Philosophizing in Hebrew

Abstract The Hebrew language holds a highly ambivalent place in the history of Jewish philosophy: It is not the original language of many of the masterpieces of Jewish philosophy, but it certainly played an important albeit complex role in the reception and practice of philosophy in Jewish culture(s). Therefore, Jewish “philosophizing in Hebrew” rather than in other languages is a phenomenon that deserves special attention. In a first section, the present study will try to delineate some general lines in the approach to—and the usage of—Hebrew as a language in Jewish philosophy. In mid-nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums and later in the study of Hebrew, linguistic “Arabicized Hebrew” has received considerable scholarly attention. This linguistic research serves as a basis for a better understanding of the “philosophers’ Hebrew” as shown in a second section of this chapter. Special attention will be given in the third section to the study of the development of philosophical and scientific terminology in the Hebrew language. As will be argued in the fourth section, this will allow for a) a differentiation between historical layers of the “philosophers’ Hebrew,” b) the development of a typology of terminological innovations in the “philosophers’ Hebrew,” c) the formulation of criteria for the description of terminological crystallizations, an elucidation of d) pragmatic aspects of the usage of the Hebrew language in philosophy, and e) a better understanding of the standardization of the “philosophers’ Hebrew” versus continuous fluidity in the development of the Hebrew language up to the present.