History of Jewish Philosophy

Daniel Frank, Oliver Leaman, Daniel Frank, Oliver Leaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134894352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Jewish philosophy is often presented as an addendum to Jewish religion rather than as a rich and varied tradition in its own right, but the History of Jewish Philosophy explores the entire scope and variety of Jewish philosophy from philosophical interpretations of the Bible right up to contemporary Jewish feminist and postmodernist thought. The links between Jewish philosophy and its wider cultural context are stressed, building up a comprehensive and historically sensitive view of Jewish philosophy and its place in the development of philosophy as a whole. Includes:
· Detailed discussions of the most important Jewish philosophers and philosophical movements
· Descriptions of the social and cultural contexts in which Jewish philosophical thought developed throughout the centuries
· Contributions by 35 leading scholars in the field, from Britain, Canada, Israel and the US
· Detailed and extensive bibliographies

Chapter 1

What is Jewish Philosophy?

Daniel H.Frank

In his introduction to the English translation of Julius Guttmann’s monumental Die Philosophie des Judentums (first edition, 1933), Zwi Werblowsky writes:

Philosophers and historians may be at variance on the question of the nature, or even of the very existence, of constant factors or structures making up an “essence” of Judaism. It is not only philosophies—including philosophies of Judaism—that may change, but also the historian’s views on the nature and historical function of earlier philosophical expressions. Perhaps sometime in the near or more distant future, a new history of the philosophy of Judaism will have to be written.¹

We believe the time has come, and not only because of advances in historical scholarship. There has also been a reconsideration of the nature of the (essentialist) foundations upon which histories such as Guttmann’s are written. As Werblowsky already noted in the 1960s, there is debate among philosophers and historians about the “very existence” of an essence of Judaism. This foundational debate is ongoing and now includes discussion of the nature or essence of philosophy itself.² At present everything seems unsettled. Little wonder, then, that the question before us—what is Jewish philosophy?—appears particularly timely, indeed timely in two senses. One sense has to do with the obvious relevance of the question in current debates; the other, foreshadowing a point I shall later stress, is perhaps best hinted at by Werblowsky himself at the end of his introduction:

Guttmann’s work stands out, not only as a reliable study which condenses sound and subtle scholarship, and a unique survey of the history of Jewish scholarship; it also represents the fruit and the summing up of an important period in the history of Jewish scholarship. As such, it will remain a lasting monument of a significant phase in the history of Jewish philosophy and its attempt to elucidate not only Judaism, but also itself.³

What Werblowsky, writing approximately thirty years after Guttmann, is here penning is an obituary, an obituary to the kind of historical scholarship which Guttmann represents, as well as the presuppositions upon which it is based. In this “terminal” sense, then, the question before us is a timely one, wearing its lineage on its sleeve, as it were. The questions of our forebears remain, relevant to current concerns and yet evocative of a bygone era in the annals of scholarship.

The question, what is Jewish philosophy? is not a perennial one, although in the way it has often been discussed it may appear to be so. Usually it is supposed that the question is a query into the essence of Jewish philosophy, a property or set of properties that Jewish philosophy has always possessed and that distinguishes it from all other branches of philosophy. The discussion of the issue demands that one should isolate common strands in the thought of Philo, Saadia, Maimonides, Crescas, (maybe) Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Levinas, and others. This may or may not be possible to do, but it is important to realize at once that reflection on the nature of Jewish philosophy is of comparatively recent vintage. We are fooled into thinking that the question, what is Jewish philosophy? is a perennial one, because its subject matter, Jewish philosophy, extends far into the past in a unified and connected way. But so characterized, the subject matter is question-begging, for the supposition that all the thinkers we have listed are Jewish philosophers, in some non-trivial sense, and that they are together engaged in something called “Jewish philosophy” is a construct we impose upon the past by virtue of the very question we are asking. Such a construction may or may not be legitimate, indeed may or may not be inevitable, but we ought at least to be aware of what we are doing when we ask about the nature of Jewish philosophy.

Much the most important part of any answer we give to our initial query into the nature of Jewish philosophy is that Jewish philosophy is an academic discipline. It is an invention, for reasons important to ponder, of nineteenth-century historians, intent on bringing together certain thinkers, while simultaneously excluding others. Before the invention of Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline no one asked or wondered about the nature of Jewish philosophy, quite simply because the subject did not exist. Put another way: a certain Platonism holds us captive. In the particular case before us, we think that there is a certain essence “out there,” namely Jewish philosophy, awaiting study and analysis by historians. But that is not the way to understand the relation which obtains between a subject and the study of it. The discipline itself “makes” the subject as much as it studies it. What counts as relevant and essential is not transparent. Liminal cases are important here and establish the point I am trying to make. In Jewish philosophy, Spinoza comes readily to mind as the paradigm of a figure who wrecks any attempt to derive a definition or essence of the subject. Try as one might, as Wolfson more than others did, Spinoza reveals himself as a protean person for all seasons, defying any attempt at a neat categorization. And what this shows is that Jewish philosophy and its study are much more intimately related to one another than a simple-minded Platonism would have it. And with the demise of such a Platonism we free ourselves to ask about the motivation of those engaged in the study of Jewish philosophy, the impetus which led to the development of the academic discipline.

