Oskar Goldberg

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Oskar Goldberg (born November 5, 1885 in Berlin , † August 13, 1953 in Nice ) was a German-Jewish doctor and religious philosopher .

Life

Oskar Goldberg was raised by his grandfather, since his father died early, and went to school in the upper middle class, German national Berlin-Lichterfelde .

Before studying medicine, he attended the orthodox Veitel-Heine-Ephraim'sche Lehranstalt (Beth ha-Midrash) in Berlin until 1908 . In his senior year he published his work The five books Mosis a number building . In this work, Goldberg attempted to show that the Torah is made up of combinations of numbers that result from the Tetragrammaton .

He became known through his work The Reality of the Hebrews , in which he analyzed the ritual practice of young Israel and the Hebrew prehistoric times using the Pentateuch. During his school days at the Friedrich-Gymnasium in Lichterfelde he was a member of a literary-philosophical association of sub-secunders, in whose focus he quickly became. There he met the later philosopher Erich Unger . Goldberg changed his mind in the Berlin clubs of the time and, with his "dangerous demonic nature" in the New Club, had a great influence on young expressionists such as Jakob van Hoddis and Georg Heym . In 1937/38 he worked as an editorial assistant for Thomas Mann's exile magazine Maß und Wert . He emigrated from Germany as early as 1938 and went to Geneva , invited by the Zurich rabbi Zwi Taubes ( Jacob Taubes' father ) . From there he went to France , where he was interned in 1941. But he managed to escape to the USA . There he worked as a medic. In 1949 he returned to Europe. In 1953 he died impoverished in Nice.

The Philosophical Group

In 1925, Goldberg and artist friends founded the Philosophical Group as one of the most intellectually interesting discussion forums in Berlin in the 1920s . Many important representatives of the German intelligentsia, including many Jews, were there, including Bertolt Brecht , Walter Benjamin , Gershom Scholem , Alfred Döblin , Karl Korsch and Robert Musil . The group quickly disbanded due to hostility and persecution from 1933 onwards.

Even though Walter Benjamin could not escape the fascination of Goldberg's magic of numbers, he considered Goldberg himself to be of a rather questionable nature. Gershom Scholem relates the following anecdote: “Benjamin felt a strong antipathy towards Goldberg, who used to speak little and was inviolable as the head of a sect, so to speak, that went so far that he was once physically unable to take Goldberg's outstretched hand in greeting. He told me that Goldberg was surrounded by such an impure aura that he just couldn't have done it. "

Goldberg's main work, The Reality of the Hebrews

Goldberg's main work, which did not appear until 1924/25, but which, according to him , was thought to have been largely completed before the First World War , is called The Reality of the Hebrews . G. Scholem, the Kabbalah researcher from Jerusalem , and Thomas Mann , two acquaintances with a finger on the pulse, are considered enemies of M. Voigts, the editor of the new edition of Goldberg's main work. Thomas Mann calls him a “typical Jewish fascist” and has him in the figure of Dr. Chaim Breisacher exposed to ridicule in Doctor Faustus . For Goldberg, the Pentateuch was the paradigm of life and analysis of the same. Any kind of enlightenment in the general sense was alien to him, even considered to be the opposite, a darkening of the transcendent , empirically tangible reality. Goldberg could experience the transcendence empirically. That is the basic idea of ​​his work. And beyond that there are means to work in the transcendence, because on the one hand this is in front of reality, on the other hand it is also dependent on it. According to him, one of the essential means for this is sacrifice, which he does not explain with the “do ut des” that can be heard everywhere, but with a transcendental mechanism “sui generis”. In doing so, Goldberg approaches the central idea of ​​magic. Basically, however, he was not a Kabbalist. The Kabbalah was considered an antediluvian Hebrew good, which Pentateuchic ritualism is vastly superior to. The terms race , people and population are precisely defined within his thinking.

If there is such a thing as a secular creed of scientism , it is Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies . One can assume that from Popper's point of view Oskar Goldberg would fall under the enemies of the Open Society , but from Goldberg's point of view Karl Popper would not be an enemy, because he doesn’t care whether the society is open or closed. Society is no longer a category of his thinking, because it dwells in a state of "fixation", that is, without any transcendent reference, according to Goldberg, it is something like the corpse of a people.

A favorite topic of Goldberg seems to be the "dear God" of modern civil religion, who has to deal with a few swipes. Goldberg, for example, breaks with the hypothesis of omnipotence , i.e. with the axiom solidified assumption that God is omnipotent, a fact that certainly does not allow him to become an orthodox in any religion. In addition, he ignores the modern Pentateuch source analysis and simply claims that YHWH and Elohim are different, in fact they are against each other and argue with each other.

Works (selection)

  • The five books of Mosis - a building of numbers: The determination of a uniformly implemented number writing. David, Berlin 1908 ( digitized version ).
  • The common origin of language and number Berlin 1911
  • The Hebrew Reality: Introduction to the Pentateuch System. German text for the Hebrew edition. First volume (not published anymore). David, Berlin 1925 ( digitized version ); Reprint: The Reality of the Hebrews. Edited by Manfred Voigts. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-447-05216-3 .
  • Maimonides: Critique of Jewish Doctrine. Glanz, Vienna 1935.
  • Buildings of numbers, ontology, Maimonides and essays 1933 to 1947. Edited by Manfred Voigts. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8260-5174-6 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Scholem, Gershom: Walter Benjamin. History of a friendship, Frankfurt a. M. 1975. Scholem refers to a passage in a letter Benjamin wrote to him in January 1921: “The Hebrew of these people comes from the source of a Mr. Goldberg, of whom I know little, but whose impure aura makes me feel like that often I had to see him most decidedly, to the point of impossibility to shake his hand, felt repulsed. ”(Benjamin, Walter: Gesammelte Briefe. Volume II, 1919–1924, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, p. 128).

swell

personal data
SURNAME Goldberg, Oskar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish doctor and religious philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1953
Place of death Nice