MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY is sometimes viewed as a response to a threat. The writers known as Jewish philosophers, so the thinking goes, were exposed to Greek philosophy, sensed a challenge to their religious beliefs from that quarter, and manned the ramparts in order to fend it off.

Philosophy was undoubtedly regarded as a threat by many medieval thinkers, Jewish as well as Muslim. In the Jewish milieu, the perceived threat was reinforced by a deep-seated antipathy towards all alien literature that is evidenced in classic rabbinic writings; the antipathy, with noteworthy exceptions made for medicine, and, in recent years, technology, gained strength in medieval rabbinic circles and today remains as potent as ever on the right wing of the religious spectrum. There was, nonetheless, a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers who did not regard philosophy as a menace. They saw it as an opportunity.

Imagine a scenario in which the consensus of mainstream biologists did not dismiss the presence of teleology in nature with contempt—as biologists today dismiss with contempt the strident theory of intelligent design—but actually found grounds for endorsing it in, let us say, a Bergsonian version. There would be religious thinkers who would regard the notion of an impersonal force immanent in nature and driving evolution as a danger to their faith. Yet some of equally theistic convictions might think otherwise. Granted that an impersonal and immanent driving force was not what they meant by God, they might nonetheless find that it goes a fair distance in the right direction and that their concept of God is, moreover, enriched and strengthened by the teachings of biology. The medieval Jewish rationalist's reaction to the teachings of philosophy was analogous.