Crescas, Chasdai

(d. c. 1412)

   Spanish leader and philosopher. A member of an old Barcelona family, Chasdai Crescas is first mentioned in 1367. The Jews were accused of having illegally bought a silver vessel containing the consecrated wafers used in mass, and one Jew ‘confessed’ to the crime under torture. The entire Barcelona Jewish community were then imprisoned in the synagogue without food. No witnesses to the alleged crime emerging from this, they were released, but the community notables, including Chasdai Crescas, remained in prison for many months.

   Chasdai was a member of the group of important Jews who negotiated with the king of Aragon in 1383 for an increase in the privileges granted to the Jews. In the same year he used his influence and money in an effort to stop the legal proceedings against the Jews of Leridá, also accused of having stolen the consecrated host. When John I succeeded to the throne in 1387, Chasdai was named a member of the court.

   In the violently anti-Jewish riots which swept Spain in 1391, fomented by Paul of Burgos, a fanatical Jewish convert to Christianity, the community of Barcelona was destroyed. Chasdai was by then the acknowledged political and spiritual leader of Aragonese Jewry and had been appointed rabbi of Saragossa in 1389. His only son, who had remained in Barcelona, and other members of his family were slaughtered, in spite of the belated personal intervention of the king and queen. As community after community was decimated by the rioters, some Jews accepted baptism to save their lives but others killed themselves for Kiddush ha-Shem (‘for the sanctification of the Holy Name’), rather than betray their faith. Chasdai’s letter to the Jews of Avignon is a chronicle of the disasters. Throughout this ‘holy war’ Chasdai did all in his power to save the Jews. When the monarchs decided in May 1393 to restore the Jewish communities in Valencia and Barcelona, they wrote to Chasdai authorizing him to choose sixty Jewish families in the kingdom and settle them in the two cities. Queen Violante continued to rely on Chasdai’s authority in all matters concerning her Jewish subjects. In 1396 the civil authorities approved his issuing a series of decrees (takkanot) regulating the election and duties of Jewish communal leaders. In the fervour of messianic speculation immediately after the disasters of 1391, Chasdai appears to have played some part; several reports refer to his announcing the birth of the Messiah in a Castilian village. After the death of his son, he petitioned the king for permission to take a second wife as his first was no longer able to bear children.

   Shortly before his death, Chasdai Crescas published his philosophical work, Or Adonai (‘The Light of the Lord’, 1555), written in opposition to Aristotelian philosophy, which he felt was at the root of many Jewish intellectuals’ desertion of Judaism. Truth, averred Chasdai, could not be found in barren rationalism, but only in the Torah. Chasdai Crescas wrote one polemic, and perhaps two, against Christianity.