Literature and film have established an interdependent relationship since the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the twentieth century. From the first silent films, which the brothers Lumière and Georges Méliès made and which followed theatre's spatial laws and dramatic structure, to the innovations introduced by David Griffith, which turned cinema into a narrative language structured according to the models of the nineteenth-century novel, cinema invariably appears as a mechanical form of reproducing a story.

Cinema flirted with poetry for a short, intense period of time. The artistic avant-garde discovered film’s potential to break with the old order and “dehumanize art,” as well as its power to express political ideologies. Cinema could summon and mobilize an essentially popular audience through a new medium of mass communication. Cinema also articulated in images the ruptures produced in aesthetics or ideology in the first third of the century, and while continuing to be linked intrinsically to literature, it emerged, as Peña-Ardid writes, as a necessary life raft if one were to “abandon rancid realism.” Thus cinema became a powerful instrument “for expressing the imaginary, the unreal, or the dreamed.”

No single person had as great an impact on Jewish thought as did Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). In addition to his tremendous accomplishments in the fields of philosophy and law, Maimonides was thoroughly versed in the sciences of his day, and the sciences were fully integrated into his view of Judaism; indeed, Maimonides' outlook was guided in large part by the scientific opinion of his day. His philosophy asserts the unity of all truth, that the deity, in keeping with Arabic usage, is in fact The Truth (al-haqq), and that the religious imperative to know God is essentially the same as the philosophical imperative to determine the truth. Many statements issuing from the different branches of knowledge claim to be true. However, Maimonides affirms, the strongest and securest claims to truth are made by the sciences, most especially the mathematical sciences, whose statements are demonstrated with logical rigor. Moreover, of all the components of the cosmos, it is the heavenly bodies, with their regular motion and subtle physics, that disclose something approaching the nature of the divine. Furthermore, the human body is marvelously constructed, and its study is also useful for the religious quest. The science of medicine, which conducts this investigation, is also important as a guide for the conduct of a healthy life – a life as free as possible from the physical and emotional disturbances that interfere with the religious quest.

In an oft-quoted dictum the twelfth-century Spanish polymath Abraham ibn Ezra describes Saadya as “first and foremost among speakers everywhere.” This seemingly simple sentence praises Saadya on more than one level, playing as it does on the multivalence of the word “speakers” (medabberim). The context of Ibn Ezra's phrase (in his book on Hebrew grammar) suggests that this word refers here primarily to linguists; yet it can also mean “spokesmen” in a general way, and it is also a literal translation of the Arabic mutakallimun, that is, practitioners of dialectic theology. In all likelihood, Ibn Ezra intended all these meanings together. Indeed, Saadya's towering figure dominates the emergence of medieval Jewish scholarship in all fields: linguistics and poetics, philosophy and exegesis, polemics and law, and he is also generally considered to be the most prominent representative of Jewish kalam. An inquiry into Saadya's thought, his background, and his influence can thus serve as a convenient introduction to Jewish kalam.

Kalam (literally “speech”) is a generic name for Islamic dialectical theology. Common to all kalam schools is the formulation of a system based on the dual basis of rationality and Scripture, and on the assumption that the two complement, rather than contradict, each other. Also typical of all kalam schools is the specific discourse that uses dialectical techniques for the analysis of religious and philosophic problems. Whether it is presented as a strictly theological compendium or in a different kind of literary composition (exegetical, polemical, or a monograph on a specific theological question), a kalam work is often recognizable as such even before a thorough acquaintance with its content. Structure and style characterize kalam works no less than contents.

INTRODUCTION

Upon catching sight today in the synagogues of Safed or Jerusalem of the white-clad, bearded kabbalists, engrossed in their meditations, one is unavoidably struck by the similarity in appearance with the swaying, white-capped Sufis performing the dhikr ritual. In point of fact, the similarity is not only external; of all forms of mysticism, perhaps an unsuspected and yet remarkable parallelism exists between Islamic and Jewish mysticism. Though the two tendencies appear to have developed quite independently, there have been significant points of intersection between them. Within the wider framework of the influence of Islamic thought and spirituality, the study of the interaction between Israel and Ishmael in the domain of mysticism is one of the most fascinating chapters of comparative religion. Even in the broad lines of their respective historical evolutions, Jewish and Islamic esotericism betray a remarkable resemblance. Both went through formative periods characterized by ecstatic experiences and followed by periods of consolidation in which mystical tendencies were tempered by legalism and philosophy. Both underwent profound transformations and were entirely renewed in the late Middle Ages by novel cosmological and speculative systems, sometimes imbued with “prophetic” aspirations, and both finally developed into institutionalized brotherhoods.

