Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism

The last major work of Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, published in 1919, the year after his death. Cohen reads the Hebrew Bible, the prophets and the rabbinic and medieval literature as sources from which a religion of reason can be drawn. Its key concept is correlation: God and humanity are bound in a relation that makes ethics possible, without either being absorbed into the other. God is not merely one but unique, unlike any other being, and creation and revelation are interpreted through this correlation. Cohen argues that ethics alone sees only humanity in general; religion discovers the individual. Through compassion for the suffering of the poor, the mere 'next man' becomes the fellow human, and through sin, repentance and the Day of Atonement the individual becomes an I before God. Later chapters treat the prophetic idea of messianism as the unity of humankind, the holy spirit, the law, and peace as the crowning virtue.

It is a bridge between Kant and modern Jewish thought, and its ideas of correlation and the fellow human strongly influenced Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas.