Oskar Goldberg’s Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (Fragments). Translator’s Foreword

Abstract

Publication of the 1st volume of Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Jews, 1925), the main work of the German-Jewish thinker of the early 20th century Oskar Goldberg (1885–1952), brought him considerable fame and led to fierce controversy. Structuring his book as a quaint metaphysical commentary on the biblical text, Goldberg re- flects on the fate of mankind, putting forward an original idea of the exis- tence of a cosmic magical-biological force that manifests itself in history. His ideas about the connection between God, the (metaphysical) people who made a covenant with Him, and the place (territory) established by this covenant, as well as about the decline that the violation of this connec- tion entails, and about the possibility and necessity of its restoration for the preservation of the people and the human race as a whole made a noticeable impact on some philosophers and writers of that era. Our publication offers a Russian translation of the first chapter and fragments of the second chapter of this book, in which Goldberg explains the philosophical and hermeneutic principles of his approach to interpreting Scripture and understanding history.