How Medieval Jewish Scholars Made Socrates into a Pious Monotheist https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2020/10/how-medieval-jewish-scholars-made-socrates-into-a-pious-monotheist/

October 7, 2020 | Yehuda Halper
About the author: Yehuda Halper is author of Jewish Socratic Problems in an Age without Plato (Brill, 2021) and an associate professor in the department of Jewish philosophy at Bar Ilan University in Israel.

In the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers in the Arabic-speaking world were aware of the Athenian philosopher Socrates, but they had little or no access to the first-hand accounts of his life by Plato and others. Instead, Yehuda Halper explains, two versions of the ancient philosopher emerged in Judaic sources: one was a skeptic, familiar to modern readers, but the other was an ascetic monotheist, whom one Hebrew writer even imagined reciting a surprisingly rabbinic daily prayer. This bifurcation of Socrates, moreover, is unique to Jewish sources. (Video, 80 minutes.)

Read more on Great Thinkers: https://thegreatthinkers.org/al-farabi/multimedia/was-socrates-a-wise-ascetic-monotheist-or-a-vocal-skeptic-the-two-socrateses-of-medieval-jewish-doxography/