Rosenzweig deliberately widened the gap Hegel had collapsed between Judaism and Islam

Evidence

It was the distinguished Orientalist and historian of philosophy Shlomo Pines who, uniquely attentive to Rosenzweig’s treatment oflslam, claimed that the key to this treatment resided in Rosenzweig’s disagreement with Hegel. “On this issue,” that is, on the issue of Islam, Pines writes, “Rosenzweig was confronted with a problem: For Hegel, both Islam and Judaism belonged to the same kind of religions. Rosenzweig’s task therefore, as he saw it according to many indications, was to separate the two by way of an essential distinction.” … Rosenzweig had no disagreement with Hegel on his characterization of Islam as such a religion, a “fanatic” religion, as Hegel had it. Yet Rosenzweig went even further than Hegel in isolating the specificity oflslam, and more importantly, in infinitely widening the gap that separates it from Judaism. For Rosenzweig, Islam is, strictly speaking, neither religion, as we have seen, nor politics. It is incapable of love, incapable of relating to the neighbor and to the world as Judaism and Christianity do: “the bond of the consummate and redemptive bonding of man and the world is to begin with the neighbor and ever more only with the neighbor, the well-nigh nighest” (234/G262). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 501

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the antisemitism-Islamophobia distinction was an intellectual project with an identifiable authorial agent (Rosenzweig vs. Hegel’s conflation) — key evidence for the constructedness claim.
• QUESTION: Pines’s claim that separation was Rosenzweig’s self-perceived task invites checking whether the Star of Redemption frames it explicitly.