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ON DECEMBER 9, 1995, THE JEWISH PHILOSOPHER AND social critic Gillian Rose died of ovarian cancer at forty-eight, after a long and painful illness of more than two years duration. She had published many books, including a memoir of her dying years, Love's Work, and a posthumous masterpiece, Mourning Becomes the Law. In the last hours before her death, Rose was received into the Anglican church by the Bishop of Coventry, a close personal friend. Her admirers, particularly her Jewish admirers, were and remain dumbfounded, since she had professed a critical loyalty to Judaism for all of her adult life.
Professor Rose had worked under Julius Carlebach, scion of a famous traditional Jewish family from central Europe, from whom she learned a "cerebral" Judaism that was profound and, at the same time, ironic. She attended conferences of Jewish philosophers in the United States, where she interacted with such luminaries as Eugene Borowitz and Paul Mendes-Flohr, and wrote her reactions to those intramural discussions from the point of view of a knowledgeable outsider. It may be prophetic of her end-point that she explicitly sought "to proclaim a New Testament which will dispose of the broken promises of modernity."' In this task both Judaism and philosophy were to have a role: reconstructing modernity was the major goal of all her thinking and writing.
Rose was a close student and critic of the icons of modern Jewish thought: Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas. She wrote: "The separation in their work of the lesson of love or perficient commandment from the actualities of law or coercion suffuses their ethics with an originary violence that has been borrowed from the political modernity which they refuse to historicize."2
Rose was at once captured and horrified by modernity. She rejected the postmodern as diffuse and irresponsible, but she regretted the "broken middle" of modernity and attacked most of the leading thinkers in the Jewish world as being much too enamored of both autonomy and modernity. She used a personal neo- Kantian critique to unmask the naive belief in modernity that most philosophers and, perhaps especially, Jewish philosophers cannot surrender.
Rose wrote her dissertation on Theodor Adorno under Leszek Kolakowski who hated him. Rose was moved by the Frankfurt School's melancholy activism, which scrupulously...