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If Ibn Daud had made himself famous by a Biblical commentary or a halakic work, or if his philosophic treatise had the distinction of being written in popular and attractive style, like Bahya's "Duties of the Hearts," or Halevi's "Cusari," it might have fared better. As it is, it suffers from its conciseness and technical terminology.
But Judah Halevi's nationalism and the expression of his poetical and religious feelings and ideas could not vie with the dominating personality of Maimonides, whose rationalistic and intellectualistic attitude swept everything before it and became the dominant mode of thinking for his own and succeeding ages.
We may therefore legitimately infer that Judah Halevi's idea was that the Jews were the originators of philosophy, but that they had long discarded it in favor of something much more valid and certain; whereas the Greeks and their descendants, having nothing better, caught it up and are now parading it as their own discovery and even setting it up as superior to direct revelation.
Granting the truth of the process, one does not see why the mover of Saturn should not produce two more emanations, one by contemplating the Intelligence immediately above it, and the other by contemplating the first Intelligence, thus making four emanations instead of two. We must therefore reproduce it here in outline together with Judah Halevi's criticism.
David Kaufmann has shown that Judah Halevi's anti-philosophical attitude has much in common with that of the great Arab writer Al Gazali, from whom there is no doubt that he borrowed his inspiration.
If Judah Halevi insists that only Israelites in the land of Palestine and at the time of their political independence had the privilege of the prophetic gift, we realize that such a belief is of the warp and woof of Halevi's innermost sentiment and thinking, which is radically opposed to the shallow rationalism and superficial cosmopolitanism of the "philosophers" of his day.
Bahya lays the greatest stress upon the commandments of the heart, i. e., upon the purity of motive and intention, upon those laws which concern feeling and belief rather than outward practice. Judah Halevi's attitude is different.
It is even sought to reconcile the antinomy of freedom vs. God's foreknowledge. God knows beforehand from all eternity how a given man will act at a given moment, but his knowledge is merely a mirror of man's actual decision and not the determining cause thereof. This is Judah Halevi's view.
Here there is clearly a touch of religious poetry and mysticism, which reveals to us Halevi's real attitude, and we have no difficulty in understanding his lack of sympathy with what seemed to him the shallow rationalism of the contemporaneous Aristotelian, who fancied in his conceit that with a few logical formulæ he could penetrate the mysteries of the divine, when in reality he was barely enabled to skim the surface; into the sanctuary he could never enter.
This sketch of Halevi's life and character, brief and inadequate as it is, will prepare us to understand better his attitude to philosophy and to Judaism. His was not a critical intellect whose curiosity is not satisfied until the matter in dispute is proved in logical form.
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