What is Jewish philosophy? We immediately enter into the even more complex area of trying to define who is a Jew, since the implication of the “Jewish” in Jewish philosophy is that its practitioners are Jews. We want to avoid saying that all philosophy that is done by Jews is Jewish philosophy, since much of the former has nothing to do with the ethnic origins of its creators. Only a racist attitude to what it is to be a member of a particular group would seek to identify everything produced by Jews as Jewish, although Jewish philosophers have not always been immune from such views themselves. Moreover, a Jewish philosopher does not need to be religious or observant, nor is any particular commitment to Judaism important. For instance, it would clearly be difficult to disregard Spinoza as a Jewish philosopher, yet he was (as is well known) excommunicated by the Jewish community and he has left no evidence of his adhering to any traditional Jewish beliefs in his writings. However, he challenged such beliefs; he was ethnically Jewish; and the nature of his writing was clearly shaped by his Jewish cultural background. Jewish philosophy is understood here to be philosophy carried out by Jews that makes some reference to a range of issues that have been highlighted in Jewish texts such as the Bible, the Talmud (an extensive series of commentaries on Judaism), and Jewish law (halakhah).
It is always difficult to decide when a philosophical area of study starts. A whole range of theoretical issues often arise that are dealt with in rather philosophical ways, but not consciously so. In the Jewish Bible, a number of texts deal with the issue of undeserved suffering (Job), the meaning of life (Ecclesiastes), the nature of mystical experience (Ezekiel), and moral issues (much of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Jewish Bible). In the extensive commentaries of the Mishnah (a commentary on Judaism in Hebrew) and the Talmud (which were written in the first few centuries of the Christian era), there is not only a good deal of philosophy but also by this time no doubt regarding the significant Greek influence over Jewish thought. In the prayer book today, there is still in the Morning Prayer service a passage that runs through the main forms of valid reasoning, a direct elucidation of Greek logic. In this passage, Rabbi Ishmael expounds the thirteen principles of logic. The commentaries concentrate on legal issues, and as one might expect, the discussion of the nature of law is well developed and interesting; however, they also deal with other matters that are more directly philosophical. Without a doubt, many of the leading Jewish theologians and legal thinkers were involved with philosophy, whether they knew it or not, and the issues that arise in the Bible and the commentaries on it have proved to be a fruitful source of philosophical meditation ever since.
The first systematic Jewish philosopher is Philo of Alexandria (first century C.E.). He was thoroughly imbued with Greek culture, and he applied it to the Jewish scriptures, thus producing a mixture of Stoicism and Middle Platonism that allowed him to interpret Judaism from the point of view of philosophy. He established a practice that was to become common, that of writing in the secular language of the community in which he lived—in his case, Greek. The other strategy he adopted was also to become very important, the allegorization of the Bible—that is, treating the literal truth of the text as not the main message of that text. His decision opened the way to philosophy, for which he could then go on to interrogate the text and establish a range of plausible meanings for it. Philosophy clearly has a potential place within religion once it is accepted that the text of faith requires interpretation. This is a point that Philo makes time and time again.
But it was really in the Islamic world that Jewish philosophy was to take off, in particular in its Neoplatonic form. Isaac Israeli is an important thinker here, and the Neoplatonism he employed came to be the main way of doing philosophy in medieval Jewish philosophy. Neoplatonism fits in well with monotheism since it works from the principle of a One that is the source of being; it then goes into the detail of how we can derive from the One the variety of objects and events in our world with which we are familiar. For the One to produce the world, even indirectly, would be problematic if it were to maintain its perfect unity. The Neoplatonists therefore used a concept of emanation instead of creation, and according to this concept, the world is continually being produced out of the One as an aspect of its Being. Creation is an event that occurs in time; the process of emanation is the opposite of creation, and it is a process that takes place all the time. The links between the deity and the One are obscure, yet it is assumed that a link exists between them. The deity is a person, whereas the One is a principle. The relationship between them is sometimes expressed as the One as the actual source of all being, but traditional religion explains this concept to the community by talking in terms of a personal God, with whom ordinary believers can relate much more easily than with a logical principle. If the One were to decide to create a world, then to do so would interfere with its perfect unity and perfection. It would raise the question that came to be so controversial in Islamic and Jewish philosophy that if the world were worth creating, why would God delay creating it, since there is no need for him to wait before doing something that needed to be done. The concept of emanation sidesteps this issue, since God need not be thought of as deciding anything at all; as a side effect of his existence, other things come into existence. The material world is therefore the eventual product, one found well down the ontological chain, that is, the continuum of being. A wide range of Jewish philosophers used the basic Neoplatonic vocabulary, and doing so became the standard philosophical curriculum for a long time. The notion of emanation had many uses, for not only can it characterize the way in which God brought the world into being, but it can also be used to explain prophecy. Prophecy can be seen as the effect of divine grace flowing from God and turning particularly gifted people into prophets. Prophets are people who are able to address the widest possible public in ways that will resonate with it; these skills are unevenly distributed among the human population. When someone with the skill is affected by the divine emanation, he becomes able to prophesy. The interesting implication is that God does not directly select prophets, nor does He decide to create the world; rather, He thinks merely about Himself, preserving His perfect unity. As a consequence, there is an overflow that goes on to create our world and preserve its existence. In thinking about Himself, God preserves the unity of His thought and its perfection, since what can be more perfect as an object of thought for God than God himself? But His thought carries so much power that it overflows the actual process of thought and goes on to create a range of other things, including our world and what is in it. God’s thought keeps that world in being: as He thinks, there is a continual production of the effects of his thought.
The theory that the world is eternal and that God Himself is subject to certain rules of behavior in his creation was constantly discussed by medieval Jewish philosophy. Saadya Gaon (882–942), the head of the Jewish community in Baghdad (a vibrant center of Jewish intellectual life in the ninth and tenth centuries), argued that the world could not be eternal, since doing so would go against Aristotle’s physics. According to the latter, the universe is finite in space, which means that it must eventually run down, since a finite space can only contain finite amounts of energy. But, if the universe is going to come to an end, then it must have started at some time; otherwise, how could something that had always been in existence come to an end?
Saadya’s lasting influence is based on his views on how to justify religious law, and we shall see later how Maimonides criticized him on this point. One of the other interesting features of Saadya’s thought is his thoroughgoing adherence to the ethical doctrines of a theological school, which originated in Islamic philosophy called Mu’tazilism. The Mu’tazilites argued that ethical terms were objective and therefore did not depend on divine authority to have the meaning that they have. The standards of right and wrong are not created by God, but embodied by him in law. This concept means, for instance, that God cannot reward or punish whomsoever he wishes on the day of judgment; he has to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. God cannot command us to behave in any way he wishes; even he has to follow the general principles of morality. Saadya also defends the compatibility of human freedom and divine predestination. God knows everything we are going to do; yet we are free, since God’s knowledge does not prevent us from deciding how to act. Does that mean that we are not really free to act as we wish, though? The argument goes that God knows what is on the page in front of you now while you are reading this, and he knew it was going to be on the page before I actually typed it onto the page; but that does not mean that I was forced to write these words that you are reading now. In fact, I thought carefully about what I was going to say, and the care that went into it is real even though God knows what my attention to the topic is going to create.
The consequences of such views were highlighted by the most outstanding Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204). Maimonides was the product of several centuries of excellent Islamic and Jewish philosophical and theological thought. He came at a time when a central philosophical issue was how to reconcile Aristotelian attitudes to the world with religious explanations of the world. Aristotle seemed to argue that the world can be regarded as an entirely natural organism—or at least this is how the Neoplatonized Aristotle was taken to argue. Certain conclusions seem to follow from this train of thought. First, God does not really know what goes on in the ordinary world; his knowledge is perfect and eternal, and therefore cannot be of events in the natural world. But if he does not know what goes on in the world of generation and corruption, how does he know how to reward or punish us after our death? How can he hear us when we pray to him? If miracles are natural events that we do not properly understand; if God did not create the world at a particular time; if God does not know what we do in our everyday lives, then what is the point of referring to “God” at all? The scientific Jew then had to ask himself the question of why it was worth remaining a Jew at all, or at least a practicing Jew. It is worth reminding ourselves that practitioners gained significant social and economic advantages in Spain when converting to either Islam or Christianity, and many Jews took advantage of this opportunity. Jewish philosophers also converted, and their movement was presumably the tip of the iceberg: the rest of the Jewish community could see little point in remaining Jewish. Philosophy seemed to show that religion was a much weaker form of reasoning than philosophy, and the ordinary believer has a limited and imperfect route to the truth as compared with the philosopher. In those circumstances, why not therefore abandon religion?
It is worth pointing out that in medieval times those who practiced philosophy also did other things. They were physicians, lawyers, scientists, poets, and in addition, some earned their living by some practical commercial activity. Maimonides combined a number of roles, including that of the head of the Jewish community in the Arabic-speaking part of the world. He saw his task as that of showing that one could be both a philosopher and a Jew. His Guide to the Perplexed is written precisely for those who are confused by the apparent conflict between religion and philosophy. In it, he argues that this conflict is indeed only apparent. It can be obviated by proving that the Jewish Bible needs to be interpreted allegorically; that is, it needs to be seen as a text designed to win adherence to a more spiritual lifestyle by those who are committed to materialism. Hence, its use of material language. Philosophers understand the limited use of that language, but they also understand that it is important for most believers, especially those who need it in order to believe. Philosophers see that a more sophisticated interpretation of religion does not invalidate it; rather, it questions its literal interpretation, and they are thus able to reconcile philosophy with religion in this way.
