Chapter IV. The Jewish Articles of Faith
1. In order to reach a clear opinion, whether or not Judaism has articles of faith in the sense of Church dogmas, a question so much discussed since the days of Moses Mendelssohn, it seems necessary first to ascertain what faith in general means to the Jew.[24] Now the word used in Jewish literature for faith is Emunah, from the root Aman, to be firm; this denotes firm reliance upon God, and likewise firm adherence to him, hence both faith and faithfulness. Both Scripture and the Rabbis demanded confiding trust in God, His messengers, and His words, not the formal acceptance of a prescribed belief.[25] Only when contact with the non-Jewish world emphasized the need for a clear expression of the belief in the unity of God, such as was found in the Shema,[26] and when the proselyte was expected to declare in some definite form the fundamentals of the faith he espoused, was the importance of a concrete confession felt.[27] Accordingly we find the beginnings of a formulated belief in the synagogal liturgy, in the Emeth we [pg 020] Yatzib[28] and the Alenu,[29] while in the Haggadah Abraham is represented both as the exemplar of a hero of faith and as the type of a missionary, wandering about to lead the heathen world towards the pure monotheistic faith.[30] While the Jewish concept of faith underwent a certain transformation, influenced by other systems of belief, and the formulation of Jewish doctrines appeared necessary, particularly in opposition to the Christian and Mohammedan creeds, still belief never became the essential part of religion, conditioning salvation, as in the Church founded by Paul. For, as pointed out above, Judaism lays all stress upon conduct, not confession; upon a hallowed life, not a hollow creed.
2. There is no Biblical nor Rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt believe!” Jewish thinkers felt all the more the need to point out as fundamentals or roots of Judaism those doctrines upon which it rests, and from which it derives its vital force. To the rabbis, the “root” of faith is the recognition of a divine Judge to whom we owe account for all our doings.[31] The recital of the Shema, which is called in the Mishnah “accepting the yoke of God's sovereignty,” and which is followed by the solemn affirmation, “True and firm belief is this for us”[32] (Emeth we Yatzib or Emeth we Emunah), is, in fact, the earliest form of the confession of faith.[33] In the course of time this confession of belief in the unity of God was no longer deemed sufficient to serve as basis for the whole structure of Judaism; so the various schools and authorities endeavored to work out in detail a series of fundamental doctrines.
3. The Mishnah, in Sanhedrin, X, 1, which seems to date back to the beginnings of Pharisaism, declares the following [pg 021] three to have no share in the world to come: he who denies the resurrection of the dead; he who says that the Torah—both the written and the oral Law—is not divinely revealed; and the Epicurean, who does not believe in the moral government of the world.[34] We find here (in reverse order, owing to historical conditions), the beliefs in Revelation, Retribution, and the Hereafter singled out as the three fundamentals of Rabbinical Judaism. Rabbi Hananel, the great North African Talmudist, about the middle of the tenth century, seems to have been under the influence of Mohammedan and Karaite doctrines, when he speaks of four fundamentals of the faith: God, the prophets, the future reward and punishment, and the Messiah.[35]
4. The doctrine of the One and Only God stands, as a matter of course, in the foreground. Philo of Alexandria, at the end of his treatise on Creation, singles out five principles which are bound up with it, viz.: 1, God's existence and His government of the world; 2, His unity; 3, the world as His creation; 4, the harmonious plan by which it was established; and 5, His Providence. Josephus, too, in his apology for Judaism written against Apion,[36] emphasizes the belief in God's all-encompassing Providence, His incorporeality, and His self-sufficiency as the Creator of the universe.
The example of Islam, which had very early formulated a confession of faith of speculative character for daily recitation,[37] influenced first Karaite and then Rabbanite teachers to elaborate the Jewish doctrine of One Only God into a philosophic creed. The Karaites modeled their creed after the Mohammedan pattern, which gave them ten articles of faith; of these the first three dwelt on: 1, creation out of nothing; 2, the existence of God, the Creator; 3, the unity and incorporeality of God.[38]
Abraham ben David (Ibn Daud) of Toledo sets forth in his “Sublime Faith” six essentials of the Jewish faith: 1, the existence; 2, the unity; 3, the incorporeality; 4, the omnipotence of God (to this he subjoins the existence of angelic beings); 5, revelation and the immutability of the Law; and 6, divine Providence.[39] Maimonides, the greatest of all medieval thinkers, propounded thirteen articles of faith, which took the place of a creed in the Synagogue for the following centuries, as they were incorporated in the liturgy both in the form of a credo (Ani Maamin) and in a poetic version. His first five articles were: 1, the existence; 2, the unity; 3, the incorporeality; 4, the eternity of God; and 5, that He alone should be the object of worship; to which we must add his 10th, divine Providence.[40] Others, not satisfied with the purely metaphysical form of the Maimonidean creed, accentuated the doctrines of creation out of nothing and special Providence.[41]
This speculative form of faith, however, has been most severely denounced by Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865) as “Atticism”;[42] that is, the Hellenistic or philosophic tendency to consider religion as a purely intellectual system, instead of the great dynamic force for man's moral and spiritual elevation. He holds that Judaism, as the faith transmitted to us from Abraham, our ancestor, must be considered, not as a mere speculative mode of reasoning, but as a moral life force, manifested in the practice of righteousness and brotherly love. Indeed, this view is supported by modern Biblical research, which brings out as the salient point in Biblical teaching the ethical character of the God taught by the prophets, and shows that the essential truth of revelation is not to be found in a metaphysical but in an ethical monotheism. At the same time, the fact must not be overlooked that the Jewish doctrine of God's unity was strengthened in the contest with the dualistic and trinitarian beliefs of other religions, and that this unity gave Jewish thought both lucidity and sublimity, so that it has surpassed other faiths in intellectual power and in passion for truth. The Jewish conception of God thus makes truth, as well as righteousness and love, both a moral duty for man and a historical task comprising all humanity.