Wisdom's Little Sister

The study of Jewish political philosophy is a recently established field in the study of Jewish philosophy. While in older histories of Jewish philosophy there is hardly any discussion of this topic, recent editors of such books have found it useful to add chapters on it. Following the pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among others, political philosophy has gained its proper place alongside ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy. This volume is another manifestation of this welcome development. Consisting of selected English-language papers the author published over the last thirty years, it concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, from Sa’adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth. These were the formative periods in the development of Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars versed in the canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic) encountered Greek political philosophy, as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, and adapted it to their Jewish terms of reference. The outcome of this effort was Jewish political philosophy.

Abraham Melamed (Ph.D. Tel-Aviv University) is Professor of Jewish Philosophy in the University of Haifa in Israel, and holds the Wolfson Chair for the study of the Jewish Cultural Heritage. He has published numerous studies, mainly concentrating on Medieval and Renaissance Jewish intellectual history, history of ideas and political philosophy. His most recent books include The Black in Jewish Culture (Routledge, 2003); On the Shoulders of Giants: A History of the Debate between Moderns and Ancients in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Thought (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003); The Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy (Haifa University Press, 2010), Medieval Jewish Political Philosophy (Hebrew, 2011) and On a Deserted Island (Hebrew, 2012).

Steven Harvey:
Abraham Melamed is one of the foremost scholars of medieval and Renaissance Jewish political thought today. Wisdom's Little Sister brings together a fine collection of his English studies, written over three decades. These thirteen studies range from the two opening oft-cited general articles that delineate the field to articles on particular subjects. This latter research is that for which Melamed is best known. He focuses on an important topic or problem, such as the knowledge of Aristotle's Politics among Jews or the presence of the tripartite classification of the law into natural, human, and divine in Jewish thought, explicates it, traces it through the ages, and then draws conclusions. In these learned and fascinating studies on Jewish political thought, Melamed presents the sources and parallel discussions in ancient Greek, medieval Islamic and Christian, and Renaissance philosophy.