Maimonidean Controversy

Light as a metaphor for truth is one of the images that most strikingly captures the impassable philosophical divide between Maimonides and Crescas. Hans Blumenberg chose light as a prime illustration of a philosophically inexhaustible metaphor throughout the history of philosophy: “Light remains what it is while letting the infinite participate in it; it is consumption without loss.” Since metaphor is a primary instrument of philosophical exegesis Blumenberg’s theory is important for providing a deeper understanding in general of medieval Jewish philosophy. My paper focuses on light as one such root metaphor which illustrates its “inexhaustibility” that illuminates an array of the challenges Crescas mounts against Maimonides. Moses Maimonides’ (1138-1205) Guide of the Perplexed, and his later philosophical and theological arch-nemesis Hasdai Crescas’ (circa 1340-1412) Light of the Lord, are works of philosophical theology intended in a core sense as primers on how to properly understand God’s revealed word. Their different uses of light imagery capture what is the core issue that informs the opposition between them across the theological spectrum. For Maimonides reason is the ultimate arbiter of truth and, ipso facto, of the Torah’s meaning, while for Crescas reason is subordinate to the supra-rational truth of the Torah which alone resolves a faith that is ‘perplexed’. Maimonides incorporates Greek notions of intellect and knowledge as light while Crescas sought to repatriate light to its origins in God and His revelation through Torah. For example, what anticipates Crescas’ entire critique of Maimonides’ thoroughgoing rationalism is his early overturning of Maimonides’ hierarchy of light which grades people in terms of its length and intensity ascending from a darkness that does not even qualify as a level of existence to its peak of “unceasing light”. Crescas immediately subverts Maimonides’ hierarchy of light with one grounded in divine grace free to discriminate as to who will be its recipient. What is sight for Maimonides is blindness for Crescas.

David ben Saul, a rabbinic sage active in southern France during the mid-thirteenth century, is known to scholars primarily because of his attempt (alongside his teacher Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier) to eradicate the rational philosophy of Maimonides from the Jewish community of Provence and Languedoc. This article examines a letter written by David ben Saul in which he criticized a halakhic work on the laws of kosher wine. The critique reveals further significant aspects of Rabbi David’s personality as a zealot opposed not only to philosophical innovations but also to new halakhic positions – whether voiced by Maimonides or by the French Tosafists. The article analyzes a number of the legal positions that David ben Saul rejected, placing his opposition in its historical and legal context. An appendix to the article presents a new section of the letter, published from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in which David ben Saul attacked the legal rulings of Rabbi Jacob ben Meir of Ramerupt (Rabenu Tam).

In this paper I will be chiefly concerned with a hitherto unknown passage from Samuel Ibn Tibbon'
s philosophical-exegetical work, Ma'amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim (Treatise Let the Waters be Gathered
). The passage has the character of a short independent work, which probably was incorporated by Ibn Tibbon into an already existing version of MYM. It is of considerable interest for a number of reasons. First, as a document of the incipient debate about the correct interpretation of God
's anthropomorphic representation in the Bible and in rabbinical literature in medieval Provence when Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans were articulating their respective positions in polemical opposition to each other. Among others, it contains a long quotation from an otherwise lost letter of David b. Saul, who was one of the leaders of the anti-rationalist movement in the first Maimonidean controversy. Moreover, an issue of more philosophical than historical interest is found in a long digression at the end of the passage, in which Ibn Tibbon presents an elaborate criticism of Maimonides'
first commandment in the Mishneh Torah: “to know that there is a First Existent,” and of his exegesis of Exodus 20:2, from which the commandment is supposedly derived. Ibn Tibbon
s argument illustrates well an aspect of his relationship to Maimonides to which scholars have paid little attention until now: his disagreement with Maimonides on a wide range of important philosophical issues.

