Jewish Philosophy Research Articles

Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (review)

Reviewed by: Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson H. D. Uriel Smith Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson. By Elliot R. Wolfson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 452. $35.00. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Elliot R. Wolfson explains sympathetically and with careful documentation the apocalyptic vision of the last Rebbe of the Ḥabad ḥasidic movement. He covers the major ranges of the Rebbe's messianism and mysticism, suggesting how these views could provide a secure emotional foundation for faith and halakhah, often leading to a sense of exaltation among his more scholarly followers, thereby confirming their faith. Wolfson's clear exposition of esoteric Kabbalist ideas, giving excellent translations of the Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic sources, should continue to recommend this work to anyone who wishes to understand Ḥabad ḥasidism. Wolfson shows that these views, ostensibly orthodox, contained ideas that could easily have become subversive and heterodox. While the presentation of the Rebbe's theosophic views is the central goal of this work, Wolfson has several secondary goals in its publication. He is looking for an alternative direction in the study of Jewish philosophy and hopes that Open Secret could serve as a paradigm for this next stage of Jewish philosophy. A major methodology in developing this future philosophy is literary analysis, and he argues that explanations of divine and mundane reality involve paradoxical thinking. Wolfson hopes that with this development the experience of the Jewish universe will again incorporate a sense of the divine. Wolfson collected and analyzed Rabbi Mena.em Mendel Schneerson's cosmic perspective from the many published writings, epistles, and collections of his discourses, augmented by the teachings of the previous six Rebbes in the Lubavich dynasty. Previous scholars have shown that Jewish mysticism in general, and Ḥabad mysticism in particular, involved aḥdut ha-shaweh, the paradoxical unification of opposites, in the ascent to God. Such a mystical stance occurs in many religious societies. It is found in Taoism, Gnosticism, and Sufi Islam. A similar paradoxical pattern was maintained in Christian mysticism and Process Theology. However, there are basic differences among these forms of mysticism. In contrast to the Kabbalist perspective, Process Theology questions the omnipotence of God, and recognizes the universe to be the body of God. Wolfson noted that similar paradoxes are found in Buddhist mysticism (pp. 109-114). Buddhism differs from the Kabbalah in its views on divine discourse. In many ways nirvana in Buddhism is equivalent to the ayin in Kabbalah. Yet, while Buddhists recognize that bodhisattvas (individuals on the path to enlightenment) communicate with their fellow humans before their final assumption into nirvana, they deny any such discourse from nirvana. In contrast, [End Page 264] Judaism and its Kabbalah affirm that God continues to communicate through the Torah and prophets with the religious faithful. In Open Secret Wolfson shows that the seventh Lubavich Rebbe continued in many ways the paradoxical stance set by his predecessors (pp. 2-3, 102-103, 247). The Lubavich leaders described publicly the divine communication of the secret Torah. For them these esoteric teachings were secrets that should be revealed to all of Israel, and to the Ḥabad membership in particular. Part of the time they are so secret that the secrecy itself is kept secret (pp. 28-65). The esoteric process of creation involved "apophatic embodiment," combining the formless invisible ayin (nothingness) with the embodied universe, this corporeal world within which the Jews fulfill the embodied mitzvot. The universe is a phenomenal one emanating from and founded upon belimah (nonexistence). The authorized rites involve corporeal acts that emotionally and rationally eradicate corporeal reality (biṭṭul ha-yesh), subordinating the worshipper to ayin (nothing), the ayn sof (infinite) from which all reality emanates. Time and space and corporeality are all negated by converging "the opposites in one subject" (p. 145). The worshipper incorporates the exoteric Torah (torah hanigleit) with the esoteric Torah (satim de-orayyta) (pp. 171-179), the Torah revealed publicly at Sinai with the Torah that both existed before the revelation and will be the messianic Torah leading...

Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (review)

Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, by Shmuel Feiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 237 pp. $25.00. Moses Mendelssohn, the of modern Jewish thought, is an enormously complicated figure, with an even more complicated legacy. Shmuel Feiner's Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity attempts above all to disentangle the man from the myth. In the introduction and the conclusion, Feiner explicitly points out that Mendelssohn's influence has been disproportionately represented by later interpreters, who either laud or execrate him as the father of the Haskalah and reform in Judaism. Feiner suggests, however, that Mendelssohn's influence in regard to emancipation and the Haskalah are greatly overexaggerated. Indeed, his importance is more historical, as [h]e was among the first Jewish philosophers compelled to deal directly with the challenges of the 'modern Jewish situation'(p. 10). Feiner has rich subject matter in the life of Mendelssohn, whose considerable talents placed him in a remarkable and often extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, position regarding the forces of the Enlightenment, the absolutist state, and the Jewish and Christian worlds of his day. Through careful attention to the early successes and later significant challenges that beset Mendelssohn, the heady excitement, the frustration, and ultimately the humiliation of being a Jew who embraced the Enlightenment project is poignantly illustrated. Feiner does a fine job illuminating the challenges faced by Mendelssohn as a public Jewish intellectual. Mendelssohn's philosophical acumen was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, he became wildly famous, and indeed, members of the Prussian Royal Academy of the Sciences elected him to become a member, although the King, Friedrich II, refused to grant approval to this appointment, ostensibly because Mendelssohn was a Jew. Mendelssohn was also widely sought out as a conversation partner by many philosophers, literary figures, and theologians. However, these conversations were not always innocent. In the case of Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian, who, taking liberties with comments from a private conversation with Mendelssohn, publicly challenged the famous Jew to refute Christianity or convert. As a result, Mendelssohn found himself caught in the center of controversy in matters of religious tolerance. Though Mendelssohn desired to devote himself to abstract matters of philosophy, the later years of his life were primarily involved with interceding on behalf of threatened Jewish communities, attempts to persuade Christians to reconsider and relinquish their anti-Jewish prejudices, and conflicts with the entrenched rabbinic authorities who saw Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment as a threat. …

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre Rebecca Rovit Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pp. $49.95. Historians and arts scholars have long discussed the rightful place of German-born Jews in German society and the tenuous relationship that they held historically vis-à-vis their non-Jewish-born fellow citizens. The curious paradigm of both belonging to German society and at the same time being apart from it distinguished Jews in Germany for centuries, despite the Enlightenment and subsequent freedoms for Jews within the unified Germany of 1871. During Wilhelmine Germany and in the Weimar Republic, Jews typically gravitated to occupations which reflected this trend. So it is not surprising that a majority of assimilated German Jews entered independent professions related to the arts, especially the theatre. What role did Jewish artists play in shaping modern German theatre during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries? What effect did avant-garde theatre trends have on German Jews and their self-identity? Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem's fascinating, edited collection of essays, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, begins to address such long-neglected questions. With the expert collaboration of twelve scholars, the recent addition to editor Thomas E. Postlewait's prize-winning series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, offers an unusually varied palette of perspectives on the extent to which German Jews not only contributed to, but co-created modern German theatre. The editors, known for their scholarship in performance history, delimit their study as dating from 1871 to 1933 and encompassing non-traditional forms of theatre, known as "modernist." The book's organization devotes roughly the first half of the book to how theatre constituted Jewish identity in Germany. Many of the authors address the notion of Jewish modernization in terms of a remaking of self, acculturation, and self-transformation when Jewish actors performed their identity. In the book's second chapter, for example, [End Page 198] Steven E. Aschheim posits the theatre as an actual "physical and psychosymbolic site" within which the complexities of Jewish post-Enlightenment identity played out (p. 27). Other scholars like Bernhard Greiner and Peter M. Marx, in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, reconsider Jewish identity and the theatre through the lens of Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing and literary critic Arnold Zweig's provocative twentieth-century writings on the Jewish actor's propensity for mimicry and talent for physical expressiveness. The book's thematic focus on Jewish theatre artists within the German theatre resonates in each chapter wherein authors emphasize the shaping force that Jews had on their Gentile theatre colleagues. Among the anthology's strengths, in addition to excellent editing, are the thematic correspondences between the chapters. Many of the assembled essays inform one another from different points of view; and yet the separate essays also provide the reader with an overlay of topics, creating a dialogic discourse between chapters. In this way, Malkin, in her essay about Jewish actors on the German Expressionist Stage (Chapter 9), refers to the modernist director Leopold Jessner's concept of transformation (1922) by which the German Jewish actor "navigated" between being and impersonation, passing between the Jewish and the German identities enfolded within him (p. 168). Anat Feinberg (Chapter 13) offers a biography of Jessner and his influence on modernist German theatre. Feinberg's chapter thus builds on Malkin's analysis of the Jewish actor's capacity for on-stage doubleness as a social strategy to hide his identity as a Jew, while revealing a specific Jewish expressive creativity. Read together, these chapters allow the reader to better assess theatre production by Jews during the 1920s, while understanding something about Jewish identity. So too do several authors provide essays on such theatre innovators and directors as Otto Brahm (born Abrahamsohn) and Max Reinhardt (born Goldmann) and their vital contribution to German theatre. Peter Jelavich (Chapter 3) situates these theatre impresarios and their artistic influence within Imperial Germany, while Lisa Silverman discusses Reinhardt's personal metamorphosis and the impact of Yiddish theatre on his grand...

