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Hello, welcome to the new books in Jewish Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barblett. Today, I am grateful, humbled, and honored to be in dialogue with Dr. Jehuda Halper.
He is a member of the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar-i-Lun University. He holds the Shneweis Chair in Jewish Philosophy and Ethics at Bar-i-Lun University and is a principal investigator for the Israel Science Foundations. Research Grant number 622 on Samuel Yibintibon's explanation of foreign terms and the foundations of philosophy in Hebrew. Today, we will be in dialogue regarding his newly published book, Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Play-Doh, Permitting and Furbidding, Opening Quiry.
In 12th to 15th Century Europe and North Africa, published in Leiden, Netherlands by Brill Publishers 2021. Today, I am thrilled to engage in a dialogue with him regarding his newly published book, Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Play-Doh, Permitting and Furbidding, Open, Inquiry in 12th to 15th Century Europe and North Africa, published in Leiden by Brill Publishers 2021. Jehuda, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today. Thank you, the honor is mine.
To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself? Where did you grow up? What formative events in your life inspired the scholar you would become as an adult? Well, I grew up in Athens, Georgia, which is a small town in Georgia, with a very small Jewish community.
And I was introduced to Play-Doh and to Greek from somewhat, something of a quite young age. I actually started studying Greek at the age of about 12th. I really got into that and I went to the University of Chicago and studied more and more of Greek. And I was very interested in Play-Doh, both from a linguistic perspective, is very difficult.
This combination of dialogue, the way people talk, people just be writing the way you speak, and also intense philosophical discussion. And also from the philosophical issues were also very interesting to me, particularly motivations of different speakers and how you balanced those kinds of ideas. I really wanted to be a Play-Doh scholar. I decided after when I finished Chicago, which was about 2004, I decided what I wanted to get in touch with my Jewish roots as a practicing religious Jew.
And I wanted to understand how Play-Doh and Aristotle were connected to that. And I came to Israel and I started to look into that at Hebrew University. And I never stopped, actually that's what I did. And I worked a lot on Aristotle in particular.
The roots are very clear. But my greatest love in a way was Play-Doh. And I wanted to know how Play-Doh was really influential on Jewish thought and when I discovered it, which ended up becoming the basis of this book, is that for most of the Middle Ages, the part that we think of has been so influenced by Greek philosophy and Greek thought, Play-Doh was not read. They didn't have access to Play-Doh's works, not directly.
They had very little access and mostly rumors about Play-Doh. Nevertheless, there were some issues, platonic issues that showed up. And that's what exploring those issues is what came up, what resulted in this book. Ten years of intense exploration of this came out with this book about what kind of socratic questions they came up with without actually access to Play-Doh himself.
What inspired you to write this book? What message do you hope to convey to your readers? Well, one of the things that's interesting to me about this book and what I... There's one particular problem that is most interesting throughout this book and that is the problem of Play-Doh's apology and this sort of divine command that Socrates feels, that Socrates is a apology written by Play-Doh, that Socrates feels that it has this divine command to explore all things and especially the divine things and the question of the divine.
But the question of the divine is to ask about whether there is a divine command or whether there is a divine. And that kind of questioning, asking questions like that, actually goes against the divine. So there's a kind of heresy involved in it, which is called out and actually put to death Socrates. So it's a very difficult position to be in.
And it's something that medieval Jews, as I studied and explored the research of this book, I discovered that medieval Jews have this, some of them, many of them, the ones who took philosophy seriously, saw the same problem. Asking questions about God is also the question of what things that you're supposed to take as assumptions that God exists, that God gives you commandments. And to do that kind of questioning is in a sense also, heretical. And they saw this as a problem.
It's a problem that actually has not gone away. If anything, it's stronger now than ever. And that's really what I want to explore in this book. So how do people in the past deal with this issue?
And I don't really have a solution to the problem, but it's a problem that we live with, like so many of the most interesting problems in philosophy. We continue to live with them. Well, can we ask questions about the meaning of divine commands, the meaning of the divine? And if you ask such a question, is that is that I'm already undermined just by asking a question already undermined the foundation, its own foundation.
What are the primary themes in your book? What story does your book tell? What message do you convey to your readers? So the story that the book tells is a story of first of all, I start with those people who had access to legends of Socrates and sometimes even small quotations from Plato, such as Judah Halévi in the 12th century, who quotes Plato a couple times in his kuzari.
