The study of Jewish political philosophy is a recently established field
in the study of Jewish philosophy. While in older histories of Jewish
philosophy there is hardly any discussion of this topic, recent editors
of such books have found it useful to add chapters on it. Following the
pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among
others, political philosophy has gained its proper place alongside
ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy.
This volume is another manifestation of this welcome development.
Consisting of selected English-language papers the author published over
the last thirty years, it concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance
periods, from Sa'adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the
seventeenth. These were the formative periods in the development of
Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars versed in the
canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic) encountered Greek
political philosophy, as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as
Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, and adapted it to their Jewish terms
of reference. The outcome of this effort was Jewish political
philosophy.