Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion

Strauss, Ze'ev
Rabbi Jedidjah ha-Alexandri: Die Wiederentdeckung der Religionsphilosophie des Philon von Alexandria in der osteuropäischen Haskala
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2027.

Das vorliegende Werk geht der Frage nach, wie Philon von Alexandria in der jüdischen Aufklärungsphilosophie zu Rabbi Jedidjah ha-Alexandri stilisiert wurde. Strauss legt durch eine historisch-philologische Analyse eine besondere Tendenz innerhalb der Haskala frei, den hellenistischen Philosophen der Zeitenwende zu einer rabbinischen Autorität umzudeuten und ihn somit für die jüdische Denktradition zurückzugewinnen. Dabei konnten die Maskilim, wie etwa Nachman Krochmal und Josef Flesch, zum ersten Mal der unter christlichen Denkern vorherrschenden Neigung, Philon in erster Linie als Vorgriff auf das Christentum einzuschätzen, etwas Wesentliches entgegensetzen. Unter Ausschöpfung der gesamten Quellenlage des Judentums waren sie bemüht, sich mit ihrem innovativen Philonbild als Philo Judaeus gegen das spätantike Konstrukt von Philo Christianus zu behaupten.

Igor H. De Souza
Rewriting Maimonides. Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557657 (open access/PDF download)

Maimonideanism, the intellectual culture inspired by Maimonides’ writings, has received much recent attention. Yet a central aspect of Maimonideanism has been overlooked: the formal reception of the Guide of the Perplexed through commentary.

In Rewriting Maimonides, Igor H. De Souza offers a comprehensive analysis of six early philosophical commentaries, written in Italy, Spain, and France, by some of Maimonides’ most loyal followers. The early commentaries represent the most creative period of exegesis of the Guide. De Souza’s analysis dispels the notion that the tradition of commentary on the Guide is monolithic. Rather, De Souza’s study illuminates how each commentator offers distinctive readings. Challenging the hierarchy of text and commentary, Rewriting Maimonides studies commentaries on the Guide as texts in their own right.

De Souza approaches the form of commentary as a multifaceted cultural practice. Employing historical, philosophical, and literary methods, this publication fills a lacuna in the history of the Guide through a global perspective on commentary.

Racheli Haliva
Isaac Polqar – A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? Philosophy and Religion in Isaac Polqar’s ʿEzer ha-Dat and Tešuvat Epiqoros
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110569599 

To date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar’s thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that covers Polqar’s thought in its entirety. This book aims to fill this lacuna by tracing and contextualizing both Polqar’s Islamic sources (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes) and his Jewish sources (Maimonides and Isaac Albalag).
The study brings to light three of Polqar’s main purposes; (1) seeking to defend Judaism as a true religion against Christianity; (2) similarly to his fellow Jewish Averroists, Polqar wishes to defend the discipline of philosophy. By philosophy, Polqar means Averroes' interpretation of Aristotle. As a consequence, he offers an Averroistic interpretation of Judaism and becomes one of the main representatives of Jewish Averroism; (3) defending his philosophical interpretation of Judaism.
From a social and political point of view, Polqar's unreserved embrace of philosophy raised problems within the Jewish community; he had to refute the Jewish traditionalists’ charge that he was a heretic, led astray by philosophy. The main objective guiding this study is that Polqar advances a systematic naturalistic interpretation of Judaism, which in many cases does not agree with traditional Jewish views.

Carsten Wilke
Farewell to Shulamit. Spatial and Social Diversity in the Song of Songs
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110500882 (open access/PDF download)

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible’s most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song’s voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text’s strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem’s artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros.