Jewish philosophy

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Jewish philosophy is the tradition of reasoned reflection — on God, on the authority of scripture, on the soul and the good life — carried on by Jewish thinkers who held that revelation and disciplined argument were answerable to one another. It is not the same as Judaism, nor the same as Jewish mysticism and the kabbalah that grew from it; it is the strand that asks what the inherited faith means when pressed by the standards of philosophy, and whether the two can be made to agree. The conviction that drives it is precise: a truth reached by reasoning cannot finally contradict a truth revealed, because the God who gave the Law also gave the mind. Where the two seem to clash, something has been read wrongly — the verse taken as fact where it meant figure, or the argument pushed past what it can carry — and the task is to find which.

That conviction has a long prehistory. The first sustained attempt to read the Hebrew scriptures through the categories of Greek thought belongs to Philo of Alexandria in the first century, a contemporary of the late Second Temple period who allegorized the Torah through Middle-Platonist philosophy and gave the divine Logos its first extended development. But Philo’s project left almost no trace in the rabbinic centuries that followed; his works survived in Christian, not Jewish, hands. Jewish philosophy as a continuous tradition begins later, and twice — at two widely separated peaks, each opening when Jewish thinkers found themselves living inside a civilization that had already taken philosophy as its common intellectual coin.

The medieval peak: philosophy in Arabic

The first peak opens in the early medieval Islamic world. Jewish scholars from Baghdad to al-Andalus wrote in Arabic — usually Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew characters — and read the same Greek inheritance their Muslim contemporaries were absorbing: Aristotle, the logicians, and the Neoplatonists whose scheme of emanation from a One beyond being had reached Arabic under Aristotle’s own name in the so-called Theology of Aristotle. The work of these thinkers shared its vocabulary, its problems, and often its very texts with falsafa — the Greek-derived philosophy of the Islamic world — and was in continuous conversation with it: they read al-Fārābī and Avicenna as closely as any Muslim philosopher did, and several wrote works that crossed between the communities without label.

Saadia Gaon (882–942), head of the Babylonian academy of Sura, opens the tradition with the Book of Beliefs and Opinions (933), the first systematic Jewish philosophy. Drawing on the methods of the Islamic dialectical theologians, the mutakallimūn, he set out to prove by reason what tradition already taught — the creation of the world in time, the unity and incorporeality of God, the rationality of the commandments — holding that revelation and reason are two roads to one truth, the second a confirmation and safeguard of the first. His near-contemporary debate over how God could be described without compromising the divine unity issued in a distinctive Jewish solution, the doctrine of a created Glory standing between the unknowable God and the prophet’s vision.

A second current ran alongside the dialectical one and drew more deeply on Neoplatonism. This medieval Jewish Neoplatonism read the God of scripture through the emanative scheme: Isaac Israeli in Qayrawān, and above all Solomon ibn Gabirol of Málaga (c. 1021–c. 1058), whose Fountain of Life posited that everything other than God — including the angels and the rational soul — is composed of matter and form, and set a Divine Will between the absolutely simple First and the duality of universal matter and form. Composed in Arabic without a single biblical citation, the work circulated for centuries in a Latin version under the name “Avicebron,” and the Christian Scholastics who argued over it took its author for a Muslim or an Arab Christian; only in 1846 did Salomon Munk identify “Avicebron” with the Hebrew poet Ibn Gabirol. Bahya ibn Paquda of Zaragoza (c. 1050–c. 1120) turned this metaphysics toward the inner life. His Duties of the Heart distinguished the duties of the limbs — the outward ritual acts the law specifies in detail — from the duties of the heart, the inward dispositions of intention, trust, humility, and love that the law assumes but does not enumerate, and laid them out as ten gates ascending from the rational establishment of God’s unity to the soul’s consummation in the love of God. It became one of the most widely read works of Jewish devotion ever written.

