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This chapter examines Judah Loew in modern Jewish scholarship. The personal and intellectual prejudices of many nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars toward Central and Eastern European Jewry affected the shape modern Jewish scholarship was to take in subsequent years. It was only as a result of the monumental scholarly efforts of Gershom Scholem, beginning in the 1920s, that the field of Jewish mysticism began to attain a respectable place within Jewish scholarly circles. Ultimately, the sparse attention given Judah Loew in nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship yielded two reactions. Those who considered him an Eastern European by birth and a mystic by inclination abhorred him. Those who considered him German by birth and an enlightened, scientifically and philosophically minded Renaissance figure by inclination distorted his views and offered a portrait of what they had hoped he was rather than of what he actually was. An example of the first approach was Heinrich Graetz, while an example of the second was Solomon Judah Rapoport. Meanwhile, in Jewish and Bohemian legend, Rabbi Loew is venerated as a master of what Jewish mystics call kabbalah ma'asit or “practical mysticism.”

This concluding chapter describes how previous studies of Judah Loew ignored his theology. Moreover, previous studies have attempted to portray him as he was not, i.e., as a proto-modern. Thus, a penultimate goal of this book has been to demonstrate the cohesion amongst the events which constitute Loew's biography, the mystical theology contained in his massive writings, and the social conditions which evoked his concern. It provides a first attempt at a comprehensive study of the major themes of Loew's theology of Judaism. Ultimately, Judah Loew's world view derived from Jewish religious tradition, specifically from Jewish mystical tradition. The chapter then considers how Jewish life and thought in Central and Eastern Europe have been neglected by modern Jewish scholarship. Historians of Jewish mysticism have virtually disregarded the significant contributions of late medieval Jewish European mystics to the development of Jewish mystical speculation.

This chapter briefly explores the question of whether or not there is a Jewish philosophy. It first attempts to define what is meant by the phrase specifically and reviews extant scholarship on the subject. The chapter reveals a variety of possibilities as to the nature of the subject. At the one extreme there is David Neumark with his History of Philosophy among the Jews, then Salomon Munk and the generality of students with their histories of Jewish philosophy. The intermediate position is occupied by the histories of the Jewish philosophy of religion. After exploring this wealth of literature in some detail, the chapter goes on to explore the role of Judaism within the context of this question and presents reasons as to why the question of a Jewish philosophy is important in the first place.