And these are people who are also quoting legendary material that's sort of mixed up with probably Persian legends, ancient also the Arabic legends that they, there's actually a vast number of these pneumologies that have been sort of combined together and that you find Socrates in them. And it's not clear if Socrates refers to our Socrates or different Socrates, and that's one way that people sort of have the Socrates. Most of the time, Socrates of this version, except for Halévi. So in most cases, when you talk about these, this kind of vision of Socrates, those people like Stephen W.
Roll, Moses Ibn Ezra, even Shinto Phallakira, they see Socrates as a kind of monotheist, who is very, doesn't question the divine, actually, but he's really radically monotheist and he goes against, he goes against the contemporary idolatrous culture and they end up putting him to death for that. And he's also very aesthetic. This is the same, this is the Socrates that seems to be, even in the homanities, we find him there. And this is quite opposed to what I call the second Socrates.
There's a Socrates who is questioning the divine, and that's those Socrates we find in the kuzari. That's the question Socrates that we find also in these Averui's writings, which are taken from based on Aristotle's Socrates, but they're mixed up with all sorts of different material, which is also another fascinating story. And then, those are the people who actually had some kind of source, some kind of platonic source. In part two of the book, the book treats people who dealt with the problem that I associated with Socrates earlier, the sort of questioning the divine, the divine, the command of the question, the divine, how that shows up in thinkers like Moses Maimonides, Jacob Anatoly, Leviger, Sonnerdis, and Abraham B.
Bago, thinkers who treat these questions but didn't have any access to Plato, and actually don't refer to Socrates directly either. But they still have the notion of this importance of this problem. And the story that the book tells is how this encounter with this problem among these thinkers, and how they keep the problem alive, actually. And they allow for a kind of philosophical exploration, and in some cases, the solution, but generally speaking, they acknowledge this is a very difficult problem too, and you can't really overcome.
And that's the story I want to tell. That's the story I want people to understand. What does your book teach us about skepticism? So skepticism is, I mean, there's many meanings of skepticism, first of all, and I don't really deal with ancient Greek skepticism.
It's not skepticism. That's not skepticism in the sense of not knowing something, it's just a doubt. Things that you don't know. And what you do in the face of not knowing something.
And that's the central part of the claim here of the book. The question is, if you have a divine command to be acquired into the divine to know something about God or to believe something about God, which in order to believe something fully, you have to know it also. That's a kind of Maimonidesan paradox. And once you start looking into it, you start thinking about it, if you really think about it, and you really open it up, right, it's paradoxical, and it's a paradoxical commandment, and at least to kind of skepticism in that sense.
And how do you live the face of that? That's the question. What status does your religious life have? What status does your intellectual life have in the face of that kind of things that you can't question?
You can't answer. What is your book challenge previously held assumptions about Jewish neoplatonism in the Middle Ages? How could Jewish neoplatonism be reconceptualized in light of your books insights? So Jewish neoplatonism is a very, it's an interesting question.
It's one that's been studied in vastly different contexts, and it's particularly with in relation to the Kabbalah. There are two main characteristics of Jewish neoplatonism. One is the emanation scheme that you're maybe familiar with from Kabbalistic works and that's where you have these few roads. You have the different aspects of God, and they emanate from one to the other, so you can go from vurat to your soda or whatever.
There's innumerable ways of dealing with those issues. There are even the letters that can be a kind of emanation. That's one form of neoplatonism. The other characteristic of neoplatonism is the notion that by looking inward, knowing yourself, you can also know God, because everything all knowledge is one.
So if you know something, and the thing that you most are able to know is the knower itself, which is to say your own knowledge. So you can then come to know God somehow. Those two aspects of neoplatonism are in a way what we traditionally think of as medieval neoplatonism. But what's important to remember about neoplatonism, what my book comes in to talk about is actually, and these exist, but they don't come from Plato, and they don't come from Plato directly.
These are the questions in a way that Plato deals with in his books. They're particularly from Plotinus, who interprets Plato hundreds of years after Plato. But we're already, when you get to the Jewish neoplatonism of the 12th century, the 13th century, the 14th, 15th century, which you're really seeing is something that developed in a totally different way. And it really should be understood that it's not Platonism in that sense.
And it's not Socraticism either. This is a Platonism that is called neoplatonism because of connected to these ideas. But there's no connection to Plato, and there's no connection to Socrates, and there's no connection to the Jewish works that think about Socrates. So this book presents a group of thinkers who really stand in contrast to neoplatonism as it's understood.