Maimonides is perhaps best known in the Jewish world as a legal thinker, and it is not surprising that issues of jurisprudence should have been raised by him. The basic question of how to justify a law was really revolutionized by him, and it is clearly a crucial question in a religion such as Judaism, which has so many rules and regulations governing everyday life. Saadya had earlier distinguished between laws that have an obvious point in any community (e.g., “do not steal”) and laws that are purely ceremonial and have no general purpose (e.g., the laws of sacrifice in the days of the Temple). The problem with this form of analysis, according to Maimonides, is that if one can distinguish between rational and ritual laws, to do so would raise the question of the point of the ritual laws. If they have no rational point, then presumably anyone capable of using reason need not follow them. But Maimonides argued that every Jew should follow the laws of the Torah, even if one does not understand the point of the particular law that is being followed. He suggests that some of the laws have purposes that go so far back in time that we do not now understand why we should obey them. All the laws were devised by God for some purpose, and we should seek out that purpose as far as we can; but if we cannot understand them, we should just obey them, because they must have a purpose that only God knows and that we do not. This is not religious dogmatism. Maimonides suggests that every law has as its point either to improve us morally or physically and that we need not understand precisely how it does this. For one thing, we may not know enough about ourselves to realize why we need to be changed and how the law is effective in this direction. God could, of course, have changed us instantly into the sorts of creatures we ought to be, but he acts with and not against our nature, providing us with rules and laws that allow us to shape ourselves gradually in the right sort of way. In this way, he allows us to acquire merit and cultivate virtue, although the consequences of this freedom are often dire, of course.
Maimonides constantly criticized anthropomorphism, treating God as though he were a person. The Jewish Bible is full of anthropomorphic passages, where God is described as angry, kind, jealous, and so on, but God is also described as knowing what goes on in the world, as listening to our prayers, and as punishing or rewarding us in the next life for our deeds in this life (although such references are limited in the early Jewish literature). Hence, it is natural for us to think of God as a person. According to Maimonides, we must not think of God in this way; we must not even associate any qualities with him. The only ways in which we are allowed to refer to God is negatively (i.e., by saying what he is not like) and in terms of what we can assume to be his actions. But, actually, Maimonides is being more extreme here than even this statement would suggest, since what he allows us to say aout God is restricted by the general ban on regarding God as anything like us.
Take the Book of Job, for example, in which Job, who we are told right at the beginning is a good man, suffers apparently for no reason. Job complains at some length, and not unreasonably wonders why he is suffering. Maimonides points out that it says in the text that Job is good, not that he is wise. The implication is that if Job were wise, he would not complain. He would not complain, Maimonides says, because he would realize that the relationship he has with God is not like a relationship one has with a person, and so God is not like Job’s father or his friend or his protector. As Maimonides puts it, God is all these things, but not in a way that we can link with what it means to be these things in our experience of everyday life, nor even what we can extrapolate from that life. Maimonides is on pretty solid ground here, especially when Job’s friends suggest that his suffering can be explained in terms of God’s being angry with him or because he brought his sufferings on himself. Maimonides is on pretty solid ground because those friends are eventually criticized by God himself for getting it wrong. The implication is that, as Maimonides says, we should not mistake our relationship with God as like our other relationships.
Let us take another example, this time of prayer. On his view of God’s relationship with us, Maimonides has a real problem with God’s listening to prayer, or even the point of prayer as traditionally understood. For one thing, why should God concern himself with what goes on in the world of generation and corruption? If his mind is filled with changing facts, then that implies that God himself changes and is therefore not constant. Can God really know what goes on in our world, since he is often thought of as only concerning himself with perfect and necessary truths, not the everyday events of the natural and human worlds? The assumption here is that a relationship exists between a knower and the object of his thought; therefore, if the objects of God’s thought are impermanent, the knower must also be impermanent. In any case, how can he listen to our prayers without having a body? He needs to have something to listen with. But if he does not listen to our prayers, why pray? Maimonides was a firm advocate of the strict following of all the rules of Judaism, including prayer. The point of prayer for Maimonides is not to change God’s mind but rather to change us, to make us think about our lives and turn us into better people. Yet the language of prayer does not suggest this conclusion; it implies that God listens to our prayers and may respond to them. Maimonides explains that this version of the truth about prayer is the only one that most people can really understand, since they are not used to contemplating abstract issues such as the nature of prayer. They want a material example of what prayer is all about since they are material creatures and can only really relate to what they think of as material.
