Jewish Philosophy

Jewish philosophy includes all philosophy carried out by Jews or in relation to the religion of Judaism. Until the modern Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and Jewish emancipation, it was preoccupied with reconciling new ideas with the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, organizing emergent ideas that were not necessarily Jewish into a distinctly Jewish scholastic framework and worldview. Medieval rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy among the Geonim of the tenth century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical and Talmudic Judaism, where it competed with Kabbalah. With their admission into broader modern society, Jews with secular educations embraced or developed entirely new philosophies. Philosophers recorded in this atlas are grouped here when their work belongs to that long tradition.