Bringing Philo Home: Responses to Harry A. Wolfson’s Philo (1947) in the Aftermath of World War II

Abstract

In 1947 Harry Austryn Wolfson published his massive and revisionary Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With the book, Wolfson aimed at proving that Philo was an innovative and highly influential philosopher—by no means an isolated Jew of no consequence to the history of philosophy. As becomes clear from numerous letters written to Wolfson on the occasion of the publication of the book and stored at the Harvard University Archives, for Jewish readers Wolfson’s proposed rehabilitation of Philo could provide a point of orientation. It served as a source of comfort and of pride in the post-war years. While the main thesis of Wolfson’s book, Philo as the precursor of medieval philosophy, was rejected by most scholars of Philo and ancient philosophy, the letters and notes discussed in this article show that much more was at stake than a purely academic discussion.

Introduction

In 1947 Harry Austryn Wolfson, Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, published his grand study on Philo of Alexandria: two volumes amounting to a thousand pages. The simple main title, Philo, is followed by a telling and far-reaching subtitle: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.¹ Wolfson’s thesis in the work is as straightforward as it is far-reaching: Philo, who lived approximately from 20 BCE to 50 CE, was not just a Jewish-Hellenistic exegete and philosopher who was enthusiastically welcomed (and transmitted) by early Christian readers, but much more than that; with Philo began, according to Wolfson, “a fundamentally new period in the history of philosophy.”² For Wolfson, Philo represents the paradigm of what was to become the “synthetic mediaeval philosopher.” Certainly influenced by but essentially different from Greek philosophers, Philo represents a new kind of philosophy. The adherents of this new philosophy believe “in one infallible source of truth, and that is revelation, and that revelation is embodied in Scripture, be it Old Testament or New Testament or Koran.”³ With the introduction of Scripture as a major (if not the) point of reference, Philo introduced something essentially different, something that Wolfson at the end of his study calls the “Philonic revolution,” and claims lasted throughout the Middle Ages.⁴ That new philosophy as a “handmaid of Scripture,” ushered in by Philo, came to an end in the seventeenth century with a new revolt by another Jew, the Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza on whose ethics Wolfson had published a monograph in 1934.⁵ As a matter of fact, Wolfson’s Philo was part of a larger project: a portrait of the longue durée of Jewish philosophy or rather of philosophy in general, ranging from classical Greek philosophy down to Spinoza. For Wolfson, Spinoza stands at the other end of the spectrum. By removing Scripture from philosophy, with his “denial of revelation,” Spinoza “pulled down,” as it were, the philosophy that Philo had “built up.”⁶ Wolfson constructed a powerful argument (against Hegel who subordinated Jewish and Muslim philosophers to Christian ones⁷) in order to prove that Philo was by no means an isolated Jew of no consequence to the later history of philosophy. According to Wolfson, Philo was innovative, consistent, and influential. In his words:

Philo will emerge from our study as a philosopher in the grand manner, not a mere dabbler in philosophy. He did have the power of intellect to be able to reject the theories of other philosophers and to strike out a new and hitherto unknown path for himself. He is to be given credit for originality in all the problems dealt with by him, for in this particular set of problems he was the originator of every fundamental concept which continued to be discussed thereafter throughout the history of philosophy.⁸

Wolfson wanted to bring Philo back to life—and launched a gigantic resurrection operation. He promulgated the grand importance of a Jewish philosopher who hitherto had often been overlooked. When the volumes were published in 1947 (two years after World War II), they were widely noticed and made an impression far beyond a small group of specialists. As we shall see, the responses ranged from enthusiastic endorsement to outright rejection. In this article, I am interested in the wider contexts of these reactions. What exactly was at stake for the various respondents to Wolfson’s Philo in the late 1940s?

That his book quickly reached a wide audience was in large part the result of Wolfson’s own efforts. With the help of Harvard University Press he made sure that copies of Philo were sent out to a great number of scholars, rabbis, and libraries in the United States, Europe, and Palestine. In handwritten notes entitled “Copies of Philo mailed [1947],” Wolfson lists around 130 addressees (mainly scholars as well as some libraries). Wolfson kept the letters and thank-you notes sent to him by those who had received copies of his book. The letters are kept at the Harvard University Archives and, so far, have not been used for a better understanding of what Wolfson’s Philo triggered at the time and what the book meant to him.⁹ Together with the reviews published in newspapers and journals, these notes and letters allow for firsthand insights into the sensibilities around a seemingly harmless topic: the place of Philo of Alexandria in the history of philosophy.

