Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. 2018

Bill Rebiger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783110575606
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110576245
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The Yearbook mirrors the annual activities of staff and visiting fellows of the Maimonides Centre and reports on symposia, workshops, and lectures taking place at the Centre. Although aimed at a wider audience, the yearbook also contains academic articles and book reviews on scepticism in Judaism and scepticism in general. Staff, visiting fellows, and other international scholars are invited to contribute.

Part I:Articles

Dirk Westerkamp

Quaestio sceptica disputata de philosophia judaeorum: Is there a Jewish Philosophy?

Paper given at the Dialectical Evening at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, Universität Hamburg, August 22, 2017. Many thanks to all its participants for the helpful comments and the lively discussion. In order to encourage a debate this paper was presented in the form of a scholastic quaestio. It should be noted, however, that this is a kind of sketch. Neither do I want to pretend that it is a bona fide Quaestio in the formal scholastic sense; nor do I think that this stylised form of a Quaestio is the best and only way to discuss this matter. I trust that the irony of its presentation does not distract from the seriousness of the arguments.

Listen to the truth whoever speaks it.

(Maimonides, Eight Chapters)

Quaestio

The question reads: Is there a Jewish Philosophy (JP) or Can there be a JP? This question evidently entails the question: What is JP?

Videtur quod

It seems that there is a JP. JP is taught at departments of philosophy and Jewish thought around the world. JP looks back on a long history and rich tradition. Sometimes JP is put to use in public debates.1 We speak of Philo, Maimonides, Mendelssohn and Lévinas as Jewish thinkers. JP is a philosophical tradition and we should not underestimate that traditions are important for (the history of) philosophy.2 They are constituents of philosophical discourse and the simple fact that they emerge, change or come out of fashion over time does not imply that they don’t exist or do not matter. So, yes, arguably there is such thing as JP.

1. However, since ontological, epistemological and methodological matters do not seem to be determinable as specifically ‘Jewish’, Tirosh-Samuelson/Hughes argue that JP is not primarily a theoretical enterprise but a practical philosophy ‘heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives.’3 To this aim, it constantly and always had to apply ideas of ‘non-Jewish’ origins ‘to Jewish ideas and values.’4 Thus, JP is ‘in tune with certain principles of rationalism.’5

2. JP aims at harmonising philosophy and the Jewish tradition;6 JP agrees with the ‘Jewish religious tradition.’ JP ‘explain[s] and rationalize[s]’ the ‘essential core of Judaism.’7 Complementary to this essentialist account, the formalist account of JP maintains that

‒JP is ‘any philosophy produced by a Jewish person, whatever the definition given for “Jewish”’8 (= necessary condition);

‒JP has to address Jewish issues to define a philosophy as Jewish (= sufficient condition): ‘While essentialism focusses on the Jewish content, moderate formalism rather takes into account the Jewish context.’9

3. It seems that there is JP as long as JP matches the standards of philosophical discourse: analysis, argument, distinction, critical evaluation, problem-solving.10 Likewise, Melamed argues that the reality

[…] for modern Jewish philosophy was that most of its participants were either good philosophers (Spinoza and Cohen) or well informed in Jewish texts (Mendelssohn, Krochmal, Soloveitchik), though unfortunately in many cases they were neither Jewishly informed nor good philosophers.11

Thus, there can be JP if it meets the—given—standards of state of the art philosophy (that seems to be one of the differences between JP and Jewish Thought, JT) plus the standards of erudite scholarship in Jewish studies. As for Modern JP, then, it seems that the ‘real question is not “Is there a Jewish Philosophy?”’ but: ‘Is Jewish philosophy (still) philosophy?’12 On this view, there can also be an Analytic Jewish Philosophy applying the tools of logical and conceptual analysis for example to talmudic reasoning13 or to Wittgensteinian accounts of lifeforms.14

4. In this sense, we may speak of JP if it is (i) philosophy (in the above mentioned sense) and (ii) concerned with Jewish religious and cultural practices. Melamed seems to adhere to the essentialist rather than to the formalist account of JP:

Unlike many others, I do not take a Jewish philosopher to be someone who is (a) Jewish and (b) a philosopher, but rather suggest that Jewish philosophy is the attempt to provide a well-argued and informed account of Jewish religious and cultural beliefs and practices.15

Being Jewish, then, would neither be a necessary nor a sufficient condition for doing JP whereas providing an ‘account of Jewish religious and cultural beliefs and practices’ would be the necessary condition.

