Spinoza, whom Bertrand Russell considered the most “lovable” of the great philosophers[1], thought that there is really only one thing, which he called “God, or Nature”. In the summer of 1656, at the age of 24, he was found guilty of heresy, excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue, and cursed with “all the curses of the firmament”. Is this man’s thought part of “Jewish philosophy”? Many subsequent thinkers and scholars have taken the view that it is; for Moses Hess, nineteenth‐century precursor of Zionism, it was “the supreme spiritual manifestation of Judaism in modern times”. There is now a Spinoza Institute in Jerusalem.
This mighty tome contains 39 essays, all of which come with scholarly notes and detailed bibliographies; the 23 pages on Spinoza are by Seymour Feldman, who works in the philosophy department at Rutgers University. This book complements the History of Islamic Philosophy, which is volume I of the Routledge History of World Philosophies; this series supplements the ten‐volume Routledge History of Philosophy. In their preface the editors write that “Jewish and Islamic philosophy are often viewed as mere footnotes in general histories of Western philosophy” because “the ‘West’ has historically been defined in exclusivist terms” that emphasize “Greco‐Roman, Christian, and Enlightenment culture”. The contributions have been arranged under four broad historical headings: Foundations and first principles; Medieval Jewish philosophy; Modern Jewish philosophy; and Contemporary Jewish philosophy. There are indexes of names and of terms. In an essay that serves as a sort of overture Daniel H. Frank directly addresses the question: “What is Jewish philosophy?”. The late Emmanuel Levinas, who introduced the influential notion of altérité or “otherness” into contemporary social thought, divided his works into “Hebrew” and “Greek”, though he wrote in French (he was actually Lithuanian). Isaac Husik, who wrote A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (1958), came to the surprising conclusion that “there are no Jewish philosophers and there is no Jewish philosophy”.
Richard H. Popkin, author of several illuminating books on scepticism (see, for example, [2]), writes here on The Jewish community of Amsterdam, which is generally known only for having expelled Spinoza. The final section includes chapters on Zionism and The Shoah. Judith Plaskow, who writes on Jewish feminist thought, has argued that “the Otherness of women is embedded in the central categories of Jewish thought”. In a discussion of Martin Buber, Oliver Leaman observes that “one of the main difficulties of establishing a genuine I‐Thou relationship is that one tends to slip into an I‐It relationship without even realizing it” (“Jewish existentialism”). Isaac Breuer, grandson of the nineteenth‐century defender of “enlightened” Orthodoxy Samson Raphael Hirsch, once said: “Blessed be God, who in His wisdom created Kant” (“Hirsch”). “Conscience is a Jewish invention”, Himmler told the SS (“Shoah”).
I have barely skimmed the surface of this work, much of the contents of which demand to be ruminated over and argued about. In chapter 2, “The Bible as a source of philosophical reflection”, Shalom Carmy and David Schatz consider Genesis 22:2, where God decides to test Abraham’s faith by telling him to “take your son, your only son, whom you love ‐ Isaac ‐ and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him up there as a burnt offering”. The authors note that scholarly reflection on this episode in modern times has been dominated by Soren Kierkegaard’s brilliantly‐expressed argument that Abraham’s reaction illustrates how we can move beyond an “ethical stage” of development to a “religious” one[3]. I am afraid I would have flunked that test.
