Abraham ibn Daud

Abraham ibn Daud (Judeo-Arabic: אַבְרָהָם בֶּן־דָּוִד הַלֵּוִי אִבְּן דָּאוּד, romanized: ʾAvrāhām ben-Dāvid hal-Lēvi ibn Dāʾūd; Arabic: ابراهيم بن داود, romanized: ʾIbrāhīm ibn Daʾūd) was a Spanish-Jewish astronomer, historian and philosopher born in Córdoba, Spain about 1110 who was said to have been killed for his religious beliefs in Toledo, Spain about 1180. He is sometimes known by the abbreviation Rabad I or Ravad I or Ravaad I or Ra'avad I. His maternal grandfather was Isaac Albalia. Some scholars believe he was the Arabic-into-Latin translator known as Avendauth.

His chronicle, a work written in Hebrew in 1161 under the title of Sefer ha-Qabbalah (Hebrew: ספר הקבלה, lit. 'Book of Tradition'; some manuscripts give the title as Seder ha-Qabbalah, i.e. the "Order of Tradition"), in which he fiercely attacked the contentions of Karaism and justified Rabbinic Judaism by the establishment of a chain of traditions from Moses to his own time, is replete with valuable general information, especially relating to the time of the Geonim and to the history of the Jews in Spain.

In his book, he attempted to explain how the pre-Inquisition Spanish Jewish community became the centre of the Jewish world by claiming that four rabbis from the Talmudic academies in Babylonia (Lower Mesopotamia), which had been the centre of Jewish scholarship for centuries, were travelling across the Mediterranean by ship in 990. Their ship was captured by a royal Spanish fleet, and all four were sold into slavery at different points around the Mediterranean. In each place where the rabbis were sold as slaves, the local Jewish communities bought their freedom. One of the slaves was Hanoch ben Moses, who was freed in Córdoba. When he began attending Torah classes and giving brilliant answers to questions, the community recognized him as a prodigious scholar and made him their leader; this transferred what Dara Horn called the 'crown of Torah' from Babylonia to Spain.^{[page needed]}

The account described in Sefer ha-Qabbalah contains numerous impossibilities and inaccuracies. Jewish historian Gerson Cohen noted that the alleged leader of the Spanish royal fleet, Abd al-Rahman III, died some thirty years before the story took place, and that the legend of Rabbi Moshe disguised as a pauper and surprising scholars in a Torah study session was nearly identical to the rise of Hillel the Elder.

The work was written in the aftermath of the Almohad persecutions of the Jewish community of al-Andalus and subsequent Jewish refugee establishment in the Christian world. Although Cohen has argued that Sefer ha-Qabbalah is an esoteric or messianic text with hidden meanings to explain its contradictions and errors, Eve Krakowski explains it as an affirmation of Jewish historical consciousness, with decisions made for polemical reasons and to counter Christian historical narratives.

An astronomical work written by him in 1180 is favourably noticed by Isaac Israeli ben Joseph. His philosophical work, al-ʿaqida l-Rafiya "The Sublime Faith", written in 1168, in Arabic, has been preserved in two Hebrew translations: one by Solomon ben Labi, with the title Emunah Ramah; the other by Samuel Motot. Labi's translation was retranslated into German and published by Simshon Weil.

Ibn Daud was the first to introduce the phase of Jewish philosophy which is generally attributed to Maimonides and which differs from former systems of philosophy mainly in its more thorough systematic form derived from Aristotle. He is considered the first Aristotelian in medieval Jewish philosophy; his work has been given less attention than Maimonides' subsequent and widely popular work The Guide for the Perplexed. Hasdai Crescas said Ibn Daud was the only Jewish philosopher among the predecessors of Maimonides.

The only Jewish philosophical works that Ibn Daud had before him, according to his own statement, were Saadia's Emunoth ve-Deoth, and "The Fountain of Life" by Solomon ibn Gabirol. On the one hand, he fully recognized the merits of Saadia Gaon, although he does not adopt his views on the freedom of the will, notwithstanding that the solution of this problem was to be the chief aim and purpose of his whole system. On the other hand, his attitude toward Gabirol was entirely antagonistic, and even in the preface to his "Emunah Ramah" he pitilessly condemned Gabirol's "Fountain of Life." He considered Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, Alfarabi and Ibn Sina, to be the only true philosophers.