Hasdai Cresques’s Impact on Fifteenth-Century Iberian Jewish Philosophy and Polemics

Abstract

Hasdai Cresques was a major Jewish thinker, author and communal leader at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, whose works are studied closely in the academic world. Nonetheless, his impact upon the traditional Jewish community has been almost non-existent. He never finished his legal opus, which might have made an impression on traditional Jews. His extant philosophical writings are difficult to follow; only one of two vernacular anti-Christian polemics survives, in a Hebrew translation/paraphrase. Although Cresques was well remembered in the century after his death, one can already detect during this period the reasons for his subsequent neglect. An examination of the fifteenth-century reception history of Cresques’s oeuvre demonstrates the extent to which his polemical, dogmatic and philosophical stances were mostly rejected despite by those who followed him, including his close students. It is not surprising, then, that in subsequent centuries, Cresques’s memory was almost erased from Jewish communal consciousness.