3 - Philosophy and Jewish Society in the Late Middle Ages

Summary

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY and original thought were not native enterprises for the Jews in medieval Christian Europe. As is well known, philosophy entered medieval Jewish culture in the Islamic East and spread from there to Muslim Spain and north Africa, stimulated by the achievements of Muslim philosopher-theologians and the need to defend Judaism in intellectually respectable terms. At this time, the small Jewish communities of Christian Europe cultivated an educational curriculum and a cultural agenda focused almost entirely on traditional Jewish texts: the Bible, the rabbinic classics of Talmud and Midrash, and the liturgy. The rapid penetration of philosophical study into Christian Europe—primarily southern France, Christian Spain, and Italy—thus entailed a transformation with powerful implications for Jewish culture and society. As we shall see, these communities were racked more than once by fierce conflicts over the legitimacy of philosophy as a Jewish engagement, conflicts that exposed and accentuated fundamental differences between Jews even though they may have prayed the same prayers in the same synagogues.

How did this philosophical enterprise establish itself in Jewish societies that were not originally predisposed towards it, and how did it flourish? Let us begin with a quick survey of the scholarly literature. The modern academic investigation of Jewish philosophy produced in Christian Europe from the late twelfth to the fifteenth century (or, to use a more internal framework, between the Almohad invasion ending Jewish life in Muslim Spain and the Expulsion ending Jewish life on the Iberian peninsula) has followed several well-worn paths.

The first continues the approach used for Jewish philosophy in its classical, Islamic period. It is essentially a history of ideas, based on a rigorous philological and conceptual analysis of philosophical texts. The great philosophical problems of the medieval tradition—the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God; the creation of the world and the order of being within it; the nature of the human soul; the meaning of revelation and prophecy; freedom of the will, and so forth—are traced in the works of Jewish thinkers to detect their sources and determine where innovation may be found. The impact of Maimonides and the influence of Arabic philosophers, especially Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Averroës (Ibn Rushd), are demonstrated and assessed. Evidence for the influence of Christian scholasticism is duly noted.