A biographical sketch may be in order: Harry (Zvi Hirsh) Austryn Wolfson was born in 1887 in Ostrin, Lithuania, and died in 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a young man, he studied Talmud at the renowned Slobodka Yeshiva. In 1903, he arrived together with his family in the United States. After high school he successfully applied for a scholarship to Harvard where he received his MA in 1912. With the help of a traveling fellowship, he spent the next two years pursuing research on medieval Hebrew manuscripts at a number of libraries in Europe. That work prepared him for what was to become his dissertation at Harvard on “Crescas on the problems of infinity and divine attributes.” He received his PhD in 1915. Wolfson started teaching at Harvard, and in 1925 became the first Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Philosophy. He was the first to hold a chair entirely devoted to Jewish Studies in the United States and stayed at Harvard throughout his life.¹⁰

Early on, Wolfson was involved in the Zionist movement: born “into a family of Hebraists and Zionists,”¹¹ during his time as a young student at the Slobodka Yeshiva he was active in the local Zionist movement and became the editor of a Hebrew journal (“Ha-Zeman”).¹² The sociologist Lewis Feuer describes Wolfson’s Zionist loyalties in his recollections as “always strong, with a nationalistic bent; he admired the Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, at a time when many American Zionists were expressing themselves bitterly against the latter.”¹³ Wolfson’s love for the Hebrew language remained strong throughout his life. As a student at Harvard, he wrote poems in Hebrew.¹⁴ In 1959, in a letter to David Ben Gurion, Wolfson calls the Hebrew language “a symbol of its [Israel’s] external singularity and internal vitality.”¹⁵ Remarkably, however, Wolfson never visited Israel.¹⁶ Early in his career, in 1926, he turned down an offer for a permanent appointment at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.¹⁷

Wolfson’s study on Philo of Alexandria is without doubt a major achievement in Philonic scholarship. It is impressively learned and remains until today by far the most detailed monograph on Philo’s philosophical and theological thinking. It is a treasure of insights covering questions of theology, philosophy, ethics, and political theory. However, in a number of respects the book is also highly problematic.¹⁸ Throughout his study, Wolfson shows a strong tendency to resolve all inconsistencies in Philo, an approach doomed to failure in light of Philo’s very diverse discussions on a variety of themes. This shortcoming in Wolfson’s work is, to a large extent, the result of a methodological approach which Wolfson called the “hypothetico-deductive method of text-study.” With the help of this method, which Wolfson labeled as “Talmudic” and which was already at the core of his books on Crescas and Spinoza, he aimed at uncovering the logical chain of reasoning—free of contradictions—which led to Philo’s philosophy.¹⁹ Moreover, his grandiose interpretation of Philo as the spiritual founder of all of medieval philosophy needs to be qualified as exaggerated. Wolfson overreacted to a widespread image of Philo at the time: a Jewish philosopher (if a real Jew and if a philosopher at all) who simply collected what was already around, a mediocre eclectic.²⁰ Wolfson’s Philo is the opposite: innovative, lively, and influential.

The work of Philo has only survived due to the early and intense interest of Christian readers, starting with Clement of Alexandria around 200 CE. Christians transmitted, but to some extent also colonized Philo. He became a “church father honoris causa.”²¹ Wolfson tried to bring Philo back both into Jewish as well as general philosophy.

It needs to be noted that Wolfson’s thesis was not exactly a creatio ex nihilo. From the mid-nineteenth century on, when Hellenistic Judaism became a topic in Wissenschaft des Judentums, some scholars and rabbis such as Maurice Wolff and Manuel Joel promoted Philo as an important Jewish voice.²² As Martin Ritter has shown, some of Manuel Joel’s arguments anticipate Wolfson quite a bit: already Joel presents Philo as a systematic and highly influential philosopher. Joel, too, places him in relation to Spinoza and asks the question which became fundamental in Wolfson’ study: what is new in Philo (“Was ist das Neue, das Originelle in Philo’s Lehre”)?²³ There is no doubt, though, that Wolfson with his massive Philo went far beyond his predecessors whose studies were much more limited in scope.

