Dīn as Torah: “Jewish Religion” in the Kuzari?
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Daniel Boyarin
Abstract:
The book known in Hebrew as the Kuzari from twelfth-century Sefardic Spain and one of its iconic texts was written by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and is called in Arabic, כתאב אלרד ואלדליל פי אלדין אלד'ליל, usually translated with the English “religion,” as “The Book of Refutation and Proof of the Despised Religion.” Modern Hebrew translators give דת dat for Arabic דין dīn, just as English translators give “religion,” presupposing that which has to be interrogated and shown, to wit what did the author of the Kuzari and his contemporaneous translator, Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Tibbon (1120 – 1190) mean when they used the Arabic term dīn or Hebrew dat, or better put, how did they use those words? We dare not read back from modern usages to interpret these medieval texts without risking simply burying their linguistic-cultural world under the rubble of a modern one, the very contrary of an archaeology. My hypothesis to be developed in the rest of this paper is that Judeo-Arabic (at least) dīn corresponds best to nomos as used by Josephus and (with a very important mutatis mutandis qualification) to Torah as well. Some powerful evidence for this claim comes from ibn Tibbon’s translation of Halevi’s Arabic into Hebrew.[1]
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
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- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Creating Religion(s) by Historiography
- Creating Religion(s) by Historiography
- Dīn as Torah: “Jewish Religion” in the Kuzari?
- Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past
- Creating Religious Identity: Rabbinic Interpretations of the Exodus
- Moses: Creating a Founding Figure
- Historiography as Anti-History: Reading Nag Hammadi Codex II
- The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome: How Historiography Helped Create the Crypt of the Popes
- “The Immortal Traveler”: How Historiography Changed Judaism
- History Writing and the Making of Mongolian Buddhism
- Narrating the Past and the Future: The Position of the religions orientales and the mystères païens in the Evolutionary Histories of Religion of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy
- Making Contact with the Divine Other: Means and Meanings
- Introduction
- Anthropomorphism, Theatre, Epiphany: From Herodotus to Hellenistic Historians
- Worshipping Hades: Myth and Cult in Elis and Triphylia
- Double Vision: Epiphanies of the Dioscuri in Classical Antiquity
- “One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist”: Divine Inspiration and theophilia in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi
- Varia
- Loosing Vows and Oaths in the Roman Empire and Beyond: Authority and Interpretation
- Martin P:n Nilsson und die Wiederbesetzung des Lehrstuhls für klassische Philologie in Heidelberg 1924/1925
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Creating Religion(s) by Historiography
- Creating Religion(s) by Historiography
- Dīn as Torah: “Jewish Religion” in the Kuzari?
- Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past
- Creating Religious Identity: Rabbinic Interpretations of the Exodus
- Moses: Creating a Founding Figure
- Historiography as Anti-History: Reading Nag Hammadi Codex II
- The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome: How Historiography Helped Create the Crypt of the Popes
- “The Immortal Traveler”: How Historiography Changed Judaism
- History Writing and the Making of Mongolian Buddhism
- Narrating the Past and the Future: The Position of the religions orientales and the mystères païens in the Evolutionary Histories of Religion of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy
- Making Contact with the Divine Other: Means and Meanings
- Introduction
- Anthropomorphism, Theatre, Epiphany: From Herodotus to Hellenistic Historians
- Worshipping Hades: Myth and Cult in Elis and Triphylia
- Double Vision: Epiphanies of the Dioscuri in Classical Antiquity
- “One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist”: Divine Inspiration and theophilia in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi
- Varia
- Loosing Vows and Oaths in the Roman Empire and Beyond: Authority and Interpretation
- Martin P:n Nilsson und die Wiederbesetzung des Lehrstuhls für klassische Philologie in Heidelberg 1924/1925
