Wijsheid is wijsheid is wijsheid Chochma, sophia en scientia in het premoderne Joodse episteme

Over the centuries, the Hebrew lexicon has accommodated an impressive series of changes and innovations. Focusing on the period before 1800 (the ‘pre-modern episteme’), this paper zooms in on transformations of the term chochma, ‘wisdom’, through three scientific revolutions. It traces chochma’s successive claims to knowledge, truth, morals and practice, and measures its varying stances vis-à-vis non-Jewish scholarly traditions, which served as sources and/or benchmarks in the conceptualization of Jewish wisdom. In sketching this dialectical relationship, we are confronted with chochma’s lasting potential as a marker of a distinctly Jewish epistemological disposition.