The nature of medieval Jewish philosophy

CHAPTER 5
The nature of medieval Jewish philosophy
Alexander Broadie
What is medieval Jewish philosophy? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that it is
philosophy written by a Jew during the Middle Ages. But even if obvious, it is also false.
In this chapter its falsity will be demonstrated, and thereafter a more satisfactory answer
to the opening question will be developed.
Faced with an unattributed text, is it possible, without looking further, to identify it as
a piece of medieval Jewish philosophy? It might be said that we can at least determine by
consideration of the linguistic evidence that the author is a medieval Jew, for the Hebrew
or Judeo-Arabic of the text will contain sufficient evidence for that. But linguistic
evidence is not always sufficient to establish that the author is a medieval Jew, for some
medieval Jewish philosophy was written in Latin, and there is almost certainly no
evidence of a purely linguistic nature supporting the fact that the Latin was written by
Jews, even if the Latin points, as it does in each case, to a specifically medieval
authorship. And on the other hand there are medieval Hebrew translations of Muslim
philosophical writings, and indeed some of Averroes’ writings are known to us now only
in their Hebrew versions. Of course translating them was not a way of making the
philosophy Jewish.
However, even if the linguistic data permitted the conclusion that a text was by a
medieval Jew, what features would permit the conclusion that the text was a piece of
medieval Jewish philosophy? Are there positions defended or arguments deployed in
medieval Jewish philosophy that are not to be found in medieval Christian or Islamic
philosophy? If so, what are these positions or arguments? If there are none such, then is
there nothing philosophically distinctive about medieval Jewish philosophy? And if so
then should we perhaps settle for saying that medieval Jewish philosophy is, after all,
simply philosophy written by Jews during the Middle Ages?
If we are forced to this conclusion it might turn out that by the same set of arguments
it can be shown that medieval Christian philosophy and medieval Islamic philosophy do
not have distinctive voices either, with the result that all that can be said is that
philosophy was written in the Middle Ages by members of the three faith communities,
and that the philosophical content, if not the linguistic style, did not vary from one
community to another. We might settle for this position on the grounds that philosophy
makes its appeal on the basis of reason, not faith, and an appeal to reason, if well
founded, will receive an affirmative response from a reasonable audience of no matter
what faith community. In that sense the universalism of philosophy would be presented
as being in contrast to the particularism of each of the three religions. However, we have
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66
some distance to cover before being able to decide whether we must settle for this
conclusion. It is necessary first to set out the conflicting arguments and to weigh them up.
Let us take as our starting point the terms in the phrase “medieval Jewish philosophy.”
It will quickly emerge that they are all problematic, and that, though some of the
problems are trivial, others go to the heart of things, and should be of interest to anyone
with an interest in Jewish philosophical speculation.
First the term “medieval.” There are difficulties here, some trivial and some which
constitute an obstacle to a proper understanding not only of medieval Jewish philosophy
but of the history of Jewish culture. “Medieval” means “pertaining to the Middle Ages.”
This is to define an age negatively, in terms not of itself but of the ages which flank it, the
ages which it mediates. But what ages are at issue when we speak about the ages which
flank the medium aevum, the age in the middle? It should first be noted that the Middle
Ages do not need to be seen as lying in the past in relation to the person who calls them
“Middle Ages.” That towering figure from the late Roman period, Augustine, who had a
deeper insight into the nature of time than most people do, said that he was living in the
Middle Ages, meaning thereby that he was living in the period between the first coming
and the second. But when modern historians use the phrase they are likely to be referring
to the time between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. That period cannot be dated with
great precision, perhaps cannot even be pinned down to within a century or two, but no
doubt that does not matter greatly. Let us suppose that it signifies the period from the
beginning of the tenth century to the end of the fourteenth, or perhaps a period within
that, or overlapping it, though not by much, on one side or the other.