Introduction

In 1873, the French National Assembly voted to build a church on Montmartre hill, looking over Paris, as a better way of dealing with social unrest than the alternative proposal of an army barracks. This Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Coeur) is now a national symbol and tourist attraction. But it was originally designed as a gesture of national contrition, seeking divine forgiveness for a military defeat, in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), and for a Socialist revolution, in the Paris Commune (1871), the short-lived people's government which refused to surrender and tried to introduce a new social order in the besieged city. In many ways, this moment sets the scene for the complex and passionate relationship between religion and politics in twentieth-century France, and for the deep and long-running conflicts they have embodied. It also provides a benchmark against which to measure the changes that have taken place over the past century or more.

This episode raises three enduring issues, which continue to preoccupy French society today. The first is the relationship between religion and the State. The builders of the Sacre-Coeur were staunch advocates of an inseparable link between the Catholic Church and the French State, but that link was decisively broken thirty years later. In the ensuing century since then, France has groped towards new ways of addressing the place of religious beliefs in the life of the nation, and managing the surges of passion that the question arouses. The second issue is the relationship between religion and politics.

Swift's most ambitious, most accessible, and most enduring literary work - Gulliver's Travels - first appeared on October 28, 1726, just over a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. Its actual title was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and it appeared anonymously, or rather pseudonymously, as by “Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.” Swift had gone to elaborate lengths to disguise his authorship and create a sense of mystery about the book's origins, but “Gulliver” quickly became the talk of the town and Swift's authorship soon was an open secret. The first printing sold out in a matter of days, and within five weeks two more printings were issued. We do not know the size of the print runs, but it is a safe guess that more than 20,000 copies of Gulliver's Travels were circulating among London's half-million people by the end of December - almost seven times the number of copies of The Spectator that Addison claimed would reach 60,000 readers - and the book's fame spread quickly throughout both England and Ireland.

Politics is the art (techne) of human government. Political science, in its classical sense, is the body of knowledge informing the practice of this art. According to Maimonides, in his Treatise on the Art of Logic, political science “falls into four parts: first, the individual's governance of himself; second, the governance of the household; third, the governance of the city; and fourth, the governance of the large nation or of the nations.” Governance of the city has traditionally been the axial political activity. It is from the city, the polis, that the art receives its name: politics. Indeed, “governance of the city is a science that imparts to its citizens knowledge of true happiness and imparts to them the [way of] striving to achieve it.” The science of the governance of the city furthermore prescribes for the citizens “the rules of justice that order their associations properly.” The comprehensive quality of the city determines the specific shape of individual ethics and household management. The government of an empire is an amplification of the basic comprehensive unit, the city.

Maimonides’ definition of political science raises important questions. Medieval Jews did not have a city (or state) of their own, and although the Jews are a nation, they were dispersed among many nations; they lacked sovereignty and a specific territory of their own. Is there any significance to a discussion of politics for a people in exile?

The nineteenth-century realist novel is in general founded on a bedrock of history. The status of history as the modern scientifically based humanism was largely unchallenged at the middle of the century and little doubt was entertained about the finality and accuracy of historical knowledge, “as it actually happened,” in Leopold von Ranke's words. Similarly, the accuracy and reliability of the mimetic procedures of fiction tended to be taken for granted: the novel's purpose, it was thought, was to reflect objective reality precisely, and it was to be judged by its success in accomplishing this aim. Clearly, there are important reservations to be made concerning this forthright and confident approach. First, it is evidently not shared by modern theorists like Hayden White, who react sharply against concepts of historical certainty and even against the relevance of history in general (Roland Barthes). Second, in their practice novelists were by no means fully observant of these norms.

It follows, nonetheless, that history – viewed as the objective reality of thepast – plays, from the socially based novels of Balzac onwards, a vital rolein the portrayal of the present in the contemporary novel. Lukács is correctin establishing a direct link between Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels andBalzac’s Comédie humaine. In fact, in Spain it would be broadly true tosay that imitation of Scott’s much-admired model divided into two divergentdirections, corresponding to the Romantic, exotic, or costumbrista sideand the realist side of his achievement respectively.

INTRODUCTION

Medieval Jewish thought flourished under the aegis of Islamic civilization from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries when the venue shifted to the Christian West. Its language was Arabic, its concerns determined by issues raised in the context of Islamic thought. The same issues (e.g. the nature of the divine, creation, prophecy, providence, human perfection, and immortality) were later pondered by Jewish thinkers in the Christian milieu, and Hebrew scientific terminology was modeled on Arabic.