No one in premodern, indeed in much of modern times understood Jewish philosophy as a subdiscipline of philosophy, as a way of philosophizing. No one felt the need to ascertain the essence of Jewish philosophy—“philosophy among the Jews” as it was invariably (and reductively) construed—distinguishing it from every other kind of philosophy or mode of theological interpretation. Note that the claim here about the relative lack of interest in earlier times in a category of Jewish philosophy is not a claim about the status of philosophy in premodern times, although it is important to remember that such demarcations as we make between philosophy, science, and theology were not always so. In the Islamic world, wherein one finds the efflorescence of medieval Jewish philosophy from the tenth century on, there existed a branch of wisdom called falsafa; presumably those engaged in it had an image of themselves as philosophers (falāsifa). Once again, the claim is not that the philosophers had no image of themselves as such, but rather that neither they nor anyone else had an awareness of them as Jewish (or Muslim) philosophers. Neither Maimonides nor Gersonides nor even Mendelssohn, in the modern period, thought of himself as a Jewish philosopher. To the extent that they thought of themselves as philosophers, they imaged themselves as providing an interpretation of the biblical and rabbinic tradition according to universal, philosophical categories.⁴ For them, the Bible is a philosophical book, and they interpret it accordingly. But such an interpretation of the tradition hardly amounts to what we call “Jewish philosophy,” if by the latter we mean to refer to an inquiry that is “by a Jew and for Jews,”⁵ with no universal implications whatsoever. For the classical Jewish philosophers, there is a duty for those able to philosophize to do so. And so they do. They philosophize about Judaism, they interpret the tradition in philosophical terms, discussing such (general) issues as divine language, creation, providence, and prophecy. But such a philosophical interpretation of the tradition is in essence not an enterprise specific to Judaism. Consider Philo, the first Jewish philosophical commentator on the Bible, and his influence upon the early Church Fathers. Wolfson considers Philo and his exegetical method as foundational for religious philosophy in all three monotheistic traditions.⁶ Again, Maimonides was a Jew and a philosopher, but he did not engage in something called “Jewish philosophy,” and the Guide is not, except in the most trivial sense, “a Jewish book.”⁷ Maimonides did not philosophize in a certain, Jewish, way; rather he speculated about his tradition in philosophical terms, about issues of general import embedded in the traditional texts. In essence Averroes did the same thing, and little is to be gained by distinguishing the Maimonidean project from the Averroean one.

What begins to emerge from all this is that not only do we err in thinking that Jewish philosophy is some sort of natural kind, but we are also misled by the surface grammar of the phrase. To the extent that Jewish philosophy has any relevance to the classical thinkers, and here I would include some modern thinkers like Hermann Cohen, it must be parsed as “philosophy of Judaism.” Jewish philosophy is not a branch of philosophy, a subdiscipline. Rather, it is, as previously noted, a way, among others, of interpreting the tradition, the philosophical way. The detractors of the Guide were surely wrong in thinking that what Maimonides was up to was at variance with the tradition. On the contrary, it was part of it, a way of understanding the tradition—the philosophical way.⁸ So construed, the understanding of a particular religious tradition becomes the vehicle for speculation about a host of general philosophical issues. The project is analogous to that of any creative thinker’s use of the past for present purposes. One thinks of MacIntyre’s use of Aristotle, Murdoch’s of Plato, and Gauthier’s of Hobbes. History of philosophy becomes philosophy. Similarly, textual exegesis subserves theoretical (and practical⁹ ) concerns.¹⁰

If Jewish philosophy, understood as requiring a self-consciousness of itself as an idiosyncratically Jewish enterprise, cannot be imposed upon premodern times, it seems, not surprisingly, that one ought to turn to the modern period to fix the genesis of our initial question. Only with emancipation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does the (consequent) fear of assimilation and loss necessitate the need to forge an identity, an identity, in the present context, of subject matter. And so one sees the emergence in the nineteenth century in Germany and, to a much lesser extent, in France of the writing of the history of the nominal subject matter of this book, Jewish philosophy.

