. German philosopher. The son of a cantor in a small Jewish community, he attended the Rabbinical Seminary at Breslau for a few years. However, he left the Seminary and instead devoted himself to the study of philosophy. In 1876, he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg. At this time, Cohen entertained little interest in Judaism and devoted himself entirely to the development of his philosophic system, a modification of the system of Immanuel Kant. The antisemitic outburst of the historian Treitschke, in 1880, stirred Cohen’s Jewish consciousness, and he attempted to defend his people. An essay Love of Fellowman in the Talmud, written as a reply to a query of a court, about the Jewish attitude toward morality drew him still closer to Jewish matters. From that time on, Cohen wrote many essays on Jewish subjects which were later collected in three volumes. He also wrote a work on the Jewish religion called Die Religion der Vernunft (The Religion of Reason). In these works, he formulated his philosophical and ethical principles of Judaism. He dwelt especially on the high value of the Messianic idea