Maimonides,(474) while his teacher
Crescas considers the Biblical miracles to be direct manifestations of the
creative activity of God.(475) Gersonides has really two opinions; in his
commentary he reduces all miracles to natural processes, but in his
philosophical work he adopts the view of Maimonides.(476) Jehuda ha Levi
alone insisted on the miracles of the Bible as historic evidence of the
divine calling of the prophets.(477) To all the rest, the miracle is not
performed by God but by the divinely endowed man. God himself is no longer
conceived of as changing the cosmic order. Both He and the world created
by His will remain ever the same. Still, according to this theory, certain
privileged men are endowed with special powers by the Supreme Intellect,
and by these they can perform miracles.

4. It is evident that in all this the problem of miracles is not solved,
nor even correctly stated. Both rabbinical literature and the Bible abound
with miracles about certain holy places and holy persons, which they never
venture to doubt. But the rabbis were not miracle-workers like the Essenes
and their Christian successors.(478) On the contrary, they sought to
repress the popular credulity and hunger for the miraculous, saying: "The
present generation is not worthy to have miracles performed for them, like
the former ones;"(479) or "The providing of each living soul with its
daily food, or the recovery of men from a severe disease is as great a
miracle as any of those told in Scripture;"(480) or again, "Of how small
account is a person for whom the cosmic order must be disturbed!"(481)
Thus when the wise men of Rome asked the Jewish sages: "If your God is
omnipotent, as you claim, why does He not banish from the world the idols,
which are so loathsome to Him?" they replied: "Do you really desire God to
destroy the sun, moon, and stars, because fools worship them? The world
continues its regular course, and idolaters will not go unpunished."(482)

5. In Judaism neither Biblical nor rabbinical miracles are to be accepted
as proof of a doctrinal or practical teaching.(483) The Deuteronomic law
expressly states that false prophets can perform miracles by which they
mislead the multitude.(484) We can therefore ascribe no intrinsic
religious importance to miracles. The fact is that miracles occur only
among people who are ignorant of natural law and thus predisposed to
accept marvels. They are the products of human imagination and