Crescas, Hasdai ben Judah

Abstract

Rabbi Hasdai Crescas was the head of the Jewish community of Aragon, and in some ways, all of Hispanic Jewry. Crescas was one of the leading rabbinic authorities of his time, the political leader of the Jews of Aragon, and a philosophical polemicist against Christianity. As one of the main medieval Jewish philosophers, Crescas critiqued the radical Aristotelian philosophy of Maimonides along with some of Maimonides’ Averroist philosophical heirs. Crescas denounced the various Aristotelian opinions as contradicting not only the Jewish tradition but also the true empirical and rational understanding of the world. By assembling adducing traditional Jewish opinion, the diverse Aristotelian sources, the neo-platonic thought of the apostate Abner of Burgos, and the new science of scholastics of the fourteenth century, Crescas succeeded in at creating one of the most original philosophical opinions and critiques of Aristotelianism belonging to the medieval period: the Or Hashem. This seminal work, an oeuvre of both Judaic thought and criticism of Aristotelian science, spurred the growth of the new science of the modern period, which started in the fourteenth century.