5. JP is the philosophy of Judaism; it is ‘invested in matters of Jewish people-hood,’ ‘in tune with certain principles of rationalism,’ and providing an ‘account of Jewish religious and cultural beliefs and practices.’ It is contested, however, as to whether this essentialist account of JP has to be critical as well—meaning that it should critically reflect JP’s own historicity: ‘The critical approach takes into account the history of the texts, their modification over time, their successive editions. This critical approach is philosophically and historically receivable.’ From the non-critical essentialist’s point of view, ‘a text of Jewish philosophy does not have to meet the criteria of the critical approach.’16

6. According to the critical essentialist view, JP and JT form a ‘dynamic space of thought’ (dynamischer Denkraum),17 consisting of three ‘spatial’ elements: philosophy, mysticism, and theology. This space, however, is systematically nuanced, thematically inclusive (there can be more, for example the musar-movement etc.), and interculturally open. This essentialist view of JP is critical insofar as it holds that the essence of JP (and Judaism) is not static and stable but in constant transition, antithesis, and dynamic.

7. Furthermore, the critical essentialist account of JP can be divided into two camps: (i) Either JP fully (though not without self-criticism) endorses, promotes and defends Jewish beliefs, practices and convictions; or (ii) JP aims at being rather a ‘philosophy of Judaism,’ implying that JP seeks to ‘achieve a critical understanding of the foundational beliefs, logical structure, and presuppositions articulated in its data, not to promote them.’18

8. Some currents of the second strand of critical essentialist account of JP can be interpreted as negativistic. On this view, we better not define the critical essence of JP in positive terms (since its Denkraum is systematically and historically open and shifting). Rather, it can be determined through negative distinctions. According to the negativistic critical essentialist account, JP is

–not a school (for example Kalam; Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists),

–not a style (analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics),

–not philosophy done by Jews (not an ethnic category),

–not philosophy written in Hebrew.19

Some positive attributes, however, can be formulated. Medieval JP, for instance, was a network of a ‘continuous dialogue’ of Jewish authors ‘embedded’ in the ‘tradition of Islamic philosophy and its Greek sources’ and, later, encountering Christian scholastic philosophy.20 Within this discourse-network, the question of the relation between Philosophy and Torah is debated. JP is ‘a causally-intraconnected discourse, or conversation, what I called a “tradition”’21 following the agenda of discussing the relation between philosophy and Torah set by Maimonides’ Guide.

Sed contra

On the other hand, the existence of a JP is heavily contested, abrogated, and denied. To highlight this, let me report a somewhat funny, yet illuminating personal conversation I had with one of my academic advisors, Yossef Schwartz, while returning to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Visiting Research Fellow (in 2000):

Schwartz: ‘What do you want to study with me while you are a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University?’

Westerkamp: ‘Medieval Jewish Philosophy.’

Schwartz: ‘Ein davar—there is no such thing as Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Study with someone else or study something else.’

1. It can be argued against the formalist account of JP (see Videtur quod, 2.) that since there is no Jewish physics, no Jewish biology and no Jewish sociology (being radically different from social studies on Judaism), there can be no JP. This is drastically canvassed by Jospe, saying that some Jews playing football doesn’t make their playing football a Jewish football game. The formalist account of JP can be formalistically challenged also by the following example: Suppose that a philosopher discovers at the end of her career that she was Jewish. Would this ‘retroactively turn’ her work ‘into a contribution to Jewish philosophy’?22 Taking the example of the late Hilary Putnam who towards the end of his life cared more and more about his ‘Jewishness’, does not mean that his earlier work becomes JP retrospectively.

2. According to the critical historiographical account of JP (JPCHA), JP was simply ‘the creation of the academic discipline, the “History of Jewish Philosophy,” an artefact made by an academic discipline as much as the discipline studies it.’23 Within the camp of JPCHA, however, there is an ongoing controversial debate on the origins of this ‘artefact’. Whereas Leora Batnizky claims that JP is a ‘modern academic construct,’24 Daniel Frank traces the idea of its tradition back to nineteenth century German-Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums. The Wissenschaft des Judentums sought to legitimate Jewish philosophical texts as a respected academic subject.25 I have shown that the idea of a philosophia judaeorum perennis is even older, stemming from seventeenth century French-German discourse on ‘historiographical holism’26 and German Enlightenment historiography of Jewish Thought.27 Even prior to that, so Giuseppe Veltri argues, the ‘first sketch of a Jewish […] history of philosophy was formulated by the Venetian Rabbi Simone Luzzatto (1583–1663),’28 consequently dating the ‘artefact’ of JP back into sixteenth century humanism.

3. In addition, JPCHA demonstrates that JP was not only a historiographical invention but also a highly polemical one.29 Within seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘historiographical holism,’ JP was introduced as an allegedly continuous tradition (from the prophets [= philosophia haebraeorum] up until Moses Mendelssohn) only in the end to be expelled from the kingdom of ‘serious’ philosophy. More bluntly: JP was invented for no other purpose than to be excluded as a mere philosophia extra-graecanica or philosophia orientali.

As a consequence, any essentialist account of JP has to question itself as to whether it wants—however unconsciously—to continue this polemical tradition of tradition-construction or not. If not, this would mean either to write a different history o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial
• Part I: Articles
• Part II Reports