Jewish Philosophers of Religion

Abstract

Standing in the gap between the Arabic philosophers of Muslim Spain and the Christian theologians of the West, the Jewish philosophers were instrumental in the transmission of Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy to medieval Europe. These Jewish thinkers were themselves to exercise considerable influence upon Christian scholasticism, so their formulations of the cosmological argument deserve our attention.1 Spawned within Islamic culture, Jewish philosophy was to a considerable extent dependent upon Arabic philosophical thought.2 Often writing in Arabic rather than their native tongue, Jewish philosophers tended to adopt the Arabic treatment of philosophical issues. The peculiar feature of medieval Jewish philosophy is that it preoccupied itself with specifically religious issues; accordingly, it might be more properly described as philosophy of religion, as Julius Guttmann observes: Even more than Islamic philosophy, it was definitely a philosophy of religion. Whereas the Islamic Neoplatonists and Aristotelians dealt with the full range of philosophy, Jewish thinkers relied for the most part on the work of their Islamic predecessors in regard to general philosophic questions, and concentrated on more specifically religio-philosophic problems....the great majority of Jewish thinkers made the philosophic justification of Judaism their main subject, dealing with problems of metaphysics in a religio-philosophic context.3