Abstract

In 1903 Rabbi Philipp Bloch, of Posen, published a unique Ashkenazic sixteenth-century polemical pamphlet which attested, so it seemed, to a heated controversy in yeshivah circles in the larger cities of the Ashkenazi cultural sphere in the late 1550s. Revolving around the place of philosophy in Judaism, the dispute reached one of its peaks in Prague some time before April 1559, probably in a public debate before a yeshivah audience, basically similar to the Disputationes then popular in European universities. The disputants were two young scholars, one of whom, the writer of the pamphlet, enthusiastically supported the teaching of classical philosophical texts in Ashkenazi yeshivot, while the other fiercely opposed what he called “philosophy.” He accused Maimonides of heresy and unbelief, as he did anything that he associated with either “philosophy” or Maimonides. The resolution adopted by the yeshivah audience — at least, so we read in the pamphlet, our only source for the event — was unequivocal: the opponent of Maimonides and philosophy was forbidden, from that time on, to broadcast his views.