يهوذا اللاوي

الأعمال

• نحو 1140الحجة والدليل في نصرة الدين الذليل

  يستجوب ملك الخزر فيلسوفًا ومسيحيًّا ومسلمًا وحَبرًا يهوديًّا – ويقنعه احتجاج الحبر بالوحي التاريخي.

الموقف

The Kuzari turns the conversion of the Khazar king to Judaism into a debate. The philosopher’s God, a first cause indifferent to humans, cannot satisfy the king; Christian and Muslim point back to Judaism; the rabbi convinces him not with proofs but with history – the revelation at Sinai, witnessed by a whole people and faithfully handed down. Reason has its place but cannot reach the living God of Abraham. Israel, he holds, has a special capacity for the “divine order” (al-amr al-ilahi), bound to the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language – a thesis often criticized as particularist. His critique of philosophy recalls al-Ghazali’s.

الحياة والسياق

Judah Halevi was born around 1075, probably in Tudela in northern Spain. Welcomed in Granada by the poet Moses ibn Ezra, he became the most celebrated Hebrew poet of his age while working as a physician, among other places in Toledo and Córdoba. In 1140 he set out for the Land of Israel and died in 1141, probably in Egypt; the legend of his death at Jerusalem’s gates is unhistorical.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Songs of Zion (poems, early 12th century)
• The Kuzari (The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion, Arabic, c. 1140)