Recently, the Israeli scholar Yohanan Silman has argued that the later sections of Kuzari, those that seem to be more philosophical, were written before the earlier sections, those that seem to be more theological. Following this thesis, then, would require one to interpret the earlier sections more literally and the later sections more figuratively in order to explicate Halevi's final position. See Bein Filosoph Le-Navi: Hitpat'hut Haguto Shel Rabbi Yehudah Halevi Be-Sefer Ha-Kuzari (Ramat-Gan, 1985), 134ff.; 239,ff. If I were to follow Silman, that would require my approaching the text of Kuzari as less than an integral work of thought and, therefore, I would be unable to draw some of the conclusions that I have drawn in this section of the book.

Like all attempts at the isolation of different sources (Quellenscheidung) in a work accepted by posterity as a unitary classic, it assumes that one can return to an “original” reading of a text. Nevertheless, the method is questionable. First, the conclusions drawn by means of this method (one that became established in the nineteenth century by scholars who were influenced by the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible) are always tentative. Second, it seems to assume that the final editor of a literary work drawn from composite sources (let alone when the editor is also the very same author of these sources) could have done a better job of reworking these sources so as to avoid specific contradictions and more general inconsistencies. Third, it does not deal with the fact that when texts are read in the context of a continuing tradition, especially a religious one, the Tendenz of the tradition is always more synthetic than analytic.