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The title of my paper rehearses an in-joke that Dick Popkin and I always repeated. Since I was interested in the borderlands between Christians and Jews, we used to say that whenever I agreed to speak at a conference, I would take a pre-written form letter already printed on University stationery, and simply add to the advertised subject the words, "…and the Jews." In 1987, we were invited to a conference at Cambridge dedicated to the philosopher Henry More, and he thought I'd finally been outfoxed, but I gave a paper entitled "Henry More and the Jews," explaining why he never mentions them.For once, though, the subject "Popkin and the Jews' is rather appropriate. I have come not only to pay tribute to Richard Popkin, but also to unveil an unpublished and unknown 7,500-word article that he wrote, describing his evolution as a Jewish historian of philosophy, not only the sum but also the parts as Jew, historian, and philosopher. The article is headed "Judaism-Katz volume," and was sent to me by email on 1 August 2001, but in a letter of 23 July 2001, Dick says that he wrote it "ten years ago or so." As there is a reference in the piece to how one 'should be a Jew in 1992," I take that as the year of composition. I had always wanted to publish a collection of Dick's articles related to Judaism and Jewish history, tentatively called Popkin His Judaicalls, but he wanted to include a very large number of articles and rejected my selection as insufficiently comprehensive. Our original publisher balked at a multi-volume project, and I was never able to interest another one, but not for lack of trying. So we are left with what might have been the preface to such a volume, the horse without the cart, so to speak.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_13

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