 Eugen Rosenstock was born in 1888. His parents were assimilated (i.e. non religious) German Jews. His mother and father, a banker, encouraged academic pursuits in their children. At school his classes were in Latin, and from a young age he devoted himself to history and linguistics. His passion for learning languages extended to teaching himself Egyptian hieroglyphics while a teenager. He is probably one of the very few social philosophers who (apart from his fluency in several modern European languages) not only read the biblical writers, ancient philosophers, poets, orators and Church fathers in their original languages, but was equally at home deciphering the walls of an Egyptian temple. This schooling formed the basis of an approach to reality which always considered the different underlying imperatives—divine and human—that fused a group or led to its dissolution. It also provided him with what he insisted was a guiding methodological principle in his life: to make no historical argument that was not based upon his own consultation of the original source material.