Krinis, Ehud
Senior Fellow: April–September 2017
Research Project: Sceptical Motifs in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari
Ehud Krinis seeks to explore various sceptical motifs in Judah Halevi’s twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic dialogue, commonly known as the Book of Kuzari or the Kuzari. These sceptical motifs include, among others, Halevi’s criticism of rational contemplation (iʿtibār) and inductive reasoning (istidlāl); the preference of the ‘naturally gifted persons’ (al-maṭbūʿūn), who receive religious truths by sparks of inspiration, over the non-gifted, who need to immerse themselves in study in order to acquire the articles of faith; and the supremacy of religious understanding gained by direct experience over that gained through discourse. Krinis hopes to demonstrate that Halevi’s scepticism is intriguing and provoking, not only in the ways in which he uses it in the Kuzari to tackle his opponents’ approaches, but even more so in the ways he directs it at approaches espoused by his spokesman in the dialogue: the Jewish sage (habr/ haver). By pursuing this direction of investigation, Krinis ventures to claim that Halevi’s scepticism culminates in implicitly calling into question the usefulness of the discursive format of his own Kuzari.
Ehud Krinis earned his PhD at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2008). He was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2015–16.