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Joseph ben Abraham (Hebrew: יוסף בן אברהם הכהן, also known by the Arabic name Yusuf al-Basir[1]) was a Karaite Jewish philosopher and theologian who flourished in Lower Mesopotamia or Persia in the first half of the eleventh century. He was the teacher of, among others, Jeshua ben Judah, also known as Abu al-Faraj. By way of euphemism, he was surnamed ha-Ro'eh "the seer" on account of his blindness.
His blindness did not prevent him from undertaking long journeys, likely as a missionary. During his travels, he frequented the religio-philosophical schools of the Mu'tazili, whose teachings he defended in his works. Of these the most important is the Muhtawi, translated from the Arabic into Hebrew, perhaps by Tobiah ben Moses, under the title Sefer ha-Ne'imot or Zikron ha-Datot. It is divided into forty chapters, in which all the main principles of Mu'tazili kalam are applied to Karaite dogmas, the five principles the monotheism: the necessity of admitting atoms and accidents; the existence of a Creator; the necessity of admitting certain attributes and rejecting others; God's justice and its relation to free will; reward and punishment; etc. He often argues against the Christians, Dualists, Zoroastrians, Epicureans, and various other sects, with whose tenets he shows himself well acquainted. He cites the founders of the Mu'tazili sects of al-Jabaiyah and al-Bahshamiyyah, Abu Ali Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Jabai, and his son Hashim Abd al-Salam, whose teachings he closely follows. The Muhtawi is still extant in manuscript, both in the original and in its Hebrew translation; the former in the David Kaufmann Library, the latter in the libraries of Leiden, Paris, and Saint Petersburg.