Carlebach Fellowship 2026
George Y. Kohler is Professor of Jewish Philosophy of Religion at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and heads the Joseph Carlebach Institute for the Study of Theological Thought in German Judaism. He obtained his doctorate from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba with a thesis on the reception of Maimonides in modern times and has since published works on modern Jewish messianism, the beginnings of Kabbalah research in Jewish studies, and, above all, the philosophy of religion of Hermann Cohen. He has served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Frankfurt, the University of Augsburg and the Lateran University in Rome.
His research focuses on the Reform theology of Judaism in 19th-century Germany and its integration into the broader history of Jewish thought. Together with Daniel Weiss, he most recently published the book “Judaism and Modern Western Philosophy: Collected Writings of Steven S. Schwarzschild” in 2024 as part of the Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy (ASJT, volume 19) series published by Springer.
At the IGdJ, I will be conducting research into the reception of the teachings of St Paul within the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. The project covers the entire spectrum of German-Jewish thought on Paul between 1840 and 1918, taking into account the ideas of rabbinical theologians (Samuel Hirsch), the first Jewish historians (Graetz, Geiger) and philosophers who wrote about Paul, right up to Hermann Cohen’s various accounts of Pauline ‘errors’ from the early decades of the 20th century. The 19th century in particular, with its drastic demarcation from Christianity, offers approaches to Jewish identity that go beyond biology and nationalism. In my research, I focus on the views of scholars of the history of ideas regarding how modern Jewish theology can be described by rejecting what they perceived as Paul’s major deviations from Judaism.