Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms

Description

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.

Introduction / Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson

1. Animal Fables and Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Kalman P. Bland, z'l

2. Biblical Commentaries as a Genre of Jewish Philosophical Writing / Raphael Dascalu

3. Commentaries on The Guide of the Perplexed: A Brief Literary History / Igor H. de Souza

4. Philosophical Commentary and Supercommentary: The Hebrew Aristotelean Commentaries of the Fourteenth through Sixteenth Centuries / Yehuda Halper

5. The Author's Haqdamah as a Literary Form in Jewish Thought / Steven Harvey

6. Does Judaism Make Sense? Early Medieval Kalām as Literature / Gyongyi Hegedus

7. Dialogues / Aaron W. Hughes

8. Poetry / Aaron W. Hughes

9. Poetic Summaries of Scientific and Philosophical Works / Maud Kozodoy

10. The Philosophical Epistle as a Genre of Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Charles Manekin

11. The Sermon in Late Medieval Jewish Thought as Method for Popularizing Philosophy / Chaim Meir Neria

12. Lexicons and Lexicography in Medieval Jewish Philosophy / James T. Robinson

13. Theological Summas in Late Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Shira Weiss

Index

Sujets

• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• History
• Jew
• Middle Ages
• Philosophy of religion
• Literary criticism
• Religious studies
• Jewish studies
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Jews
• Medieval philosophy
• Edad Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253042545
• Langue: English

Extrait

MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND ITS LITERARY FORMS
NEW JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND THOUGHT
Zachary J. Braiterman
MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND ITS LITERARY FORMS
Edited by Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Names: Hughes, Aaron W., [date] editor.
Title: Medieval Jewish philosophy and its literary forms / edited by Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Series: New Jewish philosophy and thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018049717 (print) | LCCN 2019014651 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253042552 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253042514 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253042521 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Jewish philosophy-History. | Philosophy, Medieval.
Classification: LCC B755 (ebook) | LCC B755 .M435 2019 (print) | DDC 181/.06-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049717
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
To the memory of our beloved colleague,
Kalman P. Bland (1942-2017)
CONTENTS

Introduction / Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson

1 Animal Fables and Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Kalman P. Bland, z l

2 Biblical Commentaries as a Genre of Jewish Philosophical Writing / Raphael Dascalu

3 Commentaries on The Guide of the Perplexed : A Brief Literary History / Igor H. de Souza

4 Philosophical Commentary and Supercommentary: The Hebrew Aristotelian Commentaries of the Fourteenth through Sixteenth Centuries / Yehuda Halper