And it's important for the history of philosophy to understand how many different ways there are of doing philosophy and doing thinking, and even though many of them played, even Plato's own works, and his own ideas came to different thinkers in really vastly different ways. What is meant by acrosia? Can you explain this concept and its relevance to your study? Yeah, so acrosia is the notion of the lack of self-control.
And this notion comes into play with really was Aristotle's and Aristotelian critique of Socrates. And according to, I mean, of all of the things that sometimes it's very hard or so many dialogues or 36 dialogues of Plato, and Socrates appears in most of them, and he does different things, and there's different areas of people like the breakup early Socrates, early Plato late Plato, Socrates doing different things at different times. But he seems to generally have the idea that people have self-control. And what he means by that is that if you know that something is the right thing to do, then you'll do it.
That's his idea. So really what you need to do if you want to, if you're doing the wrong thing, let's say you're a tyrant, or you're doing some awful things, and you want to start acting properly, what you really need to do is to know what's the right thing to do. And some say you talk to a philosopher and a philosopher can then solve all of these problems. And one of the things Aristotle came and said, no, not really.
I mean, people develop things that sometimes they develop habits. I mean, we think of it now the easiest way to think about it is with smoking. People have a habit. They're habitually smokers.
And it doesn't matter if they know it's wrong. I say this as a former smoker, but it's myself. If you can know that it's wrong to smoke, that's going to hurt you or it's something bad, but it's very, very hard to stop it. So knowledge is not actually enough in that case, and you need something else to do.
But on the other hand, Aristotle also acknowledges that actually knowledge of what's right and wrong plays a large part because quitting smoking is going to take an enormous effort and I'm not going to do that unless I really think a lot about it. So what happens, there's this this question of a cressia is a question of self control and what you can do if you don't have self control and a lot of the thinkers in this book, most of them to a large extent. They see the law as kind of establishing habits, law me Jewish law, the Torah that are supposed to kind of help people with self control, especially those parts itself, which aren't done with knowledge. And a lot of the book is also a story about how well questioning the very source of that, like knowledge of God knowledge of the law itself.
What happens when you do that? What happens to yourself control? How do you maintain your own self control? How do you maintain good habits?
How do you maintain good being a good, why would you remain a good person? If you no longer believe in God. So there's a kind of dialogue between the questioner or the philosopher, the aspiring philosopher and his own self control in the end and the way in which he uses that to control his actions. Which dialogues, if any, by Plato would be most complimentary to medieval rabbinic Jewish thought and theology are any quote unquote closer to rabbinic literature than others.
Why or why not? Well, I've already mentioned the apology and there's a number of others that come up through the course of the book, particularly the apologies, the most present in especially part of one of the book because that's the one that's the one that's in the most quotes. But there's a number of others that show up as well. What's important to remember about the Plato's dialogue, they're not they're not complimentary in the sense that Plato, we don't always know Plato raises questions he raises issues.
The rabbis typically, especially in the Middle Ages are they are more likely to try to give you answers, not always and the ones I have, the ones I'm talking about here, especially are the answers are not always so direct. But I see Plato's dialogue like the laws, I think is quite relevant to my Mandy's discussion, my Mandy's mission to Torah and the guy that reflects the relationship between the mission to Torah as a law book and the guy that reflects the philosophy book I compared to laws in chapter four. In chapter six, I deal with the symposium and heros with that philosophy as a kind of heros has a kind of desire and how that's manifesting their sonry's this commentary on song of songs and how this desire for God and desire for knowledge and actually he sees it as a desire for scientific knowledge and how that plays in his understanding of the song of songs, which actually was extremely influential later on. And I also talk a little bit, I compare this this Abraham B.
Bago's books to Plato's office, especially the notion of hunting that we find in the office, this office as a kind of hunter, how to find philosophical truth as this hunting. So that those are, I recommend reading those together with those dialogues. Speaking of which, who is Abraham B. Bago?
What are the core teachings of his work, Derah and Luna? Can you describe its themes and worldview? So Abraham B. Bago is a 15th century thinker who lives primarily in Saragosa, possibly also Pesca.
He is really the last generation of Jewish people in Spain. And what we find in Aragon at that time is a group of Jewish thinkers who are extraordinarily high levels of education. And we find them interested in philosophy, especially in philosophy of the scholastics, are reading around the same area. So we have Abraham B.
Bago, we have another person named Elie Khabileo. We have also Moshe Arondin, we have a number of others of Aragon at each. We have these people who are living in this area and they're translating into working on a lot of texts that are spell-based texts, for example, or even Aristotle's metaphysics, which almost nobody works on Aristotle's metaphysics before the Bible. He's the first one that really detailed commentary on Aristotle's metaphysics in Hebrew, which is quite late.
