Abraham Ben David Ha-Levi Ibn Daud

(known by the acronym Rabad; c.1110-c.1180). Spanish historian and philosopher. Born in Cordoba, he acquired a broad Jewish and secular education. As a result of the Almohad invasion in 1146, Ibn Daud fled to Castile and settled in Toledo, where he died a martyr. His two major works, both dating from 1161, were a chronicle entitled Sefer ha-Kabbalah ("The Book of Tradition") and a philosophical treatise originally written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew as Ha-Emunah ha-Ramah ("The Exalted Faith"). In the former work, Ibn Daud traced the development of rabbinic Judaism from Moses to his own time. His purpose was less historical than polemical, the book answering Karaites who maintained that the rabbinic tradition had been shattered through exile and persecution.

In Ha-Emunah ha-Ramah, Ibn Daud investigated the principles of Judaism and sought to harmonize them with Aristotelian rationalist philosophy. The first section deals with metaphysics and general philosophical questions. The second discusses particularly Jewish concerns: the existence and incorporeality of God; the nature of His unity; His attributes, judged to be essentially negative; the existence of intermediate forces between God and the world, as well as the soul's immortality; creation, prophecy, the Sinaitic revelation and its immutability; Divine omniscience, the problem of evil, and man's free will; and ethics and virtue as "medicine of the soul" which religious observance activates.

In discussing the first and penultimate questions, Ibn Daud brings original thought to bear on these problems. A coldly precise thinker, he "solves" the problem of determinism and Free Will by analyzing the various types of knowledge possible and then boldly declares that God cannot foretell the "objectively undetermined" event.

Ibn Daud was familiar with earlier Jewish and Arabic philosophy, utilized it for his own ends, and through his own work influenced Maimonides. Later Jewish philosophers, Ḥasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo, knew little of his writings, not only because most of them were lost or poorly translated but also (and primarily) because they were superseded by the classical works of Maimonides.

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