Paul R. Mendes-Flohr


Paul R. Mendes-Flohr was an American-Israeli scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specialized in 19th and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss.

Biography

Mendes-Flohr was born as Paul Flohr. He took his wife Rita’s maiden name of Mendes as the first part of his hyphenated last name. He held a doctorate from Brandeis University, which was supervised by Alexander Altmann, Nahum Glatzer, and Ben Halpern. Mendes-Flohr taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought. He was also Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He was co-author and co-editor, with Jehuda Reinharz, of a book of modern Jewish history, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, and with Arthur A. Cohen, of a book on contemporary Jewish religious thought.
In 2019, Mendes-Flohr published a highly regarded Martin Buber biography entitled, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent. The German translation appeared in 2022 and in Hebrew in 2023. His most recent work, Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities, was published in 2021.
In 2021, Mendes-Flohr began work on, an international platform for education and reflection on issues of common concern. The Global Lehrhaus was inspired by the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, a center for continuing education established by Franz Rosenzweig, and later directed by Martin Buber.
Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Mendes-Flohr lived in Israel from 1970 with his wife, artist . He had two children, both also artists, and four grandchildren. Mendes-Flohr died on 24 October 2024, at the age of 83.

Selected works

Identität. Die zwei Seelen der deutschen Juden.. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
  • Divided passions: Jewish intellectuals and the experience of modernity.German Jews: a dual identity.A land of two peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs Edited with commentary and a new preface by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr.
  • Martin Buber: a contemporary perspective.
  • Martin Buber: a life of faith and dissent.Franz Rosenzweig and the Possibility of a Jewish Theology.