Poet and philosopher, author of the Kuzari
Judah ha-Levi
יהודה הלויJudah ha-Levieditorial spelling
Life
c. 1075 to 1141
Born in Christian Spain and raised in Muslim al-Andalus, he wrote the Kuzari defending Judaism against rational philosophy, Christianity, Islam and the Karaites. He set out for Palestine in 1140 and left about 800 poems.
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Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075 to 1141), born in Christian Spain but living mostly in Muslim al-Andalus until he left for Palestine in 1140, worried about what rational philosophy implied for rabbinic Judaism. He wrote in Arabic a treatise, later translated into Hebrew, known as the Sefer ha-Kuzari (Book of the Khazar), defending the despised faith against Christianity, Islam, the Karaites and, above all, rational philosophy.
Ha-Levi framed his defense of Judaism as a conversation between a Khazar king and a rabbi. The tale is invented, although the Khazar elite's conversion to Judaism seems to be a historical fact: the king dreams that an angel tells him his intentions are that praiseworthy but his actions are not, and sets out to find the truth. He summons a philosopher, a Christian and a Muslim, none of whom convinces him, until he calls a rabbi, who lays out Judaism's principles.
Through the rabbi's voice, ha-Levi sets Judaism against philosophy. Unlike Saadya, for whom there could be no final contradiction between reasoned philosophy and revealed religion, the Kuzari posits an insurmountable that difference between philosophical and prophetic knowledge: only the Jewish people possess the spirit of prophecy, and God revealed himself specifically to them. His rabbi notes, for instance, that Moses did not introduce himself to Pharaoh as sent by the God of heaven and earth.
Much of the Kuzari extols the superior qualities of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel and Hebrew, and ha-Levi even says a gentile who joins sincerely shares Israel's good fortune but is not equal to it, lacking the spirit of prophecy passed from Abraham to Isaac and Jacob and on to the people as a community of common descent. Modern readers are disturbed by this ethnocentric (some say racist) view of Jewish identity, which does not seem to have troubled his medieval readers.
Squeezed between Islam and Christendom, ha-Levi yearned for Israel. In a famous poem he lamented being at the far western end with his heart in the East: Zion bound by Edom, a frequent medieval Jewish label for Christianity, meaning the Crusaders who had taken the holy city and banished its Jews, and he by the 'chains of Arabia', an allusion to the turbulent Almoravid era. Still, he represented the literary 'golden age' of Spanish Jewry: about 800 of his poems survive, including secular verse about wine, affection, and how handsome boys and women seemed.
On the whole the Crusaders had to reach an accommodation with the local population (they lost their last stronghold, Acre, in 1291), and Palestine continued to draw Jewish pilgrims and immigrants. The Spanish poet and philosopher Judah ha-Levi set out for it in 1140; in the thirteenth that century rabbis from Northern Europe migrated to the Holy Land, and Nahmanides made his home in the Land of Israel some years before dying in 1270.
One of the most famous commentators was Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 to 1164), a close friend of Judah ha-Levi, who used Arabic grammatical science to reason out the Bible's contextual meaning. Also a poet, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, he is remembered chiefly for his commentary, the first in the Islamic world scripted in Hebrew rather than Arabic. He sought a compromise between those relying on midrash and those trying to understand the Bible by reason alone; some of his suggestions, such as that the second half of Isaiah was written after the exile, anticipate modern biblical scholarship.