We find them working on this at that sort of circle of people working on these texts in tremendous detail until they're interrupted. And it's all sort of closed down by the expulsion from Spain, which he didn't quite live from, probably 1489. So he didn't quite make it to the end, but he's pretty close. In Derichamuna, which is called the way of faith, he's particularly interested in legendary material.
He's interested in giving, well, he's interested in doing two things. He's also interested in giving a sort of scientific account of what Judaism is. How do we describe Judaism as a scientifically acceptable religion? And this is clearly to counter Christian accounts of Christianity as a scientific religion that you find also in 15th century Spain.
He wants to say, no, the real religion that scientific is Judaism. And we can argue that. And what he also does is take legendary materials from the Talmud, from the Torah, as well from the Bible generally as well. And even we also even found folk stories in this book.
And he interprets them according to philosophy and he was sort of ericitally on interpretations. And these interpretations are great fun. I find them tremendous fun, but they were criticized almost immediately by Jacobi Pincabib. And it was the next generation after Abrahami Bhagav.
And his movement in the way lost. It was a way, he presented a way of being Jewish, accepting Jewish stories, accepting Jewish ritual, accepting Jewish legendary material, and also being philosophical and a more comprehensive kind of system. Can you elaborate on the relationship between Bipagos, Derichamuna, and Yaakov ibn Habibs and Yaakov? So in a way, they're kind of opposite works.
And I mean by that, the following, both works are interested in Jewish legendary material, particularly of the Talmud. So Yaakov ibn Habib writes the Ayaakov, which is, well, part of the work is just a, you just took the Agadot, the legendary material of the Talmud, you put it together in a readable form, but you also wrote a lengthy commentary on it. And what Bipagav also deals with a lot of the same material. And what Bipagav does in this material is he says, I don't explain how this material can be understood, actually, as being properly philosophical, how it really relates to philosophical understanding of the world.
And Yaakov ibn Habib says, this is ridiculous. He says, Abrahami Bhagav's stuff, his interpretations are so wild and so crazy that he didn't even believe them. And what he, there's no way he himself could have believed them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to, and Marjorie Lemon has showed this very nicely in her book.
What I'm going to do is say, is that I'm going to take the stories that Agadot, the legendary material of the Talmud, and I'm going to extract the Talmudic philosophy, what's really meant by that. And I'm going to understand what a story really needs, and then we're going to try to follow that. And so in a way, it comes to kind of dogma, he extracts a kind of dogma from the Talmud, and he makes his sort of philosophical understanding of the world's corresponds to that dogma. And Yaakov ibn Habib is, that's the approach that we find today as well.
It continues today in rabbinic circles, certainly around Israel, I imagine, also in the United States. But I don't know, people who are reading the Talmud to find out things about artificial insemination. They read tell me stories about them, or what happens when somebody gets impregnated from sitting on a toilet, sitting on a toilet. That's an actual tell me the story.
And what can I tell us about what is the meaning of motherhood, or fatherhood in that case. So, and then Avram Bibago said, we actually need to give, think about what's actually the case first, and then interpret the story to match our understanding of the world. And he gives another approach to it, which didn't win out, or hasn't generally been understood to win out, but it could have won out. And it's a good way of thinking about the world, and it's one that allows you to think philosophically, and not use tell me to stories to sort of govern your life, which he doesn't think you would want to do.
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What are the similarities and differences? So Plato sees love, I mean, love plays an enormous part of in the symposium and in the feeders, and in a great deal of other dialogues. Love is is eros in Greek. It can also be philia, but eros is particularly important is the idea of sort of loving something that is greater than oneself.
The erotic love is a love of something as someone that's more beautiful. It's unequal in that sense. It's an unequal love, which Aristotle criticizes in terms of human love. He doesn't think that's a good way of having a relationship.
He thinks the best relationship is between equals, but Socrates says that really the greatest kind of love is a love for someone who's much more beautiful and actually is really for the beauty, beauty itself, which is how people like your son and also my monadies describe love of God. Love of God is a kind of love for something that is greater than oneself. And it's quite similar to Plato. There's no technical, there's no relationship between a way to read Plato and get it from Plato directly.
