Isaac Polqar – A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew?

Philosophy and Religion in Isaac Polqar's ʿEzer ha-Dat and Tešuvat Epiqoros

Racheli Haliva

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110568820
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Jewish Theology

To date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar's thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that covers Polqar's thought in its entirety. This book aims to fill this lacuna by tracing and contextualizing both Polqar's Islamic sources (al-F?r?b?, Avicenna, and Averroes) and his Jewish sources (Maimonides and Isaac Albalag).

The study brings to light three of Polqar's main purposes; (1) seeking to defend Judaism as a true religion against Christianity; (2) similarly to his fellow Jewish Averroists, Polqar wishes to defend the discipline of philosophy. By philosophy, Polqar means Averroes' interpretation of Aristotle. As a consequence, he offers an Averroistic interpretation of Judaism and becomes one of the main representatives of Jewish Averroism; (3) defending his philosophical interpretation of Judaism.

From a social and political point of view, Polqar's unreserved embrace of philosophy raised problems within the Jewish community; he had to refute the Jewish traditionalists' charge that he was a heretic, led astray by philosophy.
The main objective guiding this study is that Polqar advances a systematic naturalistic interpretation of Judaism, which in many cases does not agree with traditional Jewish views.

"Haliva's lucid, learned, and incisive monograph on the thought of Isaac Polqar is the first comprehensive study devoted to this important, but neglected fourteenth century Jewish Averroist. It makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of post-Maimonidean medieval Jewish philosophy. Haliva convincingly shows that while Polqar claims to follow Maimonides, he consistently pushes his thought in a more radical direction, offering a severely naturalistic interpretation of Jewish religious principles and refusing to make any concessions to more traditional theological modes of thought. Her study leads us to ask whether it is possible to uphold such an uncompromising philosophical and naturalistic reading of Judaism as that of Polqar, that is, whether it does justice to the Jewish religious principles it purports to interpret and enables us to maintain the authority of traditional Halakhah."

Lawrence J. Kaplan, McGill University, Montreal

"Racheli Haliva's excellent book is the first comprehensive study of the philosophy of Isaac Polqar (late thirteenth-early fourteenth century). Polqar emerges as a radical and creative thinker–a fascinating link between the philosophy of Averroes and Maimonides and that of Spinoza."

Warren Zev Harvey, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"Haliva's groundbreaking book is the first comprehensive study of Polqar's intellectual world, forged in the crucible of the late Middle Ages where Greco-Arabic philosophy and the Maimonidean legacy meet inner-Jewish and anti-Christian polemics. Polqar, Haliva demonstrates, was a formidable thinker in his own right who critically engages with Maimonides and Averroes. At the same time, he defends the Jewish faith as the only true religion of reason--against Kabbalists and Jewish traditionalists and against his former teacher, Abner of Burgos, whose conversion to Christianity was a major intellectual shock. This is a meticulously researched and lucidly argued scholarly contribution that fills a crucial gap in the history of Jewish philosophy."

Carlos Fraenkel, McGill University, Montreal

Chapter 1 The Literary Form of ʿEzer ha-Dat: Between Dialogue and Essay

1.1 Introduction

ʿEzer ha-Dat is made up of a short introduction and five treatises. On first examination, the work seems peculiar. Medieval Jewish works were composed either as essays or dialogues.⁵⁹ In ʿEzer ha-Dat, by contrast, treatises 1 and 4 are written as essays, while treatises 2, 3, and 5 take the form of dialogues. Each of the three dialogues focuses on one or two main themes, outlining Polqar’s views and rejecting those of his opponents. Supplementing Polqar’s main texts, all five treatises include plenty of rhyming lines that assist him in formulating his view.⁶⁰ In this chapter, I wish to introduce the main idea(s) of each treatise. After a brief overview, I will analyze each section in detail, considering both its content and its literary form. I will also attempt to identify Polqar’s voice by differentiating it from the voices of the other characters.