This point brings us to what is perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of Maimonides’ notion of prayer, and of religion as a whole, which is that he sees religious practice as being far from fixed. He refers to the fact that in the early years of Judaism, the Jews used to sacrifice to God. When the Temple existed, the sacrifices were a crucial aspect of worship. After the exile from Israel and the destruction of the Temple, prayer came to represent worship, and we should not think that prayer will always be relevant. In the fullness of time, when human beings have become more perfect, it is silent meditation that will be the next stage, and Maimonides referred approvingly to the passages from the Psalms:
Silence is praise to you. (65.2)
and
Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be silent. (4.5)
The only conclusion we can draw from what he says here is that prayer in its traditional form is only a temporary phenomenon. Although Maimonides insists on the strict observance of all the rules and regulations concerning prayer and the rest of halakhah, this is strict observance of rules that have only limited validity. He points out that if we were to vary the rules to suit our ideas of how they should go, then we would change everything, and perhaps do nothing. We can always find some reason for not obeying the letter of the law, just as we can always find some reason for varying the law and, finally, for abandoning the law altogether. For example, we may decide that we will not say a particular prayer because it is inconvenient to do so; we may change the prayer by shortening it; finally, our decisions could lead us to abandon the prayer altogether. He obviously sees both humanity and the Jewish community in particular as engaged in a process of gradual spiritual growth. According to this view, God is initially seen as a material person; later on, he is seen as only like a person; finally, he is not associated with any humanlike qualities at all. It is this purest form of contemplation of the divine at which our ordinary religious practices are unwittingly directed. The obvious question to raise is why not change our practices now to bring them closer to what Maimonides sees as the end point? The answer he would give is that we need to go through various stages and that we do not know when the right time is to change our practices. This knowledge is something known only to God, and he has provided us with rules of behavior that can set us off in the right direction.
Maimonides did not have a decisive impact on the debate as to the existence of principles of Judaism. Maimonides thought there were, and he formulated a set of principles that represent what might be regarded as the axioms of Judaism, that is, what must be believed if one were a Jew. It is natural to think that a religion must have basic principles, since otherwise how could one define it or even describe it? But Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) argued plausibly that if we think of Judaism as having principles, then it is an easy step to distinguish the principles and the less significant facts about the religion, and even to choose to obey the former and be rather casual about the latter. Yet as Abravanel points out, the Jewish Bible does not distinguish between principles and minor rules; it discusses everything as though it were all of equal significance, and some of the Bible is of very little apparent relevance to anything of significance. Unless we assume that it is all important, we would otherwise have no reason to study it all, as Jews are so commanded. So Abravanel concludes that the project of distinguishing between the roots and the branches of Judaism is misguided.
After Maimonides’ death, the Jewish community saw a huge controversy over his work, and large-scale opposition took place to attack and defend his views. Maimonideanism tended to be linked with Averroism, the thought of the Islamic philosopher ibn Rushd (Averroes), who came from the same city as Maimonides, Cordoba, and who lived at the same time. Averroism is the doctrine that religion and philosophy are two different paths to the same truth, with the implication that philosophy is superior to religion. It also argued that the world is eternal and that individual immortality does not exist.
Maimonides had an immense effect on Jewish philosophy, an influence that persists today. After his death, Jewish philosophy moved in roughly three directions. A significant number of thinkers continued with his sort of approach, arguing that we can reconcile Jerusalem with Athens (i.e., religion with philosophy) by interpeting religion in a philosophical kind of way. Certain philosophers, however, strongly opposed his thesis. Hasdai Crescas is the outstanding thinker here, based on what were seen as problems in Aristotelianism itself. Finally, a school of mystical thought called kabbalah came to have many adherents, and it opposed the intellectualistic interpretation of scripture, which it eventually replaced with a more personal and ascetic approach. The kabbalists advocated a more personal relationship to God and argued that reason is limited in what it can reveal to us of the truth about that relationship. All these schools of thought can be considered philosophical since their views are thoroughly imbued with philosophical principles, even when they argue against particular theoretical positions. With some truth, the medieval period is often called the golden age of Jewish philosophy because it was then that the discipline really flourished in all its variety and that the main lines of disputation were established.
