Jewish views on evolution

Jewish views on evolution includes a continuum of views about the theory of evolution, experimental evolution, the origin of life, the age of the universe, and theistic evolution.

Classical rabbinic teachings

indicates that God completed the creation of the world close to 6,000 years ago. This age is reflected in the chronology developed in a midrash, Seder Olam, but a literalist reading of the Book of Genesis is rare in Judaism. This age is attributed to the tanna Jose ben Halafta, and covers history from the creation of the universe to the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Dr. Gerald Schroeder interprets Nachmanides description of the 6 days of creation in conjunction with Einstein's relativistic view of time applied to the expansion of space-time to say that the 6 days of creation are 15.75 Billion years from our perspective.
Hasdai Crescas imagines that God is the Creator of the World and of the creatures but the order in this World is possible only in this case: mineral is for the vegetative, vegetative is for the animal, animal is for man, i.e. man can eat animal… Man is the highest level in this World. On the other hand, we can think about more archetypes for more forms and substances, about an archetype for more forms but we cannot imagine the elaboration of the creatures as Charles Darwin did because the original plane of God is for a big number of creatures but not an infinite quantity of them. Hasdai Crescas gives this metaphor to explain: The first is that form comes to be in a compound through composition and blending, as oxymel comes to be through the blending of vinegar and honey. The second is that when the proportions in the blending are changed the form changes. For example, when the proportions of the ingredients in Theriac change vis-à-vis one another, the form of Theriac changes, and it takes on a different form. And even more is this the case when the simple components of the compound change. The eternity of divine knowledge cannot change because God knows everything before the Creation and after this; the status of possible can be imagined only by time-perspective for God, that is when He would like to create the World but God has always known all things from eternity. The possibility of Creation can be necessity because this is the quality of existence, so this can have “the end” because in the case of possibility, also when it can imagine and think that His divine knowledge is eternal and perfect, the existence and the knowledge of God only are perfect and higher than ours: There is no doubt that if a thing is necessary from one perspective, it does not follow that the thing is necessary in itself. This will be evident in things that are possible in themselves and exist now perceived by sense. For in the case of human knowledge, once it is known that a possible thing exists, its existence is positively necessary. And its contrary is not existent from any perspective. But this necessity does not change the nature of the thing’s possibility and does not compel the thing’s necessity in itself. Therefore, God’s having knowledge with respect to things that are subject to choice does not compel their necessity in themselves and does not change at all the nature of the possible.
Many modern rabbis believe that the world is older than 6,000 years. They believe such a view is needed to accept scientific theories, such as the theory of evolution. Rabbis who have this view base their conclusions on verses in the Talmud or in the midrash. For example:

Several passages of midrash state that there was a "time system" before the events in the first chapter of Genesis, and thus, that God created and destroyed various other "worlds" before this time.
Nachmanides writes: In the first day God created the energy "matter" of all things, and then he was finished with the main creation. After that God created all other things from that energy.
Some midrashim state that the "first week" of Creation lasted for extremely long periods of time.
The Zohar states that at the time of Adam there were already many unrelated people living in the world, but the Torah chose to focus on one person living in one location.
The Mishnah discusses a reputed creature known as Adne Sadeh, and debates whether they should be categorized as humans or wild animals for the purpose of certain laws, implying that this creature is an intermediate form between humans and wild animals.
Medieval rabbinic teachings