I have a very similar understanding of this kind of love, but it is to love something greater than oneself and to dedicate oneself to life, that to that kind of love. How does your book advance our understanding of medieval Jewish history? Well, I like to think about Jewish history in terms of problems and questions that people are interested in all the time. And I think that it's what we what I hope to have accomplished in this book is to give people material to look at, to read, to think about, and to ask questions that are really beyond just one historical avenue.
But at the same time, to really understand them in a particular historical context, which they arise and to understand them by taking the thinkers very seriously for their own in their own statements. So one example of this is my monodies is a way of forbidding in the missionary who forbids thinking about certain topics. He like asking whether God exists, for example, forbidding, right, or other topics. And then I say that, well, he has a whole list of these topics.
And actually, if you take these topics, that you're not allowed to think about. It's a forbidding by Allah, by Jewish law. And you sort of organize them. What you get is more or less a table of contents for the guy to the plast, meaning that my monodies actually does think about these questions.
And he does it. He does it very seriously. And what he in a way, he's addressing somebody who's already gone on that path. And there are these people who exist in the 12th century, I guess, who are part of that.
And it's very important to understand him in his 12th century context. But it's also a good way of thinking about in general, these philosophical questions behind them or that are accompanied them. And I hope that the book provides guidelines for both approaches. What are the similarities and differences between the stylistics of a dialogue in the Talmud and in Plato's dialogues?
Plato's dialogues are written dialogues. They're constructed. And this is something that's really important to understand. Well, let me go back to Aristotle.
Aristotle writes a book called the Poetics. And then the Poetics, he says something that we all take for granted. It seems very simple. And it's that a good poem or a good book or a good play should have a beginning, a middle and net.
That seems pretty reasonable and pretty trivial. Until you look at the Talmud or the Midrash. And then you see books that don't have a beginning, a middle or an end and they're moving in and out and there isn't really a structure in the same way. And one of the things that we see after Aristotle and event long after Aristotle and their ages in Jewish thought is that Jewish books have radically tried to become transformed.
They become especially philosophical books have become transformed into books that have their have structure. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. They're not compiled by many people writing at different times. They do have books like that as well.
My colleague Daniel Abrams talks about those in the couple of and that kind of fluidity. You have this kind of notion of an actual of an actual book and you have a dialogue that's that's constructed is constructed is meant to exist as a dialogue and you're meant to understand these different characters and to think through think them through in every context and there's a continuity that exists between them that you can understand to be there. But you really can't do in the Talmud. The characters in one place may or may not be really the same everywhere in the Talmud and statements are attributed to various people in various places, sometimes the same statement.
But they put it together. There's an enormous sort of way of an or is philological mess, if you will, to kind of understand that and we don't have that in in later works and it's important to understand to understand that and to lead them with a view to structure, which you can do. What is your books contribution to Jewish intellectual history? Well, I think my books contribution to Jewish intellectual history is again to formulate a way of understanding of talking about questions, certain types of questions that we don't do which we don't have answers and to which the people who talk about them don't think that we have answers and to understand that actually the main problem here, which is this question of questioning the divine command itself.
People take different approaches to it. And that's a sign that there's no real settled way of doing things. And what's really important, I think, for understanding the history of Jewish intellectual thought is to understand that there are some questions. There really is nothing settled about them.
There never has been. And perhaps, I mean, hopefully, there never will be because they're really beyond our abilities to come up with. And this is one such question, the kinds of things I talk about in this book are one such thing that you really will always be struggling with. What was problematic about logic in the perspective of medieval Jewish authorities?
Why was logic controversial? So the interesting thing about logic was it became controversial probably after the 13th century, when you start to have this kind of people who are attacking the study of science and study of philosophy in the early 14th century in particular, which you have. And this is coming in the wake of a vast interest in logic that we have and actually is followed by a vast interest in logic. My colleague Charles Manchin wrote that the bands on studying philosophy, Greek philosophy, were followed by an enormous increase in people who were studying them.
So you have to wonder how many people are actually following those bands. And the logic was particularly interesting about bands on logic is that we find it that understood as a band first of all by Jacob Anatoly, Jacob Anatoly, who is the first translator of a full program of logic in the first half of the 13th century. And before that, you see the expressions that he uses, like keep your sons from studying logic, me, who Benignet Gévinegéon. And we find those phrases, but we never find it really directed towards actually prohibiting logic.
It's only Anatoly who says, oh no, this is a real prohibition. And he again, he presents it as a prohibition for prohibiting asking certain types of questions, which he then proceeds to ask. And it's his way of getting into the same problem. And then later it takes on a different, it's Anatoly's way of getting into the problem, which I see as a central problem of the book, questioning the divine command.
