And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich online at

W.W. history of philosophy. net. Today's episode, choosing my religion, Judah Halevi. We choose some things about ourselves, others are thrust upon us.

I, for instance, did not choose to be born male, American, or devastatingly handsome.

Yet two out of these three things happened anyway.

And then there are some features of our lives that we usually grow up with,

but are in our power to change.

It seems that a lot of sports fans develop their allegiance as children, but I myself became a fan of Arsenal Football Club more or less on a whim after noticing that they played near where I used to live in London, which taught me the lesson that even casual

choices can lead to great emotional upheaval in the long term.

Another example would be religion. Although most religious believers were raised in their faith, it's obviously possible to convert.

One can even imagine a person surveying a wide range of religions and picking among them, like someone moving to North London and deciding whether to support Arsenal or Tautenham.

Of course, in that case, the stakes would be considerably lower, and the choice would be far easier, since no sane

person would voluntarily choose to be a Tottenham fan.

In the multi-religious and multicultural society of today, we would even find it easy to imagine such a thing.

I mean picking religions, not picking football teams.

It is tempting to assume that in the medieval era, when religion was so powerful a factor in defining each

person's social group, such a neutral and dispassionate selection between faiths would have been inconceivable. But people certainly did convert from one religion to another in the classical period of Islam and did so voluntarily.

We'll be seeing an example when we return to the eastern part of the empire and consider

the thinker Abul Barakat al-Valtari, who converted from Judaism to Islam.

There was also conversion under varying degrees of duress, as we've seen with Jews

being pressured to become Muslims under the Almojads in medieval Spain. Centuries earlier, there had been a famous case of voluntary conversion towards Judaism. In the 8th century, a group called the Chazars, whose power was centered in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea became Jews.

It's not clear how deeply this conversion penetrated into Khazar society.

Perhaps it was only the ruling class that became Jews.

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