In the opening treatise of the book, Polqar argues for the primacy of the Jewish Law over other existing laws. For him, the Torah is the best law, and Moses, the lawgiver, is the paramount leader. Together, they provide Jewish believers with the necessary groundwork to attain their ultimate purpose: the world to come. In this treatise, Polqar highlights particular themes, such as the exile and its meaning, faith in the Messiah’s ultimate arrival, Talmudic methodology and its authority, and the sages’ interpretations. The choice of these themes seems to have been motivated by the Christians having made use of them in order to argue for the superiority of Christianity over Judaism.

The second treatise is composed of several different dialogues. The main dialogue depicts a lively debate between two men with disparate worldviews: one is an old man who represents a traditional and anti-philosophical approach, while the other is a young man who is strongly drawn to philosophy. The debate between these two figures reflects a well-known controversy between traditionalist Jews who were suspicious of philosophy and Jewish philosophers who aimed to dispel this suspicion. In this dialogue, the traditionalist accuses the philosophers of holding heretical views, such as denying God’s unity, His omnipotence, His omniscience, and so forth, as a result of following Greek philosophy. The young philosopher, on the other hand, claims that no contradiction exists between the Jewish faith and Aristotelian philosophy.

The third treatise of the book is most likely based on the correspondence between Polqar and Abner regarding astrology. The dialogue in this treatise is between a philosopher⁶¹ (ḥaver) and an astrologer (hover). Whereas the latter holds an extreme deterministic view, the former believes in man’s free will.

The fourth treatise of the book presents a typology of four different groups of people, who, according to Polqar, constitute the greatest enemies of Judaism and consequently of philosophy. The first group consists of people who reject science while claiming to be true believers. The second includes the Kabbalists, who claim to have access to esoteric knowledge reaching back to the prophets. They reject the philosopher’s methods (such as syllogisms) as legitimate tools for evaluating knowledge claims. Third are those who accuse philosophers of holding radical naturalistic views. According to this group, philosophers assert that everything is governed by nature and that even God cannot change nature’s course. For these traditionalists, then, philosophers have turned nature into God’s rival, not His intermediary. The fourth group includes people who believe in magic, witchcraft, and other such farfetched things.

The fifth treatise closes the book and describes a conversation between a spirit and a man who lives in the material world. These two figures debate the question of what is preferable: to be alive, when one can fully enjoy bodily and intellectual pleasures, or to be dead, when one’s soul is free from bodily desire. Polqar concludes this section with a revelation: the two interlocutors hear the voice of the angel Gabriel, who supports the spirit’s position according to which the soul’s detachment from the body is preferable.

The poetic style is present in all five treatises and often serves secondary goals. In some cases, the rhymed lines preface the main discussion, as seen in treatise 1. In other cases, particularly in treatise 2, they recapitulate the participants’ ideas before the author moves to present the opponent’s reply. Although Polqar uses poetry in addition to dialogues and essays throughout ʿEzer ha-Dat, for the time being, I will focus on showing how dividing the book into dialogues and essays serves his primary purposes;⁶² namely, using essays to determine basic assumptions such as the need for a law and a lawgiver, and writing in dialogue form when he wishes to emphasize his interlocutor’s flaws on the one hand and to reinforce his philosophical arguments on the other. I will analyze Polqar’s use of poetry only when it contributes to a better understanding of the arguments.

It seems as if writing the first and fourth treatises of ʿEzer ha-Dat in essay form and the others in dialogue form was a deliberate decision on Polqar’s part. Polqar’s decision to open the book with an essay is particularly important if we consider that non-philosophers constituted one of the audiences of ʿEzer ha-Dat. A firm introduction, whose purpose is to show that Judaism is superior to all other religions, protects Polqar from potential attacks from the more traditionalist members of his community. Conversely, the dialogues of treatises 2 and 3 include controversial discussions that might provoke a negative response from traditionalists. Using the dialogue form blurs the radical nature of Polqar’s views. Treatise 4, an essay, focuses on people who see themselves as the defenders of the faith while in fact, in Polqar’s view, they severely damage the principles of their religion.