However, it is not the precise dating of the Middle Ages that concerns us here but the
cultural background which is presupposed. In relation to what culture were those
centuries the Middle Ages? The answer is obvious; it is the European, and particularly
the West European, culture. West Europe lived through a Dark Age, lasting for a few
centuries from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, and then, after an
intermediate period, the Middle Ages, it enjoyed the Renaissance, which lasted for a few
centuries until the Enlightenment. But we are not to suppose that these descriptive
phrases, used as large historical categories by modern historians, make much sense, or
any at all, when applied to the cultural experience of peoples in other regions during the
period 900–1400 CE.
In particular the Maghreb and the Middle East, that is, countries occupying a swathe
of territory under Muslim control from north-west Africa to at least as far east as
Baghdad, were enjoying a rich cultural life during the period that European historians call
the Dark Ages. The phrase “Dark Ages” is employed as a convenient way of expressing
simultaneously two distinct concepts, those of, first, being an age backward in civilized
accomplishment, and, second, being an age about which we know little—though no
doubt our ignorance is due in substantial measure to the paucity of literary skills during
the period in question. But very extensive written records provide ample testimony to the
flourishing arts and sciences in Baghdad, Cairo, and other great centers of the Middle
East; indeed, the initiators of the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, Saadia Gaon
(882–942), who lived in Baghdad, Aleppo, and Sura, and his contemporary Isaac Israeli
(b. 850), who lived for a time in Khartoum, did not come at the end of a Jewish cultural
dark age. Far from it.
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67
The point is not a quibble. To apply these Western cultural categories to these distant
cultures is to impose an alien categorial framework upon them, and this could lead the
unwary to have a false understanding of those cultures. This is of immediate concern to
our topic since in the main the major works of Jewish philosophy written in what we in
the West call the “Middle Ages,” were not written in the Middle Ages in relation to the
cultural environment of those works. And this is true even of those Jewish philosophical
works written in Spain, for it is Moorish Spain that is at issue here and Moorish Spain
was culturally at least as closely linked to the Middle East as to Western Christendom.
However, the phrase “medieval Jewish philosophy” is no doubt too well entrenched now
to be shifted. But I hope I have made clear my reasons for thinking that the word
“medieval” is in its own way working on behalf of a Western cultural imperialism against
which we should be on our guard. It would of course be preferable to employ cultural
categories that are dictated by the Jewish historical experience, rather than categories
imposed upon it by an alien culture seeking to dictate the terms of the discussion.
The term “Jewish” is more problematic than the term “medieval”. What makes a work
of medieval Jewish philosophy Jewish? The obvious answer is that it was written by a
Jew, but I shall argue that although obvious it is also incorrect. A distinction has to be
made between the philosopher and the philosophy. The former could be Jewish without
the latter being so, and that is how it would be unless something of the Jewishness of the
person affects the philosophy, enabling us, without knowing the author, to identify the
work, from the evidence of the ideas themselves, as a piece of Jewish philosophy. I think
that, unless it is possible to identify a philosophy as Jewish in the way just described, the
concept of Jewish philosophy is of no practical or theoretical value.
It should be clear that what is at issue here is not merely the philosophical ideas in so
far as the writer provides support for them in the form of citations of authoritative texts. It
is common, normal, for the medieval Jewish philosophers to quote extensively not only
from the Hebrew Bible but also from rabbinic literature and especially, of course, from
the sages of the Talmud. And equally they do not, except in extremely rare cases, quote
from the New Testament or the Church Fathers—Maimonides no more invokes
Augustine than Thomas Aquinas invokes the sages of the Talmud. Consequently, it is not
in general difficult to recognize that the author of a given work of medieval philosophy is
Jewish or Christian. Or, put otherwise, the auctoritates can be sufficient to stamp a
philosophical work as a Jewish book or as a Christian one. And in so far as a philosophy
book is a Jewish work, we could reasonably be said to be dealing with a work of Jewish
philosophy. The auctoritates, so to say, appropriate the work for the faith community
whose culture is most particularly expressed in the book.