And people don't always like this, of course. And there's a long history of people struggling to ban logic, to ban philosophical thought in general and in general to ban science in Jewish life. And that continues in some circles, sometimes increasing circles even to today. And that's, I think that's going unfortunate.
How did Jews discover Plato during the Renaissance? What happened? How did this come to be? Why do you note that they did all they could to hide Plato from view?
So when the Ottoman Empire fell in 1453, I mean, sorry, the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453 and the rise of the organs came there, a large number of educated Greek speaking scholars came to Italy. And these scholars in Italy, they taught Italian monks Greek. They were very interested in learning Greek and they had these texts and they wanted to study classical texts, not just Aristotle, but also they wasn't very much played actually in Latin either, very little until about 1470 when one of these monks named Marcellio Ficino translated all of Plato, all of Plotinus and the and the best of a firm edict text into into into Greek into Latin, from Greek into Latin. And at that time, the stuff was available to anybody who could read them.
And it was also around the same time that we find Jewish people who are starting to become integrated into Italian universities, which are speaking Latin at the time. So, Joachon Al-Emano is a good example. He's the first one probably to get a doctorate, it seems from from and be connected somehow to the University of Padua. We know that later on in the 16th century, we have people like Jacob Montino were really teaching at the University of Padua and teaching in Latin and then they're studying Latin and they're able to read Plato in Latin.
And that's the time that they're really able to start to understand to really access Plato and we find a growth of interest in Plato that's really directly related to this. When we have the more Jews are coming to study in Italian universities to learn Latin and they're actually able to start to really, really, become influenced by this. And we see a massive change, not just in Latin thought, which is what we call the Renaissance, but also in Jewish thought when they're also quite directly influenced by Plato and Platonic thinking in a new way. Can you tell us about Gersonides?
What was his relationship with Plato? Can you contextualize him in the context of your research? So, Gersonides is a, he lives in the 14th century. He's writing very shortly after he's really working with Aristotelian texts.
And with the type of text that he's working with, they're not actually Aristotle himself. They are of Erich's commentaries and these commentaries have been translated beginning with Yachobanatole, we mentioned earlier, from Arabic into Hebrew. And by the time of Gersonides, there's a whole body of scientific work. So you can study all the sciences with the exception of almost no exceptions at this point.
So you have, he's living in southern France and he's able to, and colonomists, men, colonomists has just finished sort of the last translations of this except for the rhetoric and the poetics. And what we find is Gersonides really, he starts to write what we call supercometeries on these works. And he's really interested in interpreting them. And he's writing them with his friends, some of whom we know their names.
They can sort of write letters to each other. Yudiah, Baderis, he's not a saponini, but there's others we don't, we don't know their names. We just have initials. And the whole circle that we have where they're studying these texts and they're trying to understand them.
At the same time, many of these people are somehow connected. We don't understand quite how to courtly intellectual life of Robert de Vancio in Provence. And they're also connected with southern Italy. And these people are living at this time and they're engaged, highly engaged with these thoughts and they start to think about them in the manner that their Latin contemporaries are also thinking about these texts.
And what we see is a great interest and a development in this engagement with Aristotle. But somehow, Gersonides is doing so in a way that's, at least what I argue in the book is very similar to the way Plato engaged in questions, even though I don't know of any direct connection between them. So it's a mystery how that might happen. He could just be really, really highly original thinker and he happens to engage in a very similar way, which is what I assume.
But it is quite fascinating that that should happen. Why was Plato ignored by medieval Jewish thinkers while Aristotle was more widely embraced? Why does Aristotle, rather than Plato, or more than Plato, complement or binic Jewish thoughts? So that's a great question and Aristotle is, I mean, the simple reason is that the first reason that's the most simple is that Plato wasn't translated into Hebrew at the time.
But the problem is, well, why wasn't he translated? And that's where things get a little more sticky and hard to understand. Some of Plato was translated into Arabic and we do have some works. Now, there's a question of how much was actually accessible to people in Europe and we don't know the answers.
We really don't know. It doesn't seem to have been very much the translation movement, which really of Arabic into Latin, which took place in Toledo in the 12th century around time of my monadies, and then continued to Naples at the court of Frederick II with Jacobana, totally, for example, focused primarily on Aristotle, along with a lot of other works that aren't exactly Aristotle, but they were quite interested in Aristotelian works and we find that these really were picked up by Christian thinkers. They were picked up by the universities, who's to incorporated them in University of Paris and then again that the Frederic Sicuit windows University in Naples. Those picked up these texts and they started incorporating them to their curricula, which we have in the case of Paris and you go see their curricula from the 13th century, if you're there.
