Muslim Influences on the Jewish Civilization

The influence of Muslim culture on medieval Jewish civilization was significant and multifaceted, reflecting the close interactions between these communities, especially in regions like the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus), the Middle East, and North Africa.

Intellectual Cross-Pollination: Jewish scholars in the Muslim world were deeply influenced by Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. This led to the emergence of Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, who were well-versed in Islamic language and scholarship. Maimonides, in particular, was influenced by Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

Language and Literature: Arabic became the primary language of many Jews living under Muslim rule. This linguistic shift had a profound impact on Jewish literature. For example, Saadia Gaon, a prominent Jewish scholar, wrote in Arabic using the Hebrew alphabet. Judeo-Arabic, as this language came to be known, became a vehicle for Jewish religious and philosophical works.

Religious Scholarship and Practices: Interaction with Islamic culture and theology influenced Jewish religious thought and practices. This is evident in the works of Jewish legalists and theologians, who sometimes incorporated Islamic legal theories and practices into their interpretations of Jewish law.

Art and Architecture: In regions such as Spain and the Middle East, Jewish art and architecture were influenced by Islamic styles. Synagogues in these areas often incorporated Islamic artistic motifs and architectural elements. Some of them were built exactly like mosques.

Science and Medicine: Jewish scholars in the Islamic world contributed significantly to the fields of science and medicine. Many of them wrote in Arabic and were part of the broader Islamic intellectual community. They played a role along with Christians in translating Greek and Arabic works into Hebrew and later into Latin, thus transmitting classical and Islamic knowledge to Christian Europe.

Social and Economic Life: Jews in Muslim lands often held significant positions in government and commerce. The relative tolerance of Muslim rulers, compared to their Christian counterparts in Europe during certain periods, allowed Jewish communities to flourish economically and socially.

Mysticism and Philosophical Thought: Jewish mysticism, particularly Kabbalah, was influenced by Islamic mystical traditions like Sufism. Similarly, Jewish philosophical thought during this period shows clear signs of interaction with Islamic philosophy.

The Jewish experience in the Muslim world was not uniformly positive, however, as there were periods of discrimination based on geopolitical situations and internal politics. Nonetheless, the overall impact of Islamic culture on medieval Jewish civilization was profound, leading to a flourishing of Jewish intellectual, cultural, and religious life.

The influence of medieval Islamic thought on Jewish theology was significant and multi-dimensional. This interaction was particularly pronounced in regions where Islamic culture was dominant, such as Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. Here are some key aspects of this influence:

Philosophical Theology: Islamic philosophy, especially the works of thinkers like Al-Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), had a profound impact on Jewish thinkers. This is most evident in the works of Jewish philosophers like Maimonides, who sought to harmonize rational philosophy with Jewish theology. Maimonides' "Guide for the Perplexed" is a prime example of this synthesis, addressing many of the same philosophical issues tackled by Muslim philosophers.

Kalam and Jewish Thought: Kalam, the Islamic theological discipline that sought to defend and explain Islamic beliefs, influenced Jewish scholars. This is seen in the development of Jewish Kalam, where Jewish thinkers used similar methods to discuss and defend Jewish beliefs. This included the use of rational argumentation to explore the nature of God, creation, prophecy, and the rational basis of the commandments.

Mysticism and Sufism: Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, with its emphasis on personal experience of the divine and esoteric knowledge, had an impact on Jewish mystical traditions. Elements of Sufi thought and practice, such as the idea of a spiritual journey leading to a closer communion with God, found echoes in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition.

Ethical and Moral Philosophy: The ethical writings of Muslim philosophers, who were often influenced by Greek thought, also impacted Jewish ethical literature. This is evident in works that explore the nature of virtue, the path to a righteous life, and the cultivation of moral character. Al-Ghazali’s ethical teachings were incorporated by Maimonides into his ethical system.

Legal Philosophy: The sophisticated development of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) influenced Jewish legal scholars (Halakhists) in the development of Jewish law (Halakha). Methods of legal reasoning, principles of jurisprudence, and even specific legal concepts in Islamic law found parallels and reflections in Jewish legal discourse.

During the medieval period, Islamic scholars and theologians engaged critically with Jewish (and Christian) texts and doctrines, including those that they perceived as anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism refers to the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object. This issue was particularly significant in theological discussions because Islamic doctrine, based on the teachings of the Quran, strongly emphasizes the transcendence and incomparability of God (Allah), categorically rejecting any anthropomorphic descriptions.

