Crescas’ Political Thought in Context: Science and Ethics as Politics in the Royal Court and Jewish Community of Medieval Iberia

• In Event: Medieval Philosophical Discourses in Historical Context

Abstract

Hasdai Crescas (c.1340-1410) lived three lives. Educated in a time described by Yitzhak Baer as the closing of a Jewish “golden age”, witness to the holocaust of 1391/2, and active as a leader during the reconstruction of the Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula thereafter. He was a halakhist and teacher, judge and courtier, philosopher, and “scientist”. While recognized as a towering figure in his time, his thought is often ignored save for scholars of medieval philosophy or the history of science, and even then divorced from his context. In this paper I hope to present Crescas’ political thought as a unified worldview born of his complex engagement with Jewish and scholastic ideas, and understood in the language of his time and place.

While Crescas’ magnum opus OR HASHEM is primarily a critique of Maimonides’ Aristotelianism via Averroes from the perspective of his physics, his critique contains two political strains. First is his direct comments on political concerns: the nature of community, messianism, Law, and governance. However, more powerfully, when viewed as the intervention I believe he intended it to be, the work itself was a political statement. It was Crescas’ attempt through immanent critique to carry on the project of his teacher Rabbi Nissim of Girona, and to buttress the Jewish community against the corrosive effects of philosophy on religious belief and practice. Crescas did so both from the perspective of tradition AND as a philosopher. Like Rabbi Nissim, his philosophy was holistic - physics, metaphysics, politics, and ethics were NECESSARILY joined, and ultimately in accordance with Halakha.

In order to understand OR HASHEM one needs to ground an analysis in both a diachronic and synchronic context - it was written as a member of the circle of the RaN to his students, and by a preeminent expositor of the medieval Aristotle AND in his efforts on behalf of the Jewish community of Aragon captured in his letters and anti-christian polemics. In understanding the contemporary political resonance of his work I hope to present Crescas as an original political thinker.

Author

• Moses Lapin, Hebrew University, Jerusalem