Judah Halevi Research Articles

The Kuzari and Early Kabbalah: Between Integration and Interpretation regarding the Secrets of the Sacrificial Rite

AbstractThe proper place of Judah Halevi’s thought in the initial emergence and subsequent development of medieval kabbalah has been the subject of debate for centuries. The general consensus has it that the Kuzari was not much more than a convenient repository of terms. This study measures the extent of Halevi’s impact on early kabbalah by using the Kuzari’s reasons for the sacrificial rite as a test case.Halevi offered an exoteric, more rationalistic explanation and alluded to an esoteric one. Catalonian kabbalists in fact engaged for generations with these two reasons offered by the Kuzari, displaying a shared yet variable approach to Halevi’s thought. Unsurprisingly, some grabbed the low-hanging fruit by interpreting Halevi’s esoteric reason, which he refused to disclose, in terms of theosophical kabbalah. More unexpected, however, is the possible conceptual indebtedness of the earliest Catalonian kabbalists, like Ezra of Gerona, to Halevi’s theurgic conception of the commandments and doctrine of the Godhead. Of particular interest, too, is the fact that later generations of kabbalists interpreted the Kuzari using paradigms they also employed in their conceptualization of theosophical kabbalah, such as astral magic or neoplatonic psychology and spiritual eschatology.Halevi’s work was not simply scavenged for its well-wrought nomenclature. If one looks closely, evidence for the Kuzari’s significant and lasting imprint can be found throughout kabbalah: in the doctrine of the Godhead, in the theurgic conception of religious ritual, in the development of an esoteric interpretation of religious praxis, in the establishment of an esoteric reading of Sefer yeẓirah, and more.

Four Jewish Visions of the Garden of Eden

What was life like for Adam and Eve before they sinned? What was their sin? What was this mysterious Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? The views on these questions of four major Jewish thinkers: Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), Moses Nahmanides (1194–1270), Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), and Solomon Maimon (1753–1800), are discussed and contrasted. For Maimonides, the Garden of Eden was the Garden of Pure Reason, and sin consisted in the abandonment of Reason. For Nahmanides, like Augustine, the Garden of Eden story is about the human beings’ attainment of free choice with all its grave problems. Criticizing Maimonides and Nahmanides, Mendelssohn followed Plato and Judah Halevi, arguing that the Garden of Eden story is about maintaining a harmony between intellect and desire. Maimon agreed with Maimonides that the Garden of Eden was the Garden of Pure Reason, but, following Kant, he argued contra Maimonides that the moral rules are rational and a priori. All four thinkers held that the Garden of Eden was a paradigmatic place of tolerance—either because rational people do not harm others, or because desireless people have no desire to harm others, or because well-balanced people have noble virtues. In an Excursus, Maimon’s “Merry Masquerade Ball” is interpreted.

Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer, Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought. Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera

Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer, Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought. Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera

From Yu–suf al-Bas.r to Judah Halevi: The Sadduceean Myth of the Origins of Karaism in Medieval Rabbanite Sources Revisited

Two main historiographic motifs invented in the Middle Ages have dominated all later Jewish historical reconstructions of the origins of Karaism. One connects it with the activity of ‘Anan ben David, while the other associates the Karaites with the Sadducees. The aim of the article is to revisit the question of the origins of the Sadduceean motif and Halevi’s role in its creation. Accordingly, its purpose is not to explore the actual relationship between the Karaites and the Sadducees, but the way in which medieval Jews imagined this relationship, especially in terms of the Karaites’ past and the beginnings of their movement. It argues that against his explicit statements to the contrary, Halevi contributed to the establishment of a direct, historical link between the Karaites and the Sadducees. In addition, the article demonstrates that when creating his narrative on the emergence of Karaism, Halevi might have been inspired by Karaite sources such as Yūsuf al-Baṣīr’s Book of Precepts. It offers an analysis of a relevant passage of this legal Code through an attempt to reconstruct a complex process of cross-sectoral interchanges and transfers of ideas behind the creation of the Sadduceean myth of the origins of Karaism.

Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought: Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera, written by Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer

Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought: Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides and Shem Tov ibn Falaquera, written by Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer

Weaving Textual Tapestries: The Role of the Biblical Intertext

In Medieval Iberia, Arabic was perceived as the most communicative, practical, and beautiful language. Forced to contend with this, authors of Hebrew works sought to raise the caliber of the Hebrew language. This paper will explore the use of these Biblical intertexts through an intertextual analysis of Judah Halevi’s poem “Song of Farewell.” These intertexts utilized the contexts of their original stories to convey a deeper meaning to the literary works as well as create additional layered meaning subsequently aiding in the reinvigoration of the Hebrew language.