Maimonides has an interesting connection with kabbalah. Aristotle is not the sort of thinker one would think would approve of mysticism, which is a statement one would at first also say about Maimonides. He had an Aristotelian distaste for forms of explanation that neither were natural nor fell into some clear theological category. Yet his son and grandson became influential mystics, and his Guide was used for some time by Sufis, among whom it was regarded as an important aid to meditation and spiritual enlightenment. Some of Maimonides’ statements could be taken in a mystical way, but there is no way of seriously regarding him as a kabbalist. One cannot really talk about kabbalistic philosophy as though it were just one form of thought; it comprises at least three main divisions here. They can be distinguished along their lines of their differing approaches to the nature of devekut, or union with God. One view is broadly Aristotelian: It sees devekut as coming about during the act of knowing precisely where the knower and the known become the same. The thoughts of the individual become lost in the contemplation of the deity. This philosophy is to be contrasted with a form of devekut that is largely practical and based on action, in particular, the fulfilling of the commandments of the Jewish religion, the mitzvot. Through action, the break between the divine and the human worlds is bridged, to a degree, and prayer can obviously be found a large place in this process. Finally, Neoplatonic theory states that meditation, especially through prayer, will allow us to reunite with the source of our being, with the divine realm. It is difficult to know how philosophical kabbalah is, since it is often contemptuous of formal philosophy itself; however, without a doubt, a lot of philosophy rests in many of its arguments and presuppositions.
We reach the modern period when we come to Spinoza, who is sometimes called the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns. He had a troubled relationship with the Jewish community in the Netherlands, being excommunicated by them in 1656. He certainly rejected Judaism in his writings, yet his work is impossible to divorce from Jewish philosophy. He is obviously very dependent on the work of Maimonides, and he takes the former to his logical conclusion by arguing that the distinction between God and nature is merely a certain way of talking about the same thing. For Spinoza, miracles are literally inconceivable since the structure of the world and its nature is necessary, so something that overturns that order would be literally impossible. Spinoza pushes the attack on anthropomorphism as far as it will go, and he comes to the conclusion that any mode of description for the deity must abandon the personal. What got Spinoza into difficulties with the local Jewish community was his argument that the Bible is neither literally true nor written by God. In his metaphysics, there is literally no room for a God who watches, who creates, and who rewards and punishes. Such a God would be far too much like us to be a feasible God, according to Spinoza. It is not difficult to see how this approach continues the Maimonidean project. In the same way that Maimonides based many of his important principles on Aristotle, Spinoza was heavily dependent on Descartes. Both Jewish thinkers had an agenda that was firmly part of the curriculum of their times, but both were also deeply involved with Jewish issues and controversies.
Despite the influence of Maimonides, Spinoza clearly was unhappy with the former’s view of creation, which makes this event thoroughly unconnected with anything except the will of God. This position makes it arbitrary, according to Spinoza, and God could not be thought of as the author of arbitrary actions. Yet the medieval use of the notion of emanation to explain creation is also rejected by Spinoza since it tries to link spirit and matter in ways that fail. How exactly does it fail? The main problem is that if the spiritual world from which emanation stems is radically distinct from the material world where it eventually ends up, then we need some explanation as to how one thing can eventually become something entirely distinct in nature from it. This basic issue led Spinoza to differentiate his approach to philosophy from that of Descartes, who shared what Spinoza took to be the basically flawed theory of dualism, the theory that the world could be basically analyzed in terms of two very different categories of substance. Spinoza then ends up with the expression Deus sive natura, “God or nature,” following the logic of his refusal to see God as outside the universe that he created.
Spinoza’s theory is certainly monistic, stressing the oneness of everything, but that does not necessarily mean that distinctions cannot be made within the context of this unity. We are mainly concerned with preserving ourselves, he suggests, and we regard what is in the interests of such self-preservation as good and what is hostile to it as bad. In fact, he argues that this statement is precisely what good and bad means. Thinking about moral concepts in this naturalistic way has its advantages, he suggests. The more abstract we make our ideas, the more we can understand that what is happening to us takes place within a wider context; thus, the more control we have of what happens to us. This greater control is not in the sense of actually affecting more of what takes place, since to do so is part and parcel of the inevitable flow of causes and effects. The control results in the approach we adopt to our emotions, since we can regard our lives relatively dispassionately. This objective point of view means that we can form increasingly adequate ideas about how what is happening to us falls into a much larger and necessary system. Real freedom is not so much being able to do what we want to do without hindrance, but rather it is understanding what is happening to us when we are affected by our emotions and external forces. Spinoza is often critical of the Jewish Bible when taken literally, in that it describes a world in which we are at the mercy of an overwhelming deity and where it is appropriate to employ emotions in deciding how to act. The reverse of both these theses is the case. The more we are in control of our emotions, the freer we are, and it is not a personal God who causes things to happen in the world, but the system of causality.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) adhered to the principles of the European Enlightenment project. He defended Judaism before its detractors, arguing that it was an especially enlightened faith and so deserving of respect and toleration. He had to follow a different strategy when presenting the desirability of joining mainstream European society to the Jewish community, who were often hesitant about abandoning their isolated status. Many Jews were worried that once they joined normal European society, it would represent the end of Judaism, since many would convert to Christianity given the powerful social and intellectual reasons for doing so. Those in favor of conversion argued that since all the main religions encouraged belief in the same divine being, it hardly matters which faith one adopts, and so one might as well adopt the major and most socially accepted faith. Mendelssohn had to argue that Judaism was just as rational as any other faith and so should be tolerated; however, at the same time, it was uniquely successful as a religion and so should not be discarded. As one might imagine, this is a difficult dual strategy to follow, and many Jews did enter into gentile society through conversion.