Islamic Critique of Jewish and Christian Texts: Islamic theologians often critiqued the Jewish and Christian scriptures for what they saw as anthropomorphic depictions of the Divine. They argued that such depictions were inconsistent with the pure monotheism (Tawhid) that Islam advocates. This critique was part of a broader Islamic polemic against what Muslims perceived as theological errors or corruptions in previous monotheistic traditions.

Jewish Responses: In response to these Islamic critiques, as well as their own internal theological developments, some Jewish scholars sought to reinterpret or recontextualize passages in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud that seemed to ascribe physical attributes or emotions to God. This was part of a larger trend within Jewish thought towards a more philosophical and less anthropomorphic understanding of God, influenced mostly by Islamic criticism but also by the broader intellectual currents of the time, including Greek philosophy.

Maimonides' Role: A key figure in this context is Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon), a preeminent Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 12th century. Living in an Islamic milieu, he was deeply familiar with Islamic philosophy and theology. In his works, particularly "The Guide for the Perplexed," Maimonides addresses the issue of anthropomorphism in Jewish texts. He argues for allegorical or metaphorical interpretations of scriptural passages that seem to describe God in human terms, aligning Jewish theology more closely with the philosophical monotheism that characterized Islamic thought of the period.

Influence on Jewish Exegesis and Philosophy: This engagement led to a significant shift in Jewish exegesis and philosophy. Many Jewish thinkers began to move away from literal interpretations of scriptural anthropomorphisms, advocating instead for readings that emphasized the absolute transcendence and unity of God. This shift was part of a broader trend within medieval Jewish thought towards rationalism and philosophical sophistication.

Continued Debates and Divergent Views: Despite these developments, there remained a diversity of views within Jewish thought regarding the interpretation of anthropomorphic descriptions in the Bible and Talmud. Some traditionalists continued to adhere to more literal interpretations, while others embraced the philosophical approaches influenced by Islamic thought and other external sources.

In summary, the medieval Muslim critique of Jewish anthropomorphisms played a significant role in shaping Jewish theological and exegetical approaches during this period. This interaction is a testament to the dynamic interplay of ideas and beliefs among the Abrahamic faiths during the Middle Ages.

Jewish Philosophers: Fine Products of Muslim Civilization

It is pertinent to mention here that Maimonides was a pure product of Islamic culture and civilization. The majority of medieval Jewish philosophers and theologians in a sense were the product and reflection of the Muslim civilization. Undoubtedly Islamic civilisation was the dominant culture during most of the Middle Ages. Burrell observes that “it is worth speculating whether the perspective of Aquinas and his contemporaries was not less Eurocentric than our own. What we call “the west” was indeed geopolitically surrounded by Islam, which sat astride the lucrative trade routes to “the east”. Moreover, the cultural heritage embodied in notable achievements in medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as the logical, philosophical commentary, translation, and original work in metaphysics begun in tenth-century Baghdad, represented a legacy coveted by Western medieval thinkers. Marshall Hodgson has called the culture that informed this epoch and extended from India to Andalusia “the Islamicate”, intending thereby to include within its scope Jewish thinkers like Maimonides who enjoyed the protected status of dhimmi and contributed to Muslim civilization. Christians like John of Damascus enjoyed a similar status, reserved by Qur’anic authority for “people of the book”, yet the divisions in Christendom saw to it that thinkers in Paris were better acquainted with Muslim and Jewish thinkers than with their co-religionist in Islamic regions.”

Julius Guttmann has observed that “The Jewish people did not begin to philosophize because of an irresistible urge to do so. They received philosophy from outside sources, and the history of Jewish philosophy is a history of the successive absorptions of foreign ideas which were then transformed and adapted according to specific Jewish points of view.” Jews have mostly lived as minorities within various majorities, and assimilated the majority’s philosophical views, to bridge the gap between their religious thought and the majority’s worldview. Philo of Alexandria is a good example of this assimilation process; he almost Hellenized Jewish theology, with the view of making it compatible with the Roman philosophical outlook. Saadia Gaon and Maimonides did almost the same thing within the Islamic culture and civilization. Both the ancient and medieval Jewish philosophy was predominantly a defense of Jewish religious tradition; as H. Wolfson has observed, the Jewish philosophy from Philo to Spinoza was mostly religious in nature. It was not pure philosophy but a sort of philosophical theology developed to defend Jewish religion.  Most medieval Muslim theologians and philosophers had almost identical agendas. The problematic relationship between reason and revelation has been discussed among the Jews since the times of Philos. The Jewish community did not produce the likes of Philo after the destruction of the Temple in the first century. There was not much of a philosophical tradition among the Jews for the next five to six centuries as most of the Talmudic academies focused upon law rather than philosophy. The Rabbinic tradition was legally oriented until the times it was challenged by the Muslim Kalam.

