The Kuzari

A dialogue in five parts written in Judaeo-Arabic by the poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, built on the reported conversion of the king of the Khazars to Judaism. The king has dreamt that his intentions please God but his actions do not, and he questions in turn a philosopher, a Christian and a Muslim before inviting a rabbi. The philosopher offers a God who does not know individuals and a path of intellectual perfection in which it hardly matters how one worships, which leaves the king unsatisfied. The rabbi grounds his faith not in proofs but in history: the public revelation at Sinai, witnessed by a whole people and transmitted since. Later parts discuss the special relation of Israel and the land of Israel to the divine, the Hebrew language, prayer and law, and finally criticise Aristotelian philosophy and the theology of the mutakallimūn. It was translated into Hebrew in 1167.

It is the classic Jewish argument for grounding faith in historical experience rather than philosophical proof, and its critique of the philosophers' God is as sharp as al-Ghazālī's.