Fackenheim, Emil Ludwig (1916–2003), philosopher and theologian, was born in Halle, Germany. He entered the Hochschule füur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1935, studied at the University of Halle, and fled *Germany to *Britain in 1939, after several months of detention in Sachsenhausen. After a year at the University of Aberdeen and a lengthy period of incarceration as an enemy alien in Britain and *Canada, he continued his studies at the University of Toronto. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1948 until his retirement in 1982, when he moved to *Jerusalem.

Fackenheim's philosophical work on Kant, Schelling, and Hegel focused on the problem of faith and reason and especially on the way in which philosophical thought confronted the reality of transcendence. The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (1968) discusses how Hegel's philosophical system understands and incorporates religion and the divine. His early essays on German Idealism were edited by John Burbidge and published as The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity (1996). Their central theme is the problem of the historicity of human existence and the claim to transcendence offered by philosophy.

His Jewish theological work defended the primacy of faith and revelation for a responsible understanding of Jewish existence and the relationship between freedom and tradition in modern Jewish life. Adapting the conception of *revelation articulated by *Buber and *Rosenzweig in the Weimar period, Fackenheim argued against secular rejections of religion and naturalistic interpretations of Judaism. His essays written between 1948 and 1967 are collected in Quest for Past and Future (1968).