Recherches sur la philosophie et la Kabbale dans la pensée juive du Moyen Age [Book Review]

The author is one of the greatest contemporary authorities on Classical Jewish philosophy. He applies his vast scholarship to probe into the inter-relationship between medieval Jewish philosophy and the cabala. The profound and daring speculation of the theosophists of the early cabala did not fail to provoke a violent reaction on the part of Jewish scholasticism, and the two long studies in the present volume try to analyze two cases of such antagonistic relationships. The first of the studies is a comparison of the philosophico-theological treatise of Samuel Judah Ibn Tibbon, "The Reconciliation of Philosophy and the Religious Law," with a treatise on the Spanish cabalist Jacob ben Seset. While in this study we see the confrontation of the spirit of Averroes with the cabalistic inspiration, the second essay is devoted to a treatise from the fourteenth century, written by Joseph ben Abraham Ibn Waquar, in which philosophical and cabalistic elements are intimately interwoven in one and the same work. To the two major studies are added ten highly interesting short treatises on cabalistic notions and texts, making the present books together with the writings of Gershon Scholem the most important monument to cabalistic scholarship available in a Western language.—M. J. V.