And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at www. History of Philosophy.net. online at God Freudental, who is professor of Jewish philosophy at the University of Geneva.

Hi God, thanks for coming on the podcast.

My pleasure.

We're going to be talking here about the engagement between Jewish culture and the scientific culture that came into the

Arabic language from the Greek tradition.

And so I thought I would start by asking you whether there's anything in particular you think we should bear in mind about Judaism which conditioned this engagement with the scientific literature?

Well, I should say there is one central feature of Judaism that should be

born in mind and this is that at least since the second century, Judaism was, or rather have been, a culture devoted to the study of the sacred texts of Judaism, which means the Mishna followed by the Talmud.

The Talmud was concluded in the, towards the end of the 5th century, and since then, being a Jewish

intellectual, a Jewish scholar meant studying the Talmud

commenting it with a lot of inventiveness and creativity. This means that what truly is in

the world what can be termed a Talmudo-centric culture, a culture at whose center you have the Talmud.

This means ipso facto that was ever was outside this sphere of Talmud commentary was an external or foreign culture or foreign knowledge.

And the entry of such foreign knowledge into Judaism was quite problematical and this has been the case from the first encounter of serious encounter of today with these foreign cultures which is in the eighth

ninth century up to today.

So is the problem there something more like we're already doing T

Tumutic commentary so we don't need to do the science, it's superfluous

or is it more like we're just not interested in anything other than this because it's not

what we're devoted to as intellectuals. Both and a third thing as well namely that

you are supposed to if you are a male and intellectual, you are supposed

to devote yourself your entire life to the study, the study of the Talmud. That means not only it's not needed, but it's even

...