This debate as to whether Jews should remain Jews continued through the next two centuries. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) combined a strong commitment to Kant, Judaism, and the German Empire. He was very much the source of two of the most exciting Jewish intellectual figures of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and Martin Buber (1878–1965). Rosenzweig employed the methodology of Hegelianism to develop an intriguing account of how Judaism fits into modernity, while Buber was committed to a form of existentialism in his account of human relationships and how they should be structured. It is around this time that an issue unique to Jewish philosophy came into prominence, that of Zionism. Cohen and Rosenzweig were antagonistic to the idea of a Jewish national home. They saw Judaism as a faith that is compatible with life in a non-Jewish civil society. Buber developed a rather romantic notion of community that was linked with his attachment to an idea that he formed of Hasidism, an East European movement that originated in an atmosphere of mysticism and pietism.
Buber and Rosenzweig engaged in a debate that was to become very important in modern times, the debate about the significance of Jewish tradition. In nineteenth-century Germany, the Reform movement began, and it was a religious reform organization that argued that Judaism should be made more modern in its practices and language. Observant Jews obey a vast panoply of rules and laws; in fact, there are taken to be 613 mentioned in the Torah but far more as a result of later discussions and rulings. The Reform movement suggested cutting through many of these legalistic practices and returning to a more authentic and also more modern form of the religion. One novel development was that they encouraged the use of secular languages in their services. They certainly criticized the length and repetitivenss of traditional prayer, as well as the mass of legal restrictions on Jewish behavior.
Buber had been brought up to be observant, and he became critical of orthodoxy. He argued that we should only obey rules if we can feel that they have been communicated to us personally, that is, not as an impersonal law but as a personal message from someone with whom we are very close. So, if God were to address us as individuals with the request that we observe a particular Jewish regulation, Buber would accept that regulation as one to be followed. However, he sees Jewish law as not having this form, but rather as being a cold, impersonal structure to which we can subject ourselves. To do so, however, is to become part of an I–It structure, or at the very best an I–You relationship. What religions should be about, Buber argues, is an I–Thou relationship, playing here on the fact that in German there are two words for the second person singular, one impersonal (Sie/You) and one familiar (Du/Thou). From an existentialist point of view, serious problems reside in acting on the authority of an impersonal principle or being, since to do so is to abrogate our freedom and deny our responsibility.
Rosenzweig, by contrast with Buber, was brought up to be nonobservant, and he became increasingly sympathetic to orthodoxy. Rosenzweig wondered why Buber could not find in traditional Judaism an authentic form of Jewish life. He accepts that halakhah could be seen as a powerful and overwhelming system of authority to which followers must individually subject themselves and that this is problematic. But it need not be seen like this. It could be argued that the rules establish a form of Jewish life that we adopt perfectly freely and that, as a consequence, links us with our ancestors. A law that is imposed on us would be objectionable, but within the context of modernity, no such laws of religion exist. We are free to obey the rules of our faith, to vary those rules, or even, as so many did, to abandon the faith altogether. Rosenzweig himself was on the point at one stage of becoming a Christian, feeling that the assimilated lifestyle of his parents represented a form of Jewish life that was superficial. If one could not make a real commitment to Judaism, Rosenzweig felt, then one might as well convert to Christianity because such conversion would at least represent a genuine commitment and choice. It was only his introduction to an orthodox Jewish synagogue service that prevented him from converting, or so we are told, since it revealed to him the scope for a genuine relationship with Judaism. He understood why Buber felt that such a relationship does not have to be based on orthodoxy, but he argued that it could be.
The other issue that became very significant in Jewish philosophy is that of the Holocaust. The murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, who stemmed from the civilization so admired by Cohen and many other Jewish thinkers, led many Jewish philosophers to ask radical questions. Was the Holocaust unique? That is, was it a disaster similar to a lot of other disasters to affect the Jewish people, albeit on a larger scale, or was it something new? Was the disaster a specifically Jewish disaster, or were other groups in the past subjected to similar sorts of treatment? The significance of the uniqueness question was felt to be that if the Holocaust were just one of many previous persecutions and massacres, then it would not call for an especially different philosophical treatment as compared with existing discussions of theodicy and Jewish nationality. If it were an entirely new phenomenon, then it might call for entirely new explanations, such as that it indicates the death of God (Rubenstein), the importance of remaining Jewish (Fackenheim), or the justification of the existence of the state of Israel (Hartman).
