It is a ponderous tome in which Rosenzweig develops a view of the relationship among God, Man, and the World mediated through the processes of creation, revelation, and redemption. In this scheme, Judaism and Christianity are the modes of revelation through which the Creator of the World is revealed to Man and through which the Man is