Il caso del cosiddetto aborto post-natale / The case of the so called post natal abortion

Non disponibile / Not available

GOD, MOSES AND LEVINAS: ON BEING THE OTHER AND RELATING TO THE OTHER. A PERSPECTIVE ON TRANSCENDENCE FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Within the context of religious experience, understood as testimony to transcendence (Stoker), this article focus on a specific constitutive element thereof, namely intentionality. It is discussed as concept in relation to three other concepts, namely religious experience, experience and transcendence. To elaborate on the importance of the qualification of the concept of intentionality, three conversation partners are engaged. The French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) since his view point on “The (O)other” makes the concept of “transcendence” problematic in a very insightful manner. The Dutch philosopher of religion Wessel Stoker and his proposal for “trans-intentionality” as a constitutive element of religious experience, and the experience of Moses with God as narrated in Ex 3. The contributions on transcendence by Levinas and Stoker are finally critically evaluated in relation to the Moses experience.And God said to Moses: “I will be who I will be” (Ex 3:14)For if God is God, then it is impossible for God to be given in any intuition orphenomenal experience, to be contained by any concept governed by any principal. But it is this very impossibility – this infinity and incomprehensibility – that makes God “possible” as God. God alone lets God self be defined by indefinable impossibility, for God begins where human possibility ends. What is impossible for us is precisely God’s characteristic possibility, for with God nothing is impossible (Jean-Luc Marion)Divinity is not transcendent (“wholly other”), but incarnate; and the incarnation, the event “inaugurating the dissolution of divine transcendence” (Gianni Vattimo).

Letters: Concerning, Spinoza: A Jewish Philosopher

This study explores several contemporary letters about the Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. It will ask and answer several underlying questions in order to illuminate a more lucid portrait of Spinoza and his philosophy. Specifically, this analysis will highlight the explicit points, underlying assumptions, target audience, and historical reliability evident in these correspondences.

The Heteronomy of Modern Jewish Philosophy

Abstract Proceeding from Jewish philosophy’s origins in the convergence and divergence of Greek and Jewish thought and the resulting possibilities of construing Judaism and philosophy as heterogeneous or homogeneous, and ranging across the three major “ages” or linguistic matrices of Jewish philosophizing (Hellenistic, Judeo-Arabic, and Germanic), the essay describes Jewish philosophy as an unresolvable entanglement in a dialectic of heteronomy and autonomy.

Commission VII: Jewish Philosophy (2008-2012)

This report of the Commission for Jewish Philosophy is based on information and personal bibliographies sent to the President of the Commission by over forty scholars in the field via the Questionnaire for SIEPM Commission Reports. Like the previous report that appeared in the Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 49 (2007), 27-44, it is thus intended to be representative and not at all exhaustive. The report features a selected bibliography, arranged alphabetically by author, of over two hundred studies in the field of medieval Jewish Philosophy, written in Western languages between the years 2008-2012. In addition, it provides a list of editions and translations in the field that have appeared during this period, as well as a list of Ph.D. dissertations in the field. The report also mentions some of the most important international conferences that have taken place, and some of the major projects. In general, the authors have tried to present a picture of the study of medieval Jewish Philosophy over the past five years, what has been its focus, what it has accomplished, and where it seems to be going. Finally, the authors address certain important issues that were raised at the meeting of the Commission for Jewish Philosophy at the 2012 SIEPM Congress in Freising.

Re-imagining the Historical in Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Historicization

Re-imagining the Historical in Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Historicization

Maimonides and the Visual Image after Kant and Cohen

Abstract In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed. Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide. There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art” of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination.