An issue that has affected several religions during modern times is the status of women, which has led to interesting debates in Judaism. In traditional Judaism, most of the major roles in prayer and communal life were undertaken by men, and the Jewish Bible itself is of course a text in which men figure far more than women. The major source of Jewish rules of behavior is the Talmud. This text is written exclusively by men, and many have suggested that its content reflects this authorship, in particular its emphasis on laws of purity. Now, some feminist philosophers have argued that Judaism needs to establish a new and deeper role for women, and to do so will require a reinterpretation of many traditional rules and biblical passages. Some philosophers have tried to carry out such a change of interpretation, finding a more central role for women and arguing for the creation of new prayers and laws. They have argued that Judaism is in fact perfectly feasible as a religion for women, but patriarchy in the past has hidden the significant role that women have played. Others have suggested that the problems are more central and that changing some of the texts and rules is superficial. What is then required is a real attempt to make women’s silence throughout the history of Judaism more audible, to identify a form of Judaism that genuinely establishes equal roles for men and women. The sorts of issues that arise here are obviously both complex and interesting. Whether the religion can survive such a reexamination and reconstitution waits to be seen.
Twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995) is fascinated by the links between Jewish and general philosophy, which he likens to speaking Hebrew and speaking Greek. Before World War II, Levinas was a well-known phenomenologist who did not discuss any specifically Jewish issues. But after the experience of the war and the fate of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, he became much more interested in combining his philosophy with aspects of Jewish traditional literature. In his later work, he does not really show much interest in previous Jewish philosophy; rather, his interests lie in the Talmud and halakhah, and he derives from these very specific cultural texts entirely universal conclusions. Levinas overturns the Heideggerian approach to philosophy, for Heidegger argued that the first question in philosophy deals with the nature of being. Heidegger also very much valued solitude and was suspicious of society. Levinas argued that the first question one should ask is who is the other for whom I have responsibility. That is, the first question is moral, and for Levinas that reveals that we are basically who we are because of our links with other people, links that we may try to ignore or sever but that nonetheless define us utterly. Along with this position, he constructs a doctrine according to which our responsibility for others is literally without limit, which he thinks follows from his point that we are defined by our morality.
Are there any general arguments or issues that have run throughout Jewish philosophy? One answer is no, that the variety of arguments and issues has generally been closely linked with the nature of philosophy in the host community. But it is useful to point to three themes that do occur in much of what might be called Jewish philosophy: technique, theological realism, and the “why be Jewish?” debate.
One issue of constant fascination is “Why do philosophy at all, and how should it be done?” After all, one might argue that if one were a member of a particular religious community, then that participation would settle the theoretical issues that arose and would therefore be sufficient for those who were concerned with theory. If philosophy is to become acceptable, what is necessary is some account of how it is linked with the religious material, and in medieval Judaism, there were many stories of Plato’s learning philosophy from Abraham and Moses! How seriously these stories were taken, one does not know, but the point behind them is that the philosophers go about a thinking process similar to those of prophets and other religious authorities. Philosophy should therefore not be rejected by the religious.
Yet philosophers will point out that philosophy is very different from Talmud, though the latter is often abstract and rigorous as an intellectual pursuit. Talmud connects arguments and issues in a variety of ways, often relying on rather weak logical connections and placing great reliance on who said what. The Talmud does not on the whole solve issues; it raises them and leaves it to the reader to resolve them. Such a combination of analogy, allusion, repetition, and so on certainly does employ logic, but not in the clear way approved of by philosophers; therefore, it is clear that Talmud does not produce entirely valid and general conclusions. In fact, Jewish writings form a vast range and need to be treated as different from one another.
What is of major importance is the conclusion that philosophy comprises many different kinds of text, and so different techniques need to be applied to assess them. It implies that philosophers have a range of ways of expressing the truth and that it is only if one understands the range that one will understand that truth. This point was emphasized by Aristotle and adapted to Islamic philosophy by al-Fārābī, whose works were much admired by Jewish philosophers, especially by Maimonides. When Maimonides discusses the terms in the Torah that he finds problematic and then analyzes them in accordance with his theory of naturalism, he has to explain why the Torah uses words that imply that God is a person and that he is literally an agent. He suggests that these different forms of expression are there to represent truths vividly to an audience that on the whole is not able to appreciate those truths unless they are represented imaginatively and figuratively. There is nothing wrong with presenting the truths in this way; in fact, this is on the contrary the right way to present them to a general audience. It follows that the language in the prayer book (via commentators in the rabbinic literature) replicates this sort of language, although often with greater sophistication; thus, the more one studies it, the more one appreciates the variety that one finds within it. To do so enables the intelligent reader to ask questions about what is not said as well as about what is said. For example, Maimonides thinks it is significant that in the Book of Job, Job himself is never called “wise,” which Maimonides argues is a signal to readers that he is not taken to be wise, and so his early complaints are to be seen as a reflection of his lack of wisdom. The question then arises, if Job is to be seen as not wise, why did not the text make this point clear? Perhaps because his words are not to be seen as so obviously foolish that they are not worth considering. They are worth thinking about like everything else in the Bible, but the more alert reader will understand that the intelligence of Job’s critique of divine justice masks the underlying shallowness of his presupposition that God’s justice must replicate our notion of justice. This approach to the text, whatever one thinks about its credibility in this particular instance, has radical implications for how to look at texts as a whole. It was not present in any definite way before Maimonides, but it became a firm part of the agenda of Jewish philosophy ever since his works became well known and influential.
