Judah Halevi

Judah Halevi, a medieval Jewish thinker and poet, is known as the most fervent defender of traditional Judaism and a fierce critic of religious rationalism. Despite the fact that a huge body of scholarly work exists on Halevi in the West, including those that deal with the Arabic-Islamic background of his thought, he has not gained much recognition in Turkish academia. This paper aims to draw attention to Halevi’s al-Kitāb al-Khazarī, widely known as Sefer ha-Kuzari, by analyzing its background and content. In this way, this paper presents an evaluation of the main points of Halevi’s defense of the Jewish religion and critique of Islam as he put forth in his Kuzari.

Halevi, through his religious-nationalist poems as well as his polemical book, the Kuzari, had a significant impact on the Jews of his time and of later periods. In his Kuzari, which is written as a dialogue between a Khazar king (Khazari) and a Jewish scholar (haver), Halevi defends the Jewish religion and criticizes, directly or indirectly, the main beliefs and opinions of certain groups that he considers to be either external (philosophers, Muslims and Christians) or internal (Karaites) adversaries of Rabbinic Judaism. The Kuzari is also regarded as the first Jewish polemical book written against Islam. Even more important is the fact that since Halevi lived in a time and place that was dominated by Muslim Arab culture, he makes use of Islamic terminology to a great extent in the Kuzari. As demonstrated by a long chain of scholars including David Kaufmann, Ignaz Goldziher, Julius Guttman, David Baneth, Israel Efros, Harry Wolfson, Shlomo Pines, Diana Lobel and Ehud Krinis, Halevi borrows Arabic words and concepts not only from the Islamic (both Sunni and Shiite) literature of philosophy, kalām and taŝawwuf, but also directly from the Qur’an and the hadīth, integrating them into his own system of thought, i.e., into a Jewish context. The most important of these Islamic words or concepts are amr/amr Allāh, ittiŝāl, ŝafwa, qiyās, ijtihād, sanad, taqlīd, etc. It is also important to note that the main adversary groups that Halevi critiques in his Kuzari –namely, the philosophers (especially the Aristotelians), the kalām scholars and the Karaites– have one point in common: they all flourished in a Muslim culture and, in the case of the first two groups, consisted mostly of Muslim scholars. Accordingly, Greek philosophy, which was criticized by Halevi, had gained ascendency through the writings of Muslim philosophers and influenced Jewish scholars as well. As for Karaite Judaism, which emerged in Muslim Iraq, it was also influenced by the Muslim kalām tradition. Thus, for some scholars, the Kuzari should be seen as a clarion call made to persuade the Jewish elite of Spain, who came under the influence of Muslim culture with its emphasis on philosophy (i.e., Athens), to return to an authentic Jewish tradition (i.e., Jerusalem). This helps to explain the eventual decision of the haver, the main character of the Kuzari, as well as of Halevi himself to travel to the holy land to live and die there.

In light of this background knowledge, it is fair to consider Halevi’s defense of Judaism in parallel to his critique of Islam. In dealing with different topics, Halevi often makes a comparison between the two religions and most of the time the main point of this comparison is the contrast made between particularism and universalism. According to Halevi, what is special about Judaism is that it is based upon the reality and experience of one people, i.e., the Jews, and therefore is particularistic and exclusivist in nature; Islam, on the contrary, has a universalistic and inclusivist orientation. From the Islamic point of view, the dependence of Jewish religion on ethnicity makes it a limited one, to say the least, whereas for Halevi this element of ethnicity or peoplehood, which is an inherent feature of Jewish religion, becomes the indicator of its authenticity. The reason for this is that Judaism, according to Halevi, is the only religion that depends on the religious experience of a whole people and not only of certain individuals. This element of peoplehood, namely the public experience of divine revelation (i.e., Sinai revelation) and its transmission by chosen individuals (i.e., prophets and sages) throughout the following generations, makes it a reliable and genuine revelation and tradition at one and the same time. Islam, on the other hand, is depicted by Halevi as a feeble and failed religion of universalism. However, this paper argues that this picture presented by Halevi does not go beyond a caricature of Islam, on the one hand, and a romantic and idealistic embellishment of Judaism, on the other.