Letters and Notes in Response to Wolfson’s Philo

To enter an archive and read through letters that were not meant to be seen by the great public can make one feel somewhat uncomfortable. It may even be seen as an intrusion into the privacy of a past generation of scholars. At the same time, letters are an extremely valuable source for reconstructing a scholar’s biography. In the case of Harry Wolfson, it is probably safe to say that he would not have minded us reading through the letters and notes (or most of them) that he received on the occasion of the publication of his Philo between the summer of 1947 and the summer of 1948. Many of the recipients of the two volumes reacted: some limited themselves to brief thank-you-notes, others wrote actual letters. Most letters are written in English, some in Hebrew, and a few in German. Harry Starr, the president of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, which supported the publication of Wolfson’s Philo with a grant, wrote on 28 November 1947, in a letter to Jacob Billikopf (a prominent figure in Jewish philanthropy and social work): “If you ever get up to Cambridge, make Harry Wolfson show you some of the letters he received about this work from the greatest names in philosophy and Semitics.”²⁴ It seems that Wolfson was proud of the responses he received to the well-orchestrated promotion of his book.²⁵ I will first discuss positive (if not enthusiastic) Jewish responses, then mixed and critical ones from both Jews and non-Jews. As will become clear, often much more was at stake than a purely academic discussion.

Rehabilitating the Jewish Philo

Most of the letters, articles, and notes in the Philo papers at the Wolfson archive at Harvard University are positive appraisals of the book. Of course, many of them are thank-you letters, and their authors were eager to show their gratitude for having received a free copy of the book. However, the excitement about Wolfson’s Philo was often more than a gesture: it is especially tangible in letters from Jewish scholars and rabbis living in the United States. Many praised Wolfson for his fresh, Jewish interpretation of Philo. Leo Schwarz, Wolfson’s biographer, writes to him: “as in your previous volumes you have given Jewish philosophy a habitation and a name.”²⁶ Especially rabbis from Reform communities enthusiastically endorsed Philo’s return to Judaism: “you have made a real Jew of Philo,” writes Rabbi Felix A. Levy, a Reform rabbi in Chicago.²⁷ Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon, professor of Jewish theology at the Hebrew Union College and a leader of the Reform movement, expresses in his letter his deep gratitude to Wolfson for placing Philo at the “headwaters of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophic streams,” because, so far, Philo had “not received a square deal.”²⁸ Ralph Marcus, a friend of Wolfson’s and himself a great specialist of Hellenistic Judaism, speaks of a “rehabilitation of Philo.”²⁹

Particularly enthusiastic are the reactions of some of the scholars who write to Wolfson in Hebrew: Shalom Spiegel, Professor of medieval Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of Hebrew Reborn (1930), writes to Wolfson that he received the volumes on the evening of Yom Kippur and that he could not stop reading. Wolfson, Spiegel writes, is Philo’s redeemer () “who returned him to his people and to the inheritance of his ancestors and also brought him back to the significance he deserves given his influence in the history of philosophy.”³⁰ Chaim Tchernowitz, a fervent Zionist who, like Wolfson, was first trained in a Lithuanian yeshiva and then later became a professor of Talmud and Rabbinic literature at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, uses very similar language: he is grateful to Wolfson because he “restored the former Jewish glory that the Goyim had taken from Philo and his name.”³¹ Tchernowitz shows great sympathy for Wolfson’s take on rabbinic parallels in Philo: there must have been an exchange between Alexandria and the rabbinic movement. If Philo had written his oeuvre in Hebrew, Tchernowitz continues, there would now be a “Midrash Alexandria,” a “Rabbi Yedidyah” (the Hebrew name for Philo since Azariah de’ Rossi) or maybe even a third Talmud, in addition to the Bavli and the Yerushalmi, a “Talmud Alexandria.” However, Philo would not have deserved that, Tchernowitz writes to Wolfson, because Philo “sinned” by not writing his tractates in Hebrew (and Wolfson, too, Tchernowitz adds, should have written his book in Hebrew!³²). Another reaction full of excitement came from Harry Blumberg, who at the time taught Hebrew at the James Monroe High School in New York and published several Hebrew textbooks.³³ In his letter, written in Hebrew, Blumberg shows his deep gratitude to Wolfson for having corrected the “misconceptions and prejudices of scholars such as Ziegert and Goodenough (…) who did not refrain from humiliating the value of Philo and the Jews in Alexandria.”³⁴

