Judah Halevi and the Kuzari's Critique of Philosophy

Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141), born in Tudela in Christian Iberia and active for much of his life in Muslim Toledo, Córdoba, and Granada before departing for the Land of Israel around 1140 (he is traditionally believed to have died shortly after arriving, though the exact circumstances remain uncertain), stands chronologically earlier than the other figures in this module — a generation before Maimonides himself — yet his major philosophical work, the Kuzari (fully titled The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Faith, composed in Judeo-Arabic and completed around 1140), was read and cited throughout the later medieval Jewish philosophical debates covered here as the principal counter-rationalist alternative against which Maimonidean philosophy, and its later radicalization by Gersonides, were implicitly or explicitly measured.