Jewish philosophy (Hebrew: פילוסופיה יהודית) (Arabic: الفلسفة اليهودية) (Yiddish: ייִדיש פֿילאָסאָפֿיע) includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or in relation to the religion of Judaism. Until modern Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and Jewish Emancipation, Jewish philosophy was preoccupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing emergent ideas that are not necessarily Jewish into a uniquely Jewish scholastic framework and world-view. With their acceptance into modern society, Jews with secular educations embraced or developed entirely new philosophies to meet the demands of the world in which they now found themselves.
Medieval re-discovery of Greek thought among Gaonim of 10th century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical-Talmudic Judaism. Philosophy was generally in competition with Kabbalah. Both schools would become part of classic Rabbinic literature, though the decline of scholastic rationalism coincided with historical events which drew Jews to the Kabbalistic approach. For European Jews, emancipation and encounter with secular thought from the 18th-century onwards altered how philosophy was viewed. Oriental and Eastern European communities had later and more ambivalent interaction with secular culture than in Western Europe. In the varied responses to modernity, Jewish philosophical ideas were developed across the range of emerging religious denominations. These developments could be seen as either continuations, or breaks, with the canon of Rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, and resulted in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods.
Read more about Jewish Philosophy: Jewish Scholarship After Destruction of Second Temple, The Rambam - Maimonides, Medieval Jewish Philosophy After Maimonides, Renaissance Jewish Philosophy and Philosophers, Seventeenth-century Jewish Philosophy, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century Jewish Philosophy
Famous quotes containing the words jewish and/or philosophy:
“It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class.... I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason.”
—Thomas Hobbes (15791688)