Karaites

The Karaites were the first to subject Judaism to Mu’atazili theology. There was a big gap between the times of Philo and the reappearance of philosophical thought among the Jews of Muslim lands, and mostly under Muslim auspices. The Jews were granted the protected status of ahl al-Zimmah, which allowed them relative ease, freedom, and autonomy; at times there were close personal friendships and business alliances between various individuals. The transmission of knowledge and information between the two communities, and even intercommunal theological debates initiated and patronized by the Muslim and Jewish elites, were a norm. This was the so-called “Golden Age” of Muslim civilization, where ecumenical dialogues and interfaith relations were mostly cherished. The Jewish community benefitted from the countless possibilities of cultural exchanges and contributed to the overall Muslim civilization.

Radhanites

The Radhanites (medieval Jewish merchants) played a decisive role in facilitating the transition. Shlomo Pines notes that “philosophy and ideology reappeared among Jews, a phenomenon indicative of their accession to Islamic civilization. There is undoubtedly a correlation between this rebirth of philosophy and theology and the social trends of that period, which produced Jewish financiers—some of whom were patrons of learning and who, in fact, although perhaps not in theory, were members of the ruling class of the Islamic state—and Jewish physicians who associated on equal terms with Muslim and Christian intellectuals.” Pines also notes that “approximately from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Jewish philosophical and theological thought participated in the evolution of Islamic philosophy and theology and manifested only in a limited sense a continuity of its own. Jewish philosophers showed no particular preference for philosophic texts written by Jewish authors over those composed by Muslims, and in many cases the significant works of Jewish thinkers constitute a reply or reaction to the ideas of a non-Jewish predecessor. Arabic was the language of Jewish philosophic and scientific writings.”

One should not overlook the influence Islamic theology and philosophy had upon medieval Jewish thought, especially that of Karaites, Saadia Gaon, Jacob al-Qirqisani, Isaac Israeli, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Bahya Ibn Paquda, Abraham bar Hiyya, Joseph Ibn Zaddik, Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Abraham Ibn Daud, Moses Maimonides, Samuel Ibn Tibbon, Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera, Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), Moses Narboni, and Hasdai Crescas. E. Renan noted that the "Arabic philosophy was never really taken seriously except by the Jews. . . whose literary culture in the Middle Ages is merely a reflection of Muslim culture." To Arthur Hyman, “by and large Jewish philosophy was a continuation of the philosophy which flourished in the Islamic world.”

Oliver Leaman notes that “It is difficult to overemphasize the significance which Islamic philosophy had for Jewish thinkers who were working at the same time in the Islamic world, or who were influenced by such work. Many Jewish thinkers wrote in Arabic and their main philosophical authorities were Arabic authors, which is hardly surprising given the pervasiveness of Arabic culture within the Islamic Empire. It was possible then as now for Jews to maintain their religious identity while at the same time becoming an important part of the cultural exchange of ideas. A very rich corpus of science, mathematics, medical theory, astronomy and philosophy was available to any literate member of society, and it was not the sole preserve of Muslims. Jews were excited by the diversity of theoretical perspectives which existed, and enthusiastically threw themselves into contemporary intellectual life. They even adapted much of the theory connected with specifically Islamic areas of enquiry, such as law and theology, to their own legal and religious texts. This is hardly surprising. Minorities generally acquire the culture of the dominant community, or at least as much of the culture as they can adapt to their own needs and interests.”

Islam, like Judaism, was a monotheistic tradition where law and theology were crowned as the highly prized sciences. There was so much common between the two faith traditions that theological insights, inquiries, concerns and even the legal theories and framework were almost identical. Both traditions were orthodoxies as well as orthopraxis. Jews had lived for centuries among the Muslims with relative ease. Unlike the Christians, they were the likely allies of the Muslims in their struggles against the Christian world and enjoyed high official positions, especially in Muslim Baghdad, Cairo, and Spain. The dominant medieval Muslim culture and civilization was a model for the Jewish community, and the Jews greatly benefitted from and contributed to that culture and civilization.

