FOREWORD

This volume charts an emerging form of inquiry, Talmud /and/ philosophy: an inquiry into the intersections, partitions, mutual illuminations and problematizations of these two traditions, disciplines, and bodies of thought. Rather than either apply philosophical ideas to the Talmud or make the Talmud relevant to philosophical problems, the goal of this inquiry is to rethink the copula and to show that and does not have to be a relationship between well-bounded or pregiven domains. The starting point for our inquiry—the contrary notion that Talmud must be clearly separated from Philosophy, both equally reified, to be related—has a long history. As Gérard Granel might say, philosophers and Talmudists inherit robust “traditions of tradition” (Gérard Granel, Traditionis Traditio [Paris: Gallimard, 1972]): preconceptions of themselves that presuppose what philosophy and Talmud should mean.

The traditions of these traditions did not arise equally over time, nor did they arise without violence. The question of what philosophy is has always been one of the central questions of philosophy. Paradoxically, this means that philosophies of Talmud often denied the latter the right to ask the same question about itself. Such asymmetry is apparent throughout even the most sympathetic and erudite efforts to systematize Talmud philosophically or “raise” it to the level of philosophy: from Maimonides’s rationalization of its complex rhetoric by transforming it into a code of law; to Canpanton’s appropriation of Aristotle to analyze and transmit the hidden logic of its dialectic; to Luzzatto’s vision of the Talmud as the supreme example of enlightened reason; to Levinas’s metaphorization of its language as the template for an ethics that philosophy had not yet realized; to Hermann Cohen’s abstraction of its theology as the principled basis for a “religion of reason”; until the present, when this hegemony of the philosophical has consciously and unconsciously influenced even “traditional” interpreters of the Talmud—those who do read the text as a source of Jewish wisdom and a theoretical expression of Judaism, if not as a practical guide to daily life.

Still more remarkably, not until recently have “secular” readers of the Talmud who are less consciously beholden to theology or philosophy—scholars of philology, history, and culture—taken Talmud seriously as an independent tradition and mode of intellectual practice. On the contrary, in their hands, too, Talmud has been predominantly reified and pigeonholed as a “historical” object on the margins of Western thought. Often, the Talmud—a book rather than a mode of practice, whether the better-known Babylonian or more obscure Palestinian Talmud—has been taken as documenting the experience of Jews in late antiquity or representing the essence of Judaism as opposed to Christianity. Only recently have scholars in secular institutions begun to ask seriously what Talmud might have meant as a form of life and mode of thought, fully coeval with those of philosophy, since Talmud’s birth in rhetorical schools of Roman Palestine. What might Talmud’s “tradition of [its own] tradition” become if its reader focused on its original and singular discipline of thought rather than seeing the Talmud through a glass darkly as incoherent philosophy or unreliable historiography? This recent question, also the question of our volume, contributes to convergence not only between Talmudic and philosophical thought but also potentially between Talmudic readers in secular and religious settings—both of whom are centrally concerned, if for their own reasons, with the matter of what Talmud, like philosophy, is.

Rather than accept an axiomatic partition between Talmud and philosophy (even if it is mediated by “influences” or erased by gestures of “translation” and “conversion”), our volume opens a new door to Talmud /and/ philosophy by placing this very question of and at its center. Rather than posit and overcome the partition, we aim to interrogate and transform its structure. The essays responding to this challenge collectively demonstrate that asking the question of relation, not only between Talmud /and/ philosophy but also of each tradition to itself, can offer a critical contribution to relocating Jewish thought in, alongside, or against Western tradition.