Against the philosophers’ confidence stood Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141), poet of the Andalusi golden age, who argued that the God of Israel is known through history rather than through proof. His Kuzari — framed as the conversion of the king of the Khazars, who summons a philosopher, a Christian, a Muslim, and at last a Jewish sage — turns the philosophers’ own tools against their universal ambition. The philosopher’s God, self-sufficient and indifferent, neither knows nor cares about individuals; against the syllogism, which any premise can unsettle, Halevi set the empirical, historical attestation of the revelation at Sinai, witnessed by a whole people and transmitted in unbroken chain. His central term, al-amr al-ilāhī — the divine influence — names a quasi-natural faculty by which prophecy, and Israel, and the Land of Israel are set apart, a capacity that no intellectual ascent can manufacture. Yet Halevi is no simple enemy of reason: the Kuzari is itself a philosophical dialogue, fluent in the very falsafa it resists, and its readers still divide over whether it conceals a philosopher’s defense of revealed law or presses, in good faith, a fideist’s case against philosophy.

The towering figure is Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), born in Córdoba, physician and head of the Jewish community in Fustat. His Guide of the Perplexed, written in Judeo-Arabic and dispatched chapter by chapter to a single qualified student, set out to reconcile the Torah with Aristotelian science — and, in doing so, gave later Jewish thought its sharpest problem: how far reason may go before it must defer, and how far scripture must be read as figure rather than fact. Maimonides identified the most restricted of all rabbinic secrets — the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot — with physics and metaphysics, and held that no positive attribute can truly be predicated of God, only the negation of defect, a negative theology he shared, with differences of register, with Bahya. Because the Guide is openly written to disclose to the prepared and conceal from the unready — Maimonides catalogs the very causes of deliberate contradiction he employs — its true teaching has been contested ever since, between those who read a closet philosophical radicalism beneath an orthodox surface and those who read a sincere, if guarded, synthesis. The depth of his rationalism, and the readings it provoked, are pursued in the Maimonidean rationalism and philosophical Jewish esotericism strands of the tradition; the bans, book-burnings, and counter-bans his program ignited across Provence, Catalonia, and Castile in the thirteenth century — and the rise of kabbalah as a rival claimant to the inner meaning of Torah — belong to the Maimonidean controversies.

Maimonides’ program was extended and contested rather than simply inherited. Levi ben Gershom — Gersonides (1288–1344) — of Provence, mathematician and astronomer, pressed the Aristotelian commitment further than Maimonides had dared: in The Wars of the Lord (1329) he argued for the world’s eternity, defended a more robust account of what reason can demonstrate about God, and held that divine foreknowledge does not extend to future contingents, so that human freedom is preserved at a cost to omniscience the tradition found hard to bear. A century later Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410) of Barcelona and Saragossa turned the critique the other way. His Light of the Lord (c. 1410) is a sustained dismantling of Aristotelian physics — the impossibility of a vacuum, the finitude of space and time — undertaken not to abandon reason but to clear the ground that Aristotle had occupied, and to make room for a God whose essence is love and a religious life ordered to joy rather than to intellectual contemplation. Crescas is the medieval tradition turning to examine the philosophical foundations it had been built on, and finding them less secure than the confident syntheses assumed.

What these thinkers held in common was a conviction, not a system. They took it that the same God who gave the Law also gave the mind, so that a truth reached by reasoning could not finally contradict a truth revealed — and that where the two seemed to clash, the reading of the text, or the limits of the argument, must be examined again. The balance struck differed sharply from one to the next: some subordinated philosophy to faith, others came near the reverse, and the line between the two was itself disputed, sometimes violently. The field is best understood not as a doctrine but as a long argument carried on under a single shared commitment — that thinking and believing owe each other an account.

The modern peak: philosophy after the Enlightenment

The second peak is modern and European, and it opens on a rupture. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), born into the Sephardic community of Amsterdam and expelled from it by herem at twenty-three, stands at its threshold as both an heir and a break. He inherited the medieval vocabulary — much of the Ethics reworks scholastic and rabbinic categories, and his negative theology owes a debt to Maimonides — but turned it against the tradition that produced it. His God is Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, a single infinite substance with no will, no purposes, and no providence directed at individuals; his Theologico-Political Treatise subjected scripture to historical criticism and detached the authority of revelation from the authority of reason that the medievals had bound together. Whether the intellectual love of God at the summit of the Ethics is the last word of a rationalist or the first word of a new mysticism is itself disputed, and the German Romantics who later made Spinoza a god-intoxicated man read into him a religious depth his geometric demonstrations do not announce. Either way, the medieval settlement — reason and revelation answerable to one another, under one God who authored both — does not survive him intact.