In order to situate ʿEzer ha-Dat’s contribution as a literary text, I will begin by examining the three treatises that are written as dialogues (treatises 2, 3, and 5) both in themselves and in relation to other dialogues from the Middle Ages dealing mainly with Judeo-Christian polemics.⁶³

Lasker characterizes the dialogue genre within religious polemics⁶⁴ as “polemics [that] attempted either to recreate a real disputation or to give the impression of a disputation, or at least a conversation that actually occurred.”⁶⁵ This characterization applies to the dialogical sections of ʿEzer ha-Dat. The text’s apologetic stance has a twofold purpose. The first is to defend Judaism from native Christians and from apostates, such as Abner, whose aim is to undercut the principles of the Jewish faith. Recreating a real disputation or giving the impression of a disputation in the form of a dialogue echoes the debate Polqar had with Abner. Indeed, several of the arguments in treatise 3 are taken almost verbatim from Abner’s Sefer Minḥat Qenaʾot. The second purpose is internal and apologetic. Polqar wrote ʿEzer ha-Dat in Hebrew and was addressing his own community; the Jewish community. He realized that it was necessary to defend Judaism from the Christians’ allegations, although the discussions in ʿEzer ha-Dat do not contain explicit criticism of Christianity; indeed, the words “Christianity” (naṣrut) and “Christians” (noṣrim) do not appear in the book. However, when Polqar discusses the essential principles of Judaism—the existence of God, His unity, and His incorporeality—he intends to simultaneously demonstrate the falsity of Christianity to his readers, insofar as they accept these essential principles. For this reason, we do not find specific arguments that refute the doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Instead, Polqar argues that every true religion must not contradict these essential principles. By pointing to the philosophical aspects of Judaism that were rejected by Christianity, Polqar thereby implicitly demonstrates Judaism’s superiority over Christianity based on philosophical grounds.

Polqar uses the dialogue form in a manner close to Lasker’s third characterization, “to recreate […] a conversation that actually occurred.” The dialogues in ʿEzer ha-Dat largely recreate the letters exchanged between Polqar and Abner. Although we do not have any evidence of oral disputes that took place between them, we do know that they corresponded after Abner’s conversion to Christianity.⁶⁶ Abner himself admits that for twenty-five years, he had had doubts about whether Judaism was the true faith; it is surely not impossible that this personal struggle found its way into the classroom, where his pupils, Polqar among them, sensed Abner’s inner conflict.⁶⁷ Hence, it is quite possible that their disagreement began even while they apparently shared the same faith. Perhaps, then, the dialogues in treatises 3 and 5 reflect familiar debates between the two men.⁶⁸ Yet this trajectory is inconsistent with the dialogue in treatise 2. Except for treatise 2, all the dialogues are imaginary conversations between two or more characters in which Polqar focuses on specific themes of a universal nature; for example, the immortality of the soul in treatise 5, or God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will in treatise 3. The dialogue that makes up treatise 2 consists of a general disagreement between two interlocutors who share the Jewish faith. The disagreements are between a young philosopher and an old traditionalist and broadly address the relationship between the principles of Judaism in particular and philosophy, an issue that was, of course, the subject of ongoing debate among Jews. Polqar’s own stance on this question is clear: the principles of Judaism are to be understood philosophically.

Why, then, did Polqar resort to a dialogue form? What could he gain by presenting his worldview through the play of ideas conveyed by several characters? Why did he divide the book into three dialogues and two essays? Can this partition point to an arbitrary division?