But the mere citation of rabbinic authorities in support of a philosophical position does
not by itself imply that the philosophical position could not equally be adopted by
Christian or Muslim philosophers. They would no doubt wish to cite different authorities
but citing different authorities does not affect the content of the idea that is being thus
supported. Our question is whether there are philosophical ideas which are recognizably
Jewish in the sense that even in the absence of clues provided by the auctoritates the
provenance of the ideas is recognizably Jewish, with the result that a Christian or Muslim
thinker would have to reject those ideas as being incompatible with his or her faith. There
are no doubt several senses that might be ascribed to the phrase “medieval Jewish
philosophy,” but the one I am outlining is probably the strongest of them.
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68
Certainly there are writings, commonly described as works of medieval Jewish
philosophy, which the above account does not fit. What for example should be said of the
Meqor Chayyim of ibn Gabirol? During a period of six centuries most of those who knew
the book knew of it as the Fons Vitae by the Muslim scholar Avicebron or Avicebrol, and
some, on the contrary, thought that the author of the Fons Vitae was a Christian. Very
few indeed knew that a Jew had written it.1 I shall leave aside the puzzling point that
during that lengthy period scholars were not alerted to what seem to us the obvious
implications of the fact that the title of Avicebron’s book is a phrase from Psalms 36:10,
and I shall attend instead to the fact that the general failure to realize that the book was by
a Jew prompts a question regarding the sense, if any, in which the Meqor Chayyim
counts as a work of Jewish philosophy. Now that we know who wrote it, we assign it to
the tradition of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism. Some Jews, for example Isaac Israeli,
Bachya ibn Paquda (second half of eleventh century), and Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–
1164), did write philosophy which could fairly be described as Neoplatonic, and here is
yet another work of that kind, and some now say that they see that it is a specifically
Jewish work and are puzzled that it took centuries for the truth to become generally
known. It does not much matter whether we are suspicious of these apparent examples of
clarity of hindsight. The important point is the conceptual one, that, whatever our
decision about the proper classification of the Meqor Chayyim, whether or not it is to be
classified as a work of Jewish philosophy should be determined by whether its content is
Jewish, not by the fact that its author was.
People do not philosophize within a cultural vacuum. In particular, if philosophers are
members of a faith community, we should expect their faith to be reflected in their
philosophy, and certainly we cannot suppose that people who know God to exist would
approach philosophical problems about the nature of existence, whether the existence of
God or of created things, as if they did not have that knowledge. If the philosophers are
Jews and their Judaism sets the agenda for their philosophizing, prompting them to ask
about the mode of existence of the God of Israel or about the metaphysical and moral
relations between God and his creatures, or about the nature of the insight of the biblical
prophets, then the resultant philosophy can be called a “Jewish” philosophy, though the
sense is weaker than that outlined earlier. It is weaker because the agenda just given, even
if it were spelled out in much more detail, might also be the agenda for works of
Christian or Muslim philosophy. Hence, on this account the agenda of a Jewish
philosophy may not be peculiarly Jewish. Of course the philosophers’ Judaism might also
be providing them with a distinctively Jewish perspective upon traditional philosophical
problems, in which case, again, it would be appropriate to speak about their philosophy
as Jewish, though of course it would be necessary to say what constitutes a distinctively
Jewish perspective. All this is a far cry from the simplistic, and false, view that a
philosophy is Jewish if the philosopher is, and it should be plain that it is also a much
more persuasive view than the simplistic one that I have rejected.
Some might object that “medieval Jewish philosophy” is a misnomer, basing their
proof upon the fact that books surveying the field2 tend to employ two grand
classificatory concepts, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic. Most Jewish philosophers from the
eleventh century, that is from the century after Saadia (who was heavily influenced by the
Muslim school of kalƗm philosophy—itself owing a great deal to Greek atomism), are
classed as one or the other, or even both, though a few, of whom Halevi is perhaps the
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69
most conspicuous, cannot readily be fitted into this schema. But how Jewish can a
philosophy be if it is Aristotelian? Should we not say that to see Judaism in Aristotelian
terms, letting Aristotle set the agenda for a Jewish investigation of the basis of Judaism,
is already to have sold the pass to an alien culture? Is that not to permit the imposition
upon Judaism of a categorial framework alien, not indigenous, to it, in which case how
can the resultant philosophy be classified as Jewish?
