Michael Wyschogrod

His father, a Hungarian chess master who discouraged his son from pursuing this interest, had moved his family to Berlin from Budapest after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a decade earlier.

It was here that Wyschogrod studied under Rabbi Shlomo Heiman, from whom he came to appreciate "that part of the Torah that cannot be written down but transmitted only in the being of the person whose everyday conduct exemplifies it.

Wyschogrod has been concerned primarily, in his activism and in his scholarly work, with the relationship, especially the theological dialogue, between Judaism and Christianity.

At the same time, Wyschogrod urges from the Jewish side that Jews not pursue a fallacious dismissal of the divinity of Christ that operates on a priori grounds.

In other words, while Jews - Wyschogrod included - can and perhaps even should reject the divinity of Christ, they should not do so by attempting to argue that God's Incarnation in man is somehow inconsistent with the teaching of the Hebrew Bible.

His emphasis on the radical and sublime shock and force of God's choice to enter human history in and through the people of Israel, a unilateral and non-abrogable event, shows an affinity with the thought of the neo-orthodox Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whose work Wyschogrod considered relevant to Jewish theologians.