Athens with Jerusalem: the Need for a Jewish Voice in Modern Liberal Arts Education

THE UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER Faculty of Education, Health & Social Care Athens with Jerusalem: The Need for a Jewish Voice in Modern Liberal Arts Education Tony Biondi Doctor of Philosophy April 2015 This Thesis has been completed as a requirement for a postgraduate research degree of the University of Winchester. 2 3 THE UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER ABSTRACT FOR THESIS Athens with Jerusalem: The Need for a Jewish Voice in Modern Liberal Arts Education Tony Biondi Faculty of Education, Health & Social Care Doctor of Philosophy April 2015 This thesis explores the need for a Jewish voice in modern liberal arts education, from which it has been historically excluded. Liberal arts have developed from a tradition reaching back to ancient Greece, and yet are supposedly representative of Western Judeo-Christian culture. Due to an anti-Jewish attitude amongst the Church Fathers that has prevailed for most of church history, both Jews and their texts have been excluded from contributing to Western education. Great Jewish literature is almost entirely absent from the Great Books tradition, while Jewish thinkers have been left out of the university until only relatively recently. This study proposes to introduce the Jewish voice alongside the Western tradition, not in opposition, but as a peer, creating a dialogue between the two voices. Liberal arts begin with the literary arts, which can be defined as the written, spoken and thinking arts. Whilst there is no discrete liberal arts tradition in the Jewish world, the ancient biblical and post-biblical rabbinic texts address these arts in their own distinctive way. This thesis examines the written Jewish voice through the Great Jewish texts and an authentic way of reading them through the rabbinic method of midrash , as opposed to the Western grammatical tradition. Consideration of the spoken Jewish voice looks at rhetoric in the biblical tradition, and especially among the Hebrew Prophets, who not only spoke well – like their Western counterparts – but spoke up for the voiceless. Finally, an examination of the thinking Jewish voice reveals Wisdom personified, as distinct from Greek philosophy. It is a wisdom which is inseparable from right action, justice, love and awe. The Jewish voice provides counterbalance to the dominant Western tradition, and opens the door to a dialogue in the fields of reading, speaking and thinking, which, in turn, opens the way for other traditions to join the conversation. 4 5 Contents Declaration, Copyright Statement and Intellectual Property Rights 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: The need for a Jewish voice 9 Chapter 1: The Written Jewish Voice 21 Chapter 2: The Spoken Jewish Voice 77 Chapter 3: The Jewish Thinking Voice 131 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 213 6 Declaration, Copyright Statement and Intellectual Property Rights No portion of the work referred to in the Thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. I confirm that this Thesis is entirely my own work. Copyright in text of this Thesis rests with the author. Copies (by any process) either in full, or of extracts, may be made only in accordance with instructions given by the author. Details may be obtained from the RKE Office. This page must form part of any such copies made. Further copies (by any process) of copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the permission (in writing) of the author. 7 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Nigel Tubbs, for his invaluable advice, support, help and commitment to this project over the past three years. Thanks to the University of Winchester for the opportunity to undertake this research, without whose assistance it would have been impossible. Thanks to the Modern Liberal Arts Department at the University of Winchester for encouragement and support, as well as providing an opportunity to ‘test-drive’ some of these ideas with students. Thanks to Chrissie Ferngrove and the Research and Knowledge Exchange Centre for kind help, support and practical advice throughout. Thanks to Dr. Yoram Hazony and Dr. Ofir Haivry at the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem for the excellent and helpful ‘Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Midrash’ conferences; as well as their encouragement and inspiration. Thanks to Dr. Dru Johnson from the King’s College, New York for encouragement and support. I would also like to thank my wife, Michelle; and my children – Reuben, Grace and Elias, for their patience with me, losing me as they did over such long periods of time. 8 9 Introduction: The need for a Jewish voice And Athens it is that has [honoured] eloquence, which all men crave and envy in its possessors; for she realized that this is the one endowment of our nature which singles us out from all living creatures, and that by using this advantage we have risen