A Jew amongst Christians and Muslims: introspection in Solomon ibn Adret's response to ibn Hazm

Abstract

Solomon ibn Adret, one of the foremost Rabbis of the Jewish community in the Iberian peninsula in the late thirteenth century, wrote a treatise that engaged directly with the claims and arguments of ibn Hazm, a Muslim scholar who had been dead for some two hundred years. His preoccupation with ibn Hazm seems strange given his many other concerns such as the spread of Averroism and Christian attacks on the Jewish post-biblical texts. One of ibn Adret's Christian interlocutors was the famous Dominican, Ramon Martí, and it is he who provides the key for understanding the treatise written against ibn Hazm. Ibn Adret's treatise is his way of exploring his own religious beliefs in the face of the Christian attacks against rabbinical Judaism.