A century later Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) argued for Judaism within the very terms of the Enlightenment that had begun to dissolve it. His Jerusalem (1783) defended freedom of conscience and the separation of religious from civil power, and presented Judaism not as a body of compelled belief but as a revealed legislation — a divinely given law binding on action, leaving the truths of reason free for reason to reach. Mendelssohn’s own death was bound up with the controversy over Spinoza’s pantheism that broke over the German intellectual world in his last years, and that controversy is the hinge on which Spinoza passed from heretic to hero of German philosophy.

The twentieth century rethought the tradition after Kant and against the catastrophe of the century. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, turned in his last years from system-building to the sources of his own people: his posthumous Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) read Jewish monotheism as the religion of reason itself, grounded in the correlation of God and the human being — an idea of God that is inseparable from the ethical task laid on humanity. Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), who had stood on the edge of conversion to Christianity and turned back, broke with the idealist confidence that thought could enclose the whole. His Star of Redemption (1921), drafted partly on postcards from the front, set God, world, and the human being as three irreducible terms bound by creation, revelation, and redemption, and made revelation an event of love between persons rather than a deposit of propositions. Martin Buber (1878–1965), with whom Rosenzweig undertook a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, drew the distinction that became the signature of the century’s religious thought: between the I–It relation in which the world is used and known as object, and the I–Thou relation of mutual address in which the eternal Thou is met. And Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), trained in phenomenology and a survivor of the war that destroyed most of his family, made ethics first philosophy: the face of the other person commands an infinite responsibility that precedes knowledge, freedom, and being itself, so that the relation to God is reached through the relation to the neighbor rather than around it.

The texts and the scholarship

The primary works reach modern readers chiefly through the medieval Hebrew translations that carried Arabic philosophy north into Christian Europe, and through nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical editions. Maimonides’ Guide exists in the Judeo-Arabic original edited with a French translation by Salomon Munk, Le Guide des égarés, 3 vols. (Paris: A. Franck, 1856–1866) — still the scholarly base text — and in the standard English of Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), with Leo Strauss’s introductory essay. The most accessible public-domain English remains Michael Friedländer’s, available in full at Project Gutenberg. Halevi’s Kuzari is read in English in Hartwig Hirschfeld’s translation from the Arabic (London: Routledge, 1905), hosted at the Internet Sacred Text Archive; Ibn Gabirol’s Fountain of Life survives complete only in the medieval Latin Fons Vitae, edited by Clemens Baeumker (Münster: Aschendorff, 1892–1895), and in Munk’s French extracts of the Hebrew, no complete pre-modern English existing. Crescas’s Light of the Lord and Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord have been edited and translated in the later twentieth century (Seymour Feldman’s English Gersonides, 3 vols., Jewish Publication Society, 1984–1999).

The field’s first general framework in English is Isaac Husik, A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1916), free at Project Gutenberg; the standard modern history is Julius Guttmann’s Philosophies of Judaism (1933; English 1964), and the standard medieval survey is Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The most-used reference work is Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997). On the relation to its Arabic matrix, Harry Austryn Wolfson’s studies and Shlomo Pines’s essays remain foundational; the connection itself is mapped in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The most disputed interpretive question — whether Maimonides wrote one doctrine for the crowd and another for the philosopher — was set by Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), and pushed toward a skeptical reading by Pines’s late work; against the strong esoteric reading stand Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and the moderate position of Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). For the modern peak, the indispensable study of Spinoza’s break with the community is Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Across both peaks the same wager holds, though the partners change. The medievals made reason and a revealed text answerable to one another; the moderns, having lost the medieval certainty that the text could be squared with the science of the day, relocated the meeting to the encounter between persons — but they did not abandon the demand that believing give reason its account, or that reason answer to something it did not invent. What binds Saadia’s proofs to Levinas’s face is not a doctrine but the refusal to let either the inherited faith or the disciplined argument settle the matter alone. The argument is not a stage the tradition passed through on the way to a conclusion; carrying it on, generation after generation, is the tradition itself.

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