Yirmiyahu Yovel

Following his interest in Spinoza, Yovel was intrigued by the broader phenomenon of the Marranos and studied it for its own sake. The result was another opus: The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton 2009). Yovel describes the Marranos as "the other within"—people who both did and did not belong. Rejected by most Jews as renegades and by most veteran Christians as Jews with impure blood, Marranos had no definite, integral identity, Yovel argues. The "Judaizers"-Marranos who wished to remain secretly Jewish - were not actually Jews, and those Marranos who wished to assimilate were not truly integrated as Hispano-Catholics. Rather, mixing Jewish and Christian symbols and life patterns, Marranos were typically distinguished by a split identity. They also discovered the subjective mind, engaged in social and religious dissent, and demonstrated early signs of secularity and this-worldliness. In these ways, Yovel says, the Marranos anticipated many central features of Western modernity, and also of the modern Jewish experience.

In 2000 Yovel won the Israel Prize for his achievements in philosophy. His thank-you address on behalf of his fellow laureates was entitled "A Report on the State of Reason." Reason is alive and breathing, Yovel reported, but is besieged by inner and outer enemies. Reason's "inner enemy" is its over-ambitious tendency to exceed its limits and control, and three "external enemies": mysticism, global commercial culture, and post-modern radical critique. Yovel argued that these challenges can be tackled by a sober attitude, committed to reason all while accepting its fallibility, finitude, and lack of absolute character. This is rationality "on a human scale," rather than a secular replica of religion.

This book, published in Hebrew in 1996 and translated into English, French, Japanese, and Romanian, also shows that universal reason does not necessarily exclude a strong anti-Jewish bias, and a philosophy of power must not necessarily be anti-Semitic.

Most of Yovel's career took place at the Hebrew University, where he served in various academic posts and held the Shulman Chair of Philosophy. During that time, he also visited and lectured in numerous universities and institutes worldwide including Columbia, Hamburg, Milan, Oxford, Paris IV ("Paris-Sorbonne"), and others. In 1994 he accepted an appointment to teach annually one-term at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research which became his "second academic home." He was then nominated to the inaugural Hans Jonas Chair in Philosophy, from which he retired in 2010.

Yovel holds that the history of philosophy is embedded in most philosophical discourse, and that often it contains issues and insights that can be fruitfully contemporized by a method of immanent reconstruction. His own philosophical position can be described as "a philosophy of immanence," which, following Spinoza, views the immanent world as all there is and as the sole possible source of social and political normativity. The latter theme was extensively probed in his two-volume Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, 1989), which traces the idea of immanence back to Spinoza and follows its adventures in later thinkers of modernity from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond.

Yovel's best-known book is Spinoza and other Heretics, (Princeton 1989), a diptych in two volumes that offers a new interpretation of the existential origins of Spinoza's intellectual revolution (Vol. I) and its developments in later thinkers of modernity (Vol. II). Spinoza appealed to Yovel primarily by his radical principle of immanence, which Yovel sees as paradigmatic of much of modern thought, and by his striking personal case. No modern thinker before Nietzsche has gone as far as Spinoza in shedding all historical religion and all horizons of transcendence. In wondering what had enabled Spinoza to tear himself so drastically from the Western theistic tradition, Yovel did not turn directly to the rational arguments that drove Spinoza, but looked first for the historico-existential situation that cleared the mental space for those arguments to emerge and take hold in the mind.

In 1986, Yovel founded the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute with a dual intention – to foster Spinoza scholarship, and to promote public education around ideas associated with Spinoza (such as democracy, secularism, and tolerance) both as all- European thinker and as an emblematic figure of Jewish modernity).

Yirmiyahu Yovel's published numerous scholarly articles and several books, among them Kant and the Problem of History (Princeton 1980,86) Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton 1989), Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (Polity 1996) and The Other Within: The Marranos (Princeton 2013). He translated into Hebrew two major philosophical classics (Spinoza's Ethics and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) with systematic introductions, and edited several collective books, including a 5-volume encyclopedia of Jewish modern secular culture. Yovel's credits as journalist include dozens of press columns and 30 major TV programs.

