Hillel ben Samuel of Verona (c.1220–95)

Hillel played a crucial role in the response of the philosophers in the Jewish community to the attacks made upon them by their enemies. He stoutly defended Maimonides while at the same time opposing the allegorical interpretation of miracles. Far less radical than Maimonides or Averroes, he tended to follow the approach of Aquinas. He also translated many philosophical texts from Latin into Hebrew. He was influenced by scholastic ideas and especially by the anti-Averroistic controversy. His major work, Tagmule ha-Nefesh (The Rewards of the Soul), completed in Forlì in 1291, deals with the nature of the soul and the intellect and with the spiritual requital of the soul after death. The chief purpose of this work is ‘to explain the existence of the soul, its essence and its rational faculty, which continues to exist externally after death’.