Dialogue as a Means of Religious Co-Production: Historical Perspectives

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.

Theological and Political Postscript to Presentations at the Haifa Conference: The Faith of Skepticism and the Skepticism of Faith in St. Augustine, Avicenna, Judah Halevi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida

Theological and Political Postscript to Presentations at the Haifa Conference: The Faith of Skepticism and the Skepticism of Faith in St. Augustine, Avicenna, Judah Halevi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida

Andalus And Sefarad: On Philosophy and its History in Islamic Spain by Sarah Stroumsa

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 3, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com SARAH STROUMSA, ANDALUS AND SEFARAD: ON PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY IN ISLAMIC SPAIN (PRINCETON, NJ; OXFORD: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019) The traditional account of the history of philosophy in Muslim Spain begins in the late tenth century. According to the eleventh-century chronicler Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī, it was then that the Umayyad Emir of Cordoba al-Ḥakam II ordered that books on ‘the ancient sciences as well as the modern ones’ be brought from Baghdad, Egypt, ‘and other places in the East’, in the hope of reaping the fruits of the ‘Abbasid-sponsored translation movement for Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. This well-known episode from Islamic history, Sarah Stroumsa reveals in Andalus and Sefarad, her recent study of philosophy in Muslim Spain, has a lesser known yet equally important Jewish coda. When the prominent Jewish physician and political advisor Ḥasday ibn Shaprut ‘attached himself to al- Ḥakam’, the same Ṣā‘id al-Andalusī wrote, ‘he used his good offices to bring whatever he wanted of the writings of the Jews in the Orient’. As Stroumsa observes, ‘It requires little imagination to appreciate that the same ships that brought the books ordered by the caliph also carried those ordered by his vizier, and that when the ships arrived at the docks, for example in Seville, their literary cargo was not divided strictly according to religious affiliation.’ Stroumsa sees this story as emblematic of the history of Andalusian philosophy. Jewish and Muslim philosophy and theology in the Iberian Peninsula, she proposes, ought to be viewed ‘as components of a common intellectual history and as stages in a continuous trajectory’. Written with a clarity befitting a scholar of Stroumsa’s expertise, Andalus and Sefarad is a masterful demonstration of how to think about the history of Andalusian philosophy in this ‘integrative’ way. The influence of Islamic traditions on medieval Jewish thinkers living under Muslim rule and writing in Arabic is well-known. It has long been accepted, for instance, that Judah Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval times and author of the famous Arabic theological treatise known as the Kuzari, drew on the Sunni Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī’s critique of Aristotelian philosophy and the Neoplatonic ideas of the Ismaili Shia. In her previous book, Maimonides and His World (2009), Stroumsa herself demonstrated that the 316 BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE RENDU great Jewish philosopher and legal authority Moses Maimonides, author of the Judeo-Arabic classic The Guide of the Perplexed, was influenced by the ideas of the Almohad dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain in the twelfth century. If ‘Islamicate’ Jewish thought is fairly well-known (to use the concept coined by Marshall Hodgson for that which is culturally if not religiously Islamic), far less so is the impact of Jewish thought on Islamic philosophy, and it is here that Andalus and Sefarad comes into its own. In chapter one we learn that the tenthcentury Muslim Neoplatonist of Cordoba Ibn Masarra, the first Andalusian philosopher of note, was influenced by Jewish speculation on the mystical significance of the letters of the alphabet and the symbolism of the divine throne. In the following chapter, we discover that the books and ideas of the rationalist Mu‘tazilite school of Islamic theology were introduced into alAndalus by Jewish Karaites, scripturalists who rejected rabbinic authority, and who, unlike their opponents the Rabbanites, usually wrote their Arabic works in Arabic, rather than Hebrew, characters, making them accessible to Muslims as well as Jews. While this is all very interesting, Stroumsa’s aim is not merely to show that the direction of influence went from Jews to Muslims as well as Muslims to Jews. Nor is it to substantiate the romantic if rather anachronistic notion of medieval al-Andalus as a site of interfaith convivencia. Rather, Stroumsa aims to demonstrate how the same philosophical traditions and ideas continuously circulated among adherents of the two religions in what...

“Light has darkened in our tents”: a lament for Tisha B’Av and its attribution to R. Judah Halevi

Amitai’s article reveals a previously unknown lament for the night of Tisha B’Av composed by R. Judah Halevi. The article discusses the lament, its language, its content and its necessary attribution to R. Judah Halevi. The reader is also presented with a complete critical edition of the lament, that the author compiled from two different manuscripts in the Genizah.