To these Jewish scholars, more important than Wolfson’s main thesis (Philo as a predecessor for medieval thought) was that Wolfson restored Philo’s Judaism. He brought Philo home. And he brought him much closer to the world of the rabbis and to the Hebrew language. According to Wolfson, Philo knew Hebrew. True, it is obvious that Philo used the Greek text of the Bible in his exegetical work, but that is because he wrote for a Greek readership: “Writing in Greek for Greek readers, he would naturally quote the translation familiar to his readers, even though his knowledge of Hebrew was such that he could himself without too much effort provide his own translation.”³⁵ With this Wolfson distanced himself from scholars such as Isaak Heinemann (see below) according to whom Philo did not know Hebrew. Especially in light of the numerous Hebrew etymologies in his exegesis, Wolfson believed that “the burden of proof is upon those who would deny that he [Philo] possessed such a knowledge [of Hebrew].”³⁶ According to Wolfson, Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism were by no means two worlds apart. Rather, the Alexandrian Jewish community endorsed “the dominant element” which came from Palestine and which “ultimately gave rise to Pharisaism.”³⁷ To readers such as Chaim Tchernowitz and Shalom Spiegel, both promoters of the Hebrew language, Wolfson’s portrait of Philo as being in an intense exchange with rabbinic thinking in Palestine was very attractive indeed, a treat for the Jewish high holidays in 1947 when the book came out. Two years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, Wolfson’s grand work could be read as proof of a strong and lively Jewish presence in intellectual history. As noted before, Wolfson was not the first to stress the importance of Philo in both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual history. Nor was he the first to situate Philo within a larger Judaism that included the rabbinic movement. Prior to Wolfson, Samuel Belkin, who was Wolfson’s student at Harvard, had already argued in his Philo and the Oral Law, that Philo had been considerably influenced by rabbinic, that is Palestinian, Judaism. Belkin, too, aimed at stressing Philo’s Jewish identity: “Philo has been studied with great interest, but Judaeus has been left unnoticed.”³⁸ But the scope of Belkin’s study, which grew out of a Brown University dissertation, was much more confined and, in comparison with the reception of Wolfson’s Philo, caused no commotion.³⁹

In the Shadow of World War II

Wolfson’s goal was to rehabilitate Philo, to secure his place in the library of Jewish philosophy. In the light of his greater history of philosophy, Wolfson’s “real critical thrust,” was, as Leon Wieseltier rightly notes, “toward a reassessment of the place of Judaism within Western culture.”⁴⁰ Wolfson wanted to show how influential Philo was for later medieval thought centered around Scripture. The young Morton Smith sent Wolfson a thank-you note, written in Hebrew, in which he called Wolfson’s Philo “the best preface to Christian theology.”⁴¹ However, to Wolfson, Philo was more than that, more than just a preparatory author.⁴² The conviction that the contributions of Jewish philosophy had been greatly underestimated and that there was an urgent need for a reevaluation had been driving Wolfson’s research early on.⁴³ With Philo, that conviction reached a pinnacle. It is not clear when exactly Wolfson started working on Philo, maybe as early as in 1937.⁴⁴ In 1942, he published a substantial article on Philo’s take on free will which became one of the backbones of the later monograph. In 1944 and 1946 two brief studies on Jewish citizenship and the Synhedrion in Philo followed.⁴⁵

Wolfson wrote his Philo during the Second World War. It is difficult to imagine that his strong emphasis on the Jewish momentum in the history of philosophy, while already present in his earlier work, was not also the result of the continuing marginalization of the Jews in Europe (and elsewhere). What seems to be clear from the letters at the Wolfson archive is that in the post-war years of mourning and uncertainty, Philo could provide an orientation for comfort and a source of pride for Jewish readers. Henry Hurwitz, the editor of The Menorah Journal (to which Wolfson had contributed several articles in earlier years),⁴⁶ writes to Wolfson: “It is thrilling to contemplate that two Jews have divided the substance and history of post-Greek European philosophy between them—Philo and Spinoza. Yet there are those who say that Jews are aliens in Europe!”⁴⁷ In an emotional letter, the ancient historian Eugen Täubler writes from Cincinnati to congratulate Harry Wolfson on his “opus grande” on Philo. Struggling with the English language, Täubler switches in the middle of a sentence to his native German (apologetically reminding Wolfson that German is not only the language of today’s Germany, it was also the language of pre-war Germany). He had always hoped, Täubler writes, “that Judaism would one day be recognized not only as a tolerated but as an indispensable part of European intellectuality.” What was left, he continues, were “two question marks: European culture? Judaism?”⁴⁸ Täubler’s appreciation for Wolfson’s Philo is to be understood against this background: throughout his work, Täubler stressed that Jewish history needs to be understood within universal history.⁴⁹ Täubler, who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1933, took note of Wolfson’s repositioning of Philo in the history of philosophy with some satisfaction.

