"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Asked by the early Christian Tertullian, the question was vigorously debated in the nineteenth century. While classics dominated the intellectual life of Europe, Christianity still prevailed and conflicts raged between the religious and the secular. Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, _Socrates and the Jews _explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism. Exploring the tension between Hebraism (...) and Hellenism, Miriam Leonard gracefully probes the philosophical tradition behind the development of classical philology and considers how the conflict became a preoccupation for the leading thinkers of modernity, including Matthew Arnold, Moses Mendelssohn, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. For each, she shows how the contrast between classical and biblical traditions is central to writings about rationalism, political subjectivity, and progress. Illustrating how the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem became a lightning rod for intellectual concerns, this book is a sophisticated addition to the history of ideas. (shrink)

Illustrating how the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem became a lightning rod for intellectual concerns, this book is a sophisticated addition to the history of ideas.

Provides an in-depth analysis of the differences between the Greek and Hebrew philosophies and religions while exaimining the consequences of both the Hellenic and Hebrew ethics codes.

Provides an in-depth analysis of the differences between the Greek and Hebrew philosophies and religions while exaimining the consequences of both the Hellenic and Hebrew ethics codes.

Dyuḳan inṭeleḳṭuʼali shel manhig ruḥani be-ʻidan mahapkhani. Yehuda leʼon Ashkenazi (Meniṭo) 1922-1996 hogeh, mekhanekh ṿe-ish maʻaśhe.

Even if somebody considers inappropriate any geographic adjective for Bioethics, nevertheless we think that there are some specific features of “Mediterranean” Bioethics that could distinguish it from a “Northern-European and Northern-American” one. First of all we must consider that medical ethics was born and grew in Mediterranean area. First by the thought of great Greek philosophers as Aristotle (that analyse what ethics is), then by Hippocrates, the “father” of medical ethics. The ethical pattern of Aristotle was based on “virtues” and (...) their practice. In this perspective we can already note a strong difference with actual North-European or American principialist ethics. But a second consideration concerns the role that great Mediterranean religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) had in the construction of the ethical thought especially on the matter of life and its respect. So, in our pluralistic and multicultural society is absolutely necessary to rescue an approach that considers both “lungs” of ethical thought (Mediterranean and Northern one) and highlights the role that Mediterranean Ethics still has in this way. (shrink)

This article examines the way Heidegger’s account of the unique spiritual mission of the German people is haunted by certain conceptions of the election of Israel. I argue that Heidegger’s political ontology is informed by three conceptions of the mission of Israel: biblical salvation history, kabbalistic panentheism, and Germany literary Hebraism. To link these disparate historical phenomena to Heidegger’s account of the mission of being German, I develop a methodological approach for understanding Heidegger’s “free use of the national” that (...) accounts for the way it binds different sources into a new figure that is haunted by the spirit of Israel. (shrink)

John Locke's treatises on government make frequent reference to the Hebrew Bible, while references to the New Testament are almost completely absent. To date, scholarship has not addressed this surprising characteristic of the treatises. In this book, Yechiel Leiter offers a Hebraic reading of Locke's fundamental political text. In doing so, he formulates a new school of thought in Lockean political interpretation and challenges existing ones. He shows how a grasp of the Hebraic underpinnings of Locke's political theory resolves many (...) of the problems, as well as scholarly debates, that are inherent in reading Locke. More than a book about the political theory of John Locke, this volume is about the foundational ideas of western civilization. While focused on Locke's Hebraism, it demonstrates the persistent relevance of the biblical political narrative to modernity. It will generate interest among students of Locke and political theory; philosophy and early modern history; and within Bible study communities. (shrink)

The Septuagint (LXX) generally approached the antiphrastic, euphemistic use of ברך [bless] with a literal translation of ברך with εὐλογέω. This choice produced a Hebraism, as the Greek verb is not generally used antiphrastically. The translators may have expected the Greek audience to track with the figurative usage. Job contains four of the six uses of this euphemism, and LXX Job is evenly split between the use of εὐλογέω and the use of more creative renderings. These creative renderings in (...) Job 1:5 and 2:9 reflect the exegesis of the translator.Contribution: The contribution of this research article is its focus on the phenomenon of euphemism in Biblical Hebrew and the implications of non-literal renderings in the Septuagint for a theologically-significant Hebrew euphemism. The article fits within the scope of the journal as a contribution to this special collection on the Septuagint. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cocceius and the Jewish CommentatorsAdina M. YoffieThe case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). He (...) praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the "new" Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and "Calvinist Copernicanism" in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject [End Page 383] to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to "dogmatic humanism." As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that "almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives."4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves "Cocceians" battled the "Voetians," followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). Neither the De ratione nor his voluminous biblical commentary (except [End Page 384] for a short treatise on the last six chapters of Deuteronomy) was published in Cocceius's lifetime. His son Johann Heinrich released these and his father's... (shrink)