The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought

The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought

The Art of Ambiguity: The Karaites as Portrayed in Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari

On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Judah Halevi is assumed to have originally composed his influential book of religious thought, the Kuzari, as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, he neither perceived nor described the Karaites as heretics. In fact, his depiction of the adherents of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism and their origins so appealed to the Karaites that some of them believed that the author had been a (crypto-)Karaite himself, and his reconstructions of the movement's history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. This paper attempts to discern Halevi's attitude toward the Karaites, and his perception of their main fault. It also addresses the fundamental question of his purpose in writing the Kuzari.

The Art of Ambiguity: The Karaites as Portrayed in Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari

On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Judah Halevi is assumed to have originally composed his influential book of religious thought, the Kuzari, as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, he neither perceived nor described the Karaites as heretics. In fact, his depiction of the adherents of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism and their origins so appealed to the Karaites that some of them believed that the author had been a (crypto-)Karaite himself, and his reconstructions of the movement's history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. This paper attempts to discern Halevi's attitude toward the Karaites, and his perception of their main fault. It also addresses the fundamental question of his purpose in writing the Kuzari.

‘Zion, Memory and Hope of All Ages’: Nina Davis Salaman’s Romantic-Zionist Poetry

Abstract This article analyses the romantic-Zionist poetry of Nina Davis Salaman, contextualising it alongside other fin-de-siècle Zionist poets to argue that she too similarly adopted bibliocentric, prophetic, and diasporic perspectives, particularly themes associated with the medieval Andalusian poetry of Judah Halevi. In doing so, Salaman, much like other Anglo-Jewish women writers, defined her own subjectivity in the context of nostalgic, romanticising religious and nationalistic discourses. However, uniquely, Salaman’s poetry adopts not only the themes of medieval Andalusian verse yearning for Zion-Jerusalem and the land of Israel, but also, as she put it, its diasporic ‘clothing of metre and rhyme’. Indeed, Salaman’s romantic poetry is populated with intertextual links recalling the biblical Prophets and Halevi’s exilic poetry, which offer historical and scriptural substantiation to support contemporaneous Zionist discourses. Songs of Many Days draws equally on her underlying belief that ‘metre and rhyme’, including in her own poetry, are a feature of diasporic existence.

Does God Prefer the Powerful? Reforming the King in Judah Halevi's Kuzari

Does God Prefer the Powerful? Reforming the King in Judah Halevi's Kuzari

“Separated in Neither Death nor Life”: The Folk Traditions Linking Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra

Abstract Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra are two of the most celebrated pre-modern Jewish figures of all time. Born in late eleventh-century Spain, their lives intersected on several occasions. However, there is also an extensive web of folk narratives and traditions that have been told about them from the Middle-Ages to the present day which links them to each other through their imagined biographies. In fact, many stories were told about them separately depicting various facets of each man’s character. Here, however, we show that unlike other stories, those that bring them together revolve around a specific type of activity common to both; namely, poetry. Furthermore, their hagiographies tend to reproduce the typical milestones characteristic of biographies of saints and cultural heroes (Noy 1975): the prenatal legend, the biographical legend, the posthumous legend, events associated with the hero’s descendants, and events associated with the hero’s possessions. In this case, however, we argue that the stories not only correspond to their biographical phases, but that these stories shape their poetic endeavors as adhering to these phases as well, thus turning these two poets into a timeless couple separated in neither life or death, before their births or posthumously.

Yehudah Ben Samuel Halevi: el exilio como redención

In medieval poetry of the Spanish Jews, both sacred and profane, late nostalgia for a lost and saved by the tongue homeland. She is his firmer ground, which can restore from the wreck of a hostile situation the fullness of collective memory. In the case of tudelano poet Judah Halevi, whose wanderings took him to visit different courts, Zaragoza, Toledo, Cordoba, Sevilla, Granada, but without settling permanently in any, the exile experience led him to feel like axis of history among the nations, live with the hope of returning to a land identified with paradise. Because poetry involved herself in this double movement of expulsion and return out put than usual and back source, the only point that awakens the to the meaning of live.