The twelfth century brings us a critical moment of medieval Judaism. There are threats to
Jewish existence, whether in the medieval Christian West or in the Muslim world. In the Christian
majority space crusades occur, in which many Jewish communities are urged to conversion or death,
occurring numerous cases of self-immolation (called Kidush Hashem). In North Africa and Al Andaluz
(Muslim Hispania) the rise of the Almoad dynasty brings the winds of intolerance and waves of forced
conversions or death of Jews occur. And in the sequence the Islamic intolerance to the Jews arrives in
distant Yemen (south of the Arabian Peninsula) in which forced conversions occur. The wise rabbi Moses
ben Maimon (Maimonides) writes on two occasions epistles of consolation and encouragement of the
identity resistance of the Jews to forced conversions in spaces dominated by Islam. These epistles
originally written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew in the same period are our sources. One is called
the Epistle of conversion and the other Epistle of Yemen. We use Hebrew versions and translations in
English and Portuguese. Our aim is to analyze the Jewish identity discourse in the sense of the resistance
of the minority against its cultural and religious extermination.
Keywords: Maimonides; forced conversions; religious pedagogy; Jewish identity.

Several scholars have pointed out the impact of Jewish
Philosophy on Spinoza (1632 – 1677), and the role of Jewish
intellectual history from the late middle ages to the Renaissance in
shaping his philosophy, but the influence of Jewish Averroism on
Spinoza is still debatable and was continuously contested. In this
article I will concentrate on the presence of some of the Jewish
opponents and proponents of Averroism in the works of Spinoza,
namely: Jehuda Al-Fakhar (early thirteenth century, d.1235), Levi ben
Gershom (1288- 1344), Hasdai Crescas (1340 – 1411), and Joseph ibn
Shem Tob (1400 – 1460). These are the Jewish thinkers that were
mentioned by Spinoza in polemical contexts, refusing the positions of
Al-Fakhar and Joseph ibn Shem Tob concerning the subordination of
Reason to Scripture and the subordination of rational morality to
scriptural precepts respectively, defending the opposite position that
was identical to Averroes’; and on the other hand accepting some of
the ideas of Ben Gershom and Crescas that were identical with
Averroes like the concept of circular infinity in Crescas that was a
restatement of Averroes’, and the eternity of matter in Ben Gershom
that was his compromising Averroes’ eternity of the world with
creationism.
The aim of my investigation is to prove that Spinoza was well
informed of Averroes’ system from those philosophers, and he even
put himself in the middle of the Jewish anti-Averroean debates, taking
sides with the opposite positions of the Jewish opponents of
Averroism. Spinoza, openly or tacitly, refused all the counter
arguments of Al-Fakhar, Crescas and ibn Shem Tob against Averroes,
and thereby adopting the Averroean positions that they attacked,
without mentioning Averroes himself. This silence of Spinoza to the
name of Averroes among all his writings while refusing the arguments of Averroes’ Jewish opponents makes Spinoza’s final position tacitly
Averroean, so we can say that there is an Averroean subtext in the
works of Spinoza that we can reveal by analyzing his dealings with
Jewish anti-Averroism.

