The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (review)

Hughes’ second major work can be read as an amplification of his first work, The Texture of the Divine, in which attention was paid to “secondary” themes in Jewish philosophy pertaining to aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric; these themes have often been marginalized in histories of Jewish philosophy. In both works, Hughes focuses upon the importance of cultural history in understanding philosophical texts, exploring motifs and tropes often left out of more mainstream histories of Jewish philosophy. In The Art of Dialogue, he argues that, inasmuch as a text’s content cannot be separated from its form, we must become more sensitive to why particular thinkers chose the form of dialogue over others: what did this genre allow the thinker to accomplish, and how are the literary features of the dialogue instrumental in the construction of philosophical arguments? Hughes notes that Jewish thinkers were more apt to employ the dialogue during periods in which it was popular in non-Jewish writings. Although the dialogue form itself has had a venerable history in Jewish thought, Hughes argues that there is no evidence that Jewish philosophers looked to this body of rabbinic literature when composing their own dialogues.

To make his case that Jewish writers were influenced by their non-Jewish peers, Hughes examines a number of works, drawn from various periods in Jewish thought. Chapters two, three, and four are devoted to classical medieval Jewish thinkers. Hughes argues that in each case, the thinker in question was influenced by non-Jewish philosophical schools and cultural circles. For example, Judah Halevi (1075–1141) lived in Andalusian Spain and was very much influenced by the medieval Islamicate courtier culture known as adab. Constructed as an elaborate dialogue between the King of the Khazars and a Rabbi, Halevi’s Kuzari allowed him to construct a “full-scale justification and defense of Judaism” (28). Following recent scholars such as Lobel, Pines, Kogan, Ivry, and others, Hughes makes a credible case that Halevi was influenced by the Isma’ilis, a spiritualist Islamic sect that emphasized esotericism in their works, presenting the Kuzari as a “dialogue of subversion” in that it appropriates from the Isma’ilis a particular method, but turns it against their more philosophical aims (29).

Both ibn Falaquera (c. 1225–95) and Isaac Polleqar (mid-1300s) used the dialogue to popularize philosophical knowledge and reach a broader audience. In Epistle of the Debate, ibn Falaquera argued that there is a fundamental harmony between the truths of philosophy and religion, while in Book of the Seeker, he presents an encyclopedic overview of philosophy in the form of a dialogue between a seeker and his many interlocutors. While Hughes does not spend much time situating ibn Falaquera in a broader context, he does argue that Isaac Polleqar’s use of the dialogue in Support of the Faith must be read against the backdrop of theological disputations in medieval Christian society.

Chapters five and six treat two pre-modern Jewish thinkers, Judah Abravanel (b. c. 1465–d. after 1521) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), both of whom reflect and adopt the dialogue tradition in their respective cultures. Abravanel was the first Jewish thinker to encounter the Platonic dialogue first-hand, through the translations of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99); Hughes argues that Abravanel’s Dialoghi must be read as a response to the “christianiziation” of Ficino’s translations of Plato (107). He pays considerable attention to the gender implications of the female protagonist Sophia, and argues that through her Abravanel presents a revolutionary view of the female, of love, and of sexuality. Both Abravanel and Mendelssohn raise the particular problem of what constitutes a Jewish work in that neither dialogue contains obviously “Jewish” material. Hughes tries to make the case that both works are examples of Jewish philosophy, although he reminds us that Mendelssohn himself did not consider the Phaedon suitable for a Jewish audience, and he wrote a Hebrew version of the dialogue. Of all the chapters, the discussion on Mendelssohn...