Laudatory language on Wolfson’s Philo can also be found in the Jewish Press. In a long review, published in the Passover edition of The Jewish Advocate in 1948, Rabbi Joseph Shubow, who served as a military chaplain in Europe and was a prominent Zionist leader, praises the book in the most enthusiastic terms: when he read the book, Shubow felt himself to be “in a state of spiritual ecstasy.” “Nobody,” Shubow writes, “has ever so fully depicted the majesty and inner depth of value and enriching influence which Jewish political thought merits.” The review, surrounded by large “Happy Passover” ads, is a long hymn on how Wolfson liberated Philo, and Jewish philosophy in general, from slavery.⁵⁰ Later in the year, in December of 1948, the “Jewish Book Council of America” awarded Wolfson the prize for the best non-fiction Jewish work of the year. Wolfson was the first recipient to be awarded this prize.⁵¹

Irony and Critique: Scholem, Bickerman, Heinemann

Among the letters that were sent to Harry Wolfson on the occasion of the publication of his Philo one also finds responses that were less enthusiastic than others, sometimes not without hints of irony. Thus Gershom Scholem, the great specialist of Jewish mysticism, writes from Jerusalem to Harry Wolfson: “I am filled with wonder about the discussions it [the book] certainly should entail. I am very glad I am not a historian of philosophy as your book would put me in great distress as to what to do about all that goyish gibberish which hitherto has been called history of philosophy. Now it seems that the Jews have stolen the show for another time: three philosophers who count, and two of them Jews. [may it be] that you are right of which, of course, I am not sure having not yet studied the volumes.”⁵² Scholem does not hide that he has doubts about Wolfson’s grandiose repositioning of Philo in the history of philosophy. However, in the letter one also notices, beyond the irony, a sympathetic wondering about Wolfson’s new take on Philo.⁵³ With “three philosophers who count, two of them Jews” he means, as he states in his critical review on Leo Schwarz’ biography of Wolfson from 1979, Aristotle, Philo and Spinoza. In that review, published more than thirty years later, Scholem leaves no doubt that in his opinion Wolfson greatly exaggerated the importance of Philo as a philosopher: “Wolfson, in his big work on Philo of Alexandria, maintained the bold thesis that Philo was the most important philosopher between Aristotle and Spinoza, thereby making out that two of the great pillars of Western philosophy were Jews—a contention scarcely acceptable to many of Wolfson’s readers, or of Philo’s, for that matter, Jews and Gentiles alike.”⁵⁴ Naturally, in his thank you note to Wolfson, Scholem phrased his critique in a much less skeptical tone. But at the time, under the immediate impression of the Holocaust, Scholem may even have felt some sympathy for Wolfson’s grandiose thesis.

Wolfson’s book raised eyebrows, especially among those who otherwise did not have great interest in or sympathy for Philo. The ancient historian Elias Bickerman, who at the time had a research fellowship at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, writes to Wolfson: “I don’t know anything about Philo. Except his political tracts, I could never compel myself to read more than a couple of pages of his tiresome homiletics. You, however, succeed in making this synagogue preacher interesting and important. Viewed in the line of Maimonides and St. Thomas, even Philo appears endowed with reason (…).”⁵⁵ It can be doubted that Wolfson’s book left a lasting impression on Bickerman or that it changed the latter’s opinion on Philo.