For Islam, as for Judaism, the religious law is paramount, a comprehensive guide to life in all its aspects. Study of Qur’an, tradition (hadith), theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh) dominated Muslim intellectual life. The ‘ulama’ (clerics) regarded “the ancient sciences” as alien and useless, as an insidious threat to religious faith.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (d. 1198), a philosopher and jurist, justified philosophy as a religious obligation, but his opinion had no effect on the career of philosophy in Islam, which was emphatically rejected by religious authorities. Even the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) felt the need to refute philosophy.

The medieval Islamic world had no universities as did Europe, where philosophy was taught alongside theology. Muslim rulers sponsored scientific research, which was institutionalized in libraries, hospitals, and observatories. Philosophers taught privately or to circles that met in their homes or in other venues such as bookstores.

Introduction

A century of French film-making has provided us with a unique perspective on a range of aspects of French culture: from the earliest recordings of the Belle Epoque period, to the twenty-first century appetite for fairytales like Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulin (Amelie, Jeunet, 2001), the cinema has revealed, like no other medium, the myriad moments of a national life lived in modern times. People, places, events, ideas: as all have passed in front of the lens, so they have left behind them not only a wealth of creative products that speak to us of the country, its citizens and their artistic energies, but equally a record of patterns of cultural practice and production that reflect the wider apparatus and structures of national life. This would be true in any culture, but as the birthplace of cinema, the midwife of much global debate and theory about film practice, and the school yard of many of the world's most significant players, France provides a rare insight into how cinema functions as the locus of art, industry and intellectual interest, and thus as a significant indicator of questions of national identity.

Jonathan Swift had a lifelong interest in the English language. The extent of this interest is extraordinary. It includes language history and theories; dialect, jargon, and slang; vocabulary, orthography, and punctuation; etymology; rhetoric and dialectic; code and private languages; puns and language games; the social and political function of language and its abuse in propaganda. A received view in the extensive modern scholarship on Swift and the English language is that Swift is a linguistic conservative. He deplores the impurity, instability, and impermanence of English and aspires to arrest its obsolescence and purge it of corrupt words. He prescribes standardization in spelling and punctuation. He insists on simplicity and stylistic propriety, which he polices in his satiric invective against offending authors. Yet, paradoxically, Swift's stylistic practice is characterized by unconstrained linguistic freedom. Swift was certainly called to account by contemporary critics for his impropriety. In the “Apology” for his brilliant early satire A Tale of a Tub the “Author”acknowledges that “he gave a Liberty to his Pen, which might not suit with maturer Years, or graver Characters” (PW i: 1-2).

Philosophers sometimes argue that there are particular expressions that are so frequently fought over that they are best characterized as “essentially contested concepts.” The concept of Jewish philosophy is just such a concept. There has always been a lot of controversy about what it is, and whether it is anything at all. This is not a problem for Jewish philosophy alone, of course, but affects all philosophies that are described in religious and ethnic terms, and familiar issues of definition then enter the discussion. Is Jewish philosophy philosophy by Jews? That is not such a simple question either, since the whole issue of who is a Jew is complex, and although at the time of the Third Reich the Nazis thought they had a neat definition of the Jewish race, we would probably hesitate to call Catholic priests Jewish thinkers merely on the basis of the fact that they had one Jewish grandparent. On the other hand, it would be wrong to define as a Jewish philosopher only those Jews who had a commitment to Judaism itself, since we know that many people feel themselves to be Jewish and are ethnically Jewish without sharing any religious beliefs at all with their more observant coreligionists. Yet they may have interesting views on religion and philosophy and it seems wrong to disqualify their work as potentially being Jewish philosophy. On the other hand, perfectly observant Jews may write on topics in philosophy that have nothing to do with Judaism, and it would be strange to classify what they do as Jewish philosophy.We seem to be getting back to the idea of Jewish science, a doctrine popular with racists but without much to be said for it otherwise.

“When a true Genius appears in the World,”Swift wrote, “you may know him by this infallible Sign; that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him” (PW i: 242). He may well have been speaking about himself. After his death, his ghost was said to haunt the aisles of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, complaining that “The Pamphlets wrote against me, would have form'd a Library.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) lived a contentious life in a contentious age.

