Medieval Representations of Abraham: Mockery as a Vehicle of Rational Enlightenment in Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan ha-Bavli’s Revealer of Secrets

Abstract

Abstract:Portraits of Abraham often bear the distinctive stamp of their creators, a fact attested in spiritual biographies of the patriarch in medieval Jewish literature. An example is Abraham as portrayed in the pages of a Torah commentary by the fourteenth-century Maimonidean Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan ha-Bavli. In step with Maimonidean models, this Abraham ardently cultivates noesis as the principal religious activity. At the same time, he puts himself in grave danger in order to promote a revolutionary monotheistic teaching. While often taking his bearings from Maimonides, Eleazar can imbue Maimonidean ideas and interpretations with new resonances and turn them in novel directions. In his account of Abraham’s career as a monotheist missionary, Eleazar portrays Abraham in a manner without Maimonidean precedent when he imputes to the patriarch the use of mockery as a device to breach idolatrous ignorance. Eleazar emulates Abraham’s use of ridicule in his campaign on rationality’s behalf. Yet where Eleazar’s Abraham uses mockery against pagan irrationality, Eleazar deploys it to deride fruits of the midrashic hermeneutic and its foremost medieval spokesperson, Rashi. Put otherwise, Eleazar ridicules midrashim that threaten to turn the divine word into a propagator of the sort of unscientific myths Abraham so heroically opposed. In so doing, he positions himself in a line of enlighteners standing at the perennial crossroads between rational religion and popular faith.