Key words: Judah (Yehuda) Halevi, Sefer ha-Kuzari, al-Kitāb al-Khazarī, Judaism, Islam, Jews.

Jewish sources commonly refer to Muslims as “Ishmaelites” and to Islamdom as “the Kingdom of Ishmael” due to an alleged biblical genealogy that both Jews and Muslims accept. Other classic Jewish sources, however, associate pre-Islamic Arabs as well as Muslims with two other biblical nations, Ammon and Moab, even when, and even though, the “standard” appellations are at hand. The Ammon and Moab nexus is mentioned in academic literature but without much elaboration. This article investigates several Jewish mentions of the nexus – most of Hispano-Jewish provenance – and proposes five explanations for its use.

Résumé
Les sources juives qualifient généralement les musulmans d’Ismaélites et le domaine de l’Islam en tant que “royaume d’Ismaël”, et ce au nom de généalogies bibliques reconnues autant par les juifs que les musulmans. D’autres sources juives classiques, cependant, rattachent les Arabes préislamiques ainsi que les musulmans à deux autres nations mentionnées dans la Bible, Ammon et Moab, et ce indépendamment de leur traditionnelle appellation d’Ismaélites. Jusqu’à présent, le lien avec Ammon et Moab n’a été que sommairement évoqué dans la littérature scientifique. La présente étude examine plusieurs sources juives, pour la plupart d’origine hispanique, évoquant un pareil lien.

In the thirteenth century, Judaism and Islam gave birth to two monumental works which had a lasting impact on their respective mystical systems: within Judaism and the Kabbalistic tradition it was the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, “which was destined to overshadow all other documents of Kabbalist literature by the success and the fame it achieved and the influence it gradually exerted” (G. Scholem). Within the Muslim mystical tradition, it was the work of the Andalusia born Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), in particular his Meccan Revelations (al-Futuhat al-makkiyya), in which “he was to express in writing that vast range of esoteric knowledge, which, until his time, had been transmitted orally or by way of allusions only” (R. Austin). That these two mystical works, which respectively mark turning points in the history of Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions, were conceived within such temporal and spatial proximity is thought provoking. The fact that these thirteenth-century works, which came to occupy such outstanding positions in their respective mystical traditions were compiled by mystics of Spanish origin, raises the question of possible common roots. Indeed, although Kabbalah, geographically speaking, relates to post-Andalusian Jewish history, when one adds up the literary testimonies stemming from the 10th century onwards, it appears that the question of Kabbalistic origins should be viewed with an Andalusian pre-history in mind. In spite of clear distinctions between the two – the Zohar was compiled in Aramaic in the later part of the 13th century within a Jewish circle from the north of Spain living under Christian rule; the Meccan Revelations was written in Arabic in the earlier part of that same century by an Andalusian Muslim (albeit after having left al-Andalus for the eastern Muslim world) – both the Zohar and the Meccan Revelations mark the culmination of an intellectual, mystically-inclined process, which, for Andalusian Jews and Muslims alike, had started approximately two centuries before, that is, in the 10th century, when certain teachings were brought to al-Andalus from the East and inspired there a growing interest in the mystical dimension of the religious life. This chapter wishes to chart the track and contents of these mystical teachings; consequently, it will attempt to show that these “common roots” and sources of inspiration must be identified as versions of Neoplatonic mystical philosophy, which, since the tenth through the thirteenth century and beyond, had circulated in Muslim Spain in Arabic as well as in Judaeo-Arabic and which, through a long line of Jewish and Muslim authors, contributed to the development of Jewish and Islamic mysticisms in the Middle Ages. These texts belong mainly to the fields of philosophy (falsafa) and mystical philosophy (‘ilm batin, hikma), and only to a small extent to Sufism. By bringing mystical philosophy to the forefront of the historical, comparative and typological enquiry, this chapter also wishes to draw typological distinctions between Sufi-type Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalistic type. It may thus put in perspective the wish, benevolent as it may be, to reconcile Judaism and Islam by emphasizing similarities, affiliations and reciprocities between their respective mysticisms: Sufism and the Kabbalah. Finally, my discussion concerns continuity rather than influences. The question of ‘influences’, to my mind, is overrated in scholarship and tends to be either biased or reductive. Furthermore, evidence concerning ‘influences’ may be circular, especially in the context of cross-fertilization phenomena as those which prevail between Judaism and Islam in the Middle Ages. At this stage of the study of Medieval Jewish and Muslim mysticisms, questions concerning influences should, I believe, give way to more pertinent questions concerning literary connections, thematic continuities, and typological distinctions.

