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This chapter explores medieval Jewish philosophy by focusing primarily on Maimonides. Maimonides implicitly develops a peaceful reading of Judaism by accentuating a universalism predicated on the notion that all human beings can achieve intellectual perfection. Moreover, Maimonides mitigates the violence of the Bible by insisting that the Canaanites and Amalekites had to be offered terms of peace before Israel waged war on them, a condition absent in the biblical text. Maimonides also depicts the messianic period as a time in which there will be peace among the nations. According to a second reading, Maimonides implicitly encourages violence. He still saw the Jewish people as being superior to other nations. He expressed hostility to Christianity and Islam. He endorsed violence against the Canaanites and Amalekites, despite the terms of peace offered to them. And while he characterizes the messianic era as peaceful, it is a peace that comes about through war.

This chapter uses the figure of Maimonides as its case study, and his writings as a prism with which to re-imagine the creation of a canon of medieval Jewish philosophy in the nineteenth century. The quest to create a good, rational, and liberal medieval Jew has created an unstable terrain upon which stands the edifice of Jewish philosophy. This chapter seeks to deconstruct our inherited narrative of the history of medieval Jewish philosophy by retelling it from a different perspective. The medieval Jewish philosophers, while claiming rationalism as their gold standard, produced a totalitarian version of Judaism, one predicated on what they considered to be an authentic and pristine past.

This chapter describes the origins of medieval Jewish philosophy as a response to a threat. Philosophy was undoubtedly regarded as a threat by many medieval thinkers, Jewish as well as Muslim. In the Jewish milieu, the perceived threat was reinforced by a deep-seated antipathy towards all alien literature that is evidenced in classic rabbinic writings. There was, nonetheless, a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers who did not regard philosophy as a menace. This chapter thus weaves a composite figure out of a number of writers who dipped their toes in philosophy or plunged in head first. It focuses on the rationalist approach to the existence of God, the love of God, and the obligation to study the Torah. The writers from whom the composite image is drawn are not all cut from the same cloth and would not all agree with everything to be said here. There would be demurrals, especially regarding the proposition that philosophy formed an integral component of the rabbinic curriculum. The composite portrait nevertheless captures the overall attitude of the segment of the medieval Jewish spectrum that qualifies as rationalist.

This chapter argues that the mid- to late nineteenth-century hasidic dynasty of Izbica–Radzyń constitutes an intellectual renaissance in hasidic creativity. The canonical tradition of medieval philosophic, kabbalistic, and pietistic literature emerged in mid-nineteenth-century hasidic discourse, specifically in Congress Poland, with surprising regularity. Rabbi Gershon Henoch of Radzyń revisited medieval Jewish philosophy and kabbalah and attempted to represent this rich tradition within the ideological framework of hasidic spirituality. His project seemed to have numerous goals, none of which was explicitly developed in his writings. First, he apparently sought to root hasidism in medieval philosophical and kabbalistic tradition in an attempt finally to put to rest the criticism that hasidism departed from normative Jewish practice and ideology. Second, Rabbi Gershon Henoch's entire programme was founded on an overt messianic impulse. This programme, including his attempt to reinstitute the lost tradition of tekhelet, should be seen as representing a mid-nineteenth-century hasidic response to modernity.

This chapter looks at the premier debate in medieval Jewish philosophy about the God of Maimonides and the nature of the Torah. It mentions prominent rabbinic figures from modern times who echo mahloket rishonim, an argument among earlier post-talmudic authorities. It also emphasizes the medieval debate about the philosophy of Maimonides that was not just any mahloket rishonim but rather an argument about a particular law or principle within the Torah. The chapter talks about later thinkers who grapple with Maimonides and the debate that surrounded him who are forced to come to grips with his own fundamental views about the nature of the Torah. It explains how some thinkers try to liberate themselves from the influence of Maimonides' ideas.