Peter Martyr Vermigli's distinctive blend of humanism, hebraism, and scholasticism constitutes a unique contribution to the scriptural hermeneutics of the Reformation. The Companion consists of 24 essays addressing the reformer’s international career, exegetical method, biblical commentaries, major theological topics, and later influence.

Rationalism and faith.--The Socratic revolution.--Platonic idealism.--The Platonic teleology.--Illusions of reason.--The evolution of Hebraism.--The telos of Christianity.--The gift of hope.

In the aftermath of the debate between Derrida and Levinas on Hebraism and Hellenism, Christian thought that retains a place for philosophy is often regarded as “Graeco‐Christian”, a monolithic system with an unfortunate history. The work of the French philosopher Stansilas Breton suggests that the reality is more complex. In Le Verbe et la croix , he examines the function of the term logos staurou in Paul, arguing that this untranslatable term stands as a question mark in a world (...) of language that could only speak “Jew” or “Greek”. Far from being a sign of Christian superiority, the cross signals an imperative for dispossession intrinsic to Christian language. In its “nothingness” the cross functions as a principle of critique that makes innovation and engagement possible. Thus while the cross involves negation it moves beyond negative theology. Drawing upon neoplatonist philosophy, Breton delineates the way in which the cross makes possible “the writing of the self in the world”. This paper draws upon Breton's understanding of the function of the cross to argue that the heritage of Athens endures and must be re‐thought, always recognizing the limits of all human language. After examining Breton's understanding of the logos staurou, it relates this notion to his broader understanding of revelation as “writing”. Finally it shows how Breton appeals to neoplatonist meonotology to speak in more universal terms of the need for a principle of dispossession at the heart of all religious language. For Christians the cross is this principle, enabling human beings to be causes of themselves who engender new being. (shrink)