Bickerman was a historian, a specialist of the Hellenistic period and the Maccabees. Much closer to Wolfson’s interests was the classicist Isaak Heinemann, who at the time was already an established Philo scholar. Heinemann, who came out of a modern-orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, was the author of Philons jüdische und griechische Bildung, published in 1926, and since 1919 the co-editor of the German Philo edition.⁵⁶ To Heinemann it was clear that Philo did not know Hebrew. He tries to show that Philo was much closer to Greek legal and philosophical thinking than to Jewish “oral law” (with a few exceptions).⁵⁷ For Heinemann, one could say, Philo in a way represented an integrated German Jew avant la lettre.⁵⁸ Heinemann’s approach to Philo differed, then, quite a bit from Wolfson’s. Heinemann wrote a letter in German from Jerusalem (he had emigrated to Palestine in 1939) to thank Harry Wolfson for having sent him a copy of Philo. In the letter, Heinemann, who was Wolfson’s senior by about ten years, lets Wolfson politely know who is ahead in the study of Philo: “you made yourself quite successfully familiar with a field which in your earlier research you have touched upon less.”⁵⁹ Heinemann barely mentions any points of disagreement: “we entirely agree on many points” (in vielem sind wir uns vollkommen einig). This, though, was the polite language of a thank-you letter. That Heinemann was not convinced by Wolfson’s main thesis becomes clear from two review essays he published on the book: the first in Hebrew, the second—with a more substantial critique—in German.⁶⁰ Heinemann rejects Wolfson’s view that Philo introduced philosophy as a handmaid of Scripture. Philo, Heinemann argues, was much more embedded in Greek philosophy (and much further away from the rabbis) than Wolfson suggests. Moreover, according to Heinemann, Wolfson overlooks the fact that the Greeks, too, could think of law as something inspired and that for Philo the concept of revelation was not that essential after all (much less than for medieval philosophers). Neither was there a clear cut between Greek philosophy and Philo, nor was Philo the predecessor of medieval philosophy tout court. Heinemann’s and Wolfson’s methodological approaches to Philo were worlds apart: here the classicist trained by German philologists (Heinemann wrote his dissertation on Solon in Berlin under the supervision of Hermann Diels), there the philosopher whose “Talmudic hypothetico-deductive method” was based on the assumption that every text passage is significant and part of a reasoning that can be deduced.⁶¹

Goodenough’s Critique and Marcus’s Defense

In many respects, Heinemann’s critique coincided with that of Erwin R. Goodenough, the historian of religions at Yale University and Wolfson’s great rival.⁶² Goodenough and Wolfson each imagined a very different Philo. For Goodenough, the author of By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (1935), Philo was primarily a mystic, his Judaism, mystical Judaism.⁶³ Wolfson rejects that view early on in his monograph.⁶⁴ There are two letters from Goodenough in the Wolfson papers at Harvard. In the first, Goodenough congratulates Wolfson on this “accomplishment,” not without indicating that they will probably continue to disagree.⁶⁵ In the second letter, the tone continues to be friendly, but Goodenough remains firm with regard to one of his main critiques (shared by Heinemann): the parallelization of Philo with rabbinic sources. Just how rabbinic sources could possibly “throw light on a period from two to ten centuries before they were written,” remains methodologically questionable to Goodenough. Such a method “has never been proposed, let alone demonstrated.”⁶⁶ Like Heinemann, Goodenough published a review essay on Wolfson’s book.⁶⁷ In the review, he rejects Wolfson’s concept of “native” Judaism in which rabbinic and Jewish-Hellenistic thought convene. For Goodenough, Wolfson, although he makes Philo a greater person than he had ever been, does not do justice to the Alexandrian philosopher. Very much like Heinemann, Goodenough criticizes Wolfson’s urge to “reconcile inconsistencies.”⁶⁸ With such an approach, according to Goodenough, Wolfson belittled the complexities of Philo’s thinking which allowed for contradictions. In the eyes of Goodenough, Wolfson may have promoted Jewish philosophy, but not Philo of Alexandria.⁶⁹ With this, Goodenough declared a failure what was most important to Wolfson: to prove the importance of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Such a critique was not to remain without a response. It was his friend and mentor Ralph Marcus, an established scholar of Josephus and Philo, who came to Wolfson’s assistance. In a review article published in the spring of 1949, Marcus defends Wolfson against some of the critiques, especially the one by Goodenough. By stating that Wolfson’s Philo “surpasses the studies of earlier scholars in breadth and depth,” he places Wolfson above Goodenough.⁷⁰ Following up on Wolfson’ last chapter (“What is New in Philo?”) Marcus asks: “What is new in Wolfson’s Philo?” While Marcus is not willing to endorse Wolfson’s grand thesis of Philo as the founder of medieval philosophy, he repeats publicly what he had written to Wolfson in a private letter⁷¹ and what to him as a Professor of Hellenistic culture apparently was most important: before Wolfson, Philo had “not been adequately recognized as a philosopher in his own right.”⁷² As becomes clear from a letter that Marcus sent to Wolfson in the summer of 1948, the review was orchestrated by the two: “My own adverse comments on Philo are few and detailed, not too gefährlich. … If youre not pleased by my review, boy, you sure aint never gonna be pleased by any review.”⁷³

