Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 157 - Choosing My Religion - Judah Hallevi.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Today's episode, Choosing My Religion, Judah Halevi. We choose some things about ourselves others are thrust upon us. I, for instance, did not choose to be born male, American, or devastatingly handsome. Yet two out of these three things happened anyway. And then there are some features of our lives that we usually grow up with, but are in our power to change. It seems that a lot of sports fans develop their allegiance as children, but I myself became a fan of Arsenal Football Club more or less on a whim after noticing that they played near where I used to live in London. Which taught me the lesson that even casual choices can lead to great emotional upheaval in the long term. Another example would be religion. Although most religious believers were raised in their faith, it's obviously possible to convert. One can even imagine a person surveying a wide range of religions and picking among them, like someone moving to North London and deciding whether to support Arsenal or Tottenham. Of course, in that case, the stakes would be considerably lower, and the choice would be far easier, since no sane person would voluntarily choose to be a Tottenham fan. In the multi-religious and multi-cultural society of today, we would even find it easy to imagine such a thing. I mean picking religions, not picking football teams. It is tempting to assume that in the medieval era, when religion was so powerful a factor in defining each person's social group, such a neutral and dispassionate selection between faiths would have been inconceivable. But people certainly did convert from one religion to another in the classical period of Islam, and did so voluntarily. We'll be seeing an example when we return to the eastern part of the empire and consider the thinker Abul Barakat al-Bartari, who converted from Judaism to Islam. There was also conversion under varying degrees of duress, as we've seen with Jews being pressured to become Muslims under the Almohads in medieval Spain. Centuries earlier, there had been a famous case of voluntary conversion towards Judaism. In the 8th century, a group called the Khazars, whose power was centered in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, became Jews. It's not clear how deeply this conversion penetrated into Khazar society, perhaps it was only the ruling class that became Jews. This event served to inspire a text which imagines exactly the scenario we have been considering, the Khuzari. Its author was Judah Ben Samuel Halevi, a poet, doctor, and philosopher who lived in Spain in the 11th to the 12th century. In the Khuzari, he depicts the king of the Khazars adjudicating between the rival claims of four belief systems, philosophy, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. At the risk of ruining whatever suspense still remains, I'll reveal that the king of the Khazars does indeed decide to convert to Judaism. In fact, although the choice between faiths is the most famous part of the Khuzari, Judah Halevi devotes most of the text to a series of conversations between the king and the Jewish advisor, the scholar who persuades him that Judaism has the strongest claim on the king's allegiance. Thus, the Khuzari is, for the most part, a dialogue between the converted king and this scholar. Nonetheless, the entire work presents a sustained and often polemical defense of the Jewish faith against its rivals, and also of rabbinical Judaism against the enemy within, the Karaite Jews. Whereas Halevi depicts spokesmen who argue in favor of philosophy, Christianity, and Islam, he does not deem Karaism worthy of this treatment. Instead, the Karaites are attacked within the dialogue between the king and the scholar. The Khuzari shows that Halevi too lived within a multicultural and multi-religious society. As we've been seeing, that is a fair description of the whole Islamic world in the classical period and it applies especially to Spain under the domination of Islam. Halevi came from the city of Tudela in the north of Spain, as did a man who was his younger contemporary friend and, most importantly, star of our next podcast episode, Abraham ibn Ezra. After traveling south, he won renown for his poetry, meeting and impressing fellow poet and philosopher Moses ibn Ezra. This launched a career which would see Halevi celebrated for his expertise in poetry and medicine. For a time, he would establish himself as a court doctor in Toledo, but his life was to be a peripatetic one and not in the Aristotelian sense. When Halevi was still quite young, possibly even a teenager, the Almoravids invaded from northern Africa and took control of the Taifa principalities of southern Spain. As we've seen, this was not nearly as unfavourable a development for Jews as the later coming of the Almohads, but it still caused some instability for men like Halevi. Along with Moses ibn Ezra, he was forced to leave a stable life in Granada when they sacked the city. He would travel from place to place after that, first to Toledo, Cordoba and Almería in Spain and at the end of his life to Egypt and, finally, to the Holy Land, where he died in 1141. Halevi wrote hundreds of surviving poems in Hebrew. He would