d-be proselyte came to Shammai
and requested him to sum up the entire Torah in one principle, he
received no better treatment than he deserved, when he was made to
take to his heels. That Hillel did not rebuff him and gave him the
principle, "What is hateful to thee do not do unto thy neighbor,"
proves that Hillel knew how to be patient and tactful, but not that
the Talmud looks upon that summary, or any other, as expressive of the
essence of Judaism. The same applies to religious practices,
concerning which the Mishnah announces the maxim that it is not for us
to estimate which are more important than others. We are told that the
custom obtained at one time of having the Ten Commandments read as
part of the daily service; but that as soon as it gave rise to the
impression that the Ten Commandments were more essential than the rest
of the Torah, it was discontinued. It is true that Philo reduces the
teachings of Judaism to five essential doctrines, but that was because
Judaism to Philo was Platonism divinely revealed.

_As Shown by Judah Ha-Levi_

THE movement to formulate the fundamental teachings of Judaism first
gained headway at the beginning of the eleventh century with the
Karaites, whose entire conception of Judaism was such as to render
their sect hopelessly stagnant and doomed to dwindle. Still, even they
would never have thought of emphasizing certain dogmas as
indispensable, had they not discerned in the teachings of
Mohammedanism a dangerous challenge to Judaism. Thus the dogma-making
tendency in Judaism arose during the Middle Ages not as an indigenous
product but as a retort to the dominant religions of the time. What
might be called the application of the synoptic method to the Jewish
religion remained confined mostly to the part of Jewry which came,
directly or indirectly, under the influence of Aristotelian
intellectualism.

To this trend Judah Ha-Levi (1085-1140) stands out as a notable
exception. In him the disapproval of having Judaism subsumed under
formulas of a philosophic stamp comes again to the surface. His being
a poet even more than a philosopher enabled him to get a better
insight into the inwardness of Judaism than that obtained by the
intellectualists with their analytic scalpels. This is apparent in his
well-known "Al-Khazari." The story goes that the Khazar king, after
consulting a philosopher, a Mohammedan, and a Christian as to what he
should believe and do, finally turned to a J