Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (ישעיהו ליבוביץ; 29 January 1903 – 18 August 1994) was an Israeli Orthodox Jewish public intellectual and polymath.

He was a professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry, and neurophysiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish thought and western philosophy.

He was known for his outspoken views on ethics, religion, and politics.

Leibowitz cautioned that the state of Israel and Zionism had become more sacred than Jewish humanist values and controversially went on to describe Israeli conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as "Judeo-Nazi" in nature while warning of the dehumanizing effect of the occupation on the victims and the oppressors.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga, Russian Empire (now in Latvia) in 1903, to a religious Zionist family.

His father was a lumber trader, and his cousin was a future chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch.

In 1919, he studied chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin.

After completing his doctorate in 1924, he went on to study biochemistry and medicine, receiving an MD in 1934 from the University of Basel.

He immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1935, and settled in Jerusalem.

Leibowitz was married to Greta, with whom he had six children, two of whom died at young ages.

His son Elia was chairman of the Tel Aviv University astrophysics department, and the longest-serving director of the Wise Observatory.

Another son, Uri, was a professor of medicine at Hadassah University Medical Center.

His daughter, Yiska, was a district prosecutor.

Leibowitz's sister, Nechama Leibowitz, was a world-famous biblical scholar.

Leibowitz was active until his last day.

Leibowitz joined the faculty of mathematics and natural science of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1936.

He became a professor of biochemistry in 1941, and was promoted to the position of senior professor of organic chemistry and neurology in 1952.

He taught at the Hebrew University for nearly six decades, lecturing in biochemistry, neurophysiology, philosophy, and the history of science.

Leibowitz served as the editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica in its early stages.

Apart from his innumerable articles and essays, Leibowitz authored a wide range of books on philosophy, human values, Jewish thought, the teachings of Maimonides, and politics.

Many of his lectures and discourses, including those given as part of the "Broadcast University" project run by Israeli Army Radio, were subsequently compiled and printed in book form.

Leibowitz was a prolific letter writer, and his advice or comment was sought out widely.

The first collection of his letters (in Hebrew) was published posthumously.

Leibowitz was an Orthodox Jew who held controversial views on the subject of halakha, or Jewish law.

He wrote that the sole purpose of religious commandments was to obey God, and not to receive any kind of reward in this world or the world to come.

He maintained that the reasons for religious commandments were beyond man's understanding, as well as irrelevant, and any attempt to attribute emotional significance to the performance of mitzvot was misguided and akin to idolatry.

He believed that Jews should perform mitzvot solely for the sake of worshipping God and that although they could also have incidental benefit to the one performing the mitzvah, it would only be a religiously worthy act as long as the motivation was to worship God.

He denied the idea of ethical mitzvot, believing that any mitzvot which set out duties towards others were duties based on a person's position before God rather than their position before their fellow man.

The essence of Leibowitz's religious outlook is that a person's faith is his commitment to obey God, meaning God's commandments, and this has nothing to do with a person's image of God.

This must be so because Leibowitz thought that God cannot be described, that God's understanding is not man's understanding, and thus, all the questions asked of God are out of place.

Leibowitz claimed that a person's decision to believe in God (in other words: to obey him) defines or describes that person, not God.

Leibowitz viewed God as transcending all reality as humans know it, believing that as an entity God is incomparable to any other form of reality humans can encounter, and is completely separate from the material world.

He viewed human history in the natural world as having no divine significance and rejected the idea that God had set out a divine purpose in history or extended some form of providence over humanity.

He did not see Torah as an account of historical and scientific truths, but rather as the source of the mitzvot or commandments on how Jews are to serve God.

He believed that the stories presented as factual in the Torah were simply using literary forms within the realm of human comprehension to deliver demands on how to worship God, writing that "from the standpoint of religious faith, the Torah and the entirety of Holy Scripture must be conceived as a demand which transcends the range of human cognition - the demand to know God and serve him - a demand conveyed in various forms of human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought, and narrative."

He believed that the Torah should not be read as a purely factual historical account, that the inclusion of any actual historical information in the Torah would be merely coincidental, and that all descriptions of God intervening in nature and history were not to be seen as factual but rather interpreted in terms of the messages they carry, as his ideas of God's transcendence denied that there could be any such contact between holiness and the world of the profane.

One result of this approach is that faith, which is a personal commitment to obey God, cannot be challenged by the usual philosophical problem of evil or by historical events that seemingly contradict a divine presence.

When someone told Leibowitz that he stopped believing in God after the Holocaust, Leibowitz answered, "Then you never believed in God".

He died in his sleep on 18 August 1994.

Shamai Leibowitz is one of his grandchildren.