above them in all other respects as well; she saw that in other activities the fortunes of life are so capricious that in them often the wise fail and the foolish succeed, whereas beautiful and artistic speech is never allotted to ordinary men, but is the work of an intelligent mind, and that it is in this respect that those who are accounted wise and ignorant present the strongest contrast; and she knew, furthermore, that whether men have been liberally educated from their earliest years is not to be determined by their courage or their wealth or such advantages, but is made manifest most of all by their speech, and that this has proved itself to be the surest sign of culture in every one of us, and that those who are skilled in speech are not only men of power in their own cities but are also held in [honour] in other states’ (Isocrates, Panegyricus , 4.47- 49). 1 Both medieval and contemporary models of liberal arts education are essentially rooted in the ancient Greek and Roman educational traditions. The words of Isocrates above mention ‘men [who] have been liberally educated’ – perhaps one of the earliest references to the idea of a liberal education. His words also enshrine the Western voice: the voice of ‘eloquence’, ‘beautiful and artistic speech’, ‘culture’ and ‘power’. Thus, the Western voice has dominated the liberal arts tradition. However, another ancient voice has been overlooked in liberal arts education – namely, the voice of the Jewish educational tradition. An explicitly Jewish form of liberal arts education has never existed historically, but the disciplines have all been addressed in the Jewish tradition. I propose that the Hebrew Bible and its subsequent Jewish exegesis from ancient times to the medieval period and into the present, forms an equally valid but very different approach to the disciplines involved in liberal arts education. The absence of these sources impoverishes the potential for any modern liberal arts education to truly address these disciplines beyond the limits of a Western monologue. The inclusion of the Jewish voice, however, opens a dialogue between the traditions. In time this dialogue may open further to include voices from other traditions. 1 Isocrates, Isocrates with an English Translation in three volumes , trans. George Norlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1980) <www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144%3Aspeech%3D4%3Asection%3D47> [accessed 30 June 2014]. I have anglicised American spellings in square brackets throughout this work. 10 Defining Liberal Arts Education It will help at the outset to try and define a liberal arts education. Paul Axelrod claims that liberal arts education is ‘the most enduring and changeable of academic traditions’: ‘Its roots are in the intellectual culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and it continues, at least ideally, to embrace some core ideals from that period.’ 2 Bruce Kimball, likewise, traces the origins of the liberal arts back to the ancient Greek tradition, where reason and speech form the basis: ‘it is helpful to contrast a tradition that has privileged “reason” – including its various denotations of a rationale, a faculty of thinking, and an act of thinking – with a tradition that has privileged “speech” with all its meanings – the pronouncing of words, the faculty of talking, and a formal act of communication. These are the two semantic branches of the Greek term logos, which was thought to define the nature of civilization and of a civilized human being.’ 3 David Conway argues that the liberal arts began to take more definite shape through Roman development: ‘In late Roman times, the three linguistic arts of grammar, rhetoric and logic, became collectively known as the trivium .’ 4 However, James Muir contests this view, with a much later dating: ‘…the liberal arts were not divided into the trivium and quadrivium by “the Greeks” or by “the Romans”, but by medieval African and European educators’. 5 Muir credits the naming and numbering of seven arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) to the medieval North African educator Martianus Capella (c. fifth century CE). 6 Yet, he does maintain that the tradition of liberal arts education derives from ancient Greece, and specifically from Isocrates. 7 The division of grammar, rhetoric and logic into the trivium , he dates to the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth century CE; whilst the ‘term quadrivium originates with Boethius’ in the sixth century CE.8 The Jewish tradition deals with all seven arts, although not necessarily as discrete subjects. For the purpose of this study I will focus on the disciplines of the trivium , as the preliminary and foundational studies in liberal arts education that still shape modern expressions. Specifically, grammar has influenced the Great Books tradition and how we read; rhetoric is still practised as the art of speaking well; and logic can be seen in the study of thinking skills and philosophy.

Load more