5 The Author s Haqdamah as a Literary Form in Jewish Thought / Steven Harvey

6 Does Judaism Make Sense? Early Medieval Kalam as Literature / Gyongyi Hegedus

7 Dialogues / Aaron W. Hughes

8 Poetry / Aaron W. Hughes

9 Poetic Summaries of Scientific and Philosophical Works / Maud Kozodoy

10 The Philosophical Epistle as a Genre of Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Charles H. Manekin

11 The Sermon in Late Medieval Jewish Thought as Method for Popularizing Philosophy / Chaim Meir Neria

12 Lexicons and Lexicography in Medieval Jewish Philosophy / James T. Robinson

13 Theological Summas in Late Medieval Jewish Philosophy / Shira Weiss

Index
MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND ITS LITERARY FORMS
INTRODUCTION
Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson
To raise the issue of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. . . . Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. 1
W ITH THIS STATEMENT , H AYDEN W HITE SUGGESTS THAT THE only meaning that history can have is the one that narrative imagination assigns to it. In this volume, we wish to suggest, in a similar vein, that the only meaning that philosophy can have is through the various literary genres that provide it form. There is not one abstract notion of philosophy, in other words, to which we assent but only various narratives of philosophy that organize, build an argument, and, in the process, ultimately seek to influence a readership. This is as true for Jewish philosophy, as White suggests, as it is for all types of philosophy.
The academic study of medieval Jewish philosophy began in Central Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. In their desire to make Jews rational and to show how Jewish philosophy coincided with the various species of non-Jewish rationalism, towering figures such as Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907), Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), and Jakob Guttmann (1845-1919) created the parameters of a field of study that is still largely in place to this day. 2 Such individuals wrote during a period of inner turmoil within Judaism to be sure, one wherein all of the major denominations of Judaism were created, all of which revolved around the perceived relationship between Jews and non-Jewish ideas and culture. 3 While none of this was unique to the nineteenth century-Jews after all had been intimately involved in other cultures since at least the first century CE-what was new was the creation of a distinct field devoted to the academic study of Judaism in general and medieval Jewish philosophy in particular. Methods supplied by larger disciplinary frameworks such as history and philology formed the context for this new endeavor. 4 Wissenschaft des Judentums, the predecessor to the modern field of Jewish studies, also established many of the categories and subdisciplines-medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, rabbinics, parshanut (i.e., biblical exegesis), and so on-that continue to structure how premodern Jewish texts are categorized and studied both in North America and Israel. In addition to these rubrics, the non-Jewish temporal periodizations of medieval Jewish philosophy, which continue to be employed, were also developed to subdivide medieval Jewish philosophy: Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Averroistic, humanist, and so on.
While recent years have witnessed many new trends and developments in the more general study of the Middle Ages, many of these trends and developments have made few or no inroads into the field of medieval Jewish philosophy. 5 The field continues to develop largely along the technical and insular lines laid out by Wissenschaft des Judentums over a century and a half ago. Despite the increased intersection between medieval studies and the larger humanities in which they are located, the study of medieval Jewish philosophy remains a fairly technical and unwelcoming field. The present volume seeks to redress this oversight by providing what we believe to be a set of new and critical investigations into the study of medieval Jewish philosophical texts by focusing on the important role of genre.
This overwhelming evidence on a generically constructed medieval Jewish philosophy too often overlooks the ways in which ideas contained within the texts associated with them are presented, articulated, and developed. While this may be forgiven in the modern period, in which philosophy tends to be written in technical monographs and disseminated through university presses, this has not always been the case. The medieval period, for example, witnessed a host of different genres and forms to express, to communicate, and to teach the more technical aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Because of this diversity of genres, proper attention must be paid to the various literary forms of these texts and not just their contents. It is not insignificant, for example, that some philosophers chose to express their ideas using the genre of dialogues, that some did so using poetic meter, or that others chose to present their ideas through commentaries of either earlier philosophers or sacred scripture.
Such literary genres, of course, need not mean that the contents are not philosophical. However, too often within Jewish studies that deal with the medieval period, nontraditional genres are written off as unoriginal and then subsequently lumped into another subfield created by Wissenschaft des Judentums, such as parshanut or poetry. It is frequently assumed, for example, that a philosophical commentary is an unoriginal genre because it simply restates, albeit in different language, that which is found in an earlier composition (be it Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, or Averroes). Such an assumption, however, overlooks the often extremely original and creative ideas embedded in the genre. Indeed, one could even go so far as to claim that the genre provides a certain conservative cover under which innovative or even dangerous ideas could be expressed. A similar case could be made for poetry. Today there is a tendency to think, and this may well be part of our Platonic inheritance bequeathed to us by our Wissenschaft forebears, that poetry is the antithesis of philosophy. Yet we all know that Plato was an expert in mythopoesis, and that some of the great Islamic philosophers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, argued for the philosophic importance of the genre. Such a conceit also ignores the fact that many medieval Jewish philosophers-especially the Neoplatonists associated with the Andalusi tradition-were highly accomplished poets and made a conscious effort to write their philosophy in poetic style. This does not mean they were inept philosophers, as Hermann Cohen implied, 6 but, as Aaron Hughes argues in his chapter devoted to poetry, these philosophers felt that the poetic medium offered a particular way of thinking about the cosmos and metaphysics that the standard philosophical treatise fundamentally lacked.
A renewed attention to genre shows us to what extent medieval thinkers made connections between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical-three spheres that Wissenschaft des Judentums tore