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Halakha, kabbala, and philosophy in the thought of Joseph Jabez

One of the most important questions confronting students of Jewish intellectual history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the relationship of the three major disciplines of the mediaeval Jewish academy: halakha, the study of Talmud and Jewish law, kabbala and philosophy. While halakha was a permanent fixture in the curriculum, the latter two disciplines were often in direct conflict with each other. The struggle for supremacy between kabbala and philosophy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is generally conceded, was won by kabbala, causing a decline in philosophical study by Jews. Yet the process leading to the ‘victory’ of kabbala and the ’defeat’ of philosophy was neither simple nor straightforward. It is the complexity of the interplay between kabbala and philosophy which this article attempts to illustrate. It centres on the place of these disciplines in the thought of a prominent Jewish ‘critic’ of philosophy of the early sixteenth century, Joseph b. Hayyim Jabez (d. 1507).’ Jabez, like many Jewish authors of his time, left behind little in the way of biographical data beside certain items scattered in his works. He was presumably born in the Iberian peninsula in the mid-fifteenth century, but he was reticent concerning his early life, recording almost no details of his birth and education.2 Prior to the expulsion from Spain, he mentions only his residence in the city of Lisbon, where he came into contact with the kabbalist Joseph Hayyun and the statesman and scholar Isaac Abarbanel with whom he studied portions of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed .3 3