But, as just stated, those medieval Jewish philosophers did not philosophize in a
cultural vacuum. As well as the biblical and rabbinic literature which they inherited, they
lived in an environment which had a rich philosophical tradition, and which was even
then alive with philosophical activity. Many things that the non-Jewish philosophers said,
on the basis of their reading of Aristotle, of the Neoplatonists, and of the Muslim kalƗm
philosophers, were supported by persuasive arguments, and Jews could not ignore those
arguments, especially as many of the subjects at issue were of immediate concern to
Judaism. Among those subjects are the existence of God and the nature of his oneness,
where the crucial questions are whether his existence can be proved and whether his
existence is identical with his essence. If they are identical then this would imply that
God is, in a profound metaphysical sense, one. The question of the eternity or otherwise
of the world was also a matter of central concern. So also was the possibility of
providence, and the related question of the compatibility of human free will with divine
foreknowledge of every human act. The whole question of the proper way for human
beings to conduct themselves was also of course the subject of extensive discussion
among ancient writers, and questions such as the relation between, on the one hand,
Aristotle’s doctrine of the ethical mean and, on the other hand, the halakhah were bound
to attract the attention of Jewish philosophers once they alighted upon the Nicomachean
Ethics. To what extent could a life lived in accordance with halakhic requirements also
conform with Aristotelian ethical values? And finally, in this abbreviated list, there was
the overarching question of the appropriate way to interpret terms when predicated of
God: are they to be understood literally, or perhaps negatively? And the ancient logicians
discuss several other uses of terms also, for example, analogical and amphibolous, uses
duly appropriated by medieval Jewish thinkers in their attempts to make sense of terms
used of God.
Plainly the non-Jewish philosophers, even pagan philosophers, could not be ignored
by Jews. If conclusions of the philosophers were correct then it had to be demonstrated
that Judaism did not contradict them, and if Judaism did contradict them then the errors
of the philosophers had to be exposed. And since there were many philosophies, it was
necessary to determine which of these was most congenial to Judaism, or at least to
Judaism as understood by the particular Jewish philosophers at issue. And here it is
necessary to note that Judaism is of course no more a monolith than philosophy is, and
that the content of a person’s concept of Judaism might be deeply influenced by what was
learned from philosophers, even pagan philosophers. Apart from the point that Judaism
might become intellectually impoverished if it did not seek to respond to current
philosophical ideas, there was also a danger, to which some were alert, that the faith of
the philosophically minded among the faithful might be set at risk, if it were not
demonstrated that the fundamentals of their faith were compatible with highly plausible
theses of non-Jewish philosophers. There were therefore pressures from several
directions forcing Jews to engage very positively with the surrounding philosophical
History of Jewish philosophy
70
culture. The point is that there were powerful arguments for plausible theses, and
whatever their origins, pagan or not, it was necessary, for intellectual and pastoral
reasons, for Jews to respond.
This is not to deny that there were in the Middle Ages pressures in the opposite
direction also. It is noteworthy that in his Sefer Emunot ve-De‘ot (Book of Beliefs and
Opinions) Saadia attempts to counter the charge that speculation of the kind to be found
in that book leads to unbelief and is conducive to heresy, a charge that is apparently
supported by a famous talmudic saying: “Whoever speculates about the following four
matters would have been better off had he not been born; namely, what is below and what
is above, what was before and what will be behind?”3 However, it is Saadia’s view, for
which he finds support in Isaiah (40:21) and Job (34:4), that this rabbinic warning is
aimed at those who lay aside the books of the prophets and, as Saadia puts it, “accept any
private notion that might occur to an individual about the beginning of place and time.”
In short it is not philosophical speculation as such that is at issue, but such speculation
which is not guided by Scripture.4 And in the centuries following Saadia, the centuries I
shall classify for practical purposes as medieval, Jews, guided by Scripture, produced an
immense and rich literature of philosophical speculation.
