Kotzk Podcast 091: R. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik’s adaptation of German Volk elements.

Hello everybody.

Our share today is titled Rabbi Yosef Be'er Soloveitchik's Adaption of German Folk Elements.

And I've based myself on the research by Professor Daniel Herskovitz.

What we're going to do is we're going to be looking at how certain elements of German folkic or folkish thought, folk is German for folk, folk thought, which circulated in the interwar years in Germany.

how these thoughts are evident in the writings of Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, who's also known as the Rav.

And Rabbi Soloveitchik is born in 1903 and passes away in 1993.

Rabbi Soloveitchik studied the cultural themes that also appeared in folkish thought, as well as later in German national socialist discourse.

And this is where our discussion gets very interesting and quite fascinating.

But of course, Rabbi Soloveitchik's use of folkish ideology, which we'll define in a moment, German folk ideology, was only philosophical.

It was certainly never political.

So we just only made quite sure that no one is suggesting that Rabbi Soloveitchik was in any way aligned with the national socialists in Germany.

later on in the 1930s he certainly wasn't but interesting that both parties as it were made use of a folkish ideology uh we just have to get that very clear at the beginning uh Rabbi clearly when he saw where folkish ideology was going in Germany as we get closer to the 1930s he immediately criticized.

He didn't distance all that much from the actual folkish thought, but he distanced himself entirely from the weaponization of that thought by the nascent Nazis in Germany.