And we have them working through these texts and what we find most likely with the Jewish texts and the Hebrew texts is that they're actually they're working on the same texts as the Christians, somewhat, some of them are slightly different, but they really want to have this kind of the same knowledge, perhaps because they want to have some kind of recognition of having this knowledge so that they can function maybe as doctors, maybe as pharmacists or whatever kind of professional degree that they need to have, they need to have some kind of knowledge of in there. And because of that, rabbis were interested in in sort of describing how Jewish thought could work with Aristotle and because Plato wasn't available, they never did that. And it's only when Plato shows up, as I've said after 1470 that they that they sort of have to deal with that and deal with much more complicated relationship between between Plato and the right. That's a story for a different book.
What is your book teach us about the history of Halachach? The question about Halachach and the history of Halachach is is a question that is extremely difficult. And what the book teaches us is that there are questions that are kind of beyond Halachach and the questions of sometimes some thinkers like to call them meta Halach questions but the questions of do we accept Halachach or not and that kind of question is a question that's well understood to have existed in the Middle Ages. And again, the question of usefulness of Halachach for things like self control and for directing yourself towards the good, how much can religious texts also, which is practice and also religious text with ideas, how much can these things help you become a better person, how much can they help you adjust your habits in this sort of Aristotelian notion of how do you combat the lack of self control, how do you make yourself control yourself using using using the Jewish law.
I don't know, for example, you control what you eat so that you're not completely, you know, you'll go completely crazy when you see some good food and or you control yourself with various ideas that are meant to regulate your imagination to make you a better person. And that's a large part about what these medieval thinkers thought Halachah was doing and was supposed to do, not as an imposition or a political imposition on a person and not as way of forcing people into uncomfortable situations, but as helping them people regulate themselves to become better people. Why were Jewish and Islamic thinkers in conversation with one another while Jewish and Byzantine thinkers were not? What does this reveal about the nature and character of medieval Jewish philosophy?
So that's a great question. And the answer is that we really, the relationship between, it really depends on what we know and what we talk about things that we know and we have so far a lot of scholarship and a lot of interest in the relationship between Islamic thinkers and Jewish thinkers, particularly in Spain in the 12th century. It's a great time for this. We really see a lot of interactions.
And we really have done a lot of research. We have much more left to do. We're really, you know, just we have the tip of the iceberg for this kind of knowledge. But when it comes to Byzantium, we have, we have nothing.
And most likely, there's a lot there. Most likely there's a very rich, interesting tradition. We just, we just need to uncover it. And we have a little bit of after, after in the late 15th century, early 16th century, we do have Jewish thinkers living in Byzantium.
We have some interactions that we find that people do study and they are quite interesting, but we don't, we're missing enormous amounts of material. And it's my hope that that that will be, you know, one of the things that I would encourage future scholars, that's a great area to go into to work on that. How does your book contribute to contemporary debates about religion, science, and secular studies in Israel and in the West? Well, I hope that my book will contribute by giving us an understanding that, that we don't know everything.
And that's okay. We don't, we're not actually able to reconcile everything. We don't have all of the answers. Nobody does.
There's no rabbi who's so great who has all the answers and there's no professor who has all the answers. And that, like everything else in life, things are pretty complicated. And we struggle with these, with these concepts. Science is particularly interesting because in order to develop science going all the way back really to the 12th century, development of the university is through these independent institutions that are that treat science, just science.
And we all kind of recognize that we create universities now everywhere on the same model, more or less with some, well, fairly important stations. But still, we have this notion that you have to study this independently. You have to study, you have to have scientific questions and scientific questions and you have to allow people to just to just actually do that and to regulate themselves and to do to follow that. And this goes back in Jewish context also, all the way down to the first one to say that this is something that's the value that we do.
We go to, you know, we go to a, we go to a, we go to a, we go to be there style. We think in an Aristotelian, Aristotelian manner. And sometimes we can reconcile that with our Jewish beliefs and sometimes we can't. And if we can't, that's sometimes okay.
Like we can, we can, we don't have to, we don't have to have a unified worldview of everything. We can struggle with things. But life has longed. There's a lot to struggle with.