On Plural Universes: A Debate in Medieval Jewish Philosophy and the Duhem-Pines Thesis

The debate between Gersonides and Crescas on the question of plural universes is addressed, with details of their arguments for their positions and the conceptual frameworks within which they developed their ideas. Also considered is the view current among several leading scholars, who claim that Christian Scholasticism had a significant impact upon the doctrines of both Gersonides and Crescas. This thesis is examined and rejected: both Gersonides and Crescas developed their ideas independently of any Scholastic influence.

Modern Jewish Thought and Jewish Feminist Thought: An Uncommon Conversation

AbstractModern Jewish thought is that area of Jewish thought that emerges in response to the Jewish encounter with modernity. It spans the earliest contributions of modern Jewish philosophers and religious reformers in 19th‐century Europe to contemporary thinkers from Jewish communities around the world today. Jewish feminist thought also stands out as a vital stream within modern Jewish thought. Although most histories and anthologies of modern Jewish thought do not normatively include Jewish feminist thinkers as significant contributors to this intellectual history, selected Jewish feminist thinkers like Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler should be integrated into modern Jewish thought’s disciplinary narrative. The following discussion of current scholarship in modern Jewish thought, modern Jewish philosophy and Jewish feminism places Jewish feminist thought firmly within the history, methods and subject of modern Jewish thought. Taking seriously the inherent inclusiveness of the term modern Jewish thought and redrawing its boundaries to explicitly include Jewish feminist thinkers exposes the shared concern of each discipline. Doing so foregrounds common themes and questions occasioned by modern Jewish life such as Israel, Jewish identity, tradition and halakha, the status and authority of sacred texts and revelation and the constitution and diversity of Jewish communities. Such a comparative approach also draws attention to dissonance–particularly around questions of gender and sexuality in Judaism that are raised around transgender, gay and lesbian Jewish life and gender and halakah.

Liberating Imagination and Other Ends of Medieval Jewish Philosophy

Abstract In its treatment of imagination as understood by medieval Jewish philosophers, modern scholarship has tended to neglect the intersection of animal fables and political thought. This paper examines several Aesopian themes in Greek philosophy and medieval Jewish philosophic literature, especially the tales composed by Berakhiah ha-Naqdan, in order to highlight the attention lavished by these premoderns on the faculty of imagination. It is argued that, according to the philosophers, human perfection requires the cultivation of both intellect and imagination. It is also shown that Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises” as constituting philosophy is fruitfully applicable to the genre of fable.

The Debate Between Salomon Munk and Heinrich Ritter on Medieval Jewish and Arabic History of Philosophy

Abstract In the middle of the nineteenth century, the German historian of philosophy Heinrich Ritter and the Jewish scholar and Orientalist Salomon Munk had a debate on the history of Jewish Philosophy. This debate is an example of how Salomon Munk’s work functioned to point up the reciprocal influences between Jewish, Arab and Christian Thought in the Middle Ages. Munk, who was a scholar within the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a Jewish movement that promoted the scientific study of Judaism, criticized Ritter’s History of Philosophy. In fact, Munk noticed that in his work, Ritter mentioned only a few references to Jewish thinkers like Maimonides. Ritter’s response was that Christian historians of philosophy knew too little about this subject in order to give a qualified judgment. Nevertheless, later on, in the second edition of his History of Philosophy, Ritter added many important details on Al-Gazali, Ibn-Badja and Ibn-Roschd after the reading of Munk’s articles. Ritter also shaped an entirely new paragraph on the history of Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages using above all Munk’s seminal studies on Avicebron’s Fons Vitae.

Two Implicit Sources of Judah Messer Leon's Commentary on <em>Physics</em> 1–4

While he was in Mantua in 1475, the Italian Jewish philosopher Judah Messer Leon (ca. 1425–1498) wrote a wide commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 1–4. As a “Hebrew Schoolman,” he inserted into this work a number of explicit and implicit references to Latin Scholastic commentaries on the Physics. An examination of the Latin sources quoted explicitly has been given elsewhere. Here, two implicit sources are examined: Paul of Venice’s Expositio super octo libros Physicorum necnon super commentum Averrois, and Gaetano de Thiene’s Recollectae super octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis. The former was apparently employed by Judah Messer Leon only for the general structure of his work; the latter, by contrast, was widely employed as the direct source of several long passages, although the Latin author was never mentioned by name. Some of these passages, found in Book 1, Parts 1–2 of the commentary (on Aristotle, Physics 184a10–188a8), are listed and examined here. Their close relationship with Gaetano de Thiene’s work is shown.

