e legends, turns the evil angels of
the Bible into wicked men.(582)

5. As to demons in general, the Talmudists never doubted their existence,
but endeavored to minimize their importance. They changed the demon
_Azazel_ into a geographical term by transposing the letters.(583) They
explained "the sons of God who came to the daughters of men to give birth
to the giants of old" as aristocratic Sethites who intermarried with
low-class families of the Cainites.(584) As to the rest, the entire belief
in demons and ghosts was too deeply rooted in the folk mind to be
counteracted by the rabbis. Even lucid thinkers of the Middle Ages were
caught by these baneful superstitions, including Jehuda ha Levi, Crescas,
and Nahmanides, the mystic.(585) Only a small group fought against this
offshoot of fear and superstition, among them Saadia, Maimonides and his
school, Ibn Ezra, Gersonides, and Juda Ibn Balag. To Maimonides the demons
mentioned in Mishnah and Talmud are only figurative expressions for
physical plagues. He considers the belief in demons equivalent to a belief
in pagan deities. "Many pious Israelites," he says,(586) "believe in the
reality of demons and witches, thinking that they should not be made the
object of worship and regard, for the reason that the Torah has prohibited
it. But they fail to see that the Law commands us to banish all these
things from sight, because they are but falsehood and deceit, as is the
whole idolatry with which they are intrinsically connected."

6. This sound view was disseminated by the rationalistic school in its
contest with the Cabbalah, and has exerted a wholesome influence upon
modern Judaism. Thus Satan is rejected by Jewish doctrine, while Luther
and Calvin, the Reformers of the Christian Church, still believed in him.
Milton's "Paradise Lost" placed him in the very foreground of Christian
belief, and the leaders of the Protestant Churches, up to the present,
accord him a prominent place in their scheme of salvation, as the opponent
and counterpart of God. In his work on Christian dogmatics, David
Friedrich Strauss observes acutely: "The whole (Christian) idea of the
Messiah and his kingdom must necessarily have as its counterpart a kingdom
of demons with a personal ruler at its head; without this it is no more
possible than the north pole of the magnet would be without a south pole.
If Christ has come to destroy the works of the Devil, there would be no
need for him to come, unles