Baḥya ibn Paquda

Baḥya ibn Paquda lived in Muslim Spain, probably in Saragossa, in the second half of the eleventh century, where he served as a judge (dayyan) of the Jewish community. Little else is known of his life.

His one major work, written in Arabic around 1080 and translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon in 1161 as Ḥovot ha-Levavot, “The Duties of the Heart”, argues that Judaism commands not only outward acts but inner dispositions: faith in God’s unity, trust, sincerity, humility, repentance, self-examination and above all the love of God. Its ten “gates” lead the reader from the philosophical demonstration of God’s unity to the pure love of God.

Baḥya drew freely on Arabic philosophy and on the Sufi literature of piety, which he quotes without naming its authors, and adapted them to Jewish teaching. The Duties of the Heart became one of the most widely read works of Jewish ethics, studied in the Musar movement of nineteenth-century Lithuania and still read today.

The book is addressed to ordinary readers as well as scholars, and its tone is personal and urgent: Baḥya says he wrote it because he found that the inner duties, though they bind every Jew at every moment, had been neglected in favour of outward observance and legal learning.