“Speaking German Like Nobody’s Business”: Anna May Wong, Walter Benjamin, and the Possibilities of Asian American Cosmopolitanism

In the summer of 1928 in Berlin, the noted German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) shared an unlikely encounter that set in relief European and American conceptions of modernity as well as white European intellectual and American racial minority cosmopolitanisms. On July 6, 1928, Benjamin published the results as “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong” [“Speaking with Anna May Wong: A Chinoiserie from the Old West”] on the front page of the leading German literary review, Die Literarische Welt. Read against a cache of Wong’s writings, the encounter and the writings are significant for how they intervene in constructions of cosmopolitanism and racial and gendered difference. This encounter raises questions concerning the relationship between Asian America, modernity, race, gender, and cosmopolitanism, linking notions of cosmopolitanism to a discourse of race in the transnational American context. Benjamin’s struggles in fully characterizing Wong also point to the antagonism between racialized American modern femininity and Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

Philosophy from the outside in: Rosenzweig’s critical project

This paper examines Rosenzweig?s philosophic project in the context of his time as a critical intervention in the discussion of the place of Jewish thought in the university and in society. If Hermann Cohen represented the first generation of Jewish philosophers claiming that participation in the university is constitutive for the institution?s claim to universalism, the second generation-represented by Martin Buber - was more diffident about the university and its openness. For Buber, literary modernism offered what the university would refuse. Disappointed about the failure of the recognition of the efforts of the previous two generations, Rosenzweig represents the third generation. He turns the situation into a creative response anchoring philosophy as a project that calls for a resolute move outside the university.

Gersonides' Naturalistic Account of Providence in Light of the <em>Book of Animals</em>

Divine province is one of the central themes considered by medieval Jewish philosophers. Gersonides (1288–1344) wrote extensively on this subject in the Wars of the Lord and his biblical commentaries. Throughout these works we find evidence of Gersonides’ acquaintance with Aristotelian natural philosophy. One motif recurs in Gersonides’ account of divine providence, which originates from Aristotle’s zoological treatises, known in the Middle Ages as the Book of Animals . This principal idea is that natural kinds are ranked on a hierarchical scale ( scala naturae ). Aristotle and his commentators were of the opinion that ascending levels of beings differ essentially in their physical configuration. Gersonides adapts this notion to his religious discussions and sees divine providence as hierarchical and following the scala naturae . This providence, according to Gersonides, is responsible not only for various degrees of biological perfection, but also includes other elements traditionally ascribed to divine providence. Examining Gersonides’ explicit references to a prevalent Aristotelian concept reveals his unique understanding of divine providence, as well as his unique method of combining scientific theories with theological views.

Book Review: <i>Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life</i>

Author: Hilary PutnamTitle: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig. Buber, Levinas, WittgensteinPublishers: Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 2008121 pagesReviewer: Peter Collins

DISTURBING BOUNDARIES: DEVELOPING JEWISH FEMINIST ETHICS WITH BUBER, LEVINAS AND FACKENHEIM

This paper proposes an inclusivist, meta-denominational theoretical framework for Jewish feminist ethical thought by opening up a conversation between modern Jewish thought, Jewish feminism and feminist thought. Although the disciplinary narratives of modern Jewish philosophy and Jewish feminism have tended to be largely inattentive to each other, their shared critical engagement with Jewish thought, tradition, history and contemporary life, argues for a more substantive interdisciplinary dialogue. By strategically engaging the thought of three modern Jewish thinkers, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Emil Fackenheim, this paper proffers a constructive feminist re-reading that highlights the promise and challenge their work presents for Jewish feminist ethics. These critiques elicit three corresponding Jewish feminist ethical frameworks: the ethics of relationship, alterity, and presence. The principles proffered here are mutually grounded in Jewish feminist theory and activism, modern Jewish thought, feminist theory and ethics, and Jewish women's historical and contemporary experiences. In bringing together these disciplines, I demonstrate that Jewish feminist ethics is Jewish, feminist and ethical when it articulates what I describe as a “thick” description of ethics; one that is ethically attentive to a multiplicity of ethical narratives.