In the light of the foregoing remarks it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions
concerning how a piece of Jewish philosophy is to be identified as Jewish. In almost all
cases the writings which we classify as medieval Jewish philosophy are richly imbued
with Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, or kalƗmist philosophical ideas, ideas which are present as
presuppositions, or which are there as theses to be defended, or there as targets of attack.
Plotinus and Proclus were particularly important as informing the thought of Jewish
philosophers from the time of Isaac Israeli in the mid-ninth century. And as regards
Aristotle, it is necessary to keep sight of the fact that, just as it was only within the
context of the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Philoponus, and
others that Aristotle’s writings penetrated the Islamic philosophical schools, so also it
was only within the context of the commentaries of those ancient writers and also of the
commentaries of Muslim thinkers such as al-FƗrƗbƯ, Avicenna, ibn BƗjja, and Averroes
that Aristotle’s writings penetrated Jewish philosophical circles.
It is in virtue of the fact that certain Jewish writings are sustained, rational reflections
upon Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and the atomist philosophy of the kalƗm that those
writings have to be classified as philosophy. It is not a matter for dispute that the Jewish
philosophers of the Enlightenment or of the post-Enlightenment periods do not stand in
anything like the same relation to Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and the kalƗm. As
regards those later periods, classifications such as neo-Kantian or existentialist are more
appropriate and more common. And in these later periods, as with the earlier ones, it is
the philosophical schools of the wider philosophical community which provide the
principles of classification that enable us to place contributions to specifically Jewish
philosophy.
A tentative articulation of the concept of medieval Jewish philosophy has now been
provided. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed played a special role in fixing that
concept, for it was treated as a paradigm or exemplar—if the Guide is not, in some
plausible sense, a piece of medieval Jewish philosophy, then nothing at all is. In addition
it determined the agenda for almost all subsequent Jewish philosophizing in the Middle
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71
Ages. No account of medieval Jewish philosophy can be taken seriously that does not
give pride of place to the Guide.
In recent work on medieval Jewish philosophy there is no topic which has been more
vigorously disputed than the extent of Maimonides’ Aristotelianism.5 But no one has
sought to deny that he is a follower of Aristotle, even if perhaps, as some have
maintained, a follower of a highly judaicized Aristotle. A glance at the chapters in the
Guide on the doctrine of creation should make the point. Whether he is attacking
Aristotle, as when discussing belief in the eternity of the world, or defending him, as
when denying that Aristotle thought he had demonstrated the eternity of the world, or
arguing in what seems non-Aristotelian territory, as when investigating the
presuppositions of the law of Moses, he shows himself to be aware of Aristotle’s
presence. The influence that Aristotle, overwhelmingly and at all times, exerts on
Maimonides stamps him as a philosopher of what we are accustomed to call the “Middle
Ages”. By the same token the way in which Saadia brings the kalƗm philosophy to bear
upon Jewish themes, and the way Halevi brings his Neoplatonism to bear upon Jewish
themes, mark both out as major contributors to the tradition of medieval Jewish
philosophy.
NOTES
1 For a sketch of the history of its transmission, see Loewe 1989, pp. 39–43.
2 For example, Husik 1916; Guttmann 1973; Sirat 1985.
3 Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 11b.
4 Saadia Gaon 1948, pp. 26ff.
5 See for example Strauss 1952, pp. 38–94; 1988, pp. 30–58; 1963, pp. xi-lvi.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Guttmann, J. (1973) Philosophies of Judaism, translated by D.Silverman (New York: Schocken).
Husik, I. (1916) A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Macmillan).
Loewe, R. (1989) Ibn Gabirol (London: Grove).
Saadia Gaon (1948) The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, translated by S.Rosenblatt (New Haven:
Yale University Press).
Sirat, C. (1985) A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Strauss, L. (1952) “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” in Persecution and the
Art of Writing (Glencoe: Free Press), pp. 38–94. (Reprinted with changes in J.A.Buijs (ed.)
Maimonides: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1988), pp. 30–58.
——(1963) “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Maimonides, The Guide of
the Perplexed, translated by S.Pines, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1: xi-lvi.