Zwischen Orient und Europa

Ritter responded, in his own review of Munk’s translation of Sa’adia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions , as follows:

Herr Munk macht mir den Vorwurf, dass ich in meiner Geschichte der Philosophie die Werke der jüdischen Philosophen nicht genug berücksichtigt hätte. Wenn er dies besonderes auf Moses Maimonides bezieht, so will ich zugestehen, dass ich auf ihn etwas genauer hätte eingehen können, weiss aber doch kaum zu sagen, welche neuen Einsichten daraus hervorgegangen sein würden… Meine Meinung über die jüdischen Philosophie ging von der allgemeinen Betrachtung aus, dass die Juden in der Zerstreuung ihre literarische Bildung überall an die Literatur der Völker, unter welchen sie lebten, angeschlossen haben, was sehr natürlich ist.16

In addition to rectifying Ritter’s errors and deepening the insights contained in his text, Munk’s essays were also meant to draw the attention of the German Orientalists to the importance and originality of Arabic philosophy which, as Munk had written in his entry in Adolphe Franck’s Dictionary of Philosophy , had passed through “more or less all the phases in which [philosophy] had appeared in the Christian world,” including “dogmatism, skepticism, the theory of emanation” and even “doctrines analogous to Spinozism and modern pantheism”:

En général, on peut dire que la philosophie chez les Arabes, loin de se borner au péripatetisme pur, a traversé à peu près toutes les phases dans lesquelles elle s’est montrée dans le monde chrétien. Nous y retrouvons le dogmatisme, le scepticisme, la théorie de l’émanation et même quelquefois des doctrines analogues au spinozisme et au panthéisme moderne. 17

This aspect of Munk’s work can be better appreciated when seen in the context of the collaboration that existed between German and Jewish scholars of Islamic and Jewish Studies around 1845 – a phenomenon described by Ismar Schorsch in his essay on the intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in nineteenth-century Germany. According to Schorsch, this collaboration was largely the result of the efforts of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s most prominent Arabist and founder of the Deutschen-Morgenländischen-Gesellschaft , who was also a friend and admirer of Munk’s.18 Evidence of the high regard in which Fleischer held Munk is provided by a letter of 1857 in which Munk expresses his gratitude for his friend’s warm response to the first volume of his translation of the Guide :

Your heartfelt words stirred me deeply … If anything is able to strengthen my resolve to persevere in my arduous efforts, it is the encouragement offered by men like you. [Moreover], your favorable opinion of my work is of supreme importance to me. Given how much stock I put in your judgment, I have reason to hope that my edition and translation of the Guide will not be unworthy of the attention of Orientalists, theologians and philosophers.19

Another piece of evidence quoted by Schorsch are letters by Fleischer in which the latter, impressed by “Munk’s facility with Arabic and familiarity with Jewish philosophy” repeatedly mentions Munk to his friend, the philologist and Orientalist Konrad Dietrich Hassler.20

Munk’s work, which combined the techniques of Protestant biblical criticism with a deep knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, attempted to challenge and undermine the hegemony of Christian theology vis-à-vis its position on Judaism, and to rewrite the history of the West from a distinctly Jewish perspective. As the debate with Ritter shows, Munk chose the study of the reciprocal relationship between Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought as the symbolic battleground for his debate with Christian scholars.

The conclusion of Munk’s review was that Ritter’s work, even when bolstered with the details on the Islamic authors furnished by Munk’s essays, was insufficient: sooner or later, a comprehensive history of Arabic philosophy would have to be written. At the same time, Munk took Ritter’s answer as a challenge to write his own history of Jewish philosophy, the Esquisse historique de la philosophie chez les Juifs , which he published two years later.

Despite a certain resentment, Ritter was willing to concede his mistake and give Munk credit for having proven to him the importance of Jewish philosophers in the philosophical development of the Middle Ages, placing them on equal footing with their Muslim and Christian contemporaries. In the second edition of his history, Ritter, using Munk’s articles as sources, added numerous important details on Al-Ghazali, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, as well as a new section on the history of medieval Jewish philosophy which relies principally on Munk’s edition of the Fons Vitae .

Ritter’s admission and recognition was an extraordinarily important achievement for Munk – a success that can be seen, in a more general sense, as a victory for the Science of Judaism as a whole. In discussing Munk’s central role in the growing influence of the movement on Christian scholarship, Leopold Löw emphasized:

Munk war einer der ersten jüdischen Adepten der arabischen Sprache und Literatur, deren Studium von den jüdischen Gelehrten gänzlich vernachlässigt worden war, wiewohl es seit dem siebzehnten Jahrhundert nicht an Anregung dazu fehlte. Da aber die Sprache der christlichen Orientalisten die von den allerwenigsten jüdischen Gelehrten verstandene lateinische war, so ging der Aufschwung, den die arabischen und syrischen Studien seit dem siebzehnten Jahrhundert allmählich nahmen, an den jüdischen Schulen ganz spurlos vorüber. Erst im dritten Jahrzehnt unseres Jahrhunderts stellen sich einige jüdische Jünglinge unter die Fahne eines umfassenden semitischen Sprachstudiums. Unter diesen befand sich Salomon Munk. 21

Although Munk, as we learn from his Esquisse historique , inherited this conception, which brought him to emphasize the role of the medieval Jewish philosophers as mediators of Greek thought to the West through the medium of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, he also challenged the predominant view of his time from a Jewish perspective, proposing a novel reconstruction of the general history of philosophy. Referring in particular to the medieval era – he argued for the existence of one philosophical tradition, written in (at least) three languages: Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, with Latin as a potential fourth language. Furthermore, Munk suggested that the efforts of thinkers like Maimonides to create a synthesis of philosophy and Judaism had also raised the possibility of an original Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages. With this interpretation – which, one must note, was not devoid of clichés, including the view of the medieval Arab thinkers as mere mediators – Munk became an important voice in the debate on the role of the Arabs (and the Jews) in the transmission of Greek philosophy to European culture.

By raising awareness of the interconnectedness between Islamic and Jewish Studies Munk revolutionized the study of medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy. Confronted with a history of philosophy articulated from a prevalently Christian perspective, Munk not only argued against the ideas of German and French Orientalists and historians, who used linguistic arguments to “prove” the inferiority or non-rationality of Semitic cultures, but challenged the very foundations – philosophical as well as anthropological – of this idea.22 In so doing, Munk rediscovered the complex process of the transmission of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy through the works of the medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophers – an entire world that had been practically off-limits for centuries.23

Munk’s achievements in this field, inspired by his universalistic interpretation of Judaism, were unique even compared to the significant contributions made by Munk’s fellow German-Jewish scholars to the critical study of Judaism in the nineteenth century.24 In addition to his achievements as a librarian, cataloguer and editor of Hebrew, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts,25 it was the widespread influence he exerted on the scholarship of his time – fostered and facilitated by the relatively open intellectual atmosphere in France – that distinguished Munk from his colleagues. Writing in French, Munk was in a position to capture the attention of (and engage in open discussion with) the leading French and German scholars of Oriental Studies, becoming a protagonist in the war of linguistic and philological competency that raged between Orientalists and historians of philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of the philological and critical study of the Arabic commentaries of Aristotle.