The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167–1900

by Adam Shear

Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari is a defense of Judaism that has enjoyed an almost continuous transmission since its composition in the twelfth century. By surveying the activities of readers, commentators, copyists, and printers for more than 700 years, Adam Shear examines the ways that the Kuzari became a classic of Jewish thought. Today, the Kuzari is usually understood as the major statement of an anti-rationalist and ethnocentric approach to Judaism and is often contrasted with the rationalism and universalism of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed. But this conception must be seen as a modern construction, and the reception history of the Kuzari demonstrates that many earlier readers of the work understood it as offering a way toward reconciling reason and faith and of negotiating between particularism and universalism.

402 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2008

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I've read or heard references to the Kuzari in recent years, I have noticed comparisons of Judah Halevi's Kuzari to the work of Maimonides, contrasting Halevi the antirationalist and Jewish particularist to Maimonides the rationalist universalist. The purpose of this book is to show that there are other ways of understanding the Kuzari, and to create a history of how the Kuzari has been understood over the centuries.

The story begins in 14th-c. Spain and France, where some authors treated the Kuzari not as antirational, but as an attempt to reconcile faith and reason. In Shear's words, some commentators saw the Kuzari "as a necessary prerequisite to the study of Maimonides... or as part of the same tradition."

After the printing press was invented, the Kuzari became more popular in some places, though not in others- most popular in Renaissance Italy, much less popular in Ottoman lands and in Eastern Europe. If I understand him correctly, Shear suggests that 16th and 17th century writers often treated the Kuzari as a kind of general guide to Judaism. And as books got cheaper in the 19th century, Jews of all stripes mined the Kuzari to support their views.