English Abstract
This research portrays R. David Messer Leon’s (~ 1470–1535) exegetic methods on Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed. One of Italian Jewry’s spiritual leaders at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, Messer Leon's great work, Ein HaKore, ignited controversy with other commentators. His work includes theoretical discussions alongside interpretive examples. He dealt with The Guide in his other essays as well, and offered a unique interpretive direction.
Maimonides’ treatise has been interpreted numerous times, in various and varied ways. One of the main directions that has developed since the 13th Century claims that Maimonides hid his radical views from the public, and that his writing is esoteric. Other commentators, especially since the Renaissance, offered a more conservative interpretation to The Guide, usually accepting the simple meaning of Maimonides' words. Later, many traditional and rabbinical thinkers tried to dull the radical dimension that might be implied by Maimonides' words. This hermeneutic discussion continued in modern research, by proposing new methodologies for understanding Maimonides’ inner meanings. In my study I claim that Leon’s message is double faceted: on the one hand, with extreme rational commentators, and on the other hand, with conservative thinkers who read The Guide through a narrow rabbinic prism. According to Leon, without a comprehensive and profound philosophical knowledge The Guide cannot be interpreted. One of the major innovations in his method is the introduction of an esoteric reading method that supports a conservative interpretation to The Guide for the Perplexed.
תקציר עברי
מחקר זה מבקש להציג את דרכי הפרשנות לחיבור המיימוני 'מורה הנבוכים' שהציע ר' דוד מסיר ליאון (רדמ"ל; ~1470–1535), ממנהיגי יהדות איטליה במפנה המאות 15–16. חיבורו הגדול של מסיר לאון, 'עין הקורא', הוא מדריך לדרכי הפרשנות של החיבור המיימוני, תוך פולמוס עם פרשנים אחרים וכולל דיונים תיאורטיים לצד דוגמאות פרשניות. המחבר עסק בפרשנות ה'מורה' גם בחיבוריו האחרים, והציע כיוון פרשני ייחודי.
החיבור המיימוני 'מורה הנבוכים' התפרש מאז כתיבתו בדרכים שונות ומגוונות. אחד הכיוונים המרכזיים שהתפתח מאז המאה הי"ג טוען שהרמב"ם הסתיר את דעותיו הרדיקליות מן ההמון וכי כתיבתו היא אזוטרית. הוגים אחרים, במיוחד מאז תקופת הרנסאנס, הציעו פרשנות שמרנית יותר למורה הנבוכים, המקבל בדרך כלל את משמעם הפשוט של דברי הרמב"ם. מאוחר יותר ניסו הוגים מסורתיים ורבניים רבים להקהות את הממד הרדיקלי שעשוי להשתמע מדברי הרמב"ם. דיון הרמנויטי זה נמשך גם במחקר המודרני, שניתח את שיטות הקדמונים והציע מתודולוגיות חדשות להבנת החיבור המיימוני ומשמעותו. מחקר זה מבקש להראות כי מסר לאון מנהל ויכוח כפול: מחד, מול פרשנים שכלתניים קיצוניים, ומאידך, בהוגים שמרניים הקוראים את מורה הנבוכים מתוך פריזמה רבנית צרה. לטענתו, ללא ידיעה פילוסופית מקיפה ועמוקה לא ניתן לפרש את מורה הנבוכים. אחד החידושים המרכזיים בשיטתו היא הצגת  מתודת קריאה אזוטרית התומכת בפרשנות שמרנית למורה הנבוכים.

This article presents a new reading of the polemical strategies and arguments embodied in the “anti-Jewish” tractate by the converted bishop of Burgos, Pablo de Santa María (c.1352–1435), the Scrutinium scripturarum (c.1432). It suggests the Scrutinium reflected a unique polemical dynamic that emerged between converts and Jews following
the mass conversions of 1391 and the early fifteenth century, regarding the spiritual assimilation of converts to their new faith. Grappling with the new challenges faced by converts, the Scrutinium articulated a Christian approach toward rabbinic traditions and Jewish skepticism that differed dramatically from the scholastic–polemical traditions
that were employed at the disputation of Tortosa. Its introduction of rabbinic esotericism provided its Latin-reading audience new historical and theological grounds for the integration of rabbinic authority within Christian scholarship and history. In doing so, it embodied what could be considered a distinct “converso voice,” which challenged the customary religious boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

The Jewish communities of Occitania, known by medieval Jews as “Provence,” were unusually involved in the repeated outbreaks of public controversy over the integration of Greco-Islamic rational philosophy into Jewish intellectual culture and, due to its halakhic implications, into Jewish practice and society. By the time of the early fourteenth-century controversy centered in Montpellier, Maimonideanism was a dominant cultural movement; its critics were concerned with the potential for what I term ideational transgression. In contradistinction to the theological term heresy, ideational transgression denotes halakhic transgression deriving from a matter of conscience or ideology. This examination is undertaken through a careful study of the letter collection Minḥat Qenaʾot, compiled by Abba-Mari, the most significant extant source of the controversy and an unusual textual object. Minḥat Qenaʾot permits us an unusually large and clear window into an understudied region of medieval Jewish life, just as it reached a critical turning point which reverberated throughout the Jewish world.

This paper delves into  the question of Isaac Ibn Latif's authorship on "The Letter of Reply" (אגרת התשובה) , a responsa concerning philosophy, biblical commentary, and medical knowledge, which its author spoke highly of Maimonides and his philosophical  legacy.
The article  provides  textual evidences  which placed the author  between Spain and Provence  during the  fifth decade of the 13th century, after R. Moses Ben Nahman (Ramban) and R. Yonah Gerondi, took power in Barcelona and Toledo, causing some of the non-Kabbalists elite to roam to Provence, where they could still find a philosophical milieu. 
In addition, This publication Inquires the  author's philosophical interpretations of  theological  motifs, such as: the Akedah (Binding of Isaac), resurrection, and  the eternity of the soul , in accordance with philosophical ethics and VIta Contemplativa of the philosophers.