330 A History of Judaism
in halakhah, but the philosophical underpinnings of such behaviour. It
was to become popular among Jews in ensuing centuries, especially
after the translation of the Arabic ethical writings of Saadiah into Heb-
rew in the second half of the twelfth century.
Notwithstanding the abstract nature of his philosophy and his secu-
lar verse which treated the standard themes of wine, friendship, love
and despair, ibn Gabirol’s religious poetry showed a deep spiritual sens-
ibility in hymns of penitence and glorification of the majesty of God, as
in his poem on The Kingly Crown, which entered some liturgical trad-
itions for private recitation and contemplation on Yom Kippur:
Mysterious are Thy works, my soul well knows:
Thine, Lord, is majesty, all pomp and power,
Kingship whose splendour yet more splendid grows
O’ertopping all in glory and wealth’s dower.
To Thee celestial creatures, and the seed
Of earth- sprung kind concede
They all must perish, Thou alone remain,
The secret of whose strength doth quite exceed
Our thought, as Thou transcendest our frail plane.^22
Over seventy years after ibn Gabirol’s death, Judah Halevi, another
contributor to what had become a golden age for the composition of
Hebrew religious poetry in Spain, wrote in Arabic between 1140 and
1170 a very different sort of philosophical treatise. His Kuzari, cast in
the form of a dramatic dialogue like the dialogues composed by Plato,
imagined a discussion between the king of the Khazars and a rabbi about
the place of Judaism within world history. The Khazars had indeed
adopted Judaism some 400 years before (see Chapter 9), but the signifi-
cant historical background to Judah Halevi’s great work was the struggle
between Muslims and Christians for control of his home town of Toledo
and the precarious destiny of Jews between these two powers.^23
The aim of the Kuzari was to demonstrate the inadequacy of philos-
ophy and the supremacy of revelation – and specifically the superior
revelation vouchsafed by God to the Jews. Halevi insisted that God is
known through experience, and especially the history of Israel, and not
by abstract speculation about the First Cause. He asserted that the
ancient philosophers could justify their preference for rational argu-
ments on the grounds ‘that they did not have the benefit of prophecy or
of the light of revelation’ and that for this they were not to blame:
‘Rather, they deserve our praise for what they managed to achieve