Time to reclaim the centrality of Jewish philosophy - The Jewish Chronicle

Most Jews know somebody who’s converted to Judaism. Sometimes conversion is born of deep conviction, coming entirely from within. Sometimes the initial motivation may have been to marry a Jewish partner. Conversion to Judaism is, of course, relatively rare, but still, I’m sure we all know someone, somewhere, who did it (indeed, some of the readers of this article may have done it).

But how many readers of this article, I wonder, know a Jew who converted, with full conviction, to Christianity? Jews assimilate. Jews marry out. But they don’t tend to embrace the Christian faith; at least not these days, not in large numbers, and not if they were raised with a strong Jewish identity.

Until I reached my 30s, I didn’t know a single Jew who had become a Christian. But then, in quick succession, I met three. All were professional academic philosophers at elite universities. How did that happen?

Contemporary philosophy, in the English-speaking world, tends to be highly deferential to the natural sciences, and prizes logical rigour in its argumentation. Accordingly, you might expect that philosophy departments would be generally inhospitable to religious belief, of any persuasion.

But, in the 1970s, a generation of gifted philosophers, who made important contributions to quite technical fields of philosophy (fields with obscure sounding names like “modal logic”, and “mereology”), came together to found the Society for Christian Philosophers.

Once it became widely known that these well-respected scholars were devout Christians, and once they turned their hands to writing defences of their Christian beliefs, it was no longer so easy to ridicule religious devotion in the corridors of academic philosophy.

Consider how the world of common-sense collapses, upon inspection, into something very wacky indeed. Solid objects, like your sofa, turn out to have huge spaces in them, between which electrons madly rush.

I’m even told that all of this may just be an appearance created by the interactions of one-dimensional strings. For that reason, philosophers don’t mind people advancing strange sounding theories, so long as they can provide solid philosophical justification for them.

Christian philosophy was therefore able to re-establish itself, in recent times, once a generation of philosophers emerged, putting forward serious, peer-reviewed, justifications for their views. Their work demonstrates how a scientifically literate scholar, trained in the rigours of mathematical logic, can find reason to believe in the God of the Bible, and — given their Christianity — that Jesus is the Messiah, who rose from the dead.

Their arguments for theism and religion are powerful and can support Jewish faith too. Their arguments for the specific claims of Christianity, by contrast, pose a challenge to Judaism and require a rebuttal. Given these developments, Christian philosophy is presented, in philosophy departments around the world, as a living, if eccentric, discipline.

But Jewish philosophy tends to be taught only in Jewish Studies departments, and only as history.

In the early days of Jewish Studies, one of its founders, Leopold Zunz, declared that the academic history of Jewish thought can now begin because “no new or significant development is likely to disturb our survey.” Jewish thought was considered to be dead. His colleague, Moritz Steinschneider is reported to have said that the aim of Jewish Studies was “to give the remains of Judaism an honourable burial.” Jewish students meet Jewish thought, in their university studies, largely as an object for historical observation; a fascinating fossil, but not a living intellectual tradition with its own viable ways of understanding the world.

Having grown up with little Jewish education, three Jews arrived at three separate universities and began to study philosophy. Most of their peers were convinced by the atheistic theories of most of their teachers, but these three Jews discovered that there are, even in the world of scientifically literate, logically rigorous philosophy, a number of prominent, and respected philosophers advocating for the continuing relevance of theistic viewpoints. All of these scholars, without any noticeable exception, were Christian.

We shouldn’t be surprised, if and when an academic philosopher, in the current intellectual climate, comes to believe in God, that they also come to embrace Christianity. To my mind, this isn’t merely because of the great strength of contemporary Christian philosophy. It’s also because there is a dearth of living, serious, rigorous, well-informed, Jewish philosophy in our universities.

This is the context in which I published my first book of Jewish philosophy. The Principles of Judaism is my attempt to express and explore the main tenets of my own Orthodox Judaism. Upon what claims do my own faith commitments stand or fall? How can these claims be maintained in the face of what we’ve come to learn from contemporary biology, archaeology, cosmology, metaphysics, and secular ethics?

My hope was to create a voice, however small, for Judaism as a living body of thought, with its own distinctive outlook, in the world of academic philosophy, and in the marketplace of ideas.

The Principles of Judaism is published by Oxford University Press, £75