raism and Hellenism. It
was not a success so far as Judaism is concerned, as is evidenced by
the fact that he was neglected and forgotten by his Jewish successors.
He was made use of, however, by the early Christian writers in the
formulation of the Trinitarian dogma, and by early Christian
apologists and theologians in presenting the doctrines of the new
religion in a form likely to appeal to the Graeco-Roman world, which
trained as it was in philosophical thought would have been repelled by
the simple narratives of Scripture and the Gospels.

_Representative Men and Tendencies in Jewish Thought_

THE next essay by M. Simon deals with the second and more successful
attempt to enrich Jewish literature by infusing into it the spirit of
rationalistic inquiry originally derived from Greece. This time, in
the ninth and tenth centuries, the scene is placed in Babylonia. The
place of the Greeks is now taken by their medieval successors, the
Mohammedan Arabs, upon whom fell a part of the Hellenic mantle, that
represented by Greek science and philosophy. The aesthetic and literary
aspects of the Greek genius were left severely alone by the Arabs. The
man about whom this sketch centers is the famous Gaon of Sura,
Saadiah. And Mr. Simon lays great stress upon his achievements in
Biblical exegesis. As the Septuagint was the first Jewish translation
of the Bible, so Saadiah's Arabic translation was the second, and it
was enriched by introductions and a commentary in which Saadiah leads
his co-religionists, the Rabbanite Jews, from the Talmud back to an
appreciation of the Bible.

The period of systematic and rationalistic effort culminated in the
legal and philosophical works of Maimonides, the greatest Jew of the
middle ages. The Rev. H. S. Lewis gives a readable and sympathetic
sketch of this pre-eminent Jewish systematizer and rationalist. He
defends him against the strictures of Luzzatto and Graetz and points
out the great influence his thinking had on Judaism and Jews of his
own and subsequent ages, and even on the Christian scholastics.

The following four essays are devoted not to representative men but to
brief and interesting sketches of tendencies in Jewish thought and
departments of Jewish literature. The Rabbinic legalistic lore of the
Mishnah and Talmud, which finds no general treatment in the volume, is
partly represented by the article of Dr. S. Daiches, who gives a
popular account of the post-Talmudic attempts