In the midst of the many expensive multiauthor volumes that are marketed as companions or handbooks, and devoted to Jewish philosophy, this volume stands out as something new, given the prominence given to analytic Jewish theology among the various essays. Most of the book is given over to various themes in Jewish philosophy—God's nature, sacrifice, miracles, and revelation—that overall privilege how contemporary scholars doing analytic Jewish theology take up various moves made in the canon of medieval Jewish philosophers (Maimonides, Halevi, Gersonides, etc). Only the last eight essays (of a total of thirty-seven) explicitly take up a historical orientation that is characteristic of Routledge's last multiauthor treatment of the grand sweep of Jewish philosophy, the 1997 History of Jewish Philosophy edited by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman. The thematic focus of the majority of the articles allows for the inclusion of certain areas of study that have not hitherto been part of such volumes, such as Kabbalistic texts and antisemitism. One might hesitate to say that this volume is representative of the field as a whole. Only five of the forty-one contributors—four of the essays have multiple authors—are women, and Jewish philosophy is in this generation not as male-centered as it had been in 1997, although the ratio of women contributors to men in this volume is about the same as the previous Routledge volume, which had five women among its thirty-eight contributors. In addition, while analytic Jewish theology is a growing subarea in Jewish philosophy, it is still (to my view) a small one. As Dustin Crummett points out in his essay on the field, it does important work in challenging the hegemony of Christianity in the broadly analytic sort of philosophy of religion done by scholars in departments of philosophy. But an essay on God's existence that only occasionally cites canonical figures in Jewish philosophy, such as Joshua Rasmussen's lead essay in this volume, is a structural puzzlement; Gary Rosenkrantz's essay on God and infinity, which makes extensive use of technical aspects of Georg Cantor's set theory, is an intellectual puzzle (to me) in a different way. All of this is to say that few of these essays seem appropriate for the advanced undergraduate classroom—as the genre of the companion or handbook purports to be—and this volume is most apt for libraries that serve graduate students. The best of the essays in the volume give a historical overview of an issue in order to orient readers to the territory of scholarship: Crummett's essay serves this role, as do Benjamin Pollock's essay on prophecy and Alexander Green's essay on miracles. Yonatan Y. Brafman's essay on the relationship between halakha and morality is a particularly accessible entry to this issue, and should be assigned by anyone who teaches Aharon Lichtenstein's classic essay “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakhah?” Tamar Ross's essay on feminist Jewish philosophy contains some autobiographical reflection that clarifies her other work, as well as this particular essay. Finally, Michael L. Morgan's essay on post-Holocaust theology contains a substantive critique of Amos Funkenstein's “Theological Interpretations of the Holocaust” that will hopefully be expanded in his future work, and with which other scholars will have to grapple. Given the rate at which departments of religion are closing or ending their degree programs, it is likely that scholars of Jewish philosophy will in the coming decades once again be housed in Departments of Philosophy, as was largely the case before the 1970s. This volume makes a strong case for shifting the site of that scholarship, as opposed to ceasing to give it a home in the university. (The struggle to diversify departments of philosophy over the last fifty years means that one cannot rely on Departments of Philosophy to accept scholars of Jewish philosophy out of the kindness of their hearts.) It will also be important for future historians who will want to tell a story about how analytic Jewish theology, through its funding sources such as the John Templeton Foundation, came to make its mark on the field of Jewish philosophy.
Martin Kavka (Mon,) studied this question.