Only Lowenthal and Fromm among Institute members retained any Jewish religious engagement

Evidence

In the face of this vehement rejection of the meaningfulness of Jewishness in their backgrounds, one can only look for indirect ways in which it might have played a role. Certainly the overt impact of Judaism as a system of belief seems to have been negligible. The two possible exceptions to this were Leo-Lowenthal and Erich Fromm, both of whom had been active in the group comprising the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. Lowenthal had been one of the contributors to the Festschrift dedicated to Rabbi Nobel in 1921, writing on the demonic in religion. He continued to find his way into the pages of such publications as the Frankfurter lsraelitisches Gemeindeblatt as late as 1930, although by then he had left his truly religious period behind. Still, one would be hard pressed at any time to find echoes of Lowenthal’s interest in Judaism in the work he did for the Institut. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 164

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Lowenthal’s and Fromm’s Jewish background shape their later critical-theory output, if at all? Jay himself gestures that the question needs unpacking.