Law,Charity and Taboo or Kant's Reversal of St. Paul's Spirit‐Letter Opposition and its Theological Implications

This article gives the first account of Kant's reversal of St. Paul's Spirit‐Letter opposition. By means of such reversal Kant defines both charity and law as obtaining a complete autonomy from ‘profane’ life. In Kant's interpretative framework Judaism and Jews represent the ‘profane’, whereas Christ symbolizes the complete transcendence of the empirical. I shall discuss how different Jewish writer – Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and Franz Baermann Steiner – respond to such a body‐spirit dichotomy in which ‘the Jew’ functions as the representation of that which is devalued as the material, the bodily.