The Jewish Philosophy Reader (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jewish Philosophy Reader Norman Solomon The Jewish Philosophy Reader, edited by Daniel H. Frank, Oliver Leaman and Charles H. Manekin. New York: Routledge, 2000. 618 pp. $100.00. This Reader is intended as a source book to accompany the History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by Frank and Leaman and published by Routledge in 1997. “Jewish philosophy,” in both of these works, is not “philosophy done by Jews,” nor some distinctive way of philosophizing, but rather, as they put it (p. xi), the “creative reworking of regnant philosophical categories, Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, Hegelian, existentialist, for purposes of explicating Judaism.” It would be interesting to know how, if at all, this activity is to be distinguished from “theology”; the problem is not addressed by the editors, though it shows up in Leo Strauss’s rather dated essay “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” reproduced as Chapter 32. It would also be instructive to learn why no one appears to have “creatively reworked” Judaism [End Page 162] in terms of the philosophy which has dominated British and many American universities since the days of logical positivism; there is certainly no shortage of practitioners such as Putnam and Kripke who cherish their Jewish identity. The volume covers fully two thousand years, from Philo to the present day, in a little over a hundred extracts. How can all this material be organized? The editors compromise between the thematic and chronological approaches. There are four main heads, though arguably five sections. The first head, “Foundations and First Principles,” falls into two parts. The first of these, “The Bible and Philosophical Exegesis,” is thematic. The problematic of each theme is presented through a biblical passage, and followed by later treatments of the theme; for instance, sections of Exodus in which the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is described are followed by passages from Maimonides and David Shatz on freedom and responsibility. The second section of “Foundations and First Principles” is headed “Talmud, Mishnah and Midrash as Sources for Philosophical Reflection.” There are no key rabbinic citations in the manner of the biblical ones in the previous section, but simply a selection of medieval and modern writings in which authors utilize rabbinic material for their own agendas. The remaining three heads follow a chronological plan. Chapters 11–17 cover Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Philosophy; 18–22 constitute Modern Jewish Thought, which apparently came to an end round about 1900; 23–33 are Contemporary Jewish Philosophy, but not very contemporary, since the core material is Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig, with a dash of Kook, Baeck, and Soloveitchik; much of the best recent material is in fact to be found in the first part. The uneasy arrangement of material means that if you wish to follow a particular theme, or a particular author, you have to jump around the book. For instance, for Covenant you would have to read Hartman (Chapter 1); Novak (Chapter 8); Rosenzweig and Baeck (Chapter 29). For Evil and Suffering you might think you had a fair sample of Jewish views through the Job extracts and the five essays in Chapter 4; but no, Cohen, Kook, and Leibowitz have their say in Chapter 27, and there are still two Holocaust essays and an elegant if characteristically vague page of Levinas to contend with in Chapter 30. Maimonides is spread even more widely through Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, and 14, with numerous further references throughout. But these are minor inconveniences, and with a little practice and the aid of the excellent indexes you can enjoy navigating the book to pursue your interest. Browsing your way through, as in a well-stocked supermarket, you will be rewarded by the discovery of unsuspected delights of Jewish thought. One of the strengths of the volume is the inclusion of extracts from works not easily accessible to the English reader, or not readily available in the average Jewish studies library; amongst those that caught my attention were the newly translated extract from the fifteenth-century Spanish philosopher Abraham Bibago’s “Way of Faith,” and the original English of Steven Schwartzschild’s provocative 1962 essay on Rationalism. [End Page 163] Should Spinoza be regarded as...