Customer Reviews

Fifty Key Jewish Thinkers (Routledge Key Guides)

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Educated persons will know at least something about such Jewish philosophers as Philo, Maimonides, Spinoza, Martin Buber, and Elie Wiesel. All of them have found their way into most major Western encyclopedias. This book offers much more. Cohn-Sherbok, a well-known writer of things Jewish, is an ordained Reform rabbi, and he naturally, and properly, concentrates on the religious aspects of his subject. Cohn-Sherbook devotes a two-page essay to each of the fifty thinkers included in this mini-encyclopedia. There are no footnotes, but numerous crossreferences. The author's deep involvement in his subject helps the reader apprehend the book as a unified whole. This becomes all the more evident if the essays are read in chronological order, which is easy to do, since the author includes a neat 2000-year chronological table of the names included. We thus get a fascinating view of how the Jewish religious landscape changed under the impact of several catastrophic events, from the Babylonian exile, over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, to the Nazi Holocaust. The endurance of the Jewish people under such calamities is striking. So is the ability of the thinkers presented here to steer their philosophical and religious reflection into fruitful channels. This implies neither an easy optimism, nor a resigned submission to fate. Rather, we witness here a deep rethinking of the foundations of religion, obviously relevant to Jews and non-Jews alike.

This book is about evenly divided between profiles of premodern (mostly medieval) thinkers and modern (mostly Reform or Zionist) thinkers. The quality of the profiles varied; nonphilosophers (e.g. Zionists) were dealt with fairly well, and this book made me aware of some that I knew nothing or almost nothing about. However, Cohn-Sherbock struggles to make the deeper philosophers comprehensible. General rule of thumb: if you don't understand philosopher X's own work, you won't understand it any better after reading this book.

This work competently traces the lives and outlines the thought of major Jewish thinkers from Medieval times. But it seems to me to have what might be called an ' over-liberal bias' and includes at least two people who certainly are not ' major Jewish thinkers'. It also naturally excludes many others who might be said to truly deserve a place here.
A good work which could be better.