“How Would He Not Protest God’s Putting to Death the Righteous Child?”: Eleazar Ashkenazi on the Akedah

Medieval Jewish readings of the Akedah remain almost entirely oblivious to the antinomy between ethics and revealed religion that many modern interpretations find at the heart of the story. This study explores an exception, the teaching of the fourteenth-century rationalist, Eleazar Ashkenazi. In his Torah commentary Revealer of Secrets, Eleazar seeks a remedy for what he takes to be the theological and moral scandals that arise when the Akedah is read according to its plain sense. He finds his solution in an interpretive technique favored by many rationalists from which their critics strongly recoiled: the assignment of narratives traditionally understood as describing events in the external world to the sphere of prophetic visions. In addition to exemplifying characteristic features of Eleazar’s exegetico-theological work and cast of mind, Eleazar’s treatment of the Akedah handsomely illustrates how he builds on ideas of medieval Judaism’s paramount thinker, Maimonides. In so doing, it serves as a reminder that “epigonism,” a significant feature of medieval Jewish intellectual history, need not preclude a writer’s exercise of literary agency or promulgation of daring and original ideas. Near the end of his exploration of the Akedah, Eleazar sets down the broader principle that animates his exegesis—and his Judaism writ large: “In the final analysis, the Torah was given to rational people who acknowledge the truth.” Thus does Revealer emerge as a work that illustrates medieval Jewish rationalism at the limit, in both matter and manner.