deserve a place of honour in a podcast devoted to the history of Jewish literature, if anyone out there feels like starting one up. These poems reflect his sense of the state of Jewry in his own life. His own wanderings might have given him extra reason to focus on the theme of exile and it was a happy ending to his story that he eventually found his way to Israel, the land glorified in many of his verses. But it was not just the perennial situation of exile that troubled Halevi. His poems allude to the Jews' vulnerability as Christian and Muslim armies clashed for control of Spain. These same themes seem to underlie the Khuzari, which transposes the conflict between faiths to a more intellectual level, as their respective merits are judged by the king of the Khazars. As it develops, the Khuzari reflects Halevi's pride for his own faith and for the Holy Land, as well as his sadness about the tribulations of the Jews. He compares Israel's status among the nations to that of the heart and the body, but adds that just as the heart is affected by illnesses, so have the Israelites suffered mightily through the ages. Another striking feature of the king's judgment in the Khuzari is that it is not only religions that bid for his approval, there is also philosophy. This confirms for us the cultural prominence philosophy had attained in early 12th century Spain. Of course, the kind of philosophy envisioned here is that of Halevi's own context, not that of the 8th century fictional setting. This means that philosophy is presented as a highly rationalist theory that insists on the eternity of the universe, which is depicted as the necessary effect of a remote and impersonal god. Several times, Halevi alludes critically to Avicenna's view that God does not know about the particular things in our world. This view caused widespread horror among Muslim readers of Avicenna, and Halevi is likewise deeply unimpressed by it. It's worth noting though that philosophy is being presented here not just as a list of abstract ideas which we are being invited to reject, rather it is a full-fledged alternative to religion, placed on equal footing with the Abrahamic faiths in the beauty pageant of belief systems staged for the king of the Khazars. Of course, this is a backhanded compliment, if it is a compliment at all. Halevi is implying that philosophers must reject the truth claims of the three Abrahamic faiths. For them, religions can, at best, be second-class versions of the truth. Here we see that the universalist rationalism set out by Al-Farabi could not just inspire fellow philosophers like Averroes, who will live in the generations just after Halevi. It could also provoke pious Jews and Muslims into treating philosophy as a belligerent rival rather than the friend of faith that many philosophers wanted it to be. In Halevi's own immediate background, the universalist approach of a writer like Ibn Gabyrol may have seemed to pose a threat within Judaism itself. Thus, Halevi wastes no time in depicting philosophy in a negative light. The king of the Khazars summons a philosopher first when he begins his search for wisdom. He does so in response to a dream, a vision in which the king has been told that his intention is pleasing to God, but his action is not. As Halevi depicts the philosopher advertising his intellectual wares to the king, stress is placed on the aspects of philosophy most incompatible with Judaism. Its denial of creation, its claim that God is ignorant of particular things, its condescending suggestion that religion could prove useful for forming the king's habits and governing the king's nation even if it does not establish truth, as philosophy does. The king reacts unfavorably to some of these specific proposals and his own experience also undermines what the philosopher has said. After all, the king is a man who has just had a vision handed down to him from above, and the philosopher is trying to convince him that he needs to engage in deep study in order to unify with the active intellect. The king already has a hotline to God and the philosopher is telling him to go read the phone book. More importantly, the king knows from the dream that it is only his practical actions that need amendment, not his intention. His failings are at the level of practice and this is something the philosopher can discuss in only the broadest of terms. This anticipates a theme that will be emphasized later in opposition to the Karaites. Purity of soul and the sincere application of reason cannot tell us how God wants to be worshipped. For that we need revelation and tradition. But which revelation and which tradition? That's the cue for the speeches of the Christian and Muslim scholars who enter next. The king finds the Christian religion incoherent and remarks that in order to believe such things he would need to have been raised in the faith from childhood, an interesting comment in light of our earlier reflections. Halevi believes Christianity could never be endorsed by anyone considering it rationally from the outside. It is the Tottenham Hotspurs of the Abrahamic religions. Not much detail is given here as to why Christianity is literally incredible, but perhaps Halevi has in mind such teachings as the Incarnation and Trinity. Once the Christian is sent packing, Islam gets