To ask, then, about the nature of Jewish philosophy is to position oneself in a certain historical framework, one in which there is the felt need to establish a boundary, a marker whereby the definiendum gains legitimacy. Again, to ask about the nature of Jewish philosophy is to accede to a certain characterization of thinkers, ideas, and texts. And this may, of course, be a false characterization, false in the sense that it is insufficiently attentive to the historical context in which the grouped thinkers and their ideas were originally nested. Indeed, if I am right, there was no Jewish philosophy and there were no Jewish philosophers before the nineteenth-century historians of Jewish philosophy invented the subject. Husik’s famous and oft-quoted remark at the end of his influential A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (1916), “there are Jews now and there are philosophers, but there are no Jewish philosophers and there is no Jewish philosophy,”¹¹ seems to me just backwards. For now there are Jewish philosophers, or at least individuals who imagine that they are engaged in something called “Jewish philosophy,” whereas before the modern period, before the nineteenth century, there was no one who had such a thought. Again, this is not to suggest that there were no philosophical influences upon Jews—of course, Plato and Aristotle influenced Halevi, Maimonides, Gersonides, and del Medigo, and Kant influenced Mendelssohn (and vice versa). Nor is it to suggest that we are wrong in understanding and even interpreting the medieval Jewish thinkers and their immediate successors as part of the philosophical tradition. Rather the point is that their being influenced by current philosophical trends and the plain fact of their being Jews writing from within the tradition does not mean that they were engaged in something called “Jewish philosophy” or that in some non-trivial sense they were themselves Jewish philosophers.

As noted, Jewish philosophy came into being as a disciplinary response of Jewish academics to a particular historical condition, one which threatened the very identity and being of Jewish culture. Jewish philosophy came into being as an attempt to delineate, along standard academic lines, a certain body of literature. Perforce Jewish philosophy quickly came to exclude those elements which did not fit the regnant academic model. Mysticism was excluded from the discipline because of its (supposed) arationality, even though we have come to learn of its philosophical (Neoplatonic) antecedents. Again, to gain a foothold of academic respectability, Jewish philosophy quickly began to parallel, even ape, current trends. It still does.

But there is no a priori reason why Jewish philosophy must parallel non-Jewish philosophy. Why does it? Is it part of an assimilationist ideology, to which Scholem more than anyone else drew our attention?¹² It was Scholem’s general charge against the proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums that they, historians of Judaism, whitewashed the past in the service of a liberal, assimilationist, ultimately anti-Zionist agenda. Ought the great historians of Jewish philosophy to stand accused of the same charge? Why really has the history of mysticism been so notably absent in histories of Jewish philosophy? To answer in a positivist way that its absence is due to its unphilosophical nature is, first, to be historically misinformed and, second and most importantly, to evince a way of doing the history of philosophy which is patently derivative, driven by current or recent trends.

Let us return to the initial question. At first it gave the appearance of an essentialist inquiry into the nature of the subject. Now I hope we see that such an inquiry is a non-starter and that in fact the question is ill-formed or, at least, admits of a radically different answer than it originally suggested. For now the simple answer to the question, what is Jewish philosophy? is: Jewish philosophy is an academic discipline invented in the nineteenth century by scholars intent on gaining a foothold of academic respectability. I pass no value judgement here whatever. I hope merely to provide a bit of genealogy. In this regard I stand with Nietzsche in attempting to “historicize” what too often is taken in an atemporal sense.

I have intimated at a great divide between premodern and modern times. But more important is a distinction, not quite identical to the temporal one alluded to, between history and tradition. A distinction there is, but it can be overdrawn. History, historical events can be appealed to in order to confirm tradition. Further, tradition is not monolithic and unchanging. Traditional Jews and Judaism are as multiform as are their varieties of self-understanding. Maimonides writes the Guide to help a co-religionist understand the tradition in a new (and better) way. Presumably such (self-) understanding constitutes in itself a transformation or change in the tradition; at least it constitutes a change in the life of a traditional Jew.

But while we must guard against an overdichotomization of the distinction between history and tradition, there is no doubt that at some point in the recent past such traditional bonds as held the community together began to fray. Prior to this, tradition (texts and norms) was the explicandum for all thoughtful Jews; even Spinoza presents his critique of the rabbinic tradition as congruent with the intentions of the foundational texts, as the best reading of the tradition. But with the advent of modernity, which I would place well into the nineteenth century, tradition came to be viewed as the antithesis to progress and progressive thinking. In the course of such re-evaluation of the tradition, Orthodoxy came into being in response to reform. So too, Jewish philosophy came into being in response to traditional biblical exegesis. And with this a new set of problems and questions began to emerge, about autonomy and community, the ...