From the introduction of Between Reason and Faith: Anti-Rationalism in Italian Jewish Thought 1250-1650 (The Hague: Mouton 1967), by Isaac E. Barzilay: During the five centuries which separate Sa'adyah Gaon (d. 942) from Joseph Albo (d. 1444) a supreme effort was made by Jewish intellectuals to reinterpret Judaism in the light of Greco-Islamic philosophy and science which, from about the tenth century on, began to penetrate the Jewish world, exerting a marked influence on it. A tenacious loyalty to an ancient law and culture, on the one hand, and a growing awareness of the intellectual and scientific trends in the milieu, on the other hand, prompted such an interpretation and made it imperative. The creative minority within Jewry, it seems, could not respond to the challenge of the philosophical and scientific awakening in both the Islamic and, at a later period, the Christian world in any way other than by absorbing the new ideas and attempting to reconcile them with Judaism.
Between Reason and Faith, part I
Between Reason and Faith, part I
Between Reason and Faith, part I
From the introduction of Between Reason and Faith: Anti-Rationalism in Italian Jewish Thought 1250-1650 (The Hague: Mouton 1967), by Isaac E. Barzilay: During the five centuries which separate Sa'adyah Gaon (d. 942) from Joseph Albo (d. 1444) a supreme effort was made by Jewish intellectuals to reinterpret Judaism in the light of Greco-Islamic philosophy and science which, from about the tenth century on, began to penetrate the Jewish world, exerting a marked influence on it. A tenacious loyalty to an ancient law and culture, on the one hand, and a growing awareness of the intellectual and scientific trends in the milieu, on the other hand, prompted such an interpretation and made it imperative. The creative minority within Jewry, it seems, could not respond to the challenge of the philosophical and scientific awakening in both the Islamic and, at a later period, the Christian world in any way other than by absorbing the new ideas and attempting to reconcile them with Judaism.