{"id":87158,"date":"2025-08-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de\/?p=87158"},"modified":"2026-01-30T10:44:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T09:44:28","slug":"the-forgotten-conciliator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de\/en\/forschung\/the-forgotten-conciliator\/","title":{"rendered":"The forgotten conciliator"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raphael Straus firmly believed in the bonds between Jews and Christians \u2013 even during the Nazi terror<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Raphael Straus
Photo: Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In the early 1940s, a Jewish scholar who had fled from the Nazis to Palestine wrote \u201cEine friedvolle Betrachtung \u00fcber Judentum und Christentum\u201d (\u201cA Peaceful Contemplation on Judaism and Christianity\u201d). Who was Raphael Straus? And where did he find the strength to promote understanding in the midst of the Holocaust?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Little is known about the life and death of Raphael Straus. Together with his wife and four children, the German scholar, who was of Jewish faith and an expert on medieval Jewish history, fled from Nazi persecution to what was then the British-administered territory called Mandatory Palestine, now Israel, in 1933. But Straus, who had advocated the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine since his youth, was never able to really gain a foothold in Jerusalem. He tried in vain to find a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had opened in 1925. Straus kept his head above water through scholarships and work in adult education. In 1945, he emigrated to New York, where the German-Jewish scholar, largely forgotten by his contemporaries, died of a heart attack at the age of only 60.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dead, forgotten and rediscovered<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt might well be that his fate \u2013 emigration, exile and a precarious existence \u2013 contributed to his early death,\u201d says Christian Wiese, holder of the Martin Buber Chair for Jewish Religious Philosophy, who as a Jewish studies scholar is studying the life and work of Raphael Straus and finds one of his works particularly impressive: Despite the persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany, despite the reticence of most Christian theologians and believers, in his unpublished work \u201cApokatastasis. Eine friedvolle Betrachtung \u00fcber Judentum und Christentum\u201d<\/em> (\u201cApokatastasis. A Peaceful Contemplation of Judaism and Christianity\u201d), written in around 1940 and still unpublished, Straus upheld his interpretation of the two religions as neighbors, which he considered to be intertwined by similarities in religious doctrine as well as a history of social relations and economic interdependence stretching back thousands of years. Straus probably borrowed the term \u201cneighborhood\u201d from James Parkes (1896-1981), an Englishman, Anglican theologian and activist for Christian-Jewish understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This makes Raphael Straus\u2019 work a suitable case study in the context of the interdisciplinary research project \u201cDynamics of Religion: Ambivalent Neighborhoods between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Historical and Contemporary Constellations\u201d, whose academic spokesperson is Christian Wiese. In this project, Wiese has joined forces with colleagues from disciplines such as Jewish studies, Islamic studies, religious studies and history, archaeology and ethnology, as well as social and educational sciences to build a prominent international research network, in which scholars from Goethe University Frankfurt, Marburg University, JLU (Giessen University) and other partner institutions are collaborating. The goal of this research into the neighborhoods between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in history and the present day, and in their various forms, from successful coexistence to violence and genocide, is to lay the groundwork for educational strategies aimed at combating religiously motivated hate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The new normal:
On November 10, 1938, a woman walks past a Jewish printworks in Berlin, whose windows have been smashed by the Nazi rabble. Raphael Straus experienced from a distance the steadily escalating terror.
Photo: Picture Alliance\/AP Images
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IN A NUTSHELL<\/p>\n\n\n\n