Maimonides also played a decisive role in putting the topic of realism firmly on the philosophical and rabbinic agenda. He was the first Jewish philosopher to grasp enthusiastically the significance of philosophy as part of an understanding of religion. Once one appreciates the role of philosophy, he argues, the appropriate understanding of religious claims is unproblematic and must therefore be investigated and resolved in accordance with intellectual methods. The nature of the facts as described by religion is not important, yet the Torah itself does not display much doubt about the truth of the claim of realism; on the contrary, it constantly reiterates the literal truth of what it describes. First of all, it is the rabbinic commentaries and then the philosophers who start to investigate what these claims actually mean, who point to apparent inconsistencies and who ask for explanations of the precise formulation of the religious texts. This inquiry is obviously linked to the first problem on the philosophical agenda, the discussion of different kinds of literary expression in the Torah, but the realism issue was much discussed even before Maimonides took such control of the discipline. One tends to link the issue with him because it was only his Guide and other related works that provided Jewish philosophy with the techniques to deal with the issue in a decisive sort of way. Maimonides did set off the debate in a far more nuanced manner than before, and it has remained ever since firmly part of the Jewish intellectual curriculum. One might even say that it is not mere chance that such a large proportion of the protagonists of postmodernism and deconstructionism are Jewish. This follows directly from the longstanding critique of theological realism.
This issue really resonated with the lives of all Jews during the Middle Ages and even more so today when assimilation rather than conversion is such an important issue. In the past, Jews were under sustained pressure to convert, by both Muslims and Christians; yet even after conversion, their loyalty to their new faith remained suspect for some time in Christian Europe. Most Jews probably made their decision on purely prudential grounds (if they converted) or to remain within the faith with which they were familiar (if they did not). Argument played little part in the decision, but argument was undoubtedly important for the intellectual elite in the community who were troubled not only by the strength of competing faiths but also by the apparent conceptual difficulties of traditional religion (especially when it came into apparent conflict with modernity) with science and philosophy. The attack on realism by Maimonides and many subsequent thinkers makes the conversion/assimilation question harder to resist, in some ways, given that one is no longer allowed to say that one religion is better than another because it is true or more true. Since a level of reality on which Judaism rests cannot be accepted at face value by Maimonides and his followers, it seems that the religion is based on nothing at all. The conclusion adopted by many Jews has been to abandon Judaism, sometimes in order to adopt an alternative faith that is more sure of its factual basis. Maimonides did not, of course, doubt that any of the facts described in the Bible were not actually true. The important question for him and for much Jewish philosophy is not whether they are true but how they are true, and this question clearly calls for sophisticated analysis and debate—a request that Jewish philosophy has answered over the last two millennia and continues to do so today.
With the exception of Leaman’s Moses Maimonides, passages from all of the following texts are found in The Jewish Philosophy Reader (JRP), edited by Frank, Leaman, and Manekin (2000).
Abravanel, Isaac. Principles of Faith. Translated by M. Kellner. Oxford: Littmann Library, 1982.
Buber, Martin. After Mamre: Essays in Religion. Translated by G. Hort. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1946.
Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by S. Kaplan. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1972.
Fackenheim, Emil. The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-Reading. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
Frank, Daniel, and Oliver Leaman, eds. History of Jewish Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997.
Frank, Daniel, Oliver Leaman, and Charles Manekin, eds. The Jewish Philosophy Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
Hartman, David. “The Challenge of Modern Israel,” reprinted in JPR, 557–67.
Leaman, Oliver. Moses Maimonides. Richmond: Curzon, 1997.
. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by A. Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Maimonides, Moses. Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by S. Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem. Translated by A. Arkush. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.
Philo. On the Creaion of the World. Translated by F. Colson and G. Whitaker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929.
Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Translated by W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Saadya, Gaon. The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs. Translated by A. Altmann. Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1960.
Spinoza, Baruch. A Spinoza Reader. Translated by E. Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Rubenstein, Richard. After Auschwitz. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1992.