a hearing. This time the king complains that the main argument for Islam's truth is the miraculous nature of the Quran. But the king cannot appreciate this, since he is not a speaker of Arabic. That's a fascinating point for Halevi to put into the king's mouth. For one thing, it is a much less critical remark than what was said about Christianity. For another thing, Halevi himself certainly did know Arabic. Indeed, the Khazari itself is written in Judeo-Arabic, not in Hebrew. So this rationale for rejecting Islam is not one that could have been given by Halevi himself. A second rationale given here is one Halevi would surely share though, that although the Prophet Muhammad did supposedly perform other miracles, these were witnessed only by small numbers of people. More convincing would be reports about supernatural interventions by God in support of a faith, which were experienced by so many people that no skepticism regarding them is possible. It is this that finally leads the king to turn to the Jewish spokesman, since the Old Testament is full of such miracles, for instance the parting of the Red Sea. The king does so with some reluctance. He wasn't originally planning to consult the Jews, since he has heard such bad things about them. Here, as I've already mentioned, Halevi is alluding to the sorry condition of Judaism, embattled by other faiths and disdained by many people. That idea is present even in the official title of the Khazari, which is wonderfully alliterative in Arabic, Kitab ar-rad wa-dalil fiddin al-dalil, meaning Book of Refutation and Proof on behalf of the despised religion. The rabbinic scholar manages to convert the king in relatively short order, which sets the stage for the philosophical and theological debates to follow. He refers here not only to Judaism's unparalleled arsenal of miracle stories, but also spurs the king on to consider the historical primacy of the Jewish faith. We saw that in late antiquity, the Church Fathers insisted that Hellenic philosophy drew from Jewish roots. Now Halevi likewise insists that what good there is in philosophy derives ultimately from the figures we know from the Old Testament. It passed down ultimately from Adam himself, and of course then from Adam's sons, which incidentally makes my name an appropriate one for a philosophy podcaster. Philosophy then went to the Persians and the Chaldeans, and only then to the Greeks and Romans. No wonder that the teachings we find in Aristotle are to some extent garbled and false. This culture had no living tradition of wisdom passed down directly through the generations, such as the Jews enjoy. Now Halevi again mentions the philosopher's conviction that the universe is eternal. Anticipating Maimonides, he states that reason can prove neither the eternity nor non-eternity of the world, so that only prophetic testimony can decide the issue. But poor Aristotle didn't have the benefit of such a tradition. This passage is typical of Halevi's stance regarding philosophy. His critique is no unrestrained, anti-rational polemic. Rather, he is carefully trying to show that reason has its limits. Without the help of God, preserved through authentic tradition, we have no way to transcend these limits. So nuanced is Halevi's attitude that he even cites Hellenic sources in support of his own position of epistemic modesty and against the confident knowledge claims made by the philosophers of his own day. He quotes the Hippocratic maxim, life is short, but art is long, as well as Aristotle's uncharacteristically poetic remark that in our search for wisdom we are like bats blinded by the light of the sun. Most to the point are Halevi's allusions to a passage from Plato's Apology, in which Socrates claimed to have only human, but not divine wisdom. To experienced historians of philosophy like us, this inevitably evokes the approach of the ancient skeptics. Taking Socrates as a model, they were similarly hesitant about what humankind can know. Halevi even alludes to the incessant disagreement between various philosophers as a way to undermine their theories, another tactic frequently deployed by the ancient skeptics. The difference, of course, is that just like Aristotle, but unlike the Jews, the skeptics had no access to a tradition based on prophetic revelation. Halevi's insistence on the need for tradition also lies at the heart of his critique of another group of opponents, the Karaites. As you'll hopefully remember, these were Jews who rejected the authority of rabbinic texts such as the Mishnah and Talmud. Instead, they believed that the use of one's own reasoning was sufficient to interpret scripture and live a righteous life. A letter survives in which Halevi modestly says that his gazari is a mere trifle, which he wrote only to win over a so-called heretic. Scholars tend to think that this refers to a Karaite opponent, and indeed the gazari does take aim at the Karaite Jews. Against them, Halevi insists that resources of human reason are insufficient. How could we discover, for instance, the rules governing ritual purity for the slaughtering of animals? No amount of reasoning will lead us to the right answer, we must turn to tradition. Unsurprisingly, by relying on their individual judgments, the Karaites are beset by mutual disagreement, just like the philosophers. This