What does interreligious dialogue look like from different religious perspectives? What does it do? One way of answering these questions is by examining historical examples of “religious dialogue”. These illustrate first-hand the rhetoric of interreligious dialogue. This article examines three case studies: (1) from 2nd-century Rome, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho; (2) from 12th-century Spain, the Kuzari by Judah Halevi the Jew alongside the Dialogus of Petrus Alfonsi, a Christian convert from Judaism (both discuss Islam); (3) from 18th-century Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem and Johann Caspar Lavater’s Nathanael. Each contextualized case-study reveals the creative, morally enigmatic tension between commitment to hearing the religious Other, the utility of the Other for demarcating one’s own religious identity, and the epistemological contradictions of religious systems. Borrowing Martin Buber’s insight that the Ich (the “I”) needs a Du (a “you”) to form itself but must transform that Du into a third person es (an “it”), this article shows how complicated a process religious co-production through dialogue is—one which is both morally problematic and ethically promising. Here, literary dialogues establish a general feature of interreligious dialogue: the requirements of self-construction, not just the need for peaceful coexistence, recommend the adoption of a strong dialogical tolerance.

The purpose of the present study is to submit to careful historical,
literary and linguistic analysis the entire text of the muwassaha by
Yehuda Halevi (1075-1141) which begins with the words ra'se cam
("Chiefs of the people") and culminates in one of the most resounding
jarchas hitherto deciphered:
des kand mosedilo benid tan bona 'a/be sara
kom ra'yo desol 'esid 'en wa'd 'afhagara

One of the difficulties in interpreting texts with a messianic and eschatological scope in Scripture is due to the fact that they have been monopolized by a venerable and powerful Christian exegetical tradition dating back to the Fathers of the Church of the first centuries, in order to apply them exclusively to Christ, Church and his faithful, even where it is evident that they concern-equally if not exclusively-the Jewish people. To clarify this process, I propose to call it, by analogy with substitution theology, "substitutionist exegesis". The confusion is further increased when, in accordance with one of the literary peculiarities of Scripture: the frequent passage from the singular to the plural, or from a single character to a corporative entity-as illustrated by what the Biblical scholars call the "Songs of the Servant" in the Book of Isaiah-induces, among Christians, the certainty that this "Servant" is the suffering Jesus, while the rabbinical tradition sees in him the type of the persecuted Jewish people, as says the medieval Jewish philosopher and poet Judah Halevi, in his Kuzari...

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/566316

The book provides the first in-depth study on Judah Halevi’s instrumental use of sceptical tactics in his wrestling with the dogmatic-rationalistic trends of the Arabic culture of his period (11th- 12th centuries). The Book's main claim is that in this historical context, Halevi made an original contribution by inserting sceptical argumentation to his formulation of a Fideistic response to the rationalistic interpretations of religion.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), and his seminal statement of Jewish philosophy, The Guide of the Perplexed, and Judah Halevi (1075-1141), and his philosophical dialogue, The Cuzari, offer sharp contrasts. Small wonder that their world-views, as well their positions on specific issues, have often been compared. 1 Maimonides' book was written ostensibly in order to guide the Jew who is troubled by the conflict between the science and some seemingly unscientific accounts in Scripture and rabbinic texts. Halevi's book recounts the cross-examination of a Jewish scholar, the ḥaver, by a pagan monotheistic king who is troubled by a recurring dream, in which he informed that his ideas are sound, but his rituals are not. Both books present, in fact, well-developed philosophies of Judaism, whose wide compass far outreaches the formal justifications for their composition. Science plays a very significant role in the philosophies of Judaism which these two thinkers elaborated. The boundaries between science and philosophy in the medieval context are not at all sharp. This is especially true when looking at writers like Maimonides and Halevi, who are consciously and deliberately aiming to present a vision of Judaism in which the truth and supremacy of their ancestral tradition is to be demonstrated, and science plays an important role in this project. The creation of the world and the possibility of miracles are scientific questions that bear heavily upon the vision of each thinker, however much they may differ.

