WHEN HANS-JOACHIM SCHOEPS DIED, Der Spiegel ran an obituary that described him as “the embodiment of the type of assimilated Jew who was so very German that he did not want to see the threatening menace of National Socialism.” This was a bit misleading. After all, the formulation suggests that Schoeps did his best to look away from National Socialism or that he minimized its significance, as some assimilated Jews in fact did. Schoeps, however, did just the opposite. Nor did he distance himself from Judaism. Even as he worked to “affirm Jewish existence in the modern world,” to cite his son's biographical sketch of him, he embraced the National Socialist regime. An avid reader of Oswald Spengler, Stefan George, and Ernst Jünger, Schoeps founded, as his son notes, a rather dubious association, the deutsche Vortrupp, whose mission was to bring Jews into the National Socialist fold. Not long after the Machtergreifung, Schoeps wrote, in the association's newspaper, “National Socialism will save Germany from its demise. Today Germany is experiencing the renewal of its people.” At the very same moment, rather than de-emphasizing his Jewishness, Schoeps was producing Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit (Jewish Faith in Our Time), which his son calls “the basis for a systematic theology of modern Judaism.”

The basis for this basis was, as Julius H. Schoeps observes, the “neoorthodox theology” (or dialectical theology) of the Protestant Karl Barth. During the past decade, some of the most compelling work produced in the field of European-Jewish intellectual history has dealt precisely with issue of how, in seeking to redefine Judaism, key early-twentieth-century Jewish thinkers made use of dynamic developments in Protestant theology. I have in mind here, above all, Peter Gordon's book Rosenzweig and Heidegger (2003) and Samuel Moyn's 2005 study of Levinas, Origins of the Other. And it might well be fruitful to try to situate Schoeps's early theological writings within this trend. But that, obviously, would be a project for another day. In the brief space I have remaining here, I want to come back to the point that, contrary to what his obituary in Der Spiegel suggested, Schoeps did not embody a type of Jewish assimilation. As a young man, he was an outlier among outliers, a National Socialist Jew who systematically “affirmed Jewish existence in the modern world.”