Many of the theological questions raised by Muslim theologians and philosophers were closely related to the religious discussions prevalent among the medieval Jews. The Muslims' lead on many such thorny questions was well appreciated by the Jewish scholars. Leaman states that “when we look at the works of thinkers such as Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides and even Gersonides we can observe the curriculum of Islamic philosophy quite fully represented. They did not just take some of the leading ideas and try to see how far they could use them to make sense of their own philosophical concerns, as was very much the case with many of the major Christian philosophers. The Jewish philosophers went much further than this in their work, often working well within the tradition of Islamic philosophy itself, albeit just as often using it to develop points which were of specifically Jewish concern. Perhaps one of the reasons why Jewish philosophy came to rely so much on Islamic philosophy lies in the proximity of the religions.” Steven Wesserstrom agrees that “another reason for common cause on the part of Jewish and Muslim philosophers was their joint monotheistic opposition to a common pagan adversary. The ostensible impetus of this joint counterforce remains a leitmotif of scholarship on Jewish-Muslim symbiosis.”

Muslim Synthesis

Muslims absorbed multiple ideas from various philosophical traditions such as Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian. The impact of Greek philosophy was so great that at times the Muslim philosophical terms, phrases, and ideas looked like mere reflections of Greek philosophy. But there was a subtle caveat that those terms and ideas were synthesized in such a fashion that they took a new Islamic shape as well as meaning. The Greeks were mostly pagan, while the Muslims were monotheists; therefore, Greek philosophy was synchronized with fundamental Islamic beliefs. Aristotle’s First Cause was merged into the Islamic concept of transcendent God- even though the terms were the same, the agenda was totally different. This was not the case with the Jewish tradition. The Jews not only adopted Muslim terms, phrases, ideas, and concepts, but they adopted the whole scheme with similar agendas. Leaman rightly observes that “what we should look for is not so much the people who are quoted or the sort of language which is used but the ways in which the arguments are supposed to work. If they are supposed to work in a way which is very similar to the way in which they are taken to work in a previous cultural context, or in a different cultural atmosphere, then we can rightly say that the influence of that culture is very important for the framing of the arguments. We can say this about the links between much Islamic and Jewish philosophy. What is significant about these links is that the latter reproduces much of the agenda of the former, not just the language and the individual thinkers but the agenda itself.” Undoubtedly, the influence of Islamic culture and civilization upon medieval Jewish culture and civilization was tremendous.

The identification and similarities between the two communities were so great that just like the Muslim community there were Jewish Kalam Mu’atazilites, Jewish philosophers, Jewish Aristotelians, Jewish Platonists, Jewish Neo-Platonists, Jewish Averroists, Jewish mystics, Jewish jurists just like their Muslim counterparts. Colette Sirat observes that “Jews in Islamic lands divided into the same philosophical schools as the Muslims: the kalam, Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. Similarly, the questions which Jewish philosophers set themselves were, to a large extent, the same as those discussed by their Muslim counterparts.”

The Medieval Jewry was a true reflection of the majority Muslim community in so many ways that it would not be wrong to call the resultant civilization an Islamico-Hebraic civilization, as Mauro Zonta states: “We might speak of ‘Hebrew-Arabic’ philosophy while considering the great influence of Islamic thought on much of the Jewish philosophical legacy written in the Hebrew language during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The close relationship of late medieval Jewish philosophy to Islamic thought has been stressed by the editors of the recent two-volume Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy in their decision to devote several chapters of their work to medieval Jewish philosophy. The reasons that led to this choice may be discerned from Arthur Hyman's contribution to the book. Interestingly, these chapters are found in a lengthy section entitled The Jewish Philosophical Tradition in the Islamic Cultural World, even though one of the chapters is on the phenomenon of Jewish Averroism, which developed in Christian Spain and Provence (which surely do not belong to the Islamic world), and one on Gersonides, who lived always in a Christian milieu, and might have not even had a knowledge of Arabic. As a matter of fact, the work of most late medieval Jewish philosophers in Europe consisted mainly in interpreting Islamic philosophical texts (mostly Averroes, but also Alfarabi and, in some cases, Avicenna) in light of some general lines, some of which had been already traced by the Islamic philosophical tradition. Thus a significant part of their work looks like a continuation of the work of their Islamic counterparts, where the difference is marked only (or mostly) by the different religious context- a context which is marked, after 1200, by the use of Hebrew instead of Arabic.”

See details in my book "St. Thomas Aquinas and Muslim Thought."