is in stark contrast, Halevi proudly states, to the harmony between the teachings of the rabbinic scholars. This is scarcely a persuasive move on Halevi's part, since as we saw, the Talmud in fact records in great detail the disagreements and disputes between scholars rather than setting out a single body of unchallenged teaching. Halevi could, however, turn this to his advantage. The sages may have debated among themselves, but ultimately the truth would emerge from this process as a consensus view. What distinguishes the rabbinic Jews from both the Karaites and philosophers then is not a blanket rejection of reasoning. Rather it is the belief that reasoning can be successful only within the context of wisdom, passed down through an inspired tradition. Nonetheless, Halevi can often sound like a vigorous anti-rationalist. At one point he castigates the Karaites for reasoning about Scripture at all, citing the biblical text, He also emphasizes the features of nature that cannot be understood or reproduced by humans. We cannot anticipate, for example, when an egg might be spoiled and unable to hatch. For that matter, even nature, whose complexity already outstrips human understanding, cannot suffice as an explanation for the creation of humans. After all, humans are capable of rationality and thought, so how can they be the results of a mindless, natural process? To get results like that, divine intervention is needed. Yet passages such as these express only one half of Halevi's attitude towards human reason. At another point, far from contrasting the deliverances of reason to prophetic truth, he says that prophecy corrects our false beliefs in the same way that reason can correct our naive everyday beliefs. For instance, it is only through careful reasoning that we would be able to disprove the possibility of void space, or realize that every body is in principle infinitely divisible. Both of these claims are familiar from Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. Halevi also likes to use philosophy against itself, sounding like many a Platonist when he says that the soul's connection to matter is what prevents it from attaining knowledge more easily. Ultimately, Halevi believes not that the philosophers are wrong to seek truth, but simply that their search is doomed to failure because they do not avail themselves of divine assistance. Thus he unfavorably compares Aristotle's speculations in zoology to the more profound observations about animals laid down in the Jewish law. If all this is sounding familiar to you, it may be because you were king of the Khazars in a former life. Or more likely, it's because you listened to the podcast episodes about Al-Ghazali. Halevi delivers a moderate critique of philosophy. Like the king himself, it is admirable in its intentions, but arrogant and misguided in carrying out these intentions. And this is highly reminiscent of Al-Ghazali, which is no coincidence. As we know from looking at other Andalusian thinkers like Ibn Tufail, Al-Ghazali's works were known in Muslim Spain. They seem to have been used by Judah Halevi, so that the two have far more in common than just their general attitude to faith and reason. A particularly striking case is Halevi's accusation that for all their boasts about reason, the philosophers in fact engage in taqlid, uncritically accepting the doctrines of their masters. At best, this is an accusation that misses as many targets as it hits. Avicenna looms large in the portrayal of philosophy we find in both Al-Ghazali and Judah Halevi, and he was anything but an uncritical follower of authority. Indeed, if Avicenna could have read the Khuzari, I imagine he would have been happy to throw the accusation of taqlid back at Halevi himself. It is, after all, Halevi who insists that one must depend upon tradition in seeking the truth. Of course, Halevi would hasten to add that his tradition is supported by divine revelation as proven by numerous miracles. Not for the first time, we see that one man's taqlid is another man's humble submission to the guidance of rightful authority. Soon, Jews in Spain and indeed throughout the Mediterranean world will have another rightful authority to guide them—maimonides. Halevi paves the way for him in some respects, for instance with his emphasis on the limits of human reason, a theme that will resonate strongly in the pages of the great Maimonides. We'll be turning to him in a couple of episodes, but first I want to complete the picture I've been painting of earlier Jewish thought in Andalusia. Among the thinkers we will look at next time is Judah Halevi's close friend, Abraham ibn Ezra. The association between them seems to have crossed some intellectual barriers, given that Ibn Ezra was a devotee of several sciences about which Halevi was rather skeptical. The best example is astrology, a topic explored enthusiastically by Ibn Ezra but dismissed in typical fashion by Halevi in the Khuzari. No doubt the heavens do influence our world, he says, but it is beyond human ability to make predictions on that basis. Maybe so, but even without looking at the stars, I am boldly going to predict that you will want to join me as I look at the tension between astrology and freedom in Jewish thought next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.