A betegség és annak gyógyítási praktikái a zsidóság múltjában (A zsidó népszokásokból)

This short presentation aims to show something, which is mainly bygone, since the religious and traditional Jewish way of life and lifestyle demonstrated here submerged in the former ages. The study presents the relationship of the religious, traditional ashkenasi Jewish communities to diseases, healing, and recovery in the context of the Tanach, the Talmudic, and the medieval Jewish rabbinical traditions, approaching the subject from both the individuals and the community. By mentioning a number of biblical passages, it shows what the Hebrew Bible says about the possible cause of diseases, e.g. how Job relates himself to the disease or how this story a122ppears in the psalms. Views about illness and healing, practical advice, and the individual and collective measures needed for recovery are demonstrated as well. It was an essential part of religious Jewish people to pray together in case of illness, praying of the psalms in worship by specific order, and visiting the sick regularly in the due course. The study approaches Jewish folk traditions from the concept of folk healing. It concerns also the activity of professional healers, such as Maimonides and Judah Halevi, the advice and practice of folk healers, the habits and ideas of childhood diseases, the women’s role in healing, the practices against harmful demons, and the intertwining of dybbuk and diseases.

Ibn Gabirol and Judah ha-Levi’s Usage of Dialogue: The Role of the Disciple in Fons Vitae and that of the King in Kitāb al-Khazarī

The literary framework of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae is a conversation between a master and a disciple. In this article, the nature of the disciple’s questions will be analyzed in order to explain the advantages of the dialogical process in Ibn Gabirol’s thought. The literary framework of Judah ha-Levi’s Kitāb al-Khazarī is similar to that of Fons Vitae. Ha-Levi’s composition is built as a conversation that allegedly took place between the king of the Khazars and a Jewish scholar (ḥaver). Analysis of the king’s responses to the ḥaver shows that the king did not fully understand the ḥaver’s lessons, in which the deep meaning of Judaism is taught. In this article, the king’s responses will be analyzed and, likewise, the question of Judah ha-Levi’s intention in using this literary sophistication. As is shown in this article both famous Andalusian poets and thinkers, R. Judah ha-Levi and R. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, masters of linguistic phrasing and style, used the dialogical form not only as an opportunity to present their world views, but also as a method by which to critique their own philosophies.

Uriah Kfir. A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp.

Reviewed by: A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry by Uriah Kfir Jonathan Decter Uriah Kfir. A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000187 "The Hidden Praises of Time Have I Seen" is a panegyric by a poet named Pinḥas, a rival of the more famous Todros Halevi Abulafia (1247–d. after 1298), in honor of Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok, a courtier in the service of Alfonso X of Castile. The poem opens with a fictional poetic speaker recounting a "prophetic" vision, a gathering in which poets come from all directions to boast over their specific locales. After the representatives of the East, North, and South speak, they call for the prince of the West, but no one answers until Pinḥas himself steps forth and boasts of its qualities. The participants "whisper to one another about [End Page 214] the one for whom kingship is fitting" until Time (i.e., Fate) interjects, "What have I to do with North, East, and South? The West have I acquired! / Behold, my seal and its cord [Genesis 38:18] are yours; the mark of dominion have I set upon your beloved's forehead." The "beloved," of course, refers to the addressee of the poem, Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok. Pinḥas's masterful poem participates in a discourse of post-Andalusian Hebrew poetry that centered on geography, a subject of cultural import after the period of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus (Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, etc.) had come to a close. Clearly for Pinḥas, the West (which meant Spain from a Mediterranean perspective) could claim superiority over other regions, and here the claims of poetic accomplishment and political legitimacy dovetail poignantly. The recent book by Uriah Kfir, based on a Hebrew doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv University), provides an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics of geographic debate in Andalusian and post-Andalusian Hebrew literature. (The dissertation also offers critical editions of many of the texts discussed.) The approach departs from existing scholarship in that previous scholars (with a few exceptions) have thought more in terms of literary development across geography rather than the way in which geography itself functions as a topic within medieval Hebrew literature. Rather than focusing on the degree to which post-Andalusian poets depended on, selectively absorbed, or departed from Andalusian literary conventions, Kfir investigates the cultural tensions of place, wherein al-Andalus and later Christian Iberia functioned as a "center" with a venerated literary tradition, while other locales—including Italy, Provence, Egypt, and Iraq—functioned as its "periphery." In approaching the corpus in this way, Kfir reads through prisms that have been employed fruitfully in postcolonial theory in Europe and the United States, including within the field of modern Hebrew literature. The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals with the Iberian "center" from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Here Kfir discerns a four-part process ("distinction, amplification, promotion, and preservation") by which the hegemonic claims of the earliest generations of Andalusian poets are reproduced by authors of Christian Iberia for the retention of hegemony in the face of rising Hebrew centers in Provence and the Islamic East. Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. Thus Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. Andalusian Jews represented themselves as the descendants of Jerusalem exiles, hence claimants of pure Hebrew speech, and also as the inheritors of Eastern geonic authority. Hebrew authors of Christian Iberia, though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways, could make the case for continuing the Andalusian tradition most easily and represent their superiority not as a matter of mere emulation but rather as one of innate ability. The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth...