Judaism & Jewish Philosophy: A Selected Bibliography

Having recently posted bibliographies for Hinduism, Classical Chinese Worldviews, and Buddhism as part of the larger Directed Reading series, we move on to the so-called Western monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sometimes referred to as the "religions of Abraham." And "so-called" because the geo-historical boundaries between East and West are not sharp, in this instance illustrated by the fact that these are Semitic worldviews, the word Semite referring to "a member of any of various ancient and modern people originating in southwestern Asia, including Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopian Semites." Yet it is these Semitic traditions that are central to what we call Western civilization(s). The fuzziness of geo-historical boundaries is reinforced with the case of Zoroastrianism, often cited as "uniquely important in the history of religion because of its possible formative links to both Western and Eastern religious traditions." Indeed, those links are indirectly or implicitly revealed in Barbara Holdrege's groundbreaking comparative study, Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (1995).

The oldest of these Semitic religious worldviews is of course Judaism, and hence the first of our next three bibliographies. Yet our list goes beyond religion as such in so far as many self-described Jews are of secular or humanist orientation and thus not religious, however much they identify with this or that aspect of Jewish history, culture or philosophy, or even simply the modern state of Israel. Modern narratives of Western intellectual history rightly grant pride of place to such emblematic or iconic secular Jews as Marx, Freud and Einstein, thereby according a rather different meaning to the adjectival phrase "Judeo-Christian" when speaking to the character of Western civilization (its other face being Greco-Roman; and we might endeavor to appreciate the Islamo-Christian quality of this civilization as well). For our bibliography, this secular or humanist Jewish dimension is confined to that which falls within the rubric of Jewish philosophy and explains the title of this particular compilation.

Perhaps needless to say, there are no hard and fast boundaries between religion and philosophy, a fact far easier to appreciate in the case of Asian worldviews but no less important with regard to Western civilization(s). For instance, the theodicy question that arises from an examination of the problem of evil in theistic belief (i.e., belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity alongside the facts of suffering and evil as intrinsic to the human condition) is an unavoidable one for all sincere Jews, Christians and Muslims, a question that appears resistant if not unamenable to rationalist resolution but is no less urgent for all that. Now even if one is not a theist, as are atheists or agnostics (keeping in mind that one might, like the Buddhist, be religious and non-theist), the question of evil or suffering simpliciter is unavoidable and the possible answers, while now of "naturalist" or "materialist" construction, are no less poignant or urgent, at the very least they are not ready-made. More generally, discussions of the "meaning of life" make mincemeat of sharp divisions between religion and philosophy (even if there was a time in the world of anglophone analytic philosophy when this would have been derisively dismissed as a 'pseudo-' or meaningless question!), and one of the merits of non-religious existentialist philosophy (or humanistic psychology for that matter) is that it confronted this topic in a forthright and relatively clear manner (cf. Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, 2007, a recent attempt to deal seriously with this 'meaning' question from the premises of a naturalistic metaphysics). We might, with John Haldane (in his essay, 'On the Very Idea of Spiritual Values,' in Anthony O'Hear, ed., Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, 2000), think too of the perspectives provided by non-religious yet "spiritual" philosophies, such as the Hellenistic "therapies of desire" analyzed by Martha Nussbaum. Jewish philosophy may be avowedly non-religious, but perhaps on occasion it is nevertheless "spiritual," in either case it does not avoid the inevitable question of evil and suffering.

It is not only the treatment of common topics or questions, or the focus on particular kinds of experience, virtue ethics and contemplation, that make the boundaries between religions and philosophies porous, but the vigorous cognitive or rational dimensions found within religions (cf. James Kellenberger's outline of the 'third perspective' in The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives, 1985; the 'natural theology' tradition of Catholicism; and Oliver Leaman's remark in A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, 1999, that 'I do not know if it is ever useful to rank religions with respect to rationality, but were this to be done, there is little doubt that Islam would score highly. There are many references to the importance of reason in the Qur'an, and Islam seems to take pride, at least in its early years, in presenting itself as highly rational.') that likewise attest to the welcome and ineluctable philosophical permeability of religious worldviews. The figure of Moses Maimonides, for instance, is compelling evidence of the proposition that it is not always easy to distinguish Jewish religious tradition from Jewish philosophical tradition. Philosophy is a strong and essential element of the Oral Law in Judaism and it came to be an equally vibrant component of the kabbalistic mystical tradition (As Leaman notes, 'In most cases, the mystical understandings of Judaism had no difficulty in linking up with the rational and legal approach....').