Looking at the picture of Hermann Cohen on the cover of his opus
Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, it is a bit
difficult to believe that he was a rock star. Not in the sense
that he wrote brave contemporary music that spoke to the minds
of the people, garnering an immense following and becoming a
household name in his country, but rather that he did exactly
that in the field of philosophy. Cohen (1842-1918) made his
bones as a Kant scholar, attaining a professorship at the
University of Marburg while still in his early thirties,
exceptional by any standard and unheard of for a Jew – the Jews
had not been emancipated for even half a century. Cohen’s shift
of focus to Judaism in his later life brought about a conceptual
revolution in Jewish philosophy. Religion of Reason, which was
published in 1919, after his death, takes the textual sources
for Jewish religion and uses them as a jumping-off point for a
universalistic religion centered not around an imminent God and
heteronomous law, but rather