Writing in dialogue form can serve the author in several ways. Hughes has already noted two possible advantages of presenting one’s thoughts in dialogues.⁶⁹ First, the dialogue form allows the author to confront and rebut his opponent directly: in ʿEzer ha-Dat, one of the main opponents is Abner. In addition, it constitutes an entertaining and dramatic structure that can attract a wide readership. Hecht, in agreement with Hughes’s first suggestion, maintains that the dialogue’s purpose as a literary device is primarily to allow the author to present and refute his opponent’s arguments.⁷⁰

In addition, one may suggest that the dialogue form that we find in three treatises of ʿEzer ha-Dat allows Polqar to explain and clarify the stages of his arguments. The separation of the text into the various interlocutors’ interventions serves primarily to clarify the issues at stake and the exact points of disagreement. Then, inasmuch as a written dialogue, unlike a verbal one, permits the author to control the conversation as he pleases, he can eventually triumph over his opponent. On the one hand, Polqar had the freedom to determine the extent to which he would present his interlocutor’s arguments, all the while stressing the points he wished to emphasize, as Hecht suggests. In addition, by phrasing his opponent’s arguments in certain ways, Polqar sought to change the minds of those among his community who often defended the opponent’s point of view. In some cases, Polqar demonstrates that the contradiction between his opponents’ views and his own is only imaginary: a closer examination reveals that they are fundamentally in agreement and that the seeming opposition was only a misunderstanding on the part of his opponents.

Polqar also uses fictitious characters to present several views, deliberately refusing to identify his real position. Significantly, in the introduction to ʿEzer ha-Dat, Polqar indicates that he will write allegorically in several places in the book in order to conceal his true opinion from those who might accuse him of heresy, thinking his views contradict the principles of Judaism.⁷¹ Thus, he writes in a contradictory fashion as he addresses different audiences. To his non-philosophical fellow Jews, he writes in a way that supports their opinions, while at the same time directing a different message to the potential philosophers in his community.

Let us now examine Polqar’s diverse stylistic approaches in greater depth, proceeding on the assumption that the five treatises of ʿEzer ha-Dat were not put together arbitrarily.⁷² Can we detect Polqar’s own voice? After all, the dialogues often consist of more than two participants, and it is not always certain which character, if any, reflects the author’s genuine views.⁷³ Perhaps Polqar’s voice is revealed in more than one voice.⁷⁴ I would propose that in order to identify Polqar’s voice, we must take into consideration his views throughout ʿEzer ha-Dat. Hence, I will now analyze the speaking characters in relation to the leading ideas displayed throughout the text.

ʿEzer ha-Dat’s introduction begins with a brief passage of six lines of rhymed prose that reflect one of the book’s purposes. Here, Polqar highlights the criticism directed against him by his former teacher, Abner of Burgos, and defends his own views within the framework of the Jewish faith and Aristotelian philosophy, which, for him, are in accordance with each other:

To the teacher of righteousness and (to) all those who are engaged in inquiry. Sound the voice, oh ye intellectuals, and endow him with authority.⁷⁵

May [the teacher of righteousness] reveal [to him; i. e., to Polqar] the brightness of light, and teach the straight path, to defend the Torah, and raise support for the faith.⁷⁶

These lines express the central ideas that Polqar reiterates throughout the book; the phrase “the teacher of righteousness” alludes to the title of Abner’s book, in which he presents himself as the man who speaks the truth. Here, Polqar uses Abner’s title in order to claim the function of “teacher of righteousness” for himself. As the protector of the Jewish religion, Polqar serves as the spokesman for the Torah in his time. He therefore turns to the intellectual members of his community, asking that they authorize him to serve as the faith’s true defender and protector. Polqar’s appeal to the intellectuals (mas´kilim) is deliberate, as it is the intellect that plays a central role when one wishes to defend one’s religion. Polqar thus portrays himself as a philosopher asking for ...

Índice

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Literary Form of ʿEzer ha-Dat: Between Dialogue and Essay
• Chapter 2 Philosophy and Religion
• Chapter 3 The Concept of God
• Chapter 4 The Conception of the World
• Chapter 5 The Conception of Man
• Conclusions
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Sources