  Rosenzweig was born in 1886, and grew up as the only child of Georg and Adele Rosenzweig, in an intellectually and culturally vibrant, assimilated Jewish home in Kassel. After beginning his university studies in 1904 with the intention of studying medicine, first in Göttingen and then in Munich, Rosenzweig moved in the fall of 1906 to Freiburg. The University of Freiburg was one of the centers of the Southwest school of neo-Kantianism at the time, and Rosenzweig studied philosophy there with Heinrich Rickert and Jonas Cohn, and history with Friedrich Meinecke. By the early months of 1908, Rosenzweig had decided to write a dissertation on the genesis of Hegel’s political philosophy under Meinecke.