Jewish Theology

Jewish philosophy includes all philosophical activity carried out by Jews, or, in relation to the religion of Judaism. Jewish philosophy, until modern Enlightenment and Emancipation, was pre-occupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism; thus organizing emergent ideas, that are not necessarily Jewish, into a uniquely Jewish scholastic framework and world-view. With their acceptance into modern society, Jews with secular educations embraced, or developed, entirely new philosophies to meet the demands of a world in which they now found themselves.

Medieval re-discovery of Greek thought among Gaonim of 10th century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical-Talmudic Judaism, which later competed for the mainstream with emergent mysticism. Both schools would become part of classic Rabbinic literature, though the decline of scholastic rationalism coincided with historical events which drew Jews to mystical theology. For European Jews, emancipation and encounter with secular thought from the 18th-century onwards altered how philosophy was viewed. Oriental and Eastern European communities had later and more ambivalent interaction with secular culture than in Western Europe. In the varied responses to modernity, Jewish philosophical ideas were developed across the range of emerging religious denominations. These developments could be seen as either continuations, or breaks, with the canon of Rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, and resulted in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods.