Problematics

Medieval Jewish philosophy, like all religious philosophies, is the attempt to reconcile the potentially irreconcilable: rationalism under the guise of Greek philosophy and faith as taught by religious scripture. For some, let us call them ‘‘religious philosophers,” reason and faith naturally went together at least when properly interpreted. For most, however, the two worldviews could never coexist because they represented two completely different modalities and thus two mutually exclusive sets of authority. If reason was based on the free exercise of the rational faculty, religion was dependent upon a series of commandments derived, not from reason, but from revelation. Whereas the majority of philosophical speculation was, for example, predicated on the eternity of the universe (as Aristotelian physics presupposed), religion needed an omnipotent and omniscient deity who created the world ex nihilo.

We witness all of these tensions, and others, in medieval Jewish philosophy. The Bible presents a God who creates the universe from nothing, who is described using anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language, who chooses one people (i. e., the Jews) over others, and who will redeem the world at the end of times. On the human side, Jews possess a series of commandments - many of which, on first blush, appear to be irrational (e. g., the mixing of various substances) - that govern every aspect of their life (from circumcision to diet to death) and whose performance is connected to religious, if not necessarily intellectual, perfection.

The reconciliation of faith and reason, religious practice and intellectual speculation, becomes the goal of Jewish philosophy. As a result, medieval Jewish philosophers engaged in the interpretation of each one of these apparently contradictory activities in terms of the other. If the first chapter of Genesis, for example, claims that God created the world ex nihilo, then how might this act of creation be compatible with Neoplatonic of Aristotelian metaphysics? If the commandments dictate that Jewish males must be circumcised on the eighth day after birth or that Jews must refrain from mixing meat and dairy, how can such practices be reconcilable with larger and more universal sets of ethical claims?

This reconciliation was facilitated by a series of readings that included a number of hermeneutical strategies, the most important of which was allegory. Beginning as early as Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE), Jewish philosophers engaged in the practice of using allegory to show that when the biblical text says something that apparently does not coincide with the dictates of reason, it is not the case that the Bible is wrong, only that our understanding of it is. The result is that the literal level of the Bible must be reinterpreted - critics would say interpreted away - so that it may now be seen to coincide with reason. This use of allegory would subsequently be employed by virtually every medieval Jewish philosopher as a way to smooth over the potential roadblocks that prevented the smooth harmonization of philosophy and religion. If the philosophers thought that they had succeeded in this, their critics accused them of perfidy and of making a mockery of religious texts and the commandments derived therefrom.