to codify the immense
legal material scattered in Mishnah and Talmud and in later additions.
Maimonides' code naturally occupies an important place in this sketch,
and a novel feature is the important place assigned to Jacob ben Asher
(1280-1340), the author of the _Turim_, who superseded Maimonides and
is popularized by Joseph Caro in his _Shulchan Aruch_.

_Jewish Rationalism and Mysticism_

THE title of the next paper, written by the competent hand of Dr. A.
Wolf, versed in philosophy as well as in Jewish literature, sounds
novel; and as the author says, is the first effort of the kind so far
made. It is well known that the philosophic movement in medieval Jewry
is characterized with few exceptions by the more or less faithful
adaptation of Aristotelian thought as represented in the Arabic
translations of his works and in the compendia and expositions made by
such ardent disciples of the Stagirite as Al Farabi, Avicenna, and
Averroes. Dr. Wolf undertakes briefly and readably to indicate how
much the Jewish medieval philosophers owed to the Greek sage and what
their attitude to him was, and interestingly summarizes the
Aristotelian point of view by the one word rationalism, as
distinguished from dogmatism and mysticism. He rightly points out that
while the specific doctrines borrowed from Aristotle and read into the
Bible by his ardent Jewish disciples are for the most part obsolete,
the spirit of systematic inquiry, the use of the reason in elucidating
disputed problems, "the exalted conception of the place and function
of human thought, the hallowing of intellectual effort," which was the
product of this philosophical activity, is a gain of inestimable value
for all time.

Rationalism and dogmatism, however, do not exhaust the aspects of
Jewish thought and literary endeavor. Parallel with the development of
Mishnah and Talmud and philosophy, there is visible, at first feebly
and in the background, and later, as circumstances favored it, more
aggressively and in full view, the mystic outlook upon life and
religion in its various phases. H. Sperling in a very interesting and
sympathetic manner traces this mystic element in Jewish literature
from the Prophets of the Bible, through the "Maase Bereshit" and
"Maase Merkaba" of the Haggadah down to the Sefer Yezira and the Zohar
and its successors.

There is no treatment of Jewish medieval poetry, and the volume closes
with a brief account of the more critical and