This article highlights on the metamorphosis of the dualistic manifestation of Maimonides and Judah Halevi’s historical images, illustrated by Samuel David Luzzatto, in the 1830’s. 
As part of his "counter enlightenment" position, Luzzatto attempted to tarnish the venerated images of Maimonides, who, in his view, exemplified the penetration of alien elements into Judaism. He wished to replace him with alternative ideal role-model, Judah Halevi, man who embodied authentic Jewish qualities and was eminently worthy of admiration. 
This dualistic manifestation infiltrated into the intellectual discourse and caused a continuous polemic.  Maimonides and Judah Halevi were referred to as the two heads of the main and opponent Jewish philosophical schools.
On the one hand, some romanticist/nationalist intellectuals developed the manifestation of Luzzatto. On the other hand, the maskilim responded to Luzzatto and strengthened the Maimonides historical image as a maskilic hero, who served as a propaganda and polemical weapon against opponents of the enlightenment. Some of them, even, attacked Judah Halevi, Maimonides' new adversary.
Moreover, orthodox scholars, who perceived themselves as both Maimonides’ and Judah Halevi’s successors, tried to rehabilitate their beaten historical images, and minimize the differences of their doctrines.     
Finally, this dualistic manifestation diverged beyond the original polemic and its outcomes, and was copied into philosophical and political fields.

The dissertation is the first book length study of the intellectual links between Judaism and Shi‘ism in the Middle Ages. It is dedicated to Rabbi Judah Halevi's treatise al-Kitāb al-khazarī, (Book of the Kuzari), one of the most renowned and important treatises in Judeo-Arabic culture. This central treatise is a fascinating test-case instance of a Jewish writer drawing from Shī‘ī literary sources. At the core of his work, Judah Halevi examined the idea of the Chosen People. A wide-ranging textual and phenomenological investigation of the Judeo-Arabic text shows that the writer relies on terms and conceptions borrowed from the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine, in order to develop the principal motifs depicting the People of Israel as God's Chosen. Judah Halevi's inclination towards Shī‘ī literature seems to move upon the axis drawn between the central theme of Shī‘ī theology – the Imām doctrine - and the main idea of Halevi's thought – the idea of the Chosen People. Some of the terms, conceptions and structures characteristic of the Shī‘ī  Imām doctrine and of the way in which Shī‘ī  theology shape the status of the Prophets and Imāms as God's Chosen appear in Halevi's work in the theological context of shaping the status of Israel's progenitors and the People of Israel as God's Chosen.
This study also aims to present a certain historical perspective that enables us to understand the basis for Judah Halevi's interest in and attraction to Shī‘ī  literature, with its unique category of God's Chosen. The polemic argument over the issue of the legitimate heir to leadership in early Islam, as well as the debate around the legitimate heir-group in medieval inter-religious dispute, emerge as the relevant historical background for the seemingly surprising linkage between concepts and ideas of the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine and the idea of the Chosen People in Judah Halevi's thought. This linkage reflects Halevi as a bold, original thinker on the one hand, and the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine as exceedingly fruitful on the other – reaching beyond the bounds of Islam.
This study is based on a comparative reading of a wide variety of Shī‘ī sources of the 8th – 11th centuries; treatises that represent the lines of development of the Shī‘ī Imām doctrine in its two central trends– the Imāmī Shī‘a and the Ismā‘īlī Shī‘a. The study is further based upon the impressive progress made by the recent generation of researchers of Shi‘a trends, and it benefits from the recent considerable improvement in accessing Shi‘a's early literary sources.

This chapter discusses the connection between concepts of Jewish distinctiveness and di aspora/exile in five paradigmatic medieval and early modern Jewish thinkers. The article argues that the medieval Jewish thinkers examined, Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, wrote primarily for a Jewish audience, and as such their conceptions of Jewish distinctive ness and diaspora were aimed at bolstering Jewish self-confidence. By contrast, the early moderns Simone Luzzatto and Menasseh ben Israel wrote primarily for Gentile audiences and articulated conceptions of Jewish distinctiveness and diaspora aimed at ameliorating Jewish political standing. A third early modern thinker, Benedict Spinoza, also discussed Jewish distinctiveness and diaspora for activist ends, but did so in a deflationary way, as his concern was not with improving the political status of Jews, but rather with promoting the general public's freedom to philosophize.

Because of their religious and existential appeal, Judah Ha-Levi and Baya ibn Paquda are studied in circles otherwise opposed to the study of philosophy. Ha-Levi emphasizes correct actions, whereas Baya emphasizes intention and internalization. Diana Lobel shows how both thinkers adopted Islamic, especially Sufi, terms and ideas, but adapted them to their Jewish context, thus exemplifying Wolfson's notion of "repercussions" rather than one-way "influences." Her Quest for God and the Good contains broad scholarship but goes beyond it to the multi-cultural philosophical search over the ages for the truth and the good life.

This is the latest version that I am allowed to upload--by now you must all know about the "agreements" that we must sign. The published version (In Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science) will soon be available at Elsevier's Science Direct, for those with access.

The book develops a new approach to the puzzling divine statement of Exodus 3:14a, mostly translated as ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be who I will be’. This includes an investigation of the preceding request for a divine name (3:13) against the background of the use of divine names in Genesis and within the call narrative. That investigation also concerns the reference to the fundamental act of sending by God. The new approach involves further a detailed study of the idem of idem structure characteristic of the statement, distinguishing between several syntactical types with different sense effects and marking the way in which such an effect is used at the discourse level. In order to get more insight into what determines our interpretation of the divine statement, among other things many historic translations are investigated in addition (Septuagint, its daughter translations, Vulgate, pre- and early-modern translations).

A collection of 25 articles on various topics in Jewish history and literature, encompassing biography, text editions and translations, grammar and lexicography, exegesis, philosophy, theology, polemics, textual criticism, codicological-textual history, Dead Sea Scrolls, and historiography.
For the Table of Contents and further details click on the publisher's link above.

Статья доступна по ссылке: https://nbpublish.com/library_read_article.php?id=15810
Данная работа является своеобразным продолжением программной статьи Лео Штрауса «Преследование и искусство письма» и одноименной книги, частью которой является указанная статья. В статье политический философ излагает свой герменевтический метод, именуемый методом внимательного чтения, а в книге предлагает несколько примеров использования данного метода: анализ работ М. Маймонида, Й. Галеви и Б. Спинозы. «О забытом виде письма», является ответом на критику, полученным Штраусом после публикации своего труда. Штраус разбирает два примера такой критики: во-первых, рецензию Д. Сабина, во-вторых статью Й. Белавала. Философ отвергает критику Сабина, последовательно разбирая ее и указывая на ее недостатки, неточности и ошибки. Он куда более благосклонен к Белавалу, основными пунктами критики которого являются неверная – с точки зрения самого Белавала – ориентация Штрауса на Восточную средневековую философию, представителей которой Белавал скорее склонен именовать учеными или комментаторами, а не философами; и не полная достоверность самого метода.
В целом данную работу сложно назвать прорывной или определяющей, она скорее призвана прояснить некоторые вопросы, оставшиеся не проясненными в «Преследовании и искусстве письма».