Yovel's major work on Kant was to become his Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton 1980, 1986; French 1989). Kant's historical thought had for a long time been ignored, or dismissed as marginal and inconsistent. Yovel's work was instrumental in reversing this outlook. The book goes beyond Kant's customary moral teaching, which revolves on the formal and personal characteristics of morality, to uncover a second, material tier in Kant's practical philosophy, in which the moral will becomes a world-shaping will: the will is not satisfied with its personal morality alone, but works to reshape the entire social-historical world as "a moral totality". The will does not only strive to make itself good, but to reshape its world in its own image—to see its moral goals embodied in the actual world's ways and institutions. This makes possible a critical philosophy of history, and of particular areas within it—politics, law, social ethics, moral education, and a religion of reason.

After Labor's historic defeat in 1977, he joined "Circle 77," a group of intellectuals that tried to reform the Labor party, but found himself unfit for party politics. Henceforth he focused on the written press, publishing scores of political columns until the 1990s.

Yovel's first book, based on his PhD dissertation, was Kant and the Renewal of Metaphysics (1974, in Hebrew.) While Kant had been often held to have destroyed metaphysics, Yovel's book argues that Kant's actual program was to renew it, by replacing the old dogmatic metaphysics with a new critical one. Metaphysical questions are deeply significant even when they exceed the range of legitimate answers. To either repress the questions or to pretend answering them is equally irrational. Reason in Kant has a metaphysical interest and a critical interest that are equally indispensable, yet contradict each other in the absence of a critique. The critical turn resolves this antinomy in two stages. First, it establishes a system of synthetic a-priori categories and principles that functions as a valid metaphysics of the immanent (empirical) domain; and, secondly, in the Dialectic, it re-orients the metaphysical drive from its search of empty, illusory objects back into the empirical world, and makes us realize our fundamental finitude, as well as the endlessly open horizons within this world which we can explore.

Yovel was to return as visiting professor both to Princeton University (1970–71) and the Sorbonne (1978–80), among other foreign appointments. His years on both sides of the Atlantic helped shape Yovel's attitude towards Anglo-American analytic philosophy. He shares its demand for clarity and precision – this was recognized as a hallmark of his writing – but criticized its often scholastic tendencies and a-historical approach.

Yovel's involvement in journalism started in his student days. In 1960–64 he worked for radio Israel and co-founded its weekly news magazine. In 1967 he participated in the project of creating an independent Israeli broadcasting authority, serving two terms on its council. Later he edited the first political documentaries of Israel TV, and during 1975–1978 he edited and hosted 30 major TV programs on social and political issues (drugs, gay liberation, divorce, adoption, violence in sports, Arab land rights; the right to die, etc.). His viewers also remembered him as a military reporter in the Sinai frontline in both the 1967 and 1973 war. In 1973 he was among the few journalists who insisted on reporting the truth about Israel's military setbacks in the early stage of the war.

Born in Haifa, Palestine, then under a British mandate, Yirmiyahu Yovel graduated in 1953 from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. Following his mandatory military service he studied philosophy and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1964. He supported his studies as radio news editor and presenter. However, he declined a permanent career in broadcasting and went to the Sorbonne and Princeton University to complete his philosophical studies. In 1968 he earned his PhD from the Hebrew University. His adviser was Nathan Rothenstreich.

Yirmiyahu Yovel (20 October 1935, Haifa – 10 June 2018) was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist and community organizer, and they had a son, Jonathan Yovel, poet and law professor, and a daughter, Ronny, classical musician, TV host and family therapist.

The answer, Yovel suggested, is linked to the dualities and confused religious identity of the peculiar Jewish group from which Spinoza came, the so-called Marranos, who before arriving in Holland had lived for generations in Spain and Portugal as forced converts from Judaism, absorbing Christian symbols, mental patterns and ways of thinking. Former Jews who tried to remain Jewish in secret had only scant knowledge of Judaism, and what they knew they conceptualized in Christian terms; while others, having mixed the two religions, ended up neither Jews nor Christians, and looked to the affairs of this life and this world as a substitute to religious salvation in either Jesus or Moses. However, describing the events of Marranos responding to the miracle in the Convent of São Domingos in Lisbon on April 19, 1506 with statements such as "How can a piece of wood do miracles?", or "Put some water to it and it'll go out", Yovel states that these words "expressed the same rough Jewish common sense resisting the Catholic sense of mysterium and insisting on calling super-rational phenomena by their earthly names." The Marrano experience, Yovel suggests, made it possible for several ex-Marranos to adopt the immanent and "secular" standpoint which Spinoza radicalized and gave it a powerful systematization.