- Length
- 320 pagesKorobkin, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, 1998
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Kuzari
A dialogue in which philosophy speaks first, speaks well, and is set aside - not refuted but declared to be answering a different question. Halevi's rabbi begins not with proofs but with an event, and that move is the most sustained argument anyone in the medieval period made against making religion a branch of metaphysics.
- Date
- c. 1140
- Author
- Judah Halevi
- Region
- Al-Andalus
- Language
- Judaeo-Arabic
- 1167 Hebrew, Judah ibn Tibbon The version most readers used for eight centuries Attested
- 1905 English, Hartwig Hirschfeld Public domain Attested
- 1998 English, N. Daniel Korobkin In copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Dialogue
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 113 years
The standing alternative to the philosophical tradition within Jewish thought, and the text every later Jewish rationalist has had to answer.
What the book says
A dialogue built on a historical event: the king of the Khazars, a Turkic people on the Volga, is said to have converted his kingdom to Judaism in the eighth century. Halevi imagines how the decision was reached. The king dreams repeatedly that his intentions please God but his actions do not, and summons four advisers. A philosopher comes first and explains that God does not know individuals, that the First Cause neither wills nor responds, and that the king's dream is a function of his own imagination - to which the king replies that this may be true and does not address the dream, which was about his actions. A Christian and a Muslim follow, and each grounds his case on an event: something happened, and here is what it means. The king notices that both are appealing to a history that belongs to the Jews, and sends for a rabbi. The rabbi's opening is the book's argument in miniature: asked what he believes, he does not offer proofs of a first cause but says he believes in the God who brought Israel out of Egypt - the God of a documented public experience rather than of a demonstration. The remaining four parts develop that: prophecy, the land, the commandments, and finally a survey of the philosophers' doctrines and where they fail.
What it argues
That the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham are not the same, and that only the second is worth having. The philosopher's God is reached by inference from features of the world and is therefore as impersonal as the inference: it does not know you, cannot be addressed, and issues no commands. The God of Israel is known by a different route entirely - a mass public event, transmitted by continuous testimony from the people who were present. Halevi is explicit that this is a weaker kind of evidence than demonstration and holds that it is the right kind, because what it delivers is a relation rather than a conclusion. Around this he builds arguments about prophecy, the significance of a particular land, and the commandments as instructions rather than symbols.
What it answered
The Aristotelian tradition in its Arabic form, and its Jewish adherents. The dialogue is unusually fair to it - the philosopher's speech is not a caricature, and readers have noted that Halevi states the position better than some of its defenders. He is also answering Christianity and Islam, and the structure of his answer is the same: he grants that each rests on a claimed event and asks which events are attested by whom.
How it argues
By staging the argument rather than making it, which lets the opposing positions speak in their own voice at their own strength. The king is a genuinely open enquirer with no stake, and his objections are the ones a reader would raise. The Arabic title calls it a book in defence of a despised faith, and the defensive posture is structural: Judaism is presented as the position that has to justify itself, which allows Halevi to argue from weakness and to make the smallness and dispersion of the community part of the case rather than an embarrassment.
The moment
Twelfth-century Spain, between the Almoravid and Almohad conquests, with Jewish communities under increasing pressure and the golden age of Andalusian Jewish culture visibly ending. Halevi was its greatest poet. The book's insistence on the land, and his own departure for it, belong to the same movement of thought - he left Spain around 1140 and died shortly after reaching Egypt or beyond it.
How it travelled
In Hebrew, and inside one tradition. Ibn Tibbon's translation of 1167 became the standard text and the book was studied continuously in Jewish communities, generating commentaries and, in the modern period, a substantial afterlife: it is the text Jewish thinkers reach for when arguing that Judaism is not reducible to a philosophical system, and it was important to Rosenzweig and to twentieth-century religious existentialism. Outside Judaism it has been read comparatively little, which is a curious fate for a book whose central argument is not parochial at all.
The strongest objection
That the argument from public testimony proves too little to be decisive and too much to be safe. If a mass event witnessed by a whole people establishes a religion, the criterion is available to any tradition with a comparable narrative, and Halevi's grounds for preferring one such claim over another come down to the reliability of transmission - which is a historical question he does not settle. Maimonides represents the rival Jewish answer and does not engage Halevi directly, but the two books are the standing alternatives, and the rationalist objection is simply that a religion insulated from demonstration is also insulated from correction.
Why read it
Because the philosopher's opening speech and the rabbi's first answer take four pages and contain the whole argument, and because it is one of the very few medieval philosophical works that is genuinely a pleasure to read. The dialogue form is used properly: the king keeps pressing, and the rabbi does not always come off best.
- First printed
- 1506
- First in English
- 1905
- Digitised
- Yes
Written in Arabic and known for most of its history in Ibn Tibbon's Hebrew translation of 1167, which is itself the text most later readers used and commented on.
Hirschfeld's 1905 English is public domain. Korobkin's and the recent scholarly versions are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. The question it raises - whether religious commitment can or should rest on demonstration, and what kind of evidence testimony is - is a current topic in philosophy of religion and in epistemology, where testimony has become a serious subject in its own right.
On quoting this book
The Arabic and Hirschfeld's English are public domain, but the older translation is loose at exactly the points that matter. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much the Khazar conversion is history and how much legend is debated by historians, and the book's argument does not depend on it. Whether Halevi is rejecting philosophy or subordinating it is disputed - the fifth part, which surveys philosophical doctrine at length, has been read as evidence that he took it more seriously than his reputation allows. And whether the rabbi speaks for Halevi throughout, or whether the dialogue leaves more open than it appears to, is a genuine question given how well the opposing speeches are written.