Emil Fackenheim’s Review of Philo

As becomes clear from a number of letters and notes in the Harvard Archives, another review (or rather a review essay), published in the newly founded journal The Review of Metaphysics, made Wolfson truly furious. The author of the review was the young Emil L. Fackenheim, at the time a recent PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and rabbi at a reform community in Hamilton, Ontario.⁷⁴ The review may show a bit of ardor iuvenilis, but it is by no means spiteful. Rather, Fackenheim discusses in a balanced way the merits and shortcomings (some of which he does not hesitate to call “serious”) of the book. Fackenheim endorses Wolfson’s initial observation that in scholarship Philo had been neglected as a philosopher. He praises Wolfson for having demonstrated to what extent Philo corrects Plato’s theory of knowledge (by recognizing the need for revelation). And he discusses in most laudatory terms Wolfson’s interpretation of Philo when it comes to ethical questions. At the same time, Fackenheim notes three methodological limitations in Wolfson’s Philo. First, he rejects Wolfson’s “hypothetico-deductive method of text-study.” That method, Fackenheim writes, “fetters the creative potential of philosophic ideas to conditions behind them; it makes Philo, a pious Jew with sincere philosophic aspirations, perforce face the problem of reconciling Scripture with Greek philosophy, and relentlessly be driven to certain conclusions.”⁷⁵ What Fackenheim, the reform rabbi, rejects is Wolfson’s proneness to make Philo an orthodox Jew. In some ways, Philo becomes here the object of an inner-Jewish dialogue on orthodoxy and liberalism. The second critique concerns Wolfson’s hesitation, in Fackenheim’s view, to ask how and why a doctrine in Philo came about. Third, Fackenheim criticizes Wolfson for not looking more into historical realities when explaining the peculiarities of Philo’s arguments.⁷⁶ Moreover, Fackenheim regrets that Wolfson sometimes did not dig deeper. If in Philo reason is subordinate to faith, how can reason then explain the true meaning of Scripture, Fackenheim wonders.⁷⁷ Towards the end of his nineteen-page review essay, Fackenheim—he, too, a Jewish immigrant (from Halle, Germany)—goes so far as to criticize Wolfson’s English: “His style, while on the whole adequate, is sometimes absurdly involved, and there are grammatical mistakes.”⁷⁸ As becomes clear from letters that ensued, it was in particular Fackenheim’s critical remarks with regard to language that hurt Wolfson tremendously. Remarkably (or maybe naively), Fackenheim sent offprints of the review to Wolfson. In an enclosed letter, written on 15 May 1948 (the day after the Israeli declaration of independence), Fackenheim stresses “how very instructive and stimulating” he found the reading of the “two learned volumes:” “Had I not been entrusted with the task to review them, I should probably not have found the time to study them as carefully. It has been most worthwhile.”⁷⁹ When Wolfson received Fackenheim’s letter, he had already seen the review and intended to publish a sharp response. Here, too, it was Ralph Marcus who tried to calm Wolfson down. In two letters to Wolfson, Marcus strongly advised against writing “a rejoinder in a ferocious tone.”⁸⁰ In the first two weeks of May 1948, Wolfson exchanged letters with the editor of The Review of Metaphysics, Paul Weiss, as well as members of the editorial board of the journal (Anton Pegis and Charles Hartshorne). Weiss showed little sympathy for Wolfson’s reaction, but was willing to publish a response under the condition that Fackenheim would be allowed to respond in the same issue of the journal.⁸¹ That condition, however, was not acceptable to Wolfson (“I will not debate with a man who went out of the way to be personally insulting”).⁸² In another letter to Paul Weiss, Wolfson indicates that he would not want to exclude writing a response at some point—“in a form both satisfactory to myself and suitable for your Review.”⁸³ Wolfson’s poisonous response to Fackenheim was never printed.⁸⁴ On 25 May 1948 Wolfson wrote an angry letter to Fackenheim, accusing him of acting like a “stern schoolmaster, querying, spattering corrections, and handing out advice.” In the letter, he rejects Fackenheim’s points of critique in toto. He ends by writing: “I am sorry for you.”⁸⁵ Nowhere in these letters is there mention of what was happening in mid-May of 1948 in the Near East. Harry Wolfson, a fervent Zionist from his youth, got caught up in his own battlefield.⁸⁶

