Yeshayahu Leibowitz 1903 – 1994

Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a Latvian-Israeli philosopher, scientist, and Orthodox Jewish religious thinker, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in biochemistry, neurology, and philosophy, and one of the most distinctive and uncompromising voices of late twentieth-century Israeli thought. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State and his many published lectures argued that Jewish religion is constituted by the practice of the commandments alone and not by belief in any historical or metaphysical proposition, and mounted a sustained critique of the political theology of the State of Israel and of the conflation of religion with nationalism. He was widely admired and widely opposed for his moral courage in publicly criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born at Riga, Latvia, in January 1903 into a Lithuanian Jewish family. He took his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1924, a second doctorate in philosophy at Berlin in 1928, and a medical degree at Basel in 1934. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and held chairs at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem successively in biochemistry, organic chemistry, and the history and philosophy of science, taught medical ethics at the medical school, and served as editor-in-chief of the Hebrew Encyclopedia from 1958.

His Hebrew writings, mainly collected from lectures and essays, include Judaism, the Jewish People, and the State of Israel (1975), Faith, History, and Values (1982), Conversations on the Tractate Avot and on Maimonides, the five-volume series of Talks on the Weekly Torah Portion, and the late Body and Mind: The Mind-Body Problem (1982). A selection has been translated as Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992).

Leibowitz combined a strict Orthodox Jewish observance with a Maimonidean rationalism and a rigorous severance of religion from politics: the religious value of mitzvot is their character as worship of God for its own sake, and the state of Israel is a political and not a religious category. From the 1967 occupation onward he was the most outspoken Orthodox critic of the Israeli annexation, warning of a 'Judeo-Nazi' degradation of Israeli society. He died at Jerusalem in August 1994.