Hasdaï Crescas

Rabbi Hasdaï Ben Abraham Crescas (approx. 1340 - 1410 or 1411) was large a philosopher and legalist Juif.

Biography

Resulting from a line of scientists, he studies under the supervision of Nissim Gerondi, known as RaN, at the sides of Isaac Ben Chechet (Ribash), and will train large scientists, among whom Joseph Albo, Rav Mattathias of Saragossa, and Rav Zerahia ha-Lévi Saladin.
It will also greedily be read by Baruch Spinoza, which will make use of it to refute the union of the Philosophie and the Religion that Maïmonide proposes.

Like its Master, Hasdaï Crescas was indeed large a talmudist and philosopher. It had also its word to say as regards Jewish Loi, although it did not occupy an official station of Rabbin.

He also enjoyed a certain material richness and regard the powerful ones: thus, in 1393, it is named exclusive executor of its uncle, Vitalis Azday by the king d' Aragon. Nevertheless, he had also known, like all the Jews, his batch of sufferings and miseries: in 1378, it was imprisoned on the basis of charge false, and was calumniated with many resumptions of the simple fact of being Juif.
En 1391, his/her only son died as a martyr for his faith, during the folk persecutions anti-semites of his time.

However, these tests started neither its faculties, nor its faith, since it wrote its philosopher's stones only after this period.
Another episode marking of its life was its meeting with the Forgery Messie of Cisneros, of which it was briefly in favor.
In 1401, it left to visit Joseph Orabuena at the request of the king de Navarre, whose annals teach us that it paid the expenditure of that which one called “Rav of Saragossa” at the time of his voyages in various towns of Navarre.

Works

Its halakhic work did not arrive to us, if they never existed in organized form, notwithstanding the comment on the Mishné Torah.
On the other hand, work which we know marked its time as much than they influenced ours:

Or Hashem , the Light of God, is a pure and simple refutation doctrines of Aristote, not only of its “religious” sights that in the most elementary fields of medieval science (like physics and the geometry). Initially conceived to criticize Maïmonide (and those among the Juifs thinkers which accepted its vision of the world while rejecting those of its elements considered contrary with the tradition), this work became precursory scientific revolution of XVIe century. An important study of this work was carried out by Harry Austryn Wolfson (“Crescas' off Criticizes Aristotle” Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1929).
Refutation of the Christian Principles , written in Spanish in 1398 at the request of the large ones of Spain, from which we know only the translation of Joseph ibn Shem Tov. Although the work was written at unquestionably polemical ends, work slips quickly towards the apologetic one, the goal of Crescas being in truth to explain the reasons for which the Jews are so faithful to their ancestral faith.
the sermon Pascal , where he spoke about religious philosophy, but also of Halakha.
Letter with the congregation of Avignon , published in appendix of the edition of Wiener of “Shevet Yehuda”, in which he reports the events which have occurred during persecutions of 1391.

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