Bringing Philo to Germany

Wolfson promoted his book with an almost missionary effort. Copies of the volumes were sent out to different parts of the world. Among the addressees, German scholars figure particularly prominently. It seems that Wolfson wanted to make sure his Philo reached German scholarship. For this purpose, he had received help from Erich Frank, the philosopher who, until his expulsion in 1936, had been Martin Heidegger’s successor in Marburg, and now taught philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. Frank sent Wolfson several letters in which he referred to (mainly) German scholars who would be interested in his Philo such as Ernst Käsemann (Mainz), Günther Bornkamm (Göttingen), Joseph Pascher (Munich) and Gerhard Kittel (Tübingen).⁸⁷ On Wolfson’s own lists of scholars who were to receive copies of Philo German scholars, especially theologians (but also journals and libraries), also figure prominently: Rudolf Bultmann (Marburg), Martin Dibelius (Heidelberg), Heinrich Schlier (Bonn). As for Wolfson’s motivations to promote his book strongly in Germany one can only guess (besides the fact that in Germany Philonic scholarship was more present than elsewhere). It may not be too far-fetched to assume that Wolfson wished that his portrait of a Jewish Philo who was so important for all of medieval philosophy would also take foot in the country which had led such a gruesome war against the Jews. As a young man, after having visited Germany on his travel fellowship, he reported in rather pessimistic language about the possibility of a full acceptance of Jews in German society: “that the Jews are capable of being good patriots is no longer questioned, but can they be genuine ones? Will not the Jews always remain the carriers of an alien culture, unabsorbable and unassimilable, despite their conversion and intermarriage? It is this problem that confronts the Jewish intellectuals in Germany.”⁸⁸

Strikingly, in the Philo-correspondence in the Wolfson archive, there is only one brief response that was sent to Cambridge from Germany: the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers thanked Wolfson for this “offenbar ungemein gründliche, historisch genaue und begrifflich konstruktive Buch” (“this clearly extremely thorough, historically accurate and conceptually constructive book”).⁸⁹ For whatever reason, Wolfson’s Philo was not well received in Germany. The points of critique were similar to those we have already encountered in the reviews by Goodenough, Heinemann, and Fackenheim. Wolfson was criticized for his tendency to harmonize inconsistencies in Philo’s work, for over-systematizing Philo, for artificially bringing rabbinic thought into proximity with Greek philosophy, but also—as the church historian Walther Völker (Mainz) put it—for his strong “Jewish point of view.” For Völker, Wolfson’s self-confident presentation of a greatly influential Philo must have been too provocative. In his own monograph on Philo, published in 1938, Völker had argued the opposite: that early Christian piety has very little in common with Philo. In his review, he compares Wolfson with Jewish-Hellenistic authors who claim that Plato had plagiarized Moses.⁹⁰ Other reviews published in Germany were less harsh on Wolfson, but far from endorsing his thesis.⁹¹ Wolfson cannot have been pleased with the reception of his Philo in Germany.

Conclusion

Wolfson’s revisionary outline of ancient and medieval philosophy triggered disparate reactions. Both established and rising scholars of Philo and ancient philosophy rejected the main thesis of Philo. Leo Schwarz, Wolfson’s friend and biographer, greatly exaggerates when he writes that Wolfson’s Philo “was quickly acclaimed in the learned and general press.”⁹² While reviewers often show great sympathy for Wolfson’s impressive erudition, many have serious reservations with regard to his methodology.⁹³ Positive appraisals in scholarly journals were the exception.⁹⁴ As has become evident from Wolfson’s reaction to Emil Fackenheim’s review, he did not take such critique lightly, to say the least. That his proposal of a history of philosophy with Philo and Spinoza as cornerstones did not find support among scholars (Jewish and non-Jewish) must have been a major disappointment to Wolfson.⁹⁵

However, as has become clear from the letters and notes that were sent to Wolfson after the publication of Philo, this is not the whole picture. The book evoked strong sentiments and the reception of the study includes expressions of gratitude. Many Jewish readers—scholars, rabbis as well as non-academics—genuinely welcomed Wolfson’s new, fresh, and Jewish Philo, even if only in private. Scholarly critique of Wolfson’s main thesis could seemingly coincide with great appreciation for the overdue “rehabilitation of Philo” (Ralph Marcus). Many Jewish readers of Wolfson reacted enthusiastically, some of them writing to Wolfson in Hebrew: Wolfson was Philo’s “redeemer” (Shalom Spiegel). In addition, what shines through from a number of notes as well as from the Jewish press reporting on the book, is that Wolfson’s triumphant Philo, released only two years after the worst catastrophe in Jewish history, could serve as an antidote to the postwar Jewish experience. Even if flawed, or at least overstated, this version of Philo offered a Jewish moment of inclusion that landed on fertile soil.