Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations (Jewish, Judaism) by S.D. Goitein

Author:S.D. Goitein [Goitein, S.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780486121260
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

3. The Rise of Jewish Philosophy under Muslim Impact.

In the first part of this chapter, the linguistic aspects of Jewish-Arabic symbiosis have been discussed in some detail, for these, although most tangible in everyday life, are usually overlooked. Fortunately, and most characteristically, the same cannot be said about the study of the impact of Muhammadan spiritual life on the Jewish mind.

Many Jewish scholars engaged in Islamic studies directed a part of their activities to this subject. They were led in this by I. Goldziher, the Nestor of modern Islamics (1850–1921), who regarded his own work on Jewish-Arab philosophy as so essential, that in private letters he complained that it did not find the same attention as his widely read books on Islam.

A tremendous amount of scholarly work, some of first-rate quality, has been devoted, during the last hundred years, to the rise and development of Jewish philosophy and theology under the influence of the Islamic culture. Beginning with Solomon Munk’s Melanges de philosophie juive et arabe, and his classical edition and translation into French of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, down to the masters of our own times, H. A. Wolfson of Harvard, or the lamented Julius Guttmann of Jerusalem (whose The Philosophies of Judaism, 1933, is now available in an English translation), many experts on Jewish philosophy or on philosophy at large have devoted their lives to the study of the relations between Muslim and Jewish thought. This work is being vigorously continued by a younger generation of scholars in the United States, France and England—as well as in Israel.

It is due to the activities of scholars of this type that some of the Jewish-Arabic authors, to whom comparatively little attention has been paid before, have come into the foreground in our own times, e.g., the enigmatic Ibn Kammuna, a thirteenth century author of a comparative study on Islam, Christianity and Judaism, or the original thinker, Abu’l-Barakat ibn Malka (twelfth century), whose philosophy has been lucidly explained by Solomon Pines, Guttmann’s successor to the chair of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Abu‘l-Barakat’s main philosophical work has been recently edited by Muslim scholars in India, while Pines is preparing an edition of his philosophical commentary on Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). In his criticism of Aristotle’s Physics, Abu’l-Barakat, like the Hebrew-writing Hasdai Crescas of the fourteenth century, (who, however, worked independently of him), anticipated that destruction of Aristotle’s authority, which marked the beginning of modern science.

The basic fact about Jewish-Arabic thought is that Greek science and Greek methods of thinking made their entrance into Jewish life mainly through the gates of Arab-Muslim literature. With the Arabic-writing Jewish doctors, mathematicians, astronomers and philosophers of the ninth and tenth centuries, science, in the Greek sense of the word, for the first time became known and practiced among the bulk of the Jewish community. All genuine Jewish reasoning before that time consisted either of simple, practical observations and conclusions, or of mythological conceptions, no matter how profound.

Systematic, scientific thinking, such as that developed by the Greeks, was practiced by the Jewish people only under “Muslim” influence.

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