Hasdai Crescas's Critique of Aristotelian Physics

Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410/11) served as a leading rabbinic and communal authority in Aragon, based mainly in Zaragoza and Barcelona, and lived through the traumatic anti-Jewish massacres of 1391 that swept through Castile and Aragon, in which his own son was among the victims — an experience of communal catastrophe that scholars have long connected to the urgency and severity of his philosophical polemic. His major philosophical work, Or Hashem (The Light of the Lord), completed around 1410, mounts the most sustained and technically rigorous critique that any medieval Jewish philosopher directed against the Aristotelian physical and metaphysical framework that Maimonides and Gersonides had both, in different ways, accepted as the basic scientific backdrop for Jewish theology.