For any serious philosophy nerd, Jewish philosophy is indispensable for understanding the development of human knowledge.
For years, I’ve been obsessed with Philo of Alexandria, an early Jewish philosopher who treated the stories of scripture as allegories, avoiding the literal interpretation of the Torah common at the time.
As a youth, the writings of the first century BCE Hellenistic thinker were as revolutionary as the later medieval thinkers Thomas Aquinas and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who similarly sought to reconcile Greek philosophy and faith.
Philo was a recurrent topic of discussion with an Israeli friend who left his home country to conduct a doctorate in Jewish theology in Germany.
My friend left Israel after giving up on the possibility of political reform in his country. As a theologian, he no longer felt affinity to the state of Israel and what it represented.
“Being Jewish and being Israeli are two independent identities that should not be conflated,” he would tell me.
My friend’s words have reverberated with me since 7 October.
The theologian was not surprised that a secular and staunchly pro-Palestine man like me could relate to the ideas of Jewish philosophers like Philo, Moses Mendelssohn and Spinoza.
Being influenced by such thinking is the opposite of supporting a state that has looted lands and unlawfully incarcerated and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians for more than 75 years. One that has treated us Arabs with nothing but insolence throughout its existence.
“If Philo and Spinoza were alive,” my Jewish friend once told me, “they would’ve found it morally reprehensible to be committed Israelis.”
For the past few weeks, the world we inhabited has ceased to exist.
All the progress we made in film and culture have proven to be futile and illusionary. The dominant politics of diversity have transpired to be nothing but a phony marketing tool for business leaders eager to attract wider demographics.
The deliberate silencing of pro-Palestinian voices - Arab, western, and Jewish - in Europe and the US has woken us to a crude reality none of us, including this writer, had the courage to acknowledge.
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