Franz Rosenzweig was born in Kassel, Germany, to an affluent, minimally observant Jewish family.

Through his granduncle, Adam Rosenzweig, he came in contact with traditional Judaism and was inspired to request Hebrew lessons when he was around 11 years old.

Rosenzweig, under the influence of his colleague and close friend Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, considered converting to Christianity.

After attending Yom Kippur services at a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin, he underwent a mystical experience.

If one makes a diagram with God at the top, and the World and the Self below, the inter-relationships generate a Star of David map.

Two translations into English have appeared, the most recent by Dr. Barbara E. Galli of McGill University in 2005[7] and by Professor William Wolfgang Hallo in 1971.

[9] Unlike Buber, Rosenzweig felt that a return to Israel would embroil the Jews into a worldly history that they should eschew.

Many prominent Jewish intellectuals were associated with the Lehrhaus, as it was known in Germany, such as Leo Löwenthal, the liberal rabbi Benno Jacob, historian of medicine Richard Koch, the chemist Eduard Strauß, the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, Siegfried Kracauer, a culture critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung, S.Y.

Agnon, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Gershom Scholem, the founder of modern secular studies of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism (some of these intellectuals are also associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory).

Rosenzweig's library with about 3,000 volumes was to follow him, but the cargo ship was diverted to Tunis during the Second World War.