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Ḥasdai Crescas And Simeon Ben Ẓemah Duran On Tradition Versus Rational Inquiry, Seth (Avi) Kadish

Journal of Textual Reasoning

Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340-1410/11) and Simeon ben Ẓemah Duran (1361-1444) were products of the same culture and reflect a shared intellectual tradition. Persecution of the Jews of Spain in 1391 led the former to devote his life to rebuilding Spanish Jewish communities, while the latter fled Spain and became a rabbinic leader in Algiers.

As time went on, the intellectual gap between them became much wider than the sea that separated them. Duran was an eclectic thinker with a passion for the details both in his Torah study and in his analysis of the shared general knowledge of the middle …