Totality and Infinity , the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV , Glissant (...) attempts one more time to clarify the sense in which the reader will have to understand his use of the word “totality,” thinking, and rightfully so, that this word might lead to some confusion: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.” Of course, here, it will be necessary to try to ascertain whether or not Levinas’s totality and Glissant’s can peacefully coexist, or, rather, whether this word might, in Glissant, have opposite meanings. Where the second word is concerned, “infinity,” any reader of Glissant will know that he locates its source in those societies he calls atavistic, which are grounded in foundational texts that are the bearers of stories of filiation, of legitimacy, societies whose arrogance and whose errors the author never ceases to decry and whose decomposition, in the very times in which we live, he never ceases to announce (even as Glissant recognizes that there was a time when atavistic cultures undoubtedly must have experienced their own period of creolization, and that, conversely, composite cultures undoubtedly often tend to become atavistic). On this level, “totality” and “infinity,” for him, seem to belong to the same world. Thus, and still in Traité du tout-monde , he proposes that "Hebraism, Christianity, Islam are grounded in the same spirituality of the One and to the same belief in a revealed Truth… The thought of the One that has done so much to magnify, as well as to denature. How can one consent to this thought, which transfigures while neither offending nor de-routing the Diverse?" Moreover, it would be interesting, I think, to know how Levinas might react to these words of Glissant’s: “Totality is not that which has often been called the universal. It is the finite and realized quantity of the infinite detail of the real.” This word, “infinite,” is decidedly dangerous: what is an “infinite detail?” Does this word, “infinite,” not always lead to the unknown, to the non-totalizable, to what Levinas would call an “enigma,” to what Glissant would call an “opacity?&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost,”Gordon TeskeyTorah and Law in “Paradise Lost,” by Jason P. Rosenblatt; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.The epic project that includes the poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained marks the last occasion in Europe when the most ambitious literary form sought stability in theology rather than in philosophy. The philosophical poem, a minor form before the Enlightenment, became after Milton the general idea (...) of what a great long poem should be. One thinks of Faust, naturally enough, where the triumph of philosophy over theology is enacted, of Coleridge’s youthful plans for a philosophical epic, and of Wordsworth’s qualified achievement of it in The Prelude. Hegel said that art, having been supplanted by philosophy as the discourse of truth, must be for us a thing of the past. A less striking but perhaps more accurate statement would be that the art that once sought stability in the knowledge of God now seeks it in the impersonal knowledge of truth. The Milton who, before Paradise Lost, composed for his own use a theological treatise in which every point made is anchored in scripture, belongs to an earlier age. Yet there are in him clear indications of what is to come. No poet before Milton is so preoccupied with metaphysical questions, with the ultimate nature of being and the causative principles governing creation.It is the theological Milton with which Jason P. Rosenblatt is concerned in this fine study of Paradise Lost, a study that is more controversial than is suggested by its title or by its eirenic scholarly tone. The book is an attack on what its author regards as the Pauline bias of Milton studies in the tradition of A. S. P. Woodhouse and Arthur Barker. It is a bias, persisting even in Miltonists who are unconcerned with theological questions, against Hebraism in general and the “Old Law” in particular, the system of law referred to as Torah. Expressed in positive terms, Rosenblatt’s aim is to show how Milton’s prose tracts of 1643–1645 (the tracts on divorce) are “the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of Paradise Lost” (p. ix), that is, of the books in which human beings are shown in the state of innocence, giving us a utopian model [End Page 546] of what we should strive for in our own lives. But the Hebraic ethos of Eden gives way in the later books of the epic, after the Fall, to a Pauline perspective where the Law is an evil that stands in the way of our freedom. Whereas Pauline theology condemns the Hebrew Law as a law of bondage, Torah, like the Tao, is a means to live freely in accord with the law of one’s nature. Such law is felt not as a restraint but as a path. Rosenblatt suggests that Paradise Lost is not the unified, orthodox Christian vision Woodhouse claimed it to be but a work that undergoes radical ideological change after the Fall, reenacting the historical change brought about by Christianity itself.In the 1640s Milton embarked on an arduous program of Hebraic studies, spurred on by his desire to recuperate the one Mosaic law Christ explicitly overturned: that permitting divorce for causes other than fornication, a word that, as Milton’s Satan says of another, bears no single sense. After the exaggerated assessments, earlier this century, of Milton’s Hebrew erudition an over-correction set in, asserting that because Milton resorted to secondary sources, reference works, and translations his Hebrew learning was shallow. But Milton never pretended to be a Hebrew or an Aramaic scholar. He knew the languages and used them to learn more, as he used and acknowledged the work of great scholars like Selden; and for an amateur his attainments were truly remarkable. Miltonists will value this book for its balanced, expert reassessment of the poet’s Hebrew learning. And it will be especially appreciated by Miltonists for the new insight it brings to the importance of the divorce tracts of the 1640s for the representation of human innocence in Paradise Lost.For most readers the book will be of interest as... (shrink)

본고의 목적은 레비나스의 ‘얼굴’ 개념이 헤브라이즘의 ‘이웃’이 아니라 대승불교의 ‘법신’과 같은 것임을 밝히려는 데 있다. 기존의 연구들이 대개 레비나스가 말하는 ‘얼굴의 환대’를 헤브라이즘의 ‘이웃사랑’과 혼동해 온 이유는 그들이 레비나스를 헬레니즘에 맞선 헤브라이즘의 사상가로 파악하기 때문이다. 그러나 이는 레비나스가 깨고자 했던 구도 속에 그를 도로 가두는 격이다. 오히려 레비나스는 헬레니즘과 헤브라이즘 사이에서 대승불교로 – 그중에서도 여래장 사상으로 – 향하는 제3의 길을 연 사상가다. 이를 매우 경제적인 방식으로 보여주는 것이 그의 ‘얼굴’ 개념이다. 본고는 어떻게 그가 헤브라이즘의 사랑과 헬레니즘의 이성 사이에서 제3의 길을 (...) 개척해 나가는가를 추적하여, 그의 얼굴론이 불교의 불신설에 방불함을 보인다. 아울러, 그의 사상의 근본이 일심에 있음을 밝힌다. (shrink)