Chapter 4 Judah Halevi’s Fideistic Scepticism against the Backdrop of Developments in the Arabic Culture of His Time

Abstract

From the analysis in the previous chapter, the trends of dogmatic rationalism in Arabic culture have emerged as the most relevant background to the appearance of sceptical manifestations in The Kuzari. Thus, it seems fitting to point to a general historical parallel between the circumstances under which scepticism appeared in Hellenistic antiquity and the circumstances under which sceptical manifestations emerged in Judah Halevi’s thought. The Hellenistic sceptical trend formed in reaction to the establishment of the dogmatic rationalist schools, first and foremost the Stoic, Epicurean, and Aristotelian schools of thought in the fourth and third centuries BCE, while the sceptical manifestations in Halevi’s thought are a response to and a means of countering the establishment of the dogmatic rationalist schools of Arabic culture, above all the kalām and falsafah schools. For Halevi himself, as a thinker and writer active in the late eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries, a period when the Arabic variations of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism were prevalent among Jewish and Muslim writers in al-Andalus, the challenge posed by dogmatic rationalism as processed by the falsafah trends was greater than that posed by the thought of the kalām trends.1 In his works, Ibn Sīnā, active in the first decades of the eleventh century, presented a systematic philosophical synthesis that covered all scientific disciplines, including metaphysics, which he called “the divine sciences” (al-ilāhiyāt), which, theologically speaking, is the most significant. Ibn Sīnā’s tremendous philosophical achievement made a very profound impression on Arabic rationalists in the following generations.2 Ibn Sīnā’s thought reverberates throughout The Kuzari more strongly than that of al-Fārābī, falsafah’s important representative in the generations preceding Ibn Sīnā’s time.3 In the specific context of Halevi as an Andalusian thinker, the thought of the contemporaneous Andalusian philosopher Abū Bakr ibn Bāǧǧah (d. 1139), the first important representative of falsafah in Andalusia, also left a significant imprint on The Kuzari.4 In addition to noting the general parallel of circumstances in which classical Hellenistic scepticism appeared and the appearance of scepticism in Halevi’s thought, it is also necessary to discuss the specific historical circumstances under