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What Is Jewish Philosophy?

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What Is Jewish Philosophy? Josef Stern What is JewishPhilosophy? AView from the Middle Ages* KeynoteLectureatthe Grand Opening of the Maimonides Centre forAdvanced Studies on 29 October,2015 My late teacherProfessor Sidney Morgenbesser often taught his studentsthe ‘laws’ of JewishPhilosophyor, more specifically, of Jewishlogic,Jewishepistemology,Jewish metaphysics,and so on. Forexample, the laws of general logic are tautologies like ‘If p, then p’ or ‘If it is the casethat if p, then q, then not-q,then not-p.’ The first lawof Jewish Logic is: ‘If p, whynot q(spoken with aYiddish accent)?’¹ The question—What is Jewish Philosophy?—is typicallyanswered by describing Jewishphilosophies,i.e,the books, theories, and doctrines of canonicalJewishphi- losophers, such as,Saadiah Gaon, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), Judah Halevi, Levi ben Gershon(Gersonides). Indeed the distinguishedscholar of Jewishphiloso- phy, Julius Guttmann, entitled his classic history, Philosophies of Judaism.² But Jew- ish philosophyismore than asequence of doctrines or books. Like all philosophy, it is an activity,something one ‘does.’³ Forsome it is an intellectual exercise that solves theoretical puzzles. Forothers these exercises are practices that constituteawayof life, practices that give central place to the intellect and reasoning but aim at aprac- tical end, the achievement of happiness or aharmonious life in which one’sJudaism and intellect are in sync.⁴ In either case, philosophyisapursuit in which one engag- es, not onlyasubjectmatter or the results of the pursuit. Thenameofthe subject ‘Jewish Philosophy’ first emergedinGermany in thelate seventeenth centuryand earlyeighteenthcentury when we find the firsthistories of phi- losophy—andthe very idea that philosophyhas ahistory.The earliest histories areinthe doxographical tradition, portraying certain historical figuresasparadigms of what was then considered to be philosophical wisdom.Slightlylaterhistoriesweredevelopmental * Manythanks to Michael Fagenblat,Zev Harvey,and David Shatz for very helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. And of Jewish epistemology: ‘Your mother always knows best.’ And of Jewish metaphysics: ‘To be is to be in tzures (“pain, suffering”).’ And of Jewish aesthetics: ‘Beauty is for the goyim.’ But onlyinthe English translation which was not authorizedbyhim; the title of the German orig- inal uses the singular: Die Philosophie des Judentums. See Mark Steiner, “Rabbi Yisrael Salanter as aJewish Philosopher,” TheTorah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000): 42– 57. On philosophyasawayoflife, see PierreHadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2002)and his collection of essays,idem, Philosophy as aWay of Life (Ox- ford: Blackwell, 1995). On Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed as aguide to away of life, see Josef Stern, TheMatter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press,2013). OpenAccess. ©2017 Josef Stern, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110527971-011 186 Josef Stern narrativesthat aimedtoshow that thepast is at most of historical interest andofnocon- temporaryphilosophical value. It is in these histories that the category of Hebraic, Mo- saic, scriptural,orprophetic andfinally ‘JüdischePhilosophie’ (first coined by Brucker in the 1740’s) was introduced, and ironicallyinsome of these books to specifically ex- clude theJewish tradition(as well as ‘barbarianphilosophy’)fromthe historyofphilos- ophythat tracesits originstoGreece. Later in thenineteenth century, historians and phi- lologists of Wissenschaft des Judentums appropriated the term ‘Jewish Philosophy’ in ordertoclaim afield of scholarship of their owninorder to legitimatetheir academic respectability.⁵ In short,itisonlyrelativelyrecent that engagement with ancient,medi- eval, andearlymodern philosophers became ahistorical discipline, creatingthe history of philosophy. Jewish philosophy is aspecialcase or byproduct of this phenomenon.Un- likethe physical worldthat existsindependentlyofand prior to thescientific discipline ‘Physics,’ the domain ‘Jewish Philosophy’ wasthe creation of the academic discipline, the ‘HistoryofJewishPhilosophy,’ an artifact made by an academic discipline as muchasthe discipline studies it. What was it,then, that those thinkers and authors were doing—and Iwill con- centrate now on the medieval casesince thatiswhat Iknow best—that we scholars nowadays refer to as ‘Medieval JewishPhilosophy’?Well, the simple answer is: Phi- losophy! However,stating what philosophyis, say, in adefinition, or through neces- sary and sufficient conditions,isnoeasier than spellingout what Jewish philosophy is. Instead Iwill sketch two examples of different conceptions of philosophyinwhich two seminal medieval Jewishphilosophers wereengaged, Saadiah Gaon and Maimo- nides. But,first,you might reasonablyask: ‘If it was simplyphilosophythey were doing,why label it Jewish philosophy?’ What JewishPhilosophy is Not Letmefirst tell youwhat Jewish philosophy is not. It is not philosophycomposed or studied in aJewish language, say, Hebrew.⁶ We do speakofmedieval Arabic philosophy and medieval Latin philosophy, meaningmedieval philosophywritten in Arabic or in Latin, but we cannotdescribethe full gamutofmedieval Jewish philosophy as medieval Iamindebted to Dirk Westerkamp’srich and insightful “The Philonic Distinction: Germanic En- lightenment HistoriographyofJewish Thought,” Historyand Theory 47 (2008): 533–559, for the his- tory of the origins of the term ‘Jewish philosophy’ and of the fields of Jewish philosophyand the his- tory of Jewish philosophy. See also Daniel Frank, “What is Jewish philosophy?,” in HistoryofJewish Philosophy,eds. Daniel H. Frank and OliverLeaman (London: Routledge,2004): 1–8. On the emer- genceofthe academic studyofthe historyofphilosophyingeneral, and on varieties of ways of doing the history of philosophy, see Michael Frede, “The History of PhilosophyasaDiscipline,” Jour- nal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 666–672. JacobKlatzkin, the author of the famed Oṣar ha-Munaḥim ha-Filosofiyyim (Thesaurus Philosophicus Linguae Hebraicae)(reprintedNew York: Feldheim, 1968), makes aclaim to this effect. What is Jewish Philosophy? AViewfromthe Middle Ages 187 Hebrew philosophy.⁷ Leavingaside Philo of Alexandrainthe first century whowrote in Greek,works written in theIslamic empire(e.g.,bySaadiah,Maimonides,Judah Halevi, andmanyothers)wereall composed in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic(Arabic in Hebrew char- acters).Onlyafter 1148 domedieval Jewish philosophers in Christian Europe compose andread works in Hebrew.And, of course, for modern Jewish philosophyafter the En- lightenment,the relevant languagesinclude German, French, andEnglish. Moreover,itisnot self-evident thateverything philosophical written or read in Hebrew should necessarilycount as Jewish philosophy. ManyAristotelian and Arabic philosophical texts weretranslated into Hebrew,and some onlysurvive in their me- dieval Hebrew translations. Is this sufficientfor them to count as Jewish philosophy? To complicatematters,manymedieval Jewishthinkers composed supercommenta- ries in Hebrew on commentaries originallywritten in Arabic but then translated into Hebrew (say, Gersonides’ supercommentaries on Averroes’ Arabic commenta- ries) on Greek classics by Aristotle. If these supercommentariesare part of medieval Jewishphilosophy—and whyshouldn’tthey be?—should the Hebrew-translatedAra- bic commentaries on which they are super-commentaries,orthe original Greek texts translated into Hebrew,alsocross the boundary?Maybe it would more accurate to saythat thereisnoboundary.Inany case, languagealone cannot settle the question. Second, youdon’thavetobeJewishtodoJewish philosophyand, by the same token, not just anykind of philosophycomposed by aJew,i.e., someone of Jewish descent or confession, need be Jewish philosophy.⁸ Some medieval Jewish philo- sophical texts werecomposed after theirauthor’sconversion to Islam (e.g., Abu’l- Notethat some Islamic (Arabic?) philosophy, such as Avicenna’s Danishnamah-yi ‘Ala’,was com- posed in Persian. See, however,Raphael Jospe, What is JewishPhilosophy? (Ramat Aviv:Open University,1988): 28–29: ‘Aphilosopher’sJewish identity is anecessary condition, but not asufficient condition, for determiningwhetherhis philosophyis, indeed, aJewish philosophy[…]. Jewish philosophycannot be developed by anon-Jew. Anon-Jewcannot writeJewish philosophy.” See also p. 6whereJospe claims that Aristotle and Al-Farabi, for all their influence on Jewish philosophy, ‘have no sharein [it] for the simple reason that they werenot Jews.’ No argument is given, but even if one agrees that aJewish philosopher (meaningsomeone whoisboth aJew and aphilosopher)must be Jewish, it does not follow that Jewish philosophy must be written by aJew.That would be no different than requiringthat feminist philosophybewritten onlybywomen. Notwithstanding the counterexamplesI mention in the text, of course, the fact—contingent fact of course—is that (almostall?) Jewish philos- ophyhas been written by Jews.But this fact,atleast in the past,can be easilyexplained by historical, sociological reasons(access to languages, training,ethnic divisions). The same was true for at least a thousand years about rabbinics—and for the simple reason that non-Jews (apart from Jewish converts to Christianity) did not have the education or trainingtodoserious rabbinics.Today, however,with the proliferation of academic Jewish studies,wenow
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