Medieval Representations of Abraham: Mockery as a Vehicle of Rational Enlightenment in Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan ha-Bavli’s Revealer of Secrets

PORTRAITS OF ABRAHAM OF TEN BEAR the distinctive stamp of their creators. This phenomenon, well known from the Pauline epistles, is attested in spiritual biographies of the patriarch in medieval Jewish literature. In Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, for example, Abraham goes beyond the impersonal “God of Aristotle” known through logical proof, pledges obedience to the personal God known through “taste” (that is, religious experience), and comes to disdain his own “former syllogistic arguments” about the most sublime and mysterious things. This account at once fits Halevi’s teachings on reason and revelation and bears autobiographical overtones. Consider, for instance, his denunciation of Greek philosophy in an epistle comprising the only statement in Halevi’s voice explaining his late-in-life pilgrimage to the land of Israel: “It claims to shed light but only yields blight.”¹