In a mere four-week span, the Jewish people lost four impressive philosophers, each with wide-ranging interests, but little known in the English-speaking world. Warren Zev Harvey, a distinguished scholar of medieval Jewish thought, recounts their achievements:
Michael Schneider, sixty-three, a remarkably erudite historian of Jewish philosophy and mysticism, died on September 24 of this year; David Brézis, seventy-two, a provocative philosopher and leading interpreter of [the 20th-century French Jewish philosopher] Emmanuel Lévinas, died on October 8; Michael Zvi Nehorai, eighty-eight, a veteran authority on Maimonides and Rabbi Kook, died on October 16; and Gabriella Elgrably-Berzin, fifty-three, an impressive young specialist in Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophy, died on October 20.
Harvey examines at the life and work of each. Of particular interest is a pathbreaking 1986 essay by Nehorai, who was a student—and for a time likely successor to—Tsvi Yehudah Kook, the son of the great rabbi, mystic, and Zionist thinker Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.
It had been customary to couple Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915) and Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) together as the two great “fathers of religious Zionism.” Rabbi Reines was the founder in 1902 of the Mizrahi faction of the Zionist movement, which was the organization that represented religious Zionists throughout the world. Rabbi Kook was appointed in 1921 as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine. It was widely presumed that their ideologies as “religious Zionists” were roughly identical.
Nehorai, however, found their attitudes toward Zionism to be in sharp opposition. Rabbi Reines and his early Mizrahi colleagues emphasized that Zionism was not a religious or messianic movement but a purely political one, and thus its leaders should be the best politicians, even if, like Theodor Herzl, they are not religious. This emphasis on the nonreligious character of Zionism made it possible for Orthodox Jews to participate fully in the Zionist movement even though most of its leaders were secularists.
Rabbi Kook, for his part, criticized Rabbi Reines’s strictly political approach, and held that the movement for the rebuilding of the Land of Israel must necessarily be a religious and messianic one. In 1917 he founded the Banner of Jerusalem movement, which sought to provide a theological and messianic alternative to the Mizrahi, but which was unsuccessful. Nehorai concludes provocatively that if Reines had followed Kook’s approach, there would have been no Mizrahi faction in the Zionist movement—that is, no movement of religious Zionism—and the history of Zionism would have been very different.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/four-scholars-jewish-philosophy