ewish rabbi. When the king
asked him about the Jewish religion, the rabbi replied, "I believe in
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led the Children of Israel
out of Egypt, who fed them in the desert, and gave them the land. . . .
Our belief is comprised in the Torah, a very large domain." Upon
hearing this, the king grew indignant, and said to the rabbi,
"Shouldst thou, O Jew, not have said that thou believest in the
Creator of the world, its Governor and Guide, and in Him who created
and keeps thee, and such attributes which serve as evidence for every
believer?" But the rabbi persists in his mode of stating Judaism. He
parries successfully the king's efforts to draw out of him some
definition of Judaism in terms of speculative theology. The king in
time becomes a convert to Judaism, and it is only then, according to
Judah Ha-Levi, that he succeeds in getting the rabbi to teach him
concerning the attributes of God, as if to imply that one has first to
be a Jew before indulging in any abstract or philosophic study of
Judaism. The keynote of Ha-Levi's thought is that the essence of
Judaism is not merely to give assent to any general belief, but to
belong to Israel and share in its experiences.

_By Maimonides and by Abravanel_

EVEN Maimonides (1135-1204), who is usually represented as the chief
sponsor of the systematizing and speculative tendency in Judaism, is
far from having attached as much significance to the Creed he
formulated as the fact of its presence in the prayer book might
indicate. He himself strongly deprecates attaching more importance to
one part of the Torah than to another. "The Ten Commandments and the
Shema in the Torah," he says in the very same chapter of his
commentary on the Mishnah which contains the Creed, "are no holier
than any of the genealogies that are found in it." Albo (1380-1444)
reduces the essence of Judaism to three, yet inconsistently declares
that he who denies other articles of faith which are of minor
importance is no less a heretic than he who denies any of the
essential ones. In fact, he admits that there are as many articles of
faith as commandments in the Torah.

Abravanel (1437-1508), though an admirer of scholasticism, and
practically the last of the line of Jewish Aristotelians, considers
the thirteen Articles of Maimonides' Creed gratuitous, and as not
representative of the maturer views of Maimonides. His opinion is that
they properly belonged to the commen