RT Article
T1 Bringing Philo Home: Responses to Harry A. Wolfson’s Philo (1947) in the Aftermath of World War II
JF Harvard theological review
VO 116
IS 3
SP 466
OP 489
A1 Bloch, René S. 1969-
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1853515485
AB In 1947 Harry Austryn Wolfson published his massive and revisionary Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With the book, Wolfson aimed at proving that Philo was an innovative and highly influential philosopher—by no means an isolated Jew of no consequence to the history of philosophy. As becomes clear from numerous letters written to Wolfson on the occasion of the publication of the book and stored at the Harvard University Archives, for Jewish readers Wolfson’s proposed rehabilitation of Philo could provide a point of orientation. It served as a source of comfort and of pride in the post-war years. While the main thesis of Wolfson’s book, Philo as the precursor of medieval philosophy, was rejected by most scholars of Philo and ancient philosophy, the letters and notes discussed in this article show that much more was at stake than a purely academic discussion.
K1 Harry A. Wolfson
K1 Hebrew
K1 Hellenistic Judaism
K1 Philo of Alexandria
K1 World War II
K1 Antisemitism
DO 10.1017/S001781602300024X