 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Chosen Ones, Judaism and Philosophy. Stop me if you've heard this one. A devout man is caught in a terrible flood, and retreats to the roof of his house as the waters rise inexorably towards him. As the water reaches the level of the roof, a rowboat comes past. The people in the boat offer to rescue him, but the man says, no need, I put my trust in God. The water keeps rising up to his knees. Two boy scouts come past in a canoe and offer to rescue him. The man says, no need, I put my trust in God. The water rises to his neck, but just in time a helicopter flies overhead and they throw down a rope. He shouts up, no need, I put my trust in God. The helicopter flies off and the man drowns. He goes to heaven and says to God, my Lord, I put my trust in you, why didn't you save me? God says, what are you talking about, I sent a rowboat, a canoe, and a helicopter. I know it's an old joke, but I did tell you to stop me if you've heard it before. It brings us to an issue that has been central in the history of both Islam and Judaism. Both of these faiths are, of course, based on a belief in prophetic revelation. But once God has sent his prophets, what comes next? Does he keep trying to deliver the message to humankind, sending help again and again until we finally accept it? It might seem that the teaching of Islam on this point is clear. God did send many prophets, and Muhammad was the last of them. The Qur'an would be the last book revealed to mankind. Of course, Muslims can still believe that God continues to work his will in the world in other ways. For instance, as we've seen, Muslims in the Shiite tradition believe that Ali and his descendants should be recognized as divinely sanctioned interpreters of the prophet's message. This belief and its rejection by Sunni Muslims have had momentous implications for both political affairs and interpretations of Muslim doctrine and law. A similar controversy raged among Jews in the 9th century, the period in which Greek philosophy was being imported into Arabic-speaking culture. The parallel is certainly not exact, but this too was a controversy about whether an original revelation should be understood in the light of later authoritative interpretation. In this case, the mainstream view was that of the Rabbinic Jews, who continue to be dominant in Judaism today. Of course, they accepted the written canon of scriptural writings, including the Torah, but they also believed that the revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai included more than what we find in the written Torah. The parts of the revelation that were not set down at that time passed down through the generations by word of mouth. Centuries later, this oral Torah became the basis for the texts of commentary and law composed by rabbis in late antiquity. In the 9th century, though, the authority ascribed to these rabbinic texts was questioned by another group of Jews, known as the Karaites. For them, the late ancient texts could claim no special authority, no divine sanction. They were just attempts by fallible humans to expound the meaning of the written Torah. Although these podcasts are devoted to the history of philosophy, not the history of religion, we have several reasons to look at the late antique writings that were at the center of this debate. For one thing, the texts themselves are of considerable philosophical interest. They represent the most crucial intellectual development in Judaism between our old friend Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century AD and the beginnings of medieval Jewish philosophy in the 9th century. Also, the history of Jewish philosophy has mostly unfolded within rabbinic Judaism. That means that if we are to understand the religious sources drawn on by Jewish philosophers, the inspiration and the challenges set to them by Judaism as they understood it, we cannot just think in terms of the Hebrew Bible. We also need to remember the later tradition of law and commentary. Above all, we need to consider the text known as the Mishnah and the bodies of commentary that emerged in its wake, Talmud and Midrash. These texts were set down in late antiquity, a time of considerable uncertainty and disruption for the Jews. As we saw when we looked at Philo of Alexandria, Jewish ritual had for centuries centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. It was destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC, but soon thereafter rebuilt when control over Jerusalem passed to the more benign Persians. This ushered in the period known as Second Temple Judaism, which ended in scenes of carnage and despair when the Romans wrecked the Second Temple in 70 AD. The land of Judea was also devastated in this period with a significant loss of population. Things then went from bad to worse to even worse. In the first half of the 2nd century AD, there were Jewish uprisings all across the Roman world which led to renewed reprisals. For instance, an unsuccessful uprising in the time of Trajan provoked a backlash so severe that the Jewish population of Egypt was virtually wiped out. And yet Jewish patriarchs were still allowed a measure of political power in the Holy Land and served as intermediaries between the restive Jews and the Roman authorities. We might assume that the coming of Christianity would mean further bad news for the Jewish faith. Certainly, when we looked at late ancient Christian thought, we saw severe intellectual critique being aimed at the Jews by authors like Justin Martyr. Christians could be severe at the legal and political level too. There are plentiful examples of discriminatory laws, to say nothing of hostile rhetoric, being directed against the Jews by Christian emperors. On the other hand, Christians were aware of the Jewish roots of their own faith, and laws were also passed to protect their property and their religious practices. Nonetheless, it was a moment of great hope for Jews when the pagan Julian the Apostate became emperor. In an attempt to embarrass the Christians, he declared his intention to restore the Temple in Jerusalem. The hope was short lived. Hardly any progress had been made on the new construction when he died in battle, ending his brief reign. The Temple would not be rebuilt. But a different kind of edifice was already being erected, a structure of laws and of texts built one upon the other. The first to be set down was the Mishnah at around 200 AD. Credit for this text is given to Judah the Patriarch, but this is no monograph written by a single religious leader or scholar. Instead, it records the teachings of many scholars, called rabbis. The word rabbi, by the way, means my master. At first glance, it seems to be a book of legal judgments, which are divided into six large sections or orders covering the offering of crops, times of religious observance such as the Sabbath, which prayers to say in which circumstances, and so on. These judgments are obviously intimately related to the texts of the written revelation, but they are not presented as a commentary on Scripture, which is rarely mentioned explicitly. Instead, we are told what various rabbis decided about a wide range of legal questions. Legal issues concerning women, marriage, purity laws, and the like loom large in the Mishnah, and the text recognizes the possibility of allowing women to study Torah. Later Talmudic texts even name women scholars who spent years studying Torah in an intriguing parallel to well-educated Christian women in late antiquity like the Cappadocian Macrina and the ascetic women whom we refer to as Desert Mothers. This was not the first time that women were able to play a role in the intellectual culture of ancient Judaism. It has recently been argued that a group of Jewish women called the theraputai, who are mentioned by Philo of Alexandria, were part of the development towards allegorical readings of the Bible that is so striking a feature of Philo's own work. Rather surprisingly, given that the Mishnah was formed more than a century after the destruction of the Temple, much of the material gathered in it still deals with fine points of rituals that could only be carried out by priests while the Temple still stood. In this respect, the Mishnah seems to have an almost timeless frame of reference. Yet this magisterial and ahistorical aspect of the Mishnah is balanced by other features. For one thing, it is written in a much different kind of Hebrew from the language of the Torah. For another, there are the signs of its origin in oral teaching. The purpose of the written version may have been simply an aid to memory. And of course, oral traditions change over time. No one reading the Mishnah can miss this point because, rather surprisingly for readers expecting this to be an austere legal tome, the Mishnah frequently records disagreements between rabbis. This gives us a vivid sense of ongoing debate over the prescriptions and application of the Jewish law. Although the Mishnah is no commentary, it fills gaps left by Scripture, significantly extending the Jewish legal teaching through interpretation of the written revelation and through newly offered legal reasoning. Already during Late Antiquity, well before the skepticism of the Karaites, the rabbis needed to stake a claim to authority, to justify their right to make binding legal judgments. Ultimately, the authority of the Mishnah is grounded in its claim to set down the oral Torah, what was revealed at Sinai to Moses and his followers, but not included in written Scripture. But rabbis were also said to be wonder-working sages, capable of killing a man with a glance or magically causing a field to bring forth a crop of cucumbers. Whether this event led to the invention of the dill pickle is not recorded. The working of miracles further bolstered the rabbis' claim to authority. In rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnah would be seen not just as the collection of some learned legal opinions, but as a sacred text in its own right. Inevitably, the Mishnah itself became an object of study and commentary alongside the written Torah that was seen as the revelation given to Moses. So it was that, even as Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire, two further bodies of Jewish texts arose, Midrash and Talmud. Midrash is commentary on the Scriptures, and is standardly divided into two types, halakha, which deals with actual legal rulings, and agada, which provides religious teachings on non-legal subjects. These texts exploit the interpretive possibilities envisioned in a saying about Scripture found in the Mishnah, Jews also turned to the Mishnah itself, finding in it fertile ground for further reflection and commentary. This