Jewish Philosophy

The Hebrews first encountered Greek philosophy beginning in the 1st c. A.D. (Philo of Alexandria), but there is no evidence of philosophic activity in Hebraic communities during the centuries of the early Middle Ages until the 9th c., when it began to be cultivated again in Islamic countries (in particular in al-Andalus) in Arabic and not in Hebrew, the sacred language. Unlike the Muslims, Jewish philosophers did not distinguish between philosophy of classical origin (falsafa) and the dialectics of Kalam, nor did they identify philosophy with Kalam. Thus, although Jewish philosophy reached its apex in Spain in the 11th and 12th c. with Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Moses Maimonides (this latter was a contemporary of Averroes), its development continued in the Christian West (Provence, Catalunia, and Italy) starting in the following century with scholars writing in Hebrew and interweaving ever more tightly Scholastic concepts. Isaac Albalag was a committed Averroist, and Gersonides and Moses of Narbona developed ideas analogous to those of the Scholastics. Alongside philosophy of Greek and Islamic origin, even a system of original Hebraic philosophic thought began to take shape, the Kabbala: a doctrine of gnostic and mystical origin dedicated to the study of the sacred language, that leads to mystical experience, and of a cosmology based on the divine attributes, the ten Sefirot. The origin of the Kabbala is pre-medieval, but it flourished in Spain in the 13th c., while its diffusion in Christian intellectual circles did not take place until the 15th c. with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; later in the Renaissance, a strand of ‘Christian Kabbala’ was also articulated.