Abstract

With Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and Gersonides’s Wars of the Lord, Hasdai Crescas’s Light of the Lord deserves a place on any shortlist of medieval Jewish philosophical classics. Apart from partial translations by Warren Harvey and Harry Wolfson, the English-speaking student of medieval Jewish philosophy has had limited access to the text. Thanks to Roslyn Weiss’s felicitous new translation, this is no longer the case.Light of the Lord [=Light] has of course its own internal philosophical dynamic, but it is helpful to remember the broader historical context in which it was written. In 1391, the life of Spanish Jewry was upended. Thousands of Jews in Barcelona and...