The story is told simply and interestingly. Dr. Husik is gifted with the faculty of clear insight and he has succeeded in grasping and in exhibiting in a very readable manner the essential nature of the various problems treated and the gist of the solutions offered by the different Jewish philosophers discussed. The author has not attempted to read into the mediæval thinkers modern ideas which were foreign to them. He has endeavored to interpret their ideas from their own point of view as determined by their history and environment, and the literary sources, religious and philosophical, under the influence of which they came. It is an objective and not too critical exposition of Jewish rationalistic thought in the middle ages.
In the words of an eminent reviewer, “To have compressed a comprehensive discussion of five centuries of earnest and productive thought upon the greatest of themes into a book of less than four hundred and fifty pages is an achievement upon which any author may be congratulated. To have done the work so well and in particular to have expressed profound reflections upon abstruse problems in a style so limpid, so fluent, so readily understood is to have placed all who are interested in thought and thinkers under great obligation. That an American-Jewish scholar should have produced a pioneer work that must, for a long time to come, be the authority in its field is a subject of felicitation to all who have at heart the perpetuation of Jewish learning in America.”
The Macmillan Company
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Studies in Judaism
By Rabbi Solomon Schechter, Litt.D.
The author is President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America since 1902; formerly Reader in Talmudic, Cambridge University, and Professor of Hebrew, University College of London, 1898-1902.
Cloth, 12mo, 366 pages, $1.50
“The book is, to our mind, the best on this subject ever written. The author condenses a literature of several thousand pages into 564 pages, and presents to us his history in a splendid English and splendid order. This work deserves the highest appreciation, and without the slightest hesitation do we recommend it to the public at large, and more especially to our co-religionists in this country.”