“Levi’s works continued to be of importance during the entire Middle Ages. […] Everyone contested his views, no one denied his importance.”

MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER (1889)¹

Levi ben Gershom, known as Gersonides (1288–1344), is doubtless one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages. An outstanding representative of the scientific and philosophical Hebrew Jewish culture that flourished in southern France between the 12th and the 15th centuries, Gersonides excelled in and wrote on mathematics, logic, astronomy, physical science, metaphysics and theology. Additionally, he commented in great detail almost the entire biblical corpus, bringing his scientific-philosophical outlook to bear on the biblical text. All of his researches were interconnected by Gersonides’ firm belief that “truth agrees with itself in every respect.”²

In the last half-century, a growing body of scholarship has considerably improved our understanding of Gersonides’ ideas and of his unique originality.³ By contrast, the impact of Gersonides’ multifarious oeuvre on posterity has to a large extent remained under the radar. In 1889 Moritz Steinschneider commented: “Levi’s works continued to be of importance during the entire Middle Ages. His daring originality and his independence of mind were severely castigated by the authorities of both camps: the traditionalists and the mystics branded Gersonides the philosopher as a heretic; the Averroists rejected his criticism. Everyone contested his views, no one denied his importance.”⁴ Since these words were written, not much progress has been made in the study of Gersonides’ reception.⁵

The three editors of this volume joined hands in an effort to shed light into this “black hole” in intellectual history. We made Gersonides’ afterlife into the theme of a conference (held at the University of Geneva on February 17–19, 2014), which is the remote cause of the present volume. (“Remote”—because all papers were subjected to double-blind refereeing, followed by an extended period of repeated revisions.) We are confident that the twenty-one papers gathered in this volume contribute significantly to our knowledge of the role Gersonides played in his time and in later centuries.

We will not present these papers individually—as a rule, their titles give a fair idea of the topics discussed in them. Let us only describe the organizational principle of the volume. It is pragmatic rather than programmatic: it does not have the pretension to map a historical reality, but simply to class together papers of similar theme or scope. Part 1 includes the papers studying reactions to Gersonides within philosophy, notably: three papers describe his reception in entire philosophical traditions; they are followed by four papers focusing on individuals and another two looking at the reception history of two of Gersonides’ works; next, one regrettably lonely paper is devoted to the reception of Gersonides’ work in Halakhah; lastly, three papers study reading publics and printing history. The three papers in Part 2 bear on aspects of the reception of Gersonides’ scientific oeuvre—for obvious reasons this aspect of Gersonides’ afterlife is the best studied one. Part 3 shifts the perspective and the epoch: in the 19th century, with the advent of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, most people did not anymore study Gersonides’ works because they thought they could teach them something about the world; instead they became the object of scholarly investigation. Last but not least, Part 4 carries a paper surveying the attitudes to Gersonides within religious Zionism.

Gersonides was one of the most brilliant medieval Jewish thinkers, whose oeuvre is impressive by its sparkling originality. That oeuvre, as well as the history of its reception, deserve more scholarly attention than they have received. We hope this volume will contribute to changing this situation.

Ofer Elior

Gad Freudenthal

David Wirmer