And, and one of the nicest things in out of toldy, which I actually don't mention in the book, but I've been a later article, is that he describes Israel as getting its name from from Jacob comes Israel while he's struggling with the angel. And this, the struggle is this, this, this, and this is the struggle that makes him human. And then for and the told his interpretation is to struggle between things that we knowledge that we come up with through science and things that we think we know through the Bible or through tradition, and how, and we're constantly struggling with that. And that's really what makes us Jewish people more than anything else is the struggle itself, is the difficulties.
What are the conflict, the consequences and implications of your book for the ways that we understand quote unquote modern orthodoxy in the contemporary Jewish world. So what I hope is to understand modern orthodoxy as a kind of struggle of the same kind that Anatoly describes it's as modern orthodoxy as people who are not afraid. So I don't like the why you focus on synthesis. I like the focus on the on the struggle on the difficulty on the notion that well, you know, we modern orthodoxy is a contradiction in terms in a way.
It is difficult and it is people who say what we have a very rich tradition, and we have a long history. And what we really want to do is to reconcile them and to look for how to do that but we may not be able to do that and and then we're going to spend a lot of time we're going to sort of dedicate ourselves to understanding ourselves, both as religious beings, and also as scientific beings and maybe there are other things that enter into that. So that's what I hope for and it's kind of humility there it's an intellectual humility and that and and even when we turn to that's one thing the other thing I'll add to that is to say that I really do think that it's very important, especially for the future to understand Jewish law as this kind of an ins relationship to habits in relationship to even habitual habituating belief habituating practice and belief. And in a person as also part of this personal struggle, as opposed to a political Judaism or blatantly political Judaism, the kind that we're seeing now rise in Israel.
And this is a personal religion it's a religion of sort of getting control of yourself. And so when a pro-converser once said main principle of Jewish ethics is can implies don't control yourself. That's what's really important. And that's a personal thing you can't impose that from from outside.
That's people have to study they have to think and there's knowledge is involved in that and I hope to see a future where people will turn to the traditions try to think about how to keep themselves under control and not as a political way of controlling others or controlling society. As we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you tell us about where your time and attention have gone since completing this work. What have you been working on next is your current project. What are you working on now.
So my current project right now is to work on Samuel Iventibon's explanation of foreign terms of the guy. It's a text that was designed to sort of explain the guide for people in Provence actually at the very beginning of the 13th century who were not happy with his translation. And they weren't happy because it was very difficult to read. And Samuel Iventibon when he translated the guide from Arabic into Hebrew realized that he really didn't have a language to make Aristotelian philosophy.
So he invented it. And then people didn't like that. So he had to explain this language. And to do that he had to introduce philosophy to them.
So it's really the first book that really is an introduction to philosophy for an entirely Hebrew speaking audience. No Arabic, just Hebrew. And in that sense it's really fascinating. It shows up in many, many copies.
It also is a documentation of because it was written in many copies written by hand. And people are when they're writing by hand and it's not really, it's not it's not the one who has this guide. It's a different book. They're kind of not so afraid of changing the text.
So what they end up doing is changing these changing the terms, changing the explanations. And by reconstructing these changes, we can actually get a pretty good glimpse into how they understood what philosophy actually is for really for hundreds of years and how they understand what they've changed over the course of hundreds of years. I'm working on that. And I've developed a new technology that I made on a website from myhadurot.com to do what I call modular digital critical editions, which is to display critical apparatus that can change.
So you can change the apparatus based on manuscript or version. And it will display different versions of the same of the main text and have a critical apatological tool of the critical apparatus change accordingly. That's a complicated, really niche scholarly tool. But I hope that it will catch on among scholars of medieval texts and other texts in the future.
It sounds like an amazing project. It's so worthwhile. And I'm so proud of you that you're going so far with it. Thank you.
Thank you so much. As we bring today's dialogue to a close, I am signing off by reminding you that I'm already barbell at your host today on the new books and Jewish Studies podcast. Today I have been in dialogue with Dr. Yuhuda Helper.
He is a member of the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Barrivan University. He also holds the Shinai Weiss chair in Jewish philosophy and ethics at Barrivan University and is a principal investigator on the Israel Science Foundation's research grant. Number 62222 on Samuel Yibinti-Bohn's explanation of foreign terms and the foundations of philosophy in Hebrew. Today we've been in dialogue regarding his newly published book.
Jewish Decratic Questions in an Age Without Plato, Permitting and Forbidding, Opening Quiry in 12th to 15th Century Europe and North Africa, published in Leiden, Netherlands, my real publishers, 2021. Thank you.