Openness to non-literal interpretation

Some medieval philosophical rationalists, such as Maimonides and Gersonides held that not every statement in Genesis is meant literally. In this view, one was obligated to understand Torah in a way that was compatible with the findings of science. Indeed, Maimonides, one of the great rabbis of the Middle Ages, wrote that if science and Torah were misaligned, it was either because science was not understood or the Torah was misinterpreted. Maimonides argued that if science proved a point that did not contradict any fundamentals of faith, then the finding should be accepted and scripture should be interpreted accordingly. For example, in discussing Aristotle's view that the universe has existed literally forever, he argued that there was no convincing rational proof one way or the other, so that he was free to accept, and therefore did accept, the literal biblical view that the universe came into being at a definite time; but that had Plato's theory been convincing enough with sufficient scientific proof he would have been able to reinterpret Genesis accordingly. With regard to Genesis, Maimonides stated that "the account given in scripture is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal." Later in the same paragraph, he specifically states that this applies to the text from the beginning to the account of the sixth day of creation.
Nachmanides, often critical of the rationalist views of Maimonides, pointed out several non-sequiturs stemming from a literal translation of the Bible's account of Creation, and stated that the account actually symbolically refers to spiritual concepts. He quoted the Mishnah in Tractate Hagigah which states that the actual meaning of the Creation account, mystical in nature, was traditionally transmitted from teachers to advanced scholars in a private setting.
A literal interpretation of the biblical Creation story among classic rabbinic commentators is uncommon. Thus Bible commentator Abraham ibn Ezra wrote,
Similarly, Saadiah Gaon wrote that Biblical verses should be interpreted non-literally if they contradict the senses or intellect.
One of several notable exceptions may be the Tosafist commentary on Tractate Rosh Hashanah, where there seems to be an allusion to the age of creation according to a literal reading of Genesis. The non-literal approach is accepted by many as a possible approach within Modern Orthodox Judaism and some segments of Haredi Judaism.

Specific interpretations of Genesis

Regarding the specifics of the Genesis story, Nahmanides suggested that God initially created man as a walking humanoid creature, and only afterwards instilled with this creature a human level of intelligence and understanding.
Rashi, while his commentary on the verses describing the days of creation teaches them as literal days, brackets his discussion of Genesis ch. 1 with comments stating that the entire world was created at once, with no duration of existence before Adam being specified.

Kabbalistic discussion of eras before Genesis

Many classic Kabbalistic sources mention Shmitot—cosmic cycles of creation, similar to the Indian concept of yugas. According to the tradition of Shmitot, Genesis talks openly only about the current epoch, while the information about the previous cosmic cycles is hidden in the esoteric reading of the text. Isaac ben Samuel of Acre, a prominent kabbalist and disciple of Nahmanides, calculated based on this theory that the Universe is about 15 billion years old. Since shmitot existed before man was created, time before Adam and Eve must be measured in divine years, not human years. Psalm 90:4 says, "For a thousand years in thy sight are but like yesterday when it is past", thus one divine day equals 365,250 human days. Like Livnat Ha-Sapir, he held that we are in the seventh shmita, each of which lasts 6000 years. Overall, then, Isaac calculated the age of the universe at Adam's creation to be 7 * 6000 * 365,250 = 15,340,500,000 years.
In his commentary on the Torah, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher concludes that there were many time systems occurring in the universe long before the spans of history that man is familiar with. Based on the Kabbalah he calculates that the Earth is billions of years old.

Jewish views in reaction to Darwin

With the advent of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, the Jewish community found itself engaged in a discussion of Jewish principles of faith and modern scientific findings.

Post-1800 Kabbalistic views of compatibility

Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, an Italian Kabbalist, changed his position over time with respect to evolutionary theory. His views went through three stages, corresponding to his engagement with ideas of transmutation in three key works, namely, the Hebrew biblical commentary Em leMikra, the Italian theological treatise, Teologia Dogmatica e Apologetica, and his posthumous great work in French, Israël et l'humanité. Benamozegh came to view Darwin's account of the common descent of all life as evidence in support of kabbalistic teachings, which he synthesized to offer a majestic vision of cosmic evolution, with radical implications for understanding the development of morality and religion itself. In the context of the creation-evolution debate in Europe, Benamozegh's significance is as the earliest traditionalist Jewish proponent of a panentheistic account of evolution. From the time of his earliest work on the subject, he wrote that were evolution to become a mainstay of scientific theory, it would not contradict the Torah as long as one understood it as having been guided by God.
Rabbi Israel Lipschitz of Danzig gave a famous lecture on Torah and paleontology, which is printed in the Yachin u-Boaz edition of the Mishnah, after Massechet Sanhedrin. He writes that Kabbalistic texts teach that the world has gone through many cycles of history, each lasting for many tens of thousands of years. He links these teachings to findings about geology from European, American and Asian geologists, and from findings from paleontologists. He discusses the wooly mammoth discovered in 1807 Siberia, Russia, and the remains of several then-famous dinosaur skeletons recently unearthed. Finding no contradiction between this and Jewish teachings, he states "From all this, we can see that all the Kabbalists have told us for so many centuries about the fourfold destruction and renewal of the Earth has found its clearest possible confirmation in our time."