Dialectic of Separation: Judaism and Philosophy in the Work of Salomon Munk

Dialectic of Separation analyzes the complex relationship between Judaism and philosophy in the thought of the nineteenth-century German–Jewish orientalist and philosopher Salomon Munk. Drawing on both published and on unpublished sources, appearing here for the first time, it offers the first-ever comprehensive reconstruction of Salomon Munk’s life and work. Munk, who emigrated from his native Glogau to Paris to pursue his studies, was to exert a major influence on the development of Islamic and Jewish studies in both France and Germany, giving a vital impetus to the debate over the nature of Jewish philosophy at a time when medieval Jewish philosophers (such as Maimonides) and their Arabic and Islamic sources were completely neglected in philosophical historiography.