And now to proceed to my proper topic: Aspects of Hebrew Genius is a very creditable volume consisting of eight well-written essays on several topics of Jewish history and thought. Norman Bentwich contributes an article in which he gives an interesting sketch of the Jewish Alexandrian period of the first two centuries B. C., whose thought activities culminated in the works of Philo, the first man in history who attempted an amalgamation of Hebraism 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 Græco-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 æsthetic 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 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 historical treatment of Jewish literature created in the nineteenth century by such men as Krochmal, Rapaport, Luzzatto, Zunz, Geiger and others. Rev. M. H. Segal gives a brief but illuminating account of this latest phase of Jewish writing, which is not yet closed, and is likely to stay with us for a long while.
E. M. Adler contributes an eloquent introduction by way of connecting the necessarily independent essays and emphasizing the unity which the collection in a great measure possesses.