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According to this view Judah Halevi does not find it necessary with the philosophers and the Mutakallimun painfully to prove the existence of God. The existence of the Jewish people and the facts of their wonderful history are more eloquent demonstrations than any that logic or metaphysics can muster. But more than this. The philosophical view of God is inadequate in more ways than one.
But the mystic's explanation of the phenomenon of the existence of Judaism also failed to satisfy their yearnings. What they sought was a warrant in reason itself justifying the permanence of Judaism and its future. The arguments set forth by Maimonides and Jehudah Halevi contained no appeal for the modern soul.
But before proceeding to elaborate it with more detail and greater concreteness, it will be well to sketch very briefly the little we know of his life. Judah Halevi was born in Toledo in the last quarter of the eleventh century. This is about the time when the city was taken from the Mohammedans by the emperor Alphonso VI, king of Leon, Castile, Galicia and Navarre.
This image of the bell is purely Hebraic; it is, of course, derived from the High Priest's vestments. Jehudah Halevi often employs it to express melodious proclamation of virtue, or the widely-borne voice of fame.
With the exception of Judah Halevi and Hasdai Crescas the commonly accepted view was that philosophy and religion were at bottom identical in content, though their methods were different; philosophy taught by means of rational demonstration, religion by dogmatic assertion based upon divine revelation.
We wish to know therefore how Judah Halevi conceives of the essence and process of prophetic inspiration. We are already aware that he is opposed to the philosophers who regard the power of prophecy as a natural gift possessed by the man of pure intellect and perfect power of imagination.
And the period in which they lived was practically the same. Judah Halevi's birth took place in the last quarter of the eleventh century, whereas Ibn Daud is supposed to have been born about 1110, a difference of some twenty-five or thirty years. The philosopher whom Judah Halevi presents to us as the typical representative of his time is an Aristotelian of the type of Alfarabi and Avicenna.
But there is this additional motive in Halevi that he was defending a persecuted race and a despised faith against not merely the philosophers but against the more powerful and more fortunate professors of other religions. He is the loyal son of his race and his religion, and he will show that they are above all criticism, that they are the best and the truest there are.
Nevertheless the subject is felt to have its difficulties and the arguments against free will taken from the causal sequences of natural events and the influence of heredity, environment and motive on the individual will are not ignored. Judah Halevi as well as Abraham Ibn Daud discuss these arguments in detail. But freedom comes out triumphant.
Later, David Gordon revived the yearnings of Judah Halevi by his articles in the weekly Ha-Maggid , which he edited in Lyck, Prussia. Smolenskin's writings resound with a love for Zion from the very beginning of his literary career.
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