Canons

As should be apparent from the above, the canons of Jewish philosophy are twofold: Jewish and non-Jewish. As for the former, all Jewish philosophy can be understood, at least phenomenologically, as the attempt to explain rationally the traditional sources of Judaism (e. g., Torah, Talmud). As for the latter, all Jewish philosophy is the explanation of these concepts using the interpretive grids supplied by non-Jewish philosophical schools (e. g., Neoplatonism, Scholasticism, Humanism).

There exists, with one or two possible exceptions, virtually no works written by Jews devoted solely to the topic of philosophy. There is, for example, no ‘‘Jewish’’ Averroes i. e., someone who was interested solely in interpreting Aristotle and who had very little concern for religion or religious ideas. This led Leo Strauss to make his famous (or perhaps infamous) proclamation that the most famous and important work of Jewish philosophy, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, ‘‘is not a philosophic book - a book written by a philosopher for a philosopher - but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews’’ (1963:xv). This signals that Jewish philosophy, while certainly a speculative enterprise, is first and foremost an exegetical endeavor, the attempt to read philosophy into the Torah and vice versa. If we want to find ‘‘pure’’ philosophical treatises, devoid of religious concerns, we often search in vain.

Despite the fact that there exist very few pure philosophical treatises, nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars associated with the movement Wissenschaft des Judentums (‘‘The Science of Judaism’’) nevertheless had no problems in defining an object of study that they labeled as medieval Jewish philosophy. They subsequently created a canon of thinkers, and treatises, that they believed adequately contributed to such a field of study. Like all such canons created in the nineteenth century, it put pride of place on great men and original works, and tended to marginalize others - especially those who wrote commentaries to these earlier works - as epigonic and unoriginal. Perhaps because of the apparent freedom that Jews enjoyed under eleventh - and twelfth-century Muslim rule and the concomitant desire for equality in Germany, these Wissen-schaft scholars tended to focus on the philosophers from

Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). They identified these medieval Andalusi Jewish thinkers with a classical ‘‘golden age’’ and viewed the period between this golden age and their own as one of gradual decline. In their quest to revivify Jewish life they created, what Shmuel Feiner calls, a ‘‘pantheon of historical heroes’’ (2002:50-65) and, in many ways, they shaped this pantheon in their own image.

In their desire to make Judaism a religion of reason, to use the phrase of Hermann Cohen, all that did not fit within a rather strict definition of ‘‘rationality’’ was excluded and often ridiculed as obscurantist. In other words, ‘‘Jewish philosophy” was artificially extracted from ‘‘Jewish mysticism’’ (kabbalah) or ‘‘Talmudism’’ when in fact the boundaries between them were often quite porous. The end result is that ‘‘medieval Jewish philosophy’’ was developed - and a canon of thinkers and works imagined - as a way to correct perceived excesses and lacunae in modern Judaism.

This is certainly not to claim that medieval Jewish philosophy was simply an invention ofnineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars, however. What it does signal is that we must be aware of the potential artificiality of the enterprise and thereby realize that their definition of Jewish philosophy may in fact be too narrow or too ideological. Moreover, we should not let received opinion about medieval Jewish philosophy shackle the way we imagine it, the various relationships configured between philosophers and its discontents, in the future.

A case in point that tests the potential artificiality of ‘‘medieval Jewish philosophy’’ is the curious work of Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-c. 1058) entitled The Fountain of Life, which, although written in Arabic, survived only in a Latin translation known as the Fons vitae. This treatise is a purely metaphysical work and - with the possible exception of one quotation (from the mystical Sefer Yetzira, and not the Bible) - makes no mention of Judaism whatsoever. We thus have no idea how Ibn Gabirol either extracted his ideas from scripture or read them into it. As a result, subsequent Jewish philosophers largely ignored the work, although it would come to play an important role in Christian scholasticism, where its author was assumed to be a Muslim (the so-called ‘‘Avencebrol’’). It was not until the nineteenth century that Solomon Munk found Hebrew excerpts of the work and proved their identity with the Fons vitae that the text finally became associated with Ibn Gabirol. So what do we do with Ibn Gabirol? Is his Fons vitae a work of Jewish philosophy just because its author was Jewish? The tendency is to focus less on his Fons vitae and more on his ‘‘Jewish’’ works such as his philosophical poem Keter Malkhut that explicitly addresses Jewish themes and is replete with biblical prooftexts.