Frequently remembered as the legendary Irish patriot who rallied his people against Robert Walpole's corrupt English regime, Swift cut his teeth as a political writer - no other phrase seems appropriate - in the service of English administrations. Defending the nation against self-interested coffee-house factions, he proved a thoroughly partisan enemy of party and faction. Asserting that he understood neither party labels nor the passions they aroused, he represented himself as a judicious independent while allying himself first with the Whigs and then with the Tories. A brilliant polemicist, he crafted for general readers deeply interested in politics a body of writing that now tests the scholarly mettle of specialists in remote partisan squabbles. No wonder Swift mordantly satirizes political writers in his great narrative satires. A Tale of a Tub savages hacks who write for rival factions, as he would soon do. Gulliver's Travels opens when Lemuel Gulliver is thirty-eight, just a little older than the Swift who published A Tale of a Tub to impress potential Whig patrons and only a little younger than the Swift who began editing the Tory Examiner in 1710. In Gulliver's perpetual surprise that self-serving pettiness dominates court politics, Swift surely recalls his own political naiveté. Since Gulliver too wants to eliminate party and faction, Swift as surely recollects his own vanity of authorship when Gulliver complains that “after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions” (PW xi: 6).

Historical overview

If one understands the term mutation sociale (social transformation) in the sense in which it was established in French sociology around the work of Georges Balandier at the beginning of the 1970s, it is with just this kind of phenomenon that French society in the second half of the twentieth century was confronted: values and principles of social organisation no longer held, broke down and disappeared even while surviving as a reflex of thought and in the form of superficial ritualism. Meanwhile, new problems and new collective concerns developed under the effects of imported cultural behaviours, the impact of innovation, and the discovery of social forms unforeseeable from the vantage point of what France had been since the nineteenth century. In examining such a shift, the word 'culture' is to be taken in its widest sense. Thus, it refers not only to cultural objects produced and distributed by practitioners, but also and more generally to all of the styles of doing, thinking and feeling that distinguish a particular group, its conscious or semi-conscious shared beliefs. This is because a shift always affects, at differing rates, all levels of experience. It is also because culture, as a collective concern, has become broader in its contemporary definition, and its globalisation has become an important issue today. Finally, it is because many social and political problems can be, and are, treated as cultural issues.

A crumbling monolith?

Issues relating to language have been debated in Francophone culture ever since French replaced Latin in the sixteenth century as the dominant medium for writing. But the nature of the debates, and the assumptions underlying them, have evolved markedly over the centuries, reflecting the fortunes of the language itself. This chapter will mainly be devoted to presenting a picture of twentieth-century tendencies and the controversies accompanying them. Particularly relevant is the most recent change to affect French speakers' linguistic beliefs and attitudes: since the Second World War especially, confidence and optimism about the state of the language and its prospects have tended to give way to uncertainty and even pessimism. Partly as a consequence, traditional norms and practices are nowadays increasingly liable to be challenged and even disregarded.

The erstwhile mood of confidence set in three-and-a-half centuries ago, when the speech of the royal Court was gradually established as the cultivated standard - essentially the formal written French of today. Seventeenth-century grammarians prided themselves on creating a new and perfected language: 'worthy of the greatest monarch on earth', as one of them put it (in a reference to Louis XIV). Far from adopting a conservative, backward-looking perspective, theirs was an innovative approach, and they made a particular point of distancing themselves from the chaoti cusage of the sixteenth century, dismissing it contemptuously, though quite inappropriately, as le gaulois ('ancient Gaulish').

INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW

Defining Jewish Neoplatonism is no easy task, due in no small part to the difficulty of defining “Neoplatonism.” In an effort to best understand these categories, I will isolate two conceptual issues – the nature of the Godhead, and its relation to the cosmos – in Plotinus (the pagan third-century founder of Neoplatonism), and then, with recourse to Solomon ibn Gabirol in the first case and Isaac Israeli in the second, I will examine the extent to which these issues can be seen to exist – unmodified – within the corpus of Jewish Neoplatonism. By suggesting, first, ways in which each of these Plotinian issues seems, prima facie, at odds with the parallel Jewish Neoplatonic views, but then by emphasizing how in fact they are reconcilable with the Jewish versions, I will challenge oversimplified estimations not only of the nature of Plotinus' own philosophy, but of what real differences exist between it and Jewish Neoplatonism. In this way I will have indirectly been examining what exactly counts as “Neoplatonism,” Jewish or otherwise. By proceeding in this way, I hope to do justice to the elusive connections that exist between various Neoplatonic textual traditions. By focusing on the works of two early Jewish Neoplatonists, this chapter, rather than attempting to be comprehensive, suggests conceptual starting points from which one might address and evaluate the degree, implications, and development of Neoplatonism in any number of other Jewish texts.