is what led to the writing of Talmud. There are actually two such texts, the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmud, which comment on the Mishnah much as the Midrashim comment on the written Torah. Like the Mishnah, the Talmud gives a sense of ongoing, subtle engagement with fine points of law, attempting to resolve discrepancies within the rabbinic teachings and, where possible, to smooth over the explicit disagreements found in the Mishnah. Yet, in this search to establish firm legal rulings, Talmud preserves further evidence of careful dialectical debate between scholars. Both for this reason, and because of the sort of topics covered—legal and moral responsibility, classification of certain objects and practices into one category or another, epistemology—some scholars have even described the Mishnah and Talmud as philosophical texts. There is some debate as to the interest of rabbinic scholars in Hellenic or Roman philosophical traditions. Though the texts do not make use of terminology from philosophical texts, there is evidence of personal encounters between rabbis and philosophers. And there are certainly themes of philosophical interest in the rabbinic texts. A good example is the legal status of intentions. Obviously, it is not easy to enforce laws having to do with inward intention. Thus, the rabbis sometimes try to eliminate talk of intentions from the law, for instance by interpreting the injunction not to covet another's property as an injunction not to steal. On the other hand, we find them teaching that rituals require kavana, or sincere intention. Going through the motions is not enough. Though the texts are not written in the style of philosophical treatises, their open acknowledgement of unresolved debate invite the reader to apply his or her own scholarly and philosophical reflection. The Talmud will sometimes offer scriptural proof texts to support rival legal views. At one point, we find the saying, both sides of a controversy are the word of God. So, the magnificent structure bequeathed to the later Jews by the rabbis of late antiquity was something of a maze. The complex dialectical and unsystematic nature of the Talmud meant there was not just room, but need for yet another layer of interpretive legal writing. This call would be answered in 12th century Andalusia by Maimonides, the greatest philosopher of medieval Judaism. He was also a legal scholar, whose greatest contribution in this field was the Mishneh Torah, or second law, a systematization and rationalization of the legal teachings of these rabbinical texts. As we'll see later, a central issue in Maimonides' writings is the relationship between human reason on the one hand and divine revelation and rabbinical teachings on the other. This had already been a vexed issue in late antiquity. For instance, the commentaries on scripture, known as Midrashim, assumed that the revealed text would never say anything in vain or superfluous. From this, the rabbis inferred that scripture does not bother to lay down rules that can be discovered by unaided human reflection. On this reading, scripture is not ever in disagreement with reason, yet its whole purpose is to supplement reasoning by revealing what would otherwise remain inaccessible to us. Nonetheless, legal reasoning must also be used to bring together scriptural materials and the oral tradition to reach concrete judgments. As one rabbinical text remarks, the Torah is like wheat made into flour or flax made into a garment. It provides the indispensable materials for constructing Jewish law and belief, not the finished product. If our tour through the history of philosophy has taught us anything, though, it is that the deliverances of reason differ from time to time and place to place. For the 9th century Jews who first wrote about philosophy in the Islamic world, reason was embodied above all by two non-Jewish traditions. First, the Greek philosophical works that were then being translated into Arabic. Second, the rational theology offered by the Mo'artazilites. We can see the impact of Hellenic philosophy most clearly in the output of a man named Isaac Israeli. His long life began in Egypt in the mid-9th century and is said to have extended for about 100 years. He traveled beyond the confines of Egypt, at least to modern-day Tunisia, and may also have journeyed to the eastern provinces of the Muslim empire. Somehow, on his travels he became acquainted with the writings of the man we looked at in the last episode, Al-Kindi. Drawing extensively on Al-Kindi and on Greek works in Arabic translation, Isaac became the first thinker of a type we'll be meeting several times in episodes to come, a Jewish Neoplatonist. The most famous of the Jewish Neoplatonists is probably Ibn Gabirol, who lived in the 11th century. Isaac anticipates Ibn Gabirol's metaphysical system in some respects. In particular, he introduces a novel twist to the scheme of emanation that became available to readers of Arabic when Plotinus and Proclus were translated. You'll remember that for the Greek Neoplatonists, all things pour forth necessarily from a highest principle which is absolutely one, like light shining from a source of illumination or water gushing from a fountain. In Plotinus's system, the first principle is followed by a universal mind, in Greek nous. Isaac, and later Ibn Gabirol, agree with that, but they interpose a stage between God and the mind. In Isaac, this intermediary stage consists of two principles emanated by God, matter and form. These two then come together to constitute a perfectly wise mind which knows all things. In turn, it produces a universal, rational soul through another process of emanation. The chain of emanation continues with the emergence of the lower types of soul and finally the physical universe. As in Al-Kindi, the heavenly bodies are causally primary and bring about bodily substances and events down here on earth. Isaac does not really solve one central problem that had always faced the Greek Neoplatonists, How is it that many things come forth from a principle that is purely one? Instead, he simply assumes that God is followed immediately by two principles, the so-called first matter and first form. On the other hand, the existence of matter at this exalted level of the system can help to explain why things progressively fall away from the perfection and unity of the first principle. For Isaac, emanation is not just a shining of light, but a casting of shadow. This increases as God's originating activity becomes more mediated by the intervening influence of mind, then soul, then the heavenly bodies. Now it must be admitted that so far none of this seems to have anything to do with Judaism. But Isaac describes his first principle as a creator God who, unlike all other causes, can produce things by bringing them to be out of nothing. Both Isaac and Al-Kindi refer to this special kind of causation as ibdah, or origination. In the case of Isaac, there has been some scholarly controversy as to whether God's originating act is necessary, as in Plotinus, or freely and arbitrarily willed. Isaac does not make it easy to tell, since he refers to God's creation as both an emanation and an act of will. My own feeling is that, like Plotinus, he simply thought that God could, necessarily, give rise to all things, but still be free in doing so, insofar as no other cause was forcing him to create. Another reason Isaac foreshadows developments in later Jewish philosophy is that he was not just a philosopher, he was also a doctor. Supposedly, when asked whether he regretted not having children, he responded that his medical writings would be a better legacy than any human offspring. He might have added that medical writings don't come home drunk in the middle of the night after claiming they were going to the library to do schoolwork. Isaac himself probably never worried his parents like that. Even from the small amount of his work that survives, we can tell that he had studied not just medicine and philosophy, but also Jewish religious texts. In one partially preserved work, called On Spirit and Soul, he brings together all three traditions in the space of only a few pages. For him, spirit, in Arabic ruh, is a subtle physical substance pervading the body, a conception that comes down to him from medical writers like Galen. But unlike Galen, who was reluctant to state any firm views on the soul's nature, Isaac sharply distinguishes soul from spirit, identifying the former as an immaterial principle which can survive the death of the body. Around this same time, other Jewish thinkers turn to a different source of inspiration in constructing a rational version of Judaism—not Neoplatonism and Galen, but the Islamic theology espoused by the Mu'tazilites. One instance is David al-Muqamis, who was active in the early 9th century and thus has a good claim to be the very first medieval Jewish philosopher. He follows the Mu'tazilites on several issues central to their teaching. For instance, he uses the so-called kalam proof of God's existence, which infers the need for a divine creator from the need for substances to be joined to their accidents. He also broadly accepts their ideas about how language applies to God, or rather fails to apply to him. Like the Mu'tazilites, he tends to deny the existence of real attributes distinct from God's essence. Islamic kalam was such a rich source of inspiration for Jewish thinkers in these early centuries that it could be embraced by both parties to the debate I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. With its valorization of human reason, Mu'tazilism was an obvious fit for Karaite Judaism, which gave no special authority to the rabbinical writings of antiquity. For these Karaites, the Torah could best be interpreted through the power of human rationality. Against that standard, they frequently found rabbinical texts to be wanting. For instance, they accused the rabbis of presenting God in an anthropomorphic way. It was perhaps to answer such criticisms that the greatest Jewish philosopher of this period wrote his masterpiece, A Rational Account of Jewish Belief. He too was deeply influenced by the Islamic current that was then swirling into the stream of Jewish intellectual history. His positions on a range of philosophical and theological issues clearly reflect the impact of ideas flowing from Mu'tazilism. Yet he was a passionate defender of rabbinic Judaism and wrote a tax which poured scorn on his Karaite contemporaries. With his thought, medieval Jewish philosophy reaches its first